Contents

AT: Wilderson---2AC---Must-Read.........................................................................................3
AT: Wilderson---2AC---Permutation Solvency........................................................................5
AT: Wilderson---Policy Key.....................................................................................................9
AT: Wilderson---Totalizing/Inaccurate.................................................................................10
AT: Wilderson---Essentialist..................................................................................................12
AT: Wilderson---Non-Falsifiable............................................................................................13
AT: Wilderson---Ahistorical...................................................................................................15
AT: Wilderson---Agency Turn................................................................................................16
AT: Wilderson---Agency Turn---Ext......................................................................................18
AT: Wilderson---Ontology Turn............................................................................................20
AT: Wilderson---Pessimism Turn..........................................................................................21
Anti-Blackness Wrong............................................................................................................22
Consequences Key..................................................................................................................24
AT: Social Death*...................................................................................................................25
Extinction OW........................................................................................................................ 31
*State Not Always Racist---Wall............................................................................................32
State Not Always Racist---Ext................................................................................................35
State Not Always Racist---Hopelessness Turn......................................................................40
*Not a Root Cause---Wall.......................................................................................................41
Not a Root Cause---Ext..........................................................................................................43
AT: Afro-Pessimism- Yes Progress Clarke..........................................................................44
AT: Afro-Pessimism...............................................................................................................46
AT: Afro-Pessimism...............................................................................................................47
AT: End America....................................................................................................................49
AT: Revolution Backlash/Rollback.....................................................................................50
AT: Revolution Backlash/Rollback.....................................................................................51
AT: Revolution Cant Solve Domination.............................................................................52
Vague Alt Fails Reed...........................................................................................................53
AT: Author Bias/Epistemology..............................................................................................55
AT: Ontological Blackness......................................................................................................56
AT: Reparations......................................................................................................................59
AT: Negativity Alt hooks......................................................................................................61
AT: Sexton..............................................................................................................................63
K Aff........................................................................................................................................... 64

Coalitions hooks..................................................................................................................65

AT: Wilderson---2AC---Must-Read
Wilderson is wrong ontological death reifies oppression and falsely
applies the historical logic of slavery to the present day reform is
possible and good
Ehlers 12 (2012, Nadine, Professor, School of Social Sciences, Media, and Communication

Faculty of Law, Humanities, and Arts University of Wollongong, Racial Imperatives: Discipline,
Performativity, and Struggles against Subjection, p. 9-12, footnote from p. 145)
While I deploy these terms for analytic convenience the

study pivots on the desire to make clear the false

homogeneity of subjects that arc denoted by these terms and the arbitrariness of race per se. In the
same moment that I employ these terms as critical tools ofanalysis. then, I hope to expose the mechanisms of their production and mark
possibilities for their rearticulation. The final portion of this study is concerned with examining what forms of agency and resistance are possible
within the context of this binary construction of black and white identities. Guiding this analysis is the question of how individuals struggle
against subjection and how racial norms might be recited in new directions, given that the coercive demands of discipline and performative
constraints make it seem like race is an insurmountable climb or closed system. That race operates as a limit appears particularly so for black
subjects. For despite the fact that all subjects arc produced and positioned within and by the discursive formations ofrace, the impact ofthat
positioning and what it means for experience s markedly different. Black subjects are situated within an anti- black context where the black
body/sclfcontinues to be torn asunder within the relations ofcivil society. This means that, as Yancy (2008, 134 n. n) insists, the capacity to
imagine otherwise is seriously truncated by ideological and material forces that arc systematically linked to the history ofwhite racism.

A number of scholars have examined these realities and advanced critical accounts of what they identify as the resulting
condition of black existence. David Marriot, for instance, argues that the occult presence of racial slavery continues to haunt
our political and social imagination: nowhere, but never- theless everywhere, a dead time which never arrives and does not stop
arriving (2007, xxi). Saidiya I lartman, in her provocative Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007)
refers to this haunting as slaverys afterlife. She insists that we do not live with the residue or legacy of slavery but, rather, that
slavery lives on. It survives (Sexton 2010, 15), through what Loc Wacquant (2002, 41) has identified as slaverys functional
surrogates: Jim Crow, the ghetto, and the prison. For l-Iartman, as echoed by other scholars, slavery has yet to he undone:
Black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife
of slaveryskewed life chances, limited access to health and education, prc mature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, oo, am the
afterlife of slavery. (2007, 6)
Frank B. Wilderson III, in his Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structures of U.S. Antagonisms (2009), powerfully

frames slaverys afterlife as resulting in a form of social death for black subjects
and, more than this, he argues that black subjectivity is constituted as ontological death . For
Wildcrson, the Black (isj a subject who is always already positioned as Slave (2009, 7) in the United States, while everyone else exists as
Masters (2009, io).
Studies of slaverys afterlife and the concept of social death have inarguably made essential contributions to understandings of race.9 The
strengths of such analyses lie in the salient ways they have theorized broad social systems of racism and how they have demanded the
foregrounding of suffering, pain, violence, and death. Much of this scholarship can he put or is productively in conversa tion with Foucaults
account of hiopolitics that, as I noted earlier, regulates at the level of the population. Where sovereignty took life and let live, in the contem
porary sphere biopolitics works to make live. however, certain bodies are not in the zone of protected life, are indeed expendable and subjected
to strategic deployments of sovereign power that make die: It s here that Foucault posi tions the function of racism. It is, he argues, primarily a
way of introducing a break into the domain of life that s under powers control: the break between what must live and what must die (2003b,
254). Thus, certain bodies/subjects are killedor subjected to sovereign power and social deathso that others might prosper.
In Scenes ofSubjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997), Hartman examines the must die imperative of
social death understood broadly as a lack of social beingbut she also illuminates how, within such a context, slave performance and other
modes of practice . . . exploit[edl, and exceed[edj the constraints of domination (1997, 54, my em phasis). Hartman analyzes

quotidian enactments of slave agency to highlight practices of

(counter)invcstment (1997, 73) that produced a reconstructed self that negates the
dominant terms of identity and existence (1997, 72). She thus argues that a form of
agency is possible and that, while the conditions of domination and subjugation
determine what kinds of actions are possible or effective (1997, 54), agency is not
reducible to these conditions (1997, ) 12 The questions that I ask in this analysis travel in this direction, and aim to build
on this aspect of lartmans work. In doing so I make two key claims: first, that despite undeniable historical continuities and structural
dynamics, race is also marked by discontinuity; and second, race is constantly reworked and trans formed within relations of power by subjects.3
For Vincent Brown, a historian of slavery, violence,

dislocation, and death actually generate

politics , and consequential action by the enslaved (2009, 1239). He warns that focusing on

an overarching condition or state potentially obscures seeing these politics. More than this,
however, it

risks positioning relations of power as totalizing and transhistorical , and

it risks essentializing experience or the lived realities of individuals.14

BEGIN FOOTNOTE 14. 1 Historian Vincent Brown, in his Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery (2009),
has examined a number of scholars who seemingly take up such a view point, in that they broadly position blackness as a totalizing state that,
historically and in the present, renders slavery synonymous with social death and blackness as always already synonymous with slavery. Brown
focuses specifically on the academic uptake and what he sees as the problematic distillation and extension of Orlando Pattersons (1982) concept
of slavery as social death, where social death indicates a lack of social being. As a scholar of slavery, Brown is most concerned with examining
the limitations of this idea in relation to the enslaved, but he is also interested in how the idea is used in relation to the present. For Brown,
Pattersons slavery as social death: and contempo rary usages of this concept to account for the present, advance a

troubling transhistorical characterization of slavery . I e argues in line with I lerman Bennett (quoted in
Brown 2009, 1233), who has observed:
As the narrative of the slave experience, social

death assumes a uniform African, slave, and

ultimately black subject rooted in a static New World history whose logic
originated in being property and remains confined to slavery . It absorbs and
renders exceptional evidence that underscores the contingent nature of
experience and consciousness. Thus, normative assumptions about the experiences
of peoples of African descent assert a timeless, ahistorical, epiphenomenal black
cultural experience. END FOOTNOTE
I scale down to the level of the subject to analyze both (a) how subjects are formed, and (b) how subjects black and white
alikehave struggled against conditions in ways that refuse totalizing, immutable
understandings of race. This book does not seek to mark a condition or situation then, but instead takes up
Browns challenge (made within the context of studies of slavery) to pay attention to efforts to remake
condition . Looking to those efforts to remake condition and identity grapples with the
microphysics of power and the practices of daily life, enacted by indi viduals and in collective
politics, to consider what people do with situations: those dynamic , innovative
contestations of (a never totalizing) power . Echoing the call raised by Brown (2009, 1239), my work focuses
then on examining. . . social and political lives rather than assuming . . . lack of social being in order to think about how subjects can and have
made a social world out of death itself (Brown 2009, 1233) or how, more generally, race can he reconfigured within the broader workings of
what I am calling racial discipline and perfor mative imperatives.
But in addressing the quotidian and those efforts to remake condition and identity, this study insists on a shift in perspective in (crins of how
power is thought about. As I have remarked, I am not focused on biopolitics or what can he seen as solely sovereign forms of power that arc
deployed to condition who will live and who will die. Instead, am concerned with disciplinary power, which is articulated simultaneously but at
a different level to biopolitics (and despite the exercise of sovereign forms of power) (Foucault 2003a, 250). For Foucault, this form of

power is not absolute , nor does it exist in opposition to resistance . Rather, power is
seen as always fragmentary and incoherent, and power and resistance are seen as
mutually constitutive . Disciplinary power is productive, in that it generates particular capacities and forms of subjectivity (and,
necessarily, agency). And finally, though subjects are formed in power, they are not reducible to it, not determined by power.

AT: Wilderson---2AC---Permutation Solvency

Institutions are inevitable and engaging them is key studying,
understanding, and reforming institutions is the only way to prevent
unchecked abuses of power and atrocities
Marti and Fernandez 13 (2013, Ignasi, Associate Professor Strategy and Organization,

EMLYON Business School, OCE Research Centre, France, and Pablo, Professor, IESE Business
School, University of Navarra, The Institutional Work of Oppression and Resistance: Learning
from the Holocaust, Organization Studies August 2013 vol. 34 no. 8 1195-1223)
Oppressive institutional work In

our examination of the Holocaust, we focused initially on the

work) by the Nazis and
others to gradually regulate the lives of their targeted populations and separate
them, first symbolically, then physically through spatial segregation and ultimately concentration camps and death. The
purposeful everyday practices that involved a concerted effort (i.e. institutional

different types of oppressive work we referred to ranging from categorization, seclusion and creation of social distance to the
unleashing of absolute violence share one fundamental aspect: They all contribute to transforming the universal structures of
human relatedness to the world: space and time, social relations, and ultimately the relation to the self. They do it, however, in
different degrees. Considering such processes and transformations will expand our understanding of agency and institutions. One

might observe different forms of oppression as characterized by the degree to which they
allow actors different spaces of autonomy and leave room and potential for agency. Some types of
oppressive work restrict people only by culture and norms; whereas others produce conditions that are significantly more stringent,
such as those imposed on the Jews shortly after the Nuremberg laws were passed to severely limit their access to the job market or
the running of business; use of public transportation; attendance in school; or participation in religious ceremonies. The creation of
taxonomy of categories into which every individual can be pigeonholed appears to be a crucial type of institutional work. Such
actions were undertaken by the Nazis in classifying their target population(s) as Homo sacer or subhuman (Agamben, 1998).
Moreover, such escalation of oppression is eased by the creation of social distance between the oppressors (as well as those who
benefit from oppression) and the oppressed by means of authorization, routinization or different types of rhetorical devices
notably what we called camouflage language. Once the categories are created, the oppression continues with spatial separation,
dispossession of property and sometimes even ones names, and increasingly violent responses to any noncompliance. Here we are
fully entering the terrain of what Goffman called total institutions (Goffman, 1961). In them, one can see different degrees of selfviolation and, concomitantly, of spaces of autonomy. The oppressive work applied in ghettos was different from that used in death
camps, each featuring distinct types of institutional work. The most extreme setting the death camp allowed for almost no
resistance as the oppressors exercised near-total control, destroying any vestiges of independent social life (and, in many cases, life
itself). How relevant are those forms of oppression to present-day organizational phenomena, and how do they contribute to our
understanding of institutional work? We argue that different forms of oppressive work can be observed today, although certainly
none with the horrifying purposes of and the results attained by the Nazis. These occurrences range from well-known oppressive
institutional orders to the most regular organizations under the modern, capitalist institutional order. These and others not
discussed here offer what we believe is an important opportunity for students of institutional work. Even though less harrowing than
the Holocaust, total institutions of today may still be sadly characterized by humans

being belittled and dehumanized; sometimes spatially circumscribed; heavily guarded; often stripped of markers
of individual identity; clearly categorized as the other; and often terrorized and treated with violence.
Such instances include genocides (Pina e Cunha et al., 2010; Stokes & Gabriel, 2010); the treatment of prisoners
of war in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib (Greenberg & Dratel, 2005); institutions such as asylums and mental hospitals (Grob, 1983)
or work camps; and cases of forced labour, human trafficking or forced marriage (Bales, 1999). For example, human
trafficking has grown over the years as an industry to become according to the United Nations the fastest-growing form of
organized crime (United Nations, 2001) one which is considered a high-profit, low-risk trade for the organizers. Children and
women are trafficked for forced prostitution, domestic servitude, unsafe agricultural or sweatshop labour, or sold as brides. Cases
such as that of Nigerias Niger Delta (Akpan, 2010) are well reported. More broadly speaking, forced labour can be found in many
countries today, and the International Labour Organization estimates at least 12.3 million people in forced labour worldwide (other
estimates show that figure to be as high as thirty million; see Bales, 2004; Crane, 2013). A rather well-known example concerns
workers in the charcoal camps of Brazil (Bales, 1999).12 One can observe in these cases the creation of geographical and social
distance, which ease the treatment of enslaved human beings and contributes to their alienation. Sadly, examples like these

abound. While differing in forms and degrees of oppressive work, they nonetheless share a common theme:
the effort and intent to shatter the human capacity to resist . We believe the study of various types
of oppressive work brings an important perspective to discussions about the paradox of embedded agency (Holm, 1995; Seo & Creed,
2002) by focusing not on how institutional change is possible, but on how through which types of institutional work it can be
made impossible. Milder forms of oppressive work can be found today in humiliating practices that pervade developed and less
developed countries alike. Some examples are those regulations imposed on immigrants, both documented and undocumented, who
seek work permits, access to social welfare services or asylum. Through increasingly stringent regulations, tedious processes that are

often experienced as arbitrary, and fearful controls, people are invited to accept and embody imposed, sometimes meaningless,
categories. Such categories notably affect peoples perception of their rights and civic participation, impact their job-seeking patterns
and efforts, and make them suspects in the eyes of others.13 An insightful study of Central American immigrants in the United
States finds that this can lead [the immigrants] to accept their self-depreciation as normal (Menjvar & Abrego, 2012, p. 1413),
echoing similar findings from Europe (Escandell & Ceobanu, 2009; McLaren, 2003). Other examples of humiliating practices which
are gaining prevalence in todays society include airport security checks and other work legitimated by 9/11 and the war on terror
(Molotch, 2012), and the use of different surveillance tools and measures intended to prevent theft by employees.14 Routinization
and authorization play an extremely important role in these practices, which all contribute in varying degrees to damaging peoples
pride and dignity by imposing a sense of inferiority and subordination (Lindner, 2010). A final and rather puzzling element in most
of these practices is that they are often legally sanctioned. Thus, a promising research agenda is to examine

oppression through formal structures of power that are publicly respected rather
than focus exclusively on the wilful exercise of violence with the intention to inflict
suffering. Which carriers of power and what types of institutional work negatively impact the quotidian practices of human
beings and reduce their capacity to act? Finally, a vast body of research by anthropologists, sociologists of work, and critical
management scholars has shown how milder, often hidden forms of oppressive work find their way into many contemporary
versions of capitalist workplace organization. These types of oppression feel natural, yet they are no less important. In such settings,
work discipline is not necessarily enforced by abuse, violence or arbitrary constraints and categorization, but is expressed in other
ways. One example would be rigid and exacting guidelines for physical appearance, such as Walt Disney Worlds instruction that
fingernails should not extend more than one-fourth inch beyond fingertips (Leidner, 1993, p. 9). Leidner, drawing on the work of
Hochschild (1983) also reports how in some cases organizations seek to extend control through emotional labour too, hoping to
direct how [the employees] view themselves and how they feel (Leidner, 1993, p. 64). Alternately, workers are asked to be open to
change on short notice, take risks continually, and become ever less dependent on regulations and formal procedures (Delbridge,
1998; Harris-White, 2003). Reflecting on this trend, Sennett (1998) argues that pursuit of flexibility has produced new structures of
power and control, rather than created the conditions which set us free. Although mild compared to the extreme of genocide
described in this paper, and sometimes even hidden, such forms of oppressive work still affect the capacity of human beings to act,
think and feel. It seems reasonable to consider them as well in expanding our understanding of agency and institutions. Resisting:
Anti-oppressive institutional work The prevailing perspective on resistance continues to claim that individuals willingly subject
themselves to systems of domination (Willmott, 1993). This structural vision is strengthened by the idea that groups and individuals
usually fail in their attempts to resist oppression (Allen, 2008; Burawoy, 1979; Gaventa, 1992). However, as we have seen, resistance
did occur even in the midst of the most horrifying efforts to fully shatter it. An important insight derived from the analysis of
oppressive work and resistance in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe is the fact that the parameters of resistance are set, in an
important manner, by the institutions of oppression. To the extent that oppressive forms of work are effective, they may fully
preclude any forms of resistance. The Nazi project of human destruction reached its peak with the creation of the Muselmnner,
whose capacity to (re)act and to resist had been completely obliterated. As several authors have argued, they became the living dead
and ceased to be fully human. Hence, they were no longer capable of doing any type of work (Levi, 2009; Sofsky, 1997). Acts of
resistance that do occur under circumstances of most severe oppression are often either individual and mundane (e.g. walking erect
and washing ones face) or collectively but utterly desperate (e.g. revolts by the Sonderkommandos in Auschwitz, Treblinka and
Sobibor), which may be partially understood in terms of how the level of oppression structures the available options. Thus,
depending on the circumstances people confront, their resistance may oscillate from organized but hidden collective acts (e.g. illegal
press, theatre performances and the school system in the Warsaw ghetto) to violent overt confrontations (e.g. revolt in the last days
of the Warsaw ghetto) to silent, anonymous acts (e.g. of sabotage and foot dragging) to essentially individual, small-scale efforts
such as writing. We attribute this to the existence of some sort of correlation between the two forms of work explored in this article:
oppressive and anti-oppressive. Future studies might focus on such oscillation and look at how different types of institutional
oppressive work are confronted by different forms of resistance. Future research might also probe the intent of those efforts and how
that may impact the specific types of anti-oppressive work done. Is the resistance aiming to fully disrupt the oppressive machinery or
to nibble away part of its effects? Is the resisters goal survival, or simply reminding oneself and others that he or she remains a
human being? Addressing questions like this might bring a new perspective to discussions and today criticisms about the heroic
character of most accounts of institutional entrepreneurship. Are (arguably non-heroic and mundane) acts such as writing, walking
erect or washing ones face acts of resistance and instances of anti-oppressive work? We have argued that they are, provided they are
effortful acts performed with the intention of resisting the takeover of ones autonomy and very humanity. Furthermore, the
spectrum of acts of resistance provides students of institutional theory and agency a strong reminder of the need to seriously
consider how the nature of the institutional order(s) shape the options (Hwang & Colyvas, 2011) and ultimately the lives of people
inhabiting them (Creed, DeJordy & Lok, 2010; Hallet & Ventresca, 2006). As stated above, our argument is that different forms of
anti-oppressive work seen in the Holocaust are present and observable in the most ordinary organizations under the modern,
capitalist institutional order (see Bauman, 1989; Clegg et al., 2006). If the objective of the work of oppression is to drive some goals,
claims and aspirations to the realm of the impossible and limit peoples capacity to think, feel and act independently, our
understanding of the reasons and methods behind everyday forms of institutional work can be advanced by studying acts of
resistance (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). Such work can include both active and passive elements, which has been demonstrated by
scholars from diverse traditions studying the contemporary workplace organization (Crowley, 2012; Fleming & Spicer, 2007; Vallas,
2012). Overt forms of collective resistance, which require organized coordination and planning, have received much attention by
institutionalists over the last decade particularly those employing the colourful imagery of social movements (Schneiberg &
Lounsbury, 2008; Tilly & Tilly, 1998). Other examples of active strategies include various forms of machine sabotage, foot dragging,
theft, and criticizing supervisors in their absence (Hodson, 2001; Scott, 1990). Finally, people do play dumb, feign ignorance,
withhold enthusiasm, dissimulate and avoid work. These are well-known examples of passive strategies of resistance. While many of
these instances stop well short of outright defiance, what is left to scholars interested in institutional work is to examine how the
intent to do anti-oppressive work is inscribed in the acts, and what difference such acts does make to the acting individuals. On the
mediations of power Institutional theory suggests that institutions, through different mechanisms and carriers, shape

patterns of thought, action and organization (Battilana & DAunno, 2009; Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Zilber,

2002). We argue that the

study of oppression and resistance offers new, rather neglected,

possible angles to study how actors go about creating, maintaining and
transforming institutions. We elaborate on two of them. The first one is the study of physical violence. Recent
empirical studies of institutional reproduction and change have concentrated on the tactical, strategic, manipulative and persuasive
aspects of power to the virtual exclusion of its coercive, bodily and forceful dimensions (Clegg et al., 2006; Lawrence, 2008).
However, the study of oppression reminds us that the use of different rhetorical weapons and social skills (Fligstein, 2001) is not
necessarily the end of the story. In order to obtain compliance, human beings are granted education, indoctrinated, given access to
media and sometimes even taught sociology (Moore, 1978), but in some cases compliance is attained through fear and even terror,
by means of physical coercion and abuse, restricted mobility, rape or forcing people to kill their kin. Less horrendous examples of
situations where compliance was attained by force can be seen in todays United States or Europe. For instance, Central American
immigrants interviewed by Menjvar and Abrego (2012) explained how their fear of moving around in the cities in search of
employment or social services had fundamentally changed their lives. Likewise, some workers labour long hours under hazardous
conditions for low pay, subjected to employer abuse with little or no means of self-protection (perhaps out of fear of losing their
jobs). In these situations, physical safety and economic survival may depend on silence, which can appear as conformity and
compliance (Sennett, 1998; Vallas, 2012). The focus on oppressive work illustrates how violence can be facilitated by the use of
camouflage language, routinization, categorization, and the use of fully legitimate and formal structures of power namely, the law.
All of these mechanisms create social distance between the oppressors and the victims. Yet, in the end, as Barley points out: words
break no bones (Barley, 2008, p. 507). Where the exercise of power is concerned, we should look

not only at who has it and why, but also at how such power is exercised . More specifically,
we should ask how different forms of physical violence (or the threat of such) are mobilized to perform institutional work. While
terms such as oppression and violence are frequently regarded as obsolete, they are not. Such phenomena, even if considered to be
rare and analytically extreme, are common in the world. Since they are likely to play an important role in a large number of
processes of institutional creation, maintenance and disruption, they are relevant and timely for our research community. The
second new angle that we hope to bring to the study of institutional work is the focus on the grey zone (Levi, 1989/2009). One of
the more puzzling elements about the Holocaust is the fact that some of the Jews e.g. Jewish authorities, Sonderkommandos
contributed both actively and passively to the extermination of their own people. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of Germans,
Poles, French and Lithuanians contributed to the system of domination, not only through their roles as administrators but also by
indifference. We believe important new insights can be gleaned by examining who inhabits the grey zone and why, in different
situations (with varying degrees) of oppression. This is particularly true with regard to institutional maintenance, which has
attracted only modest empirical interest (Dacin, Munir & Tracey, 2010; Zietsma & Lawrence, 2010). Thus, a promising research
agenda is to examine how those populations targeted for oppression (e.g. the Jews, agricultural labourers, women) and those who do
not necessarily have an obvious motive to oppress others (e.g. Lithuanians during the Holocaust; co-ethnic supervisors), contribute
willingly or not to the reproduction of the system of domination, and through which types of institutional work. Furthermore,
can anti-oppressive work actually contribute to oppression by reproducing/reinforcing those institutional arrangements that enable
it? Studies of resistance in the workplace illustrate the irony of how some of the most defiant workers (Vallas, 2012, p. 25) those
particularly rigid in their opposition to managerial policies succeed only in reaffirming managements position (Courpasson, Dany
& Clegg, 2011; Fleming & Spicer, 2007; Vallas, 2012; Willis, 1977). The contradictory nature of the grey zone and who inhabits it thus
represents a promising direction for research in institutional theory one that demands less clear-cut distinctions between
challengers and incumbents in accounts of institutional reproduction and change. Things that matter? A final element that may
come more forcefully into our conversations through the study of oppression and resistance is the relevance of morality. In existing
accounts of institutional entrepreneurship and work, the status of morality is awkward and ambiguous if it appears at all. In that
respect, they are similar to most sociological narratives which, according to Bauman (1989) do without reference to morality. In
Making Social Science Matter, Bent Flyvbjerg argues that among the three things necessary to re-enchant and empower social
science there is the need to take up problems that matter to the local, national, and global communities in which we live, and we
must do it in ways that matter; we must focus on issues of values and power (Flyvbjerg, 2001, p. 167). Recent calls by management
scholars point out that we institutionalists in particular (Clegg, 2006; Munir, 2011) have failed to focus on problems that matter
and to address contemporary issues of broader societal relevance, such as the current global financial crisis (Lounsbury & Hirsch
2010; Munir, 2011); forced labour, including for children (Bales, 1999; Crane, 2013); growing job precariousness (often masked as
flexibility); or repression in Syria and censorship in China. Moreover, beyond that lack of attention to todays social issues, the
question of values and power is rarely discussed in studies of institutional work. As recently expressed by Creed and colleagues, In
the management literature, institutional change and agency are most often discussed without reference to their underlying moral or
political vision (Creed et al., 2010, p. 1380). Are we suggesting that articles should include a moral (or moralizing?) discussion?
Certainly not. The point we want to make is that today there is a marked need for debate and reorientation of values (Bauman, 2008;
MacIntyre, 2006) and organization theorists might want to have a say. Indeed, some scholars have taken on the task. For instance,
Khan, Munir and Willmott (2007) examined the elimination of the long-standing institutional practice of child labour from the
worlds largest soccer ball manufacturing cluster in Pakistan; and Creed and colleagues looked at how marginalized GLBT ministers
had to be the change they wanted to see in their churches(DeJordy & Lok, 2010, p. 1355). Nevertheless, should we settle for limiting
discussions on values and morality to just those studies dealing with issues that appear to be morally problematic? Put differently,
are there really relevant settings and contexts for which we can do without reference to morality? Flyvbjerg (2001, p. 167) suggests
that doing that would mean the perpetuation of science as usual. Instead, he argues for the emergence of what he calls a phronetic
social science, whose objective is contributing to societys capacity for value-rational deliberation and action. We think it is worth
contributing to such emergence and we see potential for doing that. For instance, revisiting recent work by Suddaby, Cooper and
Greenwood on the role of large accounting firms in the emergence of a transnational regulatory field in professional services, the
reader learns how the new emerging dominant logic reduces the concern for citizens rights and the public interest, emphasizing
instead commercialism and the protection and promotion of capital markets (Suddaby et al., 2007, p. 356). These insights join a
large number of other studies that show the growing marketization of our society (Bourdieu, 1998; Davis, 2009). Is this a matter on
which we, organization scholars, want to say something beyond the fact that it occurs? Likewise, in a recent article Mair and
colleagues (2012) study how an intermediary organization in southern Asia builds inclusive markets as a means to generate
economic and social development for the least advantaged societal groups. However, while they explicitly attend to the institutions

at play and their consequences in form of market and community marginalization, their article seems to assume that market
inclusion is all good, and leaves it unproblematized. We see in here food for further reflections and research. Finally, those interested
in how actors are able to do institutional work (Battilana & DAunno, 2009; Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006) should ask this key
question: Are there or might there be types of social structures, practices, beliefs and technologies that would

prevent those who inhabit them from becoming agents? Or if this seems to suggest too extreme a
state of affairs although historically manifested in the figure of the Muselmann are there or might there be
types of institutional work that seriously threaten the possibility of agency for
others? That certainly appears to be the case in todays world. Addressing questions like
that might shed new light on the subject of embedded agency by bringing to our
attention what the pre-conditions of agency are , thus helping to explain how
institutional change is possible if actors are fully conditioned by the institutions
that they wish to change (Greenwood & Suddaby, 2006; Holm, 1995; Seo & Creed, 2002). As we elaborated above, in
different forms and to varying degrees oppressive work transforms the capacity of human beings to act, think and feel. If people
feel their capacity to shape their lives has been taken from them (Nussbaum, 2000); or that
they have been pushed into herds like animals (Marcuse, 1991) or treated with no dignity (Hodson, 2001), is there still any
point in discussing how they may transform or create institutions? We believe it
does . But we should be well aware that without some minimum control and dignity, institutional work and for that matter, any
sort of work and even life becomes unbearable (Frankl, 1984/1959; Marcuse, 1991). People need to feel and be treated as worthy
human beings in order to envision and execute acts of agency. Thus, we need to focus on how the denial of human dignity and worth
occurs if we want to have a more complete understanding of agency and institutions. It also seems necessary to
study what actions people may take to regain their dignity (Sennett, 2003; Scott, 1990) and take
pride in their accomplishments, no matter how modest they may appear to others. Finally, we need to reflect on how
such studies can offer a solid ground for helping us to construct new institutional
orders (or change existing ones), with a renewed commitment for a more humane and respectful set of practices,
beliefs and technologies for those inhabiting them. In short, we need to study what institutional orders
should be pursuing for each and every human being, so that they are empowered
and granted conditions and spaces for moral agency .

AT: Wilderson---Policy Key

Policy focus key to combat racism---anti-blackness is not ontological
Jamelle Bouie 13, staff writer at The American Prospect, Making and Dismantling Racism,

http://prospect.org/article/making-and-dismantling-racism
Over at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates has been exploring the intersection of race and public policy, with a
focus on white supremacy as a driving force in political decisions at all levels of government. This has led
him to two conclusions: First, that anti-black racism as we understand it is a creation of
explicit policy choicesthe decision to exclude, marginalize, and stigmatize
Africans and their descendants has as much to do with racial prejudice as does any intrinsic tribalism. And second, that it's
possible to dismantle this prejudice using public policy. Here is Coates in his own words: Last night I had the
luxury of sitting and talking with the brilliant historian Barbara Fields. One point she makes that very few Americans understand is that racism is a

If we
accept that racism is a creation, then we must then accept that it can be destroyed .
creation. You read Edmund Morgans work and actually see racism being inscribed in the law and the country changing as a result.

And if we accept that it can be destroyed, we must then accept that it can be destroyed by us and that it likely must be destroyed by methods kin to
creation.

Racism was created by policy. It will likely only be ultimately destroyed by

policy.

Over at his blog, Andrew Sullivan offers a reply: I dont believe the law created racism any more than it can create lust or greed or envy or

hatred. It can encourage or mitigate these profound aspects of human psychology it can create racist structures as in the Jim Crow South or Greater
Israel. But it can no more end these things that it can create them. A complementary strategy is finding ways for the targets of such hatred to become
inured to them, to let the slurs sting less until they sting not at all. Not easy. But a more manageable goal than TNCs utopianism. I can appreciate the
point Sullivan is making, but I'm not sure it's relevant to Coates' argument. It is absolutely true that "Group loyalty is deep in our DNA," as Sullivan
writes. And if you define racism as an overly aggressive form of group loyaltybasically just prejudicethen Sullivan is right to throw water on the idea
that the law can "create racism any more than it can create lust or greed or envy or hatred." But Coates is making a more precise claim: That

there's nothing natural about the black/white divide that has defined American
history . White Europeans had contact with black Africans well before the trans-Atlantic slave
trade without the emergence of an anti-black racism . It took particular choices made by
particular peoplein this case, plantation owners in colonial Virginiato make black skin a stigma, to make the "one drop
rule" a defining feature of American life for more than a hundred years. By enslaving African indentured servants and
allowing their white counterparts a chance for upward mobility, colonial landowners began the
process that would make white supremacy the ideology of America . The position of
slavery generated a stigma that then justified continued enslavementblacks are lowly, therefore we must keep
them as slaves. Slavery (and later, Jim Crow) wasn't built to reflect racism as much as it was built in
tandem with it. And later policy, in the late 19th and 20th centuries, further entrenched white supremacist
attitudes. Block black people from owning homes, and they're forced to reside in
crowded slums. Onlookers then use the reality of slums to deny homeownership to blacks,
under the view that they're unfit for suburbs. In other words, create a prohibition
preventing a marginalized group from engaging in socially sanctioned behavior
owning a home, getting marriedand then blame them for the adverse
consequences. Indeed, in arguing for gay marriage and responding to conservative critics, Sullivan has taken note of this exact dynamic.
Here he is twelve years ago, in a column for The New Republic that builds on earlier ideas: Gay men--not because they're gay but because they are men
in an all-male subculture--are almost certainly more sexually active with more partners than most straight men. (Straight men would be far more
promiscuous, I think, if they could get away with it the way gay guys can.) Many gay men value this sexual freedom more than the stresses and strains
of monogamous marriage (and I don't blame them). But this is not true of all gay men. Many actually yearn for social stability, for anchors for their
relationships, for the family support and financial security that come with marriage. To deny this is surely to engage in the "soft bigotry of low
expectations." They may be a minority at the moment. But with legal marriage, their numbers would surely grow. And they would function as emblems

society
can create stigmas by using law to force particular kinds of behavior ? Insofar as gay men were
in gay culture of a sexual life linked to stability and love. [Emphasis added] What else is this but a variation on Coates' core argument, that

viewed as unusually promiscuous, it almost certainly had something to do with the fact that society refused to recognize their humanity and sanction
their relationships. The absence of any institution to mediate love and desire encouraged behavior that led this same culture to say "these people are too
degenerate to participate in this institution." If

the prohibition against gay marriage helped create an anti-gay

stigma, then lifting itas we've seen over the last decadehas helped destroy it. There's no
reason racism can't work the same way.

AT: Wilderson---Totalizing/Inaccurate
Refuse the characterization of blackness as ontological death by
asserting life in the face of structures of domination, blackness
exceeds its own objectification their framework is totalizing and
historically incorrect.
Brar 12 (2012, Dhanveer Singh, PhD candidate, commnications,Blackness, radicalism,
sound: Black Consciousness and Black Popular Music in the U.S.A (1955-1971), A thesis
submitted for the degree of PhD in Media and Communications 2012, Goldsmiths College,
University of London, http://eprints.gold.ac.uk/7806/1/MED_thesis_Brar_2012.pdf)

Paying attention to phonic materiality allowed the enquiry into the blackness of the Black Consciousness movement and Black
popular music between 1955 and 1971 to remain open. It allowed for an attentiveness to the ways in which blackness and

radicalism were always under contestation, and always being produced, even if
that meant radically breaking up black production. There seemed to be an
internalised resistance at work within the phonic materiality of the movement and the music which never let
them settle. The refusal to settle acted as a persistent questioning of the phonic materiality produced as the blackness and radicalism
of the movement and the music. It is for this reason that; James Brown and Amiri Baraka's respective black communal programs
were defined but also taken apart by a rhythmic psycho-sexuality; Sam Cooke and Martin Luther King's attempts to

generalise the intense spirituality of black freedom began to sound like

atemporality and death; and neither Motown or the League could engender the discipline they felt a revolutionary
project or mass black music required because that discipline was about gendered labour. This thesis has not been about identifying
the apparent failures of the Black Consciousness movement or Black popular music. Instead it has been an attempt to amplify the
sound of the blackness that instigated those events, sustained them, but which could not be called to a halt. It is by privileging the
phonic materiality of the archive that I have been able to attend to both the formation of and the strain against the blackness of black
radicalism and black music. Phonic substance was necessary to the modalities of the music and the radicalism but it was never
simply the basis for opposition to racial oppression. The phonic substance which was blackness was constantly used to work out
radically different ways blackness could be. The phonic substance structures the relationship between black music and black
radicalism as blackness, but it is also a blackness which strains against them. This is the
paraontological relation; blackness

in constant escape, pressurising its own ontological

ground, its own phenomenological features, its own basis as an epistemology . Each
time the music and the radicalism do this, they do it as a black sonic operation. Returning to the wider field of Black studies, in this
thesis I assembled an archive of sound recordings, television footage, documentaries, interviews, personal testimonies, criticism,
cultural analysis and a range of other materials to constitute the historical juncture of Black Consciousness and Black popular music
in the U.S. The phonic materiality marked across all of these materials is a realisation of the ways in which blackness is

testament to the fact objects can and do resist. The black object resists by rendering itself audible and
black radicalism is a tradition in which objects have made themselves heard . It is a
tradition of objects which have recorded their strain against their designation as objects. In this instance blackness does
not operate as a total outside, it is not non-ontological , it is not without analog and is not
social death . No matter how much intellectual, psychic and material energy is
invested in rendering these claims true. Instead blackness is the immanent critique
which lives in the life of the object, which may not be recognised as life, even when
it strains to do so, but cannot be denied as life . Neither can it be denied the strain
against its own affirmation of life. It is a life, and a strain against it , which lives in the phonic
substance the black object produces. The life of the black object lives in the sound it makes and that sound stands as a common
project of blackness, which may be dismissed as inchoate noise, as excessive feeling, as lacking in revolutionary discipline, but this
dismissal occurs because when the object resists, it rubs up against the divide between noise and music, excessive and proper
feeling, discipline and unruliness. The blackness of black radicalism , like the blackness of black music, lives in
that break, and constantly breaks, away. The debate within Black studies over what blackness is and what blackness
does is still being contested. With new work on the way from Fred Moten, Nahum Chandler and Jared Sexton, this only offers
possibilities for continued speculation. To repeat, the discussion over what blackness means within Black studies is not a minor
dispute within a relative sub-discipline of Cultural studies and Critical theory. It is, as Chandler has pointed out, necessary to
thought, because blackness is a necessary problem for what is deemed to be thought. But Chandler is very careful to remind us that

this means blackness is also, paraontologically, a possibility for thought. In light of this coming work, I believe
it is necessary to continue thinking about how this debate is informed by the phonic substance which is blackness, and which
blackness escapes from, even whilst that phonic substance escapes from it. In short, it remains vital for me to continue to be a
student of Black studies.

AT: Wilderson---Essentialist
Wliderson essentializes and limits turning the emancipation they
seek.
Ellison 11

Dr Mary Ellison University College of Aberystwyth Review of: Red, White and Black: cinema
and the structure of US antagonisms By FRANK B. WILDERSON III (Durham, NC, Duke
University Press, 2010),
388 pp. Paper 15.99 Race %26 Class 53(2) October-Dec 2011 Sage Pubs also a review
of African American Actresses: the struggle for visibility 19001960 By CHARLENE REGESTER
(Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2010), 408 pp. Paper %2427.95.
http://rac.sagepub.com.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/content/53/2/100.full.pdf+html
These are two illuminating, but frustratingly flawed books. Their approaches are different, although both frequently quote Frantz
Fanon and Jacques Lacan. Frank Wilderson utilises the iconic theoreticians within the context

of a study that concentrates on a conceptual ideology that, he claims, is based on a

fusion of Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism and psychology . He uses a small
number of independent films to illustrate his theories . Charlene Regester has a more practical
framework. She divides her book into nine chapters devoted to individual female actors and then weaves her ideological concepts
into these specific chapters. Both have a problem with clarity. Regester uses less complex language than Wilderson, but still manages
to be obtuse at times. Wilderson starts from a position of using ontology and grammar as his main tools, but manages to consistently
misuse or misappropriate terms like fungible or fungibility. Wilderson writes as an intelligent and challenging author, but is often
frustrating. Although his language is complicated, his concepts are often oversimplified . He

envisions every black person in film as a slave who is suffering from irreparable
alienation from any meaningful sense of cultural identity. He believes that filmmakers, including
black filmmakers, are victims of a deprivation of meaning that has been condensed by Jacques Lacan as a wall of language as well
as an inability to create a clear voice in the face of gratuitous violence. He cites Frantz Fanon, Orlando Patterson and Hortense
Spiller as being among those theorists who effectively investigate the issues of black structural non-communicability. His own

attempts to define what is black?, a subject?, an object?, a slave?, seem bound

up with limiting preconceptions, and he evaluates neither blackness nor the red
that is part of his title in any truly meaningful way.

AT: Wilderson---Non-Falsifiable
Non-falsifiablility --- Wildersons unverifiable generalizations are
understandable because he relies on Lacanian and Marxist
structuralism Well quote Wildersons method section
Wilderson 10 (Frank, Assoc prof of African American Studies Cal-Irvine, Red, White, &
Black, 23-24)

Throughout this book I use White, Human, Master, Settler, and sometimes non-Black interchangeably to connote a paradigmatic
entity that exists ontologically as a position of life in relation to the Black or Slave position, one of death. The Red, Indigenous, or
"Savage" position exists liminally as half-death and half-life between the Slave (Black) and the Human (White, or non-Black). I
capitalize the words Red, White, Black, Slave, Savage, and Human in order to assert their importance as ontological positions and to
stress the value of theorizing power politically rather than culturally. I want to move from a politics of culture to a culture of politics
(as I argue in chapter a). Capitalizing these words is consistent with my argument that the array of identities that they contain is
important but inessential to an analysis of the paradigm of power in which they are positioned. Readers wedded to cultural diversity
and historical specificity may find such shorthand wanting. But those who may be put off by my pressing

historical and cultural particularities-culled from history, sociology, and cultural

studies, yet neither historical, sociological, nor, oddly enough, cultural -should
bear in mind that there are precedents for such methods , two of which make cultural studies and
much of social science possible: the methods of Karl Marx and Jacques Lacan. Marx pressed
the microcosm of the English manufacturer into the service of a project that
sought to explain economic relationality on a global scale . Lacan's exemplary cartography was
even smaller: a tiny room with not much more than a sofa and a chair, the room of the psychoanalytic encounter. As Jonathan Lee
reminds us, at stake in Lacan's account of the psychoanalytic encounter is the realization of subjectivity itself, "the very being of the
subject. "31 I argue that "Savage' Human, and Slave should be theorized in the way we theorize worker and capitalist as positions
first and as identities second, or as we theorize capitalism as a paradigm rather than as an experience-that is, before they take on
national origin or gendered specfficity Throughout the course of this book I argue that "Savage' Human, and Slave are more essential
to our understanding of the truth of institutionality than the positions from political or libidinal economy. For in this trio we find the
key to our world's creation as well as to its undoing. This argument, as it relates to political economy, continues in chapter i, "The
Ruse of Analogy:' In chapter 2, "The Narcissistic Slave," I shift focus from political economy to libidinal economy before undertaking
more concrete analyses of films in parts 2, 3, and 4. No one makes films and declares their own films "Human" while simultaneously
asserting that other films (Red and Black) are not Human cinema. Civil society represents itself to itself as being infinitely inclusive,
and its technologies of hegemony (including cinema) are mobilized to manufacture this assertion, not to dissent from it. In my quest
to interrogate the bad faith of the civic "invitation;' I have chosen White cinema as the sine qua non of Human cinema. Films can be
thought of as one of an ensemble of discursive practices mobilized by civil society to "invite:' or interpellate, Blacks to the same
variety of social identities that other races are able to embody without contradiction, identities such as worker, soldier, immigrant,
brother, sister, father, mother, and citizen. The bad faith of this invitation, this faux interpeLlation, can be discerned by
deconstructing the way cinema's narrative strategies displace our consideration and understanding of the ontological status of
Blacks (social death) onto a series of fanciful stories that are organized around conflicts which are the purview only of those who are
not natally alienated, generally dishonored, or open to gratuitous violence, in other words, people who are White or colored but who
are not Black. (I leave aside, for the moment, the liminality of the Native American position-oscillating as it does between the living
and the dead.) Immigrant cinema of those who are not White would have sufficed as well; but, due to its exceptional capacity to
escape racial markers, Whiteness is the most impeccable embodiment of what it means to be Human. As Richard Dyer writes,
"Having no content, we [White people] can't see that we have anything that accounts for our position of privilege and power . . . . The
equation of being white with being human secures a position of power:' He goes on to explain how "the privilege of being white... is
not to be subjected to stereotyping in relation to one's whiteness. 'White people are stereotyped in terms of gender, nation, class,
sexuality, ability and so on, but the overt point of such typification is gender, nation, etc. Whiteness generally colonises the
stereotypical definition of all social categories other than those of race.' Unlike Dyer, I do not meditate on the representational power
of Whiteness, "that it be made strange:' divested of its imperial capacity, and thus make way for representational practices in cinema
and beyond that serve as aesthetic accompaniments for a more egalitarian civil society in which Whites and non-Whites could live in
harmony. Laudable as that dream is, I do not share Dyer's assumption that we are all Human. Some of us are only part Human
("Savage") and some of us are Black (Slave). I find his argument that Whiteness possesses the easiest claim to Humanness to be
productive. But whereas Dyer offers this argument as a lament for a social ill that needs to be corrected, I borrow it merely for its
explanatory power-as a way into a paradigmatic analysis that clarifies structural relations of global antagonisms and not as a step
toward healing the wounds of social relations in civil society. Hence this book's interchangeable deployment of White, Settler, and
Master with-and to signify-Human. Again, like Lacan, who mobilizes the psychoanalytic

encounter to make claims about the structure of relations writ large, and like
Marx, who mobilizes the English manufacturer to make claims about the structure
of economic relations writ large, I am mobilizing three races, four films, and one
subcontinent to make equally generalizable claims and argue that the antagonism between Black and
Human supercedes the "antagonism" between worker and capitalist in political economy, as well as the gendered "antagonism" in

libidinal economy. To this end, this book takes stock of how socially engaged popular cinema participates in the systemic violence
that constructs America as a "settler society" (Churchill) and "slave estate" (Spilers). Rather than privilege a politics of
culture(s)-that is, rather than examine and accept the cultural gestures and declarations which the three groups under examination
make about themselves-1 privilege a culture of politics: in other words, what I am concerned with is how White film, Black film, and
Red film articulate and disavow the matrix of violence which constructs the three essential positions which in turn structure US.
antagonisms.

Psychonalysis pre-determines the social world in advance produces

a metaphysics that ensures replication of domination
Robinson (PhD Political Theory, University of Nottingham) 05
(Theory and Event, Andrew, 8:1, The Political Theory of Constitutive Lack: A Critique)

One of the functions of myth is to cut out what Trevor Pateman terms the middle level of analytical
concepts, establishing a short-circuit between high-level generalizations and ultraspecific (pseudo-)concrete instances. In Barthess classic case of an image of a black soldier saluting the French
flag, this individual action is implicitly connected to highly abstract concepts such as nationalism, without the mediation of the
particularities of his situation. (These particularities, if revealed, could undermine the myth. Perhaps he enlisted for financial
reasons, or due to threats of violence). Thus, while myths provide an analysis of sorts, their basic operation is anti-analytical: the
analytical schema is fixed in advance, and the relationship between this schema and the instances it

organizes is
hierarchically ordered to the exclusive advantage of the former . This is precisely what
happens in Lacanian analyses of specific political and cultural phenomena . iek specifically
advocates sweeping generalisations and short-cuts between specific instances and high-level abstractions, evading the middle
level. The

correct dialectical procedure can be best described as a direct jump from the
singular to the universal, bypassing the mid-level of particularity . He wants a direct jump
from the singular to the universal, without reference to particular contexts (Butler, Laclau and
iek, 2000, 239-40).

AT: Wilderson---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 (citing Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Prof of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley) 8
(Timothy, Islamophobia & Anti-Blackness: A Genealogical Approach,
http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia-anti-blackness-genealogical-approach)
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 .

AT: Wilderson---Agency Turn

Wildersons argument is too sweeping, denies Black agency, and links
to anti-politics
B 11

(Dr. Sar Maty, Professor of Film University of Portsmouth and Co-Editor The Encyclopedia
of Global Human Migration, "The US Decentred: From Black Social Death to Cultural
Transformation", Cultural Studies Review, 17(2), September, p. 385-387)
blackas
socialdeath idea and multiple attacks on issues and scholars he disagrees with run (him) into
(theoretical) trouble. This happens in chapter two, The Narcissistic Slave, where he critiques black film theorists and
A few pages into Red, White and Black, I feared that it would just be a matter of time before Wildersons

books. For example, Wilderson declares that Gladstone Yearwoods Black Film as Signifying Practice (2000) betrays a kind of
conceptual anxiety with respect to the historical object of study ... it clings, anxiously, to the filmastextaslegitimateobject of
Black cinema. (62) He then quotes from Yearwoods book to highlight just how vague the aesthetic foundation of Yearwoods
attempt to construct a canon can be. (63) And yet Wildersons highlighting is problematic because it

overlooks the Diaspora or African Diaspora, a key component in Yearwoods thesis that, crucially, neither
navelgazes (that is, at the US or black America) nor pretends to properly engage with black film. Furthermore, Wilderson separates
the different waves of black film theory and approaches them, only, in terms of how a most recent one might challenge its precedent.
Again, his approach is problematic because it does not mention or emphasise the

interconnectivity of/in black film theory. As a case in point, Wilderson does not link Tommy Lotts

mobilisation of Third Cinema for black film theory to Yearwoods idea of African Diaspora. (64) Additionally, of course, Wilderson
seems unaware that Third Cinema itself has been fundamentally questioned since Lotts 1990s theory of black film was formulated.

Yet another consequence of ignoring the African Diaspora is that it exposes

Wildersons corpus of films as unable to carry the weight of the transnational
argument he attempts to advance. Here, beyond the UScentricity or social and political specificity of
[his] filmography, (95) I am talking about Wildersons choice of films. For example, Antwone Fisher (dir. Denzel
Washington, 2002) is attacked unfairly for failing to acknowledge a grid of captivity across spatial dimensions of the Black body,
the Black home, and the Black community (111) while films like Alan and Albert Hughess Menace II Society (1993), overlooked,
do acknowledge the same grid and, additionally, problematise Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act (STEP) policing.
The above examples expose the fact of Wildersons dubious and questionable

conclusions on black film. Red, White and Black is particularly undermined by

Wildersons propensity for exaggeration and blinkeredness . In chapter nine, Savage
Negrophobia, he writes: The philosophical anxiety of Skins is all too aware that through the Middle Passage, African culture became
Black style ... Blackness can be placed and displaced with limitless frequency and across untold territories, by whoever so chooses.
Most important, there is nothing real Black people can do to either check or direct this process ... Anyone can say nigger because
anyone can be a nigger. (235)7 Similarly, in chapter ten, A Crisis in the Commons, Wilderson addresses the

issue of Black time. Black is irredeemable, he argues, because, at no time in

history had it been deemed, or deemed through the right historical moment and
place. In other words, the black moment and place are not right because they are
the ship hold of the Middle Passage: the most coherent temporality ever deemed as Black time but also the
moment of no time at all on the map of no place at all. (279) Not only does Pinhos more mature analysis
expose this point as preposterous (see below), I also wonder what Wilderson makes of
the countless historians and sociologists works on slave ships, shipboard
insurrections and/during the Middle Passage,8 or of groundbreaking jazzstudies
books on crosscultural dialogue like The Other Side of Nowhere (2004). Nowhere has another side, but once
Wilderson theorises blacks as socially and ontologically dead while dismissing jazz as
belonging nowhere and to no one, simply there for the taking, (225) there seems to be no way back. It is therefore
hardly surprising that Wilderson ducks the need to provide a solution or alternative to both
his sustained bashing of blacks and anti Blackness.9 Last but not least, Red, White and
Black ends like a badly plugged announcement of a bad Hollywood films badly
planned sequel: How does one deconstruct life? Who would benefit from such an undertaking? The coffle approaches with
its answers in tow.

Fatalism turns their impacts greatest comparative threat

Miah quoting West in 94

(Malik Miah, Cornel West's Race Matters, May-June, http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/3079)

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
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)
well-being and political clout are requisites for meaningful Black progress. It

Denying Agency is independently wrong should be rejected

Mahoney 92

(MARTHA R. MAHONEY Associate Professor, University of Miami School of Law. Southern

California Law Review University of Southern California March, 1992 65 S. Cal. L. Rev.
1283 lawrev; lexis)
Once exit is defined as the appropriate response to abuse, then staying can be treated as evidence that abuse never happened .

If

abuse is asserted, "failure" to exit must then be explained. When that "failure"
becomes the point of inquiry, explanation in law and popular culture tends to emphasize
victimization and implicitly deny agency in the person who has been harmed.
Denying agency contradicts the self-understanding of most of our society,
including many who share characteristics and experiences of oppression with the
person who is being harmed. The conservative insistence that we are untrammeled
actors plays on this sensibility, merging rejection of victimization with an ideology
that denies oppression. The privatization of assaults on women makes it
particularly difficult to identify a model of oppression and resistance, rather than
one of victimization and inconsistent personal behavior .

AT: Wilderson---Agency Turn---Ext

Agency is inevitable asserting that systems are terminally screwed
diminishes the value of resistance to oppression even in the face of
slavery, resistance was possible
Robinson 2k4 (Reginald Leamon, prof law @ Howard U, researcher on the relation
between race and academic thought Human Agency, Negated Subjectivity, and White
Structural Oppression: An Analysis of Critical Race Practive/Praxis American University Law
Review 53, no.6 (August 2004): 1361-1419)
During slavery, when whites ruled blacks by law, vigilance, and violence, blacks

fought and died , all in the name of their natural, normal claim to freedom. In
addition to fighting and dying, they ran away so often that southern planters called
it a disease.4 Using guile and wit, slaves escaped, hiding within earshot of their
masters. Having escaped, Harriet Jacobs lived for seven years in an attic space over her
masters head.5 Working slowly, slaves frustrated the masters desired yield. Using
sabotage, slaves destroyed tools, making their exploitation inefficient . Feigning
sickness, they resisted. Denmark Vesey, future revolt leader, pretended to suffer
from epilepsy.6 When not running, slaves used sheer intelligence, patience, and planning. In 1848, Ellen Craft,
a white mulatto, dressed like a man, hid her visage behind bandages of a false injury, and refused to
talk.7 By her side, ever attentive and properly cowered, the faithful slave was her
husband. Believing in their right to be free, Craft and her husband walked and rode
their way to freedom.8 Choosing to fight and die, slaves showed us their power to act
purposefully. The power to act is human agency, and these actions can support or
transform society. Through social and cultural influences, society can constrain or empower ordinary people9 to act by
giving them relatively equal access to the rules, resources, and language. By supporting or transforming a
society, we express a latent, inexorable power that rejects the thought that white
structural oppression negates ordinary peoples subjectivity, thus making them
subtextual victims.10 Within a broad structuralist framework, white structural
oppression refers to practices like racism that constitute an objective, external
power that robs people of their natural right to be free human beings . Subtextual
victims refer to ordinary people like blacks who believe that America will always
treat them badly, preventing them from attaining social and economic success. For these ordinary people,
experiences like subtextual victimization and practices like white structural
oppression belie human agency (e.g., right action).11 Although ordinary people like blacks exercised human
agency within the crucible of slavery, Critical Race Theory ( CRT) builds its methodology on the idea
that law, race, and power oppress ordinary people, denying them the right to live
free and to act purposefully.12 Race Crits have developed deconstructive approaches to unearth how law and race
form powerful, objective relations of whites over blacks, men over women, natives over foreigners. Relying on this methodology and
these approaches, Race Crits, especially in early writings, analyzed unconscious white racism.13 Given CRTs early development,
these writings were perforce theoretical. Recently, some Race Crits have sought practical, serviceable tools
to assist lawyers and activists.14

Practical writings cope better with struggles against white

racism . Practical writings talk to community activists.15 They enable political

lawyers to examine and transform legal conflicts into practical solutions or legal
remedies. These writings encourage left scholars to leave the ivory tower, so that
they can work with the ordinary people for whom Race Crits purport to write and
on whom their scholarly existence depends.16 Under this view, Race Crits can
redress white structural oppression and engage in antisubordination struggles, so
that ordinary people can use their human agency.

Their alt is entirely useless for real people

Robinson 2k4 (Reginald Leamon, prof law @ Howard U, researcher on the relation

between race and academic thought Human Agency, Negated Subjectivity, and White
Structural Oppression: An Analysis of Critical Race Practive/Praxis American University Law
Review 53, no.6 (August 2004): 1361-1419)
Within these antisubordination practices, structural forces dominate, prevailing
over ordinary people.183 By Williams and Yamamoto applying the mindset doctrine
uncritically, they suggest that ordinary people cannot engage in this assessment and
reassessment.184 As the founders had conceived, they use the mindset doctrine to
rebuke elite whites use of white structural oppression. Yet even if they do not
think alike, ordinary people have a common culture of shared understandings
within their various communities. In the mid to late 1800s in California, Asians had
human agency. In the early 1900s, elite whites attempted to subvert this agency
through laws like the Alien Land Act. After the California legislature enacted this clearly
racist law, Asians found creative ways to hold real property. Although living in hostile
climates, Asians forged ahead to the dismay of many whites .185 During slavery,
blacks used money to buy their freedom. They worked within the slavery system,
reinforcing it indirectly, so that they could be free. The irony notwithstanding,
blacks had human agency. An antisubordination practice that negates the subject
and her agency cannot help ordinary people . Williams and Yamamoto keep
ordinary people in the blame game, encouraging them to become self-reflective
only so that they can identify the structural forces that affect their lives .
Unintentionally, ordinary people become not personally responsible but more
efficient at proclaiming their innocence and their victim status, and in so doing,
they only marginally inspect their mindsets (or core beliefs). By proclaiming their
innocence, ordinary people never know that they, too, co-create racism. In relying
on the mindset doctrine, Race Crits like Williams and Yamamoto have little interest in core
beliefs, except if they belong to white elites and a system called white structural oppression.
Further, while it is clear that Race Crits like Richard Delgado have influenced a new
generation of left scholars, none of them has unpacked the disturbing implications
for ordinary people. Even under a so-called radical theory like CRT, ordinary
people can vitiate personal responsibility, proclaim their innocence, and blame the
structural forces that lie solely in white elite hands. In effect, CRT keeps ordinary
people like blacks in a victims conscience . I apply this point with equal vigor in the
following section.

AT: Wilderson---Ontology Turn

We K the whole notion of "political ontology" as it relates to race. It
discourages black unity its net worse.
James 10 (Michael James, Bucknell University Faculty, Contemporary Political Theory;

Cultural and Ethnic Pluralism; Law and Legal Theory Ph.D., Duke University "The Political
Ontology of Race" APSA 2010 Annual Meeting Paper available via:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1643755)
The role of agency in the political ontology of race reveals another problem: the
fragility of racial solidarity. Because black political solidarity is a choice, some
blacks will likely defect from the collective fight to resist race-based inequality
(Shelby 2005, 155). Whereas biological ontology and social ontology emphasize the unchosen aspect of race, something that cannot
be unilaterally rejected, political ontology foregrounds choice , thus clarifying how black solidarity is
vulnerable not only to external attack from anti-black racism, but also to internal defection by thin blacks who reject black political
solidarity. This fragility becomes more daunting when we consider which thin blacks are most able and have

the greatest incentive to reject black political solidarity . Both those who can physically pass for
white and those whose class status facilitates their assimilation into white society can avoid the negative experiences associated with
black racial identity highlighted by interactive-kind social constructivism. But while the defection of passers can dilute the political
strength of the black community and reinforce the social structure that values physical whiteness, the defection of the

better off and the better educated is more debilitating, since it deprives the black
political community of some (but not all) of its best potential leaders (Shelby 2005, 79-80,
85).15 Thus the political ontology of race , better than its biological or social counterparts, elucidates the
fragility of black political solidarity.
The political ontology of race also highlights conflicts of interests and perspectives
that can permeate the thin black community. If lighter skinned and higher class blacks are less likely to
bear the scars of race, their experiences and perspectives will differ substantially from that of darker, poorer blacks. And in the case
of wealthier, better educated blacks, their short-term, purely economic interests will surely conflict with those of poorer blacks as
well. Finally, if higher status blacks tend to dominate leadership positions within the black political community, their divergent
perspectives and interests can at the least undermine their ability to represent ordinary blacks well, and at worst lead them to betray
their interests. Trust between black political elites and ordinary blacks thus becomes a

central problem for the political ontology of race. But as I will argue in the next section, the problem of
trust is better addressed by the political ontology of race than by the social or biological ontologies.

AT: Wilderson---Pessimism Turn

Wildersons too pessimistic this reifies his own K and locks-in the
worst oppression.
Marriott 12 David Marriott is an associate professor in the History of Consciousness

Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Incognegro and On
Black Men. "Black Cultural Studies" Years Work in Critical and Cultural Theory; vol 20(1): 3766. First published online: March 29, 2012 doi: 10.1093/ywcct/mbs003
Whatever one might think of the cogency of these remarks (if only because the notion of a non-racial life is predicated on the idea
that the human can somehow reside outside of race, a humanism that would always then be constitutively compromised by the
racism at its frontier), the question of whether US culture can ever escape racial antagonism is the primary focus of Frank B.
Wilderson IIIs powerful Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms, as part of a more general reading of
US film culture. And indeed Fanons anti-philosophical philosophical critique of racial ontology (historically blacks were seen as part
of existence but not, as yet, part of human being, a not-yet that forces Fanon to rethink the teleological form of the human as already
and essentially violent in its separation from the state of nature from which it has come) forms a major part of Wildersons
conception of anti-blackness as the major structural antagonism of US history and culture. It is against the conception that racism
could ever be simply contingent to black experience that Wilderson protests, reflecting on the fact that racial slavery has no parallel
to other forms of suffering, and perhaps most strikingly social death is the constitutive essence of black existence in the US. In brief,
slavery remains so originary, in the sense of what he calls its accumulation and fungibility (terms borrowed from Saidiya
Hartman), it not only has no analogy to other forms of antagonismWildersons examples are the Holocaust and Native American
genocidethere is simply no process of getting over it, of recovering from the loss (as wound, or trauma):
as such, slavery

remains the ultimate structure of antagonism in the US. Whether at a personal level or at the
level of historical process, if black slavery is foundational to modern Humanism, then any teleological
appeal to a humanism beyond racism is doomed from the start (p. 22). The problem with
Wildersons argument, however, is that it remains of a piece with the manichean imperatives that
beset it, and which by definition are structurally uppermost, which means that he can only confirm
those imperatives as absolutes rather than chart a dialectical path beyond them, insofar
as, structurally speaking, there is no outside to black social death and alienation, or no outside to
this outside, and all that thought can do is mirror its own enslavement by race . This is not so
much afro-pessimisma term coined by Wildersonas thought wedded to its own despair. However, this is also not the entire
story of Red, White, and Black, as I hope to show.

Anti-Blackness Wrong
Anti-blackness is not an ontological antagonism---conflict is
inevitable in politics, but does not have to be demarcated around
whiteness and blackness---the alts ontological fatalism recreates
colonial violence
Peter Hudson 13, Political Studies Department, University of the Witwatersrand,

Johannesburg , South Africa, has been on the editorial board of the Africa Perspective: The
South African Journal of Sociology and Theoria: A Journal of Political and Social Theory and
Transformation, and is a member of the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism, The
state and the colonial unconscious, Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies, 2013
Thus the self-same/other distinction is necessary for the possibility of identity itself. There always has to exist an outside , which is also
inside, to the extent it is designated as the impossibility from which the possibility of
the existence of the subject derives its rule (Badiou 2009, 220). But although the excluded
place which isnt excluded insofar as it is necessary for the very possibility of
inclusion and identity may be universal (may be considered ontological), its content (what fills it)
as well as the mode of this filling and its reproduction are contingent. In other words, the
meaning of the signifier of exclusion is not determined once and for all: the place of the place
of exclusion, of death is itself over-determined, i.e. the very framework for
deciding the other and the same, exclusion and inclusion, is nowhere engraved in
ontological stone but is political and never terminally settled. Put differently, the
curvature of intersubjective space (Critchley 2007, 61) and thus, the specific modes of the othering of
otherness are nowhere decided in advance (as a certain ontological fatalism
might have it) (see Wilderson 2008). The social does not have to be divided into white
and black , and the meaning of these signifiers is never necessary because they are
signifiers. To be sure, colonialism institutes an ontological division, in that whites exist in a way barred to blacks
who are not. But this ontological relation is really on the side of the ontic that is, of all
contingently constructed identities, rather than the ontology of the social which
refers to the ultimate unfixity, the indeterminacy or lack of the social. In this sense, then, the
white man doesnt exist, the black man doesnt exist (Fanon 1968, 165); and neither does the colonial symbolic itself, including its most intimate structuring relations

division is constitutive of the social, not the colonial division. Whiteness may
well be very deeply sediment in modernity itself, but respect for the ontological difference (see Heidegger 1962, 26; Watts 2011,
279) shows up its ontological status as ontic. It may be so deeply sedimented that it becomes difficult even
to identify the very possibility of the separation of whiteness from the very possibility of order,
but from this it does not follow that the void of black being functions as the
ultimate substance, the transcendental signified on which all possible forms of
sociality are said to rest . What gets lost here, then, is the specificity of colonialism, of its constitutive axis,
its ontological differential. A crucial feature of the colonial symbolic is that the real is not screened off by the imaginary in the way it is under
capitalism. At the place of the colonised, the symbolic and the imaginary give way because non-identity
(the real of the social) is immediately inscribed in the lived experience (vcu) of the colonised
subject. The colonised is traversing the fantasy (Zizek 2006a, 4060) all the time; the void of the verb to be is the very content of his interpellation. The
colonised is, in other words, the subject of anxiety for whom the symbolic and the
imaginary never work, who is left stranded by his very interpellation.4 Fixed into non-fixity, he is
eternally suspended between element and moment 5 he is where the colonial
symbolic falters in the production of meaning and is thus the point of entry of the
real into the texture itself of colonialism . Be this as it may, whiteness and blackness are
(sustained by) determinate and contingent practices of signification; the

structuring relation of colonialism thus itself comprises a knot of significations which, no

matter how tight, can always be undone. Anti-colonial i.e., anti-white modes of
struggle are not (just) psychic 6 but involve the reactivation (or de-sedimentation)7 of colonial objectivity
itself. No matter how sedimented (or global), colonial objectivity is not ontologically immune to antagonism. Differentiality, as Zizek insists (see Zizek 2012, chapter 11, 771
n48), immanently entails antagonism in that differentiality both makes possible the existence of any identity whatsoever and at the same time because it is the presence of one
object in another undermines any identity ever being (fully) itself. Each element in a differential relation is the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of
each other. It is this dimension of antagonism that the Master Signifier covers over transforming its outside (Other) into an element of itself, reducing it to a condition of its

symbolisation produces an ineradicable excess over itself, something it

cant totalise or make sense of, where its production of meaning falters. This is its internal limit point, its real:9 an errant
object that has no place of its own, isnt recognised in the categories of the system but
is produced by it its part of no part or object small a.10 Correlative to this object a is the subject stricto
sensu i.e., as the empty subject of the signifier without an identity that pins it down.11 That is the subject of antagonism in
confrontation with the real of the social, as distinct from subject position based
on a determinate identity.
possibility.8 All

Consequences Key
Their desire to ignore the consequences of their advocacy causes alt
failure ---must evaluate consequences of proposals
Christopher A. Bracey 6, Associate Professor of Law, Associate Professor of African & African

American Studies, Washington University in St. Louis, September, Southern California Law
Review, 79 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1231, p. 1318
Second, reducing conversation on race matters to an ideological contest allows opponents to elide
inquiry into whether the results of a particular preference policy are desirable. Policy positions
masquerading as principled ideological stances create the impression that a racial policy is not simply
a choice among available alternatives, but the embodiment of some higher moral principle . Thus,
the "principle" becomes an end in itself, without reference to outcomes. Consider the prevailing
view of colorblindness in constitutional discourse. Colorblindness has come to be understood as
the embodiment of what is morally just, independent of its actual effect upon the lives of racial minorities. This explains Justice Thomas's belief
in the "moral and constitutional equivalence" between Jim Crow laws and race preferences, and his tragic assertion that "Government cannot make us equal [but] can only
recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law." 281 For Thomas, there is no meaningful difference between laws designed to entrench racial subordination and those

Critics may point out that colorblindness in practice has the effect of
entrenching existing racial disparities in health, wealth, and society. But in framing the debate in purely
ideological terms, opponents are able to avoid the contentious issue of outcomes and make
viability determinations based exclusively on whether racially progressive measures exude
fidelity to the ideological principle of colorblindness. Meaningful policy debate is replaced by
ideological exchange, which further exacerbates hostilities and deepens the cycle of resentment .
designed to alleviate conditions of oppression.

AT: Social Death*

No social death history proves
Brown 9 Vincent Brown, Prof. of History and African and African-American Studies @
Harvard Univ., December 2009, "Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,"
American Historical Review, p. 1231-1249

THE PREMISE OF ORLANDO PATTERSONS MAJOR WORK, that enslaved Africans were
natally alienated and culturally isolated, was challenged even before he published his influential
thesis, primarily by scholars concerned with survivals or retentions of African culture and by
historians of slave resistance. In the early to mid-twentieth century, when Robert Parks view of
the Negro predominated among scholars, it was generally assumed that the slave trade and
slavery had denuded black people of any ancestral heritage from Africa. The historians Carter
G. Woodson and W. E. B. Du Bois and the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits argued the
opposite. Their research supported the conclusion that while enslaved Africans could not
have brought intact social, political, and religious institutions with them to the
Americas, they did maintain significant aspects of their cultural backgrounds.32
Herskovits ex- amined Africanismsany practices that seemed to be identifiably Africanas
useful symbols of cultural survival that would help him to analyze change and continuity in
African American culture.33 He engaged in one of his most heated scholarly disputes with the
sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, a student of Parks, who empha- sized the damage wrought by
slavery on black families and folkways.34 More recently, a number of scholars have built on
Herskovitss line of thought, enhancing our understanding of African history during the era of
the slave trade. Their studies have evolved productively from assertions about general
cultural heritage into more precise demonstrations of the continuity of
worldviews, categories of belonging, and social practices from Africa to America.
For these scholars, the preservation of distinctive cultural forms has served as an
index both of a resilient social personhood, or identity, and of resistance to slavery
itself. 35
Scholars of slave resistance have never had much use for the concept of social death. The early
efforts of writers such as Herbert Aptheker aimed to derail the popular notion that American
slavery had been a civilizing institution threatened by slave crime.36 Soon after, studies of
slave revolts and conspiracies advocated the idea that resistance demonstrated the basic
humanity and intractable will of the enslavedindeed, they often equated acts of will with
humanity itself. As these writ- ers turned toward more detailed analyses of the causes,
strategies, and tactics of slave revolts in the context of the social relations of slavery, they had
trouble squaring abstract characterizations of the slave with what they were learning about the
en- slaved.37 Michael Craton, who authored Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the
British West Indies, was an early critic of Slavery and Social Death, protesting that what was
known about chattel bondage in the Americas did not confirm Pattersons definition of slavery.
If slaves were in fact generally dishonored, Craton asked, how does he explain the degrees of
rank found among all groups of slavesthat is, the scale of reputation and authority accorded,
or at least acknowledged, by slave and master alike? How could they have formed the
fragile families documented by social historians if they had been natally
alienated by definition? Finally, and per- haps most tellingly, if slaves had been
uniformly subjected to permanent violent domination, they could not have
revolted as often as they did or shown the varied manifestations of their
resistance that so frustrated masters and compromised their power, sometimes fatally.38
The dynamics of social control and slave resistance falsified Pattersons description
of slavery even as the tenacity of African culture showed that enslaved men,

women, and children had arrived in the Americas bearing much more than their
tropical temperament.
The cultural continuity and resistance schools of thought come together pow- erfully in an
important book by Walter C. Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Re- sistance, Culture, and
Identity Formation in Early America. In Ruckers analysis of slave revolts, conspiracies, and
daily recalcitrance, African concepts, values, and cul- tural metaphors play the central role.
Unlike Smallwood and Hartman, for whom the rupture was the story of slavery, Rucker aims
to reveal the perseverance of African culture even among second, third, and fourth
generation creoles.39 He looks again at some familiar events in North AmericaNew York
Citys 1712 Coromantee revolt and 1741 conspiracy, the 1739 Stono rebellion in South
Carolina, as well as the plots, schemes, and insurgencies of Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and
Nat Turnerdeftly teasing out the African origins of many of the attitudes and actions of the
black rebels. Rucker outlines how the transformation of a shared cultural heritage
that shaped collective action against slavery corresponded to the various steps
Africans made in the process of becoming African American in culture,
orientation, and identity.40

The invocation of social death as ontologically inevitable inscribes a

pessimism towards politics which makes agency impossible and
oversimplifies the history of resistance
Brown 9 Vincent Brown, Prof. of History and African and African-American Studies @
Harvard Univ., December 2009, "Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,"
American Historical Review, p. 1231-1249

Specters of the Atlantic is a compellingly sophisticated study of the relation be- tween the
epistemologies underwriting both modern slavery and modern capitalism, but the books
discussion of the politics of anti-slavery is fundamentally incomplete. While Baucom brilliantly
traces the development of melancholy realism as an op- positional discourse that ran counter
to the logic of slavery and finance capital, he has very little to say about the enslaved themselves.
Social death, so well suited to the tragic perspective, stands in for the experience of
enslavement. While this heightens the readers sense of the way Atlantic slavery
haunts the present, Baucom largely fails to acknowledge that the enslaved performed
melancholy acts of accounting not unlike those that he shows to be a fundamental component of
abolitionist and human rights discourses, or that those acts could be a basic element of slaves
oppositional activities. In many ways, the effectiveness of his text depends upon the
silence of slavesit is easier to describe the continuity of structures of power when
one down- plays countervailing forces such as the political activity of the weak . So
Baucoms deep insights into the structural features of Atlantic slave trading and its afterlife
come with a cost. Without engagement with the politics of the enslaved, slaverys history serves
as an effective charge leveled against modernity and capitalism, but not as an uneven and
evolving process of human interaction, and certainly not as a locus of conflict in which the
enslaved sometimes won small but important victories.11
Specters of the Atlantic is self-consciously a work of theory (despite Baucoms prodigious
archival research), and social death may be largely unproblematic as a matter of theory, or even
law. In these arenas, as David Brion Davis has argued, the slave has no legitimate, independent
being, no place in the cosmos except as an instrument of her or his masters will.12 But the
concept often becomes a general description of actual social life in slavery. Vincent
Carretta, for example, in his au- thoritative biography of the abolitionist writer and former slave
Olaudah Equiano, agrees with Patterson that because enslaved Africans and their descendants
were stripped of their personal identities and history, [they] were forced to suffer what has
been aptly called social death. The self-fashioning enabled by writing and print allowed

Equiano to resurrect himself publicly from the condition that had been imposed by his
enslavement.13 The living conditions of slavery in eighteenth-century Jamaica, one slave society
with which Equiano had experience, are described in rich detail in Trevor Burnards unflinching
examination of the career of Thomas Thistle- wood, an English migrant who became an overseer
and landholder in Jamaica, and who kept a diary there from 1750 to 1786. Through
Thistlewoods descriptions of his life among slaves, Burnard glimpses a world of uncertainty,
where the enslaved were always vulnerable to repeated depredations that actually led to
significant slave dehumanization as masters sought, with considerable success, to obliterate
slaves personal histories. Burnard consequently concurs with Patterson: slavery completely
stripped slaves of their cultural heritage, brutalized them, and rendered ordinary life and normal
relationships extremely difficult.14 This was slavery, after all, and much more than a transfer of
migrants from Africa to America.15 Yet one wonders, after reading Burnards indispensable
account, how slaves in Jamaica or- ganized some of British Americas greatest political events
during Thistlewoods time and after, including the Coromantee Wars of the 1760s, the 1776
Hanover conspiracy, and the Baptist War of 18311832. Surely they must have found some way
to turn the disorganization, instability, and chaos of slavery into collective forms of belonging
and striving, making connections when confronted with alien- ation and finding dignity in the
face of dishonor. Rather than pathologizing slaves by allowing the condition of social
death to stand for the experience of life in slavery, then, it might be more helpful to
focus on what the enslaved actually made of their
situation.
Among the most insightful texts to explore the experiential meaning of Afro- Atlantic slavery
(for both the slaves and their descendants) are two recent books by Saidiya Hartman and
Stephanie Smallwood. Rather than eschewing the concept of social death, as might be expected
from writing that begins by considering the per- spective of the enslaved, these two authors use
the idea in penetrating ways. Hart- mans Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave
Route and Smallwoods Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American
Diaspora extend social death beyond a general description of slavery as a condition
and imagine it as an experience of self. Here both the promise and the problem
with the concept are most fully apparent.16
Both authors seek a deeper understanding of the experience of enslavement and
its consequences for the past, present, and future of black life than we generally find
in histories of slavery. In Hartmans account especially, slavery is not only an object of study, but
also the focus of a personal memoir. She travels along a slave route in Ghana, from its coastal
forts to the backcountry hinterlands, symbolically reversing the first stage of the trek now
commonly called the Middle Passage. In searching prose, she meditates on the history of
slavery in Africa to explore the precarious nature of belonging to the social
category African American. Rendering her re- markable facility with social theory in
elegant and affective terms, Hartman asks the question that nags all identities, but especially
those forged by the descendants of slaves: What identifications, imagined affinities, mythical
narratives, and acts of re- membering and forgetting hold the category together? Confronting
her own alienation from any story that would yield a knowable genealogy or a comfortable
identity, Hartman wrestles with what it means to be a stranger in ones putative motherland, to
be denied country, kin, and identity, and to forget ones pastto be an orphan.17 Ultimately, as
the title suggests, Lose Your Mother is an injunction to accept dis- possession as the basis of
black self-definition.
Such a judgment is warranted, in Hartmans account, by the implications of social death both for
the experience of enslavement and for slaverys afterlife in the present. As Patterson delineated
in sociological terms the death of social personhood and the reincorporation of individuals into
slavery, Hartman sets out on a personal quest to retrace the process by which lives were
destroyed and slaves born.18 When she contends with what it meant to be a slave, she

frequently invokes Pattersons idiom: Seized from home, sold in the market, and
severed from kin, the slave was for all intents and purposes dead, no less so than
had he been killed in combat. No less so than had she never belonged to the world. By
making men, women, and children into commodities, enslavement destroyed lineages, tethering
people to own- ers rather than families, and in this way it annulled lives, transforming men and
women into dead matter, and then resuscitated them for servitude. Admittedly, the enslaved
lived and breathed, but they were dead in the social world of men.19 As it turns out, this kind
of alienation is also part of what it presently means to be African American. The transience of
the slaves existence, for example, still leaves its traces in how black people imagine and speak
of home:
We never tire of dreaming of a place that we can call home, a place better than here, wherever
here might be . . . We stay there, but we dont live there . . . Staying is living in a country without
exercising any claims on its resources. It is the perilous condition of existing in a world in which
you have no investments. It is having never resided in a place that you can say is yours. It is
being of the house but not having a stake in it. Staying implies transient quarters, a makeshift
domicile, a temporary shelter, but no attachment or affiliation. This sense of not belonging and
of being an extraneous element is at the heart of slavery.20
We may have forgotten our country, Hartman writes, but we havent forgotten our
dispossession.21
Like Baucom, Hartman sees the history of slavery as a constituent part of a tragic
present. Atlantic slavery continues to be manifested in black peoples skewed life
chances, poor education and health, and high rates of incarceration, poverty, and
premature death. Disregarding the commonplace temporalities of professional
historians, whose literary conventions are generally predicated on a formal distinction
between past, present, and future, Hartman addresses slavery as a problem that
spans all three. The afterlife of slavery inhabits the nature of belonging, which in turn guides
the freedom dreams that shape prospects for change. If slavery persists as an issue in the
political life of black America, she writes, it is not because of an antiquated obsession with
bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and
devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago.22
A professor of English and comparative literature, Hartman is in many respects in a better
position than most historians to understand events such as the funeral aboard the Hudibras.
This is because for all of her evident erudition, her scholarship is harnessed not so much to a
performance of mastery over the facts of what hap- pened, which might substitute precision for
understanding, as to an act of mourning, even yearning. She writes with a depth of introspection
and personal anguish that is transgressive of professional boundaries but absolutely appropriate
to the task. Reading Hartman, one wonders how a historian could ever write
dispassionately about slavery without feeling complicit and ashamed. For
dispassionate accountingexemplified by the ledgers of slave tradershas been a great
weapon of the powerful, an episteme that made the grossest violations of
personhood acceptable, even necessary. This is the kind of bookkeeping that bore fruit
upon the Zong. It made it easier for a trader to countenance yet another dead black body or for
a captain to dump a shipload of captives into the sea in order to collect the insurance, since it
wasnt possible to kill cargo or to murder a thing already denied life. Death was simply part of
the workings of the trade. The archive of slavery, then, is a mortuary. Not content to total up
the body count, Hartman offers elegy, echoing in her own way the lamentations of the women
aboard the Hudibras. Like them, she is concerned with the dead and what they mean to the
living. I was desperate to reclaim the dead, she writes, to reckon with the lives undone and
obliterated in the making of human commodities.23
It is this mournful quality of Lose Your Mother that elevates it above so many histories of
slavery, but the same sense of lament seems to require that Hartman overlook small

but significant political victories like the one described by Butter- worth. Even as Hartman
seems to agree with Paul Gilroy on the value of seeing the consciousness of the slave as
involving an extended act of mourning, she remains so focused on her own
commemorations that her text makes little space for a consideration of how the
enslaved struggled with alienation and the fragility of belonging, or of the mourning
rites they used to confront their condition.24 All of the ques- tions she raises about the meaning
of slavery in the presentboth highly personal and insistently politicalmight as well be asked
about the meaning of slavery to slaves themselves, that is, if one begins by closely examining
their social and political lives rather than assuming their lack of social being. Here Hartman is
undone by her reliance on Orlando Pattersons totalizing definition of slavery. She
asserts that no solace can be found in the death of the slave, no higher ground can be located,
no perspective can be found from which death serves a greater good or becomes any- thing other
than what it is.25 If she is correct, the events on the Hudibras were of negligible importance.
And indeed, Hartmans understandable emphasis on the personal damage wrought by
slavery encourages her to disavow two generations of social history that have
demonstrated slaves remarkable capacity to forge fragile com- munities, preserve
cultural inheritance, and resist the predations of slaveholders. This in turn precludes
her from describing the ways that violence, dislocation, and death actually generate culture,
politics, and consequential action by the enslaved.26
This limitation is particularly evident in a stunning chapter that Hartman calls The Dead
Book. Here she creatively reimagines the events that occurred on the voyage of the slave ship
Recovery, bound, like the Hudibras, from the Bight of Biafra to Grenada, when Captain John
Kimber hung an enslaved girl naked from the mizzen stay and beat her, ultimately to her death,
for being sulky: she was sick and could not dance when so ordered. As Hartman notes, the
event would have been unre- markable had not Captain Kimber been tried for murder on the
testimony of the ships surgeon, a brief transcript of the trial been published, and the womans
death been offered up as allegory by the abolitionist William Wilberforce and the graphic satirist
Isaac Cruikshank. Hartman re-creates the murder and the surge of words it inspired,
representing the perspectives of the captain, the surgeon, and the aboli tionist, for each of whom
the girl was a cipher outfitted in a different guise, and then she puts herself in the position of
the victim, substituting her own voice for the unknowable thoughts of the girl. Imagining the
experience as her own and wistfully representing her demise as a suicidea final act of agency
Hartman hopes, by this bold device, to save the girl from oblivion. Or perhaps her hope is to
prove the impossibility of ever doing so, because by failing, she concedes that the girl cannot be
put to rest. It is a compelling move, but there is something missing. Hartman discerns a
convincing subject position for all of the participants in the events sur- rounding the death of the
girl, except for the other slaves who watched the woman die and carried the memory with them
to the Americas, presumably to tell others, plausibly even survivors of the Hudibras, who must
have drawn from such stories a basic perspective on the history of the Atlantic world. For the
enslaved spectators, Hartman imagines only a fatalistic detachment: The women were
assembled a few feet away, but it might well have been a thousand. They held back from the girl,
steering clear of her bad luck, pestilence, and recklessness. Some said she had lost her mind.
What could they do, anyway? The women danced and sang as she lay dying.
Hartman ends her odyssey among the Gwolu, descendants of peoples who fled the slave raids
and who, as communities of refugees, shared her sense of dispos- session. Newcomers were
welcome. It didnt matter that they werent kin because genealogy didnt matter; rather,
building community did. Lose Your Mother con- cludes with a moving description of a
particular one of their songs, a lament for those who were lost, which resonated deeply with her
sense of slaverys meaning in the present. And yet Hartman has more difficulty hearing similar
cries intoned in the past by slaves who managed to find themselves.27

Saltwater Slavery has much in common with Lose Your Mother. Smallwoods study of the slave
trade from the Gold Coast to the British Americas in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries likewise redeems the experience of the people traded like so many bolts of cloth, who
were represented merely as ciphers in the political arithmetic, and therefore feature in the
documentary record not as subjects of a social history but as objects or quantities.28 Each text
offers a penetrating analysis of the market logic that turned people into goods. Both books work
with the concept of social death. However, Smallwood examines the problem of social death for
the enslaved even more closely than Hartman does.29
Like Hartman, Smallwood sees social death as a by-product of commodification. If in the
regime of the market Africans most socially relevant feature was their exchangeability, she
argues, for Africans as immigrants the most socially relevant feature was their isolation, their
desperate need to restore some measure of social life to counterbalance the alienation
engendered by their social death. But Small- woods approach is different in a subtle way.
Whereas for Hartman, as for others, social death is an accomplished state of being, Smallwood
veers between a notion of social death as an actual condition produced by violent
dislocation and social death as a compelling threat. On the one hand, she argues,
captivity on the Atlantic littoral was a social death. Exchangeable persons inhabited a new
category of mar- ginalization, one not of extreme alienation within the community, but rather of
ab- solute exclusion from any community. She seems to accept the idea of enslaved
commodities as finished products for whom there could be no socially relevant
relationships: the slave cargo constituted the antithesis of community. Yet elsewhere she
contends that captives were only menaced with social death. At every point along the passage
from African to New World markets, she writes, we find a stark contest between slave traders
and slaves, between the traders will to commodify people and the captives will to remain fully
recognizable as human subjects.30 Here, I think, Smallwood captures the truth of the idea:
social death was a receding ho- rizonthe farther slaveholders moved toward the goal of
complete mastery, the more they found that struggles with their human property would
continue, even into the most elemental realms: birth, hunger, health, fellowship, sex, death, and
time.
If social death did not define the slaves condition, it did frame their vision of apocalypse. In a
harrowing chapter on the meaning of death (that is, physical death) during the Atlantic passage,
Smallwood is clear that the captives could have no frame of reference for the experience aboard
the slave ships, but she also shows how des- perate they were to make one. If they could not
reassemble some meaningful way to map their social worlds, slaves could foresee only further
descent into an endless purgatory. The women aboard the Hudibras were not in fact
the living dead; they were the mothers of gasping new societies. Their view of the
danger that confronted them made their mourning rites vitally important, putting
these at the center of the womens emerging lives as slavesand as a result at the
heart of the struggles that would define them. As Smallwood argues, this was first and
foremost a battle over their presence in time, to define their place among ancestors, kin, friends,
and future progeny. The connection Africans needed was a narrative continuity between past
and presentan epistemological means of connecting the dots between there and here, then and
now, to craft a coherent story out of incoherent experience. That is precisely what the women
on the Hudibras fought to accomplish.31

Extinction OW
Extinction outweighs social death and ontology
Anders Sandberg, James Martin Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, et al.,
with Jason G. Matheny, Ph.D. candidate in Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School
of Public Health and Special Consultant to the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center,
and Milan M. irkovi, Senior Research Associate at the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade and Assistant
Professor of Physics at the University of Novi Sad in Serbia and Montenegro, 2008 (How can we reduce the risk of
human extinction?, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September 8th, Available Online at http://thebulletin.org/webedition/features/how-can-we-reduce-the-risk-of-human-extinction)

The facts are sobering. More than 99.9 percent of species that have ever existed on Earth have gone
extinct. Over the long run, it seems likely that humanity will meet the same fate. In less than a billion years, the increased intensity of the Sun will initiate a wet
greenhouse effect, even without any human interference, making Earth inhospitable to life. A couple of billion years later Earth will be destroyed, when it's engulfed
by our Sun as it expands into a red-giant star. If we colonize space, we could survive longer than our planet, but as mammalian species survive, on average, only two
million years, we should consider ourselves very lucky if we make it to one billion. Humanity could be extinguished as early as this century by succumbing to natural
hazards, such as an extinction-level asteroid or comet impact, supervolcanic eruption, global methane-hydrate release, or nearby supernova or gamma-ray burst.
(Perhaps the most probable of these hazards, supervolcanism, was discovered only in the last 25 years, suggesting that other natural hazards may remain

the probability of any one of these events killing off our species is very lowless than
one in 100 million per year, given what we know about their past frequency. But as improbable as these events
are, measures to reduce their probability can still be worthwhile. For instance, investments in asteroid
detection and deflection technologies cost less, per life saved, than most investments in medicine. While an extinctionlevel asteroid impact is very unlikely, its improbability is outweighed by its potential death toll . The
risks from anthropogenic hazards appear at present larger than those from natural ones. Although great progress has been made in
reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the world, humanity is still threatened by the possibility of a global
thermonuclear war and a resulting nuclear winter. We may face even greater risks from emerging technologies. Advances in
unrecognized.) Fortunately

synthetic biology might make it possible to engineer pathogens capable of extinction-level pandemics. The knowledge, equipment, and materials needed to engineer
pathogens are more accessible than those needed to build nuclear weapons. And unlike other weapons, pathogens are self-replicating, allowing a small arsenal to
become exponentially destructive. Pathogens have been implicated in the extinctions of many wild species. Although most pandemics "fade out" by reducing the
density of susceptible populations, pathogens with wide host ranges in multiple species can reach even isolated individuals. The intentional or unintentional release of
engineered pathogens with high transmissibility, latency, and lethality might be capable of causing human extinction. While such an event seems unlikely today, the
likelihood may increase as biotechnologies continue to improve at a rate rivaling Moore's Law. Farther out in time are technologies that remain theoretical but might
be developed this century. Molecular nanotechnology could allow the creation of self-replicating machines capable of destroying the ecosystem. And advances in
neuroscience and computation might enable improvements in cognition that accelerate the invention of new weapons. A survey at the Oxford conference found that
concerns about human extinction were dominated by fears that new technologies would be misused. These emerging threats are especially challenging as they could
become dangerous more quickly than past technologies, outpacing society's ability to control them. As H.G. Wells noted, "Human history becomes more and more a

Such remote risks may seem academic in a world plagued by immediate

problems, such as global poverty, HIV, and climate change. But as intimidating as these problems
are, they do not threaten human existence. In discussing the risk of nuclear winter, Carl Sagan emphasized the
astronomical toll of human extinction: A nuclear war imperils all of our descendants, for as long as
there will be humans. Even if the population remains static, with an average lifetime of the order of 100 years, over a
typical time period for the biological evolution of a successful species (roughly ten million years), we are talking about
some 500 trillion people yet to come. By this criterion, the stakes are one million times greater for
extinction than for the more modest nuclear wars that kill "only" hundreds of millions of people.
There are many other possible measures of the potential lossincluding culture and science, the
evolutionary history of the planet, and the significance of the lives of all of our ancestors who
contributed to the future of their descendants. Extinction is the undoing of the human enterprise .
There is a discontinuity between risks that threaten 10 percent or even 99 percent of humanity and
those that threaten 100 percent. For disasters killing less than all humanity, there is a good chance
that the species could recover. If we value future human generations, then reducing extinction risks
should dominate our considerations. Fortunately, most measures to reduce these risks also improve global security against a range of
race between education and catastrophe."

lesser catastrophes, and thus deserve support regardless of how much one worries about extinction. These measures include: Removing nuclear weapons from hairtrigger alert and further reducing their numbers; Placing safeguards on gene synthesis equipment to prevent synthesis of select pathogens; Improving our ability to
respond to infectious diseases, including rapid disease surveillance, diagnosis, and control, as well as accelerated drug development; Funding research on asteroid
detection and deflection, "hot spot" eruptions, methane hydrate deposits, and other catastrophic natural hazards; Monitoring developments in key disruptive
technologies, such as nanotechnology and computational neuroscience, and developing international policies to reduce the risk of catastrophic accidents.

*State Not Always Racist---Wall

Too sweeping to say working-through-State never counters racism
heres 7 concrete examples:
Seligman 11 Brad Seligman Lead Counsel, Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc The

nationwide class action gender discrimination case against Wal-Mart Stores and founder of the
Impact Fund, which provides financial and technicalassistance and representation for complex
public interest litigation Clearinghouse REVIEW Journal of Poverty Law and Policy
JanuaryFebruary 2011
http://www.impactfund.org/downloads/Resources/UsingLawForChange-Seligman.pdf
Litigation as a tool for social change has a long and proud tradition in the U nited
States. In the nineteenth century cases were brought to challenge discriminatory laws such as
the Chinese Exclusion Act and to advance labor rights and the rights of women
and people of color. In the twentieth century the epic battle to dismantle Jim Crow
laws and the separate but equal doctrine culminated in the famous Brown v.
Board of Education decision. In the 1960s federal rules were developed to make
class action litigation more feasible, and courts approved massive institutionalchange cases against industries and governmental units .1 In the 1970s environmental
litigation, aided by the passage of federal laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act, became common.
Starting in the 1980s, however, social justice litigation has become more challenging to pursue due to more conservative judges,
tougher class certification and substantive law decisions, more demanding attorney-fee and cost-recovery requirements, the
decline in federal enforcement of civil rights and environmental laws, and cutbacks and restrictions on legal services funding.2 Still,
such litigation

remains a potent weapon for change . In recent years the environmental justice and
disability rights movements have shown that the path remains open for innovative litigation. Today we nevertheless must be
more strategic and thoughtful about how we use litigation . Here I describe a holistic
model of social justice litigation that includes adroit use of the media, coalitions, and
working partnerships with community and grassroots organizations and other
forms of advocacy. I explore the range of procedural devices in the social justice litigators tool box. And I remind readers
to take pride in and enjoy their work.

And, meaningful reformism now disproves sweeping claim.

Farber 98

Daniel A., Associate Dean for Faculty and Research, and Henry J. Fletcher Professor of Law,
University of Minnesota. J.D., summa cum laude, University of Illinois School of Law, 1975,
KRINOCK LECTURE SERIES: IS AMERICAN LAW INHERENTLY RACIST?, 15 T.M. Cooley
L. Rev. 361, lexis
PROFESSOR FARBER: As I was getting ready to leave for the airport, my wife gave me a final piece of advice about this debate. She
said, "Don't be too reasonable." Nevertheless, I would like to begin by stressing some common ground that I think may get lost
because the debate format naturally encourages us to take adversarial positions. In reality, Professor Delgado and I share a great
deal in our views of law and American society. Both of us see the issue of racial inequality as being central and requiring the most
serious possible attention. Both of us reject the conservative dogma of color blindness, and both of us, as I think will be shown
tonight, believe that one imperative need is for dialogue and discussion of this topic if we are to make any progress. So we do have
something in common. But we also have a fundamental disagreement, I think, a disagreement that is illustrated by the fact that we

are on the opposite sides of this debate about the inherent racism of American law .
As Professor Delgado said in his introductory remarks, critical race theory'sview is essentially that racism is embedded in the DNA of
American law. And that in effect, racism is not merely a widespread blemish on American law, but is instead, a radical infection that
goes right to the heart of the legal system. I disagree with that for reasons that I will hopefully make clear. [*375] I think that this
thesis rests on a one-sided view of the legal system. I think that it is based on a misunderstanding of some of the fundamental
principles of the system. I think in the end, despite what I know are Professor Delgado's good intentions, that the inherent

racism position (and critical race theory, in general) risks being more destructive than
constructive in terms of advancing our national conversation on race. I noticed that Professor

Delgado postponed the issue of inherent racism, or the inherency of racism, until his next ten minutes. I may also put off, to some
extent, my discussion of that point as well, though I will refer to it briefly. Let me begin with the vision of the American legal system
that Professor Delgado presented in his first twenty minutes. I do not intend to deny the reality of the dark side of American law in
American legal history, and that dark side has indeed been very bad at times. Nevertheless, I think one might equally point

to some more positive aspects of American legal society , and that we get only a skewed
and incomplete picture if we focus only on one side of the picture : if we ignore the
Thirteenth, n15 Fourteenth, n16 and Fifteenth n17 Amendments; if we ignore Brown v. Board
of Education n18 and the work of the Warren Court; if we ignore the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, n19
1965, n20 and 1990; n21 and if we ignore or minimize the commitment to affirmative action that many American
institutions, especially educational institutions, have had for the past two decades. I do not think you have to be a
triumphalist to think that these are important developments-you only have to be a realist. Similarly, as serious as the problem of
racial inequality remains in our society, it is also unrealistic to ignore the considerable amount of

progress that has been made. Consider the emergence of the black middle class in
the last generation or generation and a half, and the [*376] integration of important American
institutions such as big-city police forces, which are important in the day-to-day lives of many minority people. The military
has sometimes been described as the most successfully integrated institution in American society. We all know, as well, that the
number of minority lawyers has risen substantially. In state and federal
legislatures, there was no such thing as a black caucus in Congress thirty or forty years
ago, because there would not have been enough black people present to call a caucus. And do not forget the
considerable evidence of sharp changes in white attitudes over that period in a
more favorable and tolerant direction.

*Pessimism towards progressivism inverts the error and makes

racism worse. This card rules:
Jones 99

Richard Wyn Jones is at Cardiff University, where he is currently a Professor of Politics.

Professor Wyn Jones is the former Director of the Institute of Welsh Politics and professor in
critical security studies at Aberystwyth University. Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory
1999. ISBN 1-55587-335-9 (hc. :alk. paper) ON-LINE ED.: Columbia International Affairs
Online, Transcribed, proofread, and marked-up in HTML, September 1999.
An even more troubling feature of Adorno and Horkheimers analysis is the downplaying of individual responsibility that is implicit
in their argument. If Auschwitz is the inevitable outcome of enlightenment, and if instrumental rationality is too powerful to resist,
then can we expect an individual Nazi to act in a different fashion? In the hermetic society the individual is a mere cipher, and if this
is the case, can any individual really be blamed for his or her behavior? These questions highlight an ethical

lacuna at the heart of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Despite the obvious intentions of the authors, their analysis
generates a logic that renders them unable to differentiate meaningfully between
different actions in the political realm. If nothing complicitous with this world can have any truth, then
surely everything that exists in the real world must be judged equally untrue or false. But if this is so, how are we to
evaluate efforts at securing change in contemporary society? Let us consider the
ending of apartheid in South Africa. Although the citizens of that country cannot be
adjudged to be free after the overthrow of the apartheid system, surely they are freer .
Although the establishment of liberal democracy there offers no panacea, it is a better
system than the totalitarian one that it has replaced . But although Adorno and Horkheimer as
individuals would almost certainly have rejoiced in the downfall of the apartheid system, as theoreticians they seem
to be unable to provide us with any grounds for favoring one particular set of
social institutions over another. Here we have a bizarre inversion of the relativism to
which contemporary poststructuralist approaches are prone. By arguing that there are no grounds to choose between different
accounts of reality, poststructuralists are inevitably forced to accept that all accounts of a given reality are true. They can make no
judgment on these claims that is not arbitrary (Norris 1992; Hunter and Wyn Jones 1995). Similarly, by arguing that

everything in the world is equally false, Adorno and Horkheimer can make no judgment as to
why we might prefer some forms of behavior and some set of practices over others. Here the impasse
into which the analysis of Dialectic of Enlightenment leads its authors stands in bold relief. The determinism and

reductionism of their argument is ultimately paralyzing. It was, of course, Antonio Gramsci who
popularized the injunction that all those intent on changing society should attempt to face the world with a combination of
pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. This position has much to commend it given the propensity of radicals to
view society with rosetinted glasses. However, the limitations of this position are nowhere better illustrated than in Dialectic of
Enlightenment, in which the pessimism is so thoroughgoing that it becomes absolutely

debilitating. Any attempt to challenge the status quo already stands condemned as
futile. The logical outcome of this attitude is resignation and passivity . Adorno
attempted to make a virtue of the detached attitude that he and Horkheimer adopted toward the political struggles of their own age
by claiming: If one is concerned to achieve what might be possible with human beings, it is extremely difficult to remain friendly
towards real people. However, considering that it is only real people who can bring about a better society, Adornos complex
form of misanthropy ultimately leads only to quiescence (Wiggershaus 1994: 268). Thus, despite the clear similarities in the
influences and interests of the founding fathers of critical theory and Gramsci, the resignatory passivity of the authors
of Dialectic of Enlightenment led them to a position on political practice far more akin to that of Oswald Spengler or
Arthur Schopenhauer than to that adopted by the Sardinian Marxist Gramsci, even as he languished in a fascist prison. In view of
the traditional Marxist emphasis on the unity of theory and practice, it is hardly surprising that Adorno and Horkheimers rejection
of any attempt to orient their work toward political activity led to bitter criticism from other radical intellectuals. Perhaps the most
famous such condemnation was that of Lukcs, who acidly commented that the members of the Frankfurt School had taken up
residence in the Grand Hotel Abyss. The inhabitants of this institution enjoyed all the comforts of the bourgeois lifestyle while
fatalistically surveying the wreckage of life beyond its doors. Whereas Lukcss own apologias for Stalinism point to the dangers of
subordinating theoretical activity to the exigencies of daytoday practical politics, Adorno and Horkheimer sunder theory and
political practice completely, impoverishing the theoretical activity itself. Their stance leads to an aridity and scholasticism ill suited
to any social theory that aspires to realworld relevance. Furthermore, the critical theorists position on

political practice is based on an underestimation of the potential for progressive

change that exists even in the most administered societies. It is instructive to contrast the attitude of Adorno and Horkheimer
with that of Raymond Williams, who delivers the following broadside against high culture Marxists such as the members of the
Frankfurt School: When the Marxists say that we live in a dying culture, and that the masses are ignorant, I have to ask them...
where on earth they have lived. A dying culture, and ignorant masses, are not what I have known and see. (R. Williams 1989: 8) As I
will discuss in Chapter 6, the evidence suggests that Williams is closer to the truth. People acting both individually
and collectively, through social movements and state institutions, can actually
influence the world around them in a progressive direction . Adorno and Horkheimers
pessimism is unwarranted.

State Not Always Racist---Ext

Reforms are possible and desirable---tangible change outweighs the
risk of cooption and is still a better strategy than the alt
Michael Omi 13, and Howard Winant, Resistance is futile?: a response to Feagin and Elias,

Ethnic and Racial Studies Volume 36, Issue 6, p. 961-973, 2013 Special Issue: Symposium Rethinking Racial Formation Theory
In Feagin and Elias's account, white racist rule in the USA appears unalterable and permanent. There is little
sense that the white racial frame evoked by systemic racism theory changes in
significant ways over historical time. They dismiss important rearrangements
and reforms as merely a distraction from more ingrained structural oppressions
and deep lying inequalities that continue to define US society (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21). Feagin and Elias use a
concept they call surface flexibility to argue that white elites frame racial realities in ways that suggest
change, but are merely engineered to reinforce the underlying structure of racial
oppression. Feagin and Elias say the phrase racial democracy is an oxymoron a word defined in the dictionary as a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms. If they
mean the USA is a contradictory and incomplete democracy in respect to race and racism
issues, we agree. If they mean that people of colour have no democratic rights or
political power in the USA, we disagree. The USA is a racially despotic country in many ways, but in our view it is also in many respects
a racial democracy, capable of being influenced towards more or less inclusive and
redistributive economic policies, social policies, or for that matter, imperial policies. What is distinctive about our own epoch in the USA (post-Second World War to the present) with
respect to race and racism? Over the past decades there has been a steady drumbeat of efforts to contain and neutralize civil rights, to restrict racial democracy, and to maintain or even increase racial inequality.
Racial disparities in different institutional sites employment, health, education persist and in many cases have increased. Indeed, the post-2008 period has seen a dramatic increase in racial inequality. The
subprime home mortgage crisis, for example, was a major racial event. Black and brown people were disproportionately affected by predatory lending practices; many lost their homes as a result; race-based
wealth disparities widened tremendously. It would be easy to conclude, as Feagin and Elias do, that white racial dominance has been continuous and unchanging throughout US history. But such a perspective

Feagin and Elias claim that we overly inflate the

that we overlook the serious reversals of racial justice
and persistence of huge racial inequalities (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21) that followed in its wake. We do not. In Racial
Formation we wrote about racial reaction in a chapter of that name, and elsewhere in the book as well. Feagin and Elias devote little attention to our arguments there; perhaps because they are
misses the dramatic twists and turns in racial politics that have occurred since the Second World War and the civil rights era.
significance of the changes wrought by the civil rights movement, and

in substantial agreement with us . While we argue that the right wing was able to rearticulate race and racism issues to roll back some of the gains of the civil
rights movement, we also believe that there are limits to what the right could achieve in the post-civil rights political landscape. So we agree that the present prospects for racial justice are demoralizing at best. But

US racial conditions have changed over the post-Second World

War period, in ways that Feagin and Elias tend to downplay or neglect. Some of the major reforms of the 1960s have
proved irreversible; they have set powerful democratic forces in motion . These racial
(trans)formations were the results of unprecedented political mobilizations, led by
the black movement, but not confined to blacks alone. Consider the desegregation of the
armed forces, as well as key civil rights movement victories of the 1960s: the Voting Rights Act, the Immigration and
Naturalization Act (Hart- Celler), as well as important court decisions like Loving v. Virginia that declared antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional. While we have the greatest respect for the late Derrick Bell, we do not believe that
his interest convergence hypothesis effectively explains all these developments . How
we do not think that is the whole story.

does Lyndon Johnson's famous (and possibly apocryphal) lament upon signing the Civil Rights Act on 2 July 1964 We have lost the South for a generation count as convergence? The US racial regime has

hegemony proceeds through the incorporation of

opposition (Gramsci 1971, p. 182). The civil rights reforms can be seen as a classic example of this
process; here the US racial regime under movement pressure was exercising its hegemony. But Gramsci insists that such reforms which he
calls passive revolutions cannot be merely symbolic if they are to be effective:
been transformed in significant ways. As Antonio Gramsci argues,

oppositions must win real gains in the process .

Once again,

we are in the realm of

politics, not absolute rule. So yes, we think there were important if partial victories that
shifted the racial state and transformed the significance of race in everyday life. And yes,
we think that further victories can take place both on the broad terrain of the state and on
the more immediate level of social interaction : in daily interaction, in the human psyche and across civil
society. Indeed we have argued that in many ways the most important accomplishment of the anti-racist movement of the 1960s in the USA was the politicization of the

social. In the USA and indeed around the globe, race-based movements demanded not only the inclusion of
racially defined others and the democratization of structurally racist societies,
but also the recognition and validation by both the state and civil society of
racially-defined experience and identity. These demands broadened and deepened
democracy itself. They facilitated not only the democratic gains made in the USA by the black movement and its allies, but also the political advances towards equality, social justice and
inclusion accomplished by other new social movements: second-wave feminism, gay liberation, and the environmentalist and anti-war movements among others. By no means do we
think that the post-war movement upsurge was an unmitigated success. Far from it: all the new social
movements were subject to the same rearticulation (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, p. xii) that produced the racial ideology of colourblindness and its variants; indeed all these movements confronted their mirror

Yet even their incorporation and containment, even their

confrontations with the various backlash phenomena of the past few decades, even the need to develop
the highly contradictory ideology of colourblindness, reveal the transformative
images in the mobilizations that arose from the political right to counter them.

character of the politicization of the social. While it is not possible here to explore so extensive a subject, it is worth noting that it was the longdelayed eruption of racial subjectivity and self-awareness into the mainstream political
arena that set off this transformation, shaping both the democratic and antidemocratic social movements that are evident in US politics today .

Liberal reformism is the only way to avoid reductive theories that

collapse into totalitarianism---making the system live up to its empty
promises of equality is better than discarding equality
Jefferey Pyle 99, Boston College Law School, J.D., magna cum laude, Race, Equality and the
Rule of Law: Critical Race Theory's Attack on the Promises of Liberalism, 40 B.C.L. Rev. 787
Liberal principles are therefore "indeterminate" to the extent that they are not
mechanically determinative of every controversy.224 Indeed, as Samuel Huntington has pointed out, Americans hold
potentially conflicting ideals (such as individualism and democracy, liberty and equality) simultaneously, without trying to resolve the conflicts between them once and for
1111.2" Rather,

they have set up processes and institutions to resolve conflicts pragmatically,

case-by-case , issue-byissue, problem-by-problem

. 226

Liberals, unlike radical legal

theorists, assume that there are no universal solvents , that values are not easily ranked"' and that
reasoning by analogy is usually more helpful (and more persuasive) than deductions from the
abstract theories of philosopher-kings. 228 Liberal politics, like the common-law courts on which it relies,
requires perpetual re-examination of both the major and minor premises of most legal syllogisms. It
allows for both continuity and change, stability and flexibility , tradition and
innovation. 52 The liberal system's celebrated capacity for social change rests in the
ability of aggrieved citizens to confront power-holders, such as legislators, judges or voters, with their
failures to live up to the promises of the "American Creed."23" In doing so, the aggrieved can argue with sonic
force that they are seeking justice, not revolution, when in fact they may be seeking both."' The Voting Rights Act of 1965, for example, was not
a radical measure, yet it started a revolution in Southern politics.232 It purported to secure a right

already enshrined in the Fifteenth Amendment,233 and thus fulfill fundamental notions of equality that most Americans could not easily deny.231 The Act would probably not
have passed, however, if it had been presented as a benefit to one group to the detriment of another in a zero-sum power game. Second, liberal politics is about morality as well
as interests. It is about holding public officials morally and politically responsible for meeting unfulfilled promises.235 By casting victims of discrimination as legitimate
claimants to the promise of equality in the American Creed, liberal politics gives victims the higher moral ground, without fully separating them from the people whose
oppressive behavior they seek to change.2"" The Reverend Martin Luther King exemplified this promissory politics best on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, when he
said: In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check: When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of
Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was the promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would
be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note. ... America has given
Negro people a had check; a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of this nation. And

King

so we have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom, and the security of justice. 2"7 Through this metaphor,
brilliantly
articulated the promises and realities that animated the civil rights revolution in America. 238 He reminded Americans of their founding principles, assumed the fundamental

did not paint whites as irredeemably

racist; he simply insisted that they live up to their obligations.") To Derrick Bell, in
contrast, the coffers of justice in America have always been empty. To him, the promises of liberalism are just
equality of the bargainers, and placed the power structure on the delensive.239 King

"bogus freedom checks" which "the Man" will never honor.24 ' Bell, like other race-crits, attacks American liberalism from a European political orientation, which conceives of

all politics is power politics, and law serves merely as

oppression by the group that happens to be in power.2'3 No common principles exist which might persuade whites to he more inclusive. 241 The
race-crits, like other class theorists, do not attempt to prove that African Americans are permanently
disadvantaged; they simply assert it. Nor do they acknowledge that black
politics as a zero-sum struggle between entrenched classes or groups.242 In this view,
an instrument or

Americans have made considerable (although Far from satisfactory) progress since
de jure segregation was ended."' Critical race theory, like Marxism before it, clings to group "domination" as the single
cause of disadvantage.2' 7 It takes one unifying idea racial dominationand tries to fit all facts
and law into it. 248 Liberalism, on the other hand, distrusts grand unifying theories ,
preferring to emphasize process over ends . 24' As a result, liberalism frustrates anyone, Left
or Right, who would have governments embrace their ideologies .25 Because of the value liberals place on liberty,
they tend to he wary of the sort of power concentrations that could mandate changes quickly."' They prefer a more incremental
approach to political change that depends on the consent of the governed, even when the governed are often ignorant, misguided and even
bigoted. 252 Liberalism is never utopian, by anyone's definition, but always procedural, because it presupposes a society of
people who profoundly disagree with each other and whose interests, goals, stakes and stands, cannot
easily, if ever, be fully reconciled.'" Because of these differences, liberals know there is no such
thing as a "benevolent despot," and that utopias almost invariably turn out to be dystopias . 254 Racecrits, on the other hand, are profoundly utopian and sometimes totalitarian .25' In their view, the law should ferret out and
eliminate white racism at any costa''' Richard Delgado, for example, complains that "[n]othing in the law requires any [white] to lend a helping hand, to try to help blacks find
jobs, befriend them, speak to them, make eye contact with them, help them fix a flat when they arc stranded on the highway, help them feel like 11111 persons. ... How can a
system like that change anything?"257

The race-crits, in their preoccupation with power, forget that

the power to persuade remains the principal way of achieving lasting change in a
democratic political culture .258 A beneficial but controversial measure is much
more likely to survive changes of the party in power if it can be said to carry out the
will of "the people," from whom all power in the United States is said to derive. 25" For example, the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
controversial as it was,'" has remained a bulwark of civil rights protection for thirty-six years because of its
democratic and constitutional legitimacy. 2"1 On the other hand, if Malcolm X or the Black Panthers had
attempted to set up a separate black state on American soil in the tradition of John Brown, their efforts would have
been crushed immediately .

Our even if arg. If they win the States uniformly racist in current
form, still vote Aff. Ignores reconstructive liberalism, and what the
State *could yet become*. Contextualizes to plan and perm
Ward 99

Cynthia V. Ward Professor of Law, College of William and Mary. WILLIAM AND MARY LAW
REVIEW
Vol. 40:719 http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1554andcontext=wmlr
However bruised by the continuous attacks of its radical critics, "liberal legalism" has so far
survived the critical onslaught. But like all battles between powerful opponents the fight has
produced casualties on both sides. Liberal theorists have responded to radical attacks by reexamining certain facile assumptions about the priority of individual autonomy, the nature of
rationality, and the possibility of state neutrality, and replacing them with a rich and
provocative literature that affirmatively defends liberal values and celebrates
liberal legal institutions as the best- perhaps the only -way of respecting and
encouraging human "difference" while also maximizing freedom and equality.
On the other side, the work of radical critics of liberalism has begun to reflect the
idea that liberal values-appropriately modified-are worth examining in a
reconstructive light. Without losing sight of the injustices that have been inflicted on
vulnerable groups under the liberal American Constitution, at least some radical theorists seem
willing to concede that something precious, perhaps even irreplaceable, would be lost
were liberal rights and institutions, with their vision of respect for individual dignity and

their desire to maximize individual freedom, to be rejected wholesale along with the
scourges of racism and sexism that have always shadowed them.
It is tempting to oversimplify . One should take seriously the declared
motivations and concerns of one's opponents, and be careful not to discover casually
that they have been on one's side all along, although somehow without realizing it. Let me
therefore emphasize that I think there are important and irreconcilable differences, at
many levels, between liberal visions of the person, of politics, and of the law, and the
visions articulated by liberalism's communitarian, critical race, feminist, and
postmodern critics. What I find most fascinating in recent legal theory, though, is the
increasingly apparent intuition that amid such basic differences there is also a growing
area of common ground. Ironically, it may be that the reconstruction of liberal
legalism, in some recognizable form, will become the single most dramatic result
of radical legal theory.

The masters tools can be used to dismantle the masters house

James 9 Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of North

Carolina at Charlotte (Robin M, Autonomy, Universality, and Playing the Guitar: On the Politics
and Aesthetics of Contemporary Feminist Deployments of the Master's Tools, April 14, DOI:
10.1111/j.1527-2001.2009.01033.x)
In these two instances of successful reappropriation of the master's tools
autonomy/universality and the guitarthe particular, real-world advantages offered by this
technique might even require its adoption in instances where nothing else can do
what it does. Indeed, to require that we categorically abandon the master's tools
seems itself to be an overly abstract ideal that overlooks the often contradictory,
historically overdetermined real-world contexts in which all ideas are made
meaningful and in which actions unfold. In this world, the stage is already set in certain ways, and
sometimes the best or only way to maneuver through its various obstacles requires
the repurposing of what we find in/on this stage. If, as Coates's discussion demonstrates, power
functions not only at the level of ideology, but also at the level of desire, then feminists cannot avoid engaging dominant structures of
feeling and affective conventions (such as those at work in tonal harmony and/or rock music), because these cannot be persuaded or
altered by facts or arguments (that is, ideological critique or demystification). Reading Butler and Peaches from the perspective of
non-ideal theory demonstrates that a reappropriation of the master's tools is successful not only
when it is more effective or affective than anything else, but also when

its use of these tools problematizes

or voids the master/slave or insider/outsider hierarchy itself. Under these conditions, the
master's tools (for example, autonomy,universality, and playing the guitar) can indeed bring down the
master's house.

Working from within the system can produce change. Solves their
race args
James 9 Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of North

Carolina at Charlotte (Robin M, Autonomy, Universality, and Playing the Guitar: On the Politics
and Aesthetics of Contemporary Feminist Deployments of the Master's Tools, April 14, DOI:
10.1111/j.1527-2001.2009.01033.x)
Norma Coates expresses here an ethical and aesthetic quandary we might term a feminist guilty pleasure: liking something one
knows one just shouldn't like, since one considers its politics problematic, if not disgusting. Why would an avowed feminist like this
clearly misogynistic work? How can one have an aesthetic taste for something that is politically disgusting? This is not a new
question by any means, but it is still a contested one. Indeed, Audre Lorde has famously argued that the the master's tools will
never dismantle the master's house, just as Laura Mulvey has equally famously called for the necessity for feminists to abandon
mainstream cinematic pleasure as coercive (Mulvey 1975; Lorde 1983). I contend, however, that we should not be too

quick to dismiss either the master's tools or some of the pleasures we might experience from them.
Indeed, when appropriately hacked, the master's tools in certain situations and under

certain criteria might even be very effective tools for feminist, anti-racist work.
Examining two casesone political, one aestheticfrom the perspective of non-ideal theory, I will demonstrate concrete instances in
which multiply-underprivileged individuals have utilized, for liberatory ends, the concepts, rhetoric, and methodologies
characteristic of what bell hooks terms the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.1 Judith Butler's recent appeals for autonomy
and universality, and indie-electro artist Peaches's use of conventionally racist and sexist art forms are all instances in which the

master's tools have been productively reappropriated for progressive ends . I argue
that non-ideal theory also helps clarify two conditions that help to distinguish a successful resignification from a hegemonic
rearticulation: first, reappropriation is successful when, as Butler argues, the very process of

an
outsider's appropriation of insider privilege collapses the insider/outsider or
master/marginalized distinction, so the procedure is itself transformative ; second,
success is achieved in instances where nothing else does quite what the master's
tools do, when nothing is as accessible, effective, affective or, as in the case of Coates and the
Stones, as sexyas mainstream/conventional discourse .

State Not Always Racist---Hopelessness Turn

Claiming "States always racist" is a turn. Over-privileges
hopelessness makes actual remedies impossible
Farber 98

Daniel A., Associate Dean for Faculty and Research, and Henry J. Fletcher Professor of Law,
University of Minnesota. J.D., summa cum laude, University of Illinois School of Law, 1975,
KRINOCK LECTURE SERIES: IS AMERICAN LAW INHERENTLY RACIST?, 15 T.M. Cooley
L. Rev. 361, lexis
If it is true
that American society is inherently racist, doesn't that mean that it is essentially
hopeless? Now this conclusion does not logically follow from that premise, any more than it logically follows that if certain
And finally, what I fear the most is the response that seemed to be implied by one of the audience questions earlier.

character traits have a genetic basis then it is hopeless to do anything about them. But nevertheless, we all recognize that when we
are talking about individuals and biology, these genetic theories tend to discourage the idea of reform, and tend to reinforce, as a
matter of social reality, the view that any bad behavior that we see is just inherent. I think we can expect to see the same kind of
thing when we are dealing with the sociological equivalent involving the claim that there is this inherent genetic flaw in American
society. You can see this most clearly in Derrick Bell's writings, which are redolent of despair and which, in that respect, curiously
resemble Robert Bork's writings, who is similarly convinced that the genetic flaws of American society will prevent it from ever
achieving his vision of justice. It is true that we cannot afford to forget our history . It is true that much of that
history is unfortunate, if not worse. But

it is also true that if we remain totally obsessed with the

flaws of the past, fixated on their inevitability, we are unlikely to be able to move
past them and move forward. And in particular, it seems to me that if we approach today's
problems primarily as an issue in finger-pointing, in blaming somebody or another, or in finding the
culprit, then we are not likely to be able to unite our society in a quest toward
attacking those serious problems.

*Not a Root Cause---Wall

Their argument elevates white supremacy to an all-pervasive force that explains
nearly all global oppression---this conceptual expansion hides the actual practice
of racism and makes breaking it down more difficult
ANDERSEN 3 Margaret L. Andersen, Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies and Vice Provost for Academic Affairs
at the University of Delaware, 2003, Whitewashing Race: A Critical Perspective on Whiteness, in White Out: The Continuing
Significance of Racism, ed Doane & Bonilla-Silva, p. 28
Conceptually, one

of the major problems in the whiteness literature is the reification of

whiteness as a concept, as an experience, and as an identity . This practice not only leads to
conceptual obfuscation but also impedes the possi-bility for empirical analysis. In this literature,
"whiteness" comes to mean just about everything associated with racial domination. As such,
whiteness becomes a slippery and elusive concept. Whiteness is presented as any or all of the following: identity,
self-understanding, social practices, group beliefs, ideology, and a system of domination. As one critic writes, " If historical
actors are said to have behaved the way they did mainly because they were white, then there's
little room left for more nuanced analysis of their motives and meanings" (Stowe 1996:77). And
Alastair Bonnett points out that whiteness "emerges from this critique as an omnipresent and all-powerful historical force.
Whiteness is seen to be responsible for the failure of socialism to develop in America, for racism, for the impoverishment of
humanity. With the 'blame' comes a new kind of centering: Whiteness, and White people,

are
turned into the key agents of historical change, the shapers of contemporary America" (1996b:I53).
Despite noting that there is differentiation among whites and warning against using whiteness
as a monolithic category, most of the literature still proceeds to do so, revealing a
reductionist tendency. Even claiming to show its multiple forms , most writers
essentialize and reify whiteness as something that directs most of Western history (Gallagher
2000). Hence while trying to "deconstruct" whiteness and see the ubiquitousness of whiteness, the
literature at the same time reasserts and reinstates it (Stowe 1996:77). For example, Michael Eric
Dyson suggests that whiteness is identity, ideology, and institution (Dyson, quoted in Chennault 1998:300).
But if it is all these things, it becomes an analytically useless concept. Christine Clark and James
O'Donnell write: "to reference it reifies it, to refrain from referencing it obscures the persistent, pervasive, and seemingly permanent
reality of racism" (1999:2). Empirical investigation requires being able to identify and measure a

concept or at the very least to have a clear definitionbut since whiteness has come to mean just about
everything, it ends up meaning hardly anything.
White supremacy isnt a monolithic root cause---proximate causes determined
through empirics are more likely---and their arg shuts off productive debate over
solutions
SHELBY 7 Tommie Shelby, Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy at Harvard, 2007, We Who
Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity

Others might challenge the distinction between ideological and structural causes of black
disadvantage, on the grounds that we are rarely, if ever, able to so neatly separate these
factors, an epistemic situation that is only made worse by the fact that these causes interact
in complex ways with behavioral factors. These distinctions, while perhaps straightforward in the abstract, are
difficult to employ in practice. For example, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the members of a
poor black community to determine with any accuracy whether their impoverished condition is
due primarily to institutional racism, the impact of past racial injustice, the increasing
technological basis of the economy, shrinking state budgets, the vicissitudes of world trade, the
ascendancy of conservative ideology, poorly funded schools, lack of personal initiative, a violent
drug trade that deters business investment, some combination of these factors, or some other
explanation altogether. Moreover, it is notoriously difficult to determine when the
formulation of putatively race-neutral policies has been motivated by racism or when such

policies are unfairly applied by racially biased public officials. There are very real empirical
difficulties in determining the specific causal significance of the factors that create and
perpetuate black disadvantage; nonetheless, it is clear that these factors exist and that justice will demand different
practical remedies according to each factor's relative impact on blacks' life chances. We must acknowledge that our social world is
complicated and not immediately transparent to common sense, and thus that systematic empirical inquiry, historical studies, and
rigorous social analysis are required to reveal its systemic structure and sociocultural dynamics . There is, moreover, no

mechanical or infallible procedure for determining which analyses are the soundest ones . In
addition, given the inevitable bias that attends social inquiry, legislators and those they represent cannot simply defer to socialscientific experts. We must instead rely on open public debateamong politicians, scholars, policy makers,
intellectuals, and ordinary

citizenswith the aim of garnering rationally motivated and informed

consensus. And even if our practical decision procedures rest on critical deliberative discourse and thus live up to our highest
democratic ideals, some trial and error through actual practice is unavoidable. These difficulties and complications notwithstanding ,

a general recognition of the distinctions among the ideological and structural causes of black
disadvantage could help blacks refocus their political energies and self-help strategies.
Attention to these distinctions might help expose the superficiality of theories that seek to
reduce all the social obstacles that blacks face to contemporary forms of racism or white
supremacy. A more penetrating , subtle , and empirically grounded analysis is needed to
comprehend the causes of racial inequality and black disadvantage. Indeed, these distinctions
highlight the necessity to probe deeper to find the causes of contemporary forms of racism, as
some racial conflict may be a symptom of broader problems or recent social developments (such as immigration policy or reduced
federal funding for higher education).

White supremacy isnt a monolithic system of subordination---its fractured and

not responsible for every impact ever like they claim it is
Winant 97 Howard Winant, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for New racial
Studies at UC Santa Barbara, September-October 1997, Behind Blue Eyes: Contemporary
White Racial Politics, online: http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/winant/whitness.html
So, monolithic

white supremacy is over, yet in a more concealed way, white power and privilege live on. The overt
politics of racial subordination has been destroyed, yet it is still very possible to "play the racial card" in the
political arena. Racially-defined minorities are no longer subject to legal segregation, but they have not
been relieved of the burdens of discrimination, even by laws supposedly intended to do so. Whites are no longer the
official "ruling race," yet they still enjoy many of the privileges descended from the time when they were. In this situation
the old recipes for racial equality, which involved creation of a "color-blind" society, have been transformed into formulas for the
maintenance of racial inequality. The old programs for eliminating white racial privilege are now suspected of creating nonwhite
racial privilege. The welfare state, once seen as the instrument for overcoming poverty and social injustice, is now accused of
fomenting these very ills. Therefore, not only blacks (and other racially-identified minorities), but also whites, now experience a
division in their racial identities. On the one hand, whites inherit the legacy of white supremacy, from which they continue to
benefit. But on the other hand, they are

subject to the moral and political challenges posed to that

inheritance by the partial but real successes of the black movement (and affiliated movements). These
movements advanced a countertradition to white supremacy, one which envisioned a
radicalized, inclusive, participatory democracy, a substantively egalitarian economy, and a
nonracial state. They deeply affected whites as well as blacks, exposing and denouncing often
unconscious beliefs in white supremacy, and demanding new and more respectful forms of
behavior in relation to nonwhites. Just as the movements partially reformed white supremacist
institutions, so they partially transformed white racial consciousness. Obviously, they did not destroy the
deep structures of white privilege, but they did make counterclaims on behalf of the racially excluded and
subordinated. As a result, white identities have been displaced and refigured: they are now
contradictory, as well as confused and anxiety ridden, to an unprecedented extent. It is this situation which
can be described as white racial dualism.[1]

Not a Root Cause---Ext

Root cause arguments wrong overdetermines, prefer specificity
Swanson 5

Jacinda Swanson is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Western. Michigan University Theory, Culture & Society August
2005 vol. 22 no. 4 87-118 DOI: 10.1177/0263276405054992 The online version of this article can be found
http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/22/4/87

It is thus misleading to suggest that social relations are ever solely economic, political or
cultural, or that the causes of and remedies for unjust social arrangements are singular (see
also Butler, 1997c: 273, 276; Young, 1997: 1546; Sayer, 1999). Although Fraser insists on the thorough imbrication of culture and economics, her

emphasis on

the two categories of redistribution and recognition and on

root causes

undermines the more complex understanding she articulates elsewhere.6 Moreover, despite her
commitment to perspectival dualism and thus her rejection of substantive dualism and economism in several instances Fraser describes the
economy and capitalism in economically reductionist and determinist terms (2003: 53, 58, 21418). For

instance, although she correctly

often appears to conceptualize capitalism and other economic activities
as in themselves fundamentally economic practices that function independently of political and cultural
processes, and, related, appears to conceive economic behavior/phenomena as devoid of values. To cite just a few examples, Fraser provides the
insists that capitalism and culture interact, she

following conceptualizations: In this marketized zone, interaction is not directly regulated by patterns of cultural value. It is governed, rather by the
functional interlacing of strategic imperatives, as individuals act to maximize self-interest (2003: 58); system integration, in which interaction is
coordinated by the functional interlacing of the unintended consequences of a myriad of individual strategies; and a quasi-objective, anonymous,
impersonal market order that follows a logic of its own. This market order is culturally embedded, to be sure. But it is not directly governed by cultural
schemas of evaluation (2003: 214). As

the concept of overdetermination shows, economic practices themselves

depend on specific (cultural) knowledges, values and discourses, as well as specific (political) rules and regulations (and vice versa).
Values are therefore not confined to the cultural status order.7 In addition to discourses and knowledges, values, for example, constitute ideas and
behavior related to business enterprise success and purposes, rational considerations and calculations, individual self-interest, appropriate and
desirable objects of economic production and exchange, etc. (Amariglio and Ruccio, 1994; Watkins, 1998). The theoretical perspective I am advocating
here thus urges both the multiplication of analytical categories and concrete empirical investigations of the numerous conditions of existence (located
throughout society) of any unjust practice (see also Smith, 2001: 121). It consequently suggests that overcoming any given form of oppression most
likely will require transforming a wide range of cultural, economic and political practices.

The K isnt the root cause of our internal link. That over-determines
specific contexts key for war scenarios.
Sagan 2K

Scott D. Sagan Department of Political Science, Stanford University ACCIDENTAL WAR IN THEORY
AND PRACTICE 2000 available via: www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/trachtenberg/cv/sagan.doc
To make reasonable judgements in such matters it

is essential, in my view, to avoid the common "fallacy of

overdetermination." Looking backwards at historical events, it is always tempting to underestimate the importance of
the immediate causes of a war and argue that the likelihood of conflict was so high that the war would have broken out
sooner or later even without the specific incident that set it off. If taken too far, however, this tendency eliminates
the role of contingency in history and diminishes our ability to perceive the alternative pathways that were present
to historical actors. The point is perhaps best made through a counterfactual about the Cold War. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis,
a bizarre false warning incident in the U.S. radar systems facing Cuba led officers at the North American Air Defense Command
to believe that the U.S. was under attack and that a nuclear weapon was about to go off in Florida. Now imagine the
counterfactual event that this false warning was reported and believed by U.S. leaders and resulted in a U.S. nuclear "retaliation" against the
Russians. How would future historians have seen the causes of World War III? One can easily imagine
arguments stressing that the war between the U.S. and the USSR was inevitable. War was
overdetermined: given the deep political hostility of the two superpowers, the conflicting ideology, the escalating arms race,
nuclear war would have occurred eventually. If not during that specific crisis over Cuba, then over the next
one in Berlin, or the Middle East, or Korea. From that perspective, focusing on this particular accidental event as a
cause of war would be seen as misleading. Yet, we all now know, of course that a nuclear war was neither
inevitable nor overdetermined during the Cold War.

AT: Afro-Pessimism- Yes Progress Clarke

Black progress is undeniable---afro-pessimism requires ignoring
mass amounts of evidence to the contrary
Leroy Clark 95, Professor of Law, Catholic University Law School, A Critique of Professor
Derrick A. Bell's Thesis of the Permanence of Racism and His Strategy of Confrontation, 73
Denv. U.L. Rev. 23
Professor Bell treats the post-1960s claims of progress as an illusion: discrimination simply
became more covert, but equally efficient. n69 The facts, however, viewed with a holistic

perspective , largely refute this claim. n70 The most thorough analysis of black-American status since Gunnar
Myrdal's An American Dilemma in 1944, is A Common Destiny--Blacks and American Society. n71 The report covers the period from
1940 through 1986, and is more comprehensive than the studies Professor Bell relied on in recent law review articles. A Common
Destiny answers Professor Bell's central question in Faces: Contemporary views of the status of black-white relations in America
vary widely. Perspectives range from optimism that the main problems have been solved, to the view that black progress is largely an
illusion, to assessments that the nation is retrogressing and moving toward increased racial disparities. To some observers, the
present situation is only another episode in a long history of recurring cycles of apparent improvement that are followed by new
forms of dominance in changed contexts: the level of black status changes, it is said, but the one constant is blacks' continuing
subordinate social position. To other observers, the opposite is correct: long-run progress is the dominant trend. n72 A Common
Destiny, however, concludes that the overwhelming majority of black-Americans made
substantial progress since 1940: Over the 50-year span covered by this study, the
social status of American blacks has on average improved dramatically , both in
absolute terms and relative to whites. The growth of the economy and public policies promoting racial equality
led to an erosion of segrega- tion and discrimination, making it possible for a substantial fraction of blacks to enter the mainstream
of American life. n73 Just five decades ago, most black Americans could not work, live, shop, eat, seek entertainment, travel where
they chose. Even a quarter century ago--100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863--most blacks were effectively denied
the right to vote. . . . Today the situation is very different. n74 The Committee acknowledged that "the great gulf that existed
between black and white Americans in 1939 . . . has not closed," because one-third of blacks "still live in households with incomes
below the poverty line." n75 Yet the study reported that 92% of blacks lived below the poverty line in

1939. n76 A 60% drop in poverty is an astounding improvement, by any measure, and is an
even faster movement out of poverty than that of the white public that was also suffering
from the ravages of the economic depression of the 1930s. n77 Some reduction of black poverty occurred when
blacks secured higher paying jobs in defense industries during World War II. But the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act
brought a significant reduction in racial employment discrimination. By 1984, blacks had
$ 9 billion more per year in real income, adjusted for inflation, than they would have had if they had remained arrayed throughout
the occupational spectrum as they were before the Act. n78 A new black economic elite developed through movement into higher
paying employment in the private sector and away from employment in government, the clergy, and civil rights organizations; this
new elite should sustain their progress and finance opportunities for their young. n79 The number of black elected

officials increased from a few dozen in 1940 to 6,800 by 1988, and the number of black public administrators went
from 1% in 1940 to 8% in 1980. n80 No white elected official has openly supported racial segregation since
Governor Wallace in the early 1960s, a testament, in part, to the substantial increases in black voter registration and voting, due to
the Voting Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1965. n81 One could also show decreases in racial segregation in

education, housing, and other aspects of American life, coupled with the virtual
disappearance of racial exclusion in public accommodations--all due to enforcement of the new
legislation. It is true, racial discrimination has not been totally eradicated. n82 But, Peter F. Drucker
summarizes: In the fifty years since the Second World War the economic position of AfricanAmericans in America has improved faster than that of any other group in
American social history--or in the social history of any country. Three-fifths of America's blacks
rose into middle class incomes; before the Second World War the figure was one
twentieth . n83 I doubt that Professor Bell believes that racial discrimination should have totally disappeared. But what, then,
accounts for Professor Bell's statements that "the civil rights gains, so hard won, are being steadily eroded"; that it has been "more
than a decade of civil rights setbacks in the White House, and in the courts"; n84 and that the civil rights movement is "a movement
now brought to a virtual halt"? n85 Professor Bell was not looking at the total sweep of black progress since the 1960s, but was
dismayed by the hostility towards--or lack of support for--civil rights displayed during the twelve years of the Reagan and Bush
administrations. n86 Ex-president Jimmy Carter appointed a record number of black attorneys to the federal courts. n87 Reagan

and Bush returned to the old style, appointing few minorities and women to the federal bench. Further, their appointees often
proved unsympathetic to the arguments of civil rights organizations. n88 Reagan and Bush were the only presidents who opposed
passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the only presidents who vetoed civil rights legislation in the 20th century. n89 They also
used subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, "racial codes" to covertly organize whites to break the Democratic party's hold on the
presidency, especially in the South. n90 Even given this executive branch hostility to civil rights, the Congress, the branch of
government much more vulnerable to the electorate, consistently and successfully opposed or reversed actions that undermined civil
rights. Congress amended and improved the Voting Rights Act in 1982. n91 Congress overrode the veto of one of the most popular
presidents in modern times, Reagan, and passed the Civil Rights Restoration Act in 1986. n92 The enforcement machinery of the
Fair Housing Act, prohibiting racial discrimination in the sale or rental of housing, was substantially improved by amendment in
1988. n93 A bill barring discrimination in employment and public accommodations for the disabled, a disproportionate number of
which are blacks, passed in 1990. n94 The major "setbacks," to which Professor Bell refers, were several United States Supreme
Court cases which limited the scope of statutes prohibiting discrimination in employment, or which created proof problems for
plaintiffs. n95 Congress passed a bill in 1991 which reversed all of the adverse decisions by the Court. n96 This history of
Congressional repudiation of executive and judicial hostility to civil rights and, indeed, the extension of civil rights to new areas, is
not noted in either of Professor Bell's two books. n97 Why, if society is as irremediably racist as Professor

Bell alleges, can Congress, which constantly sounds out the public, confidently pass this wide
range of pro-civil rights legislation? The answer is that the overwhelming majority of
white Americans underwent attitude changes in the last thirty years, generally relinquishing
crude or unadulterated racial prejudice. A majority of whites no longer believe in the racial inferiority of blacks, and believe
blacks should not be discriminated against in employment, schools, and access to public and private accommodations. n98 Professor

Bell's books contain no mention of the extensive opinion poll data showing less
racial prejudice . Indeed, his books, especially Confronting Authority, portray the white public as massively, and often
incomprehensibly and stupidly, committed to racism.

AT: Afro-Pessimism
Afro-pessimism is inaccurate and is used to justify white
supremacism
Patterson 98

The Ordeal Of Integration:

Progress And Resentment In America's "Racial" Crisis
Orlando Patterson is a Jamaican-born American historical and cultural sociologist known for his
work regarding issues of race in the United States, as well as the sociology of development
the
country has been ill served by its intellectuals, policy advocates, and leaders in recent
years. At present, dogmatic ethnic advocates and extremists appear to dominate
discourse on the subject, drowning out both moderate and other dissenting voices. A strange
convergence has emerged between these extremists. On the left, the nation is misled by an
endless stream of tracts and studies that deny any meaningful change in America's
"Two Nations," decry "The Myth of Black Progress," mourn "The Dream Deferred," dismiss AfroAmerican middle-class
In the attempt to understand and come to terms with the problems of Afro-Americans and of their interethnic relations,

status as "Volunteer Slavery," pronounce AfroAmerican men an "Endangered Species," and apocalyptically announce "The Coming

On the right is complete agreement with this dismal portrait in which we

are fast "Losing Ground," except that the road to "racial" hell, according to conservatives, has been paved by the very
Race War."

pQlicies intended to help solve the problem, abetted by "The Dream and the Nightmare" of cultural changes in the sixties and by the
overbreeding and educational integration of inferior Afro-Americans and very policies intended to help solve the problem, abetted
by "The Dream and the Nightmare" of cultural changes in the sixties and by the overbreeding and educational integration of inferior
Afro-Americans and lower-class Euro-Americans genetically situated on the wrong tail of the IQ "Bell Curve." If it is true that a

"racial crisis" persists in America, this crisis is as much one of perception and
interpretation as of actual socioeconomic and interethnic realities . By any
measure, the record of the past half century has been one of great achievement ,
thanks in good part to the suecess of the government policies now being maligned
by the left for not having gone far enough and by the righ t for having both failed and gone too far. At the same time,
there is still no room for complacency : because our starting point half a century ago was so deplorably
backward, we still have some way to go before approaching anything like a resolution.

AT: Afro-Pessimism
Afro-pessimism is the flip side of right-wing discourses about black
pathologythey lock in an impoverished view of Blackness as an
ontology of lack where sociality is impossible. The alternatives
fatalistic reliance on explanation alone accepts in advance the
ideological coordinates of whiteness.
Moten 8 (Fred, English Professor at Duke University, The Case of Blackness, Criticism,
50.2, MUSE)

The cultural and political discourse on black pathology has been so pervasive that it could be said to
constitute the background against which all representations of blacks, blackness, or (the color) black take
place. Its manifestations have changed over the years, though it has always been poised between the realms of the pseudo-social scientific, the birth of new
sciences, and the normative impulse that is at the heart ofbut thatstrains againstthe black radicalism thatstrains againstit. From the origins of the
critical philosophy in the assertion of its extra-rational foundations in teleological principle ; to the advent and
solidification of empiricist human biology that moves out of the convergence of phrenology, criminology,
and eugenics; to the maturation of (American) sociology in the oscillation between good-and bad-faith attendance to "the negro
problem"; to the analysis of and discourse on psychopathology and the deployment of these in both
colonial oppression and anticolonial resistance; to the regulatory metaphysics that undergirds interlocking notions
of sound and color in aesthetic theory: blackness has been associated with a certain sense of decay, even
when that decay is invoked in the name of a certain (fetishization of) vitality. Black radical discourse has
often taken up, and held itself within, the stance of the pathologist. Going back to David Walker , at least, black
radicalism is animated by the question, What's wrong with black folk? The extent to which radicalism (here
understood as the performance of a general critique of the proper) is a fundamental and enduring force in the black public sphere so much so that
even black "conservatives" are always constrained to begin by defining themselves in relation to it is all but self-evident. Less self-evident is
the normative striving against the grain of the very radicalism from which the desire for norms is derived.
Such striving is directed toward those lived experiences of blackness that are , on the one hand, aligned with
what has been called radical and, on the other hand,[End Page 177]aligned not so much with a kind of being-towarddeath but with something that has been understood as a deathly or death-driven nonbeing. This strife between
normativity and the deconstruction of norms is essential not only to contemporary black academic discourse but also to the discourses of the barbershop, the beauty
shop, and the bookstore. I'll begin with a thought that doesn't come from any of these zones, though it's felt in them, strangely, since it posits the being of, and being in,
these zones as an ensemble of specific impossibilities: As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to
experience his being through others. There

is of course the moment of "being for others, " of which Hegel speaks, but every
ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society. It would seem that this fact has not been given enough
attention by those who have discussed the question. In theWeltanschauungof a colonized people there is an impurity, a flaw, that outlaws[interdit]any ontological
explanation. Someone

may object that this is the case with every individual, but such an objection merely
conceals a basic problem. Ontologyonce it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the waysidedoes not permit us to
understand the being of the black man. For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in
relation to the white man. Some critics will take it upon themselves to remind us that the proposition has a converse. I say that this is false. The
black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man. This passage, and the ontological (absence of)
drama it represents, leads us to a set of fundamental questions. How do we think the possibility and the law of outlawed,
impossible things? And if, as Frantz Fanon suggests, the black cannot be an other for another black, if the black can
only be an other for a white, then is there ever anything called black social life? Is the designation of this or that thing as
1

lawless, and the assertion that such lawlessness is a function of an already extant flaw, something more than that trying, even neurotic, oscillation between the
exposure and the replication of a regulatory maneuver whose force is held precisely in the assumption that it comes before what it would contain? What's the relation
between explanation and resistance? Who

bears the responsibility of discovering an ontology of, or of

discoveringforontology, the ensemble of political, aesthetic, [End Page 178]and philosophical derangements
that comprise the being that is neither for itself nor for the other? What form of life makes such discovery
possible as well as necessary? Would we know it by its flaws, its impurities? What might an impurity in a worldview actually be? Impurity implies a
kind of non-completeness, if not absence, of a worldview. Perhaps that non-completeness signals an originarily criminal refusal
of the interplay of framing and grasping, taking and keepinga certain reticence at the ongoing advent of

the age of the world picture. Perhaps it is the reticence of the grasped, the enframed, the taken, the kept
or, more precisely, the reluctance that disrupts grasping and framing, taking and keepingas
epistemological stance as well as accumulative activity. Perhaps this is the flaw that attends essential,
anoriginal impuritythe flaw that accompanies impossible origins and deviant translations. What's at
stake is fugitive movement in and out of the frame, bar, or whatever externally imposed social logica movement of escape, the
stealth of the stolen that can be said, since it inheres in every closed circle, to break every enclosure. This
fugitive movement is stolen life, and its relation to law is reducible neither to simple interdiction nor bare
transgression. Part of what can be attained in this zone of unattainability, to which the eminently attainable ones have been relegated, which they occupy but
2

cannot (and refuse to) own, is some sense of the fugitive law of movement that makes black social life ungovernable, that demands a para-ontological disruption of the
supposed connection between explanation and resistance. 3This

exchange between matters juridical and matters sociological is

given in the mixture of phenomenology and psychopathology that drives Fanon's work, his slow approach
to an encounter with impossible black social life poised or posed in the break, in a certain intransitive
evasion of crossing, in the wary mood or fugitive case that ensues between the fact of blackness and the
lived experience of the black and as a slippage enacted by the meaningor, perhaps too "trans-literally,"
the (plain[-sung]) senseof things when subjects are engaged in the representation of objects. The title of this
essay, "The Case of Blackness," is a spin on the title of the fifth chapter of Fanon'sBlack Skins, White Masks, infamously mistranslated as "the fact of blackness."
"The lived experience of the black" is more literal"experience" bears a German trace, translates asErlebnisrather thanTatsache, and thereby places Fanon within a
group of postwar Franco-phone thinkers encountering phenomenology that includes Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, and Tran Duc
Thao.4The phrasing indicates Fanon's veering off from an analytic engagement with the world as a set of facts that are available to the natural scientific attitude, so it's
possible to feel the vexation of certain commentators with what might[End Page 179]be mistaken for a flirtation with positivism. However, I want to linger in, rather
than quickly jump over, the gap between fact and lived experience in order to consider the word "case" as a kind of broken bridge or cut suspension between the two.
I'm interested in how the troubled, illicit commerce between fact and lived experience is bound up with that between blackness and the black, a difference that is often
concealed, one that plays itself out not by way of the question of accuracy or adequation but by way of the shadowed emergence of the ontological difference between
being and beings. Attunement to that difference and its modalities must be fine. Perhaps certain recalibrations of Fanonmade possible by insights to which Fanon is
both given and blindwill allow us to show the necessity and possibility of another understanding of the ontological difference. In such an understanding, the
political phonochoreography of being's words bears a content that cannot be left by the wayside even if it is packaged in the pathologization of blacks and blackness in
the discourse of the human and natural sciences and in the corollary emergence of expertise as the defining epistemological register of the modern subject who is in
that he knows, regulates, but cannot be black. This might turn out to have much to do with the constitution of that locale in which "ontological
explanation"isprecisely insofar as it is against the law. One

way to investigate the lived experience of the black is to consider

what it is to be the dangerousbecause one is, because we are (Who? We? Who is this we? Who volunteers for this already given
imposition? Who elects this imposed affinity? The one who is homelessly, hopefully, less and more?) the constitutivesupplement. What is it to be
an irreducibly disordering, deformational force while at the same time being absolutely indispensable to normative order, normative form? This is not the
same as, though it does probably follow from, the troubled realization that one is an object in the midst of
other objects, as Fanon would have it. In their introduction to a rich and important collection of articles that announce and enact a new deployment of
Fanon in black studies' encounter with visual studies, Jared Sexton and Huey Copeland index Fanon's
formulation in order to consider what it is to be "the thing against which all other subjects take their
bearing." But something is left unattended in their invocation of Fanon, in their move toward equating
objecthood with "the domain of non-existence" or the interstitial space between life and death, something
to be understood in its difference from and relation to what Giorgio Agamben calls naked life, something
they call raw life, that movesor more precisely cannot movein its forgetful non-relation to that
quickening, forgetive force that Agamben calls the form of life.
5

AT: End America

Wilderson demands an internationally focused anti-Blackness
strategy
Farrow 8 Kenyon, "Incognegro" Author Frank Wilderson, III in NYC This Week,

http://kenyonfarrow.com/2008/10/21/incognegro-author-frank-wilderson-iii-in-nyc-thisweek/
This notion flies in the face of what so many on the left extrapolate from Black leftist politicspeople seem to love the idea that Black
revolutionaries learn to transcend concerns about Black people to take on more international concerns. From Malcolm Xs trip to
Mecca and MLKs speech on opposing the Vietnam War, Black radicals can make it into the leftist

pantheon of stars. Wilderson is drawing the conclusion that anti-Black racism is a global
phenomenon and has yet to be addressed, let alone already solved , as much of the Left
seems to purport. The

world needs the Black position, Wilderson said.

AT: Revolution Backlash/Rollback

Militantly oppositional black resistance generates backlash from the right and the
left---it materially reverses efforts towards racial justice
SHELBY 7 Tommie Shelby, Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy at Harvard, 2007, We Who
Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity

Even if it were possible lo effectively mobilize a multicorporatist Black Power program

without running afoul of democratic values or compromising broader egalitarian concerns, this
form of black solidarity may not be pragmatically desirable because of factors that are
exogenous to black communities. Thus far I have discussed this program without much consideration for how other
ethnoracial groups would be likely to respond to its institutional realization. It is reasonable to assume that Black
Power politics would engender a counter mobilization on the part of nonblacks, and not
Just whites, seeking to protect their own interests. Indeed, if Carmichael and Hamilton were correct about the
essentially ethnic basis of American politics, we should fully expect this kind of resistance . With
increased political centralization and organizational autonomy, openly aimed at advancing black
interests, we would also likely see a rise in white nationalism, where some whites increase
their collective power through greater group self-organization and solidarity, as they have often
done in the past and, to some extent, continue to do even now. Such resistance would not come solely from racists, however. Some
potential allies would also be alienated by this nationalist program and may consequently become
(further) disillusioned

with the ideal of racial integration, indifferent to black problems, or

disaffected from black people. Nonblacks would naturally view their relegation to "supporting
roles" within black political organizations as a sign that their help in the struggle for racial
justice is unneeded or unwanted; that their commitment to racial justice is in question; that
blacks are more concerned with advancing their group interests than with fighting injustice; or
that blacks do not seek a racially integrated society. Moreover, because those who have status and
exercise power within institutions generally have a stake in preserving these institutional
structures, even if they no longer serve the goals for which they were initially established, nonblacks have wellfounded reasons to worry that black political organizations may, through sheer inertia or
opportunism, become ends in themselves. Thus, although institutional autonomy might increase the
organizational independence of blacks, the overall power of the group could be reduced because of
isolation from other progressive forces. This situation would be particularly disastrous for blacks who live in
minority-black electoral districts, for they cannot elect effective political representation without the support of like-minded nonblack
citizens.

AT: Revolution Backlash/Rollback

Their destruction of America as an embodiment of white supremacy would spark
an intense right-wing backlash movement
Winant 97 Howard Winant, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for New racial
Studies at UC Santa Barbara, September-October 1997, Behind Blue Eyes: Contemporary
White Racial Politics, online: http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/winant/whitness.html
Indeed, for

the US to come to terms in the mid-20th century with its own history of conquest and
enslavement would have involved at a minimum a deep national reckoning. It would have
severely threatened the foundations of the nation-state. The consequences of this agonizing self-appraisal
would necessarily have included massive economic redistribution and the kind of atonement for white supremacy which was later to
be associated with demands for compensatory programs such as "affirmative action" -- or more properly, reparations. Thus the

threat posed by the black movement -- material, political, and psychic -- to the key institutions of the
Pax Americana, not to mention the majority of the US population, the white majority, was profound. In
opposition to this threat, building upon the foundation laid down by Wallace, the new right developed a
political orientation that was nationalist, populist, and authoritarian. This position, of course, has
numerous precedents in earlier historical moments. It seeks by covert means to legitimate the "psychological
wage" that Du Bois argued was an essential benefit allocated to whites by white supremacy (Du
Bois 1977 [1935]). It continues the racist legacy of southern populism, which in the past bred the likes of Ben
Tillman and Theodore Bilbo (Woodward 1973). And it associates whiteness with a range of capitalist virtues: productivity, thrift,
obedience to law, self-denial, and sexual repression. This in turn permits the crucial articulation of corporate and white working
class interests -- the cross-class racial alliance -- which endows new right positions with such strategic advantage today. Like the far
right, the new right seeks to present itself as the tribune of disenfranchised whites. But the new right is

distinguished -- if not always sharply -- from the far right by several factors. First, rather than
espouse racism and white supremacy, it prefers to present these themes subtextually: the
familiar "code-word" phenomenon. Second, it wholeheartedly embraces mainstream political
activity, rather than abjuring it or looking at it suspiciously. Third, it can accept a measure of nonwhite social
and political participation, and even membership (think of Alan Keyes, for instance), so long as this is
pursued on a "color-blind" basis and adheres to the rest of the authoritarian, nationalist
formula. For the far right in general, "color-blindness" is race mixing and therefore verboten. For the new right, suitably

authoritarian versions of "color-blindness" are fine. The new right diverges from neoconservatism (discussed below), in its
willingness to practice racial politics subtextually, through coding, manipulation of racial fears, etc. De facto, it recognizes the
persistence of racial difference in United States society. The new right understands perfectly well that its mass

base is white, and that its political success depends on its ability to interpret white identity in positive political terms.
Precisely because of its willingness to exploit racial fears and employ racially
manipulative practices, the new right has been effective in achieving much of its agenda for
political and cultural reaction and social structural recomposition . These were crucial to the new right's
ability to provide a solid base of electoral and financial support for the Republican Party and the Reagan "revolution." The
demagoguery employed by George Bush in the 1988 Willie Horton campaign ads, or by Pete Wilson or Phil Gramm in their
contemporary attacks on immigrants and affirmative action, shows this strategy is far from exhausted.
Neoconservatism has not, and could not, deliver such tangible political benefits, and in fact lacks an equivalent mass political base.
That is why the neoconservatives are seen as a bunch of "pointy-headed intellectuals" by many on the new right.

AT: Revolution Cant Solve Domination

Revolutionary overthrow reproduces domination- only agonism
provides effective political critique
Newman 00,
(Saul, Postdoctoral Fellow @ Macquarie University, Anarchism and the Politics of
Ressentiment, muse)

What is the point of this distinction between power and domination? Does this not bring us back to original anarchist position
that society and our everyday actions, although oppressed by power, are ontologically separated from it? In other words, why not
merely call domination 'power' once again, and revert back to the original, Manichean distinction between social life and power?
However the point of this distinction is to show that this essential separation is now impossible. Domination -- oppressive

from the same world as power. In other words it disrupts the strict
and indeed radical politics generally, cannot remain in this
comfortable illusion that we as political subjects, are somehow not complicit in the very regime that
oppresses us. According to the Foucauldian definition of power that I have employed, we are all potentially complicit,
political institutions like the State -- now comes

Manichean separation of society and power. Anarchism

through our everyday actions, in relations of domination. Our everyday actions, which inevitably involve power, are unstable
and can easily form into relations that dominate us. As political subjects we can never relax and hide behind

essentialist identities and Manichean structures -- behind a strict separation from the world of power. Rather we must be
constantly on our guard against the possibility of domination. Foucault says: "My point is not that everything is
bad, but that everything is dangerous...If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads
not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism." [52] In order to resist domination we must be aware of its risks -- of the
possibility that our own actions, even political action ostensibly against domination, can easily give rise to further domination.
There is always the possibility, then, of contesting domination, and of minimizing its possibilities and effects. According to
Foucault, domination itself is unstable and can give rise to reversals and resistance. Assemblages such as the State

are based on unstable power relations that can just as easily turn against the institution they form the basis of.
So there is always the possibility of resistance against domination. However resistance can never be in the form of
revolution -- a grand dialectical overcoming of power, as the anarchists advocated. To abolish central institutions like
the State with one stroke would be to neglect the multiform and diffuse relations of power they are based on ,
thus allowing new institutions and relations of domination to rise up. It would be to fall into the same reductionist
trap as Marxism, and to court domination. Rather, resistance must take the form of what Foucault calls agonism -- an
ongoing, strategic contestation with power -- based on mutual incitement and provocation -- without any final hope of
being free from it.[53] One can, as I have argued, never hope to overcome power completely -- because every
overcoming is itself the imposition of another regime of power. The best that can be hoped for is a reorganization of
power relations -- through struggle and resistance -- in ways that are less oppressive and dominating. Domination can
therefore be minimized by acknowledging our inevitable involvement with power, not by attempting to place
ourselves impossibly outside the world of power. The classical idea of revolution as a dialectical overthrowing of power -- the
image that has haunted the radical political imaginary -- must be abandoned. We must recognize the fact that power can

never be overcome entirely, and we must affirm this by working within this world, renegotiating our
position to enhance our possibilities of freedom.

Vague Alt Fails Reed

The broad alternative of rejecting X fails---movements must have
specific demands to be successful
Adolph Reed 9, Professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and a member
of the interim national council of the Labor Party, The limits of anti-racism,
http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Antiracism.html

Antiracism is a favorite concept on the American left these days. Of course, all good sorts want to be against racism, but what does
the word mean exactly? The contemporary discourse of antiracism is focused much more on

taxonomy than politics. It emphasizes the name by which we should call some
strains of inequalitywhether they should be broadly recognized as evidence of
racism over specifying the mechanisms that produce them or even the steps
that can be taken to combat them . And, no, neither overcoming racism nor
rejecting whiteness qualifies as such a step any more than does waiting for the
revolution or urging Gods heavenly intervention . If organizing a rally against racism seems at
present to be a more substantive political act than attending a prayer vigil for world peace, thats only because contemporary
antiracist activists understand themselves to be employing the same tactics and pursuing the same ends as their predecessors in the
period of high insurgency in the struggle against racial segregation. This view, however, is mistaken. The postwar activism that
reached its crescendo in the South as the civil rights movement wasnt a movement against a

generic racism; it was specifically and explicitly directed toward full citizenship
rights for black Americans and against the system of racial segregation that defined a specific regime of explicitly
racial subordination in the South. The 1940s March on Washington Movement was also directed
against specific targets,like employment discrimination in defense production .
Black Power era and post-Black Power era struggles similarly focused on combating specific
inequalities and pursuing specific goals like the effective exercise of voting rights and
specific programs of redistribution. Clarity lost Whether or not one considers those goals correct or
appropriate, they were clear and strategic in a way that antiracism simply is not. Sure, those earlier struggles relied on a discourse
of racial justice, but their targets were concrete and strategic. It is only in a period of political

demobilization that the historical specificities of those struggles have become

smoothed out of sight in a romantic idealism that homogenizes them into timeless
abstractions like the black liberation movementan entity that, like Brigadoon, sporadically appears
and returns impelled by its own logic. Ironically, as the basis for a politics, antiracism seems to reflect, several
generations downstream, the victory of the postwar psychologists in depoliticizing the critique of racial
injustice by shifting its focus from the social structures that generate and
reproduce racial inequality to an ultimately individual, and ahistorical, domain of
prejudice or intolerance. (No doubt this shift was partly aided by political imperatives associated with the Cold
War and domestic anticommunism.) Beryl Satters recent book on the racialized political economy of contract buying in Chicago in
the 1950s and 1960s, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America, is a good illustration of
how these processes worked; Robert Selfs book on Oakland since the 1930s, American Babylon, is another. Both make abundantly
clear the role of the real estate industry in creating and recreating housing segregation and ghettoization. Tasty bunny All too
often, racism is the subject of sentences that imply intentional activity or is characterized as an autonomous force. In this kind of
formulation, racism, a conceptual abstraction, is imagined as a material entity. Abstractions can be useful, but they shouldnt be
given independent life. I can appreciate such formulations as transient political rhetoric; hyperbolic claims made in
order to draw attention and galvanize opinion against some particular injustice. But as the basis for social interpretation, and
particularly interpretation directed toward strategic political action, they are useless. Their principal function is to

feel good and tastily righteous in the mouths of those who propound them . People do
things that reproduce patterns of racialized inequality, sometimes with self-consciously bigoted motives, sometimes not. Properly
speaking, however, racism itself doesnt do anything more than the Easter Bunny does. Yes, racism exists, as a conceptual
condensation of practices and ideas that reproduce, or seek to reproduce, hierarchy along lines defined by race. Apostles of
antiracism frequently cant hear this sort of statement, because in their exceedingly simplistic version of the nexus of race and
injustice there can be only the Manichean dichotomy of those who admit racisms existence and those who deny it. There can be only
Todd Gitlin (the sociologist and former SDS leader who has become, both fairly and as caricature, the symbol of a class-first line)
and their own heroic, truth-telling selves, and whoever is not the latter must be the former. Thus

the logic of straining

to assign guilt by association substitutes for argument . My position isand I cant count the
number of times Ive said this bluntly, yet to no avail, in response to those in blissful thrall of the comforting Manicheanismthat
of course racism persists, in all the disparate, often unrelated kinds of social relations and attitudes that are
characteristically lumped together under that rubric, but

from the standpoint of trying to figure out

how to combat even what most of us would agree is racial inequality and injustice,
that acknowledgement and $2.25 will get me a ride on the subway. It doesnt lend itself to any
particular action except more taxonomic argument about what counts as racism .
Do what now? And heres a practical catch-22. In the logic of antiracism, exposure of the racial
element of an instance of wrongdoing will lead to recognition of injustice, which in
turn will lead to remedial action though not much attention seems ever given to
how this part is supposed to work . I suspect this is because the exposure part, which feels so
righteously yet undemandingly good, is the real focus. But this exposure convinces
only those who are already disposed to recognize .

AT: Author Bias/Epistemology

Accusing authors of white supremacy makes discussion impossible
Martyn Hammersley, September 1993, British Journal of Sociology, Research and anti-racism: the case of Peter foster and
his critics, 44.3, JSTOR
The second view I want to consider is sometimes associated with versions of the first, but must be kept separate because it involves a
quite distinctive and incompatible element. I will refer to this as standpoint theory. Here people's experience and knowledge is
treated as valid or invalid by dint of their membership in some social category.'7 Here again Foster's arguments may be dismissed
because they reflect his background and experience as a white, middle class, male teacher. However, this time the

implication is that reality is obscured from those with this background because of
the effects of ideology. By contrast, it is suggested, the oppressed (black , female and/or
working class people) have privileged insight into the nature of society . This argument produces a
victory for one side, not the stalemate that seems to result from relativism; the validity of Foster's views can
therefore be dismissed. But in other respects this position is no more satisfactory than
relativism. We must ask on what grounds we can decide that one group has
superior insight into reality. This cannot be simply because they declare that they
have this insight; otherwise everyone could make the same claim with the same
legitimacy (we would be back to relativism). This means that some other form of ultimate justification is involved, but what
could this be? In the Marxist version of this argument the working class (or, in practice, the Communist Party) are the group with
privileged insight into the nature of social reality, but it is Marx and Marxist theorists who confer this privilege on them by means of
a dubious philosophy of history.l8 Something similar occurs in the case of feminist standpoint theory, where the feminist theorist
ascribes privileged insight to women, or to feminists engaged in the struggle for women's emanci-pation.l9 However, while we

must recognise that people in different social locations may have divergent
perspectives, giving them distinctive insights, it is not clear why we should believe
the implausible claim that some people have privileged access to knowledge while
others are blinded by ideology.20

AT: Ontological Blackness

Focusing upon the traumatic elements of black subjectivity denies the
agency present within black attempts at thwarting white supremacy
and domination
Walker 12 Graduate of Psychosocial studies (Tracey, Graduate of Psychosocial Studies at
Birbeck University of London, Graduate Journal of Social Science July 2012, Vol. 9, Issue 2, "
The Future of Slavery: From Cultural Trauma to Ethical Remembrance" pg. 165-167,
http://gjss.org/images/stories/volumes/9/2/Walker%20Article.pdf)

To argue that there is more to the popular conception of slaves as victims who
experienced social death within the abusive regime of transatlantic slavery is not to say that these
subjectivities did not exist. When considering the institution of slavery we can quite confidently rely on the
assumption that it did indeed destroy the self-hood and the lives of millions of Africans. Scholar Vincent Brown (2009) however,
has criticised Orlando Pattersons (1982) seminal book Slavery and Social Death for positioning the
slave as a subject without agency and maintains that those who managed to
dislocate from the nightmare of plantation life were not in fact the living dead, but the
mothers of gasping new societies (Brown 2009, 1241). The Jamaican Maroons were one such disparate group of Africans who
managed to band together and flee the Jamaican plantations in order to create a new mode of living under their own rule. These
runaways were in fact ferocious fighters and master strategists, building towns and military bases which enabled them to fight and
successfully win the war against the British army after 200 years of battle (Gotlieb 2000,16). In addition, the story of the Windward
Jamaican Maroons disrupts the phallocentricism inherent within the story of the slave hero by the very revelation that their leader,
Queen Nanny was a woman (Gotlieb 2000). As a leader, she was often ignored by early white historians who dismissed her as an
old hagg or obeah woman (possessor of evil magic powers) (Gotlieb 2000, xvi). Yet, despite these negative descriptors, Nanny
presents an interesting image of an African woman in the time of slavery who cultivated an exceptional army and used psychological
as well as military force against the English despite not owning sophisticated weapons (Gotlieb 2000). As an oral tale, her story
speaks to post-slavery generations through its representation of a figure whose gender defying acts challenged the patriarchal
fantasies of the Eurocentric imaginary and as such the study of her experiences might change the lives of people living under
paternalistic, racist, classist and gender based oppression (Gotlieb 2000, 84). The label of social death is rejected
here on

the grounds that it is a narrative which is positioned from the vantage point
of a European hegemonic ideology. Against the social symbolic and its gaze, black slaves were indeed regarded
as non-humans since their lives were stunted, diminished and deemed less valuable in comparison to the Europeans. However,
Fanons (1967) assertion that not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man (Fanon 1967,
110) helps us to understand that this classification can only have meaning relative to the symbolic which represents the alive ness of
whiteness against the backdrop of the dead black slave (Dyer 1997). Butler (2005) makes it clear that the death one suffers relative
to the social symbolic is imbued with the fantasy that having constructed the Other and interpellated her into life, one now holds
the sovereignty of determining the subjects right to live or die: this death, if it is a death, is only the death of a certain kind of
subject, one that was never possible to begin with, the death of the fantasy of impossible mastery, and so a loss of what one never
had, in other words it is a necessary grief (Butler 2005, 65). The point to make here is that although the concept of

social death has proved useful for theorists to describe the metaphysical
experience of those who live antagonistically in relation to the social symbolic, it is
nevertheless a colonial narrative within which the slaves are confined to a one
dimensional story of terror. In keeping with Gilroys (1993b) argument that the memory of slavery must be
constructed from the slaves point of view, we might instead concentrate, not on the way in which the slaves are figured within the
European social imaginary, but on how they negotiated their own ideas about self and identity. We might therefore find
some value

in studying a group like the Maroons who not only managed to create an
autonomous world outside of the hegemonic discourse which negated them, but
also, due to their unique circumstances, were forced to create new modes of communication which
would include a myriad of African cultures, languages and creeds (Gottlieb 2000). This creative and resistive
energy of slave subjectivity not only disrupts the colonial paradigm of socially dead
slaves, but also implies the ethical tropes of creation, renewal and mutual
recognition. In contrast, the passive slave proved to feature heavily in the 2007 bicentenary commemorations causing
journalist Toyin Agbetu to interrupt the official speeches and exclaim that it had turned into a discourse of freedom engineered
mostly by whites with stories of black agency excluded8. Youngs argument that one of the damaging side effects of the focus on
white peoples role in abolition is that Africans are represented as being passive in the face of oppression, appears to echo the
behaviour in the UK today given that a recent research poll reveals that the black vote turnout is significantly lower than for the

white majority electorate and that forty percent of second generation immigrants believe that voting doesnt matter.9 Yet, Gilroy
(1993a) argues that this political passivity may not simply be a self fulfilling prophecy, but might allude to the lived contradiction of
being black and English which affects ones confidence about whether opinions will be validated in a society that, at its core, still
holds on to the fantasy of European superiority (Gilroy 1993a). Without considering the slaves capacity

for survival and their fundamental role in overthrowing the European regime of
slavery, we limit the usevalue of the memory and risk becoming overly attached
to singular slave subjectivities seeped in death and passivity. The Maroons story
however, enables slave consciousness to rise above the mire of slaverys abject victims
and establishes an ethical relation with our ancestors who lived and survived in
the time of slavery.

Their ontological framing of blackness dooms the alternative. Placing

Blackness as oppositional denies it any existence independent of
white supremacy and makes identity reliant on oppression
Pinn 4 Macalester College Professor of Religious Studies (Anthony, Dialog: A Journal of

Theology, Volume 43, Number 1, Spring 2004, 'Black Is, Black Aint: Victor Anderson, African
American Theological Thought, and Identity', pg.57-58, Wiley online Library)
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 life issues, 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.
European genius, complete with its heroic epic, met its match in the aesthetic categories of tragedy and the grotesque genius revived
and espoused by Friedreich Nietzsche. The grotesque genius served as an effective counter-discourse by embracing both the light
and dark aspects of life, and holding in tension oppositional sensationspleasure and pain, freedom and oppression.16 Utilizing
Nietzsches work, Anderson ask: what should African American cultural and religious criticism look like when they are no longer
romantic in inspiration and the cult of heroic genius is displaced by the grotesqueryfull range of expression, actions, attitudes,

behaviors everything found in African American lifeof contemporary black expressive culture and public life?17 Applied

to
African Americans, the grotesque embodies the full range of African American life
all expressions, actions, attitudes, and behavior. With a hermeneutic of the
grotesque as the foci, religio-cultural criticism is free from the totalizing nature of
racial apologetics and the classical Black aesthetic. By extension, Black theology is able to address
both issues of survival (Anderson sees their importance.) and the larger goal of cultural fulfillment, Andersons version of liberation.
That is to say, placing blackness along side other indicators of identity allows African

Americans to define themselves in a plethora of ways while maintaining their

community status. This encourages African Americans to see themselves as they
are complex and diversifiedno longer needing to surrender personal interests
for the sake of monolithic collective status .

AT: Reparations
Reparations are impossible because there is no ethical relation to the
pastWilderson basically agrees with thisbut using it as the focal
point of politics ONLY results in despair
Best 12associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley

(Stephen, On Failing to Make the Past Present, Modern Language Quarterly 2012 Volume 73, Number 3: 453-474)
In fact, why

has the slave past had such enormous weight for an entire generation of
thinkers? Why must we predicate having an ethical relation to the past on an
assumed continuity between that past and our present and on the implicit consequence that to study that
past is somehow to intervene in it? Through what process has it become possible to claim the lives and efforts of historys defeated as ours either to
redeem or to redress? And if

we take slaverys dispossessions to live on into the twenty-first

century, divesting history of movement and change, then what form can effective
political agency take? Why must our relation to the past be ethical in the first place
and is it possible to have a relation to the past that is not predicated on ethics? It is
time to ask these questions again, though I am far from having answers to them. The idea of continuity between the
slave past and our present provides a framework for conceptions of black
collectivity and community across time. And this idea, a proxy for race, nests within it a signicant thesis: the present that most African
Americans experience was forged at some historical nexus when slavery and race conjoined, and in the coupling of European colonial slavery and racial
blackness a history both inevitable and determined proved the result.2 Nonetheless, with terms of coalition and political solidarity increasingly difficult
to articulate, a

sense of racial belonging rooted in the historical dispossession of slavery

seems unstable ground on which to base a politics . My goal is merely to clear some
space for a black politics not animated by a sense of collective condition or
solidarity.3 The project of rethinking racial belonging might well begin with forms of unbelonging, negative sociability, abandonment, and

other disruptions that thwart historical recovery.These premise a kind of social connectedness on what anthropologists term social abandonment, the
idea that the social destinies of the unwanted are ordered.4 The

traces of abandonment frustrate historical

recovery (or the attempt to solicit the past for present purposes ) to the extent that
they signal an insistent previousness evading each and every natal occasion , especially
when the names proposed for that natality are either race or blackness.5 One critical origin for these ideas comes from queer theory, specifically the
historiographical ethics of what Leo Bersani calls an anticommunal model of connectedness, or in Daniel Tiffanys phrase a sociological sublime
magnetized by abjection.6 These strains of thought not

only acknowledge the radical alterity of the

past but announce that it may be necessary to check the impulse to turn . . .
representations [of the past] to good use in order to see them at all. 7 This essay
invites contemplation of the gains to be derived from extending the queer
acknowledgment of nonrelationality between the past and the present to the racial
case. An understanding of slavery in relation to the politics of abandonment (as
articulated especially in queer critique) responds to the calls of David Scott and David Lloyd to invigorate discussions of
the usable past with the idea of failed futures. Extending the insights of Reinhart Kosellecks Futures Past, Scott
argues that the political projects begun by earlier revolutionaries and historical
predecessors can be neither continued nor completed. It is futile to attempt to
redeem the past, as for merly dominant cognitive and political categories can no
longer have the same usefulness, the same salience, the same critical purchase, when the historical
conjuncture that originally gave [them] point and purchase has passed. Any
revisionary practice of historical criticism in the present must unfold against the
backdrop of the dead end of the hopes that defined the futures of the anticolonial
and . . . postcolonial projects.8 Faced with such foreclosed possibilities, we have only
our present conjuncture, only our current predicament. Writing in much the same spirit, Lloyd argues
that the figures in the past with whom we crave a connection possess their own
specific and unreproducible orientation to the future, and our present, rather
than represent the fulllment of that projection, is more likely the future imposed
on the dead by past violence. The restlessness of the dead, Lloyd proposes, stems from the lack of a future fit for them.9 To

be historical in our work, we might thus have to resist the impulse to redeem the
past and instead rest content with the fact that our orientation toward it remains
forever perverse, queer, askew. With its goal of replacing holding with letting go,
clutching with disavowal, this essay runs against the grain of work advanced under
the banners of recovery and melancholy. The goal is to specify some of the limits to these modes of critique and
to propose other ways of thinking about loss than have been offered by the melancholic turn in recent African Americanist and African-diasporic
cultural criticism.

AT: Negativity Alt hooks

Optimism and solidarity are our only hope---their strategy of
negativity accepts the foundational premises of racism as its starting
point for politics
bell hooks 96, Killing Rage: Ending Racism, Google Books, 269-272

black Americans are succumbing to and internalizing the racist

assumption that there can be no meaningful bonds of intimacy between blacks and
whites. It is fascinating to explore why it is that black people trapped in the worst situation of racial oppres sionenslavementhad the foresight to see that it would be
269More than ever before in our history,

disempowering for them to lose sight of the capacity of white people to transform themselves and divest of white supremacy, even as many black folks today who in no way suffer

black folks, like their

white counterparts, have passively accepted the internalization of white
supremacist assumptions. Organized white supremacists have always taught that
there can never be trust and intimacy between the superior white race and the
inferior black race. When black people internalize these sentiments, no resistance
such extreme racist oppression and exploitation are convinced that white people will not repudiate racism. Con temporary

to white supremacy is taking place; rather we become complicit in spreading

racist notions . It does not matter that so many black people feel white people will never repudiate racism because of being daily assaulted by white denial and
refusal of accountability. We must not allow the actions of white folks who blindly endorse racism to determine the direction of our resistance. Like our white allies in struggle
we must consistently keep the faith, by always sharing the truth that 270white people can be anti-racist, that racism is not some immutable character flaw.

Of course many white people are comfortable with a rhetoric of race that suggests
racism cannot be changed, that all white people are inherently racist simply because they are born and raised in this society.
Such misguided thinking socializes white people both to remain ignorant of the way in which

white supremacist attitudes are learned and to assume a posture of learned helplessness as though they have no agencyno capacity to resist this
thinking. Luckily we have many autobiographies by white folks committed to anti-racist struggle that provide documentary testimony that many of
these individuals repudiated racism when they were children. Far from passively accepting It as inherent, they instinctively felt it was wrong. Many of
them witnessed bizarre acts of white racist aggression towards black folks in everyday life and responded to the injustice of the situation. Sadly, in our
times so many white folks are easily convinced by racist whites and bLack folks who have internalized racism that they can never be really free of
racism.
These feelings aso then obsc]re the reality of white privi lege. As long as white folks are taught to accept racism as natura] then they do not have to see
themselves as con sciously creating a racist society by their actions, by their political choices. This means as well that they do not have to face the way in
which acting in a racist manner ensures the maintenance of white privilege. Indeed, denying their agency allows them to believe white privilege does
not exist even as they daily exercise it. If the young white woman who had been raped had chosen to hold all black males account able for what
happened, she would have been exercising white privilege and reinforcing the structure of racist thought which teaches that all black people are alike.
Unfortunately,
271so many white people are eager to believe racism cannot be changed because internalizing that assumption downplays the issue of accountability.
No responsibility need be taken for not changing something fit is perceived as immutable. To accept racism as a system of domination that can be
changed would demand that everyone who sees him- or herself as embracing a vision of radai social equality would be required to assert anti-racist
habits of being. We know from histories both present and past that white people (and everyone else) who commit themselves to living in anti-racist
ways need to make sacrifices, to courageously endure the uncomfortable to challenge and change.

Whites, people of color, and black folks are reluctant to commit themselves fully and
deeply to an anti-racist struggle that is ongoing because there is such a pervasive feeling of

hopelessnessa conviction that nothing will ever change . How any of us can
continue to hold those feelings when we study the history of racism in this society
and see how much has changed makes no logical sense . Clearly we have not gone
far enough. In the late sixties, Martin Luther King posed the question Where do we go from here. To live in anti-racist society we
must collectively renew our commitment to a democratic vision of racial justice
and equality. Pursuing that vision we create a culture where beloved community
flourishes and is sustained. Those of us who know the joy of being with folks from all walks of life, all races, who are
fundamentalls anti-racist in their habits of being. need to give public testimony. Ve need to share not only what we have experienced but the conditions
of change that make such an experience possible. The interracial circle of love that I know can happen because each individual present in it has made
his or her own commitment to living an anti- racist life and to furthering the struggle to end white supremacy 272 will become a reality for everyone
only if those of us who have created these communities share how they emerge in our lives and the strategies we use to sustain them. Our devout
commitment to building diverse communities is cen tral. These commitments to anti-racist living are just one expression of who we are and what we
share with one an other but they form the foundation of that sharing. Like

all beloved communities we affirm our

differences. It is this generous spirit of affirmation that gives us the courage to challenge one another, to work through misunderstandings,
especially those that have to do with race and racism. In a beloved community solidarity and trust are

grounded in profound commitment to a shared vision. Those of us who are always anti-racist long for a
world in which evezyone can form a beloved community where borders can be crossed and cultural hybridity celebrated. Anyone can begin to make
such a community by truly seeking to live in an anti-racist world. If

that longing guides our vision and our

actions, the new culture will be born and anti-racist communities of resis tance
will emerge everywhere. That is where we must go from here.

AT: Sexton
Sextons entire K is de-contextual and based on poor evidence
Spickard 9

(Paul Spickard is a professor of history and Asian American studies at the University of
California, Santa Barbara. Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of
Multiracialism (review) American Studies, Volume 50, Number 1/2, Spring/Summer 2009, pp.
125-127 Project Muse)
Sexton does point out, as do many writers, the flawed tendencies in multiracial advocacy mentioned in the
second paragraph above. But he imputes them to the whole movement and to the subject of
study, and that is not a fair assessment. The main problem is that Sexton argues
from conclusion to evidence, rather than the other way around . That is, he begins with the
conclusion that the multiracial idea is bad, retrograde, and must be resisted. And then he cherry-picks his evidence
to fit his conclusion. He spends much of his time on weaker writers such as Gregory
Stephens and Stephen Talty who have been tangential to the multiracial literature. When he
addresses stronger figures like Daniel, Root, Nash, and Kennedy, he carefully selects his quotes
to fit his argument, and misrepresents their positions by doing so. Sexton also makes
some pretty outrageous claims. He takes the fact that people who study multiracial
identities are often studying aspects of family life (such as the shaping of a child's identity), and
twists that to charge them with homophobia and nuclear family-ism. That is
simply not accurate for any of the main writers in the field . The same is true for his argument by
innuendo that scholars of multiraciality somehow advocate mail-order bride services. And sometimes Sexton simply
resorts to ad hominem attacks on the motives and personal lives of the writers
themselves. It is a pretty tawdry exercise .

K Aff

Coalitions hooks
Uniting different coalitions is necessary to overcome white
supremacy---the alt recreates white divide and conquer
bell hooks 3, social critic extraordinaire, Beyond Black Only: Bonding Beyond Race,

http://prince.org/msg/105/50299?pr
African Americans have been at the forefront of the struggle to end racism and
white supremacy in the United States since individual free black immigrants and the larger body of enslaved blacks first landed here. Even though much
of that struggle has been directly concerned with the plight of black people, all
gains received from civil rights work have had tremendous positive impact on the
social status of all non-white groups in this country. Bonding between enslaved Africans, free Africans, and Native Americans is well documented. Freedom
fighters from all groups (and certainly there were many traitors in all three groups who were co-opted by rewards given by the white power structure) understood the importance of solidarity-of struggling against

The enemy was not white people. It was white supremacy . Organic
freedom fighters, both Native and African Americans, had no difficulty building coalitions with those
the common enemy, white supremacy.

white folks who wanted to work for the freedom of everyone. Those early models
of coalition building in the interest of dismantling white supremacy are often
forgotten . Much has happened to obscure that history. The construction of reservations (many of which were and are located in areas where there are not large populations of black people)
isolated communities of Native Americans from black liberation struggle. And as time passed both groups began to view one
another through Eurocentric stereotypes, internalizing white racist assumptions
about the other. Those early coalitions were not maintained . Indeed the bonds between African Americans struggling to resist
racist domination, and all other people of color in this society who suffer from the same system, continue to be fragile, even as we all remain untied by ties, however frayed and weakened, forged in shared antiracist struggle. Collectively,

within the United States people of color strengthen our capacity to resist

white supremacy when we build coalitions . Since white supremacy emerged here within the context of colonization, the conquering and
The concrete
practice of solidarity between the two groups has been eroded by the divide-andconquer tactics of racist white power and by the complicity of both groups. Native American artist and activist of the Cherokee people Jimmie Durham, in
conquest of Native Americans, early on it was obvious that Native and African Americans could best preserve their cultures by resisting from a standpoint of political solidarity.

his collection of essays A Certain Lack of Coherence, talks about the 1960s as a time when folks tried to regenerate that spirit of coalition: In the 1960s and 70s American Indian, African American and Puerto
Rican activists said, as loudly as they could, This country is founded on the genocide of one people and the enslavement of another. This statement, hardly arguable, was not much taken up by white activists. As
time passed, it was rarely taken up by anyone. Instead the fear that ones specific group might receive more attention has led to greater nationalism, the showing of concern for ones racial or ethnic plight without

Bonds of solidarity between people of color

are continuously ruptured by our complicity with white racism . Similarly, white immigrants to the United States,
linking that concern to the plight of other non-white groups and their struggles for liberation.

both past and present, establish their right to citizenship within white supremacist society by asserting it in daily life through acts of discrimination and assault that register their contempt for and disregard of
black people and darker-skinned immigrants mimic this racist behavior in their interactions with black folks. In her editorial On the Backs of Blacks published in a recent special issue of TIME magazine Toni
Morrison discusses the way white supremacy is reinscribed again and again as immigrants seek assimilation: All immigrants fight for jobs and space, and who is there to fight but those who have both? As in the
fishing ground struggle between Texas and Vietnamese shrimpers, they displace what and whom they canIn race talk the move into mainstream America always means buying into the notion of American blacks
as the real aliens. Whatever the ethnicity or nationality of the immigrant, his nemesis is understood to be African AmericanSo addictive is this ploy that the fact of blackness has been abandoned for the theory of
blackness. It doesnt matter anymore what shade the newcomers skin is. A hostile posture toward resident blacks must be struck at the Americanizing door. Often people of color, both those who are citizens and
those who are recent immigrants, hold black people responsible for the hostility they encounter from whites. It is as though they see blacks as acting in a manner that makes things harder for everybody else. This
type of scapegoating is the mark of the colonized sensibility which always blames those victimized rather than targeting structures of domination. Just as many white Americans deny both the prevalence of
racism in the United States and the role they play in perpetuating and maintaining white supremacy, non-white, non-black groups, Native, Asian, Hispanic Americans, all deny their investment in anti-black
sentiment even as they consistently seek to distance themselves from blackness so that they will not be seen as residing at the bottom of this societys totem pole, in the category reserved for the most despised

jockeying for white approval and reward obscures the way allegiance to the
existing social structure undermines the social welfare of all people of color .
group. Such

White supremacist power is always weakened when people of color bond across
differences of culture, ethnicity, and race . It is always strengthened when we act
as though there is no continuity and overlap in the patterns of exploitation and
oppression that affect all of our lives. To ensure that political bonding to challenge and change white supremacy will not be cultivated among diverse
groups of people of color, white ruling groups pit us against one another in a no-win game of who will get the prize for model minority today. They compare and contrast, affix labels like model minority, define
boundaries, and we fall into line. Those rewards coupled with internalized racist assumptions lead non-black people of color to deny the way racism victimizes them as they actively work to disassociate themselves

we have yet to build a

contemporary mass movement to challenge white supremacy that would draw us
together. Without an organized collective struggle that consistently reminds us of
our common concerns, people of color forget. Sadly forgetting common concerns sets the stage for competing concerns. Working within the
from black people. This will to disassociate is a gesture of racism. Even though progressive people of color consistently critique these standpoints,

system of white supremacy, non-black people of color often feel as though they must compete with black folks to receive white attention. Some are even angry at what they wrongly perceive as a greater concern on
the part of white of the dominant culture for the pain of black people. Rather than seeing the attention black people receive as linked to the gravity of our situation and the intensity of our resistance, they want to
make it a sign of white generosity and concern. Such thinking is absurd. If white folks were genuinely concerned about black pain, they would challenge racism, not turn the spotlight on our collective pain in ways
that further suggest that we are inferior. Andrew Hacker makes it clear in Two Nations that the vast majority of white Americans believe that members of the black race represent an inferior strain of the human
species. He adds: In this view Africans-and Americans who trace their origins to that continent-are seen as languishing at a lower evolutionary level than members of other races. Non-black people of color often

do not approach white attention to black issues by critically interrogating how those issues are presented and whose interests the representations ultimately serve. Rather than engaging in a competition that sees
blacks as winning more goodies from the white system than other groups, non-black people of color who identify with black resistance struggle recognize the danger of such thinking and repudiate it. They are
politically astute enough to challenge a rhetoric of resistance that is based on competition rather than a capacity on the part of non-black groups to identify with whatever progress blacks make as being a positive
sign for everyone. Until non-black people of color define their citizenship via commitment to a democratic vision of racial justice rather than investing in the dehumanization and oppression of black people, they
will always act as mediators, keeping black people in check for the ruling white majority. Until racist anti-black sentiments are let go by other people of color, especially immigrants, and complain that these groups

As more
people of color raise our consciousness and refuse to be pitted against one
another, the forces of neo-colonial white supremacist domination must work
harder to divide and conquer. The most recent effort to undermine progressive bonding between people of color is the institutionalization of multiculturalism.
are receiving too much attention, they undermine freedom struggle. When this happens people of color war all acting in complicity with existing exploitative and oppressive structures.

Positively, multiculturalism is presented as a corrective to a Eurocentric vision of model citizenship wherein white middle-class ideals are presented as the norm. Yet this positive intervention is undermined by
visions of multiculturalism that suggest everyone should live with and identify with their own self contained group. If white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is unchanged then multiculturalism within that context
can only become a breeding ground for narrow nationalism, fundamentalism, identity politics, and cultural, racial, and ethnic separatism. Each separate group will then feel that it must protect its own interests by

For even
though demographics in the United States would suggest that in the future the nation will
be more populated by people of color, and whites will no longer be the majority
group, numerical presence will in no way alter white supremacy if there is no
keeping outsiders at bay, for the group will always appear vulnerable, its power and identity sustained by exclusivity. When people of color think this way, white supremacy remains intact.

collective organizing, no efforts to build coalitions that cross boundaries . Already, the white
Christian Right is targeting large populations of people of color to ensure that the fundamentalist values they want this nation to uphold and represent will determine the attitudes and values of these groups. The
role Eurocentric Christianity has played in teaching non-white folks Western metaphysical dualism, the ideology that under girds binary notion of superior/inferior, good/bad, white/black, cannot be ignored.
While progressive organizations are having difficulty reaching wider audiences, the white-dominated Christian Right organizes outreach programs that acknowledge diversity and have considerable influence. Just
as the white-dominated Christian church in the U.S. once relied on biblical references to justify racist domination and discrimination, it now deploys a rhetoric of multiculturalism to invite non-white people to
believe that racism can be overcome through a shared fundamentalist encounter. Every contemporary fundamentalist white male-dominated religious cult in the U.S. has a diverse congregation. People of color
have flocked to these organizations because they have felt them to be places where racism does not exist, where they are not judged on the basis of skin color. While the white-dominated mass media focus critical
attention on black religious fundamentalist groups like the Nation of Islam, and in particular Louis Farrakhan, little critique is made of white Christian fundamentalist outreach to black people and other people of
color. Black Islamic fundamentalism shares with the white Christian Right support for coercive hierarchy, fascism, and a belief that some groups are inferior and others superior, along with a host of other
similarities. Irrespective of the standpoint, religious fundamentalism brainwashes individuals not to think critically or see radical politicization as a means of transforming their lives. When people of color
immerse themselves in religious fundamentalism, no meaningful challenge and critique of white supremacy can surface. Participation in a radical multiculturalism in any form is discouraged by religious

coalition building between people of color

threatens to disrupt white supremacist organization of us all into competing
camps. However, this vision of multiculturalism is continually undermined by greed, one group wanting rewards for itself even at the expense of other groups. It is this perversion of solidarity the
fundamentalism. Progressive multiculturalism that encourages and promotes

authors of Night Vision address when they assert: While there are different nationalities, races and genders in the U.S., the supposedly different cultures in multiculturalism dont like to admit what they have in
common, the glue of it all-parasitism. Right now, theres both anger among the oppressed and a milling around, edging up to the next step but uncertain what it is fully about, what is means. The key is the
common need to break with parasitism.

A based identity politics of solidarity that embraces both a broad

based identity politics which acknowledges specific cultural and ethnic legacies,
histories , etc. as it simultaneously promotes a recognition of overlapping
cultural traditions and values as well as an inclusive understanding of what is
gained when people of color unite to resist white supremacy is the only way to
ensure that multicultural democracy will become a reality .