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Black Nationalism
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Notes
Black Nationalism
Here’s some stuff that should help you understand the thesis:
4 Tenants of Black Nationalism according to Melanye Price
1. Black Self-determination-a. Black people need control over their lives can only happen through self-governance of a
black nation
b. Some say not a black nation but instead black communities
2. Control-a. independence and self-sustenance by virtue of its own financial, political, and intellectual
resources in the form of self-help programs.
3. Drop the Baggage-a. Sever ties with white people that believe or operate on notions of white superiority and
black inferiority
4. Pan-Africanist Identity
a. Find the connections between an african american identity and an African identity and
recognize the intersections to create a Pan-African identity that is key to solving black
oppression ad white supremacy
"Because African descendants initially arrived in the United States designated as chattel rather than fully
human citizens and that legacy continued for centuries afterward, whites and some blacks see blacks as
a group that should be kept in permanent servitude. In order for blacks to embrace independence, they
had to rid themselves of any beliefs in white superiority and black inferiority."
This is strategic because you defend state action but link to none of the DA’s. Some of the DA’s with
deontological impacts could be threatening BUUUUUUT y’all get to defend circumvention on the aff
because it doesn’t really matter if the plan has durable fiat. The perception by Black America of this
horridly racist thing would be enough to spur black nationalist movements. So because circumvention is
a thing, the links to the DA’s don’t really apply.. except maybe politics... but if you’re reading that against
this aff.. hmm
1AC
Plan Texts
Plan Text 1 (decrease surveillance): United States federal government should
substantially curtail surveillance on all non-black populations.
Plan Text 2 (increase surveillance): United States federal government should
substantially increase surveillance on all black populations.
1AC—Surveillance
Overtly racist policies are key to igniting Black Nationalist movements
Price 9 (Melanye Price, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers, B.A. (Magna cum Laude) in
geography with a political science minor at Prairie View A&M University, PhD in political science with a
specialty in the field of American politics at the Ohio State University “Dreaming Blackness: Black
Nationalism and African American Public Opinion” Accessed via Kindle Books// ekr)
In the current political climate, where overt racial hostility is publicly denounced by even the most
racially conservative sources and more subtle attempts at retreat from civil rights gains endure, the
space for the resurgence of Black Nationalism is both fertile and fragile. It is fertile because, as this
research indicates, there is a high level of distrust and dissatisfaction with current conditions for blacks.
Many feel blacks should have progressed much further in the forty years since the height of the Civil
Rights Movement. Additionally, as the focus of the federal government and federal dollars shifts from
domestic policy to international concerns and war, those social programs that were created as remedies
to racially biased policies and practices are more likely to come under attack, which is likely to further
distance blacks from the federal government. It is simultaneously fragile because characteristics and
conditions that foster intraracial ties between blacks seem to be weaker than in previous iterations of
Black Nationalist prominence. To be sure, blacks still see their fate as tied to that of other blacks, but
they are engaging in high degrees of black blame that lead to conditional rather than unwavering
support for community empowerment efforts. As the gap between the black poor and the black middle
class continues to widen, the ability to opt out (albeit on a limited basis) of the black community is more
attainable than ever before. In the absence of overt residential segregation and other policies that
reinforce blacks’ communal solidarity, some blacks may simply choose to withdraw entirely from the
African American community. Unlike in the past, when the only avenue of retreat from racial hostility
was further cloistering oneself in the black community, in the face of increased racial hostility and
absent overtly racist policies, blacks now have more options in terms of racial coping strategies. This
seems especially true among those who most vehemently reject Black Nationalism and are also more
likely to frame policies around individual concerns rather than community or collective benefits.
Whether there will be a full recovery for displaced Katrina residents is difficult to tell. We know that
Barack Obama will be the forty-fourth president of the United States. Still, it is likely that blacks will
continue to support some level of racial group independence. If the pendulum shifts toward increased
racial hostility and black frustration, then there should be increased support for Black Nationalism. The
ability of this ideology to gain traction among ordinary citizens in the post–Civil Rights era is undermined
by the diminished importance of racial group membership among younger African Americans. Without
legal and social barriers that keep the African American community bounded, defining problems through
a narrow group membership lens fails to account for real changes in the African American community
that make it more diverse than in any other period. Understanding, negotiating, and accounting for ingroup diversity are the tests of post–Civil Rights black politics. As a result, the effort to achieve political
empowerment remains a collective one. Henderson (2000) notes: DuBois was quite prescient in his view
that the problems of the twentieth century would be the problem of the color line. . . . Cruse was no less
prescient; his pendulum thesis suggests that the challenge of the twenty-first century will be the
challenge of the culture line—at home and abroad. (359)
The plantation has recreated itself in the surveillance state—rejection is key to a black
critical consciousness
Williams 14 (Jason Michael Williams B.S and M.S in Criminal Justice from New Jersey City University
(NJCU) and his PhD in Administration of Justice from Texas Southern University Criminal Justice
department chair at the Hampton Institute, 10.3.14, “Social Control and ‘Otherness’”
http://www.drjasonwilliams.com/blog //ekr)
*edited for ableist language*
The end-result of this problem, of course, is the death of people, communities, and the nation. Nevertheless, the
consequences of this problem has failed to shock the majority into acting in a manner consistent with human dignity and the urgency necessary
to combat this never-ending war against certain segments of society. The
criminal justice system, for the most part, operates as
a contemporary system of slavery. For example, slavery, before it was "officially" done away with, provided the majority with a
system that kept them at the top, while also keeping Blacks at the bottom. After the Civil War, slavery had lost its footing in
the south and the advent of Black Codes and Jim Crow took its place. However, it would not be too long before
human dignity/rights would prevail again, thus canceling "separate but equal." However, now the majority was left
with another problem, it was one of social control yet again. How could the majority control the masses contemporarily
without appearing as if it is denying the "others" human dignity/rights? The answer to this question
would come by way of the criminal justice system. The criminal justice system, a supposedly democratic and impartial
institution would later punish and control the "others" in the name of democracy and fairness. In fact, it was during the 1980s when the "war
on drugs" in particular gained superior footing alongside the emergence of conservative criminology, which really catapulted the administration
of justice away from the rehabilitative practices won in the 1960s-70s and toward a more punitive orientation. This
shift within policy
and academic criminology led to the grave disparities and injustices presently recognized in the system
today. Nonetheless, the outcome of this paradox accentuates that although Blacks are citizens of the U.S., by way of the
criminal justice system they have subjective citizenship (this is reflected in disenfranchisement studies/stats). Blacks
possess a citizenship that must be constantly validated (e.g., birthers), and at any time their citizenship can
lose its benefits if they should ever come in contact with the criminal justice system, which is highly
likely because of differential law enforcement and the occupation of Black communities by law enforcement. This
partnership between the criminal justice system and racial demotion/subjugation is one that maintains white supremacy.
Today, the criminal justice system serves as a democratic function in furthering white supremacy at the expense of minorities (mostly Blacks)
and nobody speaks upon it because, theoretically, the processes that govern the administration of justice are based on the consensus model.
What further complicates this absurdity is the advent or notion of colorblindness color ignorance -that, in fact, the
U.S. presently operates in a reality that excludes race as a factor in any fashion. The use of colorblindness
color ignorance as a reality is, of course, an anecdotal expression of white conservation it is neither true nor
achievable because colorblindness color ignorance is the quintessential enemy of individualism. More important,
an adaptation to colorblindness color ignorance presents to society the same issue that colorblindness
color ignorance attempts to solve, a society in which people cannot be themselves. Furthermore, many
people wonder if a consciousness will ever arise out the U.S. regarding the issue of subjective citizenship
by way of criminal sanctions, yet one must also wonder if it serves the best interests of the majority to rid it. Would the majority be
willing to sacrifice and allow others to be themselves and participate in the greater American society without having to be someone else? Major
contemporary implications
regarding the criminal justice system as a tool of racial control would be the
post-911 era and the super heightened surveillance complex that presently invades minority life.
Although many (regardless of race/ethnicity) in the U.S. are now complainants against the strong surveillance state
which now exists, they should be reminded that such a reality is nothing new to minority communities - yet the majority only
sees such mechanisms as strange when they are the target. Until citizenship is conceptualized as an equal possession for
all, the lives of certain sectors within society will continue to be micro-managed via the criminal justice system, "democratically" of course.
However, those
who have lived under auspices of validation and superiority for so long may soon need to
rethink their position given the onslaught of the surveillance complex which is slowly but surely
becoming racially indiscriminate in its processes. Now is the time to bind together as one despite these
differences. Whether this is possible or not remains to be seen.
The affirmative is critical to countering notions of white supremacy
Shelby ’03 (Tommie Shelby – PhD in philosophy; Professor of African and Africana Studies and
Philosophy at Harvard; 2003; “TWO CONCEPTIONS OF BLACK NATIONALISM Martin Delany on the
Meaning of Black Political Solidarity”)//CC
Delany maintains that once this association of black skin with low social status had been established,
there was virtually nothing blacks could do (short of extensive “race-mixing” or passing for white) to
elevate themselves to social equality.66 Advancing an argument made famous by Alexis de Tocqueville,
Delany insists that even the abolition of slavery would not end black oppression or racial antagonism,
because the stigma of servitude would have become attached to their easily observable “distinguishing
mark.”67 Thus, the skin color of blacks would remind not only whites but also blacks of their former
slave status, causing many whites to have contempt for blacks and some blacks to have self-contempt.
Delany thinks that this association of skin color with forced servitude could perhaps be broken if blacks
were to rise to positions of honor and status within society. This is why he implores blacks to avoid
taking on menial labor and service roles, an injunction that some commentators have wrongly reduced
to a form of conservative elitism.68 However, Delany is not critical of those blacks who are forced to
take such positions out of material necessity; he simply insists that no self-respecting person would do
so, as some have, just to buy ostentatious clothes and modern conveniences.69 Indeed, he argues that
when an individual performs the role of servant, this is not necessarily degrading at all, but when a great
number of a recognizable social group do, they inevitably come to be viewed as a “naturally”
subservient people.70 Delany becomes convinced that blacks cannot erase the stigma attached to their
color while remaining in the United States, and thus he urges them to emigrate elsewhere. He mounts a
powerful case, on pragmatic nationalist grounds, in support of this radical conclusion. The Fugitive Slave
Law of 1850 effectively denied full citizenship to even “free” blacks, a denial that was later solidified and
made explicit in the Dred Scott decision of 1857.71 He maintains that whites cannot be rationally or
morally persuaded out of their prejudice because they have a material stake in black subordination and
because they have too little sympathy for what they consider a degraded race.72Blacks certainly cannot
compel whites to treat them as equals, because whites greatly outnumber and have significantly more
power than blacks.73 Blacks cannot achieve economic parity with whites while living among them, since
whites all but monopolize land, capital, and political influence.74 Living under such oppressive
conditions also fosters servility and resignation among the oppressed.75 Thus, if blacks were to remain
in the United States, they would not only be sacrificing their right to equal respect, democratic
citizenship, and self-government but would also be forgoing the cultivation and expression of a vigorous
character, which no group can do and retain its dignity. And even if blacks were to gain legal equality
with whites in the United States, the antiblack attitudes of the latter, along with their overwhelming
power and shear numbers, would make it quite difficult, if not impossible, for blacks to fully exercise
their civil rights.76
White Supremacy informs genocide and war—only a rupturing of the slave state can
restructure society
Rodriguez 11 (Dylan Rodríguez is Professor and Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside. He
received his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley (2001), and earned
two B.A. degrees and a Concentration degree from Cornell University (1995). “The Black Presidential Non-Slave:
Genocide and the Present Tense of Racial Slavery”, in Julian Go (ed.) Rethinking Obama (Political Power and Social
Theory, Volume 22) Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp.17 – 50)
To crystallize what I hope to be the potentially useful implications of this provocation toward a retelling of the slavery-abolition story: if we
follow the narrative and theoretical trajectories initiated here, it should take little stretch of the historical imagination, nor a radical distension
of analytical framing, to suggest that the
singular institutionalization of racist and peculiarly antiblack social/state
violence in our living era - the US imprisonment regime and its conjoined policing and criminalization
apparatuses - elaborates the social logics of genocidal racial slavery within the American nation-building
project, especially in the age of Obama. The formation and astronomical growth of the prison industrial complex has become a commonly
identified institutional marker of massively scaled racist state mobilization, and the fundamental violence of this apparatus is
in the prison's translation of the 13th Amendment's racist animus. By "reforming" slavery and anti-slave
violence, and directly transcribing both into criminal justice rituals, proceedings, and punishments, the 13th Amendment
permanently inscribes slavery on "post-emancipation" US statecraft. The state remains a "slave state" to
the extent that it erects an array of institutional apparatuses that are specifically conceived to reproduce or
enhance the state's capacity to "create" (i.e., criminalize and convict) prison chattel and politically legitimate the
processes of enslavement/imprisonment therein. The crucial starting point for our narrative purposes is that the emergence of the
criminalization and carceral apparatus over the last forty years has not, and in the foreseeable future will not build its institutional protocols
around the imprisonment of an economically productive or profitmaking prison labor force (Gilmore, 1999).16 So, if not for use as labor under
the 13th Amendment's juridical mandate of "involuntary servitude," what
is the animating structural-historical logic behind
the formation of an imprisonment regime unprecedented in human history in scale and complexity, and which
locks up well over a million Black people, significantly advancing numbers of "nonwhite" Latinos as, and in which the
white population is vastly underrepresented in terms of both numbers imprisoned and likelihood to be prosecuted (and thus
incarcerated) for similar alleged criminal offenses?17 In excess of its political economic, geographic, and juridical registers, the
contemporary US prison regime must be centrally understood as constituting an epoch-defining
statecraft of race: a historically specific conceptualization, planning, and institutional mobilization of state institutional capacities and
state-influenced cultural structures to reproduce and/or reassemble the social relations of power, dominance, and
violence that constitute the ontology (epistemic and conceptual framings) of racial meaning itself (da Silva, 2007;
Goldberg, 1993). In this case, the racial ontology of the postslavery and post-civil rights prison is anchored in the crisis of social meaning
wrought on white civil society by the 13th Amendment's apparent juridical elimination of the Black chattel slave being. Across historical
periods, the social inhabitation of the
white civil subject - - its self-recognition, institutionally affirmed (racial) sovereignty, and
everyday social intercourse with other racial beings - is made legible through its positioning as the administrative authority and
consenting audience for the nation- and civilization-building processes of multiple racial genocides. It is the bare fact of the
white subject's access and entitlement to the generalized position of administering and consenting to racial
genocide that matters most centrally here. Importantly, this white civil subject thrives on the assumption that
s/he is they are not, and will never be the target of racial genocide.18 (Williams, 2010) .Those things obtained and
secured through genocidal processes - land, political and military hegemony/dominance, expropriated
labor - are in this sense secondary to the raw relation of violence that the white subject inhabits in
relation to the racial objects (including people, ecologies, cultural forms, sacred materials, and other
modalities of life and being) subjected to the irreparable violations of genocidal processes. It is this raw
relation, in which white social existence materially and narratively consolidates itself within the normalized systemic logics of racial genocides,
that forms the condition of possibility for the US social formation, from "abolition" onward. To push the argument further: the distended
systems of racial genocides are not the massively deadly means toward some other (rational) historical ends, but are ends within themselves.
Here we can decisively depart from the hegemonic juridical framings of "genocide" as dictated by the United Nations, and examine instead the
logics of genocide that dynamically structure the different historical-social forms that have emerged from the classically identifiable genocidal
systems of racial colonial conquest, indigenous physical and cultural extermination, and racial chattel slavery. To recall Trask and Marable, the
historical logics of genocide permeate institutional assemblages that variously operationalize the historical forces of planned obsolescence,
social neutralization, and "ceasing to exist." Centering
a conception of racial genocide as a dynamic set of
sociohistorical logics (rather than as contained, isolatable historical episodes) allows the slavery-to-prison continuity to
be more clearly marked: the continuity is not one that hinges on the creation of late-20th and early-list century "slave labor," but
rather on a re-institutionalization of anti-slave social violence. Within this historical schema, the post-1970s prison regime institutionalizes the
raw relation of violence essential to white social being while mediating it so it appears as non-genocidal, non-violent, peacekeeping, and justiceforming. This
is where we can also narrate the contemporary racial criminalization, policing, and
incarcerating apparatuses as being historically tethered to the genocidal logics of the post-abolition, postemancipation, and post-civil rights slave state. While it is necessary to continuously clarify and debate whether and how this statecraft of racial
imprisonment is verifiably genocidal, there seems to be little reason to question that it is, at least, protogenocidal - displaying both the capacity
and inclination for genocidal outcomes in its systemic logic and historical trajectory. This contextualization leads toward a somewhat different
analytical framing of the "deadly symbiosis" that sociologist Loi'c Wacquant has outlined in his account of antiblack carceral-spatial systems.
While it would be small-minded to suggest that the emergence of the late-20th century prison regime is an historical inevitability, we should at
least understand that the
structural bottom line of Black imprisonment over the last four decades - wherein the
quantitative fact of a Black prison/jail majority has become taken-for-granted as a social fact - is a contemporary institutional
manifestation of a genocidal racial substructure that has been reformed, and not fundamentally
displaced, by the juridical and cultural implications of slavery's abolition. I have argued elsewhere for a conception of
the US prison not as a selfcontained institution or isolated place, but rather as a material prototype of organized punishment and (social, civil,
and biological) death (Rodriguez, 2006). To understand the US prison as a regime is to focus conceptually, theoretically, and politically on the
prison as a pliable module or mobilized vessel through which technologies of racial domin8ance institutionalize their specific, localized practices
of legitimated (state) violence. Emerging as the organic institutional continuity of racial slavery's genocidal violence, the US prison regime
represents a form of human domination that extends beyond and outside the formal institutional and geographic domains of "the prison (the
jail, etc.)." In this sense, the prison is the institutional signification of a larger regime of proto-genocidal violence that is politically legitimized by
the state, generally valorized by the cultural common sense, and dynamically mobilized and institutionally consolidated across different
historical moments: it is a form of social power that is indispensable to the contemporary (and postemancipation) social order and its changing
structures of racial dominance, in a manner that elaborates the social logics of genocidal racial slavery. The
binding presence of
slavery within post-emancipation US state formation is precisely why the liberal multiculturalist narration of the Obama
ascendancy finds itself compelled to posit an official rupture from the spectral and material presence of
enslaved racial blackness. It is this symbolic rupturing - the presentation of a president who consummates the liberal dreams of Black
citizenship. Black freedom, Black non-resentment, and Black patriotic subjectivity - that constructs the Black non-slave presidency as the fleshand-blood severance of the US racial/racist state from its entanglement in the continuities of antiblack genocide. Against
this
multiculturalist narrative, our attention should be principally fixated on the bottom-line Blackness of the
prison's genocidal logic, not the fungible Blackness of the presidency. CONCLUSION: FROM "POST-CIVIL RIGHTS" TO WHITE
RECONSTRUCTION The Obama ascendancy is the signature moment of the post-1960s White Reconstruction, a period that has been
characterized by the reformist elaboration of historically racist systems of social power to accommodate the political imperatives of American
apartheid's downfall and the emergence of hegemonic (liberal-to-conservative) multiculturalisms. Byfocusing on how such reforms
have
neither eliminated nor fundamentally alleviated the social emergencies consistently produced by the
historical logics of racial genocide, the notion of White Reconstruction departs from Marable's notion of the 1990s as the "twilight
of the Second Reconstruction" (Marable. 2007. p. 216)19 and points toward another way of framing and narrating the period that has been
more commonly referenced as the "post-civil rights" era. Rather than taking its primary point of historical departure to be the cresting of the
Civil Rights Movement and its legacy of delimited (though no less significant) political-cultural achievements. White Reconstruction focuses on
how this era is denned by an acute and sometimes aggressive reinvention and reorganization of the structural-institutional formations of racial
dominance. Defined schematically, the
recent half-century has encompassed a generalized reconstruction of
"classically" white supremacist apparatuses of state-sanctioned and culturally legitimated racial
violence. This general reconstruction has (1) strategically and unevenly dislodged various formal and de facto institutional white monopolies
and diversified their personnel at various levels of access, from the entry-level to the administrative and executive levels (e.g., the sometimes
aggressive diversity recruitment campaigns of research universities, urban police, and the military); while simultaneously (2) revamping,
complicating, and enhancing the social relations of dominance, hierarchy, and violence mobilized by such institutions - relations that broadly
reflect the long historical, substructural role of race in the production of the US national formation and socioeconomic order. In this sense, the
notion of White Reconstruction brings central attention to how the historical
logics of racial genocide may not only survive
the apparent disruption of classical white monopolies on the administrative and institutional
apparatuses that have long mobilized these violent social logics, but may indeed flourish through these
reformist measures, as such logics are re-adapted into the protocols and discourses of these newly
"diversified" racist and white supremacist apparatuses (e.g.. the apparatuses of the research university, police, and military
have expanded their capacities to produce local and global relations of racial dominance, at the same time that they have constituted some of
the central sites for diversity recruitment and struggles over equal access). It is, at the very least, a remarkable and dreadful moment in the
historical time of White Reconstruction that a Black president has won office in an electoral landslide while well over a million Black people are
incarcerated with the overwhelming consent of white/multiculturalist civil society.
The communal focus of black nationalist thought liberates and opens new doors for
black identity expression
Price 9 (Melanye Price, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers, B.A. (Magna cum Laude) in
geography with a political science minor at Prairie View A&M University, PhD in political science with a
specialty in the field of American politics at the Ohio State University “Dreaming Blackness: Black
Nationalism and African American Public Opinion” Accessed via Kindle Books//ekr)
Relying on historical racial conflict and hostility, as well as a desire to reconnect to African cultural origins, Black Nationalists have called for
various levels of withdrawal from the American political system. Black Zionism represents the most extreme form of Black Nationalism, and its
proponents have rarely been able to muster the support necessary to amass and sustain an emigration movement. More popular, instead, have
been more reserved forms of
Black Nationalism that endeavor to protect and maintain African American
culture, institutions, and traditions separate and apart from others. The latter type of Black Nationalism is
demonstrated most among participants here. TABLE 3.1 Typology of Black Nationalism: Attitudes and Issue Positions [Insert Table Here] For
Black Nationalists, their African American identity is central to how they define themselves. Identity
transformation is a crucial mobilizing element of Black Nationalism, accomplished largely by
strengthening connection to individuals, cultural traditions, and struggles throughout the African
Diaspora. Keesha, a civil servant and natural hair salon owner who has worked, resided, and raised her children entirely in the center city,
summarized these essential beliefs in her discussion about why she agrees with Malcolm X: Well you know if we read the books that Malcolm
told us to . . . we always talk about what we can’t do. What we are not able to do, we have not analyzed why we are there mentally and how do
we break that mental slavery . . . um . . . the fact that when you go over to Africa, not in the colonized areas because you know they are just as
confused as the black folks over here but in the rural areas . . . people eat out of the same plates, people see each other as one. If you’re
hurting, I’m hurting. If you don’t have, I don’t have. If you have, I have. So I feel good when you get because that means I got, and I feel bad
when you don’t have because that means I don’t have. So I’m saying that being kidnapped and then being raped of our identity, and like Paula
said you ain’t going to get it back in thirty years, but to be able to identify that I don’t trust people and why don’t I trust people and work on
that because the only way you’re going to get through it is—it’s almost like having a phobia, you have to expose yourself to it—and say, okay,
I’m going trust Jerri and Paula and Adrienne, and somebody’s going to let me down, but it’s okay. That’s where we’re human. But the point is—
are we looking out for the group? We’ve been so Europeanized that it’s me and I. And we forgot about you and us. Keesha’s sentiments
encompass many characteristics of Black Nationalism. For instance, she demonstrates a
social outlook that emphasizes the
importance of taking care of the collective. Community empowerment and progress are central to the beliefs of Black
Nationalists, who look inward for resources to address the needs of the community. The ability of blacks to rely on community resources and
the belief in black interdependence is realized through frequent interactions and transactions with black
businesses, community centers, and other organizations. Reflecting on this need to preserve community, Paula referred to
a time when this type of community-based living was the norm: PAULA: There was a time in school when we were on our own and our teachers
were black . . . then when we weren’t subjected to [negative treatment and stereotypes by white teachers] even though we were still being
taught the dominant culture because for you to survive that’s the culture you had to live. You had to have two personalities . . . JANELLE: It’s
called by W. E. B. DuBois duality. PAULA: Duality . . . you had to have it. Paula and Keesha also point to another component of Black
Nationalism—the recognition that there are important differences between the way blacks and whites think and interact with each other and
within their own cultural groups. Part of this seems to be the belief that African Americans have to undergo a cognitive liberation process in
which they eschew white American norms and values. Social movement scholars Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward (1979) and Doug
McAdam (1982), define cognitive liberation as a multistage process in which individuals relinquish their faith in the “legitimacy” of the current
system, understand their current situation is changeable, initiate demands, and believe they are capable of changing the system through their
own strategic actions. For Black Nationalists, cognitive
liberation is similar in the sense that ideological adherents
recognize the illegitimacy of the American political system; however, instead of making demands and
asserting rights in that system, they choose to withdraw and effect change by creating a new system.
Recall Keesha’s earlier assertion that black Americans need to relinquish those beliefs and behaviors that are
“Europeanized”—read white. The desire to alter ingrained views that are biased toward the dominant is a unique feature of Black
Nationalist ideology. Other ideological groups discuss the best tactics for maneuvering within the current system that for various reasons fails
to live up to its stated goals. The
focus on their African American identity and history, when added to the
obligation to work for group empowerment, leads Black Nationalists to engage in the cognitive
liberation process. Having gone through the process, Black Nationalists participants begin to define problems within the African
American community quite differently from other participants. They see many of the problems in the black community as evidence of
inequality and bias within the American political system. The government and its actors use institutional rules and norms to prevent black
progress. Further, other institutions that shape American life, like schools, businesses, media outlets, and banks, form a constellation of rules
and norms that render black success more difficult on multiple fronts. The attribution of blame and its political implications will be discussed
more thoroughly in the next chapter, but it should be noted that how individual participants attributed blame was often connected with the
way in which they viewed whites’ motives.
Nationalism is the only option—reformism recreates black inferiority
Price 9 (Melanye Price, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers, B.A. (Magna cum Laude) in
geography with a political science minor at Prairie View A&M University, PhD in political science with a
specialty in the field of American politics at the Ohio State University “Dreaming Blackness: Black
Nationalism and African American Public Opinion” Accessed via Kindle Books// ekr)
Because African descendants initially arrived in the United States by which blacks shed the indoctrination of
black inferiority inherent in American society. Because African descendants initially arrived in the United
States designated as chattel rather than fully human citizens and that legacy continued for centuries
afterward, whites and some blacks see blacks as a group that should be kept in permanent servitude. In
order for blacks to embrace independence, they had to rid themselves of any beliefs in white superiority
and black inferiority. In 1833, Maria Stewart, though not strictly a Black Nationalist, cogently outlined the process that many Black Nationalists felt
blacks had been subjected to in America. She asserted: “The unfriendly whites . . . stole our fathers from their peaceful and quiet dwellings, and brought them
hither, and made bond-men and bond-women of them and their little ones; they have obliged our brethren to labor, kept them in utter ignorance, nourished them
in vice, and raised them in degradation” (Stewart 1996 [1833], 98). Stewart went on to express incredulity at the fact that after everything whites had done to
blacks, they were still unwilling to see blacks as fit for American citizenship and equality. Shortly after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Martin Delany
asserted that the
very laws of America “stamp [blacks] with inferiority.” Further, whites had “despoiled” and
“corrupted” blacks and left them “broken people.”7 Thus, from the early phases of Black Nationalism’s development, a major
project of ideological adherents has been severing black social and psychological dependence on whites.
Though most early Black Nationalists defined this separation as possible only through emigration, activists and scholars have employed a more expansive meaning
of separation to include economic and political independence within the American political context. African Americans needed to develop businesses, institutions,
and organizations to sustain their community. For instance, another example of attempts to foster independent social and economic independence included the
“Buy Black” campaign championed by Carlos Cooks in the 1940s and 1950s. Cooks believed this campaign would “make the black community behave like the other
racial and ethnic groups. It will have blacks own and control the businesses in black neighborhoods” (Cooks 1977 [1955], 89). The economic independence principle
has been lived out quite successfully by religious Black Nationalists such as the Nation of Islam and the Shrine of the Black Madonna, both of which promote the
development of independent businesses to their members and have collectively, as organizations, engaged in entrepreneurial development. Black independence
also includes community control of schools and other institutions that serve as socializing agents for children and adults alike. During the Black Power era, for
instance, Black Panthers developed social programs—including free clinics, clothing and food drives, and free breakfast programs—as a key to recruitment and
social change. Abron (1998) suggests that these programs “provide a model of community self-help” that was needed then and is still relevant today. For Black
Nationalists, self-reliance
is based on more than social and economic independence. It is a broader sense of
allows blacks to choose any desired course for themselves, including the ability to defend
themselves from white oppression through armed resistance and self-defense. This became particularly important in
independence that
the Civil Rights era, when violence against blacks was both ramped up and widely publicized. These events served as both recent historical memory and fuel to the
burgeoning Black Power movement. Support for nonviolence was a point of departure for increasingly radical activists engaged in social protest in the South during
the late sixties. Activists like Kwame Ture (aka Stokely Carmichael) and Robert Williams took issue with activists who were wedded to Integrationist and nonviolent
strategies despite the continued and escalating violence against black people (Tyson 1999).
The plan gets circumvented by intelligence agencies, but generates perception to
resolve
Schulberg and Reilly 15 — Jessica Schulberg, reporter covering foreign policy and national security
for The Huffington Post, former reporter-researcher at The New Republic, MA in international politics
from American University, and Ryan J. Reilly, reporter who covers the Justice Department and the
Supreme Court for The Huffington Post, 2015 (“Watchdog Finds Huge Failure In Surveillance Oversight
Ahead Of Patriot Act Deadline,” Huffington Post, May 21st, Available Online at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/21/section-215-oversight_n_7383988.html, Accessed 06-052015)
WASHINGTON -- In a declassified and heavily redacted report on a controversial Patriot Act provision,
the Justice Department’s inspector general found that the government had failed to implement
guidelines limiting the amount of data collected on Americans for seven years.
Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which is set to expire June 1 unless Congress reauthorizes it, has been the
legal basis for the intelligence community’s bulk metadata collection. As a condition for reauthorization
back in 2005, the Justice Department was required to minimize the amount of nonpublic information
that the program gathered on U.S. persons. According to the inspector general, the department did not
adopt sufficient guidelines until 2013. It was not until August of that year -- two months after the
bombshell National Security Agency disclosures by Edward Snowden -- that Justice began applying those
guidelines in applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, the secretive body that
approves government surveillance requests.
“It’s an indictment of the system of oversight that we’ve relied upon to check abuses of surveillance
powers. The report makes clear that, for years, the FBI failed to comply with its basic legal
requirements in using Section 215, and that should trouble anyone who thinks that secret oversight is
enough for surveillance capabilities that are this powerful,” Alex Abdo, a staff attorney at the American
Civil Liberties Union, told HuffPost.
“The report confirms that the government has been using Section 215 to collect an ever-expanding
universe of records. Given the timing, it’s particularly significant,” he continued referring to the looming
expiration date.
At times during that seven-year period, the report noted, the government blocked the Justice
Department's Office of the Inspector General from determining whether the minimization guidelines
had been implemented:
The FBI in the past has taken the position, over the OIG’s objections, that it was prohibited
from disclosing FISA-acquired information to the OIG for oversight purposes because the
Attorney General had not designated anyone in the OIG as having access to the information for
minimization reviews of other lawful purposes, and because there were no specific provisions in
the procedures authorizing such access.
2AC—Case
Extensions
Ext—consciousness key
Black Nationalism is possible — consciousness is a vital first step.
Fleming 08 — Kenyatta Fleming, M.A. Candidate in Africana Studies at Clarke Atlanta University, 2008
(“The History of Black Nationalism and Internal Factors that Prevented the Founding of an Independent
Black Nation-State,” Clarke Atlanta University, January, Accessible Online at
http://digitalcommons.auctr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1548&context=dissertations, accessed on
7-15-15)
For even the most staunch black nationalists, it would seem that the prospect of founding an
independent nation today is less likely than it was thirty years ago, but that would be a mistake to
assume. The success of black nationalists founding a sovereign nation lies in their ability to correct their
internal problems, develop a wholistic view that incorporates every sector of African-American society,
develop a long range plan that addresses all facets of nationhood, and meets the needs of its people. It
may take several generations to bring the vision of black statehood into fruition, but one must
remember the long fight of African-Americans to free themselves from enslavement as evidence of what
it will take to make black statehood a reality.
Ext—black nationalism key
Black Nationalism is the only way to create freedom for blacks- integration is forced
assimilation that annihilates Black pride and culture
Valls ‘10 (Andrew, assoc prof of political science Oregon State University, August 2010, “A Liberal
Defense of Black Nationalism,” The American Political Science Review, Vol. 104, No. 3, pages 467481)//CC
Community black nationalists argued that justice demands the support of black institutions and
communities by the broader society. This argument focuses on the costs to African Americans of
integration as it was usually understood—costs that were unfair to impose on them. These costs are
similar to the costs Kymlicka draws attention to in his argument for autonomy for minority nations, and
the circumstances and vulnerabilities underlying the costs are also similar. Kymlicka emphasized that a
stable communal and institutional context are necessary for individual freedom. Without these,
individuals cannot make and carry out coherent life plans. In the context of the civil rights movement
and its aftermath, the implications of this insight for the case of African Americans are clear. Under Jim
Crow, African Americans possessed something very close to a societal culture. Though they operated
under very adverse and unjust conditions, black institutions—schools, businesses, professional
organizations, media, hospitals, churches, etc.—provided for a substantial degree of black autonomy.
Though born of oppression, these institutions took on a life of their own and came to be deeply valued
by many African Americans. Although the conditions that gave rise to black institutions were unjust,
undermining or destroying these institutions in the name of integration was arguably another injustice.
At the very least, the fate of these institutions should have been an explicit topic of discussion during
the civil rights movement and its aftermath. Yet this issue was largely ignored (Peller 1995). After the
civil rights movement, and under the banner of integration, African Americans were essentially told that
racial discrimination and de jure segregation would no longer be tolerated as a matter of policy, but that
further progress toward racial equality would be achieved through integration. This, in turn, would be
achieved through, as Norman Podhoretz put it, “the gradual absorption of deserving Negroes one by
one into white society” (quoted in Steinberg 1995, 110). This way of conceiving the route to racial
equality imposes enormous costs on African Americans and represents a great disruption to the context
in which they had formed their life plans. It undermines the associative and communal ties that many
deeply valued. It is also, many black nationalists argued, incompatible with the self-respect of African
Americans to place themselves in the position of supplicants, hoping to be found “deserving” by whites.
Black nationalists often focused on the “price” of integration (Browne 1968, 51; Ture and Hamilton
1992, 54)—a price that they argued was unfair to impose as a condition of racial equality, and a price
that many whites, taking white culture and institutions as normative, usually failed to see at all.
Furthermore, the disruption of African American communities and individuals had little analog in white
communities: African Americans were being asked to bear costs that white Americans were not. Black
individuals, institutions, and communities were to be transformed, whereas their white counterparts
were asked little, beyond “tolerating” the presence of a few blacks. Hence, considerations of both
liberty and equality support black nationalist claims in resisting the costs that integration imposed on
African Americans, and support their alternative vision of maintaining stable black communities and
institutions. Now some might argue that the costs associated with integration—the disruption to African
American individual life plans and communities—were necessary and inevitable, but this is not so, at
least not to the extent threatened by the dominant conception of integration. These costs are a result of
a set of policies that place little or no value on the continued health and prosperity of black institutions
and communities. An alternative set of policies might offer African Americans a different array of
choices: between participating in well-funded, thriving white-dominated institutions, on the one hand,
and participating in well-funded, thriving black-dominated institutions on the other. But this is not the
set of choices African Americans were offered. Instead, the set of choices that African Americans faced
came to be, essentially, between wellfunded white institutions on the one hand and black institutions
that had been underfunded and disadvantaged under Jim Crow and continued to be so during and after
the civil rights movement. They faced an intrinsically unfair set of choices that heavily favored
integration into white institutions. This is precisely the kind of coercive assimilation pressure that
national minorities have rightly resisted. There is, then, a strong parallel between the black nationalist
case for support of black institutions and Kymlicka’s argument for national minority autonomy:
members of a minority should not have to pay costs that members of the majority do not, as the price of
participating in the communities and institutions of which they are members, especially when such
membership is a result not of their choices but of the circumstances in which they find themselves.
Ext—racist policies key
Hurricane Katrina proves—racist policies provide a rally around the flag effect in black
communities
Price 9 (Melanye Price, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers, B.A. (Magna cum Laude) in
geography with a political science minor at Prairie View A&M University, PhD in political science with a
specialty in the field of American politics at the Ohio State University “Dreaming Blackness: Black
Nationalism and African American Public Opinion” Accessed via Kindle Books//ekr)
The data from Dreaming Blackness can tell us something about the potential of a Black Nationalist revival. First, we know that
there is widespread
support for some, but by no means all, policies and behaviors that encourage community control of
black institutions and social spaces. Though blacks are willing to support moderate withdrawal, the vast majority of focus group
participants and NBES survey respondents do not subscribe fully to Black Nationalist principles. Blacks are willing to patronize black
businesses over similar businesses; they are willing to give conditional support for black candidates; and when they discuss views about commitment to their racial
community, they express beliefs that responsible members should be engaged in a collective struggle for community uplift. This is true for even those participants in
the focus groups who were most opposed to Black Nationalism. When
this moderate support for Black Nationalism is coupled
with the high level of frustration and distrust focus group members experience because of their desire for unfettered pursuit of the
American dream and the obstacles to that pursuit because of enduring racial tensions, blacks seem primed for increased support for
Black Nationalism. In fact, the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina seemed to reopen old wounds and increase
support for more independent organization building. Interestingly, and expectedly, the storm also reinforced notions of linked fate
and reiterated the need for blacks to coalesce around issues that adversely and uniquely impact their community. African American churches, fraternal
organizations, and other black organizations set up benefits, collected clothes, and engaged in other efforts in the storm’s aftermath. In black communities
nationally, impromptu and often informal organizations formed to aid in hurricane relief efforts and to support arriving storm victims. One Cleveland Plain Dealer
reporter noted, “In some cases these newly minted black activists were poor themselves, but they felt a kinship with Katrina victims” (Bernstein 2005, F1). Black
philanthropic organizations reported a dramatic increase in giving, and there was growing criticism of mainstream relief organizations like the Red Cross and its
ability (or desire) to adequately meet the needs of African American communities (Dobrzynski 2005). Additionally, the Black Entertainment Television (BET) channel
and a group called the Saving Our Selves Coalition held a telethon that primarily featured young black entertainers, as well as more established African American
celebrities.1 The
initial emotional and physical upheaval in the African American community has not resulted
in enough political force to keep Katrina recovery at the top of the national agenda. Outside of the impacted area,
there has been very little sustained organizational effort. Additionally, African Americans have coalesced around the Obama
campaign, which represents a high point (even if only symbolic) for African American politics. Like Katrina, it continues to highlight the myriad ways in which African
Americans and other groups view the world. Beyond general support for more moderate forms of Black Nationalism, there is also a great deal of insight to be
gleaned from the focus group data on linked fate. It
seems to be a political truism that black Americans feel connected to
each other socially, politically, and economically. That connection generally has been viewed in two primary ways—either fixed and
neutral or fixed and positive. While there is evidence in this analysis to support both of these claims, there is also support for the need to
rethink how black politics scholars measure and employ the idea of linked fate in their analysis. These focus
group participants clearly see themselves as allied with other members of the black community; however, the nature of that alliance is far more complicated than
our current conceptualizations suggest. These participants are making distinctions about who is a member of their “black community.” These distinctions are made
on the basis of social and economic class boundaries, and geographic boundaries, and, interestingly, on the basis of what they see as socially acceptable behavioral
choices. So for many participants this connection is important and sometimes positive, but it always serves as a problematic rather than a constant.
Overt White prejudice tips the scales towards Black Nationalism.
Block 11 — Ray Block Jr., Assistant Professor of Political Science at Florida State University, Ph.D. in
Political Science from Ohio State University, M.A. in Political Science from Ohio State University, B.A. in
Philosophy from Howard University, B.A. in Political Science from Howard University, 2011 (“What
About Disillusionment? Exploring the Pathways to Black Nationalism,” Political Behavior, accessible
online at
http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ray_Block2/publication/226957565_What_About_Disillusionment
_Exploring_the_Pathways_to_Black_Nationalism/links/09e415042581d65e3a000000.pdf, accessed on
7-8-15)
The Linked Fate-Disillusionment Interaction Hypothesis
The disillusionment and linked fate hypotheses pertain only to the isolated effects of these pathways on
ideological support, for the literature portrays these concepts as mutually exclusive: When they express
support for Black nationalism, African Americans are either signaling ‘‘Black pride’’ or reacting to ‘‘White
prejudice’’ (see Davis and Brown 2002; Sniderman and Piazza 2002, Chap. 4; Spence et al. 2005). This
‘‘either/or’’ characterization is overly simplistic because a Black person can be suspicious of racial
inequality while still believing in her group’s interdependence. Because both sentiments are jointly
possible, it is conceivable that they exert interactive influences on a person’s support for Black
nationalism.
One might anticipate that disillusionment and linked fate are reinforcing concepts (such that each
strengthens the other when both are present). I, however, argue the opposite: the effect of one
pathway can diminish the impact of another. Readers will recall a similar argument in Feldman and
Huddy’s (2005) research on the role of racial prejudice in policy attitudes. Using an experiment
embedded within the 2000– 2001 New York [State] Racial Attitudes Survey (NYRAS), the authors
hypothesize and find that the effect of racial resentment on Whites’ opposition to a mock proposal for a
college scholarship varies by political ideology. The preference for limited government motivates
conservative subjects to reject such a proposal, regardless of whether it benefits Black or White
students. For conservatives, ‘‘principles,’’ not ‘‘prejudices,’’ shape policy opposition, and racial
resentment does not predict (i.e., provide useful additional information about) their viewpoints.
Conversely, prejudice is a stronger predictor among those on the other end of the ideological spectrum.
While they tend to endorse the proposal if it assists White students, liberal subjects who are racially
resentful oppose the scholarship program when African Americans are the perceived beneficiaries
(Feldman and Huddy 2005, Fig. 3; for a detailed exposition of the ‘‘principled conservatism’’ argument,
see, e.g., Sniderman and Piazza 1993; Sniderman and Carmines 1997).
Although it loses its explanatory power among Conservatives, these results suggests that resentment
towards Blacks has the ability to inform the policy attitudes of liberals; put differently, the effect of
prejudice appears only at a certain level (or ‘‘threshold’’) of political ideology (for examples of studies
examining threshold effects, see Jacobs and Helms 2001; Neuman 1990). Similar processes are at work
for Black nationalism: once disillusionment reaches a high enough threshold, the impact of the linked
fate lessens, but at lower thresholds of disillusionment, linked fate can exert a stronger impact. It is not
difficult to imagine that an African American who feels no sense of shared fate can be a passionate
follower of Black nationalism if her disillusionment is strong enough to trigger her ideological
endorsement. This is, after all, a common concern among those who suspect––to borrow Brewer’s
(2002) phrasing––that Black-nationalist organizations nurture ‘‘out-group hate,’’ rather than ‘‘in-group
love’’ (see, e.g., Adeleke 1998; Allen 1995; Davis and Brown 2002). An extremely disillusioned Black
person who believes strongly in her group’s interdependence is presumably more likely to be strongly
nationalistic than an African American who expresses only one of these sentiments (Harris-Lacewell
2004, p. 94), so attempts to stimulate this woman’s linked fate could raise her ideological support even
more. However, doing so could possibly decrease the effect that her disillusionment already has on her
adherence to Black nationalism. Extending the navigational metaphor: the importance of an alternative
route becomes most apparent when one’s initial pathway is unavailable. In this case, there is less need
for a Black person to rely on disillusionment to fuel her support for Black nationalism if her sense of
linked fate is sufficiently developed. Conversely, rising levels of disillusionment could potentially
attenuate the impact of linked fate on Black nationalism because linked fate no longer has to
compensate for missing disillusionment.
AT:
They Say: “Util”
Utilitarian ethics are used by dominant power groups to mask the need for reform —
when body counts are the only ethic for determining value, bodies that aren’t visible
to dominant power groups are never counted. This allows for structural violence in
the shadows where the official body counts ignore the impact on marginalized
communities.
Ethical concerns should shape your decision calculus — the only way to avoid talking
ourselves into atrocity is to create a set of ethics that are inviolable. There’s always a
path to justify genocide — utilitarianism never provides a coherent method to
evaluate competing proposals.
Utilitarian defenses of surveillance are wrong because they conflate efficiency with
utility. The case outweighs within a utilitarian framework.—better util card to come
Hladik 14 (Casey Hladik, Philosophy Student at Ball State University, citing Alan Rusbridger—Editor of The Guardian newspaper which
published articles by Glenn Greenwald and its own reporters about the National Security Agency based on documents leaked by Edward
Snowden, and John Stuart Mill—a 19th century British philosopher who wrote the seminal work Utilitarianism, 2014 (“Rusbridger’s ‘The
Snowden Leaks and the Public’ and Mill’s Utilitarianism: An Analysis of the Utilitarian Concern of ‘Going Dark’,” Stance, Volume 7, April,
Available Online at http://www.bsu.edu/libraries/virtualpress/stance/2014_spring/03Hladik29-40.pdf, Accessed 06-20-2015, p. 38-40)
Conclusion What
the British and American people gain in security from the surveillance activities of the NSA and
GCHQ is modest in comparison to what they lose in security. These practices also strip away their moral
rights to privacy and freedoms. The utilitarian appeal put forth by the British and American officials who
support these practices has been shown to be unsustainable in a utilitarian framework —largely because
they determine the dictates of utility with a fundamental lack of understanding of the pleasures and
pains involved. [end page 38] Therefore, according to Mill’s theory of utility, these surveillance programs are
expedient rather than ethical . Indeed, Mill writes, there have been many institutions throughout history
which have been justified by supposed appeals to utility, only to be condemned later as blatantly
unethical. One example which Mill cites is slavery: at one point in the history of the United States, slavery was argued
to be a “necessity of social existence” because the social benefits outweighed the drawbacks.36 It has
since been clarified, however, that the institution is a violation of the utilitarian paradigm that each ought
to receive what he or she justly deserves. Mill writes, “The entire history of social improvement has been
a series of transitions by which one custom or institution after another, from being a supposed primary
necessity of social existence, has passed into the rank of a universally stigmatized injustice and
tyranny .”37 Indeed, history will show that the mass surveillance programs of the NSA and GCHQ followed the
dictates of expedience rather than ethics . This fact is evident in a remark by the head of a British intelligence agency: “There’s
nothing in it for us in being more open about what we do.”38 This official is clearly more concerned about the efficiency of his organization
than the good of British citizens. Indeed, although the NSA and GCHQ appeal
to utilitarianism in attempting to justify
their practices, when these practices (i.e., their consequences) are critiqued according to the
utilitarian framework, it becomes clear that these practices are consistent with efficiency rather than utility.
The negative consequences of these activities clearly outweigh the positive ones: the NSA and GCHQ are
compromising rather than bolstering security in the United States and Britain, and they are threatening the
moral rights promoted in the utilitarian framework rather than protecting them, so they are
detracting from the peaceful functioning of society rather than facilitating it. Government officials who
approve of the indiscriminate, large-scale spying on American and British citizens by the NSA and GCHQ claim
that, if their practices are limited, the world will “go dark” and chaos will ensue. Although the utility
behind this argument initially seems compelling, it does not hold. Those who oversee the intelligence
organizations are not fully informed as to the pleasures [end page 39] and pains involved, and, hence, their
ethical calculus is skewed. In actuality, the negative consequences of these programs outweigh the
positive ones. As a result, these programs can be said to be expedient rather than ethical, and they
ought to be terminated .
They Say: “your movement fails”
All of their evidence is assumptive of the status quo—we agree that movements fail,
but that is only because Black populations lack solidarity in the absence of racist
policies—that’s the Price ev
Regardless of the outcome, struggles and discourses in support of Black Nationalism
are still good.
Singh 04 — Simboonath Singh, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of MichiganDearborn, 2004 (“Resistance, Essentialism, and Empowerment in Black Nationalist Discourse in the
African Diaspora: A Comparison of the Back to Africa, Black Power, and Rastafari Movements,” Journal
of African American Studies, Winter, Vol. 8, No. 3, Accessible Online via subscribing institution to
Springer Online, accessed on 7-15-15)
What motivates groups to construct and reconstruct their identity and culture? By challenging the
negative cultural depictions of blackness, the Black Power, Back to Africa and Rastafari movements were
able to redefine black ethnicity by injecting into the minds of the masses such things as "pride of past"
(African culture and history), and "collective memory" (the experiences of slavery and colonialism) as
their strategy for transforming culture and ethnic identity. By recasting black ethnicity into a more
positive light, they were able to recreate and re-imagine African history and culture, thereby redefining
African-Caribbean identity, and thus creating a New World African diasporic identity. The Black Power,
Garvey, and Rastafari movements illustrate the power of activism to inspire individual as well as
collective forms of ethnic identification, ethnic consciousness, and ethnic pride.
Irrespective of whether the outcomes were real or imaginary, or merely symbolic struggles to reverse
social structures and ethnic identities, the Black Power, Garvey, and Rastafari movements were,
nonetheless, instrumental in allowing particular segments of the African-Caribbean community the
opportunity to reinvent and redefine who and what they were and wished to be. It would have been a
failure of the imagination not to have recognized in a world that has used racism as a means of
exploiting people of color, that the very political, psychological and philosophical attempts to resist
such systems would necessarily take the form of a validation and reassertion of the denigrated.
They Say: “reifies bigotry”
The alternative is the status quo—Walker answers this argument. Given that white
supremacy structures America, we need to depart and leave the source of oppression
They Say: “capitalism turn”
This is a linear non-unique disad at best. This means that with no alternative or unique
link there is only a risk that the aff’s method is good and combats some form of
oppression
White Supremacy and the subjugation of African slaves structured capitalism and
continues to inform it
R.L. 13 (R.L. is an informal theorist working on the problematic of racialized identities, gender and
communization theory, cites Jared Sexton and Saidiya Hartman, June 5, 2013, “WANDERINGS OF THE
SLAVE: BLACK LIFE AND SOCIAL DEATH”, http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/wanderings-slaveblack-life-and-social-death, //ekr)
White supremacy is not some obscure hieroglyphic to be discerned by an attuned eye. White supremacy in itself is
not a coherent system. It does not possess a hidden essence that could be interrogated and revealed. It is instead a formal
practice without coherent content. White supremacy simply is a set of social and material practices. And
its formal practice aims to generate the primary distinction between black and white (or more precisely, non-black). Thus the racial distinction
was a consequence, and not the cause, of slavery. From its origins in slavery, the
racial distinction was reproduced through
historically specific institutional arrangements that enabled black subjection to continue. The primary aim of
these institutions was ‘the conjoint extraction of labour and social ostracisation of an outcast group deemed unassimilable’.15 As a direct
relation of force, slavery
was the condition of possibility for defining the content of ‘free’ labour of the
propertyless proletariat. To be ‘free’ and to be a worker was negatively defined in relation to the slave. In this
way, the structural position of the slave was objectively positioned against work, outside and against the wage
relation – ‘work is not an organic principle for the slave’.16 After Emancipation, the Southern economy was decimated by the Civil War, the
destruction of fixed capital and land, and the collapse of the Confederate currency. It was particularly the newfound mobility of freed blacks
and their refusal to immediately enter into voluntary contractual relations with former slaveholders that prompted extraeconomic means to
enforce their compliance. Freed blacks, situated outside the constraints of wage labour, needed to be integrated economically yet excluded
socially. In a way it was a problem of how to ‘humanise’ the sentient object. After all, if the slave was merely a sentient object with no will, how
could the freed black engage in the responsibilities of bourgeois individuality and ‘freedom’ requisite of waged labour? What would it mean for
a slave to become a free individual? Therefore the central concern after the abolition of slavery for white civil society was managing the
transition from the legalised subjection of slaves to the informal and racialised subjection of blacks. The figure of the ‘free’ black from the
outset was seen as fundamentally outside the wage relation, purportedly unhabituated to the ethics of work and hence in need of labour
discipline. As such, various techniques of coercion were utilised against ex-slaves to ironically enforce the construction of ‘consent’ for the free
labour contract: the glaring disparities between liberal democratic ideology and the varied forms of compulsion utilized to force free workers to
sign labor contracts exceeded the coercion immanent in capital labor relations and instead relied on older forms of extraeconomic coercion. In
short, violence remained
a significant device in cultivating labor discipline. Undeniably, inequality was the
basis of the forms of economic and social relations that developed in the aftermath of emancipation.17
During the period of American industrialisation in the 19th century, the construction of the labour contract and a submissive working class
necessitated the regulation of unemployment. As
industrial capitalism developed with the institution of slavery,
there was a transmission of techniques in labour management between industrialists and slaveowners, creating a line of continuity
between the plantation system and the factory: Not only did the crisis of industrialization – problems of
pauperism, underemployment, and labor management – occur in the context of an extensive debate about the fate of slavery,
but also slavery informed the premises and principles of labor discipline […] the forms of compulsion used against the
unemployed, vagrants, beggars, and others in the postbellum North mirrored the transition from slavery to freedom. The contradictory aspects
of liberty of contract and the reliance on coercion in stimulating free labor modeled in the aftermath of the Civil War were the lessons of
emancipation employed against the poor.
No link—their evidence is assumptive of past Black Nationalist movements, we are
distinct in that
They Say: “essentialism”
Extend Walker—we can only recognize individual identities by acknowledging race
differences and combatting color ignorance
No essentialism—the aff recognizes the common experience of racism not a universal
identity
Nielson 9 (Cynthia Nielson is a blogger that transcripted the interview between Jonathan Derbyshire and Tommie Shelby provided by The
Prospect, April 8, 2009, “An Interview with Harvard Professor Tommie Shelby: Racial Identities and Contemporary Politics”
percaritatem.com/2009/04/08/an-interview-with-harvard-professor-tommie-shelby-racial-identities-and-contemporarypolitics/#sthash.rK7ojvUB.dpuf, //ekr)
JD: In your book, We Who Are Dark, you try to articulate a non-essentialist conception of black racial identity as the basis for political solidarity. Is it plausible to try
to understand Barack Obama’s campaign in these terms? TS: In my book, I claim that we
should think of black political solidarity as
resting not on a common black identity, but on the common experience of racism and the joint
commitment to work together to combat it. Despite the diversity within the black population in the US, Obama received overwhelming
black support, not just in the general election, where as a Democrat he could expect to get at least 88 per cent of the black vote, but also in the primary against
Clinton, where a number of blacks thought he was unfairly criticised because of his race. I think this black support, especially in the south, reflects in part the
historical commitment of blacks, despite their many internal differences, to stand together in the fight for racial justice. Obama is seen by many blacks as a symbol
of the successes of our collective historical struggle, and he gives us hope that further progress lies ahead. Moreover, Obama received overwhelming black support
despite the fact that his mother is white and his father is not a descendent of black American slaves. Because he is generally regarded as black (given the one-drop
rule) and strongly identifies as black, he is accepted as an equal member in the black community and can lay claim to the legacy of the historic African-American
fight for justice. The fact that he attended a black church, is married to an African-American woman, and has mastered elements of traditional black oratory also
helped to solidify his black support. JD: Does an Obama victory also herald the end of a particular way of doing politics? Specifically, identity politics or the “politics
of recognition”? TS: Many whites are
weary, and have long been weary, of black claims of grievance. Most whites are impatient
with black claims about the continuing significance of racism. They don’t think there is a serious race problem anymore, and
they will point to Obama’s election as proof that racism does not affect black life chances, at least not in any
serious way. They think that black political solidarity is no longer necessary and that blacks should stop
suggesting that America is a racist society and reconcile with their fellow white citizens, dropping all talk
of “black America.” For some whites, this is the significance of Obama’s victory-it undermines black claims of grievance and puts the last nail in the coffin
of black identity politics. The fact that Obama ran on a platform of racial reconciliation, did not specify any concrete
proposals for how to combat racial discrimination in employment and housing or segregation in public
schools, and did not make any overt racial appeals to black voters only seems to buttress the legitimacy of this
“post-racial” stance. As this stance becomes more entrenched, and I expect it will, blacks will find it even more difficult to put
problems of racial injustice on the public agenda.
They Say: “reformism”
This was answered by Shelby and Price—reformism recreates White Supremacy
because whites are structurally positioned to disadvantage black people. Only an
independent system can challenge
Black Nationalism
Posey ’13 (Sean Posey - is a photographer, activist, and historian. He is the Urban Issues Department
chair at the Hampton Institute; September 13, 2013; The Hampton Institute; “Will Black Nationalism
Reemerge?”; http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/blacknationalism.html#.Va01ZvlVhBc)//CC
Shortly before he died, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) said in an interview with C-Span, "Black Power
has not been arrived at; we don't have Black Power yet."[24] There is no political will to deal with the
catastrophe facing black America. The recent bankruptcy of Detroit, the largest majority black city in the
nation, is a potent reminder of that. Indeed, black political power is fading, ironically in the age of the
first black president. Liberal electoral politics by themselves cannot and will not solve these problems,
As Dr. Brittney Cooper pointed out after the fiftieth anniversary of the March for Jobs and Freedom:
"Black liberal advocacy in this country for more jobs, less poverty, more education, less prisons, more
life chances and less gun deaths doesn't have a fighting chance without a visible radical alternative."[25]
Where will this all lead? Austerity, continued stagnation, and the refusal to address urban and suburban
poverty, puts black America at a crossroads. It's unclear what impact the disappointing Obama legacy
will have for the future of black politics. Still, regardless of whether a Democrat or a Republican occupies
the White House in 2017, it's doubtful any agenda addressing black communities will be discussed,
much less enacted. In the months and years ahead, it is possible that we will see the rebirth of a new,
almost certainly unique and unexpected version of Black Nationalism. If so, it will come at the darkest
hour, and if it does-look for it in the whirlwind.
Idolizing reforms and “progressive change” only serves to delay Black Liberation
Price 9 (Melanye Price, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers, B.A. (Magna cum Laude) in
geography with a political science minor at Prairie View A&M University, PhD in political science with a
specialty in the field of American politics at the Ohio State University “Dreaming Blackness: Black
Nationalism and African American Public Opinion” Accessed via Kindle Books//ekr)
The election of Barack Obama and its consequences for those who subscribe to and mobilize from a
Black Nationalist perspective also has the potential to create a protest/protection impulse. This impulse
represents a desire for African Americans to protect those members or segments of their community
that they see as embodying the best of that community. This need to protect can be in direct conflict
with the ability to critique or protest the actions of those they have lifted up. It is a category that is often
reserved for those African Americans who have achieved financial, athletic, or academic success. Cathy
Cohen (1999) points to internal tensions within the African American community between the impulse
to protect the image (or at least counteract prevailing negative stereotypes) and the need to adequately
address certain community problems. She demonstrates this through an examination of African
America’s response to the AIDS/HIV crisis. African American church officials and community activists on
the front line of dealing with the AIDS/HIV crisis have had to grapple with fulfilling their role as service
providers and coming to grips with the moral dilemmas created by their interactions with the
populations most affected (i.e., gay men, sex workers, and IV drug users). It is likely that a similar tension
will exist in an Obama administration. While racial problems will continue to exist despite Obama’s
victory, there will be a strong desire among African Americans to preserve this historic moment by
protecting Obama’s image and refraining from making protest demands that may call for the upheaval
of the status quo. This is particularly interesting given that much of the political progress made by
African Americans has resulted directly from protest demands. The controversy during the campaign
over Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, again, illustrates this point. There were dueling problems
surrounding this controversy. On one hand, African Americans were singed by what they saw as an overt
attack on their most powerful community institution, the black church. Alternatively, they wanted to
make sure that this problem did not tank Obama’s candidacy. Obama’s chances were in clear conflict
with the need to defend this critical political and cultural institution of the black community. This kind of
tension will only increase when Obama begins to govern and is forced to makes choices that potentially
conflict with black preferences and needs.
Reliance on forming the political system engages in wishful thinking that simplifies the
problem.
Price 9 (Melanye Price, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers, B.A. (Magna cum Laude) in
geography with a political science minor at Prairie View A&M University, PhD in political science with a
specialty in the field of American politics at the Ohio State University “Dreaming Blackness: Black
Nationalism and African American Public Opinion” Accessed via Kindle Books//ekr)
Those who both reject Black Nationalist tenets and seek to reshape the nature of their relationship with the
American political system adhere to a guiding principle that calls for America to live up to its expressed ideals of having a society in
which people are judged by “the content of their character.” Myrdal (1962, 4) suggests that this belief is based on “ideals of the essential
dignity of the individual human being, of the fundamental equality of all, and of certain inalienable rights to freedom, justice and fair
opportunity.” King believed black Americans should seek and would be able to have full citizenship rights. Echoing the earlier ideas of Douglass,
King (1986a, 211) cautioned, “If we are to implement the American dream we must get rid of the notion once and for all that there are superior
and inferior races.” King’s beliefs were essentially two-pronged. First, blacks would gain their rights by appealing to the moral dissonance of
whites. Implicit in his assertion is
the idea that one must simply expose whites to the plight of blacks and they
would change. The treatment blacks had received at the hands of whites would weigh too heavily on
white consciences, and whites would not prevent the integration process initiated by blacks because “In their
relation to Negroes, white people discovered that they rejected the very center of their own ethical profession. They could not face the triumph
of their lesser instincts and simultaneously have peace within” (1986d, 75). In King’s estimation, whites had rationalized
their
treatment of blacks by adopting a belief in black inferiority. Once this belief was shattered through peaceful
demonstrations, whites would have to contend with their own conscience and with the demands of blacks. This led to the second part of King’s
strategy: blacks would adopt the tactic of nonviolent direct action. Following the Gandhian model, blacks would enact political change by taking
the moral high ground. King (1986b) suggests that black protesters do not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship
and understanding. The nonviolent resister must often voice his protests through noncooperation or boycotts, but he realizes that
noncooperation and boycotts are not the ends themselves; they are the means to awaken the end of moral shame King went on to suggest that
this process is necessary for “the creation of the beloved community,” which he saw as “an interracial society
based on freedom for all.” For King and others, African Americans must recognize their importance and
not abandon a nation and associated rights they have earned by contributing to the nation-building
process. DuBois (1995 [1903]) in his earlier works suggested that American blacks should work to gain their civil rights through planned
campaigns and multiracial coalitions.11 Additionally, Booker T. Washington insisted on “interracial harmony and white good will as
prerequisites for Negro advancement” (Meier 1991). Thus,
those who reject Black Nationalism’s more separate and
self-deterministic approach are basically seeking equal access to American institutions, which would allow
them equal opportunity to pursue the vision of the framers. However, the situation is more complicated when determining
potential political goals because its proponents emphasize alternative or competing identities rather than a
singular racial filter and stress individual effort as a mechanism for change. This leads them to take factors other than racial
group membership and uplift into consideration when making political judgments.
They Say: “but like Barack Obama means things are getting better”
1. I shouldn’t need a card to answer this because that kind of thought is what
justifies the affirmative and
LOL Obama isn’t all black ppl but okay
Price 9 (Melanye Price, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers, B.A. (Magna cum Laude) in
geography with a political science minor at Prairie View A&M University, PhD in political science with a
specialty in the field of American politics at the Ohio State University “Dreaming Blackness: Black
Nationalism and African American Public Opinion” Accessed via Kindle Books//ekr)
Some have argued that the election of Barack Obama represents, for the first time, the full integration
of African Americans as U.S. citizens. At various times in history, there have been halfhearted attempts
to decrease the level of marginalization experienced by blacks. For example, there was the passage of
the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which (outside of the Reconstruction era) were
not fully enforced until more than a century later. If Obama’s victory truly represents a fully integrated
black America, then the ability of Black Nationalists to mobilize a mass movement should be greatly
diminished. Black Nationalism thrives in an environment of continued marginalization of blacks by a
white power structure. Can blacks continue to make claims based on racial oppression and exclusion
when one of their racial group members occupies the most powerful elected position in the country?
The answer to the question is, obviously, yes. The election of one African American does not erase
persistent inequalities or prejudices. One man’s individual success (even of this magnitude) cannot
account for centuries of marginalization or continued contemporary discrimination. Nor can one man’s
voice fully articulate the preferences of an entire group. In light of this, there will be an ongoing need for
black activists to engage in more robust debate with each other and make race-based petitions to the
federal government. Barack Obama’s candidacy was widely characterized as race-transcendent.
According to news pundits, Obama’s failure to rely on traditional civil rights tropes and whites’
willingness to vote for a black candidate demonstrated that Americans had moved beyond past racial
tensions. In fact, his campaign style represented an existing electoral strategy developed by black
mayors called deracialization (Persons 1993). Candidates who run deracialized campaigns avoid
discussing issues that are explicitly or implicitly racial such as welfare, crime, and so on. Instead, they
emphasize a political agenda that can be viewed as race neutral. Recent African American elected
officials such as Michael White (former mayor of Cleveland, Ohio), Corey Booker (mayor of Newark, New
Jersey), and Deval Patrick (governor of Massachusetts) all exemplify this growing cadre of deracialized
(or race-neutral) black politicians. This strategy has some relevance for understanding contemporary
expressions of Black Nationalism, which are predicated on a sense of racial group consciousness. Black
Nationalism relies on explicit and collective racial appeals that are less likely to be made in a racetranscendent or deracialized context. This means that any problem uniquely impacting African
Americans has to either be couched in a universal narrative or abandoned. Black Nationalists do not
support either of these strategies.
They Say: “Robinson turn”
Integration and reformism amounts to colorblind policies that never result in racial
equality
Valls 10 (Andrew Valls, Associate Professor Political Science Program Coordinator Political Science Program School of Public Policy, August
2010, “A Liberal Defense of Black Nationalism” American Political Science Review Vol. 104, No. 3// ekr)
In recent years political theorists and philosophers have devoted a great deal of attention to issues of
nationalism, self-determination, and multiculturalism, and in the process they have challenged the
notion that liberal values and principles require the integration and assimilation of minorities (see
Kymlicka 1995; Laden and Owen 2007; Levy 2000; Tamir 1993; Taylor 1994). Indeed, Will Kymlicka has
suggested that there is now a consensus among liberal theorists in support of “liberal
[multi]culturalism”—the idea that certain group rights are compatible with liberal principles. The issue,
he suggests, is no longer whether this is the case but rather what specific policies and institutional
arrangements are appropriate for particular kinds of minorities (Kymlicka 2001, chap. 2). Despite this
shift in liberal theory toward a more friendly view of group rights, public and legal discourse in the
United States with regard to African Americans continues to emphasize integration and colorblindness
as the route to racial equality (Peller 1995; Cochran 1999). In the case of other minorities, liberal
theorists have shown that integration and group-blindness impose considerable and unfair costs on
minority group members, and hence that justice requires groupconsciousness rather than groupblindness, group autonomy rather than integration and assimilation. Yet this position has not been
prominent in liberal discourse on race. Liberal multiculturalists usually focus on minorities that are
defined foremost by cultural differences, and this has led to an estrangement in work on minority rights,
where African Americans are treated in one literature and cultural minorities are treated in another. As
one observer put it, “when liberal political theorists tackle matters of group difference, they often evade
race in general and the case of African Americans in particular. On the subject of multicultural
challenges to liberal neutrality, for instance, political theorists tend to focus on minority groups with a
high level of cultural cohesion” (Fogg-Davis 2003, 557). Because African Americans are not necessarily a
cultural minority, liberal theorists interested in minority rights have had too little to say about them (but
see Cochran 1999; Gutmann 1996; Ingram 2000; Spinner 1994).
2AC—Off Case
2AC—DA
2AC Frontline—Stem
1. No link—plan gets circumvented, but still resolves the impacts of the 1AC—
that’s Schulberg and Reilly
2. No link: We are supporting the creation of new institutions, not defending
actions of existing state institutions
3. Traditional risk assessment strips us of our relations to others and our dignity—
this obscures how structural violence contributes to large-scale destruction
O’Brien 2k—PhD, environmental scientist and activist (Mary, © 2000, MIT Press, “Making Better
Environmental Decisions: An Alternative to Risk Assessment”, Gigapedia, p. xvii-xviii,)
This book is based on the understanding that it is not acceptable for people to tell you that the harms to which
they will subject you and the world are safe or insignificant. You deserve to know good alternatives to those
harms, and you deserve to help decide which alternative will be chosen. Underlying this book, however, is a less
explicitly stated personal belief, namely that we humans will never dredge up enough will to alter our habitual,
destructive ways of behaving toward each other and the world unless we simultaneously employ information and
emotion and a sense of relationship to others—other species, other cultures, and other generations. Using
information while divorced from emotion and using information while insulated from connection to a wide net of
others are how destruction of the Earth is being accomplished. Risk assessment of narrow options is a classic
example of using certain bits of information in such a way as to exclude feeling and to artificially sever connections
of parts to the whole. Risk assessment rips you (and others) out of connection to the rest of the world and reduces
you (if you are even considered at all in the risk assessment) to a number. You are then consigned to damage or
death or “risk,” depending on how your number is shuffled around in models, assumptions, and formulas and
during “risk management.” Assessment of the pros and cons of a range of reasonable alternatives allows the connections to remain. The
cultural emotions connected to a given alternative, for instance, can be a pro or a con, and may be both, depending on which sector of the
community you inhabit. An advantage or a disadvantage of a given alternative can be social, religious, economic, scientific, or political. Risk
assessment is one of the major methods by which parts (corporations such as Monsanto or Hyundai, “private
landowners,” industrial nations) can act on their wants at the expense of wholes (e.g., whole communities and
countries, or the seventh generation from now) without appearing to be doing so. Risk assessment lets them
appear simply “scientific” or “rational” as they numerically estimate whether or how many deaths or what birth
defects will be caused, and ignore other regions of human experience that also matter to people. Always, some
groups of humans will be trying to exercise their power at the expense of the whole. Decisions arrived at by risk
assessment can be homicidal, biocidal, and suicidal, but they are made every day. Risk assessment is a premier
process by which illegitimate exercise of power is justified. The stakes of installing alternatives to risk assessment,
therefore, are the whole Earth (just as are the stakes of fashioning democratic control over corporations, or of
requiring changes in behavior of those who have wreaked irreparable damage). Installing alternatives assessment
is one step in the struggle to use information, feeling, and a sense of relationship to others to stop
socioenvironmental madness.
4. Victim Blaming DA: Their link continues the problematic accusation that black
people are responsible for white America’s actions—that proves inherency for
the case—victim blaming is a reason to vote aff because it solidifies the need
for blacks to govern themselves rather than be blamed for policy failures of the
USFG
5. We control root cause of all your impacts—white supremacy structures war and
genocide, that’s Rodriguez
6. *insert impact defense*
Terror Security K
All of their impact evidence is epistemologically biased. Terror threats are
manufactured by the FBI to justify surveillance.
Greenwald 15 (Glenn Greenwald, Glenn Greenwald is a former Constitutional and civil rights litigator and is the author of three New
York Times Bestselling books: two on the Bush administration's executive power and foreign policy abuses, and his latest book, With Liberty and
Justice for Some, an indictment of America's two-tiered system of justice. Greenwald was named by The Atlantic as one of the 25 most
influential political commentators in the nation. He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism, and is the
winner of the 2010 Online Journalism Association Award for his investigative work on the arrest and oppressive detention of Bradley Manning.
“WHY DOES THE FBI HAVE TO MANUFACTURE ITS OWN PLOTS IF TERRORISM AND ISIS ARE SUCH GRAVE THREATS?”
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/02/26/fbi-manufacture-plots-terrorism-isis-grave-threats/, 2/26/15 SMahajan)
In this regard, this
latest arrest appears to be quite similar to the overwhelming majority of terrorism arrests
the FBI has proudly touted over the last decade. As my colleague Andrew Fishman and I wrote last month — after the FBI
manipulated a 20-year-old loner who lived with his parents into allegedly agreeing to join an FBI-created
plot to attack the Capitol — these cases follow a very clear pattern: The known facts from this latest case seem to fit
well within a now-familiar FBI pattern whereby the agency does not disrupt planned domestic terror
attacks but rather creates them, then publicly praises itself for stopping its own plots. First, they
target a Muslim: not due to any evidence of intent or capability to engage in terrorism, but rather for
the “radical” political views he expresses . In most cases, the Muslim targeted by the FBI is a very young
(late teens, early 20s), adrift, unemployed loner who has shown no signs of mastering basic life functions, let alon
e carrying out a
serious terror attack, and
has no known involvement with actual terrorist groups. They then find another
Muslim who is highly motivated to help disrupt a “terror plot”: either because they’re being paid
substantial sums of money by the FBI or because (as appears to be the case here) they are charged with some
unrelated crime and are desperate to please the FBI in exchange for leniency (or both). The FBI then gives
the informant a detailed attack plan, and sometimes even the money and other instruments to carry it out, and the
informant then shares all of that with the target. Typically, the informant also induces, lures, cajoles, and persuades the
target to agree to carry out the FBI-designed plot. In some instances where the target refuses to go along, they have
their informant offer huge cash inducements to the impoverished target. Once they finally get the target to
agree, the FBI swoops in at the last minute, arrests the target, issues a press release praising themselves
for disrupting a dangerous attack (which it conceived of, funded, and recruited the operatives for), and the DOJ and federal
judges send their target to prison for years or even decades (where they are kept in special GITMO-like units). Subservient U.S.
courts uphold the charges by applying such a broad and permissive interpretation of “entrapment” that it could almost never be successfully
invoked. Once again,
we should all pause for a moment to thank the brave men and women of the FBI for
saving us from their own terror plots . One can, if one really wishes, debate whether the FBI should be engaging in such
behavior. For reasons I and many others have repeatedly argued,
these cases are unjust in the extreme: a form of pre-
emptory prosecution where vulnerable individuals are targeted and manipulated not for any criminal
acts they have committed but rather for the bad political views they have expressed . They end up sending
young people to prison for decades for “crimes” which even their sentencing judges acknowledge they never would have seriously considered,
let alone committed, in the absence of FBI trickery. It’s hard to imagine anyone thinking this is a justifiable tactic, but I’m certain there are
people who believe that. Let’s leave that question to the side for the moment in favor of a different issue. We’re
constantly
bombarded with dire warnings about the grave threat of home-grown terrorists, “lone wolf” extremists
and ISIS. So intensified are these official warnings that The New York Times earlier this month cited anonymous U.S. intelligence officials to
warn of the growing ISIS threat and announce “the prospect of a new global war on terror.” But how serious of a threat can all of
this be, at least domestically, if the FBI continually has to resort to manufacturing its own plots by
trolling the Internet in search of young drifters and/or the mentally ill whom they target, recruit and then
manipulate into joining ? Does that not, by itself, demonstrate how over-hyped and insubstantial this
“threat” actually is ? Shouldn’t there be actual plots, ones that are created and fueled without the help of the FBI, that the agency
FBI tactic would be akin to having the Drug Enforcement
Agency (DEA) constantly warn of the severe threat posed by drug addiction while it simultaneously uses pushers on its payroll to
deliberately get people hooked on drugs so that they can arrest the addicts they’ve created and thus
justify their own warnings and budgets (and that kind of threat-creation, just by the way, is not all that far off
from what the other federal law enforcement agencies, like the FBI, are actually doing). As we noted the last time we wrote about
should devote its massive resources to stopping? This
this, the Justice Department is aggressively pressuring U.S. allies to employ these same entrapment tactics in order to create their own
terrorists, who can then be paraded around as proof of the grave threat. Threats
that are real, and substantial, do not need
to be manufactured and concocted. Indeed, as the blogger Digby, citing Juan Cole, recently showed, run-of-the-mill
“ lone wolf” gun violence is so much of a greater threat to Americans than “domestic terror” by every
statistical metric that it’s almost impossible to overstate the disparity: In that regard, it is not difficult to understand why
“domestic terror” and “homegrown extremism” are things the FBI is desperately determined to
create . But this FBI terror-plot concoction should , by itself, suffice to demonstrate how wildly
exaggerated this threat actually is . That is the FBI’s terrorism strategy — keep fear alive — and it
drives everything they do.
1AR—Util
Utilitarian ethics are used by dominant power groups to mask the need for reform —
when body counts are the only ethic for determining value, bodies that aren’t visible
to dominant power groups are never counted. This allows for structural violence in
the shadows where the official body counts ignore the impact on marginalized
communities — that’s O’Brien.
Ethical concerns should shape your decision calculus — the only way to avoid talking
ourselves into atrocity is to create a set of ethics that are inviolable. There’s always a
path to justify genocide — utilitarianism never provides a coherent method to
evaluate competing proposals.
2AC—Framework
2AC Frontline (Curtail Surveillance)
1. We meet: we defend the hypothetical enactment of a United States federal
government policy **add specs depending on the round**
2. Reading framework is white surveillance of black performance in debate—the
negative interp reinscribes problematic hierarchies that monitor and regulate
bodies within the debate space—especially when we read a topical affirmative
that defends fiat. This just proves the inherent divide between blackness and
whiteness in the debate space, supercharges uniqueness and the need for
secession
Reid-Brinkley et al, University of Pittsburgh prof, 13
(Shanara, Assistant Professor of Public Address and Advocacy Director of Debate, William Pitt Debating
Union, PhD, Amber Kelsie, M.A. Doctoral Student, Department of Communication University of
Pittsburgh, Nicholas Brady, Doctoral Student, Department of Culture & Theory University of California,
Irvine, Ignacio Evans, B.A. History Towson University, 10-06-13, “We Be Fresh As Hell Wit’ Da Feds
Watchin’: A Bad Black Debate Family Responds,” da 7-9-15,
http://resistanceanddebate.wordpress.com/2013/10/06/we-be-fresh-as-hell-wit-da-feds-watchin-abad-black-debate-family-responds/, mee)
Bankey’s positioning of himself at the borderland while excluding (multiply situated) black people in debate from that same space makes little sense to those
familiar with the history of race in America. Black people have never not had to be in close relation to whiteness . This is Dubois’
theory of double consciousness (which, though especially emblematic of black experience, is a way of understanding the world that can be learned by non-blacks).
Black people have always existed in an in-between space of blackness and whiteness with anti-blackness
serving as the context for this relationship. Black folks in America are always already in an interracial
relationship with whiteness; this is especially true in the context of debate. The tone of Bankey’s criticism assumes black people
exclude white people from their space, but MPJ and other debate
practices demonstrate the direct manner in which white
people exclude black people from interracial dialogue in the debate space. An even more recent example of how
structural racism functions is the exclusion of Elijah Smith, the reigning NDT champ, from the Kentucky Round Robin, and the attempt to change the rules pertaining
to transfer students. We are disappointed by this addition to the consistent complaint made by whites that black
people must be constantly
accessible to whites even while white people disavow the structure of policed segregation in supposedly
common spaces. In fact, it seems quite likely that this thesis will inspire debate arguments that produce exclusions
of black students rather than an inclusive space of participation. We find it highly unlikely that it will produce an authentic
communication or disalienation. There are countless examples of the manner in which black people attempt to
meet the communicative and bodily expectations of dominant culture and dominant debate. Codeswitching is part and parcel of our interracial romance with debate, an example of our commitment to
compromise. Black people often code-switch into “white-people speak” when dealing with white people
while using black language and tonal intonations (regionally specific) when in majority black spaces (in
fact, it seems that it is when we “speak authentically” in the presence of whites—share ourselves with
whites—that we are charged with the crime of being “intentionally” unintelligible). Within debates, (vis-àvis framework for example) there is a denial or a disavowal of even the possibility of an engagement across
rhetorical difference, which is the move Bankey makes. He refuses to code switch in the thesis by not attempting to understand the kinship networks in
debate for black people or to engage in rhetorical practices to demonstrate a commitment to engaging difference at the level of method and performance.[9] How
often do we encounter white people who can code-switch (and no we don’t mean the latest hip hop slang) into the communicative and socio-political practices of
black culture? The
black is always already at the borderland. But double consciousness is something that for most people—especially non-
blacks—must be learned and practiced. We believe that these kinds of practices and attempts on the part of black people to meet whites more than half-way are
in communication studies code-switching, the vernacular,
counter-publics, and many other concepts evoke the double-sidedness of rhetorical practice in ways
that complicate the very notion that there could ever be a pure communication. We therefore invite Bankey to read
the Communication Studies section of the library as well as the Black Studies section. Our relationship to debate can easily be described
as an interracial love affair. The debate community is majority white and whiteness characterizes the
performative and stylistic norms of competitive policy debate. We need not only refer to Reid-Brinkley’s thesis for this kind of
evident for those who choose to see. But also we must point out that
analysis. Shelton K. Hill and Pamela Stepp’s work on black participation in debate and white stylistic practice has been overlooked for far too long. We think that
our relationship to debate is a romantic/desirous coupling, a flirtation across racial lines that has often
left many of us bruised and bloody at the hands of whiteness and white people. We are in an abusive
relationship, one that denigrates and maligns our black thinking while engaged in (neo-)liberal efforts to
capture our black bodies. Nonetheless, we work to create an erotics of debate that can affirm our selves
in the face of such denigration. The borderland space that black debaters, judges, coaches, and directors
occupy offers a unique perspective from which to view both the beauty and the ugliness of our
community and its practices. Such a perspective provides new insights and new avenues of engagement
toward changing the conditions necessary for producing new knowledge—the kind that does not block
the development of black thought based on misdirected accusations of anti-intellectualism.
3. We access all of their standards… okie
Defense to Agonism
Agonism and deliberation suppress alternate forms of communication and assume a
level playing field
Dryzek 5 (John Dryzek is a PhD, Professor of Political Science and Australian Research Council Federation Fellow. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social
Sciences in Australia, former Head of the Departments of Political Science at the Universities of Oregon and Melbourne and the Social and Political Theory program
at ANU, and former editor of the Australian Journal of Political Science, Deliberative Democracy in Divided Societies: Alternatives to Agonism and Analgesia, Political
Theory, http://www.chinesedemocratization.com/materials/6DryzekDeliDemDividedSocieties.pdf //ekr)
Deliberation across divided identities is hard. On a widely shared account, deliberation is what Bessette calls the “mild voice of
reason”2 —exactly what is lacking in tough identity issues, at best an aspiration for how opponents might one day learn to interact once their
real differences are dissolved. Deliberative
democrats influenced by Rawls might follow him in excluding the “background
culture” from the purview of public reason. But, as Benhabib points out, issues generated by the background
culture and its “comprehensive doctrines” can be especially pressing.3 Gutmann and Thompson believe that deliberation can be
extended to deep moral disagreements, but the precondition is commitment on all sides to reciprocity, “the capacity to
seek fair terms of cooperation for its own sake,” such that arguments are made in terms the other side(s) can accept.4
Again, mutual acceptance of reasonableness is exactly what is lacking in divided societies. Gutmann and
Thompson require adoption by all sides of a particular moral psychology—openness to persuasion by critical argument—that is in fact not
widely held, and explicitly rejected by (say) fundamentalist Christians.5 Moreover,
they apply the reasonableness standard to
the content of contributions to debate, not just the motivation of speakers. Thus they are vulnerable to criticism from difference
democrats such as Young, who accepts reasonableness as a norm for motivation but not for the content of statements, because that
involves suppression of alternative communicative forms.6 More radical difference democrats and
agonists see deliberation in terms of the erasure of identity, a form of communication stuck in neutral
that does not recognize difference, partial in practice to well-educated white males, especially when it prizes the
unitary public reason advanced by Rawls and his followers. Those asserting identities for their part may feel insulted by the very idea that
questions going to their core be deliberated. What they want is instead “cathartic” communication that unifies the group and demands respect
from others.7 I
argue for a discursive democracy that can handle deep differences. The key involves partially
decoupling the deliberative and decisional moments of democracy, locating deliberation in engagement of discourses in
the public sphere at a distance from the sovereign state. I approach this argument by examining two very different
responses to divided societies. The first is agonistic, seeking robust exchange across identities. The recent history of agonism owes much to
Hannah Arendt, William Connolly, and Bonnie Honig,8 but I focus on the work of Chantal Mouffe, because she explicitly advocates agonism
against deliberative democracy in plural societies. The second response is consociational, seeking suppression of interchange through
agreement among well-meaning elites. I do not treat these two as “straw man” extremes between which a moderate path should be sought.
Indeed, I argue that a defensible discursive democracy for divided societies can develop elements of both.
Resolved
“Resolved” doesn’t require certainty
Webster’s 9 – Merriam Webster 2009
(http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/resolved)
# Main Entry: 1re·solve # Pronunciation: \ri-ˈzälv, -ˈzȯlv also -ˈzäv or -ˈzȯv\ # Function: verb # Inflected Form(s): re·solved; re·solv·ing 1 : to
become separated into component parts; also : to become reduced by dissolving or analysis 2 : to form a resolution : determine 3 : consult,
deliberate
2AC—Nationalism PIC
2AC Frontline
1. Permute: do both—the aff reclaimed notions of nationalism to create a new inclusive
communal culture—that’s Price
2. The aff is a pre-requisite – “nationalism” was gendered by civil society the aff escapes those
structures – the pic as an isolated instance of resistance cannot solve
Schram ’95 (Sanford F. Schram, Associate Professor of Political Science at Macalester; 1995; Words of
Welfare: The Poverty of Social Science and The Social Science of Poverty; “Discourses of Dependency:
The Politics of Euphemism,”, 21-23)//CC
The deconstruction of prevailing discursive structures helps politicize the institutionalized practices that inhibit alternative ways of constructing
social relations.5 Isolated
acts of renaming, however, are unlikely to help promote political change if they are
not tied to interrogations of the structures that serve as the interpretive context for making sense of new terms.6 This is
especially the case when renamings take the form of euphemisms designed to make what is described
appear to be consonant with the existing order. In other words, the problems of a politics of renaming are not confined to the
left, but are endemic to what amounts to a classic American practice utilized across the political spectrum.7 Homeless, welfare, and family
planning provide three examples of how isolated instances of renaming fail in their efforts to make a politics out of sanitizing language. [end
page 21] Reconsidering the Politics of Renaming Renaming can do much to indicate respect and sympathy. It may strategically recast concerns
so that they can be articulated in ways that are more appealing and less dismissive.
Renaming the objects of political
contestation may help promote the basis for articulating latent affinities among disparate political
constituencies. The relentless march of renamings can help denaturalize and delegitimate ascendant
categories and the constraints they place on political possibility. At the moment of fissure, destabilizing renamings have
the potential to encourage reconsideration of how biases embedded in names are tied to power relations.8 Yet isolated acts of renaming do
not guarantee that audiences will be any more predisposed to treat things differently than they were before. The problem is not limited to the
political reality that dominant groups possess greater resources for influencing discourse. Ascendant political
economies, such as
liberal postindustrial capitalism, whether understood structurally or discursively, operate as institutionalized systems
of interpretation that can subvert the most earnest of renamings.9 It is just as dangerous to suggest that paid
employment exhausts possibilities for achieving self-sufficiency as to suggest that political action can be meaningfully confined to isolated
renamings.10 Neither the workplace nor a name is the definitive venue for effectuating self-worth or political intervention.11 Strategies that
accept the prevailing work ethos will continue to marginalize those who cannot work, and increasingly so in a post- industrial economy that
does not require nearly as large a workforce as its industrial predecessor. Exclusive
preoccupation with sanitizing names
overlooks the fact that names often do not matter to those who live out their lives according to the
institutionalized narratives of the broader political economy, whether it is understood structurally or discursively,
whether it is monolithically hegemonic or reproduced through allied, if disparate, practices. What is named is always encoded in some publicly
accessible and ascendent discourse. 12 Getting
the names right will not matter if the names are interpreted
according to the institutionalized insistences of organized society.13 Only when those insistences are
relaxed does there emerge the possibility for new names to restructure daily practices. Texts, as it now has
become notoriously apparent, can be read in many ways, and they are most often read according to how prevailing discursive structures
provide an interpretive context for reading them.14 The meanings implied by new names of necessity [end page 22] overflow their
categorizations, often to be reinterpreted in terms of available systems of intelligibility (most often tied to existing institutions). Whereas
renaming can maneuver change within the interstices of pervasive discursive structures, renaming is limited in reciprocal fashion. Strategies of
containment that seek to confine practice to sanitized categories appreciate the discursive character of social life, but insufficiently and
wrongheadedly. I do not mean to suggest that discourse is dependent on structure as much as that structures are hegemonic discourses. The
operative structures reproduced through a multitude of daily practices and reinforced by the efforts of aligned groups may be nothing more
than stabilized ascendent discourses.15 Structure
is the alibi for discourse. We need to destabilize this prevailing
interpretive context and the power plays that reinforce it, rather than hope that isolated acts of
linguistic sanitization will lead to political change. Interrogating structures as discourses can politicize the terms used to fix
meaning, produce value, and establish identity. Denaturalizing value as the product of nothing more than fixed interpretations can create new
possibilities for creating value in other less insistent and injurious ways. The discursively/structurally reproduced reality of liberal capitalism as
deployed by power blocs of aligned groups serves to inform the existentially lived experiences of citizens in the contemporary postindustrial
order.16 The powerful get to reproduce a broader context that works to reduce the dissonance between new names and established practices.
As long as the prevailing discursive structures of liberal capitalism create value from some practices, experiences, and identities over others, no
matter how often new names are insisted upon, some people will continue to be seen as inferior simply because they do not engage in the
same practices as those who are currently dominant in positions of influence and prestige. Therefore,
as much as there is a need to
reconsider the terms of debate, to interrogate the embedded biases of discursive practices, and to resist
living out the invidious distinctions that hegemonic categories impose, there are real limits to what
isolated instances of renaming can accomplish.
3. Permute: do the CP-- CP must be both textually and functionally competitive. Voting Issue:
focuses on artificial mechanisms of the plan rather than the substantive portions- moots 8
minutes of the 1AC and destroys education and fairness, steals affirmative ground, skews 2AC
strategy, and forces the affirmative to argue against ourselves
4. No link—The McClintock evidence is hyper-specific to nationalisms in the context of things like
WWII—we are a movement away from structures of oppression.
5. Operating within dominant discourse is key to redeploying meaning
Stychin 95 (Carl Stychin is the Dean and Professor of Law, City Law School, City University London, Doctor of Laws, University
of Reading, Master of Laws, Columbia University in the City of New York, Juris Doctor (with honours), University of Toronto,
Bachelor of Arts (with distinction), University of Alberta, “Law's Desire: Sexuality And The Limits Of Justice” Chapter 1:
Identities, Sexualities, and the Postmodern Subject: An Analysis of Artistic Funding by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Accessed via Google Books. //ekr)
From this theoretical standpoint, the possibility exists for active intervention by the marginal subject, historically defined as the “other" against
which the universal subject is constituted, in the very structure that creates the appearance of the universal. The power of the "universal"
metanarrative operates through a matrix of constraints by which "the subjection of localized, fragmented knowledge is a necessary condition
for appearance of the discourses of authority."58 However, if
discourse is never actually totalized for the subject that is defined
resistance remains possible. Thus, an identity can be forged within the very
discourse through which one's subjectivity has been denied articulation.59 This potential for resistance also suggests
by an absence, discursive
that a measure of commonality may be found between a feminist and a postmodern conception of subjecthood. (Elements Of the postmodern
critique address the ethical issue that feminism raises: the need to retain agency. They thus posit a subject that is capable Of resistance and
political action. This conception Of the subject is articulated not by retaining a Cartesian concept of agency but by emphasizing that subjects
who are subjected to multiple discursive influences create modes Of resistance to those discourses out
of the elements of the very discourses that shape them. While the dialectical conception of the subject rests on a definition
of agency that is imported from the Cartesian subject as a given, the postmoderns attempt to formulate concepts of resistance and creativity
apart from Carte- Sian concepts. The capacity for resistance can be linked to a political agenda that focuses on the formation of identities
denied by the universal discourse of subjecthood. The destabilization of the universal subject position through practices of resistance opens up
a realm of cultural space for the establishment of identities that have been silenced. Thus, attempts to
problematize the norm
become a precondition for articulating difference.61 Moreover, by operating within the dominant discourse,
subjects that have been historically denied participation can appropriate and redeploy the terms of the
dominant discourse. It is this cultural phenomenon of discursive appropriation—a parasitic redeployment Of the excess of dis- cursive
meaning—that amounts to the cultural practice of postmodern theory That (postmodernism) has achieved such diverse cultural currency as a
term thereby demonstrates what has been seen as one of postmodernism's most provocative lessons; that terms
are by no means
guaranteed their meanings, and that these meanings Can be appropriated and redefined for different
purposes, different contexts, and, more important, different causes. In fact, this politics Of appropriation,
for so long exclusively the discursive preserve Of the colonizer, has more recently been crucial to groups on
the social margin, Who have preferred, under certain circumstances, to struggle for recognition and legitimacy on es- tablished
"metropolitan" political ground By operating within and utilizing the terms Of the dominant dis- course in subversive fashion, new identities are
shaped—subjectivities that emerge in an oppositional relationship to the universal.
They Say: “That Justifies Slurs”
Under their interpretation, it wouldn’t be okay to say the plan because it’s racist. As
long as there is a justification for the effects of the plan, then it is justified. Same with
other discourse.
Offensive language is an extreme example that crosses “red lines” and can be rejected
Frank 97 (David A., Assistant Prof and Director of Forensics – U Oregon, Argumentation & Advocacy,
Spring, p. 195)
I believe the debate
culture should establish well-developed “ red lines” that place restrictions on the verbal
behavior in the debate classroom. To be sure, any ethical attempt to refute, critique and deconstruct an opponent’s argument on the
resolution should be encouraged. Yet attacks on the selfconcepts and self- esteem of others should not be tolerated and
are inconsistent with the intent of academic debate. The existence of such “red lines” should not discourage vigorous debate, for there are
many available arguments that deal with substantive issues on any resolution. Our task as a community of debate educators is to develop
judging paradigms that integrate a commitment to the values of diversity and impartiality. The
judge should represent and enforce
communal and personal values that exist to promote the health of argument and the public sphere. At the same
time, judges can remain impartial adjudicators of substantive arguments. While some will cluck about “political
correctness” and “censorship,” the debate round is not a speaker’s corner or a talk show, it is a classroom. If it is a classroom, then some
preconditions must exist if students are to learn. Among these preconditions should be a guarantee that a person’s race, gender, ethnicity, etc.,
will not be the target of abuse or harassment.
1AR—Ext Stychin
Discourse shapes reality through social structures
Goueffic ‘96 -[Louise Goueffic. Author and speaker on discourse, BA graduate studies in France, “Breaking the
patriarchal code” 1996, http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Patriarchal-Code-Linguistic-Sexual/dp/1879198177]
N.H
To address this question, one can consider, for example, why one person’s ‘terrorist’ is another person’s
‘freedom fighter’; the contexts in which one would use the terms ‘liberal’, ‘collateral damage’ or ‘axis of
evil’; what people mean by ‘woman by colour', 'hooded youths', 'male nurse', or 'spinster'; and how
much information is conveyed (or not) by the term 'domestic violence'. In addition, violent, shocking, or
high impact events, for example, war, provide vivid and highly charged contexts where language is
paramount. During the Second World War, the Japanese were constructed as the dehumanized enemy,
described as 'specimens' to be 'bagged'. In Rwanda, during the 1994 genocide, the Tutsis were
described as 'cockroaches', the target of 'bush-clearing' by the Hutus, who were ordered to 'remove tall
weeds' (adults) and 'shoots' (children). The killing of people in wars has typically been reconceptualized as 'action', 'severe measures', 'evacuating', or 'rendering harmless'. In many cases, 'war'
has become 'conflict', 'killing fields' have become 'free fire zones', and 'killing civilians' has become
'collateral damage' (Bourke, 1999,2001). These re-conceptualizations help constitute particular versions
of events, such as a bombing, and particular social and power relations, such as those between 'us' and
the 'other' (whoever the doer(s) and the receiver(s) of an action may be). Similarly, in terms of gender,
the use of phrasing such as 'male nurse' or 'female doctor' or 'lady doctor' effectively constitutes
particular versions of the social world, where it is necessary or important for speakers to index gender in
that way. The view of language not as a fixed or closed system, but as dynamic, complex and subject to
change, assumes that every time we use language, we make meaningful selections from the linguistic
resources available to us (Antaki, 1994). This is hardly a straightforward process, not least because these
selections are embedded in a local/immediate, as well as broader/institutional and socio-cultural
context (Antaki, 1988,1994; Fairclough, 1992). Consider, for example, a public debate on the topic of
abortion. The language that may be used to write or talk about this topic must be viewed in the context
of the particular social occasion (e.g. at school, in parliament, in the media); of the medium (e.g.
spoken, written); of who argues (e.g. a doctor, a leg- islator, a campaigner); for what purpose(s) (e.g. to
convince, to change a situation) and from what perspective. The range of perspectives on abortion may
vary according to the participants' age, sex, education, race, class, or religion, but also their expectations, experiences, knowledge, expertise, and involvement. Different perspectives will also reflect and
promote different assumptions (or discourses, as we will see in Chapter 3) around gender, for example,
about women's position in a society, their relative power in terms of decision-making, the role of
parenting, a society's views about sex, and so on. It then becomes obvious that in order to understand
the role that language plays in establishing and maintaining any social relations, including gender
relations, we have to look outside of language itself, at the wider social processes in which language
plays a part (Graddol and Swann, 1989).
1AR—Ext Schram
Their isolated instance of “laptop sticker” activism does nothing but shut down
interrogations of the structures that informed the oppression
They’re a form of fake radicalism that shuts down conversations and distracts from
material change. A private discussion about language choices is a better approach.
Ahmad 15 — Asam Ahmad, Coordinator of the Youth Program at the Metropolitan Action Committee
for the Prevention of Violence Against Women & Children, Coordinator of the It Gets Fatter Project—a
body positivity group started by fat queer people of color, 2015 (“A Note on Call-Out Culture,”
Briarpatch Magazine, March 2nd, Available Online at http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/anote-on-call-out-culture, Accessed 03-05-2015)
Call-out culture refers to the tendency among progressives, radicals, activists, and community organizers
to publicly name instances or patterns of oppressive behaviour and language use by others. People can
be called out for statements and actions that are sexist, racist, ableist, and the list goes on. Because callouts tend to be public, they can enable a particularly armchair and academic brand of activism: one in
which the act of calling out is seen as an end in itself.
What makes call-out culture so toxic is not necessarily its frequency so much as the nature and
performance of the call-out itself. Especially in online venues like Twitter and Facebook, calling someone
out isn’t just a private interaction between two individuals: it’s a public performance where people can
demonstrate their wit or how pure their politics are. Indeed, sometimes it can feel like the performance
itself is more significant than the content of the call-out. This is why “calling in” has been proposed as
an alternative to calling out: calling in means speaking privately with an individual who has done some
wrong, in order to address the behaviour without making a spectacle of the address itself.
In the context of call-out culture, it is easy to forget that the individual we are calling out is a human
being, and that different human beings in different social locations will be receptive to different
strategies for learning and growing. For instance, most call-outs I have witnessed immediately render
anyone who has committed a perceived wrong as an outsider to the community. One action becomes a
reason to pass judgment on someone’s entire being, as if there is no difference between a community
member or friend and a random stranger walking down the street (who is of course also someone’s
friend). Call-out culture can end up mirroring what the prison industrial complex teaches us about
crime and punishment: to banish and dispose of individuals rather than to engage with them as people
with complicated stories and histories.
It isn’t an exaggeration to say that there is a mild totalitarian undercurrent not just in call-out culture
but also in how progressive communities police and define the bounds of who’s in and who’s out. More
often than not, this boundary is constructed through the use of appropriate language and terminology –
a language and terminology that are forever shifting and almost impossible to keep up with. In such a
context, it is impossible not to fail at least some of the time. And what happens when someone has
mastered proficiency in languages of accountability and then learned to justify all of their actions by
falling back on that language? How do we hold people to account who are experts at using anti-
oppressive language to justify oppressive behaviour? We don’t have a word to describe this kind of
perverse exercise of power, despite the fact that it occurs on an almost daily basis in progressive circles.
Perhaps we could call it anti-oppressivism.
Humour often plays a role in call-out culture and by drawing attention to this I am not saying that wit
has no place in undermining oppression; humour can be one of the most useful tools available to
oppressed people. But when people are reduced to their identities of privilege (as white, cisgender,
male, etc.) and mocked as such, it means we’re treating each other as if our individual social locations
stand in for the total systems those parts of our identities represent. Individuals become synonymous
with systems of oppression, and this can turn systemic analysis into moral judgment. Too often, when
it comes to being called out, narrow definitions of a person’s identity count for everything.
No matter the wrong we are naming, there are ways to call people out that do not reduce individuals to
agents of social advantage. There are ways of calling people out that are compassionate and creative,
and that recognize the whole individual instead of viewing them simply as representations of the
systems from which they benefit. Paying attention to these other contexts will mean refusing to unleash
all of our very real trauma onto the psyches of those we imagine represent the systems that oppress us.
Given the nature of online social networks, call-outs are not going away any time soon. But reminding
ourselves of what a call-out is meant to accomplish will go a long way toward creating the kinds of
substantial, material changes in people’s behaviour – and in community dynamics – that we envision
and need.
Conquergood Module
**note don’t read this with the other Schram and Stychin cards, it would critique their focus on artificial
meanings of words and would be a double turn**
1. Focus on written knowledge is an exercise of Western imperialism that reproduces White
Supremacy
Conquergood 2 (Dwight Conquergood was an associate professor of performance studies at
Northwestern University and an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Communication at the State
University of New York , Master’s in Communication from the University of Utah, Ph.D. in Performance
Studies from Northwestern University “Performance Studies Interventions and Radical Research”
http://www.csun.edu/~vcspc00g/301/psinterventions-tdr.pdf //ekr)
Since the enlightenment project of modernity, the first way of knowing has the Of it has qualified and
repressed other Ways of knowing that are rooted in embodied experience, oratory; and local
contingencies. Between objective knowledge that is consolidated in texts, and local know-how that
circulates on the ground within a community of memory and practice, there is no contest. It is the
choice between and "Old Wives' tales" (note the gendered as feminine). Michel Foucault coined the
term "subjugated knowledge's" to include all the local, regional, vernacular, naive knowledges at the
bottom of the hierarchy— the low other of science (1980:81-84). These are the nonserious ways of
knowing that dominant culture neglects, excludes, represses, or simply fails to recognize. Subjugated
knowledges have been erased because they are illegible; they exist, by and large, as active bodies of
meaning, outside of books, eluding the forces of inscription that would make them legible, and thereby
legitimate (see de Certeau 1998; Scott 1998). What gets squeezed out by this epistemic violence is the
whole realm of complex, finely nuanced meaning that is embodied, tacit, intoned, gestured, improvised,
coexperienced, covert—and all the more deeply meaningful because of its refusal to be spelled out.
Dominant epistemologies that link knowing with seeing are not attuned to meanings that are masked,
camouflaged, indirect, embedded, or hidden in context. The visual/verbal bias Of Western regimes of
knowledge blinds bewilders researchers to meanings that are expressed forcefully through intonation,
silence, body tension, arched eyebrows, blank stares, and other protective arts of disguise and secrecy—
what de Certeau called "the elocutionary experience of fugitive communication" (2000: 133; see
Conquergood 2000). Subordinate people do not have the privilege of explicitness, the luxury of
transparency, the presumptive norm Of clear and direct communication, free and open debate on a
level playing field that the privileged classes take for granted. In his critique of the limitations of
literacy, Kenneth Burke argued that print based scholarship has built-in blind spots and a conditioned
deafness: The [written] record is usually but a fragment of the expression (as the written word omits all
telltale record of gesture and tonality; and not only may our “literacy” keep us from missing the
omissions, it may blunt us to the appreciation of tone and gesture, so that even when we witness the
full expression, we note only those aspects of it that can be written down). ([1950] 1969:185) In even
stronger terms, Raymond Williams challenged the class-based arrogance of scriptocentrism, pointing to
the “error” and “delusion” of “highly educated” people who are “so driven in on their reading” that
“they fail to notice that there are other forms of skilled, intelligent, creative activity” such as “theatre”
and “active politics.” This error “resembles that of the narrow reformer who supposes that farm
labourers and village craftsmen were once uneducated, merely because they could not read.” He argued
that “the contempt” for performance and practical activity, “which is always latent in the highly literate,
is a mark of the observer’s limits, not those of the activities themselves” ([1958] 1983:309). Williams
critiqued scholars for limiting their sources to written materials; I agree with Burke that scholarship is so
skewed toward texts that even when researchers do attend to extralinguistic human action and
embodied events they construe them as texts to be read. According to de Certeau, this scriptocentrism
is a hallmark of Western imperialism. Posted above the gates of modernity, this sign: “‘Here only what
is written is understood.’ Such is the internal law of that which has constituted itself as ‘Western’ [and
‘white’]” (1984:161).
Their focus on textual meaning of words is a form of Western academic privilege that erases other
forms of understanding
Conquergood 91 (Dwight Conquergood was an associate professor of performance studies at
Northwestern University and an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Communication at the State
University of New York , Master’s in Communication from the University of Utah, Ph.D. in Performance
Studies from Northwestern University “Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics”,
http://www.csun.edu/~vcspc00g/301/RethinkingEthnog.pdf, //ekr)
The performance paradigm can help ethnographers recognize "the limitations Of literacy" and critique
the textualist bias of western civilization (Jackson, 1989). Geertz (1973, p. 452) enunciates the textual
paradigm in his famous phrase: "The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles,
which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders Of those to whom they properly belong." In
other words, the ethnographer is construed as a displaced, somewhat awkward reader Of texts. Jackson
vigorously critiques this ethnographic textualism (1989, p. 184): By fetishizing texts, it divides—as the
advent of literacy itself did—readers from authors, and separates both from the world. The idea that
"there is nothing outside the text" may be congenial to someone whose life is confined to academe, but
it sounds absurd in the village worlds where anthropologists carry out their work, where people
negotiate meaning in face-to-face interactions, not as individual minds but as embodied social beings. In
other words, textualism tends to ignore the flux Of human relationships, the ways meanings are created
intersubjectively as well as ' 'intertextually embodied in gestures as well as in words, and connected to
political, moral, and aesthetic interests. Though possessed Of a long historical commitment to the
spoken word rhetoric and communication suffer from this same valorizing of inscribed texts. A recent
essay in the Quarterly Journal Of Speech (Brummett, 1990, p. 71; emphasis mine) provides a stunning
example of the field's extreme textualism: "Such a (disciplinary I grounding can only come about in the
moment of methodological commitment when someone sits down with a transcript Of discourse and
attempts to explain it to students Or colleagues—in that moment we become scholars of
communication." In the quest for intellectual respectability through disciplinary rigor, some
communication and rhetorical scholars have narrowed their focus to language, particularly those
aspects of language that can be spatialized on the page, or measured and counted, to the exclusion of
embodied meanings that are accessible through ethnographic methods of "radical empiricism"
(Jackson, 1989). linguistic and textualist bias Of speech communication has blinded many scholars to the
preeminently rhetorical nature of cultural performance—ritual, ceremony, celebration, festival, parade,
pageant, feast, and so forth. It is not just in non-western cultures, but in many so-called "modern"
communities that cultural performance functions as a special form of public address, rhetorical agency:
Cultural performances are not simple reflectors or expressions of culture or even of changing culture but
may themselves be active agencies of change, representing the eye by which culture sees itself and the
drawing board on which creative actors sketch out what they Performative reflexivity is a believe to be
more apt or interesting "designs for living. condition in which a sociocultural group, or its most
perceptive members acting representa- tively, turn, bend Or reflect back upon themselves, upon the
relations, actions, symbols, meanings, codes, roles, statuses, social Structures, ethical and legal rules,
and other sociocultural components which make up their public "selves." (Turner, 1986, p. 24)
2AC—Fiat PIC
2AC Frontline
1. No link—Their args assume we are reformism and that the state creates progressive laws
2. Reject plan inclusive advocacies: steals affirmative ground, skews 2AC strategy, and forces the
affirmative to argue against ourselves- voter for fairness and education
3. Black nation building is a necessity—the PIC fails to create the institutions required to combat
White Supremacy
4. Regardless of the outcome, struggles and discourses in support of Black Nationalism are still
good.
Singh 04 — Simboonath Singh, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of MichiganDearborn, 2004 (“Resistance, Essentialism, and Empowerment in Black Nationalist Discourse in the
African Diaspora: A Comparison of the Back to Africa, Black Power, and Rastafari Movements,” Journal
of African American Studies, Winter, Vol. 8, No. 3, Accessible Online via subscribing institution to
Springer Online, accessed on 7-15-15)
What motivates groups to construct and reconstruct their identity and culture? By challenging the
negative cultural depictions of blackness, the Black Power, Back to Africa and Rastafari movements were
able to redefine black ethnicity by injecting into the minds of the masses such things as "pride of past"
(African culture and history), and "collective memory" (the experiences of slavery and colonialism) as
their strategy for transforming culture and ethnic identity. By recasting black ethnicity into a more
positive light, they were able to recreate and re-imagine African history and culture, thereby redefining
African-Caribbean identity, and thus creating a New World African diasporic identity. The Black Power,
Garvey, and Rastafari movements illustrate the power of activism to inspire individual as well as
collective forms of ethnic identification, ethnic consciousness, and ethnic pride.
Irrespective of whether the outcomes were real or imaginary, or merely symbolic struggles to reverse
social structures and ethnic identities, the Black Power, Garvey, and Rastafari movements were,
nonetheless, instrumental in allowing particular segments of the African-Caribbean community the
opportunity to reinvent and redefine who and what they were and wished to be. It would have been a
failure of the imagination not to have recognized in a world that has used racism as a means of
exploiting people of color, that the very political, psychological and philosophical attempts to resist
such systems would necessarily take the form of a validation and reassertion of the denigrated.
They Say: “Normativity”
No Link and Turn — critical theory deconstructs the bureaucracy. Rejecting
normativity strips us of agency and undermines change.
Michelman and Radin 91 — Frank Michelman, Robert Walmsley University Professor Emeritus of
Law at Harvard Law School, L.L.B. from Harvard Law School, B.A. in Philosophy from Yale University, and
Margaret Radin, William Benjamin Scott & Luna M. Scott Professor of Law at Stanford University, L.L.D.
from Illinois Institute of Technology, J.D. from the University of Southern California, 1991 (“Pragmatist
And Poststructuralist Critical Legal Practice,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol. 139, Accessible
Online at
http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3745&context=penn_law_review,
Accessed On 07-20-15)
Other critical practitioners evidently try to abstain from commitment to any jurisprudence and devote
themselves abstemiously to excavating the hidden, mystifying, self-enclosing, but also selfliquidating, structures they know (and so do we) they can find in every candidate jurisprudence that
comes along. We think even their practice cannot be non-normative in the broadest sense in which
some of them use the term, because (as we explained in Parts I and II) no discursive utterance-and in
particular no argument can be seriously entertained as non-normative in so broad a sense. Still, these
most fastidious critical practitioners apparently try to refrain from ever saying explicitly that there is
anything we ought to do; they confine their arguments to assault on (other) normative frameworks. Are
their arguments, then, perhaps nonrmative in a pragmatic sense, since they refrain from inviting us to
do anything (except engage with them)?
It has, after all, been said by way of explaining such a determinedly negative practice that it is just, well,
fun. But of course that is rarely, if ever, all that's said or intimated by way of explanation. The more
satisfying explanation, the explanation that allows this critical practice to retain its momentum and its
audience, is different. It is pragmatic. (Of course, it is poststructuralist, too.) And it is normative. It is
the belief-the situated judgment-that under current conditions, normative projects are bound to the
reproduction of evil until relentless application of the negative can break the grip on our acculturated
imaginations of a particular, historically situated, pernicious world-view.
Thus understood, anti-normativism is not foundational; it is only temporarily and not atemporally
privileged. Thus understood, antinormativism is a pragmatically inflected project. Those who still attack
all jurisprudences and embrace none must be judging in context that the moment for reconstruction is
not yet here. When and for whomever that moment does arrive, the conceptual truth that each and
every normative project is liable to deconstruction no longer works as a foundational objection against
engagement in such projects; it becomes just one more problem to be understood and negotiated.
When and for whomever that moment comes, the perpetual anticipation of mockery no longer counts
as a reason to quit. It remains, of course-an ambiguity that we live with, a risk that we take.
It seems a possibility worth considering that there is not, and is not going to be, any critical speaker for
whom the reconstructive, the visionary, the committed moment is not always already coming, and thus
is not always already here. We can deconstruct because we can reconstruct; we are anti-normative
insofar as we are normative. As the reconstructive moment seems ineradicable, so too does the human
experience of agency. It seems, in other words, a possibility worth considering that the problematic,
elusive, "humanist" experience of subjectivity-agency-is an historically irreversible, inexpungible,
constitutive aspect of our experience of (human) being. Part of what we do, as concept-making strivers
caught in forms of life, is think about the good-the better-world and ourselves acting towards it. We
cannot deny our own agency. (We cannot speak the sentence of denial except as speaking subjects,
affirming by speaking the sentence what the sentence means to deny.) We can call agency into
question, and we had better, but to call into question is also to (re)affirm, (re)create, (re)construct.
2AC—Afropessimism K
2AC Frontline
1. They misunderstand the relationship between blackness and Civil Society—it is
ontic not ontological
Hudson 13 — Peter Hudson, Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of the Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg, 2013 (“The state and the colonial unconscious,” Social Dynamics, Volume 39, Number 2,
Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Taylor & Francis Online, p. 265-266)
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 isn’t 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
[end page 265] 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 doesn’t exist, the black man doesn’t 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” (vécu) of the colonised
subject. The colonised is “traversing the fantasy” (Zizek 2006a, 40–60) 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, chap- ter 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 possibility.8
2. Permutation: do both—creating black nationalist communities and moving
away from the state is not inconsistent with the alternative
3. Their Fatalism decimates agency and destroys opportunities for change.
Ehlers 12 — Nadine Ehlers, Professor, School of Social Sciences, Media, and Communication Faculty of
Law, Humanities, and Arts University of Wollongong, 12 [“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 dear the false
homogeneity of subjects that are denoted by these terms and the arbitrariness of race per se. In the same moment that I
employ these terms as critical tools of analysis, 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 makes it seem like race is an insurmountable limit or
closed system. That
race operates as a limit appears particularly so for black subjects. For despite the fact
that all subjects are produced and positioned within and by the discursive formations of race, the impact
of that positioning and what it means for experience is markedly different. Black subjects are situated
within an antiblack context where the black body/self continues to be torn asunder within the relations of civil 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 are systematically linked to the history of white 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 nevertheless everywhere, a dead time which never arrives and does
not stop arriving" (2007, xxi). Saidiya Hartman, in her provocative Lose Your Mother: A journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007) refers to
this haunting as slavery's 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 Loic Wacquant (2002, 41) has identified as slavery's fu nctional surrogates: Jim Crow, the ghetto, and
the prison. For Hartman, as echoed by other scholars, slavery has yet to be 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 slavery- skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the
afterlife of slavery. (2007, 6)
Wilderson III, in his Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structures of U.S. Antagonisms (2009), powerfully frames
slavery's 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 Wilderson, " the Black [is) a subject who is always already
Frank B.
positioned as Slave" (2009, 7) in the United States, while everyone else exists as "Masters" (2009, 10 ).8
Studies of slavery's 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 be put or is productively in
conversation with Foucault's account ofbiopolitics that, as I noted earlier, regulates at the level of the population. Where sovereignty 'took life
and let live,' in the contemporary 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 is here that Foucault positions the function of
racism. It is, he argues, "primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power's control: the break between what
must live and what must die" (2003b, 254). Thus, certain bodies/subjects are killed - or subjected to sovereign power and social death- so that
others might prosper. 10
In Scenes of Subjection: 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 being-but she also illuminates how,
within such a context, slave "performance and other modes of practice . .. exploit[ed), and exceed[ed]
the constraints of domination" (1997, 54, my emphasis). Hartman analyzes quotidian enactments of slave
agency to highlight practices of "(counter)investment" (1997, 73) that produced "a reconstructed self that
negates the dominant terms of identity and existence" (1997, 72). 11 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, 55).'2 The questions that I ask in
this analysis travel in this direction, and aim to build on this aspect of Hartman's work. In doing so I make two key claims: first, that despite
undeniable historical continuities and structural d)'namics, race is also marked by discontinuity; and second, race is
constantly reworked and transformed within relations of power by subjects . 13
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 I scale down to the level of the subject to analyze both (a) how subjects are formed, and (b) how subjects – black
and white alike – have struggled against conditions in ways that refuse totalizing, immutable
understandings of race. This book does not seek to mark a condition or situa tion then, but instead takes up Brown's
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 individuals and i11
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 be reconfigured within the broader
workings of what I am calling racial discipline and performative imperatives.
But in addressing the quotidian and those efforts to remake condition and identity, this
study insists on a shift in perspective in
terms of how power is thought about. As I have remarked, I am not focused on biopolitics or what can be seen as solely sovereign
forms of power that are deployed to condition who will live and who will die. Instead, I am concerned with disciplinary power, which is
articulated simultaneously but at a different level to biopolitics (and despi te 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.
[BEGIN ENDNOTE]
14. 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 viewpoint, 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 Patterson's (1981) 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, Patterson's "slavery as social death," and contemporary usages of this concept to account for
the present, advance a troubling transhistorical characterization of slavery He argues in line with I-Ierman
Bennett (quoted in Brown 1009, 1133), who has observed:
As the narrative of the slave experience, soclardeath 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.
4. Aff 1st—Price indicates cognitive liberation is necessary to recognize the
illegitimacy of the American political system—the affirmative starting point is
key to consolidating the call for the end of the world
5. Their links don’t assume negative state action—we are an eraser to the law—
the fact that they can’t explain how they go from anti-black America to no
America proves the necessity of tearing down the law.
6. Their links aren’t assumptive of black nationalism—we create black institutions
that counter white supremacy—that’s Shelby
7. Permutation: do the plan then the alt—having the state pass a blatantly antiblack law is the paradigmatic analysis their authors call for—it forces the state
to reveal its central antagonism
8. Interpretations of whiteness/structural antagonism understands it solely as
transhistorical domination of one racial class over another. This erases the
political power and inputs people of color have in racial formations—turns any
positive potential for movements
***This card isn’t super necessary
Michael OMI, Associate Professor at UC Berkeley, AND Howard WINANT, Sociology at the University
of California, Santa Barbara, 13 [“Resistance is futile?: a response to Feagin and Elias,” Ethnic and Racial
Studies, Vol. 36, Issue 6, 2013]
Their essay has an overly tendentious tone and sometimes misreads and misinterprets our book. Still there
are many points of
agreement between the racial formation and systemic racism theories. Where we disagree most
strongly is over our respective understanding of racial politics. Feagin and Elias focus so intensely on racism that
they lose sight of the complexities of race and the variations that exist among and within racially defined
groups. In their ‘systemic racism’ account white racist rule is so comprehensive and absolute that the
political power and agency of people of colour virtually disappear . Indeed, the ‘white racial frame’ (Feagin
2009) is
so omnipotent that white racism seems to usurp and monopolize all political space in the USA. Yes,
‘counter framing’ is present, but it appears marginal at best, unable effectively to challenge the
pervasiveness, persistence and power of white racism. Since Feagin and Elias dismiss ideas of ‘racial
democracy’ tout court, their perspective makes it difficult to understand how anti-racist mobilization
or political reform could ever have occurred in the past or could ever take place in the future. They
see racism as so exclusively white that any notion of white anti-racism is virtually ignored and completely
unexplained.
Despite Feagin and Elias's good intentions of linking their analysis to anti-racist practice, we believe their views have quite the
opposite effect: without intending to do so, they dismiss the political agency of people of colour and of antiracist whites. In Feagin/Elias's view, ‘systemic racism’ is like the Borg in the Star Trek series: a hivemind phenomenon that assimilates all it touches. As the Borg announce in their collective audio message to
intended targets, ‘Resistance is futile’.
We have a smaller space than the main essay, so we'll dispense with a point-by-point refutation of their understanding of racial formation
theory. We assume readers of Racial Formation and of our other work know that we are not closet neocons, that we
consider racism a
foundational and continuous part of US history (and indeed modern world history), that we agree that whites
have been the primary creators and beneficiaries of racist institutions and practices, and that we not only respect but
also situate ourselves in the black radical tradition, especially the Duboisian tradition. We will focus on our fundamental point of
disagreement with Feagin and Elias – how we respectively understand the very nature of racial politics in the USA.
Here we will engage Feagin and Elias on a few important questions that will highlight both where we agree and where we disagree. Our topics
are as follows:
• What is the relationship between race and racism?
• What is distinctive about our own historical epoch in the USA – from post-Second World War to the present – with respect to race and
racism?
• What are the political implications of contemporary racial trends?
We discuss these questions with the intent of clarifying racial formation theory as well as sharpening the debate with the systemic racism
perspective. We appreciate the opportunity to do so.
What is the relationship between race and racism?
In Racial Formation we suggest that the
concepts of race and racism should be distinguished and not be used
interchangeably (Omi and Winant 1994, p. 71). Some have argued that race is solely a product of racist
domination; on that account race does not exist outside of racism. As readers of Ethnic and Racial Studies well know,
many writers place quotation marks around race (‘race’) to distinguish their use of the concept from popular biological notions of human
variation. This is meant to designate the wobbly social scientific status of the race concept.
In contrast to this perspective, we
consider race to be real because it is ‘real in its consequences.’1 Our ideas about
how the meaning of race is produced are basically Duboisian and Jamesian: we all make our racial identities, though we do
not make them under circumstances of our own choosing. Race and racism do not exist merely because
of white domination, but also because of resistance and independent action : what C. L. R. James called ‘selfactivity’ (James, Lee, and Castoriadis 2005 [1958], p. 99). The
process of making and remaking race – racial formation –
is fundamentally political . It is about the ‘freedom dreams’ (Kelley 2002) that shape racial conflict as much as the white racism
emphasized by Feagin and Elias.
As Feagin and Elias acknowledge, we
have developed a fairly detailed approach to racial politics, centred on the
constant and cumulative interaction of what we call ‘racial projects’ . In our account, racial formation proceeds
through such projects, which both signify upon race (representing it, interpreting it) and reciprocally
structure social relationships (of power, inequality, solidarity, etc.) according to race. If there is a
disagreement with Feagin and Elias here, it seems to be about how much power people of colour have in this
process of race-making, this racial formation process. In their account, the very meaning of race is
overwhelmingly, if not totally, shaped by a ‘white racial frame’ . By contrast, we believe that people of colour have
a lot of power in the production of racial meanings, much more than Feagin and Elias are willing to concede.
OK, what about racism? There are points of agreement and difference between Feagin and Elias's perspective and ours. We provide a hard-core
definition and extensive discussion (Omi and Winant 1994, pp. 69–76), defining racism as
a racial project that combines
essentialist representations of race (stereotyping, xenophobia, aversion, etc.) with patterns of domination (violence,
hierarchy, super-exploitation, etc.). Racism ‘marks’ certain visible characteristics of the human body for purposes
of domination. It naturalizes and reifies these instrumental distinctions. Racism is the product of
modern history: empire and conquest, race-based slavery, and race-based genocide have shaped the
modern world; they have been met with resistance and sometimes revolution, also race-based in crucial ways.
This is where race comes from: the drive to rule, and the imperative to resist .
Feagin and Elias think (white) racism shapes race. Although they read us quite selectively and negatively here, they recognize
that we also identify whites as the most comprehensive practitioners and by far the greatest beneficiaries
of racist practices. We agree that racism is a ferocious force, a deeply structured-in dimension of US (and world)
society. But this is apparently not enough: Feagin and Elias also want to confine racist agency to whites and whites
alone. We argue that not all racism is white, and that people of colour can practise racism as well.
Let us look more deeply at this question. Who
is white? Beyond the question of the contingent and highly porous
boundaries of this group lies the question of whether there are any ‘positive’ dimensions of white
identity or whether it is a purely ‘negative’ quality, signifying only the absence of ‘colour’.2
Then there is the ‘white privilege’ question, which builds on Du Bois's analysis (1999, p. 700) of the ‘psychological wage’ received by poor
whites in virtue of their race. While we are in substantial agreement with the ‘privilege’ argument regarding whites’ ‘possessive investment’ in
racism (Lipsitz 1998), there are problems there too. How
do we account for white anti-racism if we understand
privilege as the source of racism? Is white anti-racism even possible, if racism is envisioned as an
economistic zero-sum game in which clear winners and losers are demarcated?
We think that race
is so profoundly a lived-in and lived-out part of both social structure and identity that it
exceeds and transcends racism – thereby allowing for resistance to racism. Race, therefore, is more than
‘racism’; it is a fully fledged ‘social fact’
like sex/gender or class. From this perspective,
race shapes racism as much as racism shapes race. Racial identities
(individual and group), and other race-oriented concepts as well, are
unstable. They are not uniforms; races are not
teams; they are not defined solely by antagonism to one another. They vary internally and
ideologically; they overlap and mix; their positions in the social structure shift; in other words they are shaped by
political conflict.
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 misses the dramatic
twists and turns in racial politics that have occurred since the Second World War and the civil rights era.
Feagin and Elias claim that we overly inflate the significance of the changes wrought by the civil rights movement, and 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 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 we do not think that is the
whole story. 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 anti-miscegenation 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 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 been transformed in significant ways. As Antonio Gramsci argues, 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: oppositions must win real gains in the process.
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
Once again,
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
images in the mobilizations that arose from the political right to counter them. 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 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 long-delayed 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.
1ar—Ext Hudson
They’re still wrong—
Social death ignores historical patterns
Brown 9 Vincent, Prof. of History and African and African-American Studies @ Harvard Univ.,
December, "Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery," American Historical Review, p. 12311249
THE PREMISE OF ORLANDO PATTERSON’S 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 Park’s 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
argued
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
Carter G. Woodson and W. E. B. Du Bois and the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits
the opposite. Their research supported the conclusion
.32 Herskovits ex- amined “Africanisms”—any practices that seemed to be identifiably African—as 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 Park’s, who empha- sized the damage wrought by slavery on black families and
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.
preservation of
distinctive cultural forms has served as an index both of a resilient social personhood, or identity, and of
resistance to slavery itself. ¶
folkways.34 More recently, a number of scholars have built on Herskovits’s line of thought, enhancing our understanding of African history during the era of the slave trade. Their
,
For these scholars, the
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 enslaved—indeed, they often equated acts of will with humanity itself. As these writers 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 Patterson’s definition of slavery. “If slaves were in fact ‘generally
How could they have
formed the fragile families documented by social historians if they had been “natally alienated” by
definition
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
social control and slave resistance falsified Patterson’s 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
¶
dishonored,’ ” Craton asked, “how does he explain the degrees of rank found among all groups of slaves—that is, the scale of ‘reputation’ and authority accorded, or at least acknowledged, by slave and master alike?”
? Finally, and per- haps most tellingly,
” that so
frustrated masters and compromised their power, sometimes “fatally.”38 The dynamics of
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 Rucker’s 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
the “perseverance of African culture even among second, third, and fourth
generation creoles
New York City’s 1712 Coromantee revolt 1741 conspiracy
1739 Stono rebellion
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
rupture was the story” of slavery, Rucker aims to reveal
.”39 He looks again at some familiar events in North America—
and
, the
in South Carolina, as well as the plots, schemes, and insurgencies of Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner—deftly teasing out the African origins of many of the attitudes and actions of the black rebels. Rucker outlines
how
2AC—Black Feminism K
2AC Frontline
1. NO link—we create new institutions that are inclusive and built upon identity
formation and creation—that’s Price
2. Black Nationalism is key to Black Feminism — dismissal empirically fails and
undermines struggles.
Higashida 11 — Cheryl Higashida, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California,
Boulder, Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from Cornell University, M.A. in Ethnic Studies from Cornell University,
B.A. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkley, 2011 (“Introduction,” Black
Internationalist Feminism, Published by the University of Illinois Press, ISBN: 9780252093548, pgs. 7-10)
Yet as Neil Lazarus points out, even the most crushing of these failures, of which there have been many,
cannot eradicate the historical fact of anticolonial independence and its impact on hundreds of
millions throughout the world. Moreover, Lazarus writes, "the concrete achievements of this struggle
for national liberation are still intact and continue to provide a vital resource for present-day social and
cultural practice" Whether by reminding us that the rights of small nations and struggles for sovereignty
continue to matter or that rich traditions of resistance to U.S. neoimperialism and alternative
formulations of transnational citizenship point beyond the impasses of the war on terror or that woman
of color and/or lesbian feminisms have been forged out of battles for self-determination, political
movements centrally concerned with national liberation, such as the postwar Black Left and the Black
Power movement to which it helped give rise, are major landmarks on the terrain of progressive politics
and culture.
This is not to say that the triumphs of Third Worldist national liberation movements negate their oftenvirulent heteropatriarchy, but that their limitations with respect to gender and sexuality do not
primarily define their (ir)relevance to contemporary social movements, especially when considering
African American women writers on the postwar Black Left. Their work challenges the narrative of
decline of anticolonial nationalism as a historical force, which Aijaz Ahmad dates to the mid-1970s. As
Timothy Brennan observes, this periodization does not fit details like the rise Of the New People's Army
of the Philippines, the right-wing clerical anti-imperialism of the Iranian revolution, the victory Of the
New Jewel movement in Granada (sic, and the battle of Quito Carnavale in Angola between the Cuban
and South African armies that led directly to the Namibian accords—all of them post-1975, and all of
them (again) With resonant activist effects in the metropolis, particularly in the form Of the American
antiapartheid movement as well as Jesse Jackson's foreign-policy statements in the 1984 presidential
elections.
Audre Lorde, who was inspired by Grenada's New Jewel Movement to make national liberation central
to her feminism; Lorraine Hansberry, whose Fanonian analysis in her posthumously completed play, Les
Blancs (1970), remained relevant to the unfolding Angolan revolution; and Alice Childress and Rosa Guy,
who revisited the histories and politics of the anticolonial Black Left in novels published in 1979 and
1995, demonstrate that revolutionary nationalism continued to shape Black feminist and queer politics
well into the late twentieth century—and that radical Black women writers reshaped revolutionary
nationalism. When we dismiss intellectual and political formations that hold national liberation to be
indispensable to emancipatory politics, we silence a rich strand of Black feminism and deny the very
heterogeneity it strives to foster.
3. Permutation: Do Both. Modern Black Nationalism can help with formation of
resistance strategies — their link evidence underestimates our revolutionary
potential.
Gaines 13 — Rondee Gaines, Ph.D. candidate in Communications from Georgia State University, M.A.
in Communications from the University of Alabama, 2013 (“I am a Revolutionary Black Female
Nationalist: A Womanist Analysis of Fulani Sunni Ali's Role as a New African Citizen and Minister of Information in the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa,” Georgia State University, May
10th, Accessible Online at
http://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1044&context=communication_diss, accessed
on 07-14-15)
Considering the black feminist perspective that oftentimes denies the agency and complexity of female
black nationalists, Africana womanism and Black Nationalism actually support male-female
complementarity. Not ignoring patriarchal oppression, Hudson-Weems, from an Africana womanist
perspective, acknowledges that sexism “plays its part in dividing our [black] community, as this
menacing factor wreak[ed] havoc on the sanctity and harmony of the Africana family” (81). However,
the problems that plague black communities, whether it is sexism, capitalism, or white supremacy, do
not interfere with black men and women collectively confronting these issues and continuing to struggle
for black liberation.
While womanism brings additional insights about racially gendered activism in the Republic of New
Africa, the practice of Black Nationalism, from a revolutionary stance, also expands the margins of a
womanist method. When Phillips characterized womanism as antioppressionist, she, like other
scholars, did not explore the practicality of developing an antioppressionist womanist agenda in a
radical secessionist setting. In other words, if people are actively engaged in effectively transforming
politics, they must be equipped mentally, socially, and especially physically. A history of struggle, which
is assumed if one is opposed to oppression, should clearly include concrete problem-solving tactics and
resistive strategies to domination and repressive forces. Studying more closely how Sunni Ali attempted
to achieve the seemingly insurmountable task of building a national citizenry and “freeing the land” is an
excellent opportunity for studying such tactics and strategies. There must be an internal and external
revolution, as noted in “Republic of New Africa Nation Building Classes.” By adapting some of the Black
Nationalist’s revolutionary tactics, there is the conceivable possibility of expanding the practical
boundaries of womanism.
4. Black Feminism privileges Western Perspectives while papering over other
conditions
Blay 8 (Yaba Amgborale Blay is a research faculty member in Africana Studies and Women’s Studies at Lehigh University,
where she directs the Joint Multicultural Program. She received her doctorate in African American Studies and Women’s
Studies from Temple University. “All the ‘Africans’ are Men, all the “Sistas” are “American,” but Some of Us Resist: Realizing
African Feminism(s) as an Africological Research Methodology” The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol.2, no.2 March 2008 //
ekr)
Though Black feminist, Womanist and Africana womanist perspectives continue to vie for the discipline’s
primary consideration, each regarding itself the more appropriate viewpoint, in their treatment (or lack
thereof) of issues related to gender in African and African Diasporic spaces, it is argued here that Black
feminism, Womanism and Africana womanism all present themselves in similar paternalist fashion as
does Western feminism, often prioritizing a version of reality that is contextualized by their particular
experiences of gender, namely as it is informed by the legacy and experience of being African in
America. “From whose center are we operating?” Black Feminism In her highly-cited text, Black Feminist
Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, Patricia Hill Collins discusses
U.S. Black Feminism in a Transnational Context (Chapter 10). While Hill Collins acknowledges that the
“matrix of domination” experienced by Black women transcends U.S. borders, she also notes that the
experiences of women of African descent globally will vary across space and time according to the
specific organization of these particular matrices. Nevertheless, it appears that the purpose of engaging
Black women transnationally, according to Hill Collins, is more for a better understanding of U.S. Black
women, than it is for the women under study. She argues that “shifting to a global analysis..reveals
new dimensions of U.S. Black women’s experiences in the particular matrix of domination that
characterizes U.S. society” (Hill Collins 231). What becomes clear is that in form similar to many
Western feminists, Hill Collins situates the experience of gender as universal and conceives a “global
gendered apartheid” of sorts wherein there exists, “the exploitation of labor of women of colour
everywhere” (Emphasis mine) (Hill Collins 232). But who is defining what constitutes oppression – those
within the society or those outside of the society? Given that she positions the intersecting oppressions
of race, class, gender and sexuality as the ties that bond Black women globally with no mention of
history or culture, and that she assumes that it is possible for Black feminists to “[place] U.S. Black
women’s experiences in the center of analysis without privileging those experiences,” (Hill Collins 228) it
appears that in this context, it would be through U.S. Black feminist eyes that we would have to witness
what constitutes “exploitation” everywhere.
5. Alt Fails: Disciplinary policing bad — excluding various disciplines from black
feminism dooms it to failure.
Nash 09 — Jennifer Nash, Assistant Professor in African Studies at George Washington University,
Ph.D. in African American Studies from Harvard University, J.D. from Harvard Law School, A.B. in
Women’s Studies from Harvard College, 2009 (“Review Essay: Un-Disciplining Intersectionality,”
International Feminist Journal of Politics, December, accessible online via subscribing institutions to
Taylor and Francis Online, accessed on 7-11-15)
Despite the pervasive anxiety that intersectionality is an exercise in impossibility, that the sheer
complexity of lived experience cannot ever fully be captured, these four texts ambitiously strive to craft
a more robust intersectionality theory. Yet all four texts brush up against the limits of disciplinarity in
their imaginings of intersectionality’s future. Indeed, each text mobilizes the methodological and
theoretical tools of its respective discipline – history, political science, philosophy and sociology – to rethink intersectionality. However, the texts reveal that disciplinarity itself is a hindrance to the radical
border-crossing thinking that intersectionality requires. Creative thinking about subjectivity and inequity
in an era increasingly marked by contingent, shifting, hybrid identities necessitates scholarly exchanges
across the at-times heavily policed disciplinary borders that shape the contemporary university.
Intersectionality has a long and deeply interdisciplinary history. The power of intersectionality to
transcend disciplinary borders suggests that it might also have the power to transform disciplinary
borders. The panoply of scholarly interventions committed to re-thinking and revising intersectionality
suggest that it is an opportune time to un-discipline intersectionality. Un-disciplining intersectionality
will allow scholars to harness the tools of a wide array of disciplines in our ongoing attempts to capture
the messy social construction of identity.
2AC—Academy K of Black Feminism
Their K commodifies Black feminism and uses it as a voice for the Other
Alexander-Floyd 12 (Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd is an associate professor of women’s and gender
studies at Rutgers University and a feminist theorist whose work and teaching integrates the study of
politics, law, women’s studies, and black studies., 2012, “Disappearing Acts: Reclaiming Intersectionality
in the Social Sciences in a Post–Black Feminist Era” Feminist Formations, Volume 24, Issue 1, Spring
2012, pp. 1-25 //ekr)
In her seminal essay “The Occult of True Black Womanhood” (1996), black feminist Ann duCille dissects
the cultural and political dimensions of the newfound interest in black women as academic subjects in
the closing decades of the last millennium. As she notes, where black feminist studies across fields had
for decades remained a marginalized academic space advanced by pioneering black feminists whose
work represented a labor of love, the 1980s and 1990s brought with it an explosion of interest in black
women’s studies, particularly by white feminists, black men, and others who were not black feminists.
Although duCille and others advocated for increased attention to black feminism and black women as
academic subjects, the frenzy surrounding the study of black women in the academy reached “occult
status.” For duCille, moreover, the occult of true black womanhood represented a contemporary
example of the commodification of black women. bell hooks likens such commodification to the
consumption or “eating [of] the Other” (hooks, qtd. in duCille 1996, 82). This commodification and
consumption had deleterious effects on both black women academics and black women as subjects of
research. In terms of the former, the occult of true black womanhood heightened the “crisis of Black
female intellectuals” (118). The right to claim expertise in the study of black women was open to
everyone, but black women—not the scores of scholars partaking in the occult—were in high demand
as purveyors of gendered, racial representation (especially, for instance, to serve on committees to
speak as or for the Other). As to the latter, the occult of true black womanhood, duCille observed, was
marked by scholarship that, in fact, diminished the very subject that it wanted to “honor” “by treating it
not like a discipline with a history and a body of rigorous scholarship underpinning it, but like an
anybody-can-play pickup game played on an open field” (95). In this way, the black feminist academic
terrain was misappropriated. Scholars, moreover, driven by this occult, hailed their work as “new
scholarship,” “go[ing] . . . in fact [where] others have gone before” (ibid.).
The Academy consumes and repackages black feminist discourse to steal its liberatory
potential
Alexander-Floyd 12 (Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd is an associate professor of women’s and gender
studies at Rutgers University and a feminist theorist whose work and teaching integrates the study of
politics, law, women’s studies, and black studies., 2012, “Disappearing Acts: Reclaiming Intersectionality
in the Social Sciences in a Post–Black Feminist Era” Feminist Formations, Volume 24, Issue 1, Spring
2012, pp. 1-25 //ekr)
As noted at the outset, disciplinary pressure to conform research to dominant modes of inquiry
constitutes one of the major forces shaping intersectionality. Underlying the push for “empirical”
research is the siren call of scientific validity. Although feminists and others who are nonpositivists have
assailed its claims, positivism’s magnetic pull still draws our attention to quantitative research as our
center of scholarly authority. Appeals to empiricism in the name of championing intersectionality in
political science more broadly disqualifies and diminishes scholarship that seeks to focus on women of
color’s marginalization and the varied forces through which they are assailed. In a related vein, although
women of color social scientists like Hancock may draw on their lived identity in some part to think
through intersectionality in their work, disciplinary structures condition intersectionality’s expression in
their work in ways that are more determinative than their subject-position. Of course, the subjectposition of women of color adherents to post–black feminist intersectionality adds legitimacy to its
support, particularly among white scholars, as it travels within the mainstream of disciplines. Finally,
efforts to systematize intersectionality should be viewed with skepticism, as they also ultimately work to
disappear black women by altering their knowledge production in ways that undermine its import.
Hancock (2007b) argues that “[c]alls have emerged for the consolidation of intersectional research into
a paradigm that animates work” in a variety of fields, offering her work as one such effort (64). Calls to
“unify” knowledge present opportunities for “re-codification” and “re-colonization” (Foucault 1980, 86).
Current efforts to universalize intersectionality, to consolidate its meaning such that it is disconnected
from the lived experiences of women of color and made available to larger numbers because of a focus
on an academic demand for quantitative methods, can serve to colonize intersectionality and redeploy it
in ways that deplete its radical potential. Indeed, at its best, intersectionality decenters the project of
positivism and neo-positivism altogether.
1AR—Black Nationalism k2 Black Fem
1. Their critiques of Black Nationalism are based off a flawed model – not our aff –
and a black feminist nationalism is possible – the perm solves
Collins ’06 (Patricia Hill Collins - is currently Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, She is
also the former head of the Department of African American Studies at the University of Cincinnati, and
the past President of the American Sociological Association Council; January 1, 2006; From Black Power
to Hip Hop; “Introduction”; 11-12)//CC
Ironically, in the context Of the new racism, politics has seem- ingly shifted into the terrain Of identity
and culture. Projects for self- definition, the portion Of Black nationalist projects devoted to values,
culture, and new Black identities not only survived the challenges Of the new racism but seemingly
flourished within the increasingly conser- vative racial climate in the United States, where cultural
arguments that explained class inequalities rose in importance. The Nation Of Islam and Black studies
programs in higher education that Overtly espoused Afrocentric philosophies constitute two nationally
visible organiza- tional sites for Black cultural nationalism. With their emphasis on Black identity and
culture, these projects maintained their strength via the seeming failure Of racial integration. In the
absence of a richly textured Black nationalist debate, the ideas and actions of a few orga-nizations
became the new archetypes of Black nationalism. A good deal of recent Black intellectual criticism of
Black nationalism, much of it apparently quite convincing to others in the academy, seems directed
toward a relatively small segment of Black nationalist thought, espe- 'ally its misogynistic elements. 12
After all, if the Nation of Islam and Afrocentric Black studies programs become the straw men who stand
for all Black nationalism, then it becomes relatively straightforward to dismiss Black nationalism in total
by criticizing the limitations of these expressions of Black cultural nationalism. Socialism and similar
class-based initiatives, the third major ideol- ogy shaping Black politics, also floundered in responding to
the new racism. In contrast to the European acceptance Of socialism, African Americans advancing
socialism since the 1950s have had a hard time being heard in Ameriea.14 Several themes have
suppressed socialist ideology within African American communities, among them the McCarthy era Of
the 1950s and its attack on communism; the assassi- nation Of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 (when he
began to advance a class-based, global agenda for human rights); and government per- secution in the
1970s Of Black radical organizations such as the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense that offered
critiques Of capitalism. Moreover, the 1990 collapse of the Soviet Union as a major communist world
power simultaneously elevated capitalism's Status as the domi- nant global economic System and
nationalist ideologies in which groups competed with one another in the new global marketplace. As a
result, socialism has rarely been tested within African American poli- tics, and when it has, its language
has been co—opted. Black feminism, a fourth major ideology shaping African American politics,
experienced a renaissance in the 1970s and 1980s but also proved unable to sustain its radical potential
in the face Of the new racism. Historically, because African American women lived racially segregated
lives, Black feminism found expression within the confines of Black community polities. This meant that
African American fem-inism had a dialectical and synergistic relationship with Black nation-alism as a
"Black feminist nationalism" or "Black nationalist feminism." Black women participated in community
politics, and the models that developed there moved into modern Black feminism of the 1970s and
1980s. Individual African American women also participated in and continued to work within U.S.
mainstream feminism during this pe- riod, a fact that is lost on those who argue that feminism is for
VY11ite women. African American women have been in feminism since its in- ception, and during the
1970s and 1980s they launched a distinctive, albeit less well known, Black feminist movement. IS Like
mainstream feminism, conservative forces that set Out to dismantle women's rights also affected Black
feminist politics in the 1980s and 1990s. Black feminism garnered increasing recognition within the
academy, yet it also began to succumb to the pressures Of the new racism to eschew group-based
polities Of all sorts. Currently, the shift away from its roots in Black political activism has led some to ask:
Whatat has Black femi- nism built within African American communities?
1AR—Intersectionality Bad
Intersectionality homogenizes the experiences of black women
Nash 11 (Jennifer Nash, Assistant Professor in African Studies at George Washington University, Ph.D.
in African American Studies from Harvard University, J.D. from Harvard Law School, A.B. in Women’s
Studies from Harvard College, “Hometruths on Intersectionality”
https://www.academia.edu/2391042/Hometruths_on_Intersectionality, //ekr)
This narrower intersectionality has been detrimental to black feminism for three reasons. First, while
race/gender has become the primary intersection that captures black feminist attention, marginalization
has emerged as the principal analytic used to study this intersection. Because intersectionality has come
to equate black women's lived experiences with marginalization, black feminism has neglected to
rigorously study the heterogeneity of "black woman" as a category. 7 Second, because black feminism
attends to race/gender almost exclusively, black feminism has effectively subcontracted out
explorations of other intersections to a range of related intellectual projects. Third, and most
importantly, because intersectionality has become the preeminent black feminist lens for studying black
women's experiences, intersectionality itself is never subjected to critical scrutiny. Instead,
intersectionality is now often treated as synonymous with black feminism or, as Ange-Marie Hancock
argues, with "women of color studies,' rather than as a product of black feminism. Intersectionality's
synonymity with black feminism allows it to enjoy an invisible theoretical monarchy, 9 so that it is now
treated as "a primary, if not singular, feminist method, and the paradigmatic frame through which
women's lives are understood and theorized, as the only tool necessary to study the intimate
relationship between race, gender, and a host of other social categories. This Article suggests that
intersectionality's current relationship with black feminism is neither inevitable nor the effect of
historical accident; instead, it is the result of a set of historical convergences. This Article traces shifts in
black feminism'S conception Of intersectionality over time to better understand the particular
relationship between black feminism and intersectionality in our current moment. Ultimately, I am
interested in examining changes in intersectionality's interaction with black feminism over time,
challenging the tendency to elide intersectionality's historical formations and transformations.
1AR — Perm Cards
The Permutation is best — coalitions prevents cooption and are key to mobilize
resistance to the state.
Collins 90 — Patricia Hill Collins, Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at the University of
Maryland, Ph.D. in Gender Studies from the University of Cincinnati, M.A. in Social Science Education
from Harvard University, 1990 (“Defining Black Feminist Thought,” Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge,
Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, Published by Routledge Press, ISBN: 978-0-04-4451372, pgs. 39-40)
By advocating, refining, and disseminating Black feminist thought, other groups-such as Black men,
white women, white men, and other people of color-further its development. Black women can
produce an attenuated version of Black feminist thought separated from other groups. Other groups
cannot produce Black feminist thought without African-American women. Such groups can, however,
develop self-defined knowledge reflecting their own standpoints. But the full actualization of Black
feminist thought requires a collaborative enterprise with Black women at the center of a community
based on coalitions among autonomous groups.
Coalitions such as these require dialogues among Black women intellectuals and within the larger
African-American women's community. Exploring the common themes of a Black women's standpoint is
an important first step. Moreover, finding ways of handling internal dissent is especially important for
the Black women's intellectual community. Evelynn Hammond describes how maintaining a united front
for whites stifles her thinking: "What I need to do is challenge my thinking, to grow. On white
publications sometimes I feet like I'm holding up the banner of black womanhood. And that doesn't
allow me to be as critical as I would like to be" (in Clarke et al. 1983, 104). Cheryl Clarke observes that
she has two dialogues: one with the public and the private ones in which she feels free to criticize the
work of other Black women. Clarke states that the private dialogues are the ones that "have changed my
life, have shaped the way I feel ... have mattered to me" (p. 103).
Coalitions also require dialogues with other groups. Rather than rejecting our marginality, Black women
intellectuals can use our outsider-within stance as a position of strength in building effective coalitions
and stimulating dialogue. Barbara Smith suggests that Black women develop dialogues based on a
"commitment to principled coalitions, based not upon expediency, but upon our actual need for each
other" (1983, xxxiii). Dialogues among and coalitions with a range of groups, each with its own
distinctive set of experiences and specialized thought embedded in those experiences, form the larger,
more general terrain of intellectual and political discourse necessary for furthering Black feminism.
Through dialogues exploring how relations of domination and subordination are maintained and
changed, parallels between Black women's experiences and those of other groups become the focus of
investigation.
Dialogue and principled coalition create possibilities for new versions of truth. Alice Walker's answer to
the question of what she felt were the major differences between the literature of African-Americans
and whites offers a provocative glimpse of the types of truths that might emerge through an
epistemology based on dialogue and coalition. Walker did not spend much time considering this
question, since it was not the difference between them that interested her, but, rather, the way Black
writers and white writers seemed to be writing one immense story, with different parts of the story
coming from a multitude of different perspectives. In a conversation with her mother, Walker refines
this epistemological vision: "I believe that the truth about any subject only comes when all sides of the
story are put together, and all their different meanings make one new one. Each writer writes the
missing parts to the other writer's story. And the whole story is what I'm after" (1983, 49). Her mother's
response to Walker's vision of the possibilities of dialogues and coalitions hints at the difficulty of
sustaining such dialogues under oppressive conditions: "'Well, I doubt if you can ever get the true
missing parts of anything away from the white folks,' my mother says softly, so as not to offend the
waitress who is mopping up a nearby table; 'they've sat on the truth so long by now they've mashed the
life out of it'" (1983, 49).
Perm solves - black nationalism is an adaptable ideology
Van Deburg ’97 (William L. Van Deburg - Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison; 1997; Modern Black Nationalism: From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan; 3-4)//CC
It goes without saying that such encouragements to group solidarity may, on occasion, backfire—
actually decreasing the level of unity and national Consciousness within a targeted community. Potential
in-group Supporters turned off by the nationalists' theoretical assumptions, opera- tional agenda, or
overzealous promotional efforts may opt to cling ever tighter to a competing belief system. At such
times, nationalist recruiting agents can take comfort in the fact that they are attempting to "sell" an
ideology, not a magazine subscription or an overpriced time-share condo. As with any such intellectual
construction, nationalism can be blended with a host of related "isms" and approaches—to better address the specific needs Of individual adherents Or to more easily adapt to changed social conditions.
Nationalists can lean either to the right or to the left of their customary place on the political spectrum.
They can be "classical" or "modern" —sometimes even "neo" or "proto." Their issue orientation may
tend toward territorial, religious, economic, or cultural concerns. Nevertheless, if it can be determined
that a person's predominant passion is both galvanized by and rooted in fundamental nationalist tenets,
it is likely that the individual in question will be considered for membership in the grand and honorable
nationalist con- fraternity.
They Say: “No Women in Black Nationalism”
This claim is wrong and unfairly revisionist — reject it on face.
Gaines 13 — Rondee Gaines, Ph.D. candidate in Communications from Georgia State University, M.A.
in Communications from the University of Alabama, 2013 (“I am a Revolutionary Black Female
Nationalist: A Womanist Analysis of Fulani Sunni Ali's Role as a New African Citizen and Minister of Information in the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa,” Georgia State University, May
10th, Accessible Online at
http://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1044&context=communication_diss, accessed
on 07-14-15)
Conclusions
Sunni Ali’s revolutionary development, continuing the legacy of the black women’s resistance tradition,
was an ongoing process from her childhood throughout the rest of her life. Her experiences, ranging
from Civil Rights to the Black Power Movements, clearly correct the imbalanced black feminist account,
which occludes the revolutionary black female nationalist perspective. Examining her role as a
community organizer, a Republic of New Africa citizen, the Minister of Information for the PGRNA, the
chairperson for the People’s Center Council, and a grand jury resister, we see she was a central figure in
the long tradition of black liberation. Moreover, she, like other African-American female activists,
worked tirelessly with black and white women and men to achieve her goals.
My womanist analysis of Sunni Ali’s role in black social movements has attempted to accomplish several
things. First, by interrogating the historical context of her politicization from childhood to adulthood, we
saw that Sunni Ali, like other black women before and during her time of activism, faced the race-versussex dichotomy, which greatly impacted the priorities and choices for black female activists. Nonetheless,
revolutionary black female nationalists, such as Sunni Ali, Elaine Brown, Assata Shakur, and Afeni
Shakur, artfully negotiated their identities and roles in the Black Power Movement and as Black
Nationalists. Her archival materials, along with her first-person account, added complexity and diversity
to the black women’s resistance tradition and Black Power Movement narratives. Black women
obviously had both presence and agency in this history.