***Afro Pessimism K***

We criticize the absoluteness of the ontological critique of the Human, the modern, and the Slave.
Their absolute ontological division between Master and slave or human and slave does violence to
slaves and dooms our political strategy to one of unsuccessful revolutionary violence.

A) Modernity and civil society
Our historical reading of the relationship between slavery and civil society and humanity honors the
legacy of slave revolution. The Haitian revolution contained and expanded ideas trafficked in civil
society of universal humanity.
DASH 10 *J. Michael Africana Studies French, Social and Cultural Analysis @ NYU 10 Book Review: Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and The
Radical Enlightenment Slavery & Abolition 31 (1) p. 142-143 //liam ]
Universal Emancipation argues against the French appropriation of universalism as the exclusive product of the revolution of 1789. From the broad focus of Nesbitts
narrative, the age of revolution becomes a truly global phenomenon and furthermore, the Haitian revolution surpassed that of the metropole in realising the goal of
universal freedom. This is not a new story. Michel Rolph Trouillot, for instance, argued in 1995 The Haitian revolution was the ultimate test to
the universalist pretensions of both the French and the American revolutions.1 Later, for another major scholar Laurent Dubois, the
Haitian Revolution represented the pinnacle of Enlightenment universalism.2 Furthermore, C.L.R. James in the Black Jacobins reminded us that the revolutionary
events in Frances colony would take the French Revolution further than was ever intended. The slaves of St Domingue were left out of the universalist claims of 1789
but they used its ideals to press for their freedom. As James put it, the slaves had heard of the revolution and had construed it in their
own image . . . they had caught the spirit of the thing. Liberty, equality, Fraternity.3 Nesbitt asserts that there is nothing surprising
about the fact that the slaves caught the spirit of the thing since they needed no interpreter but the fact that they were on the so-called periphery of the modern
world-system in 1791 meant that the truth of 1789 could be most fully comprehended (36). Furthermore, the Haitian revolution serves to
disprove the notion that there was any single Enlightenment project but a variegated complex of multiple
enlightenments (20). Consequently, the former slaves of St Domingue were not passively parroting ideas imported from
France but autonomously exercised their faculty of judgement in order to illuminate the universal implications of the
natural rights tradition in ways unthinkable for the North American or Parisian political class (60). In rejecting a linear filiation
between Enlightened Europe and savage colony, Nesbitt scrambles centres and peripheries and challenges the silencing of the Haitian Revolution by asserting that it
succeeded in displacing the center of modernity . . . not only for a small peripheral island but for the entire world system (131). The revolution is rendered
thinkable through an intricate discussion of the universally operative nature of Spinozas concept of natural law and
Kantian universalism, which meant human beings were free to define themselves in their differential singularity (101).
For Nesbitt the abstract concept of freedom or liberte emanating from Europe was reinterpreted by the ex-slaves of St Domingue as libete and formed the basis for
the creation of a self-regulating egalitarian bossale state. In this regard, he ventures where historians of the Haitian revolution fear to tread. For historians, the impact
of ideas on the revolution is hard to quantify and is therefore underplayed. He speculates that political awareness came through such transnational Atlantic sites as
waterfronts and marketplaces. The slaves then transformed this Enlightenment-derived liberty into the idea of absolute
freedom for post-plantation St Domingue. Since Universal Emancipation depends on no new research into the circumstances of the Haitian
revolution, Nesbitt depends heavily on the work of Carolyn Fick and the late Gerard Barthelemy to make his case for the importance popular insurgency inthe making
of the revolution. In their refusal of large-scale agrarian capitalism, the exslaves produced an egalitarian peasant system that could
harmonise social relations without recourse to government, police, or legal code. He follows Bathelemy in citing social strategies,
such as the refusal of technological innovation, the subdivision of property from generation to generation, and active caco resistance to the outside world that
supported bossale egalitarianism. Haitian peasant society is presented as a maroon enclave beyond the reach of the liberal individualism and boundless consumerism
of the West. This seems a puzzling departure from both Eugene Genovese and Michel-Rolph Trouillot who are cited at other times with approval. Genovese argued in
From Rebellion to Revolution that the great achievement of the Haitian revolution was the attempt to create a modern black
state and not continue the restorationist practices of marronage.4 Similarly, Trouillot has argued that those who insist on the
isolation of the moun andeyo or the dualist sociologists have missed the depth of penetration of urban civil society by the
peasantry.5 In both instances, Haitian peasants are seen to be part of a global process and not the worlds indigestible
other. The modern heroes of Nesbitts spirited narrative of mass-based revolution are the agronomist turned broadcaster Jean Dominique and the priest turned
politician Jean Bertrand Aristide. In both instances, heroic popular resistance masks the much more complex reality of the spread of modern technology, of cassettes
and transistor radios in rural Haiti, and the doctrine of liberation theology spread by the grassroots church or ti legliz. The idealising of strategic marronnage and
stateless egalitarianism in Haiti is aimed ultimately at all who believe that the coming shift from unlimited consumerism to an ethics of global responsibility will
require fundamental changes to the sociopolitical system that has brought us to the brink of disaster (171). It might have been more useful to think of the New
World context and not the new World order. Oddly enough there is no reference, except for a fleeting allusion to Brazilian music at the end, to other instances of the
radicalisation of the idea of the rights of man in the hemisphere. What of Guadeloupe, for instance, which had a parallel history at the turn of the century? Do other
peasant societies in the Caribbean share Haitis bossale culture? Trouillot claims to have learned more about the Haitian peasantry after fifteen months doing
fieldwork on the peasantry of Dominica than he did during eighteen years in Port-au-Prince. 6 What Nick Nesbitt does very persuasively is present the Haitian
revolution as the most radical revolution of its time. He is less convincing in enlisting the Haitian moun andeyo in his campaign against global capitalism.



B) Humanity
We should not abandon the category of universal humanity. Anti-slavery abolition and its
intersections with critiques of gendered citizenship drew on universal humanity as a source of
solidarity.
GILROY 9 [Paul, Anthony Giddens Prf. of Social Theory @ London School of Economics 9 Race and the Right to be Human p. 6-11 //liam]
At times, the movement against slavery was extended into a comprehensive assault on racial hierarchy which invoked an
idea of universal humanity (by no means always religious in origin) as well as an idea of inalienable rights1. That alternative provides my point of departure
this evening. It was articulated in distinctive accents which were neither bourgeois nor liberal2. It requires us to follow a detour through colonial history which has
come under revisionist pressure as a result of recent attempts to revive imperial relations. That dubious development has made it imperative to
place the wests avowal of modern, liberal, humanistic and humanitarian ideas in the context of the formative
encounter with native peoples whose moral personality and humanity had long been placed in doubt. The approach I
favour requires seeing not just how all-conquering liberal sensibilities evolved unevenly into considerations of human
rights but how a range of disputes over and around the idea of universal humanityits origins, its hierarchies and varying moral and
juridical dispositionswere connected to struggles over race, slavery, colonial and imperial rule, and how they in turn
produced positions which would later be narrated and claimed as liberal. This agonistic enterprise necessitates a different genealogy for
human rights than is conventional3. It begins with the history of conquest and European expansion and must be able to encompass the evolving debates over how
colonies and slave plantation systems were to be administered4. At its most basic, it must incorporate the contending voices of Las Casas and Sepulveda. It should be
able to analyze the contrapuntality of a text like Thomas Hobbes Leviathan with the introduction of Englands Navigation Acts and illuminate the relationship
between John Lockes insightful advocacy on behalf of an emergent bourgeoisie and his commitment to the colonial improvers doctrine of the vacuum domicilium.
This counter-narrative would certainly include the Treaty of Utrecht and the Assiento. It could terminate uneasily in the contemporary debates about torture and
rendition or in discussion about the institutionalisation of rightslessness which floods into my mind each time I navigate the halls of the Schiphol complex.
Focusing on that combination of progress and catastrophe through a postcolonial lens yields a view of what would
become the liberal tradition moving on from its seventeenth century origins in a style of thought that was partly
formed by and readily adapted to colonial conditions5. This helps to explain how an obstinate attachment to raciology
recurs. Struggles against racial hierarchy have contributed directly and consistently to challenging conceptions of the
human. They valorised forms of humanity that were not amenable to colour-coded hierarchy and, in complicating approaches to human sameness, they refused
the full, obvious force of natural differences even when they were articulated together with sex and gender. These struggles shaped philosophical
perspectives on the fragile universals that had come into focus initially on the insurgent edges of colonial contact
zones where the violence of racialized statecraft was repudiated and cosmopolitan varieties of care took shape
unexpectedly across the boundaries of culture, civilization, language and technology6. One early critique of the humanitarian
language and tacit racialization of the enlightenment ideal had been delivered by the militant abolitionist David Walker in his 1830 commentary on the US
constitution: Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in particular, and very expressly, to those of the United States of America. His famous text supplies a
useful symbolic, starting point for generating the new genealogy we require. Erecting secular demands over the foundation of a revolutionary, Pauline Christianity,
Walker made the problem of black humanity and related issues of rightspolitical and humanintrinsic to his insubordinate conception of world citizenship. His plea
that blacks be recognized as belonging to the human family was combined with a view of their natural rights as being wrongfully confiscated in the condition of
slavery which could, as a result of their exclusion, be justifiably overthrown7. His address was primarily offered to the coloured citizens of the world but the tactical
reduction of that universalist argument to the parochial problem of joining the US as full citizens soon followed. The consequences of that change of scale can be
readily seen in the humanistic abolitionism that followed. Frederick Douglassparticularly in his extraordinary 1852 speech on the meaning of the 4th of July to the
slave8, spoke directly to the US in the name of its polluted national citizenship. His indictment of slavery was a cosmopolitan one in which the eloquent facts of
plantation life were judged, just as Walker had suggested they should be, through global comparisons. They were compared with all the abuse to be found in the
monarchies and despotisms of the Old World (and in) South America. Douglass concluded that for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns
without a rival. He continued, again echoing Walker: Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The
slave-holders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the
slave. . . . . . How should I look to-day, in the presence of Americans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom?
speaking of it relatively and positively, negatively and affirmatively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding.9 In
demanding equality based on natural rights and exploring the relationship of debased citizenship and tainted law to
racialized life, Douglass was drawing upon the thinking of an earlier cohort of abolitionist writers. Many of them had, like
Walker and other anti-slavery radicals, practiced a chiliastic Christianity that built upon St. Paul with incendiary consequences which could not be limited by the
heading of anti-slavery. Consider the way in which Angelina Grimk had articulated the concept of human rights in her 1836 Appeal To The Christian Women of The
South: . . . man is never vested with . . . dominion over his fellow man; he was never told that any of the human species were put under his feet; it was only all things,
and man, who was created in the image of his Maker, never can properly be termed a thing, though the laws of Slave States do call him a chattel personal; Man
then, I assert never was put under the feet of man, by that first charter of human rights which was given by God, to the Fathers of the Antediluvian and Postdiluvian
worlds, therefore this doctrine of equality is based on the Bible10. Grimk elaborated upon this inspired refusal of the reduction of people to things in a memorable
(1838) letter to her friend Catherine Beecher (the older sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe). There, she connected the notion of divinely instituted human rights to a
growing sense of what it would mean for women to acquire political rights. Her insight was framed by a deep engagement with the problem of a gendered alienation
from the humanity of species being: The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to better understanding of our own. I have found the Anti-slavery cause
to be the high school of morals in our landthe school in which human rights are more fully investigated and better understood and taught, than in any other. Here a
great fundamental principle is uplifted and illuminated, and from this central light rays innumerable stream all around. Human beings have rights,
because they are moral beings: the rights of all men grown out of their moral nature, they have essentially the same
rights. 11 It is not easy to assimilate this variety of critical reflection to the political traditions inherited by modern liberalism from revolutionary France. The
foregrounding of race is, for example, a fundamental and distinguishing feature as is the suggestion that reflecting upon the thwarted rights of slaves promotes a
richer understanding of the rightslessness known by women. Here, slavery was not only a political metaphor. A different kind of connection was being proposed:
whoever we are, we can learn about our own situation from studying the suffering of others which instructively
resembles it. This approach makes the disinterest in abolitionism shown by todays liberal chroniclers of human rights
struggles all the more perplexing. The long battle to appropriate the language and political morality of human rights re-worked the assumptions which
had led to articulating the unthinkable prospects of black citizenship and black humanity in the form of the ancient rhetorical questions immortalized in
Wedgewoods porcelain: Am I not a Man and a brother? Am I not a Woman and a sister?. The liberatory recognition solicited by those
inquiries was pitched against the corrosive power of racial categories and mediated by the cosmopolitan power of
human shame. It asked that the social divisions signified by phenotypical difference be set aside in favour of a more
substantive human commonality. It promised an alternative conception of kinship that could deliver a world purged
of injustice in general and racial hierarchy in particular.

Enlightenment understandings of humanity were always fractured anti-Imperial strands in
universal humanity should be recognized. There was a robust strand of anti-Imperial universalism
that criticized dispossession and slavery.
MUTHU 3 [Sankar, Poli Sci @ Chicago Enlightenment Against Empire p. 266-271 //liam]
Universal Dignity, Cultural Agency, and Moral Incommensurability Do commitments to the idea of a shared humanity, to human dignity,
to cross-cultural universal moral principles, and to cross-cultural standards of justice rest upon assumptions and
values that unavoidably denigrate, or that disturbingly undermine respect for, cultural pluralism, that is, the wide
array of human institutions and practices in the world?16 Are they imperialistic either explicitly, to justify Europes political, military,
and commercial subjugation of the non-European world, or implicitly, by indicating a rank ordering of superior and inferior peoples, which could then be used to
justify a more indirect, quasi-imperial civilizing process? The aforementioned commitments are sometimes collectively gathered under the term
Enlightenment universalism and, as we have seen, they are sometimes considered to constitute the core of the Enlightenment project. I have
suggested already that such assertions mask and distort a complex reality. In this case, they obscure the multiplicity of
universalisms across eighteenth-century European political thought, each with distinct foundational claims, varying relationships to
conceptualizations of human diversity and to humanity (which themselves differ from thinker to thinker, and even from text to text), and different political
orientations toward the nature and limits of state power in theory and in practice. These philosophical sensibilities and approaches can yield remarkably dif ferent
political arguments toward foreign peoples, international justice, and imperialism. Thus, rather than ask whether the Enlightenment project and Enlightenment
universalism are compatible with an appreciation of cultural pluralism or whether they are at bottom imperializing ideologies, it is more constructive to
pose more precise and historically accurate versions of such questions with regard to particular texts and thinkers. In
this book, I have studied a distinctive variant of Enlightenment writings against empire, one which includes the philosophical and political arguments of Diderot, Kant,
and Herder. While there is no such thing as Enlightenment universalism as such, let alone a larger Enlightenment project, there is nonetheless an identifiable set of
philosophical and political arguments, assumptions, and tendencies about the relationship between universal and pluralistic concepts that animates the strand of
Enlightenment political thought under study here. With this in mind, one can more meaningfully ask what the relationship is between universalism, pluralism, and
incommensurability in such political philosophies, and how precisely they yield anti-imperialist political commitments. Answers to these more circumscribed
questions can be given by better understanding the core elements of Diderots, Kants, and Herders political philosophies, and how they differ from earlier (and,
indeed, from many later) understandings and judgements of empire. Immanuel Kant remarks pointedly in Toward Perpetual Peace that the Europeans who landed
and eventually settled in the New World often denied indigenous peoples any moral status. When America, the Negro countries, the Spice Islands, the Cape, and so
forth were discovered, they were, to them [to Europeans], countries belonging to no one [die keinem angehorten], since they counted the inhabitants as nothing.
(8:358, emphasis added) What philosophical concepts and arguments were necessary for New World peoples to be counted
finally as something and especially to be considered as equals, as they were eventually in some crucial respects, by
anti-imperialist political thinkers in the Enlightenment era? In this section, I focus on what I have taken in this book to be the philosophically
most robust strand of Enlightenment anti-imperialist political thought.17 Despite the many differences in the ethnographic sources that Diderot, Kant, and Herder
consulted, the philosophical languages that these thinkers employed, and the particular concepts they drew upon to attack European empires, their anti-imperialist
arguments intriguingly overlap in important respects. Thus, in this section, I identify and elucidate the family resemblances that exist among their philosophical
arguments and rhetorical strategies, and discuss the underlying assumptions, ideas, and intellec tual dispositions that make their version of anti-imperialist political
thinking conceptually possible. In contrast to what is effectively the premiss of the kinds of familiar questions asked at the opening of this section, the commitments
of Diderot, Kant, and Herder to moral universalism, cultural diversity, partial incommensurability, and the delegitimization of empire are not fundamentally in tension
but rather reinforce one another. Overall, there are three principal philosophical sources of Enlightenment anti-imperialism. The
first and most basic idea is that human beings deserve some modicum of moral and political respect simply because
of the fact that they are human. This humanistic moral principle alone, however, was far from sufficient for engendering an anti-imperialist politics. The
whole modern tradition of natural right and social contract theory held this view in some form. Moreover, Amerindians in particular were explicitly described by such
thinkers as the pure, natural humans of the state of nature. Yet much of this tradition of modern political thought, from Grotius onward, was either agnostic about
imperialism or lent philosophical support to European empires. Not every understanding of what it means fundamentally to be a human fosters the philosophical
materials necessary to build a more inclusive and pluralistic political theory that could serve as the basis of anti-imperialist arguments. Indeed, as I will argue, some
understandings of humanity that are manifestly egalitarian can nevertheless impede such a development. Second, therefore, these anti-imperialist
arguments rested upon the view that human beings are fundamentally cultural beings. Diderot, Kant, and Herder all contend that
the category of the human is necessarily marked by cultural difference; in this view, humanity is cultural agency. This thicker, particularized view of the human
subject, paradoxically, helped to engender a more inclusive and meaningful moral universalism. Third, a fairly robust account of moral
incommensurability and relativity was also necessary for the rise of anti-imperialist political thought. The anti-imperialist
arguments offered by Diderot, Kant, and Herder all partly rest upon the view that peoples as a whole are incommensurable. From this perspective, entire peoples
cannot be judged as superior or inferior along a universal scale of value. Moreover, in distinct but closely related ways, these thinkers argue that our cultural freedom
produces a wide variety of individual and collective practices and beliefs that are incommensurable, given their view that many practices and beliefs lie outside the
bounds of a categorical judgement or universal standard. When these three conceptual developments were brought together, the strand of Enlightenment anti-
imperialist political theory that I have identified became philosophically possible. I want to reiterate here that this framework is not meant to elucidate all of the anti-
imperialist arguments that one can find in the philosophical writings of the Enlightenment era. Moreover, the distinc tive intellectual dispositions, personal
idiosyncrasies, and domestic political commitments of Enlightenment-era thinkers significantly shaped their particular arguments on the issue of empire. Still, as I will
show, these three philosophical ideas play a crucial role in enabling the development of a rich strand of anti-imperialist
political theory in the late eighteenth century. In discussing the development of a more inclusive and anti-imperialist political theory, my focus in
this section (as it has been generally in this book) is on Europeans political attitudes toward non-Europeans. Many thinkers in non-European societies clearly
operated with similarly self-centred conceptions, but my emphasis throughout is on Europeans intellectual responses to the fact of cultural difference and imperial
politics, not with non-European peoples understandings of each other or of their accounts of European peoples. Nor do I examine here the variety of intra-European
distinctions between allegedly superior and inferior groups, those, for instance, involving linguistic, geographical, class, religious, and gender differences, which of
course historically also legitimated differential treatment within European societies. Thus, I do not intend to argue that Enlightenment anti-imperialist political
philosophies are inclusive as such, for their underlying principles do not necessarily (and, in the eighteenth century, they manifestly did not) support egalitarian
arguments against every form of exclusion. As I have noted, the first idea that enables Enlightenment anti-imperialism first both historically and analyticallyis that
foreigners are human beings and, consequently, that they deserve moral respect, however understood. The development, in other words, of some
variant of a humanistic moral universalism ensured that the shared humanity of both Europeans and non-Europeans
would be acknowledged and given some due. The philosophical and political legacy with which Enlightenment anti-
imperialist thinkers struggled, as they themselves understood, was one of exclusion. As they often noted, ethical principles of
respect and reciprocity had been limited almost always to (some) members of ones own tribe, polis, nation, religion, or civilization. Accordingly, the distinction
between ones own society, however defined, and the barbaroi (others, foreigners), whether justified outright or tacitly assumed, influenced not only the
anthropological conceptions of, and popular understandings about, foreign peoples, but also legitimated the often brutally differential treatment of various groups. It
is along these lines that Kant expresses dismay, in a lecture on moral philosophy, at what he calls the error that the *ancient+ Greeks displayed, in that they evinced
no goodwill towards extranei [outsiders, or foreigners], but included them all, rather, sub voce hostes _ barbari [under the name of enemies, or barbarians+. (27:674)
In the long history of imperial exploits, actions that in at least some contexts might have provoked outrage in ones own land not only gained legitimacy on foreign
soil but were deemed praiseworthy, noble, and even morally obligatory abroad. While European imperialists in the New World, writes Diderot, faithfully observe
their own laws, they will violate the rights of other nations in order to increase their power. That is what the Romans did.18 Enlightenment anti-imperialists
recognized that such Janus-faced practices constituted the very core of imperial activity from the empires of the ancient world to the imperial conquests and
commercial voyages of their day. The fact of difference itself lay at the heart of such inconsistent behaviour from Europeans initial encounters with Amerindians
onward, as Diderot notes: *t+he Spaniard, the first to be thrown up by the waves onto the shores of the New World, thought he had no duty to people who did not
share his colour, customs, or religion. 19 Not wanting to single out the Spanish, Diderot suggests further that the Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, and Danes all
followed in precisely the same spirit of exclusion and injustice. From an anthropological viewpoint, such discoveries of non-European peoples no doubt played a role
in Europeans changing conceptions of humanity. From Herodotus onward, of course, travel narratives played a central role in contemplating what it might mean to
be, in some fundamental sense, a human being. Given that theorizations of human nature relate, in complicated ways, to changing understandings of the range and
characteristics of human societies, institutions, and practices, the European discovery of new lands and peoples accordingly generated further, and at times more
complex, theorizations of humanity.20 Moreover, from the sixteenth century onward, thinkers were particularly keen to consult and appropriate the latest
ethnographic reports. In part, the heightened interest no doubt complemented, and may in part have resulted from, what is often described as the intellectual
revolution in natural philosophy and the resulting emphasis on experimentation, empirical study, and inductive reasoning in fields such as astronomy, but also
(especially from the mid-seventeenth century onward) in the study of human anatomy, physiology, and psychology. Although many of Humes contemporaries did
not share his hope of introducing the experimental method to moral philosophy, there was nonetheless a widespread presumption that an understanding of the
human condition needed to take account, in some manner, of the growing anthropological literature that detailed the vast range of human experiences, customs, and
practices throughout the globe.21 This turn toward what Georges Gusdorf has called human science, however, requires a stable referent for what counts as human
while also upsetting the stability of the term by focusing attention increasingly on human difference.22 In this sense, the attempt at identifying the most salient
features of humanity was often an erratic and inherently conflicted task, as John Locke argued it would have to be, given the very nature of our self-knowledge.

The slave represents the infra-human not the non-human. Included as only partly human the
status of the slave has historically been contested by appeals to universal human community. As
with Uncle Toms Cabin the fact that this type of political activity simultaneously contained
negative effects for our understanding of the slave doesnt mean it should be rejected.
GILROY 9 *Paul, Anthony Giddens Prf. of Social Theory @ London School of Economics 9 Race and the Right to be Human p. 13-15 //liam ]
The structure of sentimental feeling articulated by Harriet Beecher Stowe was instrumental in the formation of a trans-national moral collectivity and in winning
recognition of the suffering humanity of the slave whom it was no longer possible to dismiss as a brute. Through her voice and chosen genre, distinctive patterns of
heteropathic identification appear to have leaked not only into Europe but further afield as well. Uncle Toms Cabin helped to compose a
cosmopolitan chapter in the moral history of our world. Is all of that potential for political action and pedagogy to be
damned now because campus anti-humanism doesnt approve of the dubious aesthetic and moral registers in which
an un-exotic otherness was initially made intelligible? The scale of the historical and interpretative problems posed by the case of Uncle Toms
Cabin can only be glimpsed here. George Bullen, keeper of books at the British Museum compiled a bibliographic note included in the repackaged 1879 edition. He
revealed that almost three decades after publication, Stowes novel had been translated into numerous languages including Dutch, Bengali, Farsi, Japanese, Magyar
and Mandarin. Fourteen editions had been sold in the German language during the first year of publication and a year later, seventeen editions in French and a
further six in Portuguese had also appeared. In Russia, the book had been recommended as a primer in the struggle against serfdom and was duly banned. The first
book to sell more than a million copies in the US, the publication of Stowes novel was a world historic event. Though it cemented deeply problematic
conceptions of slave passivity, redemptive suffering and indeed of racial type, it was also instrumental in spreading
notions of black dignity and ontological depth as well as the anti-racist variety of universal humanism that interests me. This
combination merits recognition as a potent factor in the circulation of a version of human rights that racial hierarchy could not qualify or interrupt. The example of
Stowe draws attention to issues which would reappear through the nineteenth century as part of struggles to defend indigenous peoples, to improve the moral and
juridical standards of colonial government and to reform the immorality and brutality of Europes imperial order. This activity was not always altruistically motivated.
How those themes developed in the period after slavery is evident from the para-academic work of campaigners like Harriet Colenso, Ida B. Wells, Roger Casement
and E.D. Morel. The constellation of writings produced by these critical commentators on racism, justice and humanity
needs to be reconstructed in far greater detail than is possible here. They can nonetheless be seen to comprise a tradition of reflection on
and opposition to racial hierarchy that, even now, has the power, not only to disturb and amend the official genealogy provided for Human Rights but also to re-work
it entirely around the tropes of racial difference. Allied with parallel insights drawn from struggles against colonial power, these
interventions contribute to a counterhistory of the contemporary conundrum of rights and their tactical deployment.
This neglected work remains significant because debate in this field is increasingly reduced to an unproductive quarrel
between jurists who are confident that the world can be transformed by a better set of rules and sceptics who can
identify the limits of rights talk, but are almost always disinterested in racism and its metaphysical capacities. Thinkers
like Wells and Morel were alive to what we now call a deconstructive approach. They identified problems with rights-talk and saw the way that racial difference
mediated the relationship of that lofty rhetoric to brutal reality. They grasped the limits of rights-oriented institutional life empirically and saw how rights-claims
entered into the battle to extend citizenship. But, their vivid sense of the power of racism meant that the luxury of any casual anti-humanism could not be
entertained. They wished to sustain the human in human rights and to differentiate their own universalistic aspirations
from the race-coded and exclusionary humanisms which spoke grandly about all humanity but made whiteness into
the prerequisite for recognition. Their alternative required keeping the critique of race and racism dynamic and
demanding nothing less than the opening of both national- and world-citizenship to formerly infrahuman beings like
the negro. Grimk, Wells and the rest appealed against racism and injustice in humanitys name. Their commentaries might even represent the quickening of the
new humanism of which Frantz Fanon would speak years later. The movement these commentators created and mobilized persisted
further into the twentieth century when new causes and opportunities were found that could repeat and amplify its
critique of racialized political cultures and terroristic governmental administration. The political significance of
humanity is both terrible and terribly important. Though the concept of humanity makes us guilty, it also is a pre-
requisite for a politics that can fight atrocity.



Radical humanism takes up the burden and the ambiguity of humanity. Identification with
common humanity across lines of oppression opens up possibilities for everyday political virtue.
GILROY 9 [Paul, Anthony Giddens Prf. of Social Theory @ London School of Economics Race and the Right to be Human p. 20-23 //liam ]
Arendt and Agamben are linked by their apparent distaste for analyzing racism and by their complex and critical relations to the idea of the human. This combination
of positions can facilitate hostility to the project of human rights which is then dismissed for its inability to face the political and strategic processes from which all
rights derive and a related refusal to address the analytical shortcomings that arise from the dependence of human rights on an expansion of the rule of lawwhich
can incidentally be shown to be fully compatible with colonial crimes23. Histories of colonial power and genealogies of racial statecraft
can help to explain both of these problems and to break the impasse into which the analysis of human rights has fallen. This is another
reason why anti-racism remains important. It does not argue naively for a world without hierarchy but practically for a
world free of that particular hierarchy which has accomplished untold wrongs. The possibility that abstract nakedness was not so
much a cipher of insubstantial humanity but a sign of racial hierarchy in operation arises from the work of concentration camp survivors. Jean Amry recognized his
own experience through a reading of Fanon. Primo Levi, his fellow Auschwitz inmate and interlocutor, who interpreted the lagers brutal exercises in racial formation
as conducted for the benefit of their perpetrators, suggested that racisms capacity to reconcile rationality and irrationality was expressed in the dominance of
outrage over economic profit. Both men saw infrahuman victims made to perform the subordination that race theory required and anticipated but which their bodies
did not spontaneously disclose. Inspired by Levi, by the philosophical writings of Jean Amry, and various other observers of and commentators on the pathologies of
European civilisation, we should aim to answer the corrosive allure of absolute sameness and purity just as they did, with a historical and moral commitment to the
political, ethical and educational potential of human shame. Though being ashamed may sometimes appear to overlap with
sentimentality or even to be its result, they are different. Excessive sentimentality blocks shames productivity, its
slow, humble path towards ordinary virtue. Shame arises where identification is complicated by a sense of
responsibility. Sentimentalism offers the pleasures of identification in the absence of a feeling of responsible
attachment. Amry was an eloquent proponent of what he called a radical humanism. Through discovering his Jewishness under
the impact of somebodys fist but more especially as a result of having been tortured by the Nazis, he acquired a great interest in a politics of dignity which could
answer the governmental actions that brought racial hierarchy to dismal life. Perhaps for that very reason, he found through his post-war reading of
Fanon, that the lived experience of the black man . . . corresponded in many respects to my own formative and
indelible experience as a Jewish inmate of a concentration camp. . .. He continued: I too suffered repressive violence
without buffering or mitigating mediation. The world of the concentration camp too was a Manichaean one: virtue was housed in the SS blocks,
profligacy, stupidity, malignance and laziness in the inmates barracks. Our gaze onto the SS-city was one of envy and lust as well. As with the colonized Fanon,
each of us fantasized at least once a day of taking the place of the oppressor. In the concentration camp too, just as in the native city, envy ahistorically transformed
itself into aggression against fellow inmates with whom fought over a bowl of soup while the whip of the oppressor lashed at us with no need to conceal its force and
power.24 With Levi and Fanon, Amry shared a commitment to extracting humanistic perspectives from the extremity
he had survived in the lager. In a famous *1964+ essay exploring his experiences at the hands of the Gestapo, he insisted that torture was the essence25
of the Third Reich and in making that case, shows how these issues should become important again in comprehending and criticising the brutal, permissive conduct of
the war on terror.

2NC O/V

The affirmatives afro-pessimism undermines humanitys universalism and prevents the possibility of change
A modern approach to racism requires a rejection of social isolationism
This mandates an approach which acknowledges intersectionality and universalism- thats Gilroy and Dash
Their critique of whiteness undermines the role that anti-imperialist movements, feminism in the Civil War have had
in combating racism- thats Muthu
Unproductive skepticism has to be replaced with a cosmopolitanism history- this is not nave, but accepts that even
flawed systems can be net forces for good- thats Gilroy
Ahistorical
They assume that anti-black animus arises from nothingness but its caught up in a broader web of
historical power relationships like Islamophobia and nativism
Charoenying 8 [Timothy, citing Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Prof of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley, Islamophobia & Anti-Blackness: A Genealogical Approach,
http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia-anti-blackness-genealogical-approach //liam]
The year 1492 marked a major turning point in the trajectory of Western Civilization. Elementary age children are taught this as the
year Columbus famously crossed the Atlantic. An equally significant event that year, was the Spanish conquest of al-Andalusa Moorish
province on the southern Iberian peninsula established eight centuries earlierand more importantly, the last major Muslim stronghold on the
European continent. Critical race scholars have argued that these two events would not only shift the geopolitical balance of
power from the Orient to the Occident, but fundamentally alter conceptions about religious and racial identity.
According to Nelson Maldonado-Torres, of the University of California, Berkeley, the expulsion of the Moors from continental Europe marked a transition from an age
of imperial relations between Christian and Muslim empires, to an age of European colonial expansion throughout the known world. The discovery of
godless natives in the Americas would also inspire the great debates between Las Casas and Seplveda in 1550 on the nature of
the human soul. Such a geopolitical and philosophical shift, Maldonado-Torres argues, would lead to a Eurocentric, re-categorization
of humanity based upon religousand ultimately racialdifferences. Maldonado-Torres has proposed that anti-black racism is
not simply an extension of some historical bias against blacks, but rather, is an amalgam of old-world Islamophobia
linked to the history of the Iberian peninsula, and to the notion of souless beings embodied in popular conceptions
about the indigenous natives of the Americas. These beliefs would contribute to an ideological basis for, and
justification of, colonial conquests in the name of cultural and religious conversion, as well as pave the way for the
enslavement and human trafficking of sub-Saharan Africans.


Their nihilism turns the case greatest comparative threat
Miah quoting West in 94 [Malik Miah, Cornel West's Race Matters, May-June, http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/3079 //liam]
In the chapter, Nihilism in Black America, West observes The liberal/conservative discussion conceals the most basic issue now facing Black
America: the nihilistic threat to its very existence. This threat is not simply a matter of relative economic deprivation and political powerlessness --
though economic well-being and political clout are requisites for meaningful Black progress. It is primarily a question of speaking to the
profound sense of psychological depression, personal worthlessness, and social despair so widespread in Black
America. (12-13) Nihilism, he continues, is to be understood here not as a philosophic doctrine ... it is, far more, the lived
experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaningless, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness. (14)
Nihilism is not new in Black America. . . . In fact, West explains,the major enemy of Black survival in America has been and is neither
oppression nor exploitation but rather the nihilistic Threat -- that is, loss of hope and absence of meaning. For as long as hope remains
and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive. The self-fulfilling prophecy of the nihilistic threat is that
without hope there can be no future, that without meaning there can be no struggle. (14-15)


Social Death Links

The affirmatives choice to frame the nature of oppression through the rhetorical and ideological
frame of social death entrenches pessimism and despair
Brown 09 [Vincent Brown is Professor of History and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW,
DECEMBER 2009 http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/documents/brown-socialdeath.pdf //liam]
Slavery and Social Death was widely reviewed and lavishly praised for its erudition and conceptual rigor. As a result of its success, social death has become a handy
general denition of slavery, for many historians and non-historians alike. But it is often forgotten that the concept of social death is a distillation
from Pattersons breathtaking surveya theoretical abstraction that is meant not to describe the lived experiences of
the enslaved so much as to reduce them to a least common denominator that could reveal the essence of slavery in
an ideal-type slave, shorn of meaningful heritage. As a concept, it is what Frederick Cooper has called an agentless abstraction that
provides a neat cultural logic but ultimately does little to illuminate the social and political experience of enslavement
and the struggles that produce historic transformations. Indeed, it is difcult to use such a distillation to explain the actual behavior of slaves,
and yet in much of the scholarship that followed in the wake of Slavery and Social Death, Pattersons abstract distillates have been used to explain the existential
condition of the enslaved. Having emerged from the discipline of sociology, social death t comfortably within a scholarly tradition that
had generally been more alert to deviations in patterns of black life from prevailing social norms than to the worldviews,
strategies, and social tactics of people in black communities. Together with Pattersons work on the distortions wrought by slavery on black families, social
death reected sociologys abiding concern with social pathology; the pathological condition of twentieth-
century black life could be seen as an outcome of the damage that black people had suffered during slavery.University of
Chicago professor Robert Park, the grand-pe`re of the social pathologists, set the terms in 1919: the Negro, when he landed in the United States, left behind almost
everything but his dark complexion and his tropical temperament. 8 Pattersons distillation also conformed to the nomothetic imperative of social science, which has
traditionally aimed to discover universal laws of operation that would be true regardless of time and place, making the synchronic study of social phenomena more
tempting than more descriptive studies of historical transformation. Slavery and Social Death took shape during a period when largely synchronic studies of
antebellum slavery in the United States dominated the scholarship on human bondage, and Pattersons expansive view was meant to situate U.S. slavery in a broad
context rather than to discuss changes as the institution developed through time. Thus one might see social death as an obsolete product of its time and tradition,
an academic artifact with limited purchase for contemporary scholarship, were it not for the concepts reemergence in some important new studies of slavery. 9
WIDELY ACKNOWLEDGED AS AMONG themost onerous of social institutions, slavery has much to tell us about the way human beings react to oppression. At the
same time, the extreme nature of the institution naturally encourages a pessimistic view of the capacity for collective
agency among subjugated people. As a result, trends in the study of slavery, as with the study of dominancemore generally, often
divide between works that emphasize the overwhelming power of the institution and scholarship that focuses on the
resistant efforts of the enslaved. In turn, this division frames a problem in the general understanding of political life,
especially for the descendants of the powerless. It might even be said that these kinds of studies form different and opposing genreshopeful
stories of heroic subalterns versus anatomies of doomthat compete for ascendance. In recent years, if the invocation of Pattersons social death is any
indication, the pendulum seems to have swung decidedly toward despair.

Their methodology is flawedTheir focus on social death disempowers social agency and pushes us
away from political activism. We should recognize that we live in a world where culture creates
opportunities for us to find empowerment and we should reject the notion that oppression is form
of social death
Brandom 10 [Eric Brandom Brown v Agamben V. Brown, 'Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery', The American Historical Review, 114, (2009),
pp 1231-1249. http://ebrandom.blogspot.com/2009/12/brown-v-agamben.html //liam]
This essay is most straightforwardly a corrective to what Brown sees as the misuse (overuse) of Orlando Pattersons categorical definition of slavery as social death.
According to Brown, historians have often taken what Patterson meant as an ideal type definition to be a description of
reality itself. Historians have long rejected, however, the basic result of such a definition: that it would strip slaves of agency. Manifestly, historians have pointed
out, slaves had agency. One need look no further than the continuous rebellions and occasional revolutions to emerge from
new world slavery to see this. Browns real goal, though, is deeper than this. In step with his historical work in The Reapers Garden, Brown wants to retell
the story of slavery from the perspective of what we might call the micro-politics, or cultural politics, of everyday life. Brown argues
that what he calls mortuary politics, conflict and negotiation over death, burial, and associated rituals, are of the greatest importance. One might make this argument
in many contexts, but Caribbean slavery is a privileged field. Increasingly, it the worldview forged in the 18th century experience
of slavery and revolution has come to be recognized as central to modernity as such (European, Atlantic, or even if you like,
Capitalist). Mortuary politics is found to be central to the world of slavery, to the movement of the Haitian Revolution, and thus to modernity. One effect of Browns
argument, or rather one consequence of the argument that he wants to make, is a firm and empirically-oriented rejection of Giorgio Agamben. Brown deals with this
in a few paragraphs explaining the limits of an Agambenian perspective such as that taken in Ian Baucoms Specters of the Atlantic. Agambens notion of
bare life, for Brown, is piggybacked into the historical study of slavery as a sort of compliment to and intensification of
Pattersonian social death. Brown doesnt exactly want to re-open old debates about agency (vs structure!), but he does want to argue that it is
plainly wrong to see Caribbean slaves as without culture, in the sense of without resources or community. He cites William
Sewells recent definition of culture, commenting, practices of meaning are better seen as tools to be used than as possessions to be lost. There are several
somewhat separable issues here. First, there is the methodological question of how one should think about culture and agency. In this, I simply agree with Brown. I
prefer to treat culture (or, qua intellectual historian, unit ideas) as a bundle of tools to be manipulatedtools that empower, but also limit, channel, and react upon,
those that wield them. Then there is the more empirical question of the admissibility and utility of the notion of social death in the study of slave systems, say
specifically in the Caribbean. Not having read all the relevant texts, I defer with enthusiasm to Brown. What I have read leads me to believe that he is entirely correct.

Their methodology of constructing any form of barrier in life as social death precludes liberation
and makes greater manipulation and oppression inevitable
Muhwati 05 [Itai Muhwati Department of African Languages and Literature, University of Zimbabwe
http://ir.uz.ac.zw:8080/jspui/bitstream/10646/515/1/Muhwati-Mass-Neurosis.pdf //liam]
The physical wreckage and spiritual paralysis that is by definition an expression of this image, leads to an agonising
realisation that, in lifes vicissitudes, and lifes race of race survival, African people remain undeveloped and fledgling
stutters. The images of characters in these novels whose titles are vapid project Africans as victims of collective inertia, wallowing in cultural and historical
amnesia and disintegrating in irretrievable mentacide. As a result, in terms of agency and mobility, the African race remains glued on the
starting line, quite overwhelmed by the seemingly insurmountable hurdles in the race of life. Through the choice of
titles, most of the writers seem to have adopted a modality that inordinately projects social death and a host of other
social sicknesses as new forms of social identity in the contemporary dispensation. While their absolutisation of mass neurosis, closure and
entrapment might be said to be a reflection of the state of the nation in the post independence period, it is also estimable that such images of social
sickness, paralysis and mass neurosis can be manipulated by Africas anthropological detractors in their justification of a static
and back pedalling African race, particularly along the evolutionary spectrum, which is presented as a universal standard of valuation. The paper also puts
forth argument that, the adoption of an axiological paradigm that legitimises closure and race entrapment nullifies any
prospects towards racial salvation. It is an act of defining the African race as doomed. Such a definition which trivialises the African existential trajectory pays homage
to the subversive labels that Europe has generously donated to Africa. Such labels include Third World; Underdeveloped; Dark Continent; Poor majority, cultural
other and many more. These are designations that bespeak helplessness and mass neurosis.

The rhetorical frame they choose in framing life as death makes disempowerment inevitable and
risks extinction
Muhwati 05 [Itai Muhwati Department of African Languages and Literature, University of Zimbabwe
http://ir.uz.ac.zw:8080/jspui/bitstream/10646/515/1/Muhwati-Mass-Neurosis.pdf //liam]
As natural speakers of African languages, there is need for African people to be careful of not using the natural gift
that language is to disempower themselves. When language is recklessly used, it can become one of the subtle forms of ideological
and pedagogical disempowerment. Language constitutes one of the oldest and effective forms of technology that humanity has always deployed for the purposes of
transcendence. For that reason, the language or discourse that a people adopt and adapt can enhance or 5 negate survival.
Henry Paget (1997: 15) explores the African possibilities of visualising themselves as finite sites of agency. He advises us that: It is the fate of this capacity
for agency that is crucial for our attitudes toward existence. Through its sense of agency, an individual or group makes
an estimate of its chances for successful self-assertion or strategic intervention vis--vis its environment. Success or failure
in such undertakings are [sic] important determinants of our attitudes.

Social Death T/ Agency
Social death is a reductionist concept that does little to actually explain the slave experience this
pessimistic view erases notions of agency of the oppressed people.
Brown 09 [Vincent; AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 2009
http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/documents/brown-socialdeath.pdf //liam]

Slavery and Social Death was widely reviewed and lavishly praised for its erudition and conceptual rigor. As a result of its success, social death has become a handy
general definition of slavery, for many historians and non-historians alike. But it is often forgotten that the concept of social death is a distillation
from Pattersons breathtaking surveya theoretical abstraction that is meant not to describe the lived experiences
of the enslaved so much as to reduce them to a least common denominator that could reveal the essence of slavery
in an ideal-type slave, shorn of meaningful heritage.6 As a concept, it is what Frederick Cooper has called an agentless abstraction
that provides a neat cultural logic but ultimately does little to illuminate the social and political experience of
enslavement and the struggles that produce historic transformations.7 Indeed, it is difficult to use such a distillation to
explain the actual behavior of slaves, and yet in much of the scholarship that followed in the wake of Slavery and Social Death, Pattersons abstract
distillates have been used to explain the existential condition of the enslaved. Having emerged from the discipline of sociology, social death fit
comfortably within a scholarly tradition that had generally been more alert to deviations in patterns of black life from
prevailing social norms than to the worldviews, strategies, and social tactics of people in black communities. Together with
Pattersons work on the distortions wrought by slavery on black families, social death reflected sociologys abiding concern with social pathology; the
pathological condition of twentieth-century black life could be seen as an outcome of the damage that black people had suffered during slavery. University of
Chicago professor Robert Park, the grand-pe`re of the social pathologists, set the terms in 1919: the Negro, when he landed in the United States, left behind almost
everything but his dark complexion and his tropical temperament.8 Pattersons distillation also conformed to the nomothetic imperative
of social science, which has traditionally aimed to discover universal laws of operation that would be true regardless
of time and place, making the synchronic study of social phenomena more tempting than more descriptive studies of
historical transformation. Slavery and Social Death took shape during a period when largely synchronic studies of antebellum slavery in the United States
dominated the scholarship on human bondage, and Pattersons expansive view was meant to situate U.S. slavery in a broad context rather than to discuss changes as
the institution developed through time. Thus one might see social death as an obsolete product of its time and tradition, an
academic artifact with limited purchase for contemporary scholarship, were it not for the concepts reemergence in
some important new studies of slavery.9 WIDELY ACKNOWLEDGED AS AMONG the most onerous of social institutions, slavery has much to tell us
about the way human beings react to oppression. At the same time, the extreme nature of the institution naturally encourages a
pessimistic view of the capacity for collective agency among subjugated people. As a result, trends in the study of
slavery, as with the study of dominance more generally, often divide between works that emphasize the overwhelming power of
the institution and scholarship that focuses on the resistant efforts of the enslaved. In turn, this division frames a
problem in the general understanding of political life, especially for the descendants of the powerless. It might even be said
that these kinds of studies form different and opposing genreshopeful stories of heroic subalterns versus anatomies of doomthat compete for ascendance. In
recent years, if the invocation of Pattersons social death is any indication, the pendulum seems to have swung
decidedly toward despair.
Totalizing/ Nihilism Bad

Reject their totalizing understandings of race only by abandoning essentialism can we construct
new understandings of blackness in the world and challenge the nihilism threatening productive
movements.
bell hooks 90 *POSTMODERN BLACKNESS, Postmodern Culture vol.1
http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Postmodern_Blackness_18270.html //liam]
It is sadly ironic that the contemporary discourse which talks the most about heterogeneity, the decentered subject, declaring breakthroughs that allow
recognition of otherness, still directs its critical voice primarily to a specialized audience, one that shares a common language rooted
in the very master narratives it claims to challenge. If radical postmodernist thinking is to have a transformative impact then a critical break with the notion of "authority" as "mastery over" must not
simply be a rhetorical device, it must be reflected in habits of being, including styles of writing as well as chosen subject matter. Third-world scholars, especially elites, and white critics who passively absorb
white supremacist thinking, and therefore never notice or look at black people on the streets, at their jobs, who render us invisible with their gaze in all areas of daily life, are not likely to produce
liberatory theory that will challenge racist domination, or to promote a breakdown in traditional ways of seeing and
thinking about reality, ways of constructing aesthetic theory and practice. From a different standpoint Robert Storr makes a similar
critique in the global issue of Art in America when he asserts: To be sure, much postmodernist critical inquiry has centered precisely on the issues of "difference" and "otherness." On the purely theoretical plane the exploration of these concepts has produced some
important results, but in the absence of any sustained research into what artists of color and others outside the mainstream might be up to, such discussions become rootless instead of radical. Endless second guessing about
the latent imperialism of intruding upon other cultures only compounded matters, preventing or excusing these
theorists from investigating what black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American artists were actually doing. Without adequate concrete
knowledge of and contact with the non-white "other," white theorists may move in discursive theoretical directions that are threatening to and potentially disruptive of that critical practice which would support radical liberation struggle. The postmodern critique of
"identity," though relevant for renewed black liberation struggle, is often posed in ways that are problematic. Given a pervasive politic of white supremacy which seeks to prevent the formation of radical black subjectivity, we cannot cavalierly dismiss a concern with
identity politics. Any critic exploring the radical potential of postmodernism as it relates to racial difference and racial domination would need to consider the implications of a critique of identity for oppressed groups. Many of us are struggling to find new strategies
of resistance. We must engage decolonization as a critical practice if we are to have meaningful chances of survival even as
we must simultaneously cope with the loss of political grounding which made radical activism more possible. I am thinking here
about the postmodernist critique of essentialism as it pertains to the construction of "identity" as one example. Postmodern theory that is not seeking to simply appropriate the experience of "otherness" in order to enhance its discourse or to be radically chic should
not separate the "politics of difference" from the politics of racism. To take racism seriously one must consider the plight of underclass people of color, a vast majority of whom are black. For African-Americans our collective condition prior to the advent of
postmodernism and perhaps more tragically expressed under current postmodern conditions has been and is characterized by continued displacement, profound alienation and despair. Writing about blacks and postmodernism, Cornel West describes our collective
plight: There is increasing class division and differentiation, creating on the one hand a significant black middle-class,
highly anxiety- ridden, insecure, willing to be co-opted and incorporated into the powers that be, concerned with racism to the degree that it poses constraints on upward social mobility; and, on the other, a
vast and growing black underclass, an underclass that embodies a kind of walking nihilism of pervasive drug addiction, pervasive alcoholism, pervasive
homicide, and an exponential rise in suicide. Now because of the deindustrialization, we also have a devastated black industrial working class. We are talking here about tremendous hopelessness.
This hopelessness creates longing for insight and strategies for change that can renew spirits and reconstruct grounds
for collective black liberation struggle. The overall impact of the postmodern condition is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense
of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding, even if it is not informed by shared
circumstance. Radical postmodernism calls attention to those sensibilities which are shared across the boundaries of class, gender, and race, and
which could be fertile ground for the construction of empathy--ties that would promote recognition of common commitments and serve as a base for
solidarity and coalition. "Yearning" is the word that best describes a common psychological state shared by many of
us, cutting across boundaries of race, class, gender, and sexual practice. Specifically in relation to the postmodernist
deconstruction of "master" narratives, the yearning that wells in the hearts and minds of those whom such narratives
have silenced is the longing for critical voice. It is no accident that "rap" has usurped the primary position of R&B music among young black folks as the most desired sound, or that it began as a form of
"testimony" for the underclass. It has enabled underclass black youth to develop a critical voice, as a group of young black men told me, a "common literacy." Rap projects a critical voice, explaining, demanding, urging. Working with this insight in his essay "Putting
the Pop Back into Postmodernism," Lawrence Grossberg comments: The postmodern sensibility appropriates practices as boasts that announce their own--
and consequently our own--existence, like a rap song boasting of the imaginary (or real--it makes no difference) accomplishments of the rapper. They offer forms of
empowerment not only in the face of nihilism but precisely through the forms of nihilism itself: an empowering
nihilism, a moment of positivity through the production and structuring of affective relations. Considering that it is as a subject that one comes to
voice, then the postmodernist focus on the critique of identity appears, at first glance, to threaten and close down the
possibility that this discourse and practice will allow those who have suffered the crippling effects of colonization and
domination to gain or regain a hearing. Even if this sense of threat and the fear it evokes are based on a misunderstanding of the postmodernist political project, they nevertheless shape responses. It never surprises
me when black folk respond to the critique of essentialism, especially when it denies the validity of identity politics, by saying "yeah, it's easy to give up identity, when you got one." Though an apt and oftentimes appropriate comeback, this does not really
intervene in the discourse in a way that alters and transforms. We should indeed suspicious of postmodern critiques of the "subject" when they surface
at a historical moment when many subjugated people feel themselves coming to voice for the first time. Criticisms of directions in
postmodern thinking should not obscure insights it may offer that open up our understanding of African-American experience. The critique of essentialism encouraged by postmodernist thought is useful for African-Americans concerned with reformulating
outmoded notions of identity. We have too long had imposed upon us, both from the outside and the inside, a narrow constricting
notion of blackness. Postmodern critiques of essentialism which challenge notions of universality and static over-
determined identity within mass culture and mass consciousness can open up new possibilities for the construction of the self and the
assertion of agency. Employing a critique of essentialism allows African-Americans to acknowledge the way in which class mobility has altered collective black experience so that racism does not necessarily have the same impact on our lives.
Such a critique allows us to affirm multiple black identities, varied black experience. It also challenges colonial
imperialist paradigms of black identity which represent blackness one-dimensionally in ways that reinforce and
sustain white supremacy. This discourse created the idea of the "primitive" and promoted the notion of an "authentic" experience, seeing as "natural" those expressions of black life which conformed to a pre-existing pattern or
stereotype. Abandoning essentialist notions would be a serious challenge to racism. Contemporary African- American
resistance struggle must be rooted in a process of decolonization that continually opposes reinscribing notions of
"authentic" black identity. This critique should not be made synonymous with the dismissal of the struggle of oppressed and exploited peoples to make ourselves subjects. Nor should it deny that in certain circumstances that
experience affords us a privileged critical location from which to speak. This is not a reinscription of modernist master narratives of authority which privilege
some voices by denying voice to others. Part of our struggle for radical black subjectivity is the quest to find ways to construct self and
identity that are oppositional and liberatory. The unwillingness to critique essentialism on the part of many African-
Americans is rooted in the fear that it will cause folks to lose sight of the specific history and experience of African-
Americans and the unique sensibilities and culture that arise from that experience. An adequate response to this concern is to critique essentialism while
emphasizing the significance of "the authority of experience." There is a radical difference between a repudiation of
the idea that there is a black "essence" and recognition of the way black identity has been specifically constituted in
the experience of exile and struggle. When black folks critique essentialism, we are empowered to recognize multiple experiences of black identity that are the lived conditions which make diverse cultural productions
possible. When this diversity is ignored, it is easy to see black folks as falling into two categories--nationalist or assimilationist, black-identified or white-identified. Coming to terms with the impact of postmodernism for black experience, particularly as it changes our
sense of identity, means that we must and can rearticulate the basis for collective bonding. Given the various crises facing African-Americans (economic, spiritual, escalating racial violence, etc.) we are compelled by circumstance to reassess our relationship to
popular culture and resistance struggle. Many of us are as reluctant to face this task as many non-black postmodern thinkers who focus theoretically on the issue of "difference" are to confront the issue of race and racism.


***Agamben Exclusion K***


Politics of identity is necessarily founded in exclusion- turns case
McLoughlin 09- PhD in philosophy from the University of New South Wales, lecturer at Adelaide Law School (Daniel, April,
The Politics of Caesura: Giorgio Agamben on Language and the Law, Law Critique (2009) 20:163176//MGD)
The traditional determination of political identity is one of inclusion and exclusion, that is, of belonging to a class or set by
virtue of common features. This logic is common to a range of formulations of political community, from that of the nation
state, with its division between citizens and aliens, to the politics of gender, sexuality, or race. In this paper, I will refer to this political logic as the
politics of identity, because all of these approaches to politics ground community in an identity unified by a particular
shared characteristic. While this logic is central to the tradition of political philosophy, Agamben is not, however, known for his engagement with it. The
politics of identity appears in Homo Sacer only as something whose traditional logic has ceased functioning, having
unravelled in modernity through the generalisation of the sovereign exception. Further, Agambens best known work on community,
The Coming Community, is explicitly directed against the politics of identity. For Agamben the future of political thought rests not in an attempt
to revive traditional concepts of community, but the attempt to overcome it through a politics of radical singularity, a
whatever being that is neither being with this or that characteristic, nor being deprived of all characteristics, but rather
being such that it always matters (Agamben 1993, p. 1). However, as we can observe from these two examples, the understanding of political
community as determined by identity and belonging is an abiding, if submerged, concern of Agambens, for it is the political tradition over
and against which his analysis emerges. The problem I face in this section then is Agambens understanding of the politics of belonging, and its relationship to both
law and language. This analysis will establish the frame within which Agambens account of the limits of language and politics should be understood in the remainder
of this essay. It is Agambens recent text, The Time That Remains, that offers a key to understanding this problem, as it contains two important treatments of the
issue of political identity and its relationship to law. The first is the idea of nation that features in his discussion of the relationship
between Israel and the Torah. The second is the concept of calling or vocation, which appears in Pauls discussion of the relationship between the
messianic community and political status. The former appears to be an immediately juridical problem, while the latter reflects what we
might call a professionthat is, a socialeconomic category pertaining to someones public persona, and which does not appear to
have any immediate juridical significance. Despite the seeming differences between these two articulations of the logic of
belonging, Agamben posits an originary unity between them, and the argument for their unity casts light on the sense in which Agamben uses
the term law, and will enable us to observe its relationship to the nature and structure of language. In the Jewish tradition the Torah is understood as a
dividing wall or fence that separates Jews from non-Jews (Agamben 2005a, p. 47). As a consequence, Agamben argues the principle of the
law is thus division. The fundamental partition of Jewish law is the one between Jews and non-Jews, or in Pauls words, between Iudaioi
and ethne (Agamben, 2005a, p. 47). Iudaioi are members of the nation of Israel, the elected people, and this status as being-Jewish is defined by the common
characteristic of being a party to this pact, that is, being subject to Gods law. To generalise this logic, to be part of the political community of
the nation is to be subject to the same law, the juridical order marking common belonging to the set. While it is the Torah that defines the Jewish
community, modernity thinks this belonging in the conjunction between state, law and people, and membership as a citizen in
the political community is defined through the rights and obligations of positive law. Further, as we observe in the distinction between
iudaioi and ethne, the definition of political identity and community through inclusion in a law, necessarily articulates a simultaneous
exclusion of those who are outside or indifferent to it.1 In Paul, this is the division between Jew and non-Jew, and in the modern nation-state the
division between citizens and aliens.2 To produce political community through law is thus to produce a shared identity through common belonging to a legal order,
and this generates a division between inclusion or membership in the political group nation, and exclusion from it.

Calls for belonging are appeals to a common identity which asserts a law-like regime of exclusionary politics
McLoughlin 09- PhD in philosophy from the University of New South Wales, lecturer at Adelaide Law School (Daniel, April,
The Politics of Caesura: Giorgio Agamben on Language and the Law, Law Critique (2009) 20:163176//MGD)
Agambens discussion of the logic of political division in The Time That Remains appears to locate it as operating in two different
spheresfirst, the juridical problem of nation; second, the politico-economic problem of calling. Apropos the latter, Agamben
identifies a shift from a calling that pertains to ones total identity, to the narrower modern notion of vocation. However,
all of these forms of political and economic determination are possible only on the basis of a more originary sense in which Agamben,
drawing on Paul, deploys the term klesis. It is this notion of klesis that gives us the key to both the broad determination of the concept law at
operation in Agambens work, and its relationship to language. Paul uses the term both to describe being called as an apostle, and also to state that
those called by the messiah should remain in their calling (Agamben 2005a, p. 19). Paul thus writes that circumcision is nothing, and the foreskin is nothing Let
every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called. Art though being called a slave? Care not for it (Paul, I Corinthians 7:1920). For Paul, undergoing
the former, messianic klesis, being called by the messiah, does not entail abandoning the latter, ones worldly calling. What is important about this passage
for our discussion is that Paul uses klesis to describe both the fundamental division of the juridical order (circumcision/foreskin, Jew/goy), and
the socio-political and economic division of class (slave/free man). Klesis here is simply a matter of being called, and while
being called a slave, or being called a Jew, are social, political and economic problems, to be called is also a problem of
language. Thus, while modernity limits the notion of calling to the economic sphere, there is a more fundamental politico-
linguistic logic at operation here, that unites the seemingly disparate spheres of the political, juridical and economic. To
be called, is to be subject to the law in the broadest senseas Agamben puts it elsewhere, it is to be in a worldly or juridical-factical
condition. This is related to the signifying function of language because, for Agamben, law is, in a fundamental way, like language. To use signifying
language is to determine categorically an entity as being-x, and this determination groups an entity together with others
designated by a general name. Likewise, law produces determinate identities through the application of abstract normative categories to
entities, or in the language that Agamben uses in Homo Sacer, applying law to life. Thus being-Jewish is determined by the application of the juridical categories of
the Jewish Law to an individual, while being-a-slave is determined by the application of the laws of property to people. Law and language both operate
by grouping entities through the name on the basis of a common identity, and they achieve this by bringing words into
relation with things, designating particularities as belonging to certain sets on the basis of shared characteristics. The most
fundamental of these borders is that designated by the law of the political communityin Paul, this is the division between the iudaioi and the ethne, but in the
language of the modern nation-state, it is the split between citizens and aliens, the parties to the social contract and those who fall outside it. Within the wall
demarcated by the national law there are further divisions, such as those of class, gender, family, and race, all of which are legal phenomenon, understood in its
broadest sense as a mechanism that regulates and produces sociopolitical identities. Law and language are machines for producing
determinate identities. To be politically determined as the member of a group is to be subject to a law of naming, that is, to be
called and hence divided through the performative power of language. Law and politics are thus to be thought for Agamben in relation to
language, and the ability of law to generate political identity is grounded in the linguistic logic of the name.

2NC O/V

Calls for identity politics and community belonging retrench exclusion and turn case
The idea of a personal community builds an ideological fence around outsiders
The calling and vocation of the community morph into law-like imperatives which reassert power structures and
pigeon hole outsiders into fixed identities in opposition to the movement- thats McLoughlin

This turns their ethics and inclusion claims

***Black/White Paradigm K***
Generalizing descriptions of race make genocide possible
Hartigan 5- prof of anthropology @ UT, PhD from University of California, Santa Cruz
(John, South Atlantic Quarterly 104.3, Summer, Culture against Race: Reworking the Basis for Racial Analysis //MGD)
These racial identities define the type of subjects that Visweswaran advocates bringing into view via a conception of race which is socially dynamic but
historically meaningful, even though their objectification potentially risks contributing, unintentionally, to the current resurgence in
sociobiological notions of race. Visweswarans approach brings race to the fore of critical analysis, but the problem is
that it also risks reproducing racial thinking in much the way culture has been accused of perpetuating race. Herbert Lewis highlights the perils
in efforts to articulate this broader sensibility concerning race.8 Where Visweswaran strives to reanimate the richly connotative 19th century sense of race, with
its invocations of blood as a form of collectivity that encompasses numerous elements that we would today call cultural, Lewis cautions against a
return to the pre-Boasian conception that combines race, culture, language, nationality and nationality in one neat
package (980). And though the equation of racial identity with the forms of persecution and exploitation highlighted by Visweswaran is insightful, Lewis observes
that, pursued further, this logic reactivates a concept that indissolubly connects groups of people and their appearance with beliefs
about their capacity and behavior (ibid.).Given the criteria she lists, Lewis argues, it follows presumably that we should
recognize as races all those who have suffered one or another form of ill-treatment. Certainly Jews would now return to the
status of a racial group (as the Nazis contended), as do Armenians, Gypsies (Rom), Untouchables (Dalits) in India, East
Timorese, Muslim and Croats in Bosnia and Serbs in Croatia, educated Cambodians in Pol Pots Cambodia, both Hutu and Tutsi
in Rwanda and Burundi (ibid.). Every similarly subjected group would be reinscribed and reidentified with the very terms
used initially to distinguish them for exploitation and persecution. Dominguezs concerns about cultures propensity for perpetuating the very
termsof hierarchies of differential valuesthat constitute the hegemony seem equally relevant to this attempt to ensconce race at the forefront of critical social
analysis. There follow interminable questions of subdividing and distinguishing such races. Visweswarans description of the processes that produce
Chicanos and Puerto Ricans as races leads Lewis to ask, Are these two different races or one? Can rich, powerful, and
selfassured Puerto Ricans belong to this race? Do Dominicans, Ecuadorians, and Cubans each get to be their own race, or can they all be in one race
with Chicanos and Puerto Ricans because they all speak (or once spoke) Spanish? Can Spanish-speakers from Spain belong, too? (980). The
problem with formulating research in terms of race is that it becomes very difficult to proceed without reproducing
various racialized logics that promote the notion that groups are essentially differentiatedexperientially and in terms of innate
capacities and dispositionsby race.9 This is a problem that Gilroy takes as a basis for his critique of raciology, which I will examine further below.

Their white supremacy approach is essentialist- reproduces the most dangerous forms of racism and is doomed to fail
Hartigan 5- prof of anthropology @ UT, PhD from University of California, Santa Cruz
(John, South Atlantic Quarterly 104.3, Summer, Culture against Race: Reworking the Basis for Racial Analysis //MGD)
One might be tempted to assume that Gilroys stance is largely polemical, but his critique is thoroughgoing, as is his call to reject this desire
to cling on to race and go on stubbornly and unimaginatively seeing the world on the distinctive scales that it has
specified. In spite of powerful, novel efforts to fundamentally transform racial analysissuch as the emergence of whiteness
studies or analyses of the new racismGilroy is emphatic in demand*ing+ liberation not from white supremacy
alone, however urgently that is required, but from all racializing and raciological thought, fromracialized seeing, racialized thinking, and
racialized thinking about thinking (40). In contrast to Visweswaranand, interestingly, voicing concerns over cultural politics that resonate with
Dominguezs critiqueGilroy sees a host of problems in black political cultures that rely on essentialist approaches to
building solidarity (38).14 Nor does he share Harrisons confidence in making racism the centerpiece of critical cultural analysis. Gilroy plainly asserts that
the starting point of this book is that the era of New Racism is emphatically over (34). A singular focus on racism precludes an attention to
the appearance of sharp intraracial conflicts and does not effectively address the several new forms of determinism
abroad (38, 34). We still must be prepared to give effective answers to the pathological problems represented by genomic
racism, the glamour of sameness, and the eugenic projects currently nurtured by their confluence (41). But the diffuse threats posed by
invocations of racially essentialized identities (shimmering in the glamour of sameness) as the basis for articulating black political
cultures entails an analytical approach that countervails against positing racism as the singular focus of inquiry and
critique.15 From Gilroys stance, to articulate a postracial humanism we must disable any form of racial vision and ensure that it can
never again be reinvested with explanatory power. But what will take its place as a basis for talking about the dynamics of belonging and
differentiation that profoundly shape social collectives today? Gilroy tries to make clear that it will not be culture, yet this concept infuses his efforts to articulate
an alternative conceptual approach. Gilroy conveys many of the same reservations about culture articulated by the anthropologists listed above. Specifically, Gilroy
cautions that the culturalist approach still runs the risk of naturalizing and normalizing hatred and brutality by presenting them as inevitable consequences of
illegitimate attempts to mix and amalgamate primordially incompatible groups (27). In contrast, Gilroy expressly prefers the concept of diaspora as a means to
ground a new form of attention to collective identities. As an alternative to the metaphysics of race, nation, and bounded culture
coded into the body, Gilroy finds that diaspora is a concept that problematizes the cultural and historical mechanics of
belonging (123). Furthermore, by focusing attention equally on the sameness within differentiation and the differentiation
within sameness, diaspora disturbs the suggestion that political and cultural identity might be understood via the
analogy of indistinguishable peas lodged in the protective pods of closed kinship and subspecies (125). And yet, in a manner similar to
Harrisons prioritizing of racism as a central concern for social inquiry, when it comes to specifying what diaspora entails and how it works, vestiges of culture
reemerge as a basis for the coherence of this new conceptual focus. When Gilroy delineates the elements and dimensions of diaspora,
culture provides the basic conceptual background and terminology. In characterizing the Atlantic diaspora and its successor-cultures, Gilroy
sequentially invokes black cultural styles and postslave cultures that have supplied a platform for youth cultures, popular cultures,
and styles of dissent far from their place of origin (178). Gilroy explains how the cultural expressions of hip-hop and rap, along with other
expressive forms of black popular culture, are marketed by the cultural industries to white consumers who currently
support this black culture (181). Granted, in these uses of culture Gilroy remains critical of absolutist definitions of
culture and the process of commodification that culture in turn supports. But his move away from race importantly
hinges upon some notion of culture. We may be able to do away with race, but seemingly not with culture.

The alt is to engage in a cultural discussion- sole race focuses prevent effective listening
Hartigan 5- prof of anthropology @ UT, PhD from University of California, Santa Cruz
(John, South Atlantic Quarterly 104.3, Summer, Culture against Race: Reworking the Basis for Racial Analysis //MGD)
The countervailing point to concerns about past misuses of culture in relation to race is that the culture concept holds perhaps
the most powerful counterweight to racial thinking, since it depicts, on the one hand, the mutable and artificial aspects of
racial identification, and, on the other, all the forms of commonality that undercut racialized inscriptions of essential orders.
However, the work of these and other ethnographers neither directly addresses nor specifically counters the charge leveled by Abu-Lughod and Dominguez
concerning racial impacts and implications of using culture.25 Nor should my efforts here to articulate a positive role for culture in response to this critique be
regarded as a refutation of their arguments or a rejection of the claims that there are negative racial effects to invoking this concept. Even though I think we need
culture to make sense of race, I recognize that Abu-Lughod and Dominguez are right that we need to remain circumspect about the potential for
culture to reinscribe racial thinking. The uses I am advocating here will require continued vigilance. To use culture in
relation to race will necessarily depend on also engaging with and disrupting popular uses and imaginings of the term that do
equate its subjects with static, traditional, and unchanging exotic entities. But it is exactly this type of engagement with embedded
assumptions that underscores the central reason for making renewed use of culture in relation to race. From my efforts to teach students about race, I realize that
without an overarching attention to culture it is very hard to, first, convey the extent of racial thinking and, second,
effectively engage the multiple, overlapping structures of perception and experience that reproduce racial identities and
collectives. Many people cannot begin to recognize how thoroughly the significance of race informs social life unless they have the ability to first grasp culture as a
field of intelligibility that structures their actions and perception. Fundamentally, one needs a cultural vision in order to denaturalize the view
of race as a natural order of difference. In the United States, in particular, it is critical to engage the processes of socialization that lead whites to see
each other as individuals and, in contrast, to see peoples of color as representatives of vaguely comprehended groups. Historian George Lipsitz, in analyzing
the economic, political, and social bases for white dominance, labels this process the possessive investment in
whiteness.26 One of the keys to disabusing white people of this powerful form of racial thinking and perception involves
getting whites to recognize the profound group circumstances that contour life chances in racial terms in the United States.
That is, we must critically frame and analyze the collective forms that benefit whites as a group, regardless of individuals
personal sentiments about the significance of race. And this work must be done against the grain of white Americans socialization to see the world
strictly in terms of individuals. Such a thoroughgoing socialization can best be disrupted and critically objectified by the concept of culture. A cultural
perspective addresses both this inability to grasp the distinctive social conditioning that individualism entails and the
attendant ignorance of how collective processes shape our experiences and the very ground of the social order.27 This approach has
the potential to engage whites racial thinking, at least initially, by shifting discussions away from the charged accusations of
racism and onto a groundthe subject of socialization that may be more conducive to both thinking about race and
recognizing its intersection with other critical categories of social identity. We cannot effectively think through the
processes of racial identification and disidentification without a cultural perspective.28 An inability to grasp culture and
its dynamics is central to why many whites are unable to think critically about race or to grasp its various manifestations
and operations. Without some understanding that our experience of the world is culturally contoured, it is difficult to regard racism asmore than just an
individual failing or a vaguely perceived institutional by-product. Without a recognition of the interlocking aspects of cultural
perceptions and categorical identities, race appears as just another isolated subject of political correctness. But by
starting with basic cultural dynamics, it is easy to show how race both inflects and is shaped by judgments Americans
make about whether or not certain people appear to be nice, or friendly, or hardworkingeach reflecting crucial categorical demarcations that ostensibly make no
mention of race but that certainly operate at times in racial registers. A cultural perspective allows us to place race simultaneously in the mix of
everyday life, shaping perceptions that ostensibly do not appear racial, but without reductively asserting that everything is
about race.




2NC O/V
Their focus on race ignores alternate, cultural forms of differences
Meshing culturally different but racially similar groups together without an eye to difference has created historys
worse genocides- Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda, Sunni and Shiite Muslims prove
Independently replicates a sociobiological mentality towards race which reduces the value of human life and opens
the floodgates to moral atrocity like social Darwinism- thats Hartigan

The alt is to engage the harms of the 1AC through a cultural perspective rather one than zoomed in on race
Disrupting static identity notions involves the greatest number of people in identity movements
Evades the trap of scapegoating all people who dont belong to a particular racial group and involves alternate
perspectives in social progress- proves the alternative is methodologically superior


Turns Case
Turns the aff we can never solve white racism
Perea 10 [Cone, Wagner, Nugent, Johnson, Hazouri & Roth Professor of Law, University of Florida Levin College of Law, Juan, AN ESSAY ON THE ICONIC STATUS
OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT AND ITS UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES, Virginia Journal of Social Policy & the Law, Vol. 18:1, Fall, p. 57-58,
http://scs.student.virginia.edu/vjspl/18.2/Perea.pdf //liam]
Lastly, recognizing a fuller scope of civil rights struggles is important in helping us understand the full measure of
unremedied past injustice. If we take no account of denials of civil rights to Mexican Americans, American Indians,
and Native Hawaiians, among other groups, then we underestimate dramatically the scope of white racism. Every
struggle against racism and oppression deserves recognition. The iconic status of the African-American Civil Rights Movement is a testament
to the power of righteous struggle. While it certainly deserves its hallowed place in our history and our hearts, we should be careful that its long shadow not obscure
the importance of other righteous struggles. If we care about justice, we should always be attuned to struggles for greater justice, whether or not they resemble the
African-American struggle for civil rights. As inspiring as the African-American struggle has been, we may find additional
inspiration, and more possibilities for justice, if we cast our gaze beyond the African-American Civil Rights Movement,
gazing further back, further forward, and to the side.

Other Races Impact

The conception of race through a black/white paradigm marginalizes other races, excluding them from relevant policy
discussions
Perea 97- prof of law @ UF, visiting prof @ Harvard, leading scholar on race and the law
(Juan, The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race, California Law Review//MGD)
Paradigms of race shape our understanding of race and our definition of racial problems. The most pervasive and powerful
paradigm of race in the United States is the Black/White binary paradigm. I define this paradigm as the conception that race in
American consists, either exclusively or primarily, of only two constituent racial groups, the Black and the White. Many
scholars of race reproduce this paradigm when they write and act as though only the Black and the White races matter
for purposes of discussing race and social policy with regard to race. The mere recognition that other people of color exist,
without careful attention to their voices, their histories, and their real presence, is merely a reassertion of the Black/White
paradigm. If one conceives of race and racism as primarily of concern only to Blacks and Whites, and understands other
people of color only through some unclear analogy to the real races, this just restates the binary paradigm with a slight
concession to demographics. My assertion is that our shared understanding of race and racism is essentially limited to this Black/White binary
paradigm. This paradigm defines, but also limits, the set of problems that may be recognized in racial discourse. Kuhns notion of
normal science, which further articulates the paradigm and seeks to solve the problems perceivable because of the paradigm, also applies to normal research on
race. Given the Black/White paradigm, we would expect to find that much research on race is concerned with understanding the dynamics of
the Black and White races and attempting to solve the problems between Blacks and Whites. Within the paradigm, the relevant material facts are facts
about Blacks and Whites. In addition, the paradigm dictates that all other racial identities and groups in the United States are best
understood through the Black/White binary paradigm. Only a few writers even recognize that they use a Black/White
paradigm as the frame of reference through which to understand racial relations. Most writers simply assume the importance and correctness of
the paradigm, and leave the reader grasping for whatever significance descriptions of the Black/White binary relationship
have for other people of color. As I shall discuss, because the Black/White binary paradigm is so widely accepted, other racialized groups like
Latinos/as, Asian Americans, and Native Americans are often marginalized or ignored altogether. As Kuhn writes, those that
will not fit the box are often not seen at all.


The exclusion of Latinos, Asian Americans and Native Americans in the Black/White paradigm plays into white
domination
Bowman 1- prof of law @MSU, JD from Duke
(Kristi, Duke Law Journal The New Face of School Desegregation, http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?50+Duke+L.+J.+1751//MGD)
White privilege is reinforced when racial and ethnic groups are conceptualized not as White, African American, Latino,
Asian American, Native American, etc., but instead as White or Non-White. Acknowledgement of differences among
groups disappears in a White-Non-White paradigm, because instead of allowing racial or ethnic groups to identify
themselves by what they are,238 all Non- [*pg 1787] White groups are explicitly identified by what they are not, and only by
reference to whiteness. Although aspects of a specific Non-White group might be easier to identify than "White culture," this occurs because White culture is
mainstream culture. The culture of a specific Non-White group appears distinctive because it deviates from the norm. Professor
Martha Mahoney notes that a term such as "racially identifiable" in the context of housing and urban development generally refers "to locations that are racially
identifiably black."239 The same is true in the context of education: racially identifiable means racially identifiably Non-White. The White-Non-
White paradigm reinforces the power dynamic of the acted and the acted upon, of presence and absence, of the defining and the defined. The power that
Whites receive from their unearned privilege in the White-Non-White duality "is, in fact, permission to escape [the debate
of race] or to dominate."240 When federal courts reinforce this dynamic in the name of school desegregation, they perpetuate the
normalized, mainstream practices and institutions that reinforce racial inequality. It is often these practices and institutions that are most
damaging in terms of perpetuating oppression because they are not usually questioned. They are conceptualized as just normal.241 In contemporary school
desegregation jurisprudence, Whites are normalized, and all Non-Whites are collapsed into the category of "other." Like African
Americans, Latinos have been the victims of state-sanctioned educational segregation;242 but if courts gave attention to the present differences between African
Americans and Latinos, courts' remedial orders would likely be structured differently. As will be discussed below, the recognition of Latinos and African Americans as
distinct groups that continue to suffer different harms is easily within reach.

Exclusion Link
Focus on the black/white binary marginalizes other races- reworking these perceptions is key
Perea 97- prof of law @ UF, visiting prof @ Harvard, leading scholar on race and the law
(Juan, The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race, California Law Review//MGD)
The point of critical theory generally is to demonstrate shortcomings in our current understandings of legal and social structures and perhaps to suggest alternatives
that improve upon these shortcomings. One implication of this Article is that, to the extent that critical theory has focused on questions of
race, it is still tightly bound by the Black/White binary paradigm. Although this is much less true of critical race theory in particular, as some
writers have focused on the points of view and histories of many racialized American groups, a true paradigm shift away from the Black/White paradigm will only
occur when such scholarship is more widely promulgated and accepted than is currently the case. My review of important literature on race establishes the existence
of the Black/White binary paradigm and its structuring of writing on race. The normal science of race scholarship specifies inquiry into the
relationship between Blacks and Whites as the exclusive aspect of race relations that needs to be explored and elaborated. As a result, much
relevant legal history and information concerning Latinos/as and other racialized groups is simply omitted from books on race
and constitutional law. The omission of this history is extraordinarily damaging to Mexican Americans and other Latinos/as. By
omitting this history, students get no understanding that Mexican Americans have long struggled for equality. The absence of
Latinos/as from histories of racism and the struggle against it enables people to maintain existing stereotypes of
Mexican Americans. These stereotypes are perpetuated even by Americas leading thinkers on race. Ignorance of Mexican-American history allows Andrew
Hacker to proclaim that Hispanics are passive spectators in social struggle, and allows Cornel West to imply that Latino/a struggles against racism have been slight
through significant. To the extent that the legitimacy of claims for civil rights depends on a public perception of having engaged in struggle for them, the omission of
this legal history also undermines the legitimacy of Latino/a claims for civil rights. This may explain why courts treat Latino/a claims of discrimination with such
indifference. Paradigmatic descriptions and study of White racism against Blacks, with only cursory mention of other
people of color, marginalizes all people of color by grouping them, without particularity, as somehow [*1258] analogous
to Blacks. Other people of color are deemed to exist only as unexplained analogies to Blacks. Thus, scholars encourage
uncritical readers to continue to assume the paradigmatic importance of the Black/White relationship and to ignore the experiences of
other Americans who also are subject to racism in profound ways. Critical readers are left with many important questions: Beyond the most
superficial understanding of aversion to non-White skin color, in what ways is White racism against Blacks explanatory of or analogous to White racism against
Latinos/as, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and others? Given the unique historical legacy of slavery, what does a deep understanding of White-Black racism
contribute to understanding racism against other Others? Why are other people of color consistently relegated to parenthetical
status and near-nonexistence in treatises purporting to cover their fields comprehensively? It is time to ask hard
questions of our leading writers on race. It is also time to demand better answers to these questions about inclusion, exclusion, and racial
presence, than perfunctory references to other people of color. In the midst of profound demographic changes, it is time to
question whether the Black/White binary paradigm of race fits our highly variegated current and future population. Our
normal science of writing on race, at odds with both history and demographic reality, needs reworking.

Ext: Impacts
Black/white paradigms prevent effective coalitions to challenge racism and mask the American caste system
Delgado 2k- prof @ Seattle Law, Pulitzer Prize nominee
(Richard, May, Derrick Bells Toolkit- Fit to Dismantle That Famous House? New York University Law Review, lexis, d.a. 7-13//MGD)
Black/white or any other kind of binary thinking can also warp minorities' views of themselves and their relation to whites. As
social scientists know, Caucasians occasionally select a particular minority group as a favorite, usually a small, non-threatening one,
and make that group overseers of the others or tokens to rebut any inference that the dominant group is racist. n110
Minorities may also identify with whites in hopes of gaining status or benefits under specific statutes, such as the naturalization
statute, that limit benefits to whites. n111 The siren song of specialness may also predispose a minority group to believe [*300] that it
is uniquely victimized and entitled to special consideration from iniquitous whites. Latino exceptionalists, for example, sometimes
point out (if only privately) that Latinos have the worst rates of poverty and school dropout; n112 are soon to be the largest group of color in the United States; n113
fought bravely in many foreign wars and earned numerous medals and commendations; n114 and are racialized in perhaps the greatest variety of ways of any group,
including language, accent, immigration status, perceived foreignness, conquered status, and certain particularly virulent stereotypes. n115 Needless to say,
specialness lies entirely in the eye of the beholder and can be maintained only by presenting a particular interpretation of history as the only true one. 6. Impairment
of the Ability to Generalize and Learn from History: Reinventing the Wheel Binary thinking and exceptionalism also impair the ability to learn
from history; they doom one to reinvent the wheel. For example, when recent scholars put forward the theory of interest
convergence to account for the ebb and flow of black fortunes, n116 the theory came as a genuine breakthrough, enabling
readers to understand a vital facet of blacks' experience. Yet, the long train of Indian treaty violations, n117 as well as Mexicans' treatment
in the wake of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, n118 might have led commentators to arrive at that insight earlier and to
mold it into a broader, more powerful form. By the same token, the treatment of Asians, with one group first favored, [*301] then disfavored when
conditions change, n119 might have inspired a similar, more nuanced theory. n120 And in Mexican American jurisprudence, Westminster School District v. Mendez,
n121 decided seven years before Brown v. Board of Education, marked the first time a major court expressly departed from the rule of Plessy v. Ferguson in a
challenge to de jure segregation. n122 Had it not been for a single alert litigator on the staff of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund who recognized the case's importance
and insisted that the organization participate in Mendez as amicus, n123 Mendez would have been lost to African Americans and the road to Brown would have been
harder and longer. n124 Finally, when Mexican Americans were demanding their rights, George Sanchez, anticipating one of the arguments that the NAACP used to
great effect in Brown - namely, that continued discrimination against blacks endangered the United States's moral leadership in the uncommitted world - argued that
mistreatment of Latinos in the United States could end up injuring the country's relations with Latin America. n125 Earlier, the Japanese in California had effectively
deployed a similar argument when San Francisco enacted a host of demeaning rules. n126 Writings by Derrick Bell n127 and Gerald Rosenberg n128 pointing out the
limitations of legal reform for minorities are foreshadowed in [*302] the experience of American Indians when the state of Georgia refused to abide by the Supreme
Court's ruling in Worcester v. Georgia n129 and President Andrew Jackson did nothing to enforce it. n130 After Bell wrote his signature Chronicle of the Space
Traders, n131 Michael Olivas observed that Latino and Cherokee populations had experienced literal removal several times in history. n132 7. Impairment of
Coalitions Finally, dichotomous thought impairs groups' ability to forge useful coalitions. For example, neither the NAACP nor any
other predominantly African American organization filed an amicus brief challenging Japanese internment in Korematsu
v. United States, n133 or in any of the other cases contesting that practice. n134 Earlier, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a
politically moderate litigation organization for Latinos, distanced itself from [*303] other minority groups and even from darker-skinned Latinos by
pursuing the "other white" strategy. n135 And in Northern California, Asians, Mexican Americans, and blacks recently have been at loggerheads over
admission to Lowell High School and UC-Berkeley. n136 Sometimes, minority groups do put aside differences and work together successfully. For example, Chinese-
and Spanish-speaking parents successfully challenged monolingual instruction in San Francisco in Lau v. Nichols. n137 Jews and blacks marched hand in hand in the
sixties. n138 A coalition of California Latinos and Asians collaborated in litigation striking down Proposition 187, which denied social services and public education to
undocumented immigrants. n139 And another coalition of minority groups has been working to change the nearly all-white lineup on current television programs.
n140 The school desegregation case Mendez v. Westminster School District, n141 which (as I described earlier n142 ) was a rare exception to the inability of minority
groups to generalize from other groups' experiences, is worth recounting in some detail as an example of minority groups working together successfully. By the
1920s, Mexican immigration had made Mexican Americans the largest minority group in California. n143 Although state law did not require school districts to
segregate Mexican American schoolchildren, pressure from parents led most school boards to do so on the pretext that the Mexican children's language difficulties
made this in their best educational interest. n144 On March 2, 1945, a small group of Mexican American parents filed suit in federal district court to enjoin that
practice. n145 The court [*304] ruled, nearly a year later, that because California lacked a segregation statute, the doctrine of "separate but equal" did not apply.
n146 Moreover, it found that sound educational reasons did not support separation of the Mexican children, that separation stigmatized them, and ruled the practice
unconstitutional. n147 The school districts appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, at which point the case came to the attention of the American Jewish
Congress and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. n148 The NAACP's amicus brief, prepared by Robert Carter, advanced many of the same arguments the attorneys for
the Mexican plaintiffs had put forward in the trial court, but added a new one based not on legal doctrine or precedent, but on social science. n149 Relying heavily on
data collected by Ambrose Caliver, an African American researcher employed by the U.S. Department of Education, Carter argued that racial segregation would
inevitably lead to inferior schools for minorities because few school districts could afford the cost of a dual system and would inevitably cut corners with the schools
for Mexicans and blacks. n150 Citing the work of Gunnar Myrdal and others, Carter also argued that racial segregation demoralized and produced poor citizenship
among minority individuals and thus contravened public policy. n151 The NAACP's brief was cautious and incremental in arguing that segregation invariably led to
spending differentials. At the same time, its social science was rudimentary, relying as it did on studies of the adverse effects of segregation in general, rather than on
studies showing that segregated education harmed minority schoolchildren. n152 A second brief authored by a group of social scientists and submitted by lawyer and
historian Carey McWilliams supplied many of the links missing from the NAACP's brief. n153 The social scientists marshalled studies showing that young children were
especially vulnerable to the crippling effects of forced racial separation and were quick to absorb the lesson of their own inferiority. n154 Segregation became a
psychologically damaging "badge of inferiority" that could not be squared [*305] with the Fourteenth Amendment. n155 This more narrowly targeted argument was
the very one the NAACP would adopt, years later, in Brown v. Board of Education. n156 Although the Ninth Circuit affirmed the trial court opinion, it did so on the
narrow ground that California law lacked any provision for the segregation of the Mexican schoolchildren. n157 Two months later, Governor Earl Warren eliminated
that loophole by signing a bill repealing all of California's statutes requiring racial segregation. n158 Thus, official segregation in California came to an end. While the
appeal was pending, the NAACP sent their brief to William Hastie, one of the principal figures in the campaign against segregated schooling. n159 Appreciating its
significance, Hastie wrote to Thurgood Marshall, encouraging him to develop the argument contained in the social scientists' brief, "with as little delay as possible."
n160 Marshall agreed, and assigned Annette H. Peyser, a young staff member with a background in social science, to do so. n161 She did, and other social scientists,
learning of the NAACP's interest, pursued their own studies of the intrinsic harm of forced racial separation, n162 many of which found their way into the graduate
school litigation cases, n163 and ultimately into Brown itself. n164 The Mendez case demonstrates that narrow nationalism not only deprives one of
the opportunity to join with other groups, n165 it also closes one off from the experiences and lessons of others. It can
conceal how the American caste system, in a complex dance, disadvantages one group at one time and advantages it at another. n166 It
can [*306] disguise the way American society often affirmatively pits groups against one another, using them as agents of
each other's subordination, n167 or uses mistreatment of one group as a template for discrimination against another. n168
Because almost all racial binaries consist of a nonwhite group paired with whites, they predispose outgroups to focus
excessively on whites, patterning themselves after and trying to gain concessions from them, or aiming to assimilate into
white society. n169

Black/White dichotomies pit different races against one another to entrench discrimination
Delgado 2k- prof @ Seattle Law, Pulitzer Prize nominee
(Richard, May, Derrick Bells Toolkit- Fit to Dismantle That Famous House? New York University Law Review, lexis, d.a. 7-13//MGD)
Judith's entrancement with Bluebeard may stand as a metaphor for the dichotomous quality that afflicts much racial thought today. n39 As
scholars such as Juan Perea have pointed out, traditional civil rights thinking deems a single group paradigmatic, n40 with the
experiences and concerns of other groups receiving attention only insofar as they may be analogized to those of this
group. n41 Binary thinking often accompanies what is called "exceptionalism," the belief that one's [*291] group is, in fact, so
unusual as to justify special treatment, n42 as well as nationalism, the belief that the primary business of a minority group
should be to look after its own interests. n43 Consider now, the many ways that binary thinking - like Judith's initial refusal to consider the fates
of Bluebeard's three previous wives - can end up harming even the group whose fortunes one is inclined to place at the center. 1.
Shifting Tides: How Society Arranges Progress for One Group to Coincide with Repression of Another The history of minority groups in America
reveals that while one group is gaining ground, another is often losing it. From 1846 to 1848, the United States waged a
bloodthirsty and imperialist war against Mexico in which it seized roughly one-third of Mexico's territory (and later colluded
with crafty lawyers and land-hungry Anglos to cheat the Mexicans who chose to remain in the United States of their lands guaranteed under the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo). n44 Yet only a few years later, the North fought an equally bloody war against the South, ostensibly to free the slaves. n45
During Reconstruction (1865 to 1877), slavery was disbanded, the Equal Protection Clause was ratified, and black suffrage was written
into law. n46 Yet, this generosity did not extend to Native Americans: In 1871, Congress passed the Indian Appropriations Act, providing
that no Indian nation would be recognized as independent and capable of entering into a treaty with the United States. n47 A few years later, the Dawes Act
broke up land held jointly [*292] by tribes, resulting in the loss of nearly two-thirds of Indian lands. n48 In 1879, Article XIX of the
California constitution n49 made it a crime for any corporation to employ Chinese workers. n50 And in 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Laws n51 that
were soon upheld in Chae Chan Ping v. United States. n52 Goodwill toward one group, then, does not necessarily translate into the same for others. In 1913,
California's Alien Land Law n53 made it illegal for aliens ineligible for naturalization to lease land for more than three years, a measure that proved devastating for the
Japanese population, many of whom derived their livelihood from agriculture. n54 A few years later, Congress eased immigration quotas for Mexicans because they
were needed by large farm owners. n55 Go figure. During the first half of this century, Indian boarding schools sought to erase Indian history
and culture, n56 while California segregated black and Chinese schoolchildren to preserve the purity of young Anglo girls. n57 Yet, in
1944, Lopez v. Seccombe n58 found segregation of Mexicans from public parks to violate the Equal Protection Clause, n59 and
a short time later a federal court declared California's practice of requiring Mexican American children to attend separate [*293] schools unconstitutional. n60 And,
in a horrific twist, in the 1940s, the United States softened its stance toward domestic minorities, who were needed in the
war industries and as cannon fodder on the front, but turned its back on Jews fleeing the Holocaust. n61 Shortly after the war, at a time when
vistas were beginning to open up for returning black servicemen, Congress reversed its policy of giving United States citizenship to Filipino World War II veterans. n62
Even today, the patchwork of progress for one group coming with retrenchment for another continues. For example, at a time when Indian litigators are winning
striking breakthroughs for tribes, n63 California has been passing a series of anti-Latino measures, including English-Only, n64 Proposition 187, n65 and restrictions on
bilingual education. n66 [*294] 2. Affirmative Pitting of One Disadvantaged Group Against the Other Not only does binary thinking
conceal the checkerboard of racial progress and retrenchment, it can hide the way dominant society often casts minority
groups against one another, to the detriment of both. For example, in colonial America, white servants had been treated
poorly. n67 In 1705, however, when the slave population was growing, Virginia gave white servants more rights than they had
enjoyed before, to keep them from joining forces with slaves. n68 In the same era, plantation owners treated house slaves (frequently
lighter skinned than their outdoor counterparts) slightly better than those in the fields, recruited some of them to spy on their
brothers and sisters in the field, and rewarded them for turning in dissidents. n69 In the years immediately following the Civil War,
southern plantation owners urged replacing their former slaves, whom they were loath to hire for wages, with Chinese labor. n70 They succeeded: In 1868, Congress
approved the Burlingame Treaty with China, under which larger numbers of Chinese were permitted to travel to the United States. n71 Immediately following the
Civil War, the Army recruited newly freed slaves to serve as Buffalo Soldiers putting down Indian rebellions in the West. n72 In People v. Hall, n73 the California
Supreme Court used legal restrictions on blacks and Native Americans to justify banning Chinese from testifying against whites in criminal trials. The court wrote: It
can hardly be supposed that any Legislature would attempt... excluding domestic negroes and Indians, who not unfrequently have correct notions of their obligations
to society, and turning loose upon the community the more degraded tribes of the same species, who have nothing in common with us, in language, country or laws.
n74 [*295] Similarly, Justice Harlan's dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson staunchly rebuked segregation for blacks, but supported
his point by disparaging the Chinese, who had the right to ride with whites. n75 And, in 1912, when the House of Representatives debated the question
of American citizenship for Puerto Ricans, politicians used the supposed failure of other minority groups to justify withholding rights from the newly colonized. n76
During California's Proposition 187 campaign, proponents curried black votes by portraying Mexican immigrants as
competitors for black jobs. n77 Earlier, even the sainted George Sanchez exhorted his fellow Mexican Americans to oppose further emigration from Mexico,
on the ground that it would hurt Mexican Americans already here. n78 3. Over-Identification with Whites Sometimes the pitting of one
minority group against another, inherent in binary approaches to race, takes the form of exaggerated identification with
whites at the expense of other groups. For example, early in Mississippi's history, Asians sought to be declared white so that they could attend schools
for whites. n79 Early litigators followed a similar "other white" policy on behalf of Mexican Americans, [*296] arguing that segregation of Mexican Americans was
illegal because only the variety directed against blacks or Asians was expressly countenanced by law. n80 Chinese on the West Coast responded indignantly to People
v. Hall, n81 the Chinese testimony case, on the grounds that it treated them the same as supposedly inferior Negroes and Indians. n82 Later, Asian immigrants sought
to acquire United States citizenship but learned that a naturalization statute that had stood on the books for 150 years, beginning in 1790, denied citizenship to
anyone other than whites. n83 In a series of cases, some of which reached the United States Supreme Court, Asians from China, Japan, and India
sought to prove that they were white. n84 Anglocentric norms of beauty divide the Latino and black communities,
enabling those who most closely conform to white standards to gain jobs and social acceptance, and sometimes to look
down on their darker-skinned brothers and sisters. n85 Box-checking also enables those of white or near-white
appearance to benefit from affirmative action without suffering the worst forms of social stigma and exclusion. n86

Latino/a Identity Impact

Attempting to fit Latinos/as into the black-white binary relegates them to the powerless other- erases identity that
cant be categorized by paradigms
AT Education Disparity on the FW debate- Latinos/as cant receive as much from the school system because of the way theyre classified in the white/black system
Bowman 1- prof of law @MSU, JD from Duke
(Kristi, Duke Law Journal The New Face of School Desegregation, http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?50+Duke+L.+J.+1751//MGD)
Scholars refer to Latinos as both a racial and an ethnic group,52 but trying to classify Latinos in only one category (race or ethnicity) illustrates
the problematic nature of the categories themselves. If Latinos are viewed as a separate race in order to be on par with
African Americans, then their ethnic identity will have been collapsed into their racial identity. Given the history of slavery and the
continued demarcation line of skin color that have created the Black White racial binary,53 there is little room within the
racial framework for a distinct Latino racial category. Alternatively, if Latinos are viewed only as an ethnic group, then to
fit within the larger Black White binary they must also be assigned to one of the two racial groups. As will be discussed later,
the Census Bureau has taken this approach, classifying Latinos as racially White in every decennial census except the 1930 Census.54
The only way for Latinos to receive the full benefits of school desegregation is for the discourse to shift away from the
restrictive BlackWhite55 and race-ethnicity binaries. As Professor Jerome Culp suggests, the most important category of social
construction may not be the demarcation of race, ethnicity, or nationality, but that of other.56 The role of other
connotes powerlessness, and it is not necessary to distinguish among race, ethnicity, and nationality if one is in a
marginalized group. The classification of Non-White embodies otherness.


Black white binaries marginalize other forms of discrimination and excuse other forms of racial violence
Delgado 2k- prof @ Seattle Law, Pulitzer Prize nominee
(Richard, May, Derrick Bells Toolkit- Fit to Dismantle That Famous House? New York University Law Review, lexis, d.a. 7-13//MGD)
Binary thinking can also impair moral insight and reasoning for whites. Justice John Harlan, author of the famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson,
n87 wrote a shockingly disparaging opinion on the Chinese [*297] just a few years earlier in the Chinese Exclusion case, Chae Chan Ping. n88 Recently, Asian American
scholars have pointed out how the great Justice turns out to have suffered a blind spot that besmirches his reputation. n89 Similarly, others have pointed out how
Earl Warren, who enjoys towering fame as a liberal justice who supported civil rights for blacks and, as governor of California, put
an end to school segregation for Asian and Mexican American schoolchildren, was a prime mover in the effort to remove Japanese Americans
to concentration camps in the beginning months of World War II. n90 Until recently, most historians and biographers embraced the
official version in which Warren played at most a minor role. n91 It seems quite likely that binary, monocular thinking made
possible the selective empathy that enabled these two famous figures to misstep as they did. n92 Binary thinking can
easily allow one to believe that America made only one historical mistake - for example, slavery. n93 If so, the prime order of
business is to redress that mistake by making its victims whole; the concerns of other groups would come into play only
insofar as they resemble, in kind and seriousness, that one great mistake. But simplifications of that form are always debatable, never necessary,
and rarely wise. As a leading Native American scholar put it: "To the Indian people it has seemed quite unfair that churches
and government agencies concentrated their efforts primarily on the blacks. By defining the problem as one of race and making race
refer solely to black, Indians were systematically excluded from consideration." n94 The truth is that all the groups are exceptional; each has
been racialized in different ways; none is the paradigm or template for the others. n95 [*298] Blacks were enslaved. n96 Indians were massacred
and then removed to the West. n97 Japanese Americans were relocated in the other direction. n98 African Americans are stereotyped as bestial or happy-
go-lucky, depending on society's shifting needs; n99 Asians, as crafty, derivative copycats or soulless drones; n100 Mexicans as hot-tempered, romantic, or close to
the earth. n101 Blacks are racialized by reason of their color; Latinos, Indians, and Asians on that basis but also by reason of
their accent, national origin, and, sometimes, religion as well. All these groups were sought as sources of labor; Indians and
Mexicans, as sources of land. n102 Puerto Ricans, Indians, and Mexicans are racialized by reason of conquest. n103 Latinos, Indians, and Asians are pressured to
assimilate; blacks to do the opposite. n104 The matrix of race and racialization thus is constantly shifting, sometimes overlapping, for the four main groups. n105
[*299] This differential racialization renders binary thinking deeply problematic. Consider the recent trial of Ronald Ebens
for the murder of Vincent Chin, whom he beat to death for being a "Jap" supposedly responsible for the loss of jobs in
the automobile industry. n106 After Ebens's first trial in Detroit, which resulted in a twenty-five year jail sentence, was overturned for technical reasons, his
attorney moved for a change of venue on the ground that Ebens could not be tried fairly in that city. n107 The motion was successful, and the second trial was held in
Cincinnati, where Ebens was acquitted. n108 A United States Commission on Civil Rights report speculated that the acquittal
resulted from the limitations of the black/white paradigm of race, which may have misled the Cincinnati jury, sitting in a city
where Asian Americans are few, into disbelieving that racism against Asians played a part in the crime: The ultimate failure of the
American justice system to convict Ebens of civil rights charges, perhaps partly because of the Cincinnati jury's difficulty in believing in the
existence of anti-Asian hatred, also implies that many Americans view racial hatred purely as a black-white problem and
are unaware that Asian Americans are also frequently targets of hate crimes.


Invisibility of other races in relation to blacks and whites entrenches marginalization
Luna 3- JD U of Cali-Berkeley
(Eduardo, How the Black/White Paradigm Renders Mexicans/Mexican Americans and Discrimination Against Them Invisible, La Raza Law Journal//MGD)
The omission of Mexican/Mexican American experiences extends far beyond legal academia. Indeed, Mexican/Mexican Americans are poorly
represented in popular media such as the news, and the film, television, and music industries. The invisibility of Mexicans/Mexican
Americans is partly attributable to the Black/White paradigm. Scholars and popular media alike almost exclusively utilize the
Black/White paradigm to conceptualize race/ethnicity. The paradigm promulgates Black experiences but fails to
represent Latinos, Asians, Native Americans and other non-Black minority groups adequately. The coverage of the Los
Angeles riots by news media supports such an assertion. The Los Angeles riots took place in late April and early May of 1992. The catalyst for the
social unrest is largely attributed to the acquittal of the four white police officers who beat Black motorist Rodney King. The resulting riot claimed 55 lives and injured
more than 2,300 persons. More than one thousand buildings were damaged or destroyed and the resulting property damage was estimated in the billions of dollars.
Amont the images in the news media presented were police officers beating Rodney King, Black rioters beating the White motorist Reginald Denny, confrontations
between Korean storeowners and rioters and finally, rioters looting. The news media paid considerable attention to the role racial/ethnic discrimination played in
precipitating the riots. However, the journalistic and scholarly works focused on the dynamics between Whites, Blacks and
Koreans. Mexicans/Mexican Americans were all but excluded from the discussion. Professor Perea notes that, only on published
article focuses exclusively on describing and explaining the role of Latinos during the Los Angeles riots. The anthology contains works by Black, Asian, and White
scholars. Their articles detail the perspectives of their respective communities concerning the riots. The anthologys analysis is inexcusably incomplete,
especially when considering the role Mexicans/Mexican Americans played in the riots. The majority of the victims of early riot violence were
Latinos. A full third of the dead victims of the riots were Latinos. Between twenty and forty percent of the businesses damaged were Latino
owned, and Latinos comprised one half of all the arrested. These statistics are far from surprising because Latinos, primarily Mexicans/Mexican Americans, comprise
over half of South Central Los Angeles population. Considering these statistics, what should be surprising is the lack of attention visual and print media gave to
Mexicans/Mexican Americans perspectives concerning the riots. Media coverage and scholarly analyses of the Los Angeles riots provide a
poignant example of how the Black/White paradigm distorts the lens through which we view racial/ethnic group
dynamics in the United States. Under the Black/White paradigm, Mexicans/Mexican Americans are omitted from racial/ethnic
analyses, their harms and grievances are under-reported and their marginalization is exacerbated.


B/W Paradigm Alt


Debates are the key starting point for removing paradigms
Perea 97- prof of law @ UF, visiting prof @ Harvard, leading scholar on race and the law
(Juan, The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race, California Law Review//MGD)
Another objection that critics might raise to this work is that I am merely substituting another, nearly equalizing oppressive paradigm for the Black/White binary
paradigm. In other words, the critique would be that I am advocating a Black/White/Latino/a paradigm which would give Latinos/as more visibility but would render
even more invisible Asian Americans, Native Americans, Gypsies, and other racialized groups. This is not the case. I have demonstrated that the Black/White
binary paradigm renders invisible and irrelevant the history of every group other than Whites and Blacks. The rest of us
become part of the undifferentiated mass of minorities or people of color. While I have used Mexican-American
legal history to demonstrate the inadequacy of the Black/White paradigm, and I have written from my point of view as a
Latino scholar, I have used this history to illustrate how much is lost in the service of normal science and research on race, and
how the introduction of omitted history can present a radically different picture of what we are taught to believe about the story of struggles for equality. I know
that just as much is lost regarding Asian-American and Native-American legal history. In like manner, scholars must also
present this omitted history prominently as part of the development of constitutional law and other legal subjects. My argument is really an
argument against the use of paradigms of race, against orthodox attempts to understand the experiences of every
racialized group by analogy to Blacks, and for the development of particularized understanding of the histories of each and every racialized group.
Finally, I do not see my efforts as divisive. If anything, the paradigm I criticize is divisive because of its silencing of many groups.
Coalition between Blacks and Latinos/as, for example, depends upon Latinos/as being active participants in debates
about racism and racial justice. It requires mutual understanding of the particularities of each others condition and of
the particular ways in which White racism affects members of different groups.

Debates about race must account for class and cultural similarities
Hartigan 5- prof of anthropology @ UT, PhD from University of California, Santa Cruz
(John, South Atlantic Quarterly 104.3, Summer, Culture against Race: Reworking the Basis for Racial Analysis //MGD)
From a somewhat different tack, both Brumann and Sewell argue that a key dimension of deployments of the culture concept is its ability
to reference a general aspect of human activity acquired through learning (in contrast to instinct) that systematically imbues material and
social relations with meaning. Sewell observes, This distinction between culture as theoretical category and culture as concrete and bounded body of beliefs is . . .
seldom made.Yet it seems to me crucial for thinking clearly about cultural theory. 18 With this distinction in place, one can invoke culture in relation to
race without delineating or implying discrete, essentialized forms, such as white culture and black culture. Such an
approach has been crucial to my work on whiteness in the United States.19 There are certainly plenty of reasons for depicting starkly opposed,
racial perspectives on topics of contemporary concernsuch as whether racism is declining or whether affirmative action should
be supported or discontinuedbut just as striking to me are the overarching commonalities that white and black Americans
share in viewing the world in characteristically American cultural terms. In my ethnographic fieldwork in three distinct neighborhoods
in Detroit an inner-city, underclass zone; an adjacent gentrifying area; and an outlying working-class neighborhoodI found, in each of these sites, local
idioms and discourses that whites and blacks speak with varying degrees of commonality in positioning themselves, neighbors, and
strangers in relation to identities marked in terms of both class and race.20 These commonalities are linked to class structures that
cross racial lines and that turn on charged intraracial contests over belonging and difference. Such idioms are cultural but do not parse along the racial lines of
whiteness and blackness. Other ethnographers studying racial dynamics in the United States have also identified discursive forms that whites and people of color
share.21 Steven Gregorys study of black middle-class homeowners is an excellent example.22 Gregorys attention to the construction of black class
identities through the political culture of grass-roots activism (17) opens a view onto social forms that operate across
racial lines and yet are also distinctly inflected in the process of racial formation. In analyzing the way black middle-class residents of
Queens speak a homeowners discourse, Gregory revealsin concerns over local social service agencies and their clientspoints of interracial
commonalities along the lines of class interests. Furthermore, Gregorys account of how these homeowners interpret,
debate, and publicly perform the present meanings of black class divisions and racial identities (ibid.) provides a nuanced
reading of processes of racial identification and disidentification that would not be possible either by relying solely upon the
concept of race or by paying too little attention to cultural dynamics.


Inquiry into the histories of other racial groups is k/t solve marginalization
Perea 97- prof of law @ UF, visiting prof @ Harvard, leading scholar on race and the law
(Juan, The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race, California Law Review//MGD)
The very conscious recognition and use of White-against-Black racism as a paradigm, while a significant step towards clarity in the intellectual
tools we use to understand racism, also has its limitations. Feagin and Vera assert that deeper inquiry into the paradigmatic relationship is a necessary
condition for understanding the racism experienced by any other racialized American minority groups. They assert, in essence, that normal, paradigmatic research is
the key to solving pervasive, multiple racisms. The Black/White paradigm, thus asserted, may become an even more unyielding and impenetrable form of study and
discourse than it was before. All other racial studies must be dependent upon the results of normal science. In my view, Feagin and Vera are wrong in
asserting that a deeper understanding of the Black-White relationship will be necessary to promote understanding of the
particularities of other racisms. I agree with Feagin and Vera that an understanding of White-against-Black racism may be helpful in understanding the deployment
of racism against other non-Whites, for example in understanding the persistent use and tolerance of segregation against non-White peoples. However, an
exclusive focus on the Black-White relationship, and the concomitant marginalization of other people of color, can
operate to prevent understanding of other racisms and to obscure their particular operation. For example, the attribution
of foreignness to Latinos/as and Asian Americans, or discrimination on the basis of language or accent, are powerful
dynamics as played out against these groups that do not appear to be as significant in the dynamics of White-against-Black racism.
Thus the White Racism books, spanning three decades, all reproduce and reify the same Black/White binary paradigm of race. In Kuhns terminology, these books
represent the normal science of scholarship on White racism, consisting of exploration and elaboration of the Black/White binary paradigm. Only the most recent
White racism book, by Feagin and Vera, makes explicit the Black-White paradigm and its key assumption: that somehow a deeper understanding of the Black-White
relationship will yield understanding of the racism experienced by Latinos/as, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and other racialized American groups. After three
decades of books on White Racism focusing only on racism against Blacks, one can fairly ask how much anyone understands about racism against Latinos/as and the
particular forms that such racism takes? The obvious answer is not very much. For example, one could study the American Black/White relationship forever and
never understand the language and accent discrimination faced by many Latinos/as and Asian Americans. Today Latinos/as can be fired from their jobs merely for
speaking Spanish in the workplace, and Asian Americans can be passed over for hire because their accent is not quite right. Despite nominal statutory protection from
such discrimination under the national origin provisions of Title VII, the courts remain almost uniformly indifferent and find no actionable discrimination in such
cases. The reason for this indifference is that such discrimination does not fit the Black/White binary paradigm of race
discrimination. Redressing the particular forms of discrimination experienced by Latinos/as, Asian Americans, Native
Americans and other racialized groups requires very careful inquiry into the particular histories of these groups and the forms
of discrimination they have experienced. But recognition of the importance and particularity of groups other than Blacks and Whites requires inquiry well beyond the
paradigm, inquiry beyond the current bounds of normal science and research. From the point of view of LatCrit studies, then, the issue becomes why
there is such a rigid and unyielding commitment to an exclusively Black-White understanding of race that is clearly
underinclusive and inaccurate. Robert Blauner, writing in 1972, recognized and forcefully criticized the Black/White binary paradigm. His critique may be
applied generally to scholar who have embraced and reified the binary paradigm while ignoring actual racial complexity. Blauner noted that Mexican Americans
cannot be understood within the confines of the Black/White paradigm not the model of immigration and assimilation. The encounter between Mexican-Americans
and the United States is sui generis, it cannot be forced into the ethnic model of immigration-assimilation nor into the category of black/white relations. That is why
Chicanos, painfully aware of their unique history, resent and resist being classified, interpreted, or understood through analogs with the Afro-American.




Erasing the black/white binary solves for liberation from discrimination
Delgado 2k- prof @ Seattle Law, Pulitzer Prize nominee
(Richard, May, Derrick Bells Toolkit- Fit to Dismantle That Famous House? New York University Law Review, lexis, d.a. 7-13//MGD)
Minority groups in the United States should consider abandoning all binaries, narrow nationalisms, and strategies that focus
on cutting the most favorable possible deal with whites, and instead set up a secondary market in which they negotiate
selectively with each other. For example, instead of approaching the establishment supplicatingly, in hopes of a more favorable
admission formula at an elite school or university system, Asians might approach African Americans with the offer of a bargain. That bargain
might be an agreement on the part of the latter group to support Asians with respect to an issue important to them - for example, easing immigration restrictions or
supporting bilingual education in public schools - in return for their own promise not to pursue quite so intently rollbacks in affirmative action or set-asides for black
contractors. The idea would be for minority groups to assess their own preferences and make tradeoffs that will, optimistically,
bring gains for all concerned. Some controversies may turn out to be polycentric, presenting win-win possibilities so that negotiation can advance goals
important to both sides without compromising anything either group deems vital. Like a small community that sets up an informal system of barter, exchanging
jobs and services moneylessly, thus reducing sales and income taxes, this approach would reduce the number of times minorities
approach whites hat in hand. Some gains may be achievable by means of collective action alone. When it is necessary to
approach whites for something, a nonbinary framework allows that approach to be made in full force. It also deprives vested
interests of the opportunity to profit from flattery, false compliments, and mock sympathy ("Oh, your terrible history. Your group is so special. Why don't we....").
Ignoring the siren song of binaries opens up new possibilities for coalitions based on level-headed assessment of the
chances for mutual [*307] gain. It liberates one from dependence on a system that has advanced minority interests at best
sporadically and unpredictably. It takes interest convergence to a new dimension. Bluebeard's Castle could just as easily have served as an allegory about
gender imbalance and the social construction of marriage between unequals. Although Bell does not draw this lesson from it, it is certainly as implicit in the French
fairy tale as the lesson Bell extracts about black progress. Seen through this other lens, a straightforward solution, one that Judith apparently never contemplated,
would have been to engage in collaborative action with Bluebeard's three previous wives against their common oppressor, the gloomy noble bent on subjugating
them all - in short, an injection of feminist solidarity. Persisting in an unsuccessful strategy, waging it with more and more energy, can
prove a counsel of despair. Sometimes, as with the black/white binary, one needs to turn a thought structure on its side, look
at it from a different angle, and gain some needed distance from it, before the path to liberation becomes clear.


AT Marginalizes Black Oppression
They misunderstand the argument- Black history is a cornerstone of racial studies but we should analyze other
instances or racial injustice as well
Perea 97- prof of law @ UF, visiting prof @ Harvard, leading scholar on race and the law
(Juan, The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race, California Law Review//MGD)
One might object that I am distorting history by suggesting that slavery and the experience of Black Americans has not
been of central importance in the formation of American society. I believe this objection misunderstands my arguments. There can be
no question, I think, that slavery and the mistreatment of Blacks in the United States were crucial building blocks of American
society. The fact that the text of the Constitution protects slavery in so many places demonstrates the importance of slavery in the foundation of the country. The
constitutional, statutory and judicial attempts to create more equality for Blacks, imperfect as these all have been, correspond to the history of mistreatment of
Blacks. My argument is not that this history should not be an important focus of racial studies. Rather, my argument is that
the exclusive focus on the development of equality doctrines based solely on the experience of Blacks, and the exclusive
focus of most scholarship on the Black-White relationship, constitutes a paradigm which obscures and prevents the
understanding of other forms of inequality, those experienced by non-White, non-Black Americans. The Black/White
binary paradigm, by defining only Blacks and Whites as relevant participants in civil rights discourse and struggle, tends to
produce and promote the exclusion of other racialized peoples, including Latinos/as, Asian Americans and Native Americans,
from this crucial discourse which affects us all. This exclusion is both the power and the stricture of the Black/White binary paradigm. Its power derives from the fact
that a limited subject of inquiry makes possible the study of the Black-White relationship in extraordinary detail and with great insight. Its stricture, however, is that it
has limited severely our understanding of how White racism operates with particularity against other racialized people. Furthermore, the binary paradigm
renders the particular histories of other racialized peoples irrelevant to an understanding of the only racism- White racism against Blacks-
that the paradigm defines to be important. This perceived irrelevance is why the history of Latinos/as, Asian Americans, and Native
Americans is so frequently missing from the texts that structure our thinking about race.

AT K of Latino/a


The term latino is part of strategic essentialism- our discourse has the goal of revealing social inequality and
mobilizing against it
Bowman 1- prof of law @MSU, JD from Duke
(Kristi, Duke Law Journal The New Face of School Desegregation, http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?50+Duke+L.+J.+1751//MGD)
While abstract conceptions of race have existed for centuries, the origin of a common Latino identity is uncertain. As employed in contemporary
American society, the Latino group label generally applies to those with Central American, South American, or Caribbean
heritage. Though the use of the term Latino has been criticized as overly broad57 and arguably repeats the same sort of
essentialization I seek to avoid through deconstructing the WhiteNon-White paradigm,58 my approach is to be, in Professor
Stephanie Wildmans term, strategically essentialist59 with the goal of illuminating socially constructed inequality. Latinos in the
United States share many commonalties, illustrated by the shared social treatment of those labeledand thus viewedas Latinos,60 and by their economic
position.61 The mutable, non-fixed nature of group identity is illustrated by the perception that Latinos who were not born
in the United States must learn to per-form the American Latino identity.62 Despite variations in the education levels, income, and
political power that may distinguish Chicanos, Puertoriqquenos, Cuban Americans, and those with Central or South
American heritage, Latino students uniformly face increasing levels of school segregation in all parts of the country.63



***Community Bad K***

Attempting to solve minorities rights through inclusion ensures violence
Glowacka 6 (Culture Machine, Vol 8 (2006) Community and the Work of Death: Thanato-Ontology in Hannah Arendt and Jean-Luc Nancy, Dorota Glowacka
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HUMANITIES; ADJUNCT PROFESSOR MA(Wroclaw), PhD(SUNY)
Reflecting on the correlation between nationalism and totalitarianism, Arendt presses the question about multi-
ethnic national communities, which were artificially carved out by the Peace Treaty of Versailles, and in which different
'proper names', circumscribed by often conflicting political stakes, were monstrously lumped together. Arendt reflects on
what she believes to have been the colossal failure of the Versailles and minority treaties of 1918-1919, and on the plight of the millions
of stateless and minority people who, as a result of this 'disastrous experiment' (1973: 270), had lost a political guarantee
of their supposedly inalienable human rights and thus suddenly found themselves as if outside the pale of humanity
altogether. As Nancy's list of bloodied proper names dramatically manifests, after World War II, the precarious condition
of the stateless people and of the ethnic minorities in Europe only became aggravated, and today, the question not only
remains urgent but also has become pressing on the global scale.6 In 'The Nazi Myth', Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe augment Arendt's analysis by
identifying the correlation between the flourishing of the totalizing communitarian myths and the metaphysical logic of
subjective identification.

Ideas of community create binaries between insiders and outsiders-leads to passivity in the face of genocide
Glowacka 06- PhD from SUNY, Professor of Humanities at University of Kings College (Dorota, Community and the Work of Death:
Thanato-Ontology in Hannah Arendt and Jean-Luc Nancy, Culture Machine, Vol 8 (2006)
http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/38/46//MGD)
'Why is the idea of community so powerful that it is possible for its members to willingly die for such limited imaginings?' (Anderson,
1983: 7) The anthropologist's answer is that the Western conception of community has been founded on the mythical bond of death between its members, who
identify themselves as subjects through the apology of the dead heroes. Yet is not this endless recitation of prosopopeia,
which serves as the self-identificatory apparatus par excellence, also the most deadly mechanism of exclusion? Whose voices have been foreclosed in
the self-addressed movement of the epitaph? Indeed, who, in turn, will have to suffer a death that is absolute, whose negativity will not be
sublated into the good of communal belonging, so that community can perpetuate itself? 'Two different deaths': it is the 'they' who
will perish, without memory and without a remainder, so that the 'we' can be endlessly resurrected and blood can
continue to flow in the veins of the communal body, the veins now distended by the pathos of this recitation. The question I would like to ask in
this paper is whether there can be the thinking of community that interrupts this sanguinary logic. A collectivity that projects itself as unified
presence has been the predominant figure of community in the West. Such community reveals itself in the splendor of full
presence, 'presence to self, without flaw and without any outside' (Nancy, 2001:15; 2003a: 24), through the re-telling of its foundational myth. By
infinitely (self)communicating the story of its inauguration, community ensures its own transcendence and immortality. For Jean-Luc
Nancy, this immanent figure of community has impeded the 'true' thinking of community as being-together of humans. Twelve
years after writing his seminal essay 'The Inoperative Community', Nancy contends that 'this earth is anything but a sharing of humanity -- it is a world lacking in
world' (2000: xiii). In Being Singular Plural (1996), Nancy returns to Heidegger's discussion of Mitsein (Being-with) in Being and Time, in order to articulate an
ontological foundation of being-together or being-in-common and thus to move away from the homogenizing idiom of community. Departing from Heidegger's habit
of separating the political and the philosophical, however, Nancy situates his analysis in the context of global ethnic conflicts, the list of
which he enumerates in the 'Preface',3 and to which he returns, toward the end of the book, in 'Eulogy for the Mle (for Sarajevo, March 1993)'. The fact that
Nancy has extended his reflection on the modes of being-together to include different global areas of conflict indicates that he
is now seeking to re-think 'community' in a perspective that is no longer confined to the problematic of specifically
Western subjectivity. This allows me to add to Nancy's 'necessarily incomplete' list the name of another community-in-conflict: the Polish-Jewish community,
and to consider, very briefly, the tragic fact of the disappearance of that community during the events of the Holocaust and in its aftermath. Within a Nancean
problematic, it is possible to argue that the history of this community in Poland, which has been disastrous to the extent that it is now virtually extinct, is related, as in
Sarajevo, to a failure of thinking community as Being-with. What I would like to bring out of Nancy's discussion, drawing on the Polish example in particular, is that
rethinking community as being-in-common necessitates the interruption of the myth of communal death by death understood
as what I would refer to, contra Heidegger, as 'dying-with' or 'Being-in-common-towards-death'. Although Nancy himself is reluctant to step outside the ontological
horizon as delineated by Dasein's encounter with death and would thus refrain from such formulations, it is when he reflects on death (in the closing section of his
essay 'Of Being Singular Plural' in Being Singular Plural), as well as in his analysis of the 'forbidden' representations of Holocaust death in Au fond des images (2003b),
that he finds Heidegger's project to be lacking (en sufferance). This leads me to a hypothesis, partly inspired by Maurice Blanchot's response to Nancy in The
Unavowable Community (1983), that the failure of experiencing the meaning of death as 'dying-with' is tantamount to the
impossibility of 'Being-with'. In the past and in the present, this failure has culminated in acts of murderous, genocidal hatred,
that is, in attempts to erase a collectivity's proper name, and it is significant that many of the proper names on Nancy's
list fall under the 1948 United Nations' definition of the genocide as 'acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnic, racial or religious group'.4 The Polish national narrative has been forcefully structured by communal
identification in terms of the work of death, resulting in a mythical construction from which the death of those who are
perceived as other must be excluded. It is important to underscore that the history of Polish-Jewish relations has never been marred by violence of
genocidal proportions on the part of the ethnic Poles. I will argue nevertheless that what this history discloses is a fundamental failure to
produce modes of co-habitation grounded in ontological being-in-common. As became tragically apparent during the
Holocaust and in its aftermath, Poles' disidentification with their Jewish neighbors led to an overall posture of
indifference toward (and in some cases direct complicity in) their murder. Again, I will contend that this failure of 'Being-with' in
turn reveals a foreclosure of 'dying-with' in the Polish mode of communal belonging, that is, a violent expropriation of the Jewish
death. At this fraught historical juncture of ontology and politics, I find it fruitful to engage Nancy's forays into the thinking of death and the community with
Hannah Arendt's reflection on the political and social space. In 'The Nazi Myth' (1989), which Nancy co-authored with Lacoue-Labarthe, Arendt's definition of ideology
as a self-fulfilling logic 'by which a movement of history is explained as one consistent process' (The Origins of Totalitarianism, qtd in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy,
1989: 293) is the starting point for the analysis of the myth. Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe elaborate Aredn't analysis in order to argue that the will to mythical
identification, which saw its perverse culmination in the extermination of European Jews during the Nazi era, is
inextricable from the general problematic of the Western metaphysical subject. It is also in that essay that Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe
condemn 'the thought that puts itself deliberately (or confusedly, emotionally) at the service of an ideology behind which it hides, or from whose struggle it profits',
citing Heidegger's ten month-involvement with National Socialism as an example par excellence.


Reject the aff- Rejection is the only way to deconstruct the myth of the community
Morin 6 (Culture Machine, Vol 8 (2006) Putting Community Under Erasure: Derrida and Nancy on the Plurality of Singularities Marie-Eve Morin Department of
Philosophy. 3-45 Assiniboia Hall. University of Alberta.
Thus the community of human beings excludes animals, and the community of beings in general excludes ghosts. To escape this
double violence, it is necessary, according to Derrida, to cut the bond that binds me to, or excludes me from, a group.
Only then will there be an experience of the other, or a relation to the other, which will respect and do justice to its
otherness, its difference. Though Nancy does not criticise fraternity directly, his discussion of the interruption of myth serves
the same purpose. The myth presents the community to the community itself; it is the identificatory mechanism of a
community. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy explain: A myth is a fiction in the strong, active sense of shaping or moulding, or as Plato
himself says, of 'plasticity': it is a fictionning, whose role is to propose, if not to impose, models and types, -- types by
whose imitation an individual ' or a city, or a whole people ' can grasp and identify itself. (Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, 1991: 34)
The interruption of myth means that it becomes impossible for us to represent our common origin. Because the
genealogical relation rests on a phantasmatic commonality of origin, the loss of common origin means the
impossibility of recognising each other as brother. In their having been interrupted, myths do not disappear, but they no
longer function as the ground of communal belonging: it becomes impossible for us to gather around the narration of
our common origin. The interruption does not build a community, it un-works it, that is, it lets a space open in the identification of the
community with itself. This un-working is the active incompleteness of community: it prevents the community from effecting itself as work.

2NC O/V
The affs appeal to community replicates the failed efforts at social integration of incongruous groups which followed
the Treaty of Versailles and precipitated the Second World War
Forced multiethnic inclusion is the disastrous experiment- leads to intra-community resentment and anger- thats
Glowacka
The alternative is to reject the myth of community- Morin indicates this is not a cold-hearted abandonment of
empathy or fraternity, but rather a protest against the forced shaping to norms which occur in communities and lead
to indifference and hostility

-Identity Erasure
Communities lead to identity erasure- neutralize difference
Morin 06- prof of philosophy at the University of Alberta (Marie-Eve, Putting Community Under Erasure: Derrida and Nancy on the Plurality of
Singularities, Culture Machine, Vol 8 (2006) http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/37/45//MGD)
First, communities tend to neutralise differences by treating all members as brothers, that is, as the same. The other belongs to
my community only insofar as he is like me, and the 'us' -- the group of those who belong together -- appears as a homogeneous
group. It is because of this tendency to homogenise that fraternity can include apparent non-brothers (such as women)
and that the fraternal community can present itself as universal. The woman gets included in fraternity when she becomes a
brother for humanity, that is, when she is not (completely) woman anymore. Because 'man' is the archetype of humanity and
'brother' the archetype of the relation between siblings, the woman can become human or sibling only insofar as she resembles the
archetypes of 'man' or 'brother'. Fraternity as a process of universalisation is a process of inclusion, but here 'to include'
means to neutralise difference. Second, communities are inscribed in a field of opposition; they define themselves in an oppositional
logic, by excluding 'them,' that is, those who do not belong, those who are not 'brothers,' not 'the same'. If I can identify my brothers, then by
using the same criterion, I can also identify those who are not my brothers. All groups function in the same way: they define a criterion which
functions as a wall erected around the group, a wall filled with certain type of openings that let only the right elements in. Of
course, some criteria of appurtenance are more inclusive than others because they are shared by more people. But no matter
how inclusive a group is, it is always possible to find elements that are excluded. Thus the community of human beings excludes
animals, and the community of beings in general excludes ghosts. To escape this double violence, it is necessary, according to Derrida, to cut the
bond that binds me to, or excludes me from, a group. Only then will there be an experience of the other, or a relation to
the other, which will respect and do justice to its otherness, its difference. Though Nancy does not criticise fraternity directly, his discussion of
the interruption of myth serves the same purpose. The myth presents the community to the community itself; it is the identificatory mechanism of a community.
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy explain: A myth is a fiction in the strong, active sense of shaping or moulding, or as Plato himself says, of 'plasticity': it is a fictionning,
whose role is to propose, if not to impose, models and types, -- types by whose imitation an individual ' or a city, or a whole people ' can grasp and identify itself.
(Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, 1991: 34) The interruption of myth means that it becomes impossible for us to represent our common
origin. Because the genealogical relation rests on a phantasmatic commonality of origin, the loss of common origin means the impossibility of
recognising each other as brother. In their having been interrupted, myths do not disappear, but they no longer function as the ground of
communal belonging: it becomes impossible for us to gather around the narration of our common origin. The
interruption does not build a community, it un-works it, that is, it lets a space open in the identification of the community
with itself. This un-working is the active incompleteness of community: it prevents the community from effecting itself as work.

-Ext: Community Bad

Community is oppositional- creates war and ethnic cleansing
Norris 2k- PhD in political philosophy from UC Santa Barbara, assistant prof at UC Santa Barbara (Andrew, Jean-Luc Nancy and
the Myth of the Common, Constellations Volume 7, No 2, 2000, Wiley//MGD)
Nancy, however, is deeply suspicious of this understanding of community. On his account, the move from the individual to the
community will do us no good if the community is understood as being a subject of the same sort as the individual. In the
end this will only produce a politics of identity in which different identities and interests are defined in opposition to one
another. Though this is an implication of the communitarian argument that Sandel and Taylor do not emphasize, it is clearly recognized by Hegel, who argues that
war is a fundamental possibility of political life, one that is not entirely regrettable. It is a fundamental possibility because the state is, vis--vis other states, an
individual, and individuality essentially implies negation. Hence even if a number of states make themselves into a family, this
group as an individual must engender an opposite and create an enemy.10 And it is not an absolute evil because war allows for the
display of martial courage, in which the citizen transcends his limited position and becomes one with the universal in the form of the state.11 External conflict
and its possible glorification is not the only or even the most pressing danger Nancy would associate with the politics of
communal identity. He argues that conceiving of the community or the state as a subject entails that we understand the
community to have an identity that is immanent to it, and that needs to be brought out, and put to work. In Nancys
terminology, the community as subject necessarily implies the community as subject-work. If ones true or higher or more
universal self is found in ones shared communal identity, it becomes the work of politics to acknowledge and bring forth
that immanent communal identity. This will entail not merely conflict with other political identities, but the purification
of ones own community. To realize their political identity, Serbians must unite so as to become more truly Serbian;
doing so requires that they slough off what is not truly Serbian. Put more bluntly, it requires that they cleanse their community
of foreigners, and rid themselves of the influence of such. In Nancys terms, people like Milosevic seek to put community to work. When it is not simply the
blind pursuit of power or the expression of base passions, politics for such people is a matter of discovering the immanent or implicit identity of a group and setting it
to work, drawing it out and allowing it to express itself in functional activity. The conception of politics as work thus relies upon and follows from the conception of
community as immanent identity: Community understood as work or through its works would presuppose that the common
being, as such, be objectifiable and producible.12


Rejecting political agency creates border-like divides between different communities
Mitropoulos and Neilson 06- **PhD from Yale, professor at the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of
Western Sydney (Angela and Brett, Cutting Democracy's Knot, http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/40/48//MGD)
Therefore, alongside the democracy of the market--and in relation to European premonitions of a globally extended constitution and citizenship--there is the
democracy of the border. It is well known that the border, no matter how constantly it recomposes itself, entails processes of
selective inclusion as well as exclusion. But, contrary to recent insistences that the border constitutes (according to Etienne Balibar, among others) the
'non-democratic' element of the demos, democracy no less than the market is the democratic element par excellence in the foundation of citizenship and politics.
This is to say, there can be no democracy without the border. Even if that border is imagined as coextensive with the circumference of the planet
itself, the border as a technology of inclusion-exclusion can still function, whether as the internal demarcation between
'passive' and 'active' forms of citizenship (which can be traced in the historically parallel trajectories of the granting of
citizenship to more people alongside increasing stratifications within citizenship), or in the recourse to the revocation of
citizenship itself, whose criteria and rulings have by no means disappeared but, today, proliferate. This is merely to note the formal
operations of citizenship laws, without having touched on the casual operations of border technologies, as they are articulated through, say, the police checkpoints in
the banlieues no less than in the demands that migrants (whether this status as a migrant is legal or semantic) must continually prove their belonging. In any case,
without the border, there is neither demos nor kratos. This is why Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri can call, in the final chapters of Empire
(2000), for a global citizenship under the sign of 'absolute democracy'. Yet, the diplomacy that might seemingly favour the proposition of
democracy as an empty placeholder for the question of 'constituent power' fails to confront the politics of the demos and the kratos that
invocations of democracy set to work, not least because diplomacy is already a technique of statecraft and a form of
address that distinguishes and fuses kratos and demos.




Rejection alt


Rejection of their plan creates a different mode of politics
Mitropoulos 6 (Culture Machine, Vol 8 (2006) Home About Log In Register Search Current Archives Reviews InterZone CSeARCH Cutting Democracy's Knot
Angela Mitropoulos
The possibility of, as we would put it, a non-sovereign decision--of a distributed or diffuse decision that does not rely on
the mystical and auto-representative identity of the people--is the question around which the critique of democracy
turns. And while one might frame such a decision around, say, the way in which languages or forms of life might change,
the attempt to reign it back to some new political subject, figured either as the many or the one, reinstates the endless
oscillation between citizen and subject on the terrifyingly familiar and empty grounds of democracy as we know it.
Democracy, we argue, binds us, and what 'us' might mean, in certain ligatures. It leaves us bound in an indissoluble knot, where
divergent tendencies--the many and the one, citizen and subject, law and sovereignty, society and community--
tighten against each other in ways that are at once mutually reinforcing and mutually antagonistic. To cut this knot
involves a kind of total risk. It means breaking the swing between abstract formalism and substantive identity that
democracy, as a political form, 'manages' but also is. And, thus, far from amounting to a radical gesture, cutting this knot is the uninsurable action
that restores politics as a question of relation, of the tie and the decision to tie or not, of who it is that might enter into relation, and so on.
These are the questions through which politics as a praxis might be reopened. It is, in short, a break for freedom that
cannot be integrated to the tendencies of the day but which slices through the present with an incision that scrambles all tenses and leaves the
political up for grabs.




Perm Answer

It obviously links the 1AC was riddled with notions of community and inclusion; you cant undue a speech act.

The permutation fails- it reinforces notions of community and agreement that erase difference
Secomb 2K (Fractured Community Linnell Secomb Special Issue: Going Australian: Reconfiguring Feminism and Philosophy Volume 15, Issue 2, pages 133
150, May 2000
Despite these deficiencies within liberal Enlightenment universalism, Benhabib argues that a post-Enlightenment universalism is still viable.
This, she suggests, would be "interactive not legislative, cognizant of gender difference not gender blind, contextually
sensitive and not situation indifferent" (1992, 3). Benhabib proposes a universalist theory of community which attempts to
overcome the problems of Enlightenment thinking. This vision of community involves a "a discursive, communicative
concept of rationality"; "the recognition that the subjects of reason are finite, embodied and fragile creatures, and not disembodied
cogitos or abstract unities of transcendental apperception"; and "a shift from legislative to interactive rationality" (1992, 56). This reformulated
universalist model of community would be founded on "a moral conversation in which the capacity to reverse
perspectives, that is, the willingness to reason from the others' point of view, and the sensitivity to hear their voice is paramount"
(1992, 8). Benhabib argues that this model does not assume that consensus can be reached but that a "reasonable agreement" can
be achieved. This formulation of community on the basis of a conversation in which perspectives can be reversed, also implies a new understanding of identity
and alterity. Instead of the generalized other, Benhabib argues that ethics, politics, and community must engage with the concrete or particular other. A theory
that only engages with the generalized other sees the other as a replica of the self. In order to overcome this reductive assimilation of alterity, Benhabib
formulates a univetsalist community which recognizes the concrete other and which allows us to view others as unique individuals (1992, 10). Benhabib's critique
of universalist liberal theory and her formulation of an alternative conversational model of community are useful and illuminating. However, I suggest
that her vision still assumes the desirability of commonality and agreement, which, I argue, ultimately destroy
difference. Her vision of a community of conversing alterities assumes sufficient similarity between alterities so that
each can adopt the point of view of the other and, through this means, reach a "reasonable agreement." She assumes the
necessity of a common goal for the community that would be the outcome of the "reasonable agreement."
Benhabib's community, then, while attempting to enable difference and diversity, continues to assume a commonality of purpose
within community and implies a subjectivity that would ultimately collapse back into sameness. Moreover, Benhabib's
formulation of community, while rejecting the fantasy of consensus, nevertheless privileges communication,
conversation, and agreement. This privileging of communication assumes that all can participate in the rational
conversation irrespective of difference. Yet this assumes rational interlocutors, and rationality has tended, both in theory and
practice, to exclude many groups and individuals, including: women, who are deemed emotional and corporeal rather than
rational; non-liberal cultures and individuals who are seen as intolerant and irrational; and minoritarian groups who do
not adopt the authoritative discourses necessary for rational exchanges. In addition, this ideal of communication fails to acknowledge
the indeterminacy and multiplicity of meaning in all speech and writing. It assumes a singular, coherent, and transparent content. Yet, as
Gayatri Spivak writes: "the verbal text is constituted by concealment as much as revelation. [T]he concealment is itself a revelation and visa versa" (Spivak
1976, xlvi). For Spivak, Jacques Derrida, and other deconstructionists, all communication involves conttadiction,
inconsistency, and heterogeneity. Derrida's concept of diffrance indicates the inevitable deferral and displacement of any
final coherent meaning. The apparently rigorous and irreducible oppositions that structure language, Derrida contends, are a fiction. These mutually
exclusive dichotomies turn out to be interrelated and interdependent: their meanings and associations, multiple and ambiguous
(Derrida 1973, 1976). While Benhabib's objective is clearly to allow all groups within a community to participate in this rational conversation, her
formulation fails to recognize either that language is as much structured by miscommunication as by communication, or
that many groups are silenced or speak in different discourses that are unintelligible to the majority. Minority groups
and discourses are frequently ignored or excluded from political discussion and decisionmaking because they do not
adopt the dominant modes of authoritative and rational conversation that assume homogeneity and transparency. The feminist critiques
of community have usefully revealed the exclusion of difference and the abstraction from the specificity of corporeal
existence which characterize the dominant philosophical models of community. Many feminist theorists, however, continue to endorse the apparent necessity
of a final agreement or a unifying solidarity within community. While some, like Young, propose an alternative politics "conceived as a relationship of Strangers"
(Young 1992, 234), there continues, even in this endorsement of heterogeneity, to be an assumption that these diverse strangers
would share a common goal and that this would be the basis for the polity. The goal for Young is a radical, egalitarian democratic politics (24856)
which enables the differentiation, variety, eroticism, and publicity of city life (23641). While Young overcomes the liberal and communitarian imperative of unity
and fusion of identity she continues to endorse a commonality in the goal and purpose of community. I suggest, however, that this risks the re-creation
of an affinity between the strangers of the city which would once again undermine their difference through a fusion
of common political projects and goals which would create a merging of alterity into an identity founded on common purpose. In order to
overcome the unifying and totalizing tendency of community it is necessary both to emphasize the specificity of citizens, as Benhabib has done, and the radical
differences of strangers within the polity which is the basis of Young's formulation of city life. However, in order to avoid a final conflation into
sameness through the creation of a common goal it is also necessary to envisage a community without common ends
and projects. Jean-Luc Nancy's work on community develops this possibility by describing community as an "unworking" without common purpose.
UNWORKING COMMUNITY Nancy's thinking on community marks a radical departure from the universalist conceptions of
both community and subjectivity. Nancy's vision of community and singularity, formulated in the light of Heidegger's Dasein and Mitsein, puts in
question accepted ideas about human existence and society (Heidegger 1992). For Nancy, as for Heidegger, the human existence is not an individual, subject, or
citizen, but, in Heidegger's terms, a "being-there," or in Nancy's, a "singularity." For Nancy, the human existence is a singularity that is from the outset an inclining
towards others and a sharing with and exposure to others.

The holocaust was not an aberration- the western conception of community ensures totalitarianism and genocide will
break out
Norris 2K (Jean-Luc Nancy and the Myth of the Common Andrew Norris Constellations Volume 7, No 2, 2000.
When it is not simply the blind pursuit of power or the expression of base passions, politics for such people is a matter of
discovering the immanent or implicit identity of a group and setting it to work, drawing it out and allowing it to
express itself in functional activity. The conception of politics as work thus relies upon and follows from the conception of
community as immanent identity: Community understood as work or through its works would presuppose that the
common being, as such, be objectifiable and producible.12 If this is taken to suggest that Hegel or Sandel are
indistinguishable from Nazis and racist Serbian nationalists, one would surely be right to reject the argument out of hand. But
Nancy is hardly this simplistic. What the holocausts of our century have revealed is not that Hegel is really Milosevic;
nor have they revealed that totalitarianism is immanent to the West. Given Nancys rejection of the logic of immanent identity, that would only land him in an
obvious contradiction. As he and Lacoue-Labarthe argue, Nazism does not sum up the West, nor represent its necessary finality. But
neither is it possible to push it aside as an aberration, still less as a past aberration. A comfortable security in the
certitudes of morality and of democracy not only guarantees nothing, but exposes one to the risk of not seeing the
arrival, or the return, of that whose possibility is not due to any simple accident of history.13 Here a comparison with Hannah
Arendt who greatly influences Nancy might be helpful. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt attacks those political theories that center
around the defense of human rights. She does so not because she is eager to see such rights violated, but because,
ironically, their direct defense can undermine them. On her account, what is needed is rather a recognition of the ultimate
basis of civil rights what she terms the right to have rights.14 This basis Arendt finds in political action. Properly understood, human rights are civil
rights: they are based on forms of human action, not a set of moral truths about the laws of God or nature.15 It is as political, not legal, actors that we are granted
rights; and it is through political action that we defend those rights. But to do so successfully, we must defend them at their foundations: we must defend the
right and the preconditions necessary to engage in political action. To neglect this, and to concentrate solely on the rights that are attached to
politically passive and invisible legal subjects leads us to misdirect our resistance to totalitarianism a misdirection
that may prove fatal. In a similar vein, Nancy argues that our victories against totalitarianism and ethnic cleansing will remain
intermittent at best if we resist them only by supporting a rival community, one committed to norms and values that
are, if nothing else, at least better than those of racists and Nazis. What is required is an understanding of how
totalitarianism can erupt in the midst of what seems to be a civilized community or nation-state an understanding that will allow us
to resist totalitarianism in its genesis. To do that we need to ask what the relationship is between our civilization and totalitarianism. There is a temptation to
avoid this question, and to assume that totalitarian and racist movements such as Nazism are solely or essentially the result of evil, or pathology. But Nazism
was not wholly devoid of sense. To all too many people it made all too much sense. To assume that all of those people were mad or evil or
benighted will not allow us to understand what attracted them to totalitarianism. If our history is one of arbitrary
eruptions of insanity, we would seem to be helpless in the face of an equally arbitrary future. If fascism and genocide are truly
insane, they will lack all internal logic which will make them all but impossible to resist in their genesis. Contesting this, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe write:
There is a logic of fascism. This also means that a certain logic is fascist, and that this logic is not wholly foreign to the general logic of rationality inherent in the
metaphysics of the Subject.16 Put more plainly, this means that what we today count as politically rational has something in common with what counted for
rational politics in Nazi Germany.



Link Wall


No matter what the aff changes, selection inclusion ensures exclusion
Mitropoulos 6 (Culture Machine, Vol 8 (2006) Home About Log In Register Search Current Archives Reviews InterZone CSeARCH Cutting Democracy's Knot
Angela Mitropoulos
Therefore, alongside the democracy of the market--and in relation to European premonitions of a globally extended
constitution and citizenship--there is the democracy of the border. It is well known that the border, no matter how constantly it
recomposes itself, entails processes of selective inclusion as well as exclusion. But, contrary to recent insistences that
the border constitutes (according to Etienne Balibar, among others) the 'non-democratic' element of the demos, democracy no less
than the market is the democratic element par excellence in the foundation of citizenship and politics. This is to say, there
can be no democracy without the border. Even if that border is imagined as coextensive with the circumference of the planet itself, the border as a
technology of inclusion-exclusion can still function, whether as the internal demarcation between 'passive' and 'active' forms of
citizenship (which can be traced in the historically parallel trajectories of the granting of citizenship to more people
alongside increasing stratifications within citizenship), or in the recourse to the revocation of citizenship itself, whose
criteria and rulings have by no means disappeared but, today, proliferate. This is merely to note the formal operations of citizenship
laws, without having touched on the casual operations of border technologies, as they are articulated through, say, the police
checkpoints in the banlieues no less than in the demands that migrants (whether this status as a migrant is legal or semantic) must continually
prove their belonging. In any case, without the border, there is neither demos nor kratos. This is why Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri can call, in the final
chapters of Empire (2000), for a global citizenship under the sign of 'absolute democracy'. Yet, the diplomacy that might seemingly favour the proposition of
democracy as an empty placeholder for the question of 'constituent power' fails to confront the politics of the demos and the
kratos that invocations of democracy set to work, not least because diplomacy is already a technique of statecraft and a form of address that distinguishes and
fuses kratos and demos.

Transportation discussion is key to reduce metropolitan fragmentation and prop up notions of community
Orfield 99- fellow at Brookings, law professor and director of the Institute of Race and Poverty at the University of
Minnesota (Myron, Metropolitics: A regional agenda for community and stability, Forum for Social Economics Volume 28, Issue 2, 1999)
In order to stabilize the central cities and older suburbs and prevent metropolitan polarization, there are six
substantive and one structural reform that must be accomplished on a metropolitan scale. The reforms are interrelated and
reinforce each other substantively and politically. The first three reforms are the most significant in terms of the socioeconomic stability of the core. They
are (1) fair housing, (2) property tax-base sharing, and (3) reinvestment. Together, these reforms deconcentrate poverty, provide resource equity, and support the
physical rebuilding necessary to bring back the middle class and private economy. The second three, (4) land planning/growth control (5) welfare
reform/public works, and (6) transportation/transit reform, reinforce the first three and allow them to operate efficiently
and sustainably. In addition, these reforms provide for growth that is balanced socioeconomically, accessible by transit,
economical with governmental resources, and environmentally conscious. It is extraordinarily likely that these reforms can only be
accomplished, administered, and sustained by an elected metropolitan government. Finally, a panoply of tax and public finance reforms
should occur to overcome the perverse incentives created by generations of a highly fragmented, over-regulated local
marketplace.

Impact Extensions

The process of community inclusion neutralizes difference and ensures exclusion
Morin 6 (Culture Machine, Vol 8 (2006) Putting Community Under Erasure: Derrida and Nancy on the Plurality of Singularities Marie-Eve Morin Department of
Philosophy. 3-45 Assiniboia Hall. University of Alberta.
First, communities tend to neutralise differences by treating all members as brothers, that is, as the same. The other
belongs to my community only insofar as he is like me, and the 'us' -- the group of those who belong together -- appears as a
homogeneous group. It is because of this tendency to homogenise that fraternity can include apparent non-brothers
(such as women) and that the fraternal community can present itself as universal. The woman gets included in fraternity when she
becomes a brother for humanity, that is, when she is not (completely) woman anymore. Because 'man' is the
archetype of humanity and 'brother' the archetype of the relation between siblings, the woman can become human or sibling only
insofar as she resembles the archetypes of 'man' or 'brother'. Fraternity as a process of universalisation is a process of
inclusion, but here 'to include' means to neutralise difference. Second, communities are inscribed in a field of
opposition; they define themselves in an oppositional logic, by excluding 'them,' that is, those who do not belong, those who are not
'brothers,' not 'the same'. If I can identify my brothers, then by using the same criterion, I can also identify those who are not
my brothers. All groups function in the same way: they define a criterion which functions as a wall erected around the
group, a wall filled with certain type of openings that let only the right elements in. Of course, some criteria of appurtenance are
more inclusive than others because they are shared by more people. But no matter how inclusive a group is, it is always possible to find
elements that are excluded.

The creation of a mythical community is what allows for war
Norris 2K (Jean-Luc Nancy and the Myth of the Common Andrew Norris Constellations Volume 7, No 2, 2000.
Nancy, however, is deeply suspicious of this understanding of community. On his account, the move from the individual to
the community will do us no good if the community is understood as being a subject of the same sort as the individual.
In the end this will only produce a politics of identity in which different identities and interests are defined in opposition to
one another. Though this is an implication of the communitarian argument that Sandel and Taylor do not emphasize, it is clearly recognized by Hegel, who
argues that war is a fundamental possibility of political life, one that is not entirely regrettable. It is a fundamental possibility because the state
is, vis--vis other states, an individual, and individuality essentially implies negation. Hence even if a number of states make themselves into a
family, this group as an individual must engender an opposite and create an enemy.10 And it is not an absolute evil because war
allows for the display of martial courage, in which the citizen transcends his limited position and becomes one with the universal in the form of the state.11
External conflict and its possible glorification is not the only or even the most pressing danger Nancy would associate
with the politics of communal identity. He argues that conceiving of the community or the state as a subject entails
that we understand the community to have an identity that is immanent to it, and that needs to be brought out, and
put to work. In Nancys terminology, the community as subject necessarily implies the community as subject-work. If ones
true or higher or more universal self is found in ones shared communal identity, it becomes the work of politics
to acknowledge and bring forth that immanent communal identity. This will entail not merely conflict with other
political identities, but the purification of ones own community. To realize their political identity, Serbians must unite
so as to become more truly Serbian; doing so requires that they slough off what is not truly Serbian. Put more bluntly, it requires that
they cleanse their community of foreigners, and rid themselves of the influence of such. In Nancys terms, people like Milosevic
seek to put community to work.

Personal complicity with community is the ultimate incentive for these acts of violence and genocide
Suzanne Uniacke, Prof. Philosophy @ U of Wollongong, June, 99 (International Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol. 7, Iss. 2)
We bear responsibility for the outcome of anothers actions, for instance, when we provoke these actions (Iago); or when we
supply the means (Kevorkian), identification (Judas), or incentive (Eve); or where we encourage another to act as he [or she] does
(Lady Macbeth). Despite his disclaimer, Pilate cannot acquit himself entirely of the outcome of what others decide simply by ceding
the judgment to them. In these examples agents are indirectly, partly responsible for the outcomes of what others do in virtue of
something they themselves have done. But indirect, partial responsibility for what another person does can also arise through an
agents non-intervention and be grounded in intention or fault; for example, when Arthur does not prevent Brian killing Catherine, because
Arthur wants Catherine dead, or because Arthur simply cannot be bothered to warn her or call the police. Of course attributions of indirect, partial responsibility can be
dif cult. And as far as absolutism is concerned, the relevant sense of brings about, outlined earlier, will sometimes be quite stretched where an agent is attributed with
responsibility for what someone else does. All the same, by our non-intervention we can help bring about some things that are directly
and voluntarily caused by others.29

Modernity isnt the root cause of violenceits always proximately caused. The alternative leaves us
unable to deal with any global problems.
Curtler 97 PhD Philosophy, Hugh, rediscovering values: coming to terms with postnmodernism 44-7
The second and third concerns, though, are more serious and to a degree more legitimate. The second concern is that "reason is the product of the
Enlightenment, modern science, and Western society, and as such for the postmodernists, it is guilty byassociation of allthe errors attributed to them,
[namely], violence, suffering, and alienation in the twentieth century, be it the Holocaust, world wars, Vietnam, Stalin's Gulag, or computer record-
keeping . . ." (Rosenau 1992, 129). Although this is a serious concern, it is hardly grounds for the rejection of reason, for which postmodernism
calls in a loud, frenetic voice. There is precious little evidence that the problems of the twentieth century are the result of too much reason! On the contrary. To be
sure, it was Descartes's dream to reduce every decision to a calculation, and in ethics, this dream bore fruit in Jeremy Bentham's abortive "calculus" of utilities. But at
least since the birth of the social sciences at the end of the last century, and with considerable help from logical positivism, ethics (and values in general) has been
relegated to the dung heap of "poetical and metaphysical nonsense," and in the minds of the general populace, reason has no place in ethics, which is the proper
domain of feeling. The postmodern concern to place feelings at the center of ethics, and judgment generallywhich is the third
of their three objections to modern reasonsimply plays into the hands of the hardened popular prejudice that has little respect for
the abilities of human beings to resolve moral differences reasonably. Can it honestly be said of any major decision
made in thiscentury that it was the result of "too much reason" and that feelings and emotions played no part? Surely
not.Can this be said in the case of any of the concerns reflected in the list above: are violence, suffering, and alienation, or the Holocaust,
Vietnam, Stalin's Gulag, or Auschwitz the result of a too reasonable approach to human problems? No one could
possibly make this claim who has dared to peek into the dark and turbid recesses of the human psyche. In every case, it is more likely that these
concerns result from such things as sadism, envy, avarice, love of power, the "death wish," or short-term self-interest,
none of which is "reasonable."One must carefully distinguish between the methods ofthe sciences, which are thoroughly grounded in reason and logic,
and the uses men and women make of science. The warnings of romantics such as Goethe (who was himself no mean scientist) and Mary Shelley were directed not
against science per se but rather against the misuse of science and the human tendency to become embedded in the operations of the present moment. To the
extent that postmodernism echoes these concerns, I would share them without hesitation. But the claim that our present culture suffers because of an exclusive
concern with "reasonable" solutions to human problems, with a fixation on the logos, borders on the absurd.What is required here is not a mindless
rejection of human reason on behalf of "intuition," "conscience," or "feelings" in the blind hope that somehow
complex problems will be solved if we simply do whatever makes us feel good. Feelings and intuitions are notoriously
unreliable and cannot be made the center of a workable ethic. We now have witnessed several generations of college students who are
convinced that "there's no disputing taste" in the arts and that ethics is all about feelings. As a result, it is almost impossible to get them to take these issues seriously.
The notion that we can trust our feelings to find solutions to complex problems is little more than a false hope.We are confronted today with
problems on a scale heretofore unknown, and what is called for is patience, compassion (to be sure), and above all
else, clear heads. In a word, what is called for is a balance between reason and feelingsnot the rejection of one or
the other. One need only recall Nietzsche's own concern for the balance between Dionysus and Apollo in his Birth of Tragedy. Nietzscheknew better than his
followers, apparently, that one cannot sacrifice Apollo to Dionysus in the futile hope that we can rely on our blind instincts to get us out of the hole we have dug for
ourselves.

***Determinism K***

The portrayal of the African race as stuck, motionless, perpetuates deterministic attitudes and undermines racial
advancement
Muhwati 06- Department of African Languages and Literature, University of Zimbabwe (Itai,Mass Neurosis, Entrapment, Closure
and the Races Race of Life in Masango Mavi (1998) and Mapenzi (1999), ir.uz.ac.zw/jspui/handle/10646/515//MGD)
The African image in quite a number of literary creations in Zimbabwean literature is palpably bedridden in intensive care. This image
finds revelation in the titles themselves. The physical wreckage and spiritual paralysis that is by definition an expression of this
image, leads to an agonising realisation that, in lifes vicissitudes, and lifes race of race survival, African people remain
undeveloped and fledgling stutters. The images of characters in these novels whose titles are vapid project Africans as victims of
collective inertia, wallowing in cultural and historical amnesia and disintegrating in irretrievable mentacide. As a result,
in terms of agency and mobility, the African race remains glued on the starting line, quite overwhelmed by the seemingly
insurmountable hurdles in the race of life. Through the choice of titles, most of the writers seem to have adopted a modality that inordinately projects
social death and a host of other social sicknesses as new forms of social identity in the contemporary dispensation. While their absolutisation of mass
neurosis, closure and entrapment might be said to be a reflection of the state of the nation in the post independence period, it is also
estimable that such images of social sickness, paralysis and mass neurosis can be manipulated by Africas anthropological
detractors in their justification of a static and back pedalling African race, particularly along the evolutionary spectrum, which is presented
as a universal standard of valuation. The paper also puts forth argument that, the adoption of an axiological paradigm that legitimises closure
and race entrapment nullifies any prospects towards racial salvation. It is an act of defining the African race as doomed.
Such a definition which trivialises the African existential trajectory pays homage to the subversive labels that Europe has generously donated to Africa. Such labels
include Third World; Underdeveloped; Dark Continent; Poor majority, cultural other and many more. These are designations that bespeak helplessness and mass
neurosis.

Embracing forward optimism is the only chance for progress- crucial for opportunity and justice
Muhwati 06- Department of African Languages and Literature, University of Zimbabwe (Itai,Mass Neurosis, Entrapment, Closure
and the Races Race of Life in Masango Mavi (1998) and Mapenzi (1999), ir.uz.ac.zw/jspui/handle/10646/515//MGD)
While the picture might be said to be generally true, the authors vision remains nihilist and alarmist. It creates an impression that this is a race that
is not synonymous with growth and continuity. Such a picture is spiritually disempowering and energy sapping. It has the
capacity to engender life-threatening behaviours as people compete to act out their roles before the fixed end. It
imposes limits to where we can go as a race. It is fixating. We argue that, whatever the circumstances and however debilitating and
menacing, African people should simply reject such asphyxiating images. One might even hazard to say that the same version of our life as
portrayed in Mashiriapungana pays homage to the efforts of western social scientists on Africa whose statistical data on chances of Africans survival is carefully
crafted in order to signal disaster for Africa. This is crucial for the titillation of the western progeny.
2NC O/V

This affs representation of the African race as stunted, struggling creates social inertia and a negative determinism
which ensures mass neurosis and undermines social change
This is not to deny the historical oppression of race- however, embracing the alts forward optimism is the only way to
prevent spiritual disempowerment which chokes off the potential for progress- thats Muhwati
Ext: Link

Portrayals of race as underprivileged, suffering feed entrapment and neurosis
Muhwati 06- Department of African Languages and Literature, University of Zimbabwe (Itai,Mass Neurosis, Entrapment, Closure
and the Races Race of Life in Masango Mavi (1998) and Mapenzi (1999), ir.uz.ac.zw/jspui/handle/10646/515//MGD)
A people whose social theory is vague and mangled are likely to find it difficult to persevere in the race of life. A closer look at titles
that are part of Zimbabwean literature, including the titles of the novels analysed in this paper, testily problematises our social existence. One is left wondering
whose social theory informs creativity and indeed the generality of the nation. Evidence from the above titles confirms a bastardised, truncated and
self-immolating social theory. Such a theory fixes Zimbabwean people in a context of non possibilities, closure and
entrapment. We are forced to write against the popularisation of such a creative disposition which on closer examination turns
out to be a darker version of white neurosis and decadence. In the race of life, where the ultimate objective is to claim our share of the
trophies of life, the challenge is to constantly engage and re-engage, create and re-create vitalising and nourishing ideals. The
situation in Zimbabwe in the 1990s and beyond demands that we not only propose and confirm a social theory that acknowledges the stasis
and social death inherent in the country, but more importantly, increase awareness on ability to overcome forces
inimical to the realisation of life as a great ceremony. Responsible acts of creation always endeavour to strike a balance between opposites - that is, life
and death. Both Mabasa and Chiwome embrace the surreal tradition to parade the entrapped and neurotic condition of the race.


-AT Denies Utopia

Utopian visions are little more than dreams- embraces escapist fantasy and abandons active engagement
Muhwati 06- Department of African Languages and Literature, University of Zimbabwe (Itai,Mass Neurosis, Entrapment, Closure
and the Races Race of Life in Masango Mavi (1998) and Mapenzi (1999), ir.uz.ac.zw/jspui/handle/10646/515//MGD)
These dreams reflect peoples ambitions and their expectations of independence. Succumbing to dreams in such a manner
is an indication of the failure to take life head on. Dreams become an avenue to escape engagement. Since they are
escapist, it entails an abandonment of the race. Again, dreams are largely spiritual. However, any meaningful engagement in the race of life should
strive on the concatenation of both the physical and the spiritual. To live life in the spiritual alone is purely to disengage from the urge to
be immersed in the thick of things. Nonetheless, through the zeal shown by Tongai, Chiwome shows that the African race is a race of runners. It is only
the hostile environment punctuated with corruption, nepotism and favouritism which subverts peoples ability to finish the race. Life in the city is presented as
crippling. There are a number of expenses that thwart investment and personal growth. Tongai can not save any money to accomplish his personal goals. He has to
pay for water, electricity food and other expenses that require money. This is the reason why Tongai escapes into the surreal world, the world
of dreams. Life becomes indomitable and overwhelming.

***Homogenization K ***

Turn: Homogenization. They presume their performance interrupts white supremacy because it grew out of
resistance. It papers over other views in African American culture. When you assume a language only expresses
resistance, it prevents dialectic to change those ideas.
John h. Mcclendon III, Bates College Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 18, No. 4, 2004. P.308-9
Additionally, the function of various forms of social stratificationespecially the impact of class contradictionsharbors the real possibility for different ideological
responses to commonly experienced conditions of life. In the manner of the Marxist conception of ideology, as found in The German Ideology, I presume that
philosophy (ontology) is a form of ideology (Marx and Engels 1976). Hence, only on the presupposition that the African American community is socially homogeneous
can it plausibly be argued that African Americans all share the same ontology. Given it is not the case that the African American community is homogeneous, then
there is no plausible warranting for the belief that all African Americans share a common ontology. This leads directly to point three and my charge of Yancys (and
Smithermans) vindicationism, where he argues that resistance to white supremacy is the defining characteristic of African
American culture and hence language. When African American vindicationism is bereft of dialectical theory and method, as a determinate philosophical
approach to African American culture, it neglects a very important aspect of the historical dialectic of African Ameri can culture, viz. that African American
culture is not in any way a monolithically formed culture where there are only manifestations of resistance. There is
more to African American history and culture than a continuous line of resistance to oppression, for, by way of example, not all
African Americans sang the spirituals with an eye to joining the Underground Railroad (Fisher 1990). Some believed that freedom was
wearing a robe in heaben and that washing in the blood of Jesus would make one as white as the snow. Or that loyalty to Massa was the highest virtue and
resistance and revolt were of the greatest folly. The modern day connotation for Uncle Tom did not enter the lexicon of African American language without the
historical presence of real, existing Toms. It is no accident that there is the current exercise in African American locution of playing on this word (Tom) whenever
Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Tomto- us is mentioned among African American political speakers. After all, the historical record indicates that the failure of
Gabriel Prossers, Denmark Veseys, and Nat Turners slave insurrections were due in part to other slaves that were more loyal to Massa than their own liberation.
Mind you that those who ratted out the slave revolts shared in the same language, ate the same food, lived the same experiences, but also
had a different worldview (conception of reality) and set of values. The idea that social ontology and identity among African Americans, past and
present, are preeminently the same for all is the sort of reductionism that flattens out the cultural, social, political, and
ideological landscape called African American culture. Albeit, resistance is cardinal and crucial to any description, definition, and interpretation of
African American culture, nonetheless, it is not exhaustive of its actualities and even of its future possibilities. African American culture in its full
substance and scope is more complex than a singular thrust in the monodirection of resistance. Rather, African American
culture historically constitutes an ensemble of traditions in which we are able, for analytical purposes, to locate what are two
primary and yet contradictory forms, viz. one of resistance and another of accommodation. This internal dialectic is
undermined when a scenario of resistance sans accommodation gains support via vindicationism.

Its preaching to the choir: little transformative potential
Lynn Clarke, Department of Communication Studies and Theatre, Vanderbilt University, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 18, No. 4, 2004., p. 321
Returning to the question of creative powers compassYancys account of Nommo raises problems here as well. In the account, recall, the words
generative function funds an oppositional way of speaking (Yancy 2004, 289). Among other products, the speech acts of resistance
manifest themselves in a black identity and reality based on a presumption of shared interests among African American
selves.4 At the same time, however, Nommos creative force is conceptually detached from the words power to constitute
intersubjective relations between selves and others within the African American community. Thus, Yancys concept of
Nommo only admits a generative power to create identification among blacks who already agree to the presence and
terms of shared interest. The power of this Nommo fails to reach those African Americans who disagree with black
majoritarian terms. This relatively minimal compass of power suggests that Nommos potential to define black community and reality may need to be
reconceptualized beyond the presumptions of shared experience and common values to consider Nommos potential to forge relations between African Americans
who are divided on the terms of their present and future.

Performance isnt a round winner. They dont win for using it. Claiming it does leaves no space for dissent or
deliberation.
Lynn Clarke, Department of Communication Studies and Theatre, Vanderbilt University, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 18, No. 4, 2004., p. 319-21
Notwithstanding the importance of creative speech to philosophy of language and to a communitys self-formation, it remains unclear whether the collective
resistance embodied in AAL meets certain interests expressed by those in whose name it is theorized. To be sure, and as Yancy argues, oppositional speech matters to
the lives of the oppressed. Yet, questions remain about the terms and relations of Nommos creativity and its significance for AAL. Conceptually, there is no
account of whether Nommo is oriented toward coerced or communicatively reasoned terms of communal harmony. This
absence raises a question of relation: Should AAL be understood as linguistic resistance without intent to relate to self-defined
black individuals who disagree with black majoritarian terms? Put another way, do the terms of Yancys AAL community open
a space of interaction within Black America for the sort of opposition that Yancys linguistic framework defends? Equally
important, do these terms direct attention to speech practices that have the potential to render the dissent productive of
black peoples deliberation on the legitimacy of their communitys self-understanding? Extending the boundaries of humane
community a bit further, might the power of Nommo move beyond the constitution of African American identity, experience, and community, to promote the
intersubjective transformation of oppressive social norms as Fanon both worked for and hoped (Fanon 1967, 100, 222)? Asked in brief, these questions may be folded
into two queries: what compass of creative power should a philosophy of language attribute to (the speech of) AAL, and how
might this power be held accountable to the very members of the community in whose name(s) AAL is said to create? If
there is good reason to commend the presupposition of shared nonidentity that informs these two questions, neither a sheerly instrumental Nommo
nor a sheerly oppositional theory of AAL may do.2 Addressing the second question first, the problem of holding power
accountable to those in whose name it speaks is apparent in certain deployments of Nommo as instrumental force. The
speech practice of call and response is a striking example. In Yancys invocation of Nommo to account for this dynamic
co-signing and co-narrating of a shared communicative reality, a speaker makes a verbal point to an audience charged with
responding (293). The conceived, expected response is one of approval. If not received, the audience will likely be deemed
dead. Knowles-Borishade, who comes closest to thinking the question of Nommo and dissent, offers a somewhat different account. In it, responders co-create
the callers messagethe Word by either sanctioning or rejecting it spontaneously during the speech, based on the perceived morality and vision of the Caller
and the relevance of the message (Knowles- Borishade 1991, 49798). According to Knowles-Borishade, call and response aims at consensus determined by the
people themselves (49394). Through the process of checks and balances that constitutes call and response, levels of perfected social interaction are promoted.
Yet, in Yancys and Knowles- Borishades discussions of call and response, an account of disagreement and its potential to hold power
accountable does not appear. At most, disagreement is figured as privatized rejection. The grounds of this response remain
unknown to the speaker and audience members, among whom reasons for dissent may vary. In the face of silent rejection, the
accounts of AALs call and response are mum on what ought happen next. The dead audience plays no transparent cognitive- practice role.
The caller is free to cast his word-spell. The absense of accountability in a sheerly productive word appears more readily in Asantes conception of
African communication. In it, the group is thought to take precedence over the individual (Asante 1998, 74). To Asante, this strong collective mentality warrants a
focus on the aesthetic dimension of speech in traditional African public discourse. The focus is relatively narrow, prompting a declaration that, The African speaker
means to be a poet; not a lecturer, inducing compulsive relationships and invoking the audiences inner needs through the inherent power of concrete
images (91). Though reason may matter on this account of Nommo, it is tough to see how and why. Indeed, talk of reason appears relatively
unimportant in Asantes traditional understanding of African public discourse (75, 9091). Creativitys highlight shines in
the absence of an explicit role for communicative reason in public speech.3 Accountability appears as a non-issue, lurking
uncomfortably in the shadow of creative power.







2NC O/V

Their method of performance constructs monolithic interpretations of African American identity and papers over
alternative viewpoints
This reductionist conception of identity is doomed to failure- while it resonates with those who already share similar
viewpoints, it alienates those the performance is trying to persuade who dont already agree with their viewpoints-
thats McClendon and Clarke

Dont buy into their claims that they should win because they were first to perform
This shields their arguments from scrutiny and promotes a lack of accountability
Theres no inherent reason to prefer performance-thats Clarke

2NC Appropriation Turn
Turn: Appropriation
Shannon Sullivan, Penn State University, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 18, No. 4, 2004. P. 301-2
While a white/Anglo persons learning Spanish can begin to balance the relationship of power and knowledge between white/Anglo and Latino
worlds, it also can have the opposite effect of increasing the hegemony of the white world. This occurs when white people
learn a language other than Standard American LanguageSpanish, African American Language, or otherwiseprecisely
to dominate the world that speaks that language. Certainly this happened during times of colonialist conquest, but it also
continues today as business corporations and advertising firms in the United States learn (bits of) African American
Language and Spanish to better market products that promise the exoticism of Blackness and the spiciness of Latino culture.
(Standard, middleclass whiteness is so unhip nowadays, as Yancy notes [Yancy 2004, 276].) It also can happen in less insidious ways, however,
such as when white people learn another language to (try to) break out of their white solipsism. Even in these well-
intentioned instances, the protection provided to minority races by white peoples ignorance of their languages can
be eroded once white people begin to understand and speak them.



2NC White Fill In
Turn: Opens space for white hegemony
Shannon Sullivan, Penn State University, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 18, No. 4, 2004, p. 302
This point was brought home to me when a Latina friend and philosopher explained that she did not want white/Anglo people to
learn Spanish because their knowledge would intrude on the Spanish/Latina world that she and other Spanish-
speaking philosophers are able to create in the midst of white/Anglodominated conferences.2 Opening up her world to white/Anglo
philosophers tends to result in the destruction of a valuable point of resistance to white racism. Because of the
dominance of white people in philosophy in the United States, she frequently is forced to travel to white worlds and
wants to preserve a small space that is relatively free of white people and the issues of race and racism that their
presence inevitably (though not necessarily deliberately) produces.

Inclusion Calls Turn Case

The call for more inclusion and tolerance risks a faade of change that reproduces the structures they criticize.
Zizek 97 *Slavoj iek, bearded Slovenian, 1997 Repeating Lenin, http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm //liam]
One is therefore tempted to turn around Marx's thesis 11: the first task today is precisely NOT to succumb to the temptation to act, to
directly intervene and change things (which then inevitably ends in a cul de sac of debilitating impossibility: "what can one do against the global
capital?"), but to question the hegemonic ideological coordinates. If, today, one follows a direct call to act, this act will not be performed in an
empty space it will be an act WITHIN the hegemonic ideological coordinates: those who "really want to do something to help
people" get involved in (undoubtedly honorable) exploits like Medecins sans frontiere, Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist campaigns, which are all
not only tolerated, but even supported by the media, even if they seemingly enter the economic territory (say, denouncing and boycotting companies which do not
respect ecological conditions or which use child labor) they are tolerated and supported as long as they do not get too close to a
certain limit. This kind of activity provides the perfect example of interpassivity2: of doing things not to achieve something, but to
PREVENT from something really happening, really changing. All the frenetic humanitarian, politically correct, etc., activity fits the formula of "Let's go
on changing something all the time so that, globally, things will remain the same!".

AT Language First
A) Debate about social and political structures in favor of discussions on the minutia of terminology. While language
matters, material forces are an important structuring factor in the way language plays in our negotiation of reality. To
assume that it is all about language misses important structural conditions of racism which they cannot access.
Best & Kellner 91 [Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner, UT-Austin, 1991, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, p. 259-60 //liam]
Postmodern theorists do not do social theory per se, but rather eclectically combine fragments of sociological analysis, literary and cultural readings,
historical theorizations, and philosophical critiques. They tend to privilege cultural and philosophical analysis over social theory and
thereby fail to confront the most decisive determinants of our social world. Yet we believe - against much postmodern theory - that the
project of social theory itself continues to be a valuable one. Just as individuals need cognitive maps of their cities to negotiate their
spatial environment, they also need maps of their society to intelligently analyze, discuss, and intervene in social
processes. For us, social theories provide mappings of contemporary society: its organization; its constitutive social
relations, practices, discourses, and institutions; its integrated and interdependent features; its conflictual and
fragmenting features; and its structures of power and modes of oppression and domination. Social theories analyze
how these elements fit together to constitute specific societies, and how societies work or fail to function

B) Language is a constant negotiation. We understand that language is never static nor is meaning ever closed off. We
still have to try to communicate ideasOur framing represents our best attempt to communicate with the imperfect
system we have.
Biesecker 89 *Barbara Biesecker, professor of communication at UGA, 1989 Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from Within the Thematic of Differance, in
Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol 22., No. 2 //liam]
But what about this diffirance? Why should rhetorical critics struggle with this complicated internal division that is said to inhabit all writing, structure all speech, and
scandalize all texts? What is so critical about this seemingly critical difference? In his essay "differance" Derrida provides a possible answer: "Differance is what
makes the movement of signification possible . . . ." The play of differance, as Derrida puts it, is "the possibility of
conceptuality, of the conceptual system and process in general:"
What we note as differance will thus be the movement of play that "produces" (and not by something that is simply an activity) these
differences, these effects of difference. This does not mean that the differance which produces differences is before
them in a simple and in itself unmodified and indifferent present. Differance is the nonfull, nonsimple "origin"; it is the
structured and differing origin of differences.22
To repeat, differance makes signification possible. Only to the extent that we are able to differ, as in spatial distinction or
relation to an other, and to defer, as in temporalizing or delay, are we able to produce anything. ''Differance" is, as Derrida puts it,
"the formation of form." Here we do well to look a bit closer at an essay in which Derrida provides an extensive structural description of differance and then proceeds
to discuss at even greater length its enabling power. In "Linguistics and Grammatology" he says, [differance] does not depend on any sensible plentitude, audible or
viable, phonic or graphic. It is, on the contrary, the condition of such a plenitude. Although it does not exist, although it is never a thing-present outside of all
plentitude, its possibility is by rights anterior to all that one calls sign . . . concept or operation, motor or sensory. This differance is therefore not more sensible than
intelligible and it permits the articulation of signs among themselves the same abstract order ... or between two orders of expression. It permits the articulation of
speech and writingin the colloquial senseas it founds the metaphysical opposition between the sensible and the intelligible, then between signifier and signified,
expression and content, etc.
Derrida's differance is, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points out, the name for "the lack at the origin that is the condition of thought
and experience"; all writing in the narrow sense, like all speech, marks the play of this productive non-identity." Differance, Derrida
writes, is the structural condition which makes it possible for us to perform any act.






***Identity Politics K***

Sole focus on identity politics is flawed- excludes other methods of truth verification and adopts a reductionist
approach to the attitudes of all minorities
Scott 92- professor of social science at Princeton (Joan, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Identity, October, Vol. 61, The Identity in Question
(Summer, 1992), pp. 12-19, JSTOR//MGD)
There is nothing wrong, on the face of it, with teaching individuals about how to behave decently in relation to others and about
how to empathize with each other's pain. The problem is that difficult analyses of how history and social standing,
privilege, and subordination are involved in personal behavior entirely drop out. Chandra Mohanty puts it this way: There has
been an erosion of the politics of collectivity through the reformulation of race and difference in individualistic terms. The
1960s and '70s slogan "the personal is political" has been recrafted in the 1980s as "the political is personal." In other words, all politics is
collapsed into the personal, and questions of individual behaviors, attitudes, and life-styles stand in for political analysis
of the social. Individual political struggles are seen as the only relevant and legit- imate form of political struggle.5
Paradoxically, individuals then generalize their perceptions and claim to speak for a whole group, but the groups are also
conceived as unitary and autonomous. This individualizing, personalizing conception has also been be- hind some of the
recent identity politics of minorities; indeed it gave rise to the intolerant, doctrinaire behavior that was dubbed, initially by its internal
critics, "political correctness." It is particularly in the notion of "experience" that one sees this operating. In much current usage of
"experience," references to structure and history are implied but not made explicit; instead, personal testimony of oppression re- places analysis,
and this testimony comes to stand for the experience of the whole group. The fact of belonging to an identity group is
taken as authority enough for one's speech; the direct experience of a group or culture-that is, membership in it-becomes the
only test of true knowledge. The exclusionary implications of this are twofold: all those not of the group are denied even
intellectual access to it, and those within the group whose experiences or interpretations do not conform to the
established terms of iden- tity must either suppress their views or drop out. An appeal to "experience" of this kind
forecloses discussion and criticism and turns politics into a policing operation: the borders of identity are patrolled for
signs of nonconformity; the test of membership in a group becomes less one's willingness to endorse certain principles and
engage in specific political actions, less one's positioning in specific relationships of power, than one's ability to use the prescribed languages that
are taken as signs that one is inherently "of" the group. That all of this isn't recognized as a highly political process that produces identities is
troubling indeed, especially because it so closely mimics the politics of the powerful, naturalizing and deeming as discernably objective facts
the prerequisites for inclusion in any group.

Privileging identity-based knowledge is a bad model- falls prey to the same criticisms of systemic knowledge
Gur-Ze'ev 98- Lecturer, Faculty of Education at the University of Haifa (Ilan, EDUCATIONAL THEORY / Fall 1998 / Volume 48 / Nuiiibcr 4
Toward a Nonrepressive Critical Pedagogy, JSTOR//MGD)
From this perspective, the consensus reached by the reflective subject taking part in the dialogue offered by critical pedagogy is
naive, especially in light of its declared anti-intellectualism on the one hand and its pronounced glorification of the feelings,
experience, and self-evident knowledge of the group on the other. Critical pedagogy, in its different versions, claims to inhere and
overcome the foundationalism and transcendentalism of the Enlightenments emancipatory and ethnocentric - arrogance, as
exemplified by ideology-critique, psychoanalysis, or traditional metaphysics. Marginalized feminist knowledge, like the marginalized, neglected, and
ridiculed knowledge of the Brazilian farmers, as presented by Freire or Kathleen Weiler, is represented as legitimate and relevant knowledge, in
contrast to its representation as the hegemonic instrument of representation and education. This knowledge is portrayed as a
relevant, legitimate, and superior alternative to hegeinonic education and the knowledge this represents in the center. It is said to represent an identity
that is desirable and promises to function successfully. However, neither the truth value of the marginalized collective
memory nor knowledge is cardinal here. Truth is replaced by knowledge whose supreme criterion is its self-evidence,
namely the potential productivity of its creative violence, while the dialogue in which adorers of difference take part is implicitly represented as one of the desired
productions of this violence. My argument is that this marginalized and repressed self-evident knowledge has no superiority over the
self-evident knowledge of the oppressors. Relying on the knowledge of weak, controlled, and marginalized groups, their
memory and their conscious interests, is no less naive and dangerous than relying on hegemonic knowledge. This is because the
critique of Western transcendentalism, foundationalism, and ethnocentrism declines into an uncritical acceptance of
marginalized knowledge, which becomes foundationalistic and ethnocentric in presenting the truth, the facts, or
the real interests of the group -even if conceived as valid only for the group concerned. This position cannot avoid vulgar realism and
naive positivism based on the facts of self-evident knowledge ultimately realized against the self-evidence of other
groups.

***Onto Focus K***

A) LINKtheir assumption of ontological blackness essentializes blackness as a racial category subservient to
whiteness
Welcome 2004 completing his PhD at the sociology department of the City University of New York's Graduate Center (H. Alexander, "White Is Right": The
Utilization of an Improper Ontological Perspective in Analyses of Black Experiences, Journal of African American Studies, Summer-Fall 2004, Vol. 8, No. 1 & 2, pp. 59-
73)
In many of the studies of blacks, the experiences of whites, not blacks, are used as the backing for the construction of
the warrants/rules that are employed to evaluate black experiences, delimiting the "concepts and relationships that can exist" in the black
community. The life histories of whites are used as the standard against which black experiences are measured and as the
goals to which blacks are encouraged to strive. The employment of this ontology fallaciously limits the range of black
agency, producing deceitful narratives where the navigation of the social environment by blacks is dictated by either a
passive response to, or a passive adoption of, white scripts. This ontology erroneously limits descriptions and evaluations of black
experiences, excluding viable causal determinants of the socio-economic status of blacks and constructing restricted descriptions of black agency. The utilization
of whiteness to determine and/or evaluate blackness begins when whiteness and white life histories come to
represent what is "right." "White is right" is a sarcastic phrase that was an extremely popular slur during the Black Power movement in the mid-1960s to
the early 1970s; the utilization of this phrase represents a form of social critique that takes exception to both the privileging of white biographies as accurate
descriptions of history and the reconstitution of these histories as a template that blacks and other people of color should follow for navigating social environments
and achieving positive social mobility. Part of the prominence of the "white is right" perspective comes from the numerical superiority of whites. As a group, whites
have been in the majority throughout the history of the United States and the prominence of the white experience has been used to argue that white experiences
should be used as a social template. It has been used as such in the works of Robert Park (1939) and Gunnar Myrdal (1944), both of whom suggested that by copying
the patterns of whites, blacks would achieve positive social mobility. However, use of the numerical superiority of whites to support claims about the "rightness" of
white experiences relies on the equation of quantitative dominance with qualitative dominance and the employment of the fallacious argumentum ad populum.
The actual source of the dominance of the "white is right" perspective lies in the dynamics of power. The location of
the origins of the dominant ideology in power relations is conceptualized in the work of Michel Foucault (1980), who
theorized that power is imbricated with discourse: We must make allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be
both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse
transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it (p. 101). Key to the
deployment of discourses is an underlying strategy. As such, the prominence of the "white is right" perspective can be
traced to attempts to create an "order," or a way of thinking. Foucault's theoretical lens supports the hypothesis that the privileging of white
experiences and the use of these experiences as an ontological framework for the analyses of black experiences is an
effect of power imbalances.

B) Turns Case essentialism makes true insurrection impossible
Newman, Postdoctoral fellow:University of Western Australia, conducting research in the area of contemporary political and social though, 2003
(Saul, Stirner and Foucault, Postmodern Culture)
The idea of transgressing and reinventing the self--of freeing the self from fixed and essential identities--is also a central theme in Stirner's thinking. As we have seen,
Stirner shows that the notion of human essence is an oppressive fiction derived from an inverted Christian idealism that tyrannizes the individual and is linked with
various forms of political domination. Stirner describes a process of subjectification which is very similar to Foucault's: rather than power operating as
downward repression, it rules through the subjectification of the individual, by defining him according to an essential identity. As
Stirner says: "the State betrays its enmity to me by demanding that I be a man . . . it imposes being a man upon me as a duty" (161). Human
essence imposes a series of fixed moral and rational ideas on the individual, which are not of his creation and which curtail his autonomy. It is precisely this
notion of duty, of moral obligation--the same sense of duty that is the basis of the categorical imperative--thatStirner finds oppressive. For Stirner,
then, the individual must free him- or herself from these oppressive ideas and obligations by first freeing himself from essence--fromthe
essential identitythat is imposed on him. Freedom involves, then, a transgression of essence, a transgression of the self. But what form should this
transgression take? Like Foucault, Stirner is suspicious of the language of liberation and revolution--it is based on a notion of an essential self that supposedly throws
off the chains of external repression. For Stirner, it is precisely this notion of human essence that is itself oppressive. Therefore, different strategies of freedom are
called for--ones that abandon the humanist project of liberation and seek, rather, to reconfigure the subject in new and non-essentialist ways. To this end, Stirner
calls for an insurrection: Revolution and insurrection must not be looked upon as synonymous. The former consists in an
overturning of conditions, of the established condition or status, the state or society, and is accordingly a political or social act; the latter has
indeed for its unavoidable consequence a transformation of circumstances, yet does not start from it but from men's
discontent with themselves, is not an armed rising but a rising of individuals, a getting up without regard to the arrangements that spring from it. The
revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange
ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on "institutions." It is not a fight against the established, since, if it prospers, the established collapses of itself; it is only a
working forth of me out of the established. (279-80) So while a revolution aims at transforming existing social and political conditions so that human essence may
flourish, an insurrection aims at freeing the individual from this very essence. Like Foucault's practices of freedom, the insurrection aims at transforming the
relationship that the individual has with himself. The insurrection starts, then, with the individual refusing his or her enforced essential identity: it starts, as Stirner
says, from men's discontent with themselves. Insurrection does not aim at overthrowing political institutions. It is aimed at the individual, in a sense transgressing his
own identity--the outcome of which is, nevertheless, a change in political arrangements. Insurrection is therefore not about becoming what
one is--becoming human, becoming man--but about becoming what one is not . This ethos of escaping essential identities through a reinvention
of oneself has many important parallels with the Baudelarian aestheticization of the self that interests Foucault. Like Baudelaire's assertion that the self
must be treated as a work of art, Stirner sees the self--or the ego--as a "creative nothingness," a radical emptiness which is up to the individual to define: "I do not
presuppose myself, because I am every moment just positing or creating myself" (135). The self, for Stirner, is a process, a continuous flow of self-
creating flux--it is a process that eludes the imposition of fixed identities and essences: "no concept expresses me, nothing that is designated as my essence
exhausts me" (324). Therefore, Stirner's strategy of insurrection and Foucault's project of care for the self are both contingent practices of freedom that involve a
reconfiguration of the subject and its relationship with the self. For Stirner, as with Foucault, freedom is an undefined and open-ended project in which the individual
engages. The insurrection, as Stirner argues, does not rely on political institutions to grant freedom to the individual, but looks to the individual to invent his or her
own forms of freedom. It is an attempt to construct spaces of autonomy within relations of power, by limiting the power that is exercised over the individual by
others and increasing the power that the individual exercises over himself. The individual, moreover, is free to reinvent himself in new and unpredictable ways,
escaping the limits imposed by human essence and universal notions of morality. The notion of insurrection involves a reformulation of the concept of freedom in
ways that are radically post-Kantian. Stirner suggests, for instance, that there can be no truly universal idea of freedom; freedom is always a particular freedom in the
guise of the universal. The universal freedom that, for Kant, is the domain of all rational individuals, would only mask some hidden particular interest. Freedom,
according to Stirner, isan ambiguous and problematic concept, an "enchantingly beautiful dream" that seduces the individual yet
remains unattainable, and from which the individual must awaken. Furthermore, freedom is a limited concept. It is only seen in its narrow
negative sense. Stirner wants, rather, to extend the concept to a more positive freedom to. Freedom in the negative sense involves only self-abnegation--to be rid of
something, to deny oneself. That is why, according to Stirner, the freer the individual ostensibly becomes, in accordance with the emancipative ideals of
Enlightenment humanism, the more he loses the power he exercises over himself. On the other hand, positive freedom--or ownness--is a form of freedom that is
invented by the individual for him or herself. Unlike Kantian freedom, ownness is not guaranteed by universal ideals or categorical imperatives. If it were, it could only
lead to further domination: "The man who is set free is nothing but a freed man [...] he is an unfree man in the garment of freedom, like the ass in the lion's skin"
(152). Freedom must, rather, be seized by the individual. For freedom to have any value it must be based on the power of the individual to create it. "My
freedom becomes complete only when it is my--might; but by this I cease to be a merely free man, and become and own man" (151). Stirner
was one of the first to recognize that the true basis of freedom is power. To see freedom as a universal absence of power is to mask its very basis in power. The
theory of ownness is a recognition, and indeed an affirmation, of the inevitable relation between freedom and power. Ownness is the realization of the
individual's power over himself--the ability to create his or her own forms of freedom,which are not circumscribed by metaphysical
or essentialist categories. In this sense, ownness is a form of freedom that goes beyond the categorical imperative. It is based on a notion of the self as a contingent
and open field of possibilities, rather than on an absolute and dutiful adherence to external moral maxims.

2NC O/V

The affs use of black ontology adopts an essentialist approach of whiteness which uses whiteness as the measuring
stick against which blackness is compared
This underlying discourse limits black agency and turns case
Limiting the power of the individual makes coalition building and effective movements impossible- thats Newmand


Link Ontological Blackness = Essentialist
ontological blackness is essentializing and denies black agency
Pinn 2004 Professor of Religious Studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota (Anthony B., Black Is, Black Aint: Victor Anderson, African American
Theological Thought, and Identity, Dialog: A Journal of Theology . Volume 43, Number 1)
This connection between ontological blackness and religion is natural because: ontological blackness signifies the totality of black existence,
a binding together of black life and experience. In its root, religio, religion denotes tying together, fastening behind, and binding together.
Ontological blackness renders black life and experience a totality.13 According to Anderson, Black theological discussions are entangled in
ontological blackness. And accordingly, discussions of black life revolve around a theological understanding of Black experience
limited to suffering and survival in a racist system. The goal of this theology is to find the meaning of black faith in the merger of black cultural
consciousness, icons of genius, and post-World War II Black defiance. An admirable goal to be sure, but here is the rub: Black theologians speak,
according to Anderson, in opposition to ontological whiteness when they are actually dependent upon whiteness for
the legitimacy of their agenda. Furthermore, ontological blacknesss strong ties to suffering and survival result in
blackness being dependent on suffering, and as a result social transformation brings into question what it means to
be black and religious. Liberative outcomes ultimately force an identity crisis, a crisis of legitimation and utility. In Andersons words: Talk about
liberation becomes hard to justify where freedom appears as nothing more than defiant self-assertion of a
revolutionary racial consciousness that requires for its legitimacy the opposition of white racism. Where there exists no
possibility of transcending the blackness that whiteness created, African American theologies of liberation must be seen not only as crisis theologies; they remain
theologies in a crisis of legitimation.14 This conversation becomes more refined as new cultural resources are unpacked and various religious alternatives
acknowledged. Yet the bottom line remains racialization of issues and agendas, life and love. Falsehood is perpetuated through the
hermeneutic of return, by which ontological blackness is the paradigm of Black existence and thereby sets the
agenda of Black liberation within the postrevolutionary context of present day USA. One ever finds the traces of the Black
aesthetic which pushes for a dwarfed understanding of Black life and a sacrifice of individuality for the sake of a unified Black faith. Yet differing experiences of racial
oppression (the stuff of ontological blackness) combined with varying experiences of class, gender and sexual oppression call into question the value of their
racialized formulations. Implicit in all of this is a crisis of faith, an unwillingness to address both the glory and guts of Black
existencenihilistic tendencies that, unless held in tension with claims of transcendence, have the potential to overwhelm and to
suffocate. At the heart of this dilemma is friction between ontological blackness and contemporary postmodern
black lifeissues, for example related to selecting marriage partners, exercising freedom of movement, acting on gay and lesbian preferences, or choosing
political parties.15 How does one foster balance while embracing difference as positive? Anderson looks to Nietzsche.





Rejection Solves
Pinn 2004 Professor of Religious Studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota (Anthony B., Black Is, Black Aint: Victor Anderson, African American
Theological Thought, and Identity, Dialog: A Journal of Theology . Volume 43, Number 1)
Viewing these issues from the context of overtly religious thought, it is reasonable to say that Black religious studies participates in this ideological game by
demonstrating the uniqueness of Black religion in opposition to White religious expression. Ontological blackness denotes a provincial or clan-
ness understanding of Black collective life, one that is synonymous with Black genius and its orthodox activities and attitudes. Race is reified, that is,
treated as an objectively existing category independent of historically contingent factors and subjective intentions in the writings of historical and contemporary
African American cultural and religious thinkers.9 To avoid this dilemma, African American criticism must be pragmatic enough to
subvert all racial discourse and cultural idolatry, and sensitive enough to appreciate diverse and utopian or
transcendent visions of life.10 When this is done, both the friction between cultural and religious criticism highlighted
by Said and preoccupation with blacknessphysically and culturallyare resolved. Room is made for a religiously
informed cultural criticism.



***Post Racialism K***
The struggle of 21st century politics is not a struggle oriented around race; rather, it is the very concept of race which
has come to inhibit and constrain radical politics. The affirmatives deployment of the concept of race as the
organizational focus of political struggle is a smokescreen which obscures the dynamics of oppression the very
deployment of race as a concept itself is the lynchpin of racialized oppression.
Darder and Torress 4 [Antonia Darder, Prof of education policy studies at U of Illinois, and Rodolfo Torress, Associate prof of latino studies at UC Irvine, After
Race: Racism after multiculturalism, p. 1-2 //liam]
Over a century ago, W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk proclaimed one of his most cited dictums: "The problem of the 20th Century i:s the problem of the
color line" (1989, 10). In this book we echo his sentiment, but with a radical twist. The problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of
"race"-an ideology that has served well to successfully obscure and disguise class interests behind the smokescreen of
multiculturalism, diversity, difference, and more recently, whiteness. Whether the terms of analysis are "race," " racial identity," "race
consciousness," or "political race," the category of "race" and its many derivatives function as the lynchpin of racism, which "
forbids its objects to be other than members of a race" (Fields 2001, 49). As Barbara Fields has noted with respect to African Americans, Afro-
Americans themselves have fought successively for different ways of naming themselves as people . ... Each name, once accepted into the general public vocabulary,
has simply become a variant word for Afro Americans' race. A sense of peoplehood, nationhood, or comradeship in struggle may be available to others; but, for
persons of African descent, all reduces to race, a life sentence for them and their issue in perpetuity. (50) To radically shift directions and speak
"against race," as Paul Gilroy (2000) suggests, or "after race" as we attempt to do here, is to uncompromisingly refuse to accept or
legitimate any longer the perpetual racialized demarcations of "raced" (Guinier and Torres 2002) or "problem" (Du Bois 1989)
populations. Our intention is to contest the notion that the color of a person's skin, and all it has historically come to signify within the sociological, political, or
popular imagination, should continue to function as such. We seek to shatter dubious claims that essentialize the responses of
populations, whether they exist as objects or subjects of racism; and by so doing, acknowledge the complexity of the
world in which we negotiate our daily existence today. To be clear, we are not arguing in the tradition of the color-blind conservatives or
political pundits who would have us believe that the structures and practices that have formidably embedded racism as a way of life for centuries in the United States
and around the world have been undone and that the problem of racism has been ameliorated. Our position, in fact, is diametrically opposed to this argument.
Instead, the political force of our analysis is anchored in the centrality of "race" as an ideology and racism as a powerful, structuring, hegemonic force in the world
today. We argue that we must disconnect from "race" as it has been constructed in the past, and contend fully with the
impact of "race" as ideology on the lives of all people-but most importantly on the Lives of those who have been enslaved, colonized, or marked
for genocide in the course of world history.

Specifically, they see the world in black and white: the affirmatives paradigmatic citation of the white/black binary
makes redress of the multiple intersections of oppression impossible the affirmatives simplistic analysis of racism as
predominantly an issue that affects African-Americans negates the reality of other people of color.
Alcoff 3 [LINDA MARTN ALCOFF, Syracuse University Department of Philosophy, LATINO/AS, ASIAN AMERICANS, AND THE BLACKWHITE BINARY The Journal of
Ethics 7: 527 //liam]
The discourse of social justice in regard to issues involving race has been dominated in the U.S. by what many theorists name the
"black/white paradigm," which operates to govern racial classifications and racial politics in the U.S., most clearly in the formulation of civil rights law but
also in more informal arenas of discussion. Juan Perea defines this paradigm as the conception that race in America consists, either exclusively or primarily, of only
two constituent racial groups, the Black and White ... In addition, the paradigm dictates that all other racial identities and groups in the
United States are best understood through the Black/White binary paradigm.5 He argues that this paradigm operates even in recent
anti-racist theory such as that produced by Andrew Hacker, Cornel West, and Toni Morrison, though it is even clearer in works by liberals such as Nathan Glazer.
Openly espousing this view, Mary Francis Berry, former chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, has stated that the U.S. is comprised of "three nations, one Black,
one White, and one in which people strive to be something other than Black to avoid the sting of White Supremacy."6 To understand race in this way is to assume
that racial discrimination operates exclusively through anti-black racism. Others can be affected by racism, on this view, but the dominance of the black/white
paradigm works to interpret all other effects as "collateral damage" ultimately caused by the same phenomena, in both economic and psychological terms, in which
the given other, whether Latino/a, Asian American, or something else, is placed in the category of "black" or "close to black." In other words, there is
basically one form of racism, and one continuum of racial identity, along which all groups will be placed. The black/white
paradigm can be understood either descriptively or prescriptively (or both): as making a descriptive claim about the fundamental nature of racializations and racisms
in the U.S., or as prescribing how race shall operate and thus enforcing the applicability of the black/white paradigm.7 Several Latino/a and Asian American theorists,
such as Elaine Kim, Gary Okihiro, Elizabeth Martinez, Juan Perea, Frank Wu, Dana Takagi, and community activists such as Bong Hwan Kim have argued that the
black/white paradigm is not adequate, certainly not sufficient, to explain racial realities in the U.S. They have thus contested its claim to descriptive adequacy, and
argued that the hegemony of the black/white paradigm in racial thinking has had many deleterious effects for Latino/as and Asian Americans.8 In this paper, I will
summarize and discuss what I consider the strongest of these arguments and then develop two further arguments. It is important to stress that the black/white
paradigm does have some descriptive reach, as I shall discuss, even though it is inadequate when taken as the whole story of racism. Asian Americans and
Latino/as are often categorized and treated in ways that reflect the fact that they have been positioned as either
"near black" or "near white," but this is not nearly adequate to understanding their ideological representation or
political treatment in the U.S. One might also argue that, although the black/white paradigm is not descriptively adequate to the complexity and plurality
of racialized identities, it yet operates with prescriptive force to organize these complexities into its bipolar schema. Critics, however, have contested both the claim
of descriptive adequacy as well as prescriptive efficacy. That is, the paradigm does not operate with effective hegemony as a prescriptive force. I believe these
arguments will show that continuing to theorize race in the U.S. as operating exclusively through the black/white paradigm is actually
disadvantageous for all people of color in the U.S., and in many respects for whites as well (or at least for white union households and the white
poor).


Their view of power and white privilege as norms that are possessed ignores the process of the
constitution of identity. There is no coherent way for non-blacks to participate in their movement
because they cant just take off their knapsack of privileges. This perpetuates exclusions and
guarantees the failure of their movement.
McWhorter 5 (Ladelle McWhorter, University of Richmond, Where do white people come from? A Foucaultian critique of Whiteness Studies, Philosophy
Social Criticism 2005 31: 533 //liam )
It is true then that, as the Whiteness Studies theorists so often say, whiteness is a norm. But the assertion by itself, no matter how often repeated, does very little to
further analysis. Placing race and of course whiteness in the context of the development of biopower gives a much clearer picture of what it means to say
whiteness is a norm and indicates some important directions for further study. Once that context is supplied, the work of historians like Allen, Roediger, and Saxton
can help explain why it is whiteness (rather than Saxonness, for example) that functions as the racial norm in the USA. Like Whiteness Studies theorists, Foucault
meant for his work to have political effects, to disrupt power formations and make new configurations possible. Looking back on the publication of Discipline and
Punish, he had this to say to an interviewer: When the book came out, different readers in particular, correctional officers, social workers, and so on delivered this
peculiar judgment: The book is paralyzing. It may contain some correct observations, but even so it has clear limits, because it impedes us; it prevents us from going
on with our activity. My reply is that this very reaction proves that the work was successful, that it functioned just as I intended. It shows that people read it as an
experience that changed them, that prevented them from always being the same or from having the same relation with things, with others, that they had before
reading it. (Foucault, 2000: 2456) Unable to continue with business as usual, people are forced to think critically and make deliberate choices. Power relays are
disrupted, which at least opens the possibility that power networks will be realigned and come to function in different ways. Effects like this are what Whiteness
Studies theorists aim for as well. They hope their work will bring white people up short, make it difficult for them to
continue to function unthinkingly within a white supremacist social system, and make it possible for them to imagine
and create different ways of living. Whiteness Studies is less effective at this kind of political intervention than Foucaults work is, however, and far less
effective than it might yet be if it took Foucaults analytics of power and account of normalization seriously. The problem lies, I believe, in Whiteness
theorists failure to critique the conception of power that they have inherited from traditional Western political
theory. By holding on to a conception of power that insists upon the primacy of a sovereign subject and uncritically
deploys economic metaphors of possession and distribution, Whiteness Studies impedes its own efforts to account
for the political production of racial subjects and works against its own explicitly stated agenda, i.e., dethroning white
subjectivity. I will spend the rest of this essay showing how the conception of power that Foucault critiques still operates in Whiteness Studies. As good students
of Omi and Winant, Whiteness Studies theorists believe that racism operates much of the time without the consent or to be responsible for racism; they still believe
that racism originates in subjectivity, not in structures or institutions or practices. This belief is implicit in their search for a psychological account of racisms
persistence. The account offered in virtually every Whiteness Studies theorists work can be summed up in two words: white privilege. The story goes that white
people exercise power not so much by exercising their capacity to harm non-white people but by exercising the privileges that hundreds of years of racism have put
in place for them. They are in fact deploying racist power, but they do not see it as such because to them it seems that they are simply claiming for themselves the
goods to which they are entitled, and they have a deep investment in being able to continue to do so. Across the very different social analyses that Whiteness Studies
theorists put forth and across their very pronounced disagreements over political strategy, this concept of white privilege stretches; it, like the claim that whiteness
functions as a norm, unites theorists who otherwise have very little in common. My contention is that wherever we see the concept of white
privilege operating, we can be sure the conception of power that is also operating is the traditional juridical
conception that construes power as the possession of a preexistent subject. No thorough overview of Whiteness Studies ever omits
reference to Peggy McIntoshs article White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack (1989). Although McIntoshs article is tentative and limited to description at
a very basic, individualistic level, it popularized the notion that white people possess (like tools in a knapsack) something called white privilege.11 McIntosh lists 46
of these unearned assets (McIntosh, 1988: 1), including such disparate tools as: (3) If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing
in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live; (5) I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or
harassed; (21) I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group; (22) I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who
constitute the worlds majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion; (33) I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing, or body odor
will be taken as a reflection on my race; and (41) I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me (McIntosh, 1988: 59). One
could spend a lot of time critiquing this list and pointing out various problems with it, but what is important here is the focus on privilege itself. McIntosh claims that
racism persists because white people use tools that non-white people have not been given. If we want to eliminate racist exercises of power, white people have to
divest themselves of those tools. Clearly this sort of analysis can never lead to an account of the production and maintenance of white subjectivities within racist
regimes of power unless all we mean by white subjectivity is a generic subject plus a knapsack full of white privileges, a knapsack that the generic subject can
jettison without seriously altering its own composition. But that is surely not what the thesis of the social construction of white identity amounts to. So why do
Whiteness theorists hang onto this terminology? Why does the concept of white privilege appear in virtually every Whiteness Studies book and
article? Lisa Heldke and Peg OConnor are among the few writers who expend any effort at all trying to justify their use of the concept of white privilege. According to
them, the analytic value of the term privilege lies in its ability to play the opposite role to oppression. Everyone
generally agrees that there is such a thing as racial oppression and that the members of some races are oppressed,
but what of the races that are not oppressed? Heldke and OConnor write: Some will argue that domination is the companion
concept of oppression; they assert that if you are not a member of a particular oppressed group, then you are
automatically a dominator (Heldke and OConnor, 2004: 299). They dislike the term domination, however, because it presupposes that a group or an
individual exercises power over another group in very obvious and overt ways (ibid.); in other words, it runs counter to the apparent fact that, as analyses like Omi
and Winants make clear, racism does not operate in obvious and overt ways (at least not by the lights of most white people) and many white people are not aware of
its functioning at all. Heldke and OConnors analysis continues: . . . oppression has many different faces; it is created in all kinds of social practices, structures, and
institutions. In many instances of oppression, we may not be able to point to any person or group of persons who are
actively engaged in dominating the oppressed group . . . We need a companion concept that has as many different
faces as does oppression. The concept of privilege will fill the bill; its multiple aspects allow us to describe and understand the roles that
different unoppressed groups play in the maintenance of oppressive systems. (Heldke and OConnor, 2004: 299) In sum, within racist societies there are
three kinds of people; there are oppressed people (those without much power), dominators (those with power who intend to oppress
others), and people who exercise privilege (those with power who do not intend to oppress others but do so anyway). If we hang onto a
conception of power that makes it the property of a pre-constituted subjectivity and do not posit that third group, we
cannot explain how racism can continue to exist if most people are not avowed racists. We will need a psychological theory to
explain the persistence of racism. In other words, if we hang onto a traditional juridical conception of power, we will remain stuck
where race theorists were stuck 30 years ago. I contend that the pervasiveness of the term white privilege is testament
to how deeply and profoundly stuck race theorists typically still are.

2NC O/V

The aff undermines participation in movements to break down oppression
Their vocabulary of raced populations, privilege, and oppression exclude people of alternate backgrounds from
participating in their movement- thats McWhorter
A disconnect from this ideology is key- otherwise the black/white paradigm will continue to prevent universal efforts
at equality- thats Alcoff

2NC Monolithic Module

Their movement creates a static vision of whiteness
Monahan 8 [Michael J., Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Marquette University, Racial Justice and the Politics of Purity, 2008,
http://www.temple.edu/isrst/Events/documents/MichaelMonahanUpdated.doc //liam ]
The abolitionist/elimitavist position demands that any legitimately anti-racist endeavor stand simultaneously as a rejection of race, or at least racialized identity. As
Alcoff and Outlaw have argued (though in different ways), this demands that one have an ahistorical sense of identity that one reject the way in which ones
interpretive horizon has been positioned by ones racial membership. Again, this is because the abolitionist ontology both reduces whiteness to
white supremacy whiteness just is purely - an affirmation of white supremacy, and offers an effectively disembodied account of
agency, such that the only way to be anti-racist is to reject whiteness. But what I have been trying to show is the way in which the
history of white people has always been one of ambiguity and contestation over the meaning of whiteness (and that the same
is true, though in different ways, for members of all racial categories). The history is one of different people who were white in certain
important ways, but were not white in other ways, or at least were white in ways different from other white people, engaging in a process of
arbitrating the meaning and significance of that whiteness. Part of the project of white supremacy, therefore, was not merely the domination
of non whites, but the determination of the meaning of whiteness as fixed, given, and above all, pure. It is a history of
brutal conquest, genocide, chattel slavery, torture, and Jim Crow, and by no means do I wish to suggest that we ignore or white wash that
history. But it is also the history of John Brown, Sophie Scholl, the San Patricio Brigade, and, among others, those Irish
servants in Barbados who risked their lives alongside enslaved Africans. The insistence that antiracism must reject
whiteness that John Brown, in struggling against white supremacy, was therefore not white capitulates to the politics
of purity. We must understand racial membership, therefore, not as a static and pure category of identity, but as an ongoing context for negotiating who we are
(both as individuals and as groups) and how we relate to each other. Because races, like all social categories, are historical, and this history gives them meaning and
significance, their reality is manifest both politically (in how our social structures and organizations take shape and interact) and individually (in how we understand
ourselves and our place in the world). But, and this is the crucial point for my approach, the histories themselves are histories of contestation of meaning, and fraught
with ambiguity, such that we participate in the process of shaping the meaning of race not only in the here and now, but also its meaning and significance historically.
The elimitavist ontology insists, therefore, not only on purity for racial categories themselves (one either is or is not white),
but also employs a politics of purity in its approach to history. That is, it treats the history of whiteness purely as a history
of white supremacy, and any individuals or groups who break politically with white supremacy thereby demonstrate
their non-whiteness. What I am calling for is a rejection of purity in both of these senses. Racial memberships and the identities that go
along with them never really function as all or nothing categories (though they may pretend to do exactly that), and to ignore white struggles against
white supremacy is as much of an inadequate interpretation of history as it would be to ignore white affirmation of
white supremacy. And this is true for all racial categories and identities. They are all fraught with ambiguity, indeterminacy, and even outright contradiction,
and part of my claim is that the damage is done in large part by trying to conceive of them as purified of that ambiguity and contradiction, for it is that insistence
on purity that links racial categories to oppressive norms.

This renders all those who fall outside their identity and their movement as others that must be sacrificed for their
cause
Michaels 2k [Walter Benti, Prof English @ U Illinois-Chicago, "Political Science Fictions", New Literary History, 31.4 //liam]
In texts like Xenogenesis and Xenocide, then, the fundamental differences are between humans and aliens, and the fundamental questions are not about how society
should be organized but about whether the different species {or, alternatively and inconsequentially, different cultures) can survive. 9 indeed, one might say that
the replacement of ideology by bodies and cultures makes it inevitable that the only relevant
question be the question of survival, which is why texts like Xenogenesis and Xenocide are called Xenogenesis and Xenocide. Because
the transformation of ideological differences into cultural differences makes the differences
themselves valuable, the politics of a world divided into cultures (a world where difference is
understood as cultural") must be the politics of survivala politics, in other words, where the
worst thing that can happen will be a cultured death. Victory over the enemy on the cold war model may be understood as the
victory of good over evil-this [End Page 655] is what the victory of the humans over the insect-like aliens called "buggers" looks like at the end of Ender's Game, the
first volume of Card's series. But insofar as the enemy is redescribed not as people who disagree with us as to how society should be organized (communists) but as
people who occupy different subject positions (aliens), the happy ending of their destruction must be redescribed too. By the beginning of the second novel in the
Ender series (Speaker for the Dead), the very thing that made Ender a hero (destroying the enemy) has made him a villain (destroying an entire species). The
ideological enemy has been rewritten as the physiocultural other; all conflict has been reimagined on the model of the
conflict between self and other. And this is true whether the texts in question understand difference as essentially
-physical or as essentially cultural. It is for this reason that the essentialist/antiessentialist debate in
contemporary theory is so fundamental--not because the disagreements between the two positions are so
fundamental but because their agreement is. What they agree on is the value of difference itself, a value created
bv turning disagreement into otherness. The dispute, in other words, between essentialism and
antiessentialism is only secondarily the expression of a dispute about whether difference is physical or cultural:
it is primarily the expression of a consensus about the desirability of maintaining difference, of making sure
that differences survive. If difference is physical, then what must survive are different species: if difference is
cultural then it is cultural survival that matters. The point of both stories is that the happy end cannot be the
victory of one species/culture over another. The idea here is not merely that survival as such-whether it is the
survival of this species or the survival of the cultureis valued. What the interchangeability of species and culture
makes clear is rather the value of identities-it is identities that must survive-which is to sav that it is not death but
extinction that must be avoided. On Earth, this distinction is made vivid in contemporary imaginations of what
are, in effect, nonviolent genocides, as in, for example, the idea that current rates of intermarriage and
assimilation doom American Jewry to destruction and thus constitute a second Holocaust. Intermarriage poses
no threat to the people who intermarry, which is just to say that when someone like Alan Dershowitz worries about
The Vanishing American Jew, he is worried not about people who are Jewish but about the identity that is their
Jewishness. It is the identity, not the people, that is in danger of disappearing. 10
Nihilism/Totalizing Bad

Reject their totalizing understandings of race only by abandoning essentialism can we construct
new understandings of blackness in the world and challenge the nihilism threatening productive
movements.
bell hooks 90 *POSTMODERN BLACKNESS, Postmodern Culture vol.1
http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Postmodern_Blackness_18270.html //liam]
It is sadly ironic that the contemporary discourse which talks the most about heterogeneity, the decentered subject, declaring breakthroughs that allow
recognition of otherness, still directs its critical voice primarily to a specialized audience, one that shares a common language rooted
in the very master narratives it claims to challenge. If radical postmodernist thinking is to have a transformative impact then a critical break with the notion of "authority" as "mastery over" must not
simply be a rhetorical device, it must be reflected in habits of being, including styles of writing as well as chosen subject matter. Third-world scholars, especially elites, and white critics who passively absorb
white supremacist thinking, and therefore never notice or look at black people on the streets, at their jobs, who render us invisible with their gaze in all areas of daily life, are not likely to produce
liberatory theory that will challenge racist domination, or to promote a breakdown in traditional ways of seeing and
thinking about reality, ways of constructing aesthetic theory and practice. From a different standpoint Robert Storr makes a similar
critique in the global issue of Art in America when he asserts: To be sure, much postmodernist critical inquiry has centered precisely on the issues of "difference" and "otherness." On the purely theoretical plane the exploration of these concepts has produced some
important results, but in the absence of any sustained research into what artists of color and others outside the mainstream might be up to, such discussions become rootless instead of radical. Endless second guessing about
the latent imperialism of intruding upon other cultures only compounded matters, preventing or excusing these
theorists from investigating what black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American artists were actually doing. Without adequate concrete
knowledge of and contact with the non-white "other," white theorists may move in discursive theoretical directions that are threatening to and potentially disruptive of that critical practice which would support radical liberation struggle. The postmodern critique of
"identity," though relevant for renewed black liberation struggle, is often posed in ways that are problematic. Given a pervasive politic of white supremacy which seeks to prevent the formation of radical black subjectivity, we cannot cavalierly dismiss a concern with
identity politics. Any critic exploring the radical potential of postmodernism as it relates to racial difference and racial domination would need to consider the implications of a critique of identity for oppressed groups. Many of us are struggling to find new strategies
of resistance. We must engage decolonization as a critical practice if we are to have meaningful chances of survival even as
we must simultaneously cope with the loss of political grounding which made radical activism more possible. I am thinking here
about the postmodernist critique of essentialism as it pertains to the construction of "identity" as one example. Postmodern theory that is not seeking to simply appropriate the experience of "otherness" in order to enhance its discourse or to be radically chic should
not separate the "politics of difference" from the politics of racism. To take racism seriously one must consider the plight of underclass people of color, a vast majority of whom are black. For African-Americans our collective condition prior to the advent of
postmodernism and perhaps more tragically expressed under current postmodern conditions has been and is characterized by continued displacement, profound alienation and despair. Writing about blacks and postmodernism, Cornel West describes our collective
plight: There is increasing class division and differentiation, creating on the one hand a significant black middle-class,
highly anxiety- ridden, insecure, willing to be co-opted and incorporated into the powers that be, concerned with racism to the degree that it poses constraints on upward social mobility; and, on the other, a
vast and growing black underclass, an underclass that embodies a kind of walking nihilism of pervasive drug addiction, pervasive alcoholism, pervasive
homicide, and an exponential rise in suicide. Now because of the deindustrialization, we also have a devastated black industrial working class. We are talking here about tremendous hopelessness.
This hopelessness creates longing for insight and strategies for change that can renew spirits and reconstruct grounds
for collective black liberation struggle. The overall impact of the postmodern condition is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense
of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding, even if it is not informed by shared
circumstance. Radical postmodernism calls attention to those sensibilities which are shared across the boundaries of class, gender, and race, and
which could be fertile ground for the construction of empathy--ties that would promote recognition of common commitments and serve as a base for
solidarity and coalition. "Yearning" is the word that best describes a common psychological state shared by many of
us, cutting across boundaries of race, class, gender, and sexual practice. Specifically in relation to the postmodernist
deconstruction of "master" narratives, the yearning that wells in the hearts and minds of those whom such narratives
have silenced is the longing for critical voice. It is no accident that "rap" has usurped the primary position of R&B music among young black folks as the most desired sound, or that it began as a form of
"testimony" for the underclass. It has enabled underclass black youth to develop a critical voice, as a group of young black men told me, a "common literacy." Rap projects a critical voice, explaining, demanding, urging. Working with this insight in his essay "Putting
the Pop Back into Postmodernism," Lawrence Grossberg comments: The postmodern sensibility appropriates practices as boasts that announce their own--
and consequently our own--existence, like a rap song boasting of the imaginary (or real--it makes no difference) accomplishments of the rapper. They offer forms of
empowerment not only in the face of nihilism but precisely through the forms of nihilism itself: an empowering
nihilism, a moment of positivity through the production and structuring of affective relations. Considering that it is as a subject that one comes to
voice, then the postmodernist focus on the critique of identity appears, at first glance, to threaten and close down the
possibility that this discourse and practice will allow those who have suffered the crippling effects of colonization and
domination to gain or regain a hearing. Even if this sense of threat and the fear it evokes are based on a misunderstanding of the postmodernist political project, they nevertheless shape responses. It never surprises
me when black folk respond to the critique of essentialism, especially when it denies the validity of identity politics, by saying "yeah, it's easy to give up identity, when you got one." Though an apt and oftentimes appropriate comeback, this does not really
intervene in the discourse in a way that alters and transforms. We should indeed suspicious of postmodern critiques of the "subject" when they surface
at a historical moment when many subjugated people feel themselves coming to voice for the first time. Criticisms of directions in
postmodern thinking should not obscure insights it may offer that open up our understanding of African-American experience. The critique of essentialism encouraged by postmodernist thought is useful for African-Americans concerned with reformulating
outmoded notions of identity. We have too long had imposed upon us, both from the outside and the inside, a narrow constricting
notion of blackness. Postmodern critiques of essentialism which challenge notions of universality and static over-
determined identity within mass culture and mass consciousness can open up new possibilities for the construction of the self and the
assertion of agency. Employing a critique of essentialism allows African-Americans to acknowledge the way in which class mobility has altered collective black experience so that racism does not necessarily have the same impact on our lives.
Such a critique allows us to affirm multiple black identities, varied black experience. It also challenges colonial
imperialist paradigms of black identity which represent blackness one-dimensionally in ways that reinforce and
sustain white supremacy. This discourse created the idea of the "primitive" and promoted the notion of an "authentic" experience, seeing as "natural" those expressions of black life which conformed to a pre-existing pattern or
stereotype. Abandoning essentialist notions would be a serious challenge to racism. Contemporary African- American
resistance struggle must be rooted in a process of decolonization that continually opposes reinscribing notions of
"authentic" black identity. This critique should not be made synonymous with the dismissal of the struggle of oppressed and exploited peoples to make ourselves subjects. Nor should it deny that in certain circumstances that
experience affords us a privileged critical location from which to speak. This is not a reinscription of modernist master narratives of authority which privilege
some voices by denying voice to others. Part of our struggle for radical black subjectivity is the quest to find ways to construct self and
identity that are oppositional and liberatory. The unwillingness to critique essentialism on the part of many African-
Americans is rooted in the fear that it will cause folks to lose sight of the specific history and experience of African-
Americans and the unique sensibilities and culture that arise from that experience. An adequate response to this concern is to critique essentialism while
emphasizing the significance of "the authority of experience." There is a radical difference between a repudiation of
the idea that there is a black "essence" and recognition of the way black identity has been specifically constituted in
the experience of exile and struggle. When black folks critique essentialism, we are empowered to recognize multiple experiences of black identity that are the lived conditions which make diverse cultural productions
possible. When this diversity is ignored, it is easy to see black folks as falling into two categories--nationalist or assimilationist, black-identified or white-identified. Coming to terms with the impact of postmodernism for black experience, particularly as it changes our
sense of identity, means that we must and can rearticulate the basis for collective bonding. Given the various crises facing African-Americans (economic, spiritual, escalating racial violence, etc.) we are compelled by circumstance to reassess our relationship to
popular culture and resistance struggle. Many of us are as reluctant to face this task as many non-black postmodern thinkers who focus theoretically on the issue of "difference" are to confront the issue of race and racism.

Ext: Monolothic

They reify whiteness- focusing the debate on whiteness makes it into a monolith, sustaining the
narcissism that elevates whiteness to a spectacle
Ahmed 4 [Sara, University of London Race and Cultural studies, "Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism," Borderlands, Vol 3 No 2,
http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/ahmed_declarations.htm //liam ]
3. Whiteness studies is after all deeply invested in producing anti-racist forms of knowledge and pedagogy. In other words,
whiteness studies seeks to make whiteness visible insofar as that visibility is seen as contesting the forms of white privilege, which rests on the unmarked and the
unremarkable fact of being white. But in reading the texts that gather together in the emergence of a field, we can detect an anxiety about the
status or function of this anti-racism. The anxiety is first an anxiety about what it means to transform whiteness studies into a field. If whiteness
becomes a field of study, then there is clearly a risk that whiteness itself will be transformed into an object. Or if whiteness assumes integrity as an
object of study, as being something that we can track or follow across time and space, then whiteness would
become a fetish, cut off from histories of production and circulation. Richard Dyer for instance admits to being disturbed by the very idea
of what he calls white studies: My blood runs cold at the thought that talking about whiteness could lead to the development of something called White Studies
(1997, 10). Or as Fine, Weis, Powell and Wong explain: we worry that in our desire to create spaces to speak, intellectually or empirically,
about whiteness, we may have reified whiteness as a fixed category of experience; that we have allowed it to be
treated as a monolith, in the singular, as an "essential something" (1997, xi). 4. The risk of transforming whiteness into an essential
something might be a necessary risk, for sure. We have to choose whether its a risk worth taking. But the risk does not exist independently of other risks. The
anxiety about transforming whiteness into an essential something gets stuck to other anxieties about what whiteness studies might do. One of these anxieties is that
whiteness studies will sustain whiteness at the centre of intellectual inquiry, however haunted by absence, lack and emptiness. As Ruth Frankenburg asks why
talk about whiteness, given the risk that by undertaking intellectual work on whiteness one might contribute to
processes of recentering rather than decentering it, as well as reifying the term, and its "inhabitants" (1997, 1). 5. Another
risk is that in centering on whiteness, whiteness studies might become a discourse of love, which would sustain the narcissism
that elevates whiteness into a social and bodily ideal. The reading of whiteness as a form of narcissism is of course well established. The
whiteness of academic disciplines, including philosophy and anthropology has been subject to devastating critiques (see, for examples, Mills 1998; Asad 1973). For
example, a postcolonial critique of anthropology would argue that the anthropological desire to know the other functioned as a form of narcissism: the other
functioned as a mirror, a device to reflect the anthropological gaze back to itself, showing the white face of anthropology in the very display of the colour of
difference. So if disciplines are in a way already about whiteness, showing the face of the white subject, then it follows that whiteness studies sustains the direction
or orientation of this gaze, whilst removing the detour provided by the reflection of the other. Whiteness studies could even become a spectacle of pure self-
reflection, augmented by an insistence that whiteness is an identity too. Does whiteness studies function as a narcissism in which the loved object returns us to the
subject as the origin of love? We do after all get attached to our objects of study, which might mean that whiteness studies could get stuck on whiteness, as that
which gives itself to itself. Dyer talks about this risk when he admits to another fear: I dread to think that paying attention to whiteness might lead to white people
saying they need to get in touch with their whiteness (1997, 10). Whiteness studies would here be about white people learning to love their own whiteness, by
transforming it into an object that could be loved.

Otherness Bad

Converting difference into otherness produces existential violencenegation of the others
voice requires brutality and force to maintain a unified social order
Burke 7 *Anthony, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, University of New South Wales, 2007 War as a Way of Being: Lebanon, 2006, Theory
and Event, 10:21, Muse //liam+
The conceptual template for such an image of national security state can be found in the work of Thomas Hobbes, with his influential conception of the political
community as a tight unity of sovereign and people in which their bodies meld with his own to form a 'Leviathan', and which must be defended from enemies within
and without. His image of effective security and sovereignty was one that was intolerant of internal difference and dissent,
legitimating a strong state with coercive and exceptional powers to preserve order and sameness. This was a vision
not merely of political order but of existential identity, set off against a range of existential others who were sources
of threat, backwardness, instability or incongruity.29 It also, in a way set out with frightening clarity by the theorist Carl Schmitt and the
philosopher Georg Hegel, exchanged internal unity, identity and harmony for permanent alienation from other such communities (states). Hegel presaged Schmitt's
thought with his argument that individuality and the state are single moments of 'mind in its freedom' which 'has an infinitely negative relation to itself, and hence its
essential character from its own point of view is its singleness': Individuality is awareness of one's existence as a unit in sharp distinction
from others. It manifests itself here in the state as a relation to other states, each of which is autonomous vis-a-vis
the others...this negative relation of the state to itself is embodied in the world as the relation of one state to another
and as if the negative were something external.30 Schmitt is important both for understanding the way in which such
alienation is seen as a definitive way of imagining and limiting political communities, and for understanding how such a
rigid delineation is linked to the inevitability and perpetuation of war. Schmitt argued that the existence of a state
'presupposes the political', which must be understood through 'the specific political distinction...between friend and enemy'. The
enemy is 'the other, the stranger; and it sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something
different and alien, so that in an extreme case conflicts with him are possible'.31 The figure of the enemy is constitutive of the state as
'the specific entity of a people'.32 Without it society is not political and a people cannot be said to exist: Only the actual participants can
correctly recognise, understand and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict...to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his
opponent's way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one's own form of existence.33 Schmitt links this stark ontology
to war when he states that the political is only authentic 'when a fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar
collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men,
particularly to the whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship...in its entirety the state as an organised political entity
decides for itself the friend-enemy distinction'.34 War, in short, is an existential condition: the entire life of a human being is a
struggle and every human being is symbolically a combatant. The friend, enemy and combat concepts receive their
real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is
the existential negation of the enemy.35 Schmitt claims that his theory is not biased towards war as a choice ('It is by no means as though the political
signifies nothing but devastating war and every political deed a military action...it neither favours war nor militarism, neither imperialism nor pacifism') but it is hard
to accept his caveat at face value.36 When such a theory takes the form of a social discourse (which it does in a general form) such an
ontology can only support, as a kind of originary ground, the basic Clausewitzian assumption that war can be a rational way of resolving
political conflicts -- because the import of Schmitt's argument is that such 'political' conflicts are ultimately expressed through the possibility of war. As he says:
'to the enemy concept belongs the ever-present possibility of combat'.37 Where Schmitt meets Clausewitz, as I explain further below, the existential and rationalistic
ontologies of war join into a closed circle of mutual support and justification. This closed circle of existential and strategic reason generates a number of dangers.
Firstly, the emergence of conflict can generate military action almost automatically simply because the world is
conceived in terms of the distinction between friend and enemy; because the very existence of the other constitutes
an unacceptable threat, rather than a chain of actions, judgements and decisions. (As the Israelis insisted of
Hezbollah, they 'deny our right to exist'.) This effaces agency, causality and responsibility from policy and political
discourse: our actions can be conceived as independent of the conflict or quarantined from critical enquiry, as
necessities that achieve an instrumental purpose but do not contribute to a new and unpredictable causal chain.
Similarly the Clausewitzian idea of force -- which, by transporting a Newtonian category from the natural into the social sciences, assumes the very effect it seeks --
further encourages the resort to military violence. We ignore the complex history of a conflict, and thus the alternative paths to its
resolution that such historical analysis might provide, by portraying conflict as fundamental and existential in nature;
as possibly containable or exploitable, but always irresolvable. Dominant portrayals of the war on terror, and the Israeli-Arab conflict, are
arguably examples of such ontologies in action.

Sole focus on racism in present times is counterproductive
McWhorter 8 [John, linguistics prof, 8Stanford. senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary
Work in Non-Fiction. PhD in linguistic June 5, 2008; Racism in Retreat; The Sun, http://www.nysun.com/opinion/racism-in-retreat/79355/ //liam]
His victory demonstrates the main platform of my race writing. The guiding question in everything I have ever written on race is: Why do so many people
exaggerate about racism? This exaggeration is a nasty hangover from the sixties, and the place it has taken as a
purported badge of intellectual and moral gravitas is a tire-block on coherent, constructive sociopolitical discussion. Here's a typical case for what
passes as enlightenment. On my desk(top) is an article from last year's American Psychologist. The wisdom imparted? To be a person of color these days is to
withstand an endless barrage of racist "microaggressions." Say to someone, "When I look at you, I don't see color" and you "deny their
ethnic experiences." You do the same by saying, "As a woman, I know what you go through as a racial minority," as well
as with hate speech such as "America is a melting pot." Other "microaggressions" include college buildings being all named
after straight, white rich men (I'm not kidding about the straight part). This sort of thing will not do. Why channel mental energy into performance art of
this kind? Some may mistake me as implying that it would be okay to stop talking about racism. But that interpretation is incorrect: I am stating that it would be
okay to stop talking about racism. We need to be talking about serious activism focused on results. Those who suppose that the
main meal in the aforementioned is to decry racism are not helping people. At this point, if racism was unattended to for 10 years, during that time it would play
exactly the same kind of role it does in America now elusive, marginal, and insignificant. Note that I did not say that there was no racism. There seems to be
an assumption that when discussing racism, it is a sign of higher wisdom to neglect the issue of its degree. This
assumption is neither logical nor productive. I reject it, and am pleased to see increasing numbers of black people doing
same. Of course there is racism. The question is whether there is enough to matter. All evidence shows that there is not. No, the number of black men in
prison is not counterevidence: black legislators were solidly behind the laws penalizing possession of crack more heavily than powder. In any case, to insist that
we are hamstrung until every vestige of racism, bias, or inequity is gone indicates a grievous lack of confidence, which I hope any person of any
history would reject. Anyone who intones that America remains permeated with racism is, in a word, lucky. They have not had
the misfortune of living in a society riven by true sociological conflict, such as between Sunnis and Shiites, Hutus and
Tutsis or whites and blacks before the sixties. It'd be interesting to open up a discussion with a Darfurian about
"microaggressions." To state that racism is no longer a serious problem in our country is neither ignorant nor cynical.
Warnings that such a statement invites a racist backlash are, in 2008, melodramatic. They are based on no empirical evidence. Yet every time some stupid thing
happens some comedian says a word, some sniggering blockhead hangs a little noose, some study shows that white people tend to get slightly better car loans
we are taught that racism is still mother's milk in the U.S. of A. "Always just beneath the surface." Barack Obama's
success is the most powerful argument against this way of thinking in the entire four decades since recreational
underdoggism was mistaken as deep thought. A black man clinching the Democratic presidential nomination and rather
easily at that indicates that racism is a lot further "beneath the surface" than it used to be. And if Mr. Obama ends up in the White
House, then it might be time to admit that racism is less beneath the surface than all but fossilized.


Focus Bad

Including whiteness in their movement is key to redefine traditional notions of racism and give
white people a role in emancipatory politics
Sullivan 8 [Shannon, Penn State University Charles S. Peirce Society. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society. Buffalo: 2008. Vol. 44, Iss. 2; pg. 236, 27
//liam]
It is commonly acknowledged today, at least in academic circles, that racial essences do not exist. Racial categories, including whiteness, are historical and political
products of human activity, and for that reason the human racial landscape has changed over time and likely will continue to change in the future. In the wake of this
acknowledgement, critical race theorists and philosophers of race debate whether whiteness must be eliminated for racial oppression to be ended. Given whiteness's
history as a category of violent racial exclusion, eliminativists and "new abolitionists" have argued that it must be abolished. If "whiteness is one pole of an unequal
relationship, which can no more exist without oppression than slavery could exist without slaves," then as long as whiteness endures, so does racial oppression.2 In
contrast, critical conservationists have claimed even though it has an oppressive past, whiteness could entail something other than racism and oppression. Moreover,
since lived existential categories like whiteness cannot be merely or quickly eliminated, white people should work to
transform whiteness into an anti-racist category. I count myself as a critical conservationist, but I also acknowledge the force of eliminativist
arguments. If whiteness necessarily involves racist oppression, then attempting to transform whiteness into an antiracist category would be a fool's game at best, and
a covert continuance of white supremacy at worst. My goal here is not to rehearse the disagreement between new abolitionists and critical conservationists;
excellent work explaining the details of their positions already exists.3 I instead approach that disagreement by asking the pragmatic question of whether a
rehabilitated version of whiteness can be worked out concretely. What would a non-oppressive, anti-racist whiteness look like? What difference would or could it
make to the lives of white and nonwhite people? If the question of how to transform whiteness cannot be answered in some practical detail-if it's not a difference
that makes a difference-then critical conservatism would amount to a hopeful, but ultimately harmful abstraction that makes no difference in lived experience and
that damages anti-racist movements. In that case, abolitionism would appear to be the only alternative to ongoing white supremacy and privilege. I propose turning
to Josiah Royce for help with these issues, more specifically to his essay on "Provincialism."4 This turn is not as surprising as it might initially seem given that Royce
wrote explicitly about race in "Race Questions and Prejudices."5 In that essay, Royce issued an antiracist, anti-essentialist challenge to then-current scientific studies
of race, especially anthropology and ethnology, which claim to prove the superiority of white people, and he even briefly but explicitly names whiteness a possible
threat to the future of humanity. 6 I focus here on "Provincialism," however, because even though the essay never explicitly discusses race, it can help explain the
ongoing need for the category of whiteness and implicitly offers a wealth of useful suggestions for how to transform it. "Provincialism" is an exercise in critical
conservation of the concept of provincialism, and while not identical, provincialism and whiteness share enough in common that "wise" provincialism can serve as a
model for developing "wise" whiteness.7 Royce's essay thus can be of great help to critical philosophers of race wrestling with questions of whether and how to
transformatively conserve whiteness. Exploring similarities and differences between wise provincialism and wise whiteness, I use Royce's analyses of provincialism to
shed light on why whiteness should be rehabilitated rather than discarded and how white people today might begin living
whiteness as an anti-racist category. Comparing Provincialism and Whiteness Race Traitor is a contemporary journal with the motto "Treason to
whiteness is loyalty to humanity," and its editor, Noel Ignatiev, makes a scathing case against the critical conservation of whiteness.8 Ignatiev argues that there is no
valid white culture to transform. Nor is there any biological rationale for whiteness. In his view, whiteness merely concerns status, privilege, and exclusion and thus
cannot form a legitimate, antiracist identity. To suggest that it can, as critical conservationists do, is to encourage white supremacists by giving their worldview
intellectual support. Even if critical conservationists do not intend to provide this support, the effect of arguing for the conservation of whiteness is still extremely
dangerous. In addition to unintentionally validating white supremacy movements, it tends to divert the energies of well-intentioned white people away from political
struggle for racial justice to whiteindulgent racial sensitivity and diversity workshops. According to Ignatiev, what anti-racist movements need is not a white identity
that well-intentioned white people can feel good about, but race traitors who are willing to defect from whiteness. The only way for white people to be loyal to the
human race is for them to be disloyal to their racial identity. Like critical conservationists regarding whiteness, Royce knows that he faces an uphill battle in
convincing many of his interlocutors of the value of provincialism. Put positively, provincialism tends to connote a healthy fondness for and pride in local traditions,
interests, and customs. More negatively, it means being restricted and limited, sticking to the narrow ideas of a given region or group and being indifferent, perhaps
even violently hostile to the ways of outsiders. What connects these different meanings is their sense of being rooted in a particular cultural-geographical place. In
Royce's definition, which emphasizes conscious awareness of this rootedness (an important point to which I will return), a province is a domain that is "sufficiently
unified to have a true consciousness of its own unity, to feel a pride in its own ideals and customs, and to possess a sense of its distinction from other[s]." And
correspondingly, provincialism is, first, the tendency for a group "to possess its own customs and ideals; secondly, the totality of these customs and ideals
themselves; and thirdly the love and pride which leads the inhabitants of a province to cherish as their own these traditions, beliefs and aspirations" (61).
Emphasizing unity, love, and pride, Royce's definitions steer away from the negative connotations of provincialism. But in Royce's day- and not much has changed in
this regard-it was the negative, or "false," form of provincialism that most often came to people's minds when they thought about the value and effects of the
concept. As Royce was writing in 1902, the false provincialism, or "sectionalism," of the United States' Civil War was a recent memory for many of his readers. In the
Civil War, stubborn commitment to one portion of the nation violently opposed it to another portion and threatened to tear the nation apart. Provincialism, which
appealed to regional values to disunite, had to be condemned in the name of patriotism, which united in the name of a higher good. Royce's rhetorical strategy is to
take the challenge of defending provincialism head-on: "My main intention is to define the right form and the true office of provincialism-to portray what, if you
please, we may call the Higher Provincialism, -to portray it, and then to defend it, to extol it, and to counsel you to further just such provincialism" (65). Royce readily
acknowledges that "against the evil forms of sectionalism we shall always have to contend" (64). But he denies that provincialism must always be evil. Going against
the grain of most post-Civil War thinking about provincialism, Royce urges that the present state of civilization, both in the world at large, and with us, in America, is
such as to define a new social mission which the province alone, but not the nation, is able to fulfil [sic] . . . .[T]he modern world has reached a point where it needs,
more than ever before, the vigorous development of a highly organized provincial life. Such a life, if wisely guided, will not mean disloyalty to the nation. (64) Wisely
developed, provincialism need not conflict with national loyalty. The two commitments can-and must, Royce insists-flourish together. Likewise, whiteness need not
conflict with membership in humanity as a whole. The two identities can-and must-flourish together. The relationship between provincialism and nationalism, as
discussed by Royce, serves as a fruitful model for the relationship of whiteness and humanity, and critical conservationists of whiteness should follow Royce's lead by
taking head-on the challenge of critically defending whiteness. Like embracing provincialism, embracing whiteness might seem to be a step backward for the modern
world-toward limitation and insularity that breed ignorance, prejudice, and hostility toward others who are different from oneself. Like having a national rather than
provincial worldview, seeing oneself as a member of humanity rather than of the white race seems to embody an expansive, outward orientation that is open to
others. But there is a "new social mission" with respect to racial justice that whiteness, and not humanity as a whole, can fulfill. Race relations, especially in the
United States, have reached a point where humanity needs a "highly organized" anti-racist whiteness, that is, an anti-racist whiteness that is
consciously developed and embraced. How then can we (white people, in particular) wisely guide the development of such whiteness so that it does
not result in disloyalty to other races and humanity as a whole? Before addressing this question, let me point out two important differences between whiteness and
provincialism as described by Royce. First, while Royce calls for the development of a wise form of provincialism, he is able to appeal to existing "wholesome" forms
of provincialism in his defense of the concept. He addresses himself "in the most explicit terms, to men and women who, as I hope and presuppose, are and wish to
be, in the wholesome sense, provincial," and his demand that "the man of the future . . . love his province more than he does to-day" recognizes a nugget of wise
provincialism on which to build (65, 67). The development of wise provincialism does not have to be from scratch. In contrast, it is more difficult to pinpoint a nugget
of "wholesome" whiteness to use as a starting point for its transformation. Instances of white people who helped slaves and resisted slavery in the United States, for
example, certainly can be found-the infamous John Brown is only one such example-but such people often are seen as white race traitors who represent the
abolition, not the transformation of whiteness.9 The task of critically conserving whiteness probably will be more difficult than that of critically conserving
provincialism since there is not a straightforward or obvious "right form and true office" of whiteness to extol. Second, true to his idealism, Royce describes both
provincialism and its development as explicitly conscious phenomena. Royce notes the elasticity of the term "province"-it can designate a small geographical area in
contrast with the nation, or it can designate a large geographical, rural area in contrast with a city (57-58)-but it always includes consciousness of the province's unity
and particular identity as this place and not another. Put another way, probably every space, regardless of its size, is distinctive in some way or another. What gives
members of a space a provincial attitude is their conscious awareness of, and resulting pride in, that space as the distinctive place that it is. On Royce's model,
someone who is provincial knows that she is, at least in some loose way. The task of developing her provincialism, then, is to develop her rudimentary conscious
awareness of her province, to become "more and not less selfconscious, well-established, and earnest" in her provincial outlook (67). In contrast-and here lies the
largest difference between provincialism and whiteness-many white people today do not consciously think of themselves as members of this (white) race and not
another, not even loosely. Excepting members of white militant groups such as the Ku Klux Klan or the Creativity Movement, contemporary white people do not tend
to have a conscious sense of unity as fellow white people, nor do they consciously invoke or share special ideals, customs, or common memories as white people.
They often are perceived and perceive themselves as raceless, as members of the human species at large rather than members of a particular racial group. This does
not eliminate their whiteness or their membership in a fairly unified group. Just the opposite: such "racelessness" is one of the marks and privileges of membership in
whiteness, especially middle and upper class forms of whiteness. White people can feel a pride in the ideals and customs of whiteness and possess a sense of
distinction from people of other races without much, if any conscious awareness of their whiteness and without consciously identifying those ideals and customs as
white. To take one brief example, styles and customs of communication in classrooms tend to be raced (as well as classed and gendered), and white styles of
discussion, hand-raising, and turn-taking tend to be treated as appropriate while black styles are seen as inappropriate.10 White students often learn to feel proud
and validated by their teachers as good students when they participate in these styles, and this almost always happens without either students or teachers
consciously identifying their style (or themselves) as white. Such students appear to belong and experience themselves as belonging merely to a group of smart,
orderly, responsible students, not to a racialized group. In the United States and Western world more broadly, unconscious habits of whiteness and white privilege
have tended to increase after the end of de jure racism.11 Unlike provincialism as described by Royce, whiteness tends to operate more sub- and unconsciously than
consciously. But I do not think that this fact spoils wise provincialism as a fruitful model for wise whiteness. First, and reflecting a basic philosophical disagreement
that I have with Royce's idealism, I doubt that provincialism always functions as consciously as Royce suggests it does. The unity, pride, and love that are the
hallmarks of provincialism could easily function in the form of unreflective beliefs, habits, preferences, and even bodily comportment. In fact I would argue that many
aspects of our provincial loyalties-whatever type of province is at issue-operate on sub- or unconscious levels. In that case, provincialism and whiteness would not be
as dissimilar in their operation as Royce's description implies. Second, even if provincialism tends to consciously unify people while whiteness does not, Royce's
advice that people should attempt to become more, rather than less self-conscious in their provincialism still applies to white people with respect to their whiteness.
Given whiteness's history as a racial category of violent exclusion and oppression, one might think that white people need to
focus less on their whiteness, to distance themselves from it. But just the opposite is the case. Given that distance from racial identification tends to be the
covert modus operandi for contemporary forms of white privilege, white people who wish to fight racism need to become more intimately acquainted with their
whiteness. Rather than ignore their whiteness, which allows unconscious habits of white privilege to proliferate unchecked,
white people need to bring their whiteness to as much conscious awareness as possible (while also realizing that complete self-
transparency is never achievable) so that they can try to change what it means. But why focus on increased awareness of whiteness simpliciter? I
mentioned briefly above that raced styles of communication also tend to be gendered and classed, and even more accurate would be to say that race, gender, class,
sexuality, and other significant axes of lived experience transactionally co-constitute one another. Race, including whiteness, is never lived in isolation from these
other axes. In the United States, the way that a white person experiences and is impacted by her whiteness likely will vary depending on his/her ethnicity, gender and
class in particular, and across the globe, national differences can give whiteness a very different meaning.12 For these reasons, one might wonder why I do not urge
white people's increased consciousness of, for example, their Irish-American-whiteness, Southern-woman-whiteness, or lesbian-working-class-whiteness. Such forms
of hyphenated whiteness might seem more likely to be sources of consciously felt unity, shared customs, and memory than would generic whiteness. In that case,
"wise whiteness" should be read as mere shorthand for an indefinite number of forms of anti-racist whiteness. I agree that one of the functions of the term wise
whiteness is to serve as an umbrella for the infinitely rich and complicated ways that white people embody their whiteness. But I think it is important that the term
not be understood merely as a bit of convenient shorthand that could be discarded without loss. It has a more substantial function than that of an umbrella, and
treating it as mere shorthand risks letting white privilege and white supremacy off the hook too easily. Especially in the case of white ethnicities, insisting that
whiteness always be considered in connection with other axes of identity can collapse race into ethnicity and work to deflect attention away white domination and
oppression. Whiteness does mean different things for, e.g., Irish-American-whites and Italian-American-whites, and these two groups of white people have different
racial histories and therefore at least somewhat different racial presents. But its full meaning is not contained in those different ethnicities. There is something to
being white that being contemporarily Irish or Italian alone does not capture. So while whiteness is always transactionally constituted in and through other categories
of lived experience, a functional separation of race from those other categories can be and sometimes needs to be made. In practice there is no such thing as
whiteness by itself, and yet for particular purposes and because of the tendency of its erasure, it can be useful to focus on whiteness in abstraction from other lived
categories. In that pragmatic sense, with the term "wise whiteness" I speak not only of the rehabilitation of a collection of hyphenated forms of whiteness, but also
for a rehabilitated whiteness simpliciter. Royce's eloquent pleas on the behalf of provincialism speak to my point about bringing whiteness to as much conscious
awareness as possible. As Royce appeals to his readers, he urges, "I hope and believe that you all intend to have your community live its own life, and not the life of
any other community, nor yet the life of a mere abstraction called humanity in general" (67). On the same theme, he later compares the problem of wise
provincialism with the problem of any individual activity, which admittedly can become narrow and self-centered. Acknowledging this problem, Royce counters, But
on the other hand, philanthropy that is not founded upon a personal loyalty of the individual to his own family and to his own personal duties is notoriously a
worthless abstraction. We love the world better when we cherish our own friends the more faithfully. We do not grow in grace by forgetting individual duties in
behalf of remote social enterprises. Precisely so, the province will not serve the nation best by forgetting itself, but by loyally emphasizing its own duty to the nation .
. . . (98) The disappearance of the individual does not well serve larger social enterprises. Those enterprises thrive only if the personal, passionate energies of
individuals are poured into them. Large enterprises and institutions tend to become anemic abstractions if they are not rooted in felt individual commitments.
Likewise, properly understood, the nation need not be in a competitive relationship with the various communities that it shelters. Loyalty to and love for one's more
local connections can be a powerful source of meaningful loyalty to and love for one's nation. In both cases, the same pattern can be detected: rich ties to the smaller
entity-the individual or the community-are what sustain meaningful connections to the larger entity-the philanthropic cause or the nation. The two are not
necessarily in conflict, as is often thought, and in fact the larger entity would suffer if ties to the smaller entity were cut off. It is useful to anti-racist struggle to think
of a similar relationship holding between particular races, including the white race, and humanity at large. While it might initially seem paradoxical, the larger entity
of humanity can best be served by people's ties to smaller, more local entities such as their racial groups. A person's racial group is not the only smaller entity that
provides the rich existential ties of which Royce speaks-he rightly mentions family, and we could add entities such as one's neighborhood, one's church, mosque or
synagogue, and even groups based on one's gender or sexual orientation. But race also belongs in this list of sites of intimate connection that can and often do
sustain individual lives and that can support rather than undermine the well being of humanity. Forgetting one's duty to one's particular race in the name of working
for racial justice, for example, tends to turn that goal into a remote abstraction. "You cannot be loyal to merely an impersonal abstraction," Royce reminds us.13
Effectively serving the goal of racial justice is more likely to occur if one concretely explores how racial justice could emerge out of loyalty to one's particular race. This
claim might not seem objectionable when considering racial groups that are not white. Loyalty to other members of their race has been an important way for African
Americans, for example, to further the larger cause of racial justice. Black slaves who helped each other escape their white masters fought against slavery and thus
helped humanity as a whole. But the history of whiteness suggests that white people's loyalty to their race not only would not help, but in fact would undermine
struggles for racial justice. How could white people serve the larger interests of the human race by being loyal to a race that has oppressed, colonized, and brutalized
other races? What possible duties or obligations to their race could white people have, responsibilities that must be remembered if racial justice is to be a concrete,
lived goal for white people to work toward? On the one hand, these questions can seem outrageous, even dangerous. Talk of duty to the white race smacks of
militarist white supremacist movements, and indeed the first of the Creativity Movement's sixteen commandments in their "White Man's Bible" is that "it is the
avowed duty and holy responsibility of each generation to assure and secure for all time the existence of the White Race upon the face of this planet," and the sixth is
that "your first loyalty belongs to the White Race."14 Noel Ignatiev's concern about the scholarly validation of white supremacy through the critical conservation of
whiteness could not be better placed than here. Temporarily setting aside the dangerous aspect of these questions, they also can seem nonsensical if they do not
refer to the goals of white supremacist movements. What antiracist duties, we might ask with some sarcasm, do white people have that must not be forgotten?
African Americans and other non-white people might be able to combine loyalty to their racial group with loyalty to humanity, but white people cannot. Their
situations are too different to treat their relationships to their races as similar. Those relationships are asymmetrical, which means that white people's loyalty to the
human race, including racial justice for all its members, conflicts with loyalty to whiteness. Loyalty to humanity would seem to require white people to be race
traitors. On the other hand, these questions present a needed challenge to white people who care about racial justice. Rather than rhetorically or sarcastically, the
questions can be asked in the spirit of Royce's call for each "community [to] live its own life, and not the life of any other community, nor yet the life of a mere
abstraction called humanity in general" (67). For white people to fight white supremacy and white privilege does not mean for them
to attempt to shed their whiteness and become members of the human species at large. Attempting to become raceless by living the life of
an abstraction called humanity merely cultivates a white person's ignorance of how race, including whiteness, and racism inform her
habits, beliefs, desires, antipathies, and other aspects of her life. It does not magically eliminate her white privilege for even if
she succeeds in thinking of herself as a raceless member of humanity, she likely will continue to be identified and treated as white, even if unreflectively or
unconsciously, by others. By allowing her white privilege to go unchecked in this way, a white person's living the life of abstract
humanity actually tends to increase, not reduce her racial privilege. To increase the chances of reducing her racial
privilege, she must resist the temptation to see herself as raceless and instead figure out what it could mean for her to
live her own life as a racialized person. Living as a racialized, rather than abstract person does not mean attempting to take on a different race.
Attempting to take on a different race implicitly acknowledges that whiteness is problematic, and it can seem to be an expression of respect for non-white people.
But it often is no better a response to white privilege than attempting to shed one's whiteness. This is because a white person's taking on the habits, culture, and
other aspects of another race often is an expression of ontological expansiveness, which is a habit of white privileged people to treat all spaces-whether geographical,
existential, linguistic, cultural, or other-as available for them to inhabit at their choosing.15 Appropriating another race in this way thus is closer to imperialist
colonialism than a gesture of respect. For this reason, white people need to stop trying to flee the responsibilities and duties that come with being white and figure
out how to live their own racialized life, not the life of another race. Once they no longer ignore or attempt to flee their whiteness, they
can then ask how work for racial justice fits with their duties and responsibilities as a white person and how they might
live their own anti-racist white life. Three "Evils" Eliminated by Wise Whiteness Royce lists three specific problems in modern American life that cannot
be solved without wise provincialism. His discussion of these "evils," as Royce calls them, also illuminates "evils" that a wise form of whiteness could help meliorate.
The first evil is the neglect of and disruption to a community when people are only loosely associated with it and do not invest in, care about, or have a significant
history with it. Royce argues that this problem is growing in frequency and significance as people are increasingly mobile, changing their residency multiple times over
their lifetime and often moving great distances from where they were born and raised. This means that communities are increasingly dealing with a large number of
newcomers who do not (yet) have an intimate, caring connection to the new place they inhabit. This is "a source of social danger, because the community needs well-
knit organization" (73). Provincialism helps these newcomers care for their new home, and a wise provincialism does so without generating any hostility toward
either other provincial communities or larger social bodies such as the nation. In a similar fashion, when white people who care about racial justice have virtually no
conscious or deliberate affiliation with their whiteness, the meaning and effect of whiteness is left to happenstance or, more likely, is determined by white
supremacist groups. Royce's primary concern is the dissolution of communities through neglect, and if well intentioned white people do not care about, invest in, or
acknowledge a significant history with their whiteness, then whiteness will be neglected. But unlike provincial communities, whiteness does not necessarily unravel or
wither away because of simple neglect by anti-racist white people. Its neglect by anti-racists whites instead leaves it wide open for racist white groups to develop.
Like a garden, whiteness can easily grow tough weeds of white supremacy if it is not wisely cultivated. The evil of
abandoning whiteness, allowing white supremacists to make of it whatever they will, can be mitigated by a wise form of
whiteness. In practice, this means that white people who care about racial justice need to educate newcomers to
whiteness-namely, white children-to be loyal to and care about their race. While Royce's comments about the problem of newcomers due to increased
geographical mobility do not apply directly to whiteness,16 white children can be thought of as newcomers to the community of whiteness who do not (yet) have an
intimate connection to their race or know how to cultivate and care for it. Here again is an instance in which white supremacists have been allowed to
corner the market on whiteness: almost all explicit reflection and writing on how to raise white children as white has
been undertaken by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, World Church of the Creator, and Stormfront.17 The association is so tight that the mere
suggestion of educating white children in their whiteness is alarming to many people. But educating white children about their whiteness need and
should not mean educating them to be white supremacists. A wise form of whiteness would help train the developing
racial habits of white children in anti-racist ways. 18 Royce calls the second problem addressed by provincialism that of "the leveling tendency of
recent civilization" (74), but more accurate, I think, would be to characterize the problem as one of monotonous sameness. Royce is concerned that the increase of
mass communication means that people all over the nation, indeed the globe, are reading the same news stories, sharing the same ideas, fashions, and trends, and
more and more imitating one another. The rich diversity of humankind, the independence of the small manufacturer, and distinctiveness of the individual are being
absorbed into a vast, impersonal social order. A wise provincialism is not wholly opposed to these tendencies. There is great value in large groups of people coming to
understand each other across their differences. But, Royce argues, there often also is great value to be found in their differences, and those differences ought to be
allowed to thrive. A wise provincialism helps protect the variety of different places and communities so that they are not forced to be identical with each other. In a
similar way, wise whiteness helps preserve racial differences without treating people of various races as wholly alien to
each other and thus incapable of understanding each other across their differences. As Lucius Outlaw asks, "Why is it, after thousands
of years, that human beings are not all 'light khaki' instead of exhibiting the variety of skin tones (and other features) more or less characteristic of various
populations called races?"19 The answer, according to Outlaw, is not merely that racism and invidious ethnocentrism have worked to establish inviolable boundaries
between white and non-white races. It also is that different races are "the result of bio-cultural group attachments and practices that are conducive to human survival
and well-being."20With W.E.B. Du Bois, Outlaw argues that racial differences can enrich everyone and that even if racism disappeared tomorrow, we should want
discernibly distinct races to continue to exist.21 The baby need not be thrown out with the bathwater. The rich variety of human racial and ethnic cultures need not
be eliminated to eliminate racism and invidious ethnocentrism. A wise whiteness also would caution, however, that white people's appreciation for racial diversity
and variety also can be an insidious form of whiteness in disguise. Too often, celebrations of multiculturalism and racial diversity function as a smorgasbord of racial
difference offered up for (middle-to-upper class) white people's consumption and enjoyment. They do this by acknowledging some differences while simultaneously
concealing others. It is very easy for white people to recognize and even celebrate racial difference in the form of different food, dress, and cultural customs. It tends
to be much more difficult for them to recognize racial difference in the form of economic, educational, and political inequalities. Royce's criticism of the leveling
tendencies of modern culture does not explicitly depoliticize the issue, and he does mention that variety is needed particularly to counter "the purely mechanical
carrying-power of certain ruling social influences," an example of which is the hegemony of white culture (76). But given the tendency of white
(middle-to-upper class, in particular) people to see whiteness as cultureless and boring and thus want to spice it up by
dabbling in other, "exotic" cultures, care must be taken that appreciation of diversity is not sanitized through an
avoidance of the history and present of white privilege. When that happens, appreciation of plurality and diversity tend
to become a covert vehicle for white ontological expansiveness. In contrast, a wise whiteness values and thus
transactionally conserves different races, as Outlaw does, without depoliticizing the meaning of those differences. The
third evil discussed by Royce, the mob spirit, occurs when all individual judgment has been given up and a person becomes totally absorbed in a large social mass.
Without discriminating individuals, the crowd or mob is psychologically vulnerable to a strong leader, idea, or even a song that enflames emotions and leads people
to act in ways they ordinarily would not act. This danger is closely related to the one of sameness for behind the two dangers lay the same phenomenon: that of wide,
inclusive human sympathy (92-93). Openness to and sharing in the lives and the feelings of others is not always a positive event, Royce cautions us. Undiscriminating
sympathy can lend support to base absurdities as easily as to noble kindness, and as such sympathy is more of a neutral base for psychological development than an
automatic good to be ubiquitously cultivated. Under certain conditions-conditions that Royce thinks are increasingly present in the modern world-wide, inclusive
sympathy for others can become not only monotonous, but also dangerous (95). Loss of the small-the particular, the local, the individual-as it is absorbed into the
large is something to resist, and a wise provincialism helps prevent that loss Royce's concern about the mob spirit does not directly speak to problems faced by a wise
whiteness.22 But in this concern we can see the streak of organic individualism that runs through Royce's work, which can tell us something important about the
relationships of white individuals to their race. Royce's legendary concern for community does not sacrifice or dissolve the individual into the larger whole. Just as
false forms of provincialism set up a false opposition between provincialism and nationalism, false forms of individualism set up a false opposition between
individualism and community or social causes. That kind of individualism fails because of its "failure to comprehend what it is that the ethical individual needs," which
is a cause greater than the individual that she can passionately serve (38). Here is where Royce's individualism is distinctive: it insists that real individuality is found
through personal choice of a larger cause that one loyally serves, not through endless insistence that one is a single individual with personal initiative. This insistence
is empty if never acted upon, leaving the so-called autonomous individual lost and floundering. "Be an individual," Royce urges exasperatedly, "[b]ut for Heaven's
sake, set about the task."23 To be a real individual, a person needs something larger than herself to be a part of. And as communities of meaning, racial groups
historically have developed as one of those things. In Lucius Outlaw's words, racial and ethnic identification in part "develop[ed] as responses to the need for life-
sustaining and meaningful acceptable order of various kinds (conceptual, social, political)."24 Human beings need to create conceptual, social,
political and other structures, including individual and social identities, to give their lives meaning and purpose. While
Outlaw talks about this need in terms of order and Royce speaks of it in terms of a cause to devote one's self to, both
point to an existential need that racial identity, including whiteness, can serve and historically has served. And they both
suggest that a theory of racial justice that ignores this need will not be effective in practice.



Concept of Power Bad
Their method of holding whites responsible, calling for win a and a loss fails- no solvency without
breaking the juridical concept of power
McWhorter 5 [Ladelle, Professor of. Philosophy and Women's Studies, University of Richmond, Philosophy & Social Criticism, vol 31 nos 56, 2005, pp. 533
556 //liam]
In the growing body of literature that makes up what has in recent years come to be called Whiteness Studies, observations like
the following are commonplace: Whiteness has, at least within the modern era and within Western societies, tended to
be constructed as a norm, an unchanging and unproblematic location, a position from which all other identities come to
be marked by their difference (Bonnett, 1996: 146).1 According to Whiteness Studies theorists, the white race functions not so much as a
race, one among many, as, at times at least, the race the real human race and, at other times, no race, simply the
healthy, mature norm of human existence as opposed to all those other groups of people who are somehow off-white,
off-track, more or less deviant. Whiteness, the racial norm in Western industrial societies, is at one and the same time
the exemplar of human being and the unmarked selfsame over against the racially marked other(s).2 This understanding of
whiteness emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s as race scholars in the USA and the UK began to treat white identity as an epistemic object, in contrast to many
earlier race theorists who studied non-whites primarily.3 By taking whiteness as an object of study, these scholars problematized the status of the white race as an
unmarked norm and exposed the racism implicit in its having that status. Thus, it seemed, these new race theorists had discovered a potentially very powerful tool for
dismantling racism. Revealing the ways in which whiteness functions as a racial norm, they began to denaturalize it and thereby rob it of some of its power to order
thought and practice. Their scholarship was and is, deliberately and unapologetically, deeply engaged political activism. Feminist sociologist Ruth Frankenberg
articulates this confluence of theory and practice well when she writes: Naming whiteness and white people helps dislodge the claims of both to rightful dominance
(Frankenberg, 1993: 234). While readers of the work of Michel Foucault may well be struck by the deep affinities between Foucaultian genealogy, counter-memory,
and counter-attack on the one hand and Whiteness Studies denaturalization of heretofore largely unquestioned racial categories on the other, surprisingly most
writers in the Whiteness Studies movement seem all but unaware of Foucaults analytics of biopower and his descriptions of normalization.4 Their repeated
observation that whiteness functions as a norm and their close analyses of its unmarked status come not out of an
awareness of Foucaultian genealogy but rather out of sociological studies of institutional racism like Omi and Winants Racial
Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (1994). Their work sounds like Foucaults at times, but if they are moving toward an analysis that is like
his in some ways, it is from a starting point that is radically different. In this paper I will argue that, in part because of the limitations imposed by that
different starting point, Whiteness Studies theorists typically miss their mark both analytically and politically. Their major
problem lies in the fact that they still work within what Foucault calls a juridical conception of power, a conception that
simply does not capture the ways in which power operates in modern industrialized societies, especially in relation to
the so obviously bio-political phenomenon of racial oppression.



***Suffering K***


Identity politics fail- lead to an ethics of suffering, alienates different identities, and abandons emancipatory politics
Brown 93- PhD in political philosophy from Princeton, prof at UC Berkeley(Wendy, Wounded Attachments, Political Theory, Vol. 21,
No. 3 (Aug., 1993), pp. 390-410, JSTOR//MGD)
MANY HAVE ASKED HOW, given the totalizing regulatory and "othering" characteristics of identity in/as language, identity can avoid
reiterating such effects in its ostensibly emancipatory mode.' I want to ask a similar question but in a historically specific, cultural and political
register not because the linguistic frame is unimportant but because it is insufficient for discerning the character of contemporary politicized identity's problem- atic
investments. There are two levels to this inquiry. First, given the subjec- tivizing conditions of identity production in a late modern
liberal, capitalist, and disciplinary-bureaucratic social order, how can reiteration of these conditions be averted in identity's
purportedly emancipatory project? What kind of political recognition can identity-based claims seek-and what kind can they be
counted on to want-that will not resubordinate the subject itself historically subjugated through identity categories such as
"race" or "sex," especially when these categories operate within discourses of liberal essen- tialism and disciplinary
normalization? Second, given the averred interest of politicized identity in achieving emancipatory political recognition in a posthumanist discourse, what
are the logics of pain in subject formation within late modernity that might contain or subvert this aim? What are the
particular constituents-specific to our time, yet roughly generic for a diverse spectrum of identities-of identity's desire
for recognition that seem as often to breed a politics of recrimination and rancor, of culturally dispersed paralysis and
suffering, a tendency to reproach power rather than aspire to it, to disdain freedom rather than practice it? In short, where
do elements of politicized identity's investments in itself and especially in its own history of suffering come into conflict with the need to
give up these investments in the pursuit of an emancipatory democratic project?


Their performance is one of victimhood- leads to ressentiment
Brown 93- PhD in political philosophy from Princeton, prof at UC Berkeley(Wendy, Wounded Attachments, Political Theory, Vol. 21,
No. 3 (Aug., 1993), pp. 390-410, JSTOR//MGD)
However, it is not only the tension between freedom and equality but the prior presumption of the self-reliant and self-made
capacities of liberal
subjects, conjoined with their unavowed dependence on and construction by a variety of social relations and forces, that
makes all liberal subjects, and not only markedly disenfranchised ones, vulnerable to ressentiment: it is their situatedness within
power, their production by power, and liberal discourse's denial of this situatedness and production that casts the liberal subject into failure, the
failure to make itself in the context of a discourse in which its self-making is assumed, indeed, is its assumed nature. This failure, which Nietzsche
calls suffering, must find either a reason within itself (which redoubles the failure) or a site of external blame on which to avenge
its hurt and redistribute its pain. Here is Nietzsche's account of this moment in the production of ressentiment: For every sufferer
instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering, more exactly, an agent; still more specifically a guilty agent who is susceptible to
suffering-in short, some living thing upon which he can on some pretext or other, vent his affects, actually or in effigy ... This ...
constitutes the actual physiological cause of ressentiment, vengeful- ness, and the like: a desire to deaden pain by means of
affects ... to deaden, by means of a more violent emotion of any kind, a tormenting, secret pain that is becoming unendurable, and to
drive it out of consciousness at least for the moment: for that one requires an affect, as savage an affect as possible, and, in order to excite that,
any pretext at all.18 Ressentiment in this context is a triple achievement: it produces an affect (rage, righteousness) that overwhelms the hurt, it produces a culprit
respon- sible for the hurt, and it produces a site of revenge to displace the hurt (a place to inflict hurt as the sufferer has been hurt). Together these operations both
ameliorate (in Nietzsche's terms, "anaesthetize") and externalize what is otherwise "unendurable."

Identity induced ressentiment makes effective change impossible
Brown 93- PhD in political philosophy from Princeton, prof at UC Berkeley(Wendy, Wounded Attachments, Political Theory, Vol. 21,
No. 3 (Aug., 1993), pp. 390-410, JSTOR//MGD)
If ressentiment's "cause" is suffering, its "creative deed" is the reworking of this pain into a negative form of action, the
"imaginary revenge" of what Nietzsche terms "natures denied the true reaction, that of deeds."22 This revenge is achieved through the
imposition of suffering "on whatever does not feel wrath and displeasure as he does"23 (accomplished especially through
the production of guilt), through the establishment of suffering as the measure of social virtue, and through casting
strength and good fortune ("privilege" as we say today) as self-recriminating, as its own indictment in a culture of suffering: "it is
disgraceful to be fortunate, there is too much misery."24 But in its attempt to displace its suffering, identity structured by
ressenti- ment at the same time becomes invested in its own subjection. This invest- ment lies not only in its discovery of a site
of blame for its hurt will, not only in its acquisition of recognition through its history of subjection (a recogni- tion predicated on
injury, now righteously revalued), but also in the satisfac- tions of revenge that ceaselessly reenact even as they redistribute the
injuries of marginalization and subordination in a liberal discursive order that alter- nately denies the very possibility of these
things or blames those who experience them for their own condition. Identity politics structured by ressentiment reverses without
subverting this blaming structure: it does not subject to critique the sovereign subject of accountability that liberal indi- vidualism presupposes nor the
economy of inclusion and exclusion that liberal universalism establishes. Thus politicized identity that presents itself as a self-affirmation
now appears as the opposite, as predicated on and requiring its sustained rejection by a "hostile external world."25


Only way to solve is to transition from a culture of blame to one of aspiration- this embraces the possibility of futurity
without minimizing past exploitation
Brown 93- PhD in political philosophy from Princeton, prof at UC Berkeley (Wendy, Wounded Attachments, Political Theory, Vol. 21,
No. 3 (Aug., 1993), pp. 390-410, JSTOR//MGD)
What if it were possible to incite a slight shift in the character of political expression and political claims common to
much politicized identity? What if we sought to supplant the language of "I am"-with its defensive closure on identity, its
insistence on the fixity of position, and its equation of social with moral positioning-with the language of reflexive
"wanting"? What if it were possible to rehabilitate the memory of desire within identificatory processes, the moment in desire-
either "to have" or "to be"-prior to its wounding and thus prior to the formation of identity at the site of the wound? What if "wanting to be" or "wanting to
have" were taken up as modes of political speech that could destabilize the formulation of identity as fixed position, as
entrenchment by history, and as having necessary moral entail- ments, even as they affirm "position" and "history" as that which makes
the speaking subject intelligible and locatable, as that which contributes to a hermeneutics for adjudicating desires? If every "I am" is something of a
resolution of desire into fixed and sovereign identity, then this project might involve not only learning to speak but to read "I am" this
way, as in motion, as temporal, as not-I, as deconstructable according to a genealogy of want rather than as fixed interests or experiences.
The subject understood as an effect of a (ongoing) genealogy of desire, including the social processes constitutive of, fulfilling, or frustrating desire, is in this way
revealed as neither sovereign nor conclusive even as it is affirmed as an "I." In short, this partial dissolution of sovereignty into desire could be
that which reopens a desire for futurity where Nietzsche saw it sealed shut by festering wounds expressed as rancor and
ressentiment. "This instinct for freedom pushed back and repressed ... incarcerated within."34

2NC O/V

The affs identity performance creates a politics of subjugation which engenders ressentiment
This enacts itself in the form of scapegoating- redistributes injuries and rejects engagement with emancipatory
democratic projects because theyre perceived as part of the system
Only embracing a politics of futurity and transitioning from a culture of blame to aspiration can recognize past
oppression while moving into more productive social movements- thats Brown


T/ Effective Politics


Oppositional personal politics perpetuates suffering and leads to paralysis
Brown 93- PhD in political philosophy from Princeton, prof at UC Berkeley(Wendy, Wounded Attachments, Political Theory, Vol. 21,
No. 3 (Aug., 1993), pp. 390-410, JSTOR//MGD)
Revenge as a "reaction," a substitute for the capacity to act, produces identity as both bound to the history that
produced it and as a reproach to the present that embodies that history. The will that "took to hurting" in its own
impotence against its past becomes (in the form of an identity whose very existence is due to heightened consciousness of the immovability of its "it was," its
history of subordination) a will that makes not only a psychological but a political practice of revenge, a practice that reiterates
the existence of an identity whose present past is one of insistently unredeemable injury. This past cannot be redeemed unless the
identity ceases to be invested in it, and it cannot cease to be invested in it without giving up its identity as such, thus giving up its
economy of avenging and at the same time perpetuating its hurt-"when he then stills the pain of the wound, he at the same time
reinfects the wound."32 In its emergence as a protest against marginalization or subordination, politicized identity thus becomes attached to
its own exclusion both because it is premised on this exclusion for its very existence as identity and because the formation of identity at the site of exclusion, as
exclusion, augments or "alters the direction of the suffering" entailed in subordination or marginalization by finding a site of blame for it. But in so doing, it installs
its pain over its unredeemed history in the very foundation of its political claim, in its demand for recognition as identity.
In locating a site of blame for its powerlessness over its past, as a past of injury, a past as a hurt will, and locating a "reason" for the "unendurable pain" of social
powerlessness in the present, it converts this reasoning into an ethicizing politics, a politics of recrimination that seeks to avenge
the hurt even while it reaffirms it, discursively codifies it. Politicized identity thus enunciates itself, makes claims for itself, only
by entrenching, dramatizing, and inscribing its pain in politics and can hold out no future-for itself or others-that triumphs over this pain. The
loss of historical direction, and with it the loss of futurity characteristic of the late modern age, is thus homologically refigured in the
structure of desire of the dominant political expression of the age-identity politics. In the same way, the generalized political
impotence produced by the ubiquitous yet discontinuous networks of late modern political and economic power is reiterated in
the investments of late modern democracy's primary oppositional political formations.


Politicizing identity creates political impotence- props up systems of exploitation
Brown 93- PhD in political philosophy from Princeton, prof at UC Berkeley(Wendy, Wounded Attachments, Political Theory, Vol. 21,
No. 3 (Aug., 1993), pp. 390-410, JSTOR//MGD)
Enter politicized identity, now conceivable in part as both product of and "reaction" to this condition, where "reaction"
acquires the meaning that Nietzsche ascribed to it, namely, as an effect of domination that reiterates impotence, a
substitute for action, for power, for self-affirmation that reinscribes incapacity, powerlessness, and rejection. For
Nietzsche, ressentiment itself is rooted in "reaction"-the substitution of reasons, norms, and ethics for deeds-and not only
moral systems but identities themselves take their bearings in this reaction. As Tracy Strong reads this element of Nietzsche's thought,
Identity . . . does not consist of an active component, but is a reaction to something outside; action in itself, with its inevitable self-
assertive qualities, must then become something evil, since it is identified with that against which one is reacting. The will to power of
slave morality must constantly reassert that which gives definition to the slave: the pain he suffers by being in the world.
Hence any attempt to escape that pain will merely result in the reaffirmation of painful structures.21


Rejecting an ethic of victimhood does not mean we embrace failed political movements- but shifting the focus from
ontology to antagonistic debate is k/t shape the future of political outcomes
Brown 93- PhD in political philosophy from Princeton, prof at UC Berkeley(Wendy, Wounded Attachments, Political Theory, Vol. 21,
No. 3 (Aug., 1993), pp. 390-410, JSTOR//MGD)
Such a slight shift in the character of the political discourse of identity eschews the kinds of ahistorical or utopian turns
against identity politics made by a nostalgic and broken humanist Left as well as the reactionary and disingenuous assaults on
politicized identity tendered by the Right. Rather than opposing or seeking to transcend identity investments, the
replacement- even the complex admixture-of the language of "being" with "wanting" would seek to exploit politically a
recovery of the more expansive moments in the genealogy of identity formation. It would seek to reopen the moment prior to its own
foreclosure against its want, prior to the point at which its sovereign subjectivity is established through such foreclosure and through eternal repetition of its pain.
How might democratic discourse itself be invigorated by such a shift from ontological claims to these kinds of more
expressly political ones, claims which, rather than dispensing blame for an unlivable present, inhabited the necessarily
agonistic theater of discursively forging an alternative future?


T/ Exclusion

Identity politics replicate exclusion and are inevitably reductionist
Brown 93- PhD in political philosophy from Princeton, prof at UC Berkeley(Wendy, Wounded Attachments, Political Theory, Vol. 21,
No. 3 (Aug., 1993), pp. 390-410, JSTOR//MGD)
Contemporary politicized identity contests the terms of liberal discourse insofar as it challenges liberalism's universal "we"
as a strategic fiction of historically hegemonic groups and asserts liberalism's "I" as social-both relational and constructed by power-rather
than contingent, private, or autarkic. Yet it reiterates the terms of liberal discourse insofar as it posits a sovereign and unified "I"
that is disenfranchised by an exclusive "we." Indeed, I have suggested that politicized identity emerges and obtains its unifying
coherence through the politicization of exclusion from an ostensible universal, as a protest against exclusion, a protest
premised on the fiction of an inclusive/universal community, a protest that reinstalls the humanist ideal-and a specific
white, middle-class, masculinist expression of this ideal-insofar as it premises itself on exclusion from it. Put the other way around, politicized
identities generated out of liberal, disciplinary societies, insofar as they are premised on exclusion from a universal ideal, require that ideal, as
well as their exclusion from it, for their own perpetuity as identities.13 Politicized identity is also potentially reiterative of regulatory,
disciplinary society in its configuration of a disciplinary subject. It is both produced by and potentially accelerates the production of that
aspect of disciplinary society that "ceaselessly characterizes, classifies, and specializes," that works through "surveillance, continuous
registration, perpetual assessment, and classification," through a social machinery "that is both immense and min- ute."14 A recent example from the world of local
politics makes clear politicized identity's imbrication in disciplinary power, as well as the way in which, as Foucault reminds us, disciplinary power "infiltrates" rather
than replaces liberal juridical modalities.'5 Last year, the city council of my town reviewed an ordinance, devised and promulgated by a broad coalition
of identity-based political groups, which aimed to ban discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations on the basis of"sexual
orientation, transsexual- ity, age, height, weight, personal appearance, physical characteristics, race, color, creed, religion,
national origin, ancestry, disability, marital status, sex or gender."'6 Here is a perfect instance of the universal juridical
idea of liberalism and the normalizing principle of disciplinary regimes conjoined and taken up within the discourse of
politicized identity. This ordinance- variously called the "purple hair ordinance" or the "ugly ordinance" by national news media-aims to count
every difference as no difference, as part of a seamless whole, but also to count every potentially subversive rejection of
culturally enforced norms as themselves normal, as normaliz- able, and as normativizable through law. Indeed, through the definitional, procedural,
and remedies section of this ordinance (e.g., "sexual orientation shall mean known or assumed homosexuality, heterosexuality, or bisexual- ity"), persons are
reduced to observable social attributes and practices; these are defined empirically, positivistically, as if their existence were
intrinsic and factual, rather than effects of discursive and institutional power; and these positivist definitions of persons as their
attributes and practices are written into law, ensuring that persons describable according to them will now become regulated through them. Bentham couldn't have
done it better. Indeed, here is a perfect instance of how the language of unfreedom, how articulation in language, in the context of
liberal and disciplinary discourse, becomes a vehicle of subordination through individualization, normaliza- tion, and regulation, even
as it strives to produce visibility and acceptance. Here, also, is a perfect instance of the way in which differences that are the
effects of social power are neutralized through their articulation as attributes and their circulation through liberal administrative discourse:
what do we make of a document that renders as juridical equivalents the denial of employment to an African American,
an obese man, and a white middle-class youth festooned with tattoos and fuschia hair?

AT Morality

Calls for moral decisions create a culture of impotence- denies self-affirmation
Brown 93- PhD in political philosophy from Princeton, prof at UC Berkeley(Wendy, Wounded Attachments, Political Theory, Vol. 21,
No. 3 (Aug., 1993), pp. 390-410, JSTOR//MGD)
Insofar as what Nietzsche calls slave morality produces identity in reac- tion to power, insofar as identity rooted in this reaction
achieves its moral superiority by reproaching power and action themselves as evil, identity structured by this ethos
becomes deeply invested in its own impotence, even while it seeks to assuage the pain of its powerlessness through its
vengeful moralizing, through its wide distribution of suffering, through its reproach of power as such. Politicized identity, premised on
exclusion and fueled by the humiliation and suffering imposed by its historically structured impo- tence in the context of a discourse of sovereign individuals, is
as likely to seek generalized political paralysis, to feast on generalized political impo- tence, as it is to seek its own or
collective liberation. Indeed it is more likely to punish and reproach-"punishment is what revenge calls itself; with a hypocritical lie it
creates a good conscience for itself'-than to find venues of self-affirming action.26





***Cap K Components***


**IMPACTS**
Cap T/Policing

Capitalism perpetuates policing and racism to maximize profit- only reclaiming the state from capitalism can end this
cycle and lead to reform
El Kilombo Intergalactico 07 (Collective in Durham NC that interviewed Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos BEYOND RESISTANCE:
EVERYTHING,libcom.org/files/beyondresistance.pdf//MGD)
The war with no front has two faces. The first is destruction. Any coherent logic and practice that allows for the
organization of life outside of capital, anything that allows us to identify ourselves as existing independent of capital, must be destroyed or,
what may be the same thing, reduced to the quantifiable exchangeability of the world market. Cultures, languages, histories, memories, ideas,
and dreams all must undergo this process. In this regard, struggles for control over the production and subordination of racialized and
gendered identities becomes a central battlefield. All the colors of the people of the earth face off with the insipid color of
money. For the capitalist market, the ultimate goal is to make the entire world a desert of indifference populated only
by equally indifferent and exchangeable consumers and producers. As a direct consequence, the Empire of Money has turned much of
its attention to destroying the material basis for the existence of the nation-state, as it was through this institution that for the last
century humanity was able to, even if only marginally, keep the forces of money at bay. The second face is reorganization. Once the
Empire of Money has sufficiently weakened the nation-state, it then reinvigorates this same institution for its own ends
through the introduction of schemes intended to benefit the structure of the market itself, specifically the advent of privatization as government policy. This
allows for the increasing intervention of the state with the end of minimizing its redistributive or social capacity and using it as a mechanism for the
insistent imposition of the market. This imposition is so expansive that literally everything becomes a business opportunity, a site for speculation, or a marketable
moment. What was previously a site for community strength (i.e. a mural) is today simply a wall for corporate advertisement;
what was previously knowledge passed down to be shared socially is today the site for the latest pharmaceutical patent; what yesterday was free and
abundant today is bottled and sold. Without any social safety net and bombarded with images of an ever-present
enemy, the logic of policing extends to that figure previously known as the citizen of the former nation-state. This
figure is today reconstituted as an atomistic self-policing subject, a competitor who enters (i.e. misses) all encounters believing that the other,
that which is not me, exists only to defeat me, or be defeated by me. A total war indeed. Today there is simply no quiet corner to rest and catch ones breath.
Cap T/ Racism
Cap is the root cause of racism
Cole 9 (Mike Cole, Bishop Grosseteste University College Lincoln, UK, Critical Race Theory comes to the UK : A Marxist response, Ethnicities 2009 9: 246)
While, for Marxists, it is certainly the case that there has been a continuity of racism for hundreds of years, the concept of white supremacy does not
in itself explain this continuity, since it does not need to connect to modes of production and developments in capitalism. It is true that Mills (1997)
provides a wide-ranging discussion of the history of economic exploitation, and that Preston (2007) argues that CRT needs to be considered alongside Marxism.
However, unlike Marxism, there is no a priori need to connect with capitalist modes of production. Thus Gillborn (e.g. 2005, 2006a) is able to make
the case for CRT and white supremacy without providing a discussion of the relationship of racism to capitalism. For me, the Marxist concept of
racialization5 is most useful in articulating racism to modes of production, and I have developed these links at length elsewhere (e.g. Cole, 2004a, 2004b). Manning
Marable (2004) has used the concept of racialization to connect to modes of production in the US. He has described the current era in the US as The New Racial
Domain (NRD). This New Racial Domain, he argues, is different from other earlier forms of racial domination, such as slavery, Jim Crow segregation,
and ghettoization, or strict residential segregation, in several critical respects. These early forms of racialization, he goes
on, were based primarily, if not exclusively, in the political economy of US capitalism. Meaningful
social reforms such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were debated almost entirely within the context of Americas
expanding, domestic economy, and a background of Keynesian, welfare state public policies. The political economy of the New Racial Domain, on
the other hand, is driven and largely determined by the forces of transnational capitalism, and the public policies of state neoliberalism, which rests
on an unholy trinity, or deadly triad, of structural barriers to a decent life. These oppressive structures are mass unemployment, mass incarceration
and mass disfranchisement, with each factor directly feeding and accelerating the others, creating an ever-widening circle of social disadvantage,
poverty, and civil death, touching the lives of tens of millions of US people. For Marable, adopting a Marxist perspective, The process begins at the point of
production. For decades, US corporations have been outsourcing millions of better-paying jobs outside the country.The class warfare against unions
has led to a steep decline in the percentage of US workers. As Marable concludes: Within whole US urban neighborhoods losing virtually their entire
economic manufacturing and industrial employment, and with neoliberal social policies in place cutting job training programs, welfare, and public
housing, millions of Americans now exist in conditions that exceed the devastation of the Great Depression of the 1930s. In 2004, in New Yorks
Central Harlem community, 50 percent of all black male adults were currently unemployed. When one considers that this figure does not count those
black males who are in the military, or inside prisons, its truly amazing and depressing. Moreover, the new jobs being generated for the most part
lack the health benefits, pensions, and wages that manufacturing and industrial employment once offered.

Cap T/ Corruption


Flaws in the state can be traced by to capitalism- rejecting it is an a priori concern
El Kilombo Intergalactico 07 (Collective in Durham NC that interviewed Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos BEYOND RESISTANCE:
EVERYTHING,libcom.org/files/beyondresistance.pdf//MGD)
First, States: the State in the Empire of Money, as mentioned above, is reorganized. It is now the downsized state where any
semblance of collective welfare is eliminated and replaced with the logic of individual safety, with the most repressive
apparatuses of the State, the police and the Army, unleashed to enforce this logic. This state is in no way smaller in the daily lives of its
subjects; rather, it is guaranteed that the power of this institution (collective spending) is directed purely toward new armaments and the increasing presence of the
police in daily life. Second, Armies: the Army in previous eras was assumed to exist for the protection of a national population from foreign invasion. Today, in the
structural absence of such a threat, the army is redirected to respond with violence to manage (and yet never solve) a series of never-
ending local conflicts (Atenco, Oaxaca, New Orleans) that potentially threaten the overall stability of international markets. In other words,
as the EZLN points out, these armies can no longer be considered national in any meaningful sense; they are instead various
precinct divisions of a global police force under the direction of the Empire of Money. Third, Politics: the politics of the
politicians (i.e. the actions of the legislative, executive, and judiciary branches) has been completely eliminated as a site for public
deliberation, or for the construction of the previously existing 4 nation-state. The politics of the politicians has been redirected and its
new function is that of the implementation and administration of the local influence of transnational corporations. What was previously
national politics has been replaced with what the EZLN refers to as megapoliticsthe readjustment of local policy to global financial
interests. Thus the sites that once actually mediated among local actors are now additionally charged with the mission of creating the image that such mediation
continues to take place. It is best to be careful then and not believe that the politicians and their parties (be they right wing or progressive) are of no use; rather, it
is important to note that today their very purpose is the outright simulation of social dialogue (that is, they are of no use TO US!).
Rejection A Priori
You must reject the violence within capitalism its costs are beyond calculation
Daly 4 [Daly, Senior Lecturer in Politics in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at University College, Northhampton, Conversations with Zizek p. 14-16 //liam]
For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gordian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize that our ethico-
political responsibility is to confront the constitutive violence of todays global capitalism and its obscene
naturalization/anonymization of the millions who are subjugated by it throughout the world. Against the standardized
positions of postmodern culture with all its pieties concerning multiculturalist etiquette Zizek is arguing for a politics
that might be called radically incorrect in the sense that it breaks with these types of positions and focuses instead on
the very organizing principles of todays social reality: the principles of global liberal capitalism. This requires some care and
subtlety. For far too long, Marxism has been bedeviled by an almost fetishistic economism that has tended towards
political morbidity. With the likes of Hilferding and Gramsci, and more recently Laclau and Mouffe, crucial theoretical advances have been made that enable
the transcendence of all forms of economism. In this new context, however, Zizek argues that the problem that now presents itself is almost
that of the opposite fetish. That is to say, the prohibitive anxieties surrounding the taboo of economism can function as
a way of not engaging with economic reality and as a way of implicitly accepting the latter as a basic horizon of
existence. In an ironic Freudian- Lacanian twist, the fear of economism can end up reinforcing a de facto economic
necessity in respect of contemporary capitalism (i.e. the initial prohibition conjures up the very thing it fears). This is not to endorse any
kind of retrograde return to economism. Zizeks point is rather that in rejecting economism we should not lose sight of
the systemic power of capital in shaping the lives and destinies of humanity and our very sense of the possible. In
particular we should not overlook Marxs central insight that in order to create universal global system the forces of
capitalism seek to conceal the politico- discursive violence of its construction through a kind of gentrification of that
system. What is persistently denied by neo-liberals such as Rorty (1989) and Fukuyama (1992) is that the gentrification of global liberal capitalism
is one whose universalism fundamentally reproduces and depends upon a disavowed violence that excludes vast
sectors of the worlds population. In this way, neo-liberal ideology attempts to naturalize capitalism by presenting its
outcomes of winning and losing as if they were simply a matter of chance and sound judgment in a neutral marketplace.
Capitalism does indeed create a space for a certain diversity, at least for the central capitalist regions, but it is neither
neutral nor ideal and its price in terms of social exclusion is exorbitant. That is to say, the human cost in terms of
inherent global poverty and degraded life chances cannot be calculated within the existing economic rationale and, in
consequence, social exclusion remains mystified and nameless (viz. the patronizing reference to the developing world). And Zizeks
point is that this mystification is magnified through capitalisms profound capacity to ingest its own excesses and
negativity: to redirect (or misdirect) social antagonisms and to absorb them within a culture of differential affirmation.
Instead of Bolshevism, the tendency today is towards a kind of political boutiquism that is readily sustained by postmodern forms of consumerism and lifestyle.


Global Destruction Mpx
Modern leftist struggles are stuck within coordinates of capitalismtheir efforts only serve to
regulate the worst excesses of capitalism without challenging its global destruction
Zizek 4 [Slavoj, Prof of Sociology at the Institute for Sociology at Ljubljana Univ, Conversations With Zizek, pg 148-9]
My position is almost classical Marxist in the sense that I would insist that anti-capitalist struggle is not simply one among other political
struggles for greater equality, cultural recognition, anti-sexism and so on. I believe in the central structuring role of the
anti-capitalist struggle. And I dont think that my position is as crazy or idiosyncratic as it appeared maybe a couple a years
ago. It is not only the so-called Seattle Movement; there are many other signals that demonstratehow shall I put it?capitalism is
becoming a problem again; that the honeymoon of globalization, which lasted through the 1990s, is coming to an end. Its in this
context that we can also understand the incredible successes of Negri and Hardts Empire, which points out that people are again perceiving capitalism as a problem.
It is no longer the old story that the ideological battles are over and that capitalism has won. Capitalism is once more a
problem. This would be my starting point. And I am not thinking of anti-capitalist struggle just in terms of consumerist
movements. This is not enough. We need to do more than simply organize a multitude of sites of resistance against
capitalism. There is a basic necessity to translate this resistance into a more global projectotherwise we will merely
be creating regulatory instances that control on the worst excesses of capitalism. GD: This also appears to be at the base of your
dispute with Ernesto Laclau in J. Butler (et al.) Contingency, Hegemony, and Universality where you seem to be arguing that the existing political struggles are
already caught up in a certain liberal capitalist ethos and that the contemporary logiics of hegemony are already hegemonized; already configured within the capital
processes themselvesSJ: Yes, I agree with your formulation that hegemony itself is hegemonized. In what sense? I think that the
idea that today we no longer have a central struggle but a multitude of struggles is a fake one, because we shouldnt
forget that the group for this multitude of struggles was created by modern global capitalism. This doesnt devaluate
these struggles: I am not saying they are not real struggles. I am saying that the passage from old-fashioned class struggle to
all these post-modern struggles of ecological, cultural, sexual etc. struggles is one that is opened up by global capitalism.
The ground of these struggles is global capitalism.

Root Cause Slavery
They misread slavery. No where is the failure of the affs paradigm more evident then in their
argument we should begin with slavery. The affs re-telling of the history of slavery omits the
central cause of the slave-trade: class. Absent an accurate understanding of historical process,
they cannot hope to redress the harms of past injustice.
Darder, and Torress, 04 [Antonia, Prof of education policy studies at U of Illinois, and Rodolfo, Associate prof of
latino studies at UC Irvine, After Race: Racism after multiculturalism, p.6-8 //liam]

Although today race is generally linked to phenotypic characteris tics, there is a strong consensus among evolutionary biologists and ge netic anthropologists that
biologically identifiable human races do not exist; Homo sapiens constitute a single species, and have been so since their evolution in Africa and throughout their
migration around the world (Lee, Mountain, and Koenig 2001, 39). This perspective is simi lar to that which existed prior to the eighteenth century, when the notion
that there were distinct populations whose differences were grounded in biology did not exist. For the Greeks, for example, the term barbarian was tied to how
civilized a people were considered to be (generally based on language rather than genetics). So how did all this begin? George Fredrickson (2002),
writing on the history of racism, identifies the anticipatory moment of modern racism with the treatment of Jew ish converts
to Christianity in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain. Conversos were identified and discriminated against because of the belief held
by Christians that the impurity of their blood made them incapable of experiencing a true conversion (31). Fredrickson
argues that the racism inherent in the quasi-religious, Spanish doctrine of limpeza de sangre, referring to purity of blood, set the stage for the
spread of racism to the New World: To the extent that it was enforced represented the stigmatization of an entire ethnic group on the basis of
deficiencies that allegedly could not be eradicated by conversion or assimilation. Inherited social status was nothing new; the concept of noble blood had long
meant that the off spring of certain families were born with a claim to high status. But when the status of large numbers of people was depressed purely and simply
because of their derivation from a denigrated ethnos, a line had been crossed that gave race a new and more comprehensive significance. (33) Hence, religious
notions, steeped in an ideology of race, played a significant role in the exportation of racism into the Americas, wheiie
domination by the superior race was perceived as inevitable and de sirable, because it was thought to lead to human progress (Castles 1996, 21). The emergence
of race as ideology can also be traced to the rise of nationalism. Efforts by nation-states to extend or deny rights of citizenship
contingent on race or ethnicity were not uncommon, even within so-called democratic republics. Here, national mythology about those
with the biological unfitness for full citizenship (Fredrickson 2002, 68) served to sanction exclusionary practices, despite the fact that all people shared the
historical process of migration and intermingling (Castles 1996, 21). Herein is contained the logic behind what Valle and Torres (2000) term the policing of race, a
condition that results in official policies and practices by the nation-state designed to exclude or curtail the rights of racialized populations. In Germany, the Nazi
regime took the logic of race to its pinnacle, rendering Jewish and Gypsy pop ulations a threat to the state, thus
rationalizing and justifying their demise. This example disrupts the notion that racism occurs only within the context
of black-white relations. Instead, Castles (1996) argues that economic exploitation has always been central to the emergence
of racism. Whether it incorporated slavery or indentured servitude, racial ized systems of labor were perpetrated in Europe against
inunigrants, in cluding Irish, Jewish, and Polish workers, as well as against indigenous populations around the world. In
the midst of the scientific penchant of the eighteenth century, Carolus Linneaus developed one of the first topologies to actually cate gorize human beings into four
distinct subspecies: americanus, asiaticus, africanus, and europeaeus. Linneauss classification, allegedly neutral and scientific, included not only physical features but
also behavioral charac teristics, hierarchically arranged in accordance with the prevailing social values and the political-economic interests of the times. The
predictable result is the current ideological configuration of race. used to both ex plain and control social behavior. Etienne Balibars (2003) work on racism is useful
in understanding the ideological justifications that historically have accompanied the exclu sion and domination of racialized populationsa phenomenon heavily
fueled by the tensions of internal migration in the Current era of global ization. [R]acism describes in an abstract idealizing manner types of human ity, and. . .
makes extensive use of classifications which allow all indi viduals and groups to imagine answers for the most immediate existen tial questions, such as imposition of
identities and the permanence of vi olence between nations, ethnic or religious communities. (3) Balibar also points to the impact of symbolic projections and media
tions (in particula; stereotypes and prejudices linked to divine-human ity or bestial-animality) in the construction of racialized formations. Racial
classification becomes associated with a distinction between the properly human and its imaginary (animal-like)
other. Such projec tions and mediations, Balibar argues, are inscribed with modernitys ex pansionist rationalitya quasi-
humanist conception that suggests that differences and inequalities are the result of unequal access and social ex clusion
from cultural, political, or intellectual life but also implies that these differences and inequalities represent normal
patterns, given the level of humanity or animality attributed to particular populations. James Baldwin in A Talk to
Teachers (1988) links this phenomenon of racialization to the political economy and its impact on African Ameri cans.The
point of all this is that Black men were brought here as a source of cheap labor. They were indispensable to the economy. In
order to justify the fact that men were treated as though they were animals, the white re public had to brain wash itself into believing
that they were indeed ani mals and deserved to be treated like animals. (7) Lee, Mountain, and Koenig (2001) note, the taxonomy of race has al ways
been and continues to be primarily political (43). Since politics and economics actually constitute one sphere, it is more precise to say that the
ideology of race continues to be primarily about political economy. Thus, historians of race and racism argue that the idea of
immutable, biologically determined races is a direct outcome of exploration and colonialism, which furnished the
scientific justification for the eco nomic exploitation, slavery, and even genocide of those groups perceived as
subhuman.

**LINKS**
Black Subjectivity Link
Fetishizing black subjectivity makes class invisiblefailing to take into account these racist relations in the name of
economic progress
Young 6 [Robert, Asst Prof of English at Univ of Alabama, Putting Materialism Back into Race Theory,
http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/puttingmaterialismbackintoracetheory.htm //liam]
Indeed, the discourse of the subject operates as an ideological strategy for fetishizing the black experience and, consequently, it
positions black subjectivity beyond the reach of Marxism. For example, in the Afrocentric Idea, Asante dismisses Marxism
because it is Eurocentric (8), but are the core concepts of Marxism, such as class and mode of production, only relevant
for European social formations? Are African and African-American social histories/relations unshaped by class
structures? Asante assumes that class hierarchies do not structure African or the African-American social experiences, and this reveals the class politics
of Afrocentricity: it makes class invisible. Asante's assumption, which erases materialism, enables him to offer the idealist formulation that the "word
creates reality" (70). The political translation of such idealism is not surprisingly very conservative. Asante directs us away from critiquing capitalist institutions, in a
manner similar to the ideological protocol of the Million Man March, and calls for vigilance against symbolic oppression. As Asante tellingly puts it, "symbol
imperialism, rather than institutional racism, is the major social problem facing multicultural societies" (56). In the realm of African-American
philosophy, Howard McGary Jr. also deploys the discourse of the (black) subject to mark the limits of Marxism. For instance, in a
recent interview, McGary offers this humanist rejection of Marxism: "I don't think that the levels of alienation experienced by Black people are rooted primarily in
economic relations" (Interview 90). For McGary, black alienation exceeds the logic of Marxist theory and thus McGary's idealist assertion that "the sense of alienation
experienced by Black people in the US is also rooted in the whole idea of what it means to be a human being and how that has been understood" (Interview 90).
McGary confuses causes and effects and then misreads Marxism as a descriptive modality. Marxism is not concerned as
much with descriptive accounts, the effects, as much as it is with explanatory accounts. That is, it is concerned with the
cause of social alienation because such an explanatory account acts as a guide for praxis. Social alienation is an historical
effect and its explanation does not reside in the experience itself; therefore, it needs explanation and such an
explanation emerges from the transpersonal space of concepts. In theorizing the specificity of black alienation, McGary reveals his
contradictory ideological coordinates. First, he argues that black alienation results from cultural "beliefs". Then, he
suggests that these cultural "norms" and "practices" develop from slavery and Jim Crow, which are fundamentally
economic relations for the historically specific exploitation of black people. If these cultural norms endogenously emerge from the
economic systems of slavery and Jim Crow, as McGary correctly suggests, then and contrary to McGary's expressed position, black alienation
is very much rooted in economic relations. McGary's desire to place black subjectivity beyond Marxism creates contradictions in his text. McGary
asserts that the economic structures of slavery and Jim Crow shape cultural norms. Thus in a post-slavery, post-Jim Crow era, there would still be an economic
structure maintaining contemporary oppressive normsfrom McGary's logic this must be the case. However, McGary remains silent on the
contemporary economic system structuring black alienation: capitalism. Apparently, it is legitimate to foreground and
critique the historical connection between economics and alienation but any inquiry into the present day connection
between economics and alienation is off limits. This other economic structurecapitalismremains the unsaid in McGary's
discourse, and consequently he provides ideological support for capitalismthe exploitative infrastructure which produces and maintains
alienation for blacks as well as for all working people. In a very revealing moment, a moment that confirms my reading of McGary's pro-capitalist position, he asserts
that "it is possible for African-Americans to combat or overcome this form of alienation described by recent writers without overthrowing capitalism" (20). Here, in a
most lucid way, we see the ideological connection between the superstructure (philosophy) and the base (capitalism).
Philosophy provides ideological support for capitalism, and, in this instance, we can also see how philosophy carries out class
politics at the level of theory (Althusser Lenin 18). McGary points out "that Black people have been used in ways that white
people have not" (91). His observation may be true, but it does not mean that whites have not also been "used"; yes,
whites may be "used" differently, but they are still "used" because that is the logic of exploitative regimespeople are "used",
that is to say, their labor is commodified and exchanged for profit. McGary's interview signals what I call an "isolationist" view. This view disconnects black
alienation from other social relations; hence, it ultimately reifies race, and, in doing so, suppresses materialist inquiries
into the class logic of race. That is to say, the meaning of race is not to be found within its own internal dynamics but rather in dialectical relation to and as
an ideological justification of the exploitative wage-labor economy. This isolationist position finds a fuller and, no less problematic, articulation in Charles W. Mills'
The Racial Contract, a text which undermines the possibility for a transracial transformative political project. Mills evinces the ideological assumptions and
consequent politics of the isolationist view in a long endnote to chapter 1. Mills privileges race oppression, but, in doing so, he must suppress other forms of
oppression, such as gender and class. Mills acknowledges that there are gender and class relations within the white population, but he still privileges race, as if the
black community is not similarly divided along gender and class lines. Hence, the ideological necessity for Mills to execute a double move: he must marginalize class
difference within the white community and suppress it within the black community. Consequently, Mills removes the possibility of connecting white supremacy, a
political-cultural structure, to its underlying economic base. Mills empiricist framework mystifies our understanding of race. If "white racial solidarity has overridden
class and gender solidarity" (138), as he proposes, then what is needed is an explanation of this racial formation. If race is the "identity around which
whites have usually closed ranks" (138), then why is the case? Without an explanation, it seems as if white solidarity
reflects some kind of metaphysical alliance. White racial solidarity is an historical articulation that operates to defuse
class antagonism within white society, and it is maintained and reproduced through discourses of ideology. The race
contract provides whites with an imaginary resolution of actual social contradictions, which are not caused by blacks,
but by an exploitative economic structure. The race contract enables whites to scapegoat blacks and such an ideological operation displaces any
understanding of the exploitative machinery. Hence, the race contract provides a political cover which ensures the ideological
reproduction of the conditions of exploitation, and this reproduction further deepens the social contradictionsthe economic position of whites
becomes more and more depressed by the very same economic system that they help to ideologically reproduce.

Chain of Equivalences Link
Their politics reduces all struggles to a chain of equivalences: Their analysis of power relations
through the lens of race makes redressing injustice impossible by making capitalism just another
part of a chain of equivalences of oppression, rather than the totalizing social system which
materially underpins oppression, they derail any real political movement.
Darder, and Torress, 04 [Antonia, Prof of education policy studies at U of Illinois, and Rodolfo, Associate prof of
latino studies at UC Irvine, After Race: Racism after multiculturalism, p. //liam]

Since the 1970s, much of the progressive literature on subordinate cul tural populations has utilized the construct of race as a central category of analysis for
interpreting social conditions of inequality and marginal ization. In turn, this literature has adhered to a perspective of race as identity. This raced identity has
received overwhelming attention in both the sociological and political arenas. Unfortunately, the unrelenting emphasis on identity unleashed a
barrage of liberal and conservative political movements that unwittingly undermined the socialist project of
emancipation in this country and abroad. Radical mass organizations that had once worked to spearhead actions for economic democracy, human
rights, and social justice were crippled by the fury. In the midst of the blinding celebratory affirmations of identity, neoliberal efforts to seize greater dominion over
international markets proliferated and globalization became the policy buzzword of U.S. economic imperialism at the end of the twentieth century. Given this legacy,
it is not surprising that many of the theories, practices, and policies that inform the social science analysis of racialized pop ulations today are overwhelmingly rooted
in a politics of identity. Consequently this approachsteeped in deeply insular perspectives of race and representationhas
often ignored the imperatives of capitalist mulation and the presence of class divisions among racialized popula tions,
even though, as John Michael (2000) reminds us, identity cate gories and groups are always *racialized+ and gendered and inflected by class (29). As we have
previously stated, much of the literature on critical race theory lacks a substantive analysis of class and a critique of capitalism, and when class issues are mentioned,
the emphasis is usually on an un differentiated plurality that intersects with multiple oppressions. Unfor tunately, this new pluralism fails to grapple with the
relentless totaliz ing dimension of capitalism and its overwhelming tendency to homoge nize rather than to diversify human experience (Wood 1994). Strongly
influenced by a politics of identity, critical race theorists in corporate the intersectionality argument to refer to their examination of race, sex, class, national origin,
and sexual orientation and how the com bination of these identities plays out in various settings (Delgado and Ste fancic 2001). This school of thought, common to
progressive scholarship, generally includes a laundry list of oppressions (race, class, gender, ho mophobia, and the like) that are to be engaged with equal weight in
the course of ascribing pluralized sensibilities to any political project that proposes to theorize social inequalities. Hence, inadvertently in the name of
recognizing and celebrating difference and diversity, this analytical construct reduces the capitalist system (or the
economy) to one of many spheres in the plural and heterogeneous complexity of modern society (Wood 1995, 242). Wood
argues that the intersectionality argument represents a distorted appropriation of Antonio Gramscis notion of civil society, which was explicitly intended to
function as a weapon against capitalism by identi fying potential spaces of freedom outside the state for autonomous, vol untary organization and plurality. However,
as used by many on the left to link multiple oppressions to specific plural identities, the concept has been stripped of its unequivocal, anticapitalist intent. Wood
speaks to the danger inherent in this analytical twist. Here, the danger lies in the fact that the totalizing logic and the coercive power of
capitalism is reduced to one set of institutions and relations among many others, on a conceptual par with
households or voluntary associations. Such a reduction is, in fact, the principal distinctive feature of civil society in its
new incarnation. Its effect is to conceptualize away the problem of capitalism, by disaggregating society into fragments,
with no overarching power structure, no totalizing unity, no systemic coercionin other words, no capitalist system, with its expansionary drive and its capacity to
penetrate every aspect of social life. (Wood 1995, 245) This denial of the totalizing force of capitalism does not simply substantiate
the existence of plural identities and relations that should be equally privileged and given weight as modes of
domination. The logic of this ar gument fails to recognize that the class relation that constitutes capital, is not, after all, just a
personal identity, nor even just a principle of stratification or inequality. It is not only a specific system of power rela tions but also
the constitutive relation of a distinctive social process, the - dynamic of accumulation and the self-expansion of capital (Wood 1995, 246).
Furthermore, such logic ignores the fact that notions of identity result from a process of identification with a particular configuration of histor ically lived or
transferred social arrangements and practices tied to mate- - rial conditions of actual or imagined survival. The intersectionality argu ment fails to illuminate the
manner in which commonly identified diverse social spheres or plural identities exist within the determinative force of capitalism, its system of social property
relations, its expansionary im peratives, its drive for accumulation, its coinmodification of all social life, its creation of the market as a necessity, and so on (Wood
1995, 246). There is no question but that racism as an ideology is integral to the process of capital accumulation. The failure to
confront this dimension in an analysis of contemporary society as a racialized phenomenon or to continue to treat
class as merely one of a multiplicity of (equally valid) - perspectives, which may or may not intersect with the process of racial ization, is
a serious shortcoming. In addressing this issue, we must recognize that even progressive African American and Latino scholars and ac tivists have often used identity
politics, which generally glosses over class differences and/or ignores class contradictions, in an effort to build a po litical base. Constructions of race are
objectified and mediated as truth to ignite political support, divorced from the realities of class struggle. By so doing,
race-centered scholars have unwittingly perpetuated the vacu ous and dangerous notion that politics and economics
are two separate spheres of society which function independentlya view that firmly anchors and sustains prevailing
class relations of power in society.

Critical Pedagogy Link

Critical pedagogy perpetuates capitalism- doomed to be ineffective unless it adopts a capital-centric approach
McLaren 2k- prof at UCLA (Peter, Knowledge and power in the global economy, edited by David Gabbard, Chapter 39. Critical Pedagogy//MGD)
Critical pedagogy has become closely allied with multicultural education (McLaren, 1995; Sleeter & McLaren, 1995). However, just as we have witnessed in
the project of critical pedagogy an avoidance of issues related to class and the social relations of production, so too have we witnessed
in multicultural education an absence of discussions linking the practice of racism to capitalist social relations. Consequently,
both critical pedagogy and multicultural education need to address themselves to the adaptive persistence of capitalism
and to issues of capitalist imperialism and its specific manifestation of accumulative capacities through conquest (which we know as colonialism). In other words,
critical pedagogy needs to establish a project of emancipation centered around the transformation of property relations
and the creation of a just system of appropriation and distribution of social wealth. The domestication of critical pedagogy has
not infirmed its revolutionary potential.

Hip Hop Link
Hip hop is dead. The affs use of hip-hop is anything but revolutionary the appeal to authentic
local practices of experiential knowledge reintrenches the fable of identity and makes a coherent
critique of capitalism impossible. Their conception that hip-hop is necessarily transformative is just
another means to covertly essentialize identity and obscure the tools of class analysis.
Darder, and Torress, 04 [Antonia, Prof of education policy studies at U of Illinois, and Rodolfo, Associate prof of
latino studies at UC Irvine, After Race: Racism after multiculturalism, p. 101-4 //liam]

The process of signification is at work in the emphasis that critical race theory places on experiential knowledge (Delgado 1995; Ladson BilIhSgs 1999). Robin Barnes
(1990) notes that Critical race theorists... iisirgrate their experiential knowledge, drawn from a shared history as OJer with their ongoing struggles to transform a
world deteriorating under the albatross of racial hegemony (186465). In concert with this privileging of experience, critical race theory employs
narratives and storytelling as a central method of inquiry to analyze the myths, presuppositions, and received
wisdoms that make up the common culture about race and that invariably render blacks and other minorities one-
down (Delgado 1995, xiv). The results of this storytelling method are theorized and then utilized to draw conclusions meant to impact public policy and
institutional practices. The narrative and storytelling method employed by critical race theo rists sought to critique essentialist narratives in law, education, and the
social sciences. In place of a systematic analysis of class and capitalist relations, critical race theory constructs race-
centered responses to Eu rocentrism and white privilege. Delgado Bernal (2002) affirms the valid. icy of this position, arguing that Western
modernism is a network or grid of broad assumptions and be liefs that are deeply embedded in the way dominant Western culture constructs the nature of the world
and ones experiences in it. In the United States, the center of this grid is a Eurocentric epistemological per spective based on White privilege. (111) The narrative
method based on this perspective has become especially successful among groups committed to making the voice of the voiceless heard in the public arena (Viotti
da Costa 2001, 21). However, despite an eagerness to include the participation of historically excluded populations, scholars
who embrace the poetics of the narrative approach often fail to challenge the underlying socioeconomic, political
and cultural structures that have excluded these groups to begin with and have sus tained the illusion of choice (Watts
1991, 652). Thus, the narrative and storytelling approach can render the scholarship antidialectical by creat ing a false dichotomy between objectivity and
subjectivity, forgetting that one is implied in the other, *while ignoring+ a basic dialectical prm ciple: that men and women make history, but not under the conditions
of their own choosing (Viotti da Costa 2001, 20). We agree that cultural resources and funds of knowledge such as myths, folk tales, dichos, consejos,
kitchen talk, *and+ autobiographical stories (Delgado Bernal 2002, 120) employed by critical race theory canilluminate particular concrete manifestations of racism.
However, we contend that they can also prove problematic in positing a broader un derstanding of the fundamental macrosocial
dynamics which shape the conditions that give rise to the micro-aggressions (Solrzano 1998) of racism in the first place.
In an incisive critique of the narrative approach, Emilia Viottj da Costa (2001) argues, The new paths it opened for an investigation of the process of construc tion and
articulation of multiple and often contradictory identities (eth nic, class, gender, nationality and so on), often led to the total neglect of the concept of class as an
interpretive category. . . . What started as . . . a critique of Marxism, has frequently led to a complete subjectivism, to the denial of the possibility of knowledge and
sometimes even to the questioning of the boundaries between history and fiction, fact and fancy. (19) Robin Kelley, in his book Yo Mamas DisFUNKtional (1997),
offers the following illuminating and sobering commentary regarding the limits of personal experience and storytelling: I am not claiming absolute authority or
authenticity for having lived there. On the contrary, it is because I did not know what happened to our world, to my neighbors, my elders, my peers, our streets,
buildings, parks, our health, that I chose not to write a memoir. Indeed, if I relied on memory alone I would invariably have more to say about devouring Good and
Pleneys or melting crayons on the radiator than about eco nomic restructuring, the disappearance of jobs, and the dismantling of the welfare state. (45) Hence, we
believe the use of critical race theory in education and the social sciences in general, despite authors intentions, can
unwittingly serve purposes that are fundamentally conservative or mainstream at best. Three additional but related
concerns with the storytelling narrative method are also at issue here. One is the tendency to romanticize the ex perience of
marginalized groups, privileging the narratives and discourses of people of coloi solely based on their experience of
oppression, as if a peoples entire politics can be determined solely by their in dividual location in history. The second is
the tendency to dichotomize and overhomogenize both white people and people of color with respect to
questions of voice and political representation (Viotti da Costa 2iO1). And the third, anticipated by C. L. R. James in 1943, is the in inevitable
exaggerations excesses and ideological trends for which the only possible name is chauvinism (McLemee 1996, 86).
Unfortunately, these tendencies, whether academic or political, can result in unintended essentialism and superficiality in our
theorizing of broader social in equalities, as well as the solutions derived from such theories. Yet, truth be told, prescribed views
of humanity are seldom the reality, whatever be their source. Human beings who share phenotypical traits seldom respond to the world within the Constraints of
essentialszed ex pectations and perceptions. Hence, any notion of racial solidarity must run up against the hard facts of political economy ... and enormous class
disparities within racialized Communities (Gates 1997, 36). This is why Gilroy (2000) warns against short-cut solidarity attitudes that assume that a persons
political allegiance can be determined by his or her race or that a shared history will guarantee an emancipatory woridview. For this reason, we argue that such
declarations, though they may sound reasonable, commonsensical, or even promising as literary contributions, have
little utility in explaining how and why power is constituted, reproduced and transformed (Viotti da Costa 2001, 22).


Link of Ommission


Failure to discuss capitalism artificially inflates other sources of exploitation- turns the case
Brown 93- PhD in political philosophy from Princeton, prof at UC Berkeley(Wendy, Wounded Attachments, Political Theory, Vol. 21,
No. 3 (Aug., 1993), pp. 390-410, JSTOR//MGD)
What this suggests is that identity politics may be partly configured by a peculiarly shaped and peculiarly disguised form of resentment-
class resent- ment without class consciousness or class analysis. This resentment is displaced onto discourses of injustice other than
class but, like all resent- ments, retains the real or imagined holdings of its reviled subject-in this case, bourgeois male
privileges-as objects of desire. From this perspective, it would appear that the articulation of politicized identities through race,
gender, and sexuality require, rather than incidentally produce, a relatively limited identification through class. They
necessarily rather than incidentally abjure a critique of class power and class norms precisely because the injuries suffered by these
identities are measured by bourgeois norms of social acceptance, legal protection, relative material comfort, and social indepen- dence.
The problem is that when not only economic stratification but other injuries to body and psyche enacted by capitalism
(alienation, commodifica- tion, exploitation, displacement, disintegration of sustaining, albeit contra- dictory, social forms such as families
and neighborhoods) are discursively normalized and thus depoliticized, other markers of social difference may come to bear
an inordinate weight. Absent an articulation of capitalism in the political discourse of identity, the marked identity bears
all the weight of the sufferings produced by capitalism in addition to that bound to the explicitly politicized marking.


Whiteness Focus Link


A focus on whiteness trades off with the material oppression that capitalism has caused to produce
racism.
Koshy 1 [assistant professor in the Asian American Studies Department at the University of California, 1 , Morphing Race into Ethnicity: Asian Americans and
Critical Transformations of Whiteness, Duke University Press, Project Muse //liam]
Whiteness studies has focused primarily on the historical emergence of liminal European groups (the Irish and southern and eastern Europeans) as whites over the
last century and a half and on the mutually constitutive nature of whiteness and blackness in the construction of American national identity. Central to the project of
whiteness studies in both areas has been the effort to reveal the status of whiteness as an unmarked marker and to expose its historical contingency as a racial
category.1 Other minority groups have figured only tangentially in the historiography and sociology of whiteness, thereby
entrenching the black-white binary as the defining paradigm of racial formation in the United States. This essay focuses on
how Asian Americans produced, and were in turn produced by, whiteness frameworks of the U.S. legal system. In doing so, it opens up a new area of investigation in
whiteness studies and critiques the reliance on a black-white model of race relations, which has obscured the
complex reconfigurations of racial politics over the last century. Furthermore, the theoretical simplifications of the black-
white binary have impeded the articulation of strategies adequate to confronting the significant racial and class-based
realignments of the postcivil rights era. These recent shifts have enabled the reconstitution of white privilege as color-blind meritocracy through the
consent of new immigrant groups and model minorities, and have legitimized the retrenchment of civil rights gains in the name of the new global economy. The
rearticulation of whiteness in the era of global capitalism highlights another important paradigmatic constraint within whiteness studies, namely, the reliance on the
analytic framework of the nation-state for understanding the shifting meanings of whiteness. But the erosion of civil rights gains cannot be fully understood apart
from the emergence of a global economy under U.S. geopolitical supremacy in the 1970s, a connection that seems to have been largely overlooked so far. Studies
of whiteness that are limited to a nation-state model are unable to address the ways in which global capital has used,
modified, and infiltrated racial meanings in the contemporary context. No materialist analysis of racial formation can
afford to ignore the implications of the transatlantic and transpacific integration of capital circuits during what Marxist critics
have identified as the fourth epochal stage of capitalism, in the progression from mercantile to industrial to monopoly to global capitalism. Asian Americans (of
whom approximately 65 percent are foreign-born) have been a crucial conduit for and a site of the reconfiguration of racial
identities. By offering a Foucauldian analysis of the productivity of whiteness in shaping the meanings of Asian American identities and in creating stratifications
within the Asian American grouping and across minority groups, I hope to foreground the need for developing conceptions of agency that account for complicity and
resistance within this intermediary racial group.

**ALT**

Material Production of Race
Thus, the alternative: vote negative to refuse the affirmatives speech act. Rather than center
politics around practices of identity, we should evaluate debates based on argument only this can
open space for a transformative politics which leaves race behind to focus on the material
production of racism.


Our alternative creates a new standpoint on analysis of inequalities. Rather than beginning with
the framework of race and racism to orient our political struggle, politics should begin with a
critique of capitalism only understanding the way in which capitalism produces race in the first
place can create a truly effective politics
Darder, and Torress, 04 [Antonia, Prof of education policy studies at U of Illinois, and Rodolfo, Associate prof of
latino studies at UC Irvine, After Race: Racism after multiculturalism, p. 98-101 //liam]

There is no question but that the issues raised by critical race theorists in education, policy studies and the social sciences are
significant to our un derstanding of the conditions that plague racialized student populations in U.S. schools today.
However, one of our major concerns with the use of critical race theory to buttress educational-political debates of racial ized
oppression or racism is directly linked to the use of race as the central unit of analysis. Coupled with an uncompromising
emphasis on race is the conspicuous absence of a systematic discussion of class and, more importantly, a substantive critique of capitalism. Let us be more specific
here. In contending with questions of race and institutional power, references are indeed made to capitalism or 2class in some works by critical race theorists
and, in particular, Latino critical race theorists, who acknowledge that attention to class issues has a pending, but as yet underdeveloped, trajectory in the future
evolution of LatCrit theory and the consolidation of LatCrit social justice agendas (Iglesias 1999, 64). However, these efforts to explore the ways in
which socioeconomic interests are expressed in the law or education are generally vague and undertheorized.
Because of this lack of a theo retically informed account of racism and capitalist social relations, critical race theory
has done little to further our understanding of the politi cal economy of racism and racialization. In addition, much of critical
race theorys approach is informed by ambiguous ideas of institutional racism or structural racism, which, as Miles (1989) points Out, are problematic due to the
danger of conceptual inflation. Our aim here is not to dismiss this important body of work but to point out an important analytical distinction we make in our
intellectual and political project. Our analysis of racism in contemporary society be gins with the capitalist mode of production,
classes, and class struggle. The mode of production, which is the site of class relations, is the point of departure in our
interrogation of racism as an ideology of social ex clusion. In contrast, critical race scholars attribute constitutive power to the American legal
system itself. Hence, the relative autonomy of legal institutions is invoked to stress the power of race and to set their work apart from critical legal scholars, who
could not come to grips with the continuing problems of deeply embedded racism (Guinier and Torres 2002, 34). We maintain that the legal system (the state) is
located in a given economic context and is shaped by the imperatives of capital. Our critique, then, is tied to the continued use of the traditional language of social
theory, which has always been inadequate in problematizing notions of race in both research and popular discourse. In essence, we argue that the use of
race has been elevated to a theoretical construct, despite the fact that the concept of race itself has remained
under theorized Hence to employ alternative constructs derived from legal theory to shape arguments related to educational policy and in stitutional practices,
although well meaning and eloquent, is like beating a dead horse. No matter how much is said, it is impossible to enliven or extend the debate on
educational policy with its inherent inequalities by using the language of race. Even a brief overview of the most prominent
writings in critical race theory shows how little movement there has been in furthering our understanding of the concept or redirecting the debate. Overall, most
of the work is anchored in the popular intersectionality argument of the postructuralist and postmodernist era, which
maintains that race, gender, and class should all receive equal attention in our understanding of soci. ety and our
development of institutional policies and practices. More re. cently, Guinier and Tortes (2002), in an apparent effort to push through the limits of
the intersectionality argument, proposed to advocate for what they term racial literacy from which to identify patterns of in. justice that link race to class, gender,
and other forms of power. (29) Despite their innovative use of race, its traditional analytical use remains intact. Our concerns with critical race theory go beyond
the desire to construct intellectual abstractions. Rather, our concerns are grounded in political questions such as: Where exactly does
an antirace theory of society lead us in real political struggles for social justice, human rights, and eco. nomic
democracy? How do we launch a truly universal emancipatory po. lineal project anchored primarily upon a theory of race? Where is a cri tique of
capitalism or an explicit anticapitalist vision in a critical theory of race? Can we afford to overlook the inherent
existence of a politics of identity in the foundational views that led to the construction of critical race theory? We are also
troubled by the confusion with respect to the, terms critical race theorists use to frame their analysis. In this context, it is important to distinguish
between how we under stand the construct of race and its genesis. In our analysis, race, simply put, is the child of racism. That into
say, racism does not exist because there is such a thing as race. Rather notions of race are a fundamental ideological
construction of racism or a racialized interpretation of phenotypically and, may we add, regionally different human beings. The
process of racialization, then, is at work in all relations in a capitalist so ciety. Alternatively, we might say that the empire is not built on
race but on an ideology of racismthis being one of the primary categories by which human beings are sorted, controlled, and made disposable at the point of
production.


**AT AFF ANSWERS**
AT Race=Emancipatory
There is no neutral pre-discursive race which pre-exists their invocation; rather, the affs invocation
of the conceptual imagery of race calls it into being the affs speech act is the central cause in the
dialectic between academic knowledge and the segmentation of society into distinct categories.
This thwarts all hope of an emancipatory politics.
Darder, and Torress, 04 [Antonia, Prof of education policy studies at U of Illinois, and Rodolfo, Associate prof of
latino studies at UC Irvine, After Race: Racism after multiculturalism, p. 12 //liam]

While we argue against attributing explanatory or descriptive value to race, we do not mean to suggest that races have no social reality
they do. This fiction of race is produced in the real world, thus serving to legitimate it and give it conceptual meaning and social life. At its core, the effort to
transmute the concept of race into an objective reality is limited and, as Appiah (cited in Postal 2002) concludes, a morally
dangerous proposition. Hence, there is no need for a distinct (critical) theory of race; instead, what is required is an earnest endeavor to
theorize the specious concept with its illusory Status out of existence and renew our commitment to the interrogation
of racism as an ideology of social exclusion (Miles and Brown 2003). In other words, if race is real, it is so only because it has
been rendered meaningful by the actions and beliefs of the powerful, who retain the myth in order to protect their
own political-economic interests. Race as a social construct of resistance comes into play only later as racialized populations and their advocates
embrace the concept in reverse to struggle against material conditions of domination and exploitation. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the
essentialism inherent in the original epistemological intent of race is preserved. At its core, the effort to transmute the concept of
race into an emancipatory category is a limited and unwise undertaking. Thus, it is high time we disrupt the continued use of a dubious
concept that cannot help but render our theorizing ambiguous and problematic. In its simplest terms, this ambiguity is most visible in
the inconsistent, with which the term race is appliedsometimes meaning ethnicity, at other times referring to culture or ancestry. More often than not, terms
used for race are seldom defined and race is frequently employed in a routine and uncritical manner to represent ill-
defined social and cultural factors (Williams 1994). This explains why in all the w ritings on race there is so little substantive theorizing about the
construct itself. The category of race is thus suspect with respect to its analytical utility. If race is socially constructed
and its origins clearly steeped in an ideology of exclusion, domination, exploitation, even genocide, why should we
continue to make sense of peoples lives based on the legacy of a pseudoscientific distortion from a previous era? Is
not racismas an ideology that exists within a structure of class differentiation and exploitation. rather than race, the concept that merits
our attention, particularly in these perilous times of global upheaval?

AT Our Ethic O/W

The effects of the affs politics are far from benign despite the affirmatives best intentions, they
can only further entrench racism by deploying the conceptual imagery of distinct races towards
the ends of emancipation, the aff re-inforces the idea that race is real, salient, and explanatory.
Unfortunately, it is this very conception that underpins racism itself.
Darder, and Torress, 04 [Antonia, Prof of education policy studies at U of Illinois, and Rodolfo, Associate prof of
latino studies at UC Irvine, After Race: Racism after multiculturalism, p. 32-4 //liam]

Having recognized the relative distinctiveness of the political and academic space in northwest Europe and then having occupied that space, one can view those social
relations defined in Britain and the United States as race relations from another point of view, for there is no public or academic reference to the existence of race
relations in contem porary France or Germany. It then becomes possible to pose questions that seem not to be posed from within these intimately interlinked social
and historical contexts. What kinds of social relations are signified as race relations? Why is the idea of race employed in
everyday life to refer only to Certain groups of people and only to certain social Situations? And why do social
scientists unquestioningly import everyday meanings into their reasoning and theoretical frameworks in defining
race and race relations as a particular field of study? What does it mean for an academic to claim, for example,
that race is a factor in de termining the structure of social inequality, or that race and gender are interlinked forms of oppression?
What is intended and what might be the consequences of asserting as an academic that race matters? These are the kinds of questions that Miles has been posing
since the 1980s (e.g., Miles 1982, 1984, 1989), influenced in part by the French theorist Guillaumin (1972, 1995). The answers to these questions lead to
the conclusion that one should follow the example of biological and genetic scientists and refuse to attribute
analytical status to the idea of race within the social sciences and thereby refuse to use it as a descrip tive and
explanatory concept. The reasoning can be summarized as follows (cf. Miles 1982, 2243; 1993, 4749). First, the idea of race is used to
effect reification within sociological analysis insofar as the outcome of an often complex social process is explained as
the consequence of something named race rather than of the social process itself. Consider the publication of The Bell Curve by
Richard J. Herrnsteifl and Charles Murray (1994) and the authors com mon assertion that race determines academic performance and life chances. The assertion
can be supported with statistical evidence that demonstrates that, in comparison with black people, white people are more likely to achieve top grades in school
and to enter leading universities in the United States. The determining processes are extremely complex, including among other things parental class position and
active and passive racialized stereotyping and exclusion in the classroom and beyond. The effects of these processes are all mediated via a prior racial ized
categorization into a black-white dichotomy that is employed in everyday social relations. Hence, it is not race that determines academic performance: rather
academic performance is determined by the interplay of social processes, one of which is premised on the articulation of racism to effect and legitimate exclusion.
Indeed, given the nineteenthcentury meanings of race, this form of reification invites the possibility of explaining academic performance as the outcome of some
quality within the body of those racialized as black.) 3 Second, when academics who choose to Write about race relations seek to
speak to a wider audience (an activity which we believe to be fully justified) or when their writings are utilized by nonacademics,
their use unwittingly legitimates and reinforces everyday beliefs that the human species is constituted by a number of
different races, each of which is characterized by a particular combination of real or imagined physical features or
marks and cultural practices. When West seeks to persuade the American public that Race Matters, there is no doubt that he himself does not believe
in the existence of biologically defined races. But he cannot control the meanings attributed to his claim on the part of those who identify differences in skin color
for example, as marks designating the existence of blacks and whites as discrete races. Unintentionally, his writing may thus come to serve as a legitimation not
only of a belief in the existence of race as a biological phenomenon but also of racism itself. He could avoid this outcome by breaking with the race relations
paradigm. Third, as a result of reification and the interplay between academic and commonsense discourses, the use of
race as an analytical concept can incorporate into the discourse of antiracism a notion that has been central to the
evolution of racism. Antiracist activities promote the idea that races really exist as biological categories of people. Thus, while challenging the legitimation
of unequal treatment and the stereotyping implicit and explicit in racism, the reproduction within antiracist campaigns of the idea that
there are real biological differences creating groups of human beings sustains in the public consciousness the
ideological pre condition for stereotyping and unequal treatment. In other words, use of the idea of race provides one of the conditions
for the reproduction of racism within the discourse and practice of antiracism. For these reasons, the idea of race should not be employed as an analytical category
within the social sciences. It follows that the object of study should not be described as race relations. To reiterate, while we reject the race
relations problematic for the analysis of racism, we do not reject the concept of racism. Rather, we critique the race
relations problematic in order to recognize the existence of a plurality of histori cally specific racisms, not all of which
explicitly employ the idea of race. In contrast, the race relations paradigm refers exclusively to either black-white social
relations or to social relations between people of color and white people. This allows for only one racism, the
racism of whites, which has as its object and victim people of color (e.g., Essed 1991).


AT Mills

Mills theory misses the boat- millions of white people live below the poverty line
Cole 9 (Mike Cole, Bishop Grosseteste University College Lincoln, UK, Critical Race Theory comes to the UK : A Marxist response, Ethnicities 2009 9: 246)
Mills (1997: 37) acknowledges that not all whites are better off than all nonwhites, but . . . as a statistical generalization, the objective life chances of
whites are significantly better. While this is, of course, true, we should not lose sight of the life chances of millions of working-class white people. To
take poverty as one example, in the US, while it is the case that the number of black people living below the poverty line is some three times that of
whites, this still leaves over 16 million white but not Hispanic people living in poverty in the US (US Census Bureau, 2007). This is indicative of a
society predicated on racialized capitalism, rather than indicative of a white supremacist society. While the US is witnessing the effects of the DEBATE
Downloaded from NRD with massively disproportionate effects on black people and other people of colour, white people are also affected. The outsourcing by US
corporations of millions of better-paying jobs outside the country, the class warfare against unions, which has led to a steep decline in the
percentage of US workers, affects white workers too. The loss to US urban neighbourhoods of virtually their entire economic manufacturing and industrial
employment creates unemployment for white workers as well, and neo - liberal social policies cut the job training programmes, welfare and public housing of whites
as well as blacks and other people of colour. In the UK, there are similar indicators of a society underpinned by rampant racism, with black people
currently twice as poor as whites, and those of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin over three times as poor as whites (Platt, 2007). Once again,
however, this still leaves some 12 million poor white people in the UK, who are, like their American counterparts, on the receiving end of global
neoliberal capitalism.

Focus on whiteness theory obscures non color coded racism
Cole, 9 (Mike Cole, Bishop Grosseteste University College Lincoln, UK, Critical Race Theory comes to the UK : A Marxist response, Ethnicities 2009 9: 246)
Mills acknowledges that there were/are what he refers to as borderline Europeans the Irish, Slavs, Mediterraneans, and above all, of course,
Jews (Mills, 1997: 789), and that there also existed intra-European varieties of racism (Mills, 1997: 79; see also Perea et al., 2007). However, he
argues that, while there remains some recognition of such distinctions in popular culture he gives examples of an Italian waitress in the TV series Cheers, calling
a WASP character Whitey and a discussion in a 1992 movie about whether Italians are really white (Mills, 1997: 79) he relegates such distinctions primarily to
history.6 While Mills is prepared to fuzzify racial categories with respect to shifting criteria prescribed by the evolving Racial Contract, and to
acknowledge the existence of off-white people at certain historical periods, he maintains that his categorization white/nonwhite,
person/subperson seems to me to map the essential features of the racial polity accurately, to carve the social reality at its ontological joints
(Mills, 1997: 7881). It is my view that this does not address current reality. The characteristics signified vary historically and, although they have usually been
visible somatic features, other non-visible (alleged and real) biological features have also been signified. I would like to make a couple of amendments to Miles
position.7 First, I would want to add and cultural after, biological. Second, the common dictionary definition of somatic is pertaining to the body,
and, given the fact that people can be racialized on grounds of symbols (e.g. the hijab), I would also want this to be recognized in any discussion of
social collectivities and the construction of racialization (Cole, 2008b). In contemporary Britain, there continues to be non-colour-coded racism
directed at the Irish (e.g. Mac an Ghaill, 2000) and at Roma Gypsy Traveller communities (e.g. Puxon, 2005). There is also Islamophobia and xeno-
racism.


***Derogratory Language K***

Derogatory language is never emancipatory- it retrenches police oppression and aggression- turns case
Martinot and Sexton 03- *prof at San Francisco State University**PhD in ethnic studies from UC Berkeley, Director,
African American Studies at UC Irvine (Steve and Jared, The Avant-garde of white supremacy,
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~marto/avantguard.htm//MGD)
Spectacle is a form of camouflage. It does not conceal anything; it simply renders it unrecognizable. One looks at it and does not
see it. It appears in disguise. Harris, for example, looks at acquiescence and cannot see it. Camouflage is a relationship between the one
dissimulating their appearance and the one who is fooled, who looks and cannot see. Like racialization as a system of meanings assigned to the body,
police spectacle is itself the form of appearance of this banality. Their endless assault reflects the idea that race is a social envelope, a system of social categorization
dropped over the heads of people like clothes. Police impunity serves to distinguish between the racial uniform itself and the elsewhere that mandates it. They
constitute the distinction between those whose human being is put permanently in question and those for whom it goes without saying. Police spectacle is
not the effect of the racial uniform; rather, it is the police uniform that is producing re-racialization. Nothing better
exemplifies this distinction than the structure of derogatory language. Derogatory terms do not mean; they assault. Their
intention is not to communicate but to harm. Thus they are not discursive signs or linguistic statements but modes of
aggression. They express a structure of power and domination, a hierarchy that contextualizes them and gives them their force.
As gestures of assault they reflect their users status as a member of the dominant group. The derogatory term does more than
speak; it silences. That ability to silence derives from the fact that, in turning its hegemonic position to account, it turns the
racialized other into a language for whiteness itself. Those situated lower on the hierarchy have no viable means of
defending themselves. This, in effect, renders the derogation unanswerable in its own terms. The derogatory term obtrudes
with a small daily violence whose form is gratuitous, without motivation in the situation in which it is used, and whose content is to render that
situation dominated by white supremacy. If it sits at the heart of the language of racism it is because it is banal and
everyday even while symbolizing racisms utmost violence, the verbal form of its genocidal trajectory. Those who use derogatory
terms repeatedly are putting themselves in a continual state of aggression; turning their objective complicity with a structured
relation of white supremacist dominance into an active investment or affirmation. Such modes of assault demonstrate a
specific obsession with those denigrated that characterizes the socius of white supremacy, its demands for allegiance, its conditions of
membership, its residence in viciousness. Because it is gratuitous and unanswerable, the derogatory term grants itself impunity,
reiterates of the excess at the core of each racist event without calling its ethics into question. The prevalence of derogatory terms in US
conversation goes unnoticed, seen simply on the margin of common sense, as opposed to an index of white supremacy. It is a small
matter, when set against such things as, for instance, the legal codes of Jim Crow or the governments assassination of Fred Hampton. Yet
derogation comes in many different formsas stories, aphorisms, discourses, legal statutes, political practices, etc. The repetition of
derogation becomes the performance of white supremacist identity, over and over again. The derogatory term occupies
the very center of the structure of white supremacy.