Race K's - Michigan7 2013

Race File 7wS BFJR 2013
Race File 7wS BFJR
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Notes
This file contains a variety of different arguments related to racism; some are fully
developed, others are the start of something good; some are anti-whiteness Ks,
others are responses to those Ks. Notes on each argument are below.
Our goals for this file as a group for this were to:
A Investigate and cut the best of the new literature emerging from folks who were
outraged by the George Zimmerman verdict, which occurred the day before we
began our research.
B Research new literature that previous debaters hadnt researched, particularly
from books and other hard to find peer-reviewed literature that were lucky enough
to access at UM.
--BR
The arguments included are:
Whiteness K: Very similar to the common K of whiteness, but with a different set of
authors and literature. Theres a few relevant narratives included, and a focus on
pedagogy. Itd combo well with the:
Pedagogy K: A look at the educational aspects of whiteness. This may have
particular utility as a framework/prior question type argument against race
affirmatives.
Sexual Politics: The purpose of this section is for people who are looking to reject
the patriarchal norms of society. The Millet ev is all talking about how we have
blinders an making it so the lens we view through seems right when in actuality it
perpetuates the violence of the skwo. There's a link to almost every aff relating it
back to patriarchy. You should use cross ex to set up a further link the ev is really
good on the subject. The impact section of the file is realistic and should be able to
be explained with logic. Read through the entire file before you decide to run this.
There are two alts in this file, feel free to alter/ create a new one for the sake of
coherence. --SC
Latino Identity: Just a couple cards about Latino identitys relationship to the racial
binary. The second card may have some utility for answering affirmatives that
attempt to conflate Latin American struggles for freedom with racism or slavery.
AT: Grade it like a paper: A short criticism of the framework argument that the
judge should Grade the 1AC like a paper. Might or might not be useful ever.
Quar: One card about intersectionality and Quar. #unitethecrowns
Sheshadri-Crooks K: Kalpana Sheshadri-Crooks wrote a super sweet book called
Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race. This K consists of various cards
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from that book. The thesis, put simply, is that Whiteness has become a master
signifier, the result of which is that individuals come to desire a place within that
framework. These networks of repressed desire make impossible resistance to the
ordering force of race. A key distinction is between race, which S-C identifies as an
ontology, and racism, which she calls epistemological. It links particularly well to
affirmatives that claim to perform a genealogy or use a genealogical approach. The
kritik can function as an independent K of race affirmatives, or as one link in a larger
Lacanian criticism.
Loren and Metelmann: Calum talked about this argument in his Debating Race
lecture. Wilderson believes racism to be situated in the Lacanian order of the Real,
while race is in the Symbolic. Loren and Metelmanns short article criticizes this
same notion in the work of Mitchell, arguing that instead Race is the Real, and
Racism the Symbolic. Race, thus, is lackingracism is not an inevitability but a
flawed attempt at representing/signifying race in the order of the symbolic. Only
this change in conceptualization makes possible resistance to biologism/racism. This
argument is surprisingly well evidenced, but might require a large amount of time to
explain in the blockId recommend planning accordingly.
Hammersley: This argument is frequently deployed as a framework argument, but
the same article can be used to criticize the model of evidence comparison that
many race affirmatives deploy. Put simply, the argument is that evidence should be
judged based on its empirical/scientific validity, not on its functional merit, or utility
for solving racism. Failure to take this into account might turn the aff or be a reason
why the judge should reject the team on presumption.
Quiet K: This argument consists of three somewhat distinct authors who all think
that resistance/speaking out is a bad model for dealing with racism and oppression.
1. Quashiehes specific to racism. The argument centers around aesthetics,
claiming that resistance reduces our ability to understand the interiority of
blackness to the point at which the aff will end up being reductionist and
racist as supposed to productive in reducing racism. Some teams have
deployed this argument in coordination with Badiou. The cards are relatively
tricky in terms of a possible floating PIK
2. BrownWendy Brown writes some very high quality cards about how
breaking silence can become a fetish, and thus be not liberating but
oppressive overall. This would likely mix well with Quashie, with Brown being
a part of the 2NC.
3. Hundlebythis author claims that standpoint epistemology and speaking
as/for the oppressed has the unintentional result if giving away valuable
secrets that are key to achieving freedom. For example, speaking in a public
space about Blackness might be tantamount to telling ones oppressors about
the Underground Railroad. This argument may have some degree of tension
with Quashies position about resistance
Nuclear Racism: These cards talk about how racism is perpetuated through nuclear
risk logic. Nuclear plants are more prevalent in minority communities.
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Yancy: This critique is a performative one of sorts. It might hybrid well with the
Whiteness K. The second card isnt quite done, so you should finish underlining it if
you intend to read this argument.
Ontological Whiteness: This card is both an answer to the above Yancy argument
and an independent K of the logic of white judges voting to affirm black experience.
--LA
Alayna, Brittany, Brook, Lev, Greg, Sierra, Rubaie
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Whiteness
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1NC
This debate held a radical potential for resistance that was foreclosed by
the 1acs glorification of America, the worlds largest purveyor of white
supremacy. Active and ever-present consciousness raising and resistance
in the wake of the Zimmeran trial is key; its not about developing new
alternatives, but tearing down anti-blackness
Goldberg 7/14 (Jesse, State University of New York, Do not act surprised by the
verdict in the Zimmerman trial, 7/14/13,
http://liberaldogmablog.blogspot.com/2013/07/do-not-act-surprised-by-verdictin.html)//LA
Black life is not worth as much as other life. Black death is not mourned
like other death. In fact, it is celebrated, as we saw in the post-verdict
press conferences and on Twitter (trigger warning: there are very painful Tweets collected in that
link). And for those who, be it consciously or unconsciously, retain a
commitment to American democracy and American justice systems
because of their protection within them thanks to the fact that both are
deeply entrenched in the ideology of white supremacy (and despite what SCOTUS
may think, white supremacy was not eradicated in the 1960s), this celebration makes
total sense. Celebrate the sacrificial expenditure that makes possible the
continuity of the community. Thats just whats done. Because in order for
American society to continue, blackness must be contained, and those
bearing its mark must be ghettoized, stopped and frisked, locked up,
disenfranchised, and killed in order that the machine keeps moving . But so
many folks are already saying all of this, and saying it much better than I can. So what are we to do? First of all,
we cant do nothing, and we cant tell folks who are doing something to
slow down. If you dont want to change the system, you are not being
cautious or careful or moderate, you are being actively oppressive.
Because the system as it currently exists is unjust; the status quo is
morally unacceptable. So to call for a halt of attempts to overhaul this
status quo is to call for the continuity of oppression of murder. Second,
we all have skin in this game. Fellow white folks, dont you dare for a minute believe that this isnt a
fight for us as well. (Whiteness to me is oppression. And it oppresses not just black people, but people who think it
offers them something other than dominance over their fellow man. Poor white people have been sold a bill of
Dont
you dare for a minute try to silence movements which call attention to
race by shaking your white liberal finger at them and telling them that
theyre nave and we should all really be talking about class. Instead, we must ask
ourselves what we can do to actively resist a system that is set up to our
advantage. And a word of advice along the way: we must never forget our privilege as
long as it exists. As tempting as it will be to echo cries of We are Trayvon
Martin or to take to the streets wearing hoodies, we must remember that
hoodies draped over our white bodies do not hold the same meaning as
hoodies draped over black bodies. As long as that's true, we must fight.
Third, we all can do something. Not everyone has to become a street-marching
activist, or a politician, or a director of a non-profit, or a public defense attorney, or an
academic, or a journalist. But, to channel Fred Moten, and perhaps offer a different inflection,
everywhere there is the potential for performance (which is everywhere, because we
goods that offers them white supremacy and takes away jobs and economic growth. Steve Locke).
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there is potential for resistance. My

pessimism is a resignation to the facts of history which create our
contemporary moment, facts which unequivocally demonstrate that
America is a country inextricably built upon an ideology of white
supremacy and anti-blackness, and that our current systems have not exorcised this legacy. Me
pessimism is an acknowledgement that anti-blackness is not a symptom of
American capitalism, but one of its fundamental principles, and one of the
foundations on which this country stands. I believe we have to
acknowledge the enormity of these things (especially white folks , since it is our
interests which are most clearly served by not acknowledging these things), but my pessimism is not
a resignation to a belief that things will always be this way. I retain a
profound commitment to working towards a Justice that does not yet
exist. I have no idea yet what it will look like, but I know it will look
nothing like this.
are always performing, whether were paid to do so or not),
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2NC Impacts
The murder of Trayvon Martin has sent a shockwave throughout the mass
media and political system however, Trayvon is but one piece of the
puzzle we live in an anti-black society nowhere is this more evident
than the legal system black bodies are marked as born dead they are
not delegitimized because they were never legitimized to begin with this
system of gratuitous violence makes possible mass extermination
Brady 12 (Nicholas Brady, activist scholar, executive board member of Leaders of a
Beautiful Struggle, BA in philosophy from Johns Hopkins, PhD student at the
University of California-Irvine Culture and Theory program, 10-26-12, The Flesh
Grinder: Prosecutorial Discretion and the Terror of Mass Incarceration,
http://academia.edu/2776507/The_Flesh_Grinder_Prosecutorial_Discretion_and_the_
Quotidian_Terror_of_Mass_Incarceration) gz
The recent murder of Trayvon Martin brought the national conversation
back to a topic that had been repressed for the myth of a post-racial
America propagated since the election of Barack Obama to the presidency:
the fundamental openness of the black body to wanton and excessive
abuse and premature death (Gilmore, 28). That the national narrative around
Martins death, even the narratives built by black political and civil
leaders, only had Emit Till to compare his death to is example par
excellance of the complete lack of any language we have to discuss the
machinations that make a phrase such as black death into a
redundancy. Trayvon Martin was not a singular case but was one of 120
black people killed extra-judicially (by police officers, security officials, and vigilante justiceseekers) in 2012 between January and July . That every 36 hours on average a
black life is taken extra-judicially means that Trayvon Martin is not
exceptional, but we do not have a language to deal with either the
exceptional or the quotidian. Into the abyss, though the demand for justice, something productive
happened: the rallying cry for justice made an invisible and ethereal part of the justice system into something a
The call to arrest and charge George Zimmerman brought our

attention to the role of the Prosecutor in the criminal punishment system.
little more material.
After the protests, statement from the President, and daily media blitzes, a special prosecutor was assigned to the
case to meet the calls for justice. Angela Corey would become the face for an area of the law that is both ubiquitous
and unthought. It seems she understood this for her statement, before officially giving the charge, set up a context
for evaluating prosecutors, The Supreme Court has defined our role as Proscutors [as] not only ministers of
justice but seekers of the truth. Every single day our prosecutors across this great country handle difficult
cases and they adhere to that same standard: a never ending search for the truth and a quest to always do the
right thing for the right reason. There is a reason cases are tried in a court of law and not in the court of public
opinion or the media. Because details have to come out in excruciating and minute fashion. Detail by detail, bit of
evidence by bit of evidence. And it is only then, when the Trier of fact whether judge or jury, gets all the details that
then a decision can be rendered. Corey is laboring to legitimize a system that took weeks to actually arrest
Marissa
Alexander. Alexander is a mother who was convicted of attempted murder
because she shot a warning shot at the father of her children who has
admitted to beating her on several occasions before. Alexander was
arrested on spot and charged within days in a case where the stand your
ground defense was also being called upon. This supposed contradiction of methods that
George Zimmerman, yet this labor represses her own case history, for example the case of
meet different bodies is the norm of the criminal punishment system, and this paper will attempt to string out some
parts of the structure that make it so. In many disciplines there has been renewed attention given to mass
incarceration. Yet, in spite of the growing level of multidisciplinary scrutiny on police surveillance and violent gulags,
a major actor has slipped through virtually untouched in the humanities' attention to prisons. This major actor,
regularly described in criminology and legal scholarship as the most powerful agent in the criminal punishment
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system, is the Prosecutor. The office of the prosecutor exists in a place where matter doesn't matter. Or put
the prosecutors agency is assembled where black matter no

longer matters and where what matters, the happenings of the human and
the quest for civil justice, can only be produced through the quotidian
grinding and destruction of black flesh. This paper will seek to shine a light, or better yet a
differently,
shadow, on the white knights of the justice system. While one would think they know the job of a Prosecutor given
its ubiquity on television crime dramas and movies, the mundaneness of their actual day-to-day activities are
mystified by television's fascination with the drama of the trial, whether fictional or "real." In fact, it is rare that you
will find a prosecutor who takes even 10 percent of their cases to trial. Over 90 percent of cases are settled through
a plea bargain where the defendant will agree to plead guilty usually for the guarantee of less time, parole, or a
lighter charge. As one law professor put it, the plea bargain is not an addendum to the criminal justice system, it is
the criminal justice system (Scott and Stuntz, 1912). In spite of its centrality, there is little literature on the innerworkings of the plea bargain outside of schematic analysis in criminology. Instead of focusing on the theatrics of the
trial, this paper will analyze the day-to-day grind of the plea bargain in order to explicate the quotidian terror that
lies at the heart of prosecutorial discretion. From day-to-day a Prosecutor can be working on anywhere between
20 to 100 cases at a time (Heumann, 98). While a Prosecutor is given wide discretion to charge a case the way they
want, there are hierarchies that determine the norms and procedures of each office. There are the district attorneys
that the general population votes into office and the deputy attorneys that answer directly to him or her.
Underneath them are the line prosecutors who work on the majority of the cases but whose decisions generally
follow the established protocols of the veteran prosecutors and deputies. New prosecutors often come straight from
law school with lofty dreams of becoming courtroom heroes only to learn that their job is much more akin to
assembly-line justice. Legal scholar Abraham Blumberg describes this as the, emergence of bureaucratic due
process, consist[ing] of secret bargaining sessions [and] employing subtle, bureaucratically ordained modes of
coercion and influence to dispose of large case loads (Blumberg, 69). While each office is different from the next,
there is a stunning amount of unity at the procedural level. Deputy district attorneys will reject thirty to forty
percent of cases the police send to them on face. The remaining 60 percent are considered suspects that are,
according to the evidence provided, conclusively guilty. For the Prosecutor, these cases would be slam-dunk wins in
front of a jury (Lewis, 51). This begs the question: What is the dividing line between cases that are charged and
cases that get dropped by Prosecutors? Some statistics on the racial component of sentencing might lead us to an
In terms of drug crimes, according to a comprehensive report by

Human Rights Watch, blacks are 14 percent of drug users, but are 37
percent of people arrested for drug possession, and are anywhere
between 45 to 60 percent of those charged . These strings of numbers
reveal an anti-black trajectory: the cases that the Prosecutor
overwhelmingly pursues are black cases, the ones he drops are
overwhelmingly non-black. A defense attorney called these for-sure-guilty
cases born dead. This is a curious phrase, but when considering the
historic connection between blackness and crime dating back to the
inception of the national polity through slavery, the defense attorneys
phrasing gets us to a much more paradigmatic argument. Walt Lewis , a Los
Angeles prosecutor, describes a criminal justice continuum where bodies are
transformed from being free to being incarcerated (Lewis, 20). One is first
arrested by the police and becomes a suspect. If the prosecutor decides
to charge, then you go from being a suspect to a defendant. Finally if
you are found guilty, you go from being a defendant to a convict. This
process describes a temporality that transforms the human into the
incarcerated inhuman. As violent as this process can be, the blacks fate
is fundamentally different and more terrifying. The black is arrested,
charged, and convicted at disproportionate rates because we were never
actually suspects or defendants. Instead, we were always criminals,
always already slaves-in-waiting. Instead of a continuum, the black body
floats in a zone of non-being where time and transformation lose all
meaning. Cases involving black bodies do not need to be rock-solid in
terms of facts for their bodies have already been marked by the law as
criminal (Fanon, 2). Thus cases involving black bodies are always for-sure
victories, are always already born dead. In an interesting case that made it all the way
answer.
to the Supreme Court titled United States versus Armstrong, a group of black defendants levied a critique similar to
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A group of black men were brought on charges of

possessing 50 grams of crack cocaine. Unlike a normal defense where the details of the states
accusation would be called into question, the defense instead argued that the prosecution
selectively charges black people in cases involving crack cocaine . The first
this papers argument .
argument of the defense was that the majority of crack cocaine users in California are actually whites, not black
people. The second argument of the defense used testimonies from government lawyers to prove that of all 841
cases the state brought against people possessing crack cocaine, all of them were black. Using these two claims,
the defense said there was adequate proof to show that prosecutors were using unconstitutional means, racial
markers, to select who would be charged and who wouldnt be charged. According to past rulings by the Supreme
Court, if selective prosecution can be proven then that is adequate grounds to vacate the sentence, even if the
defendants were caught red-handed. Against this defense, the prosecution counter-argued that it does not
selectively prosecute based on race, but instead on fact and circumstance. The district court that initially heard the
appeal ruled that the state should turn over records of the 841 cases in question to prove who was right in the
dispute. The state refused to reveal its documents and instead appealed the decision all the way up to the Supreme
the Supreme Court ruled in favor of

the prosecution for a few reasons. The first reason Rehnquist gave was that it is
not in the best interest of the governments war on crime to monitor
prosecutors. Rehnquist argued that the prosecutor must have the freedom to operate in the way she sees fit.
The second and most important reason Rehnquist gave was by far the
most explicitly racist and I will quote it in full: quote a published 1989
Drug Enforcement Administration report concluded that "[l]arge scale,
interstate trafficking networks controlled by Jamaicans, Haitians and Black
street gangs dominate the manufacture and distribution of crack. [and]
the most recent statistics of the United States Sentencing Commission
show that: More than 90% of the persons sentenced in 1994 for crack
cocaine trafficking were black. . The Supreme Court answered the defendants accusation of
Court. Overturning the district and federal circuit court,
selective prosecution by arguing that such a prosecution strategy is legitimate because it can be verified through
the
Supreme Court ruled that it was in the states interest to terrorize black
communities because we are the most heinous drug users in the country.
To be black is to be marked as a danger that must be controlled, seized,
and incarcerated. Prosecutors act within and perpetuate this matrix of
violence that precedes discourse. When a Prosecutor sees a case with a
black body, he knows the same statistic the Supreme Court quoted and he
knows, if not consciously then unconsciously, that this case is already
done, already guilty, already born dead.
statistics that black people are the major users and distributors of crack cocaine. To word it differently,
Blackness is social death and unimaginable exclusion

Vargas and James 13 (Joo Costa and Joy, University of Texas and Williams
University, Refusing Blackness-as-Victimization: Trayvon Martin and the Black
Cyborgs, Chapter 14 in Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and
Contemporary Manifestations ed. George Yancy and Janine Jones)//LA
What happens when, instead of becoming enraged and shocked every
time a black person is killed in the United States, we recognize black
death as a predictable and constitutive aspect of this democracy? What
will happen then if instead of demanding justice we recognize (or at least
consider) that the very notion of justice-indeed the gamut of political and
cognitive elements that constitute formal, multiracial democratic practices
and institutions-produces or requires black exclusion and death as
normative? To think about Trayvon Martin's death not merely as a tragedy or media controversy but as a
political marker of possibilities permits one to come to terms with several foundational and foretold stories,
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we understand that death or killing to be prefigured by mass or

collective loss of social standing and life. One story is of impossible redemption in
the impossible polis. It departs from, and depends on, the position of the
hegemonic, anti-black-which is not exclusively white but is exclusively
non-black-subject and the political and cognitive schemes that guarantee
her ontology and genealogy. Depending on the theology, redemption requires deliverance from sin,
particularly if
and/or deliverance from slavery. 1 Redemption is a precondition of integration into the white-dominated social
universe2 Integration thus requires that the black become a non-slave, and that the black become a non-sinner.
The paradox or impossibility is that if blackness is both sin and sign of

enslavement, the mark of "Ham,'; then despite the legal abolition of juridical
enslavement or chattel slavery or the end of the formal colony, the sinner
and enslaved endure; and virtue requires the eradication of both . If we theorize
from the standpoint say of Frantz Fanon, through the lens of the fiftieth anniversary of the English publication, The
Wretched of the Earth (or Ida B. Wells's Southern Horrors, Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark, Frank
from the perspective of the

dominant, white-inflected gaze and predisposition, blacks can be
redeemed neither from sin nor from slavery. 3 For a black person to be
integrated, s/he must either become non-black, or display superhuman
and/or infrahuman qualities. (In Fanonian terms she would become an aggrandized slave or
enfranchised slave-that is, one who owns property still nonetheless remains in servitude or colonized.) The
imagination, mechanics, and reproduction of the ordinary polis rely on the
exclusion of ordinary blacks and their availability for violent aggression
and/ or premature death or disappearance (historically through lynching and the convict
prison lease system, today through "benign neglect" and mass incarceration). The
ordinary black person can therefore never be integrated. The "ordinary negro" is
's Jncognegro, etc.), we can follow a clear heuristic formulation:
never without sin. Thus, to be sinless or angelic in order to be recognized as citizenry has been the charge for
postbellum blackness. Throughout the twentieth century, movements to free blacks from what followed in the wake
of the abolition of chattel slavery ushered in the postbellum black cyborg: the call for a "Talented Tenth" issued by
white missionaries and echoed by a young W. E. B. Du Bois, Bayard Rustin's imploring a young Martin Luther King Jr.
to become "angelic" in his advocacy of civil rights and to remove the men with shotguns from his front porch
The angelic
negro/negress is not representative and his or her status as an acceptable
marker for U.S. democracy is predicated upon their usefulness for the
transformation of whiteness into a loftier, more ennobled formation. This
performance or service of the angelic black would be resurrected in the
reconstruction of Trayvon Martin as a youth worthy of the right to life, the
right of refusal to wear blackness as victimization; the right to fight back.
That is, the right to the life of the polis; so much of black life, particularly
for the average fellah, is mired in close proximity to the graveyard,
hemmed in by the materiality of social margins and decay, exclusion and
violence.
despite the bombings and death threats against King, his wife Corella, and their young children.
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2NC Silence Link

Their silence about the structures of Whiteness is a link, and it has
consequencesdesire is productive
Mazzei 11 (Lisa A., Gonzaga U, Desiring Silence: Gender, Race, and
Pedagogy in Education, British Educational Research Journal, Vol. 37, No.
4, August 2011, p. 657-96)//LA
In framing whiteness in the context of this paper, I am interested in how a lack of
cognition regarding one's racial identity/position as white serves to
explain away and in many cases perpetuate the existence of racial barriers
to social mobility (Sleeter, 2004). Since whiteness as a descriptor for whites
often goes unnamed, unnoticed and unspoken, the silence or absence
(that which is not spoken) of this racial identity continues to provide a
framework for the analysis of the conversations I have with white teachers at both the preservice and
inservice levels. If white teachers continue to effectively deny or fail to see their
whiteness as raced then they will continue to see students of colour as
'Other' and respond to them from that perception- i.e., they are raced, I
am not. Such an orientation perpetuates a racially inhabited silence that
limits, if not negates, an open dialogue regarding race and culture. In such
an environment stereotypes are furthered rather than confronted and
perceptions of self and Other are allowed to remain circumscribed in a
protective caul. In short, education as a means of transformation or
change is subverted and silence as a means of control and protection of
privilege is accepted. If we think silence is an enactment of a desire to be
recognized as governed by social norms, then we acknowledge that the desire on the part of
these white preservice teachers is a desire to be recognized 'within the constraints of
normativity' Jackson, 2009, p . 171). If they are recognized within such constraints, then their mark as white
teacher remains intact. Privilege remains unchallenged and is thus exercised as a
desiring silence that maintains an invisible mask of whiteness. In other
words, these white preservice teachers do not speak of whiteness, or
more specifically their own race, therefore whiteness is reinscribed as that
which need not be named, thereby reproducing what Seshadri-Crooks refers to as a
'neutral epistemology' . Instead of asking, 'What is desire?' the impetus is instead to ask, 'What does
desire ask of these students?' Not what does it mean, but what does it do? Deleuze draws on Nietzsche for his
the notion of desire has to do with drive. 'What we call

Deleuze
rejects desire as a lack, gap or what is missing and, instead, puts forth an
immanent concept of desire. As such, desire is primary, positive and not
left wanting but, instead, producing something. What matters for Deleuze
is not what desire means; instead, he wants to know 'whether it works,
and how it works, and who it works for' (Deleuze, 1990, p. 22). Through an
engagement with Deleuzian desire, I focus on what is producing the
silence and/or what the silence produces, in other words, a desiring
silence. Not as in 'to desire' silence, but silences that are produced and that produce an effect, emerging from a
theory of desire. For Nietzsche,
'thinking' , 'feeling' , reason' is nothing more than a competing of the passions or drives' (Smith, 2007).
'production of production' (O'Sullivan & Zepke, 2008, p. 1, emphasis in original). Such silences may be produced by
resistance or the attempt to maintain power that resists the 'gravity of the circle of recognition and its
What is desire? If desire does not begin from lack, in other

words, desiring what we do not have, then where does it begin or, put
differently, what spawns desire? Discussing Deleuzian desire, Claire Colebrook (2002)
representations' (p. 1).
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writes, 'life strives to preserve and enhance itself and does so by

connecting with other desires' (p. 91). This preserving and enhancing of
desire coalesces with power, not in a 'repression of desire but the
expansion of desire' (p. 91). The task of Deleuze's own method is to 'explain how interestssuch
as humanism, individualism, capitalism or communismare produced from
desires: the concrete and specific connection of bodies' (p. 92), in this case the
bodies of white preservice teachers. The charge then becomes not to define desire, but
to understand the interests that produce desire and the interests that desire seeks to
produce and/or protect. In the case of white preservice teachers, the visibleness of
white as a marker of their bodies has previously been deemed invisible
because of its normative presence. This failure to have previously named
whiteness thereby produces a desire to protect the invisibleness and
hence a maintenance of whiteness as an unchallenged norm. 'Desire ilself
is power, a power to become and produce images' (Colebrook, 2002, p. 94, emphasis in
original). A powerful white presence is an unnamed and silent image that
continues to be masked in the power of that which will not be named.
Desiring silence then re-produces an unspoken white presence.
The Affs silence towards anti-blackness only endorses into the racism of
the Status Quo
Fung 12 (Brian Fung, is a writer at National Journal. He was previously an associate
editor at The Atlantic and has written for Foreign Policy and The Washington Post,
article is based off a research study performed by Yale and the City University of
New York, The Quiet Racism of Abortion Bans, AUG 28 2012,
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/08/the-quiet-racism-of-abortionbans/261665/, //AR)
Like prohibitions on other goods and services, an abortion ban of the kind national conservatives propose
would take a disproportionate toll on those least equipped to adapt, and
would advance little but ideology. As national Republicans in Tampa have added a
ban on abortions as an official plank in their party platform -- a proposal
whose draft language is so severe, it doesn't make exceptions for cases of
rape or incest -- liberal commentators have grown accustomed to speaking
of the right's strict stance on reproductive issues as a war on women. But
it might be more accurate to say that it's really an attack on women of a
specific stripe: those from disadvantaged minorities and the poor . What
would happen if the GOP got its way and control over abortion rights were returned to the states? A new
study by researchers at Yale University and the City University of New
York, published in NBER, imagines how overturning Roe v. Wade might play out.
Using analyses that predicted which states might be likeliest to ban abortion if they could, the scientists established
a set of hypothetical scenarios and compared them to actual abortion data from both the pre- and the post-Roe v.
Wade era. The researchers estimate that if 31 anti-abortion states made the procedure illegal tomorrow, the
national abortion rate would drop by 14.9 percent. In a more extreme example, banning abortion in 46 states -while preserving it in places where reproductive rights enjoy constitutional protection -- would result in the abortion
rate falling 29 percent.
But whatever you make of those topline numbers, one
thing seems certain: an abortion ban would disproportionately affect

women from non-white and low-income backgrounds . To understand how that works,
we need to look at the way distance acts as a deterrent against abortion access. Among women overall
in the 1970s after New York legalized abortion but before Roe v. Wade was decided , every 100-mile
increase in distance between a patient and a New York clinic corresponded
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to a 12 percent decrease in abortion rates, the researchers wrote. The challenges

posed by distance are still valid today -- and they affect non-whites at far
greater rates than whites. In the scenario involving a 31-state ban, minorities would see their
abortion rates drop 1.8 percentage points more than whites. In the extreme example of a 46-state ban, the
difference would be 12.3 points. "If
race serves as a crude proxy for socio-economic

status," the authors conclude, "and if distance proxies the cost of an abortion,
then the racial differences are consistent with less well-off women being
more sensitive to the availability of abortion services than more
advantaged women." But we don't need to take the researchers' word for it. Dr. Patrick Whelan, a
Harvard rheumatologist who's studied abortion rates in Massachusetts, argues that financial incentives don't work
with abortion they way they might in other industries. In a phone interview last week, Whelan cited data on women
who choose to pay out-of-pocket for their abortions even when they could get the procedure done for free or at a
discount thanks to insurance. "Whether that's a modesty issue, or they don't think it might be covered, or they
don't want a public record of it someplace," Whelan said, "cost is not a deterrent for a lot of people." Whatever the
reasons behind women's choices, Whelan's larger point is this: financial barriers aren't enough to dissuade women
from getting an abortion if they want one. At first blush, Whelan and the NBER study appear to be saying different
things. The former suggests that abortions will continue irrespective of the price tag, while the latter suggests cost
really is a limiting factor for women in that living farther away from a legal abortion clinic tends to depress abortion
rates. These statements aren't really mutually exclusive, though; they're just different ways of explaining how
Where they agree is that the

wealthy, who are generally white, are better able to eat the cost of extra
travel compared to low-income non-whites. In other words, white women
are able to go to longer lengths (literally) to get a legal abortion. Nonwhite and low-income women aren't so lucky. For them, an abortion ban
would mean either carrying their unplanned pregnancies to term -something the NBER paper predicts could happen to some degree, and which would likely be
exacerbated by conservative attempts to limit contraception access at the
same time that they crack down on abortion -- or resorting to unsafe,
illegal abortions. These procedures, by their very nature, would be ignored by
women of different backgrounds respond to the problem of cost.
official abortion figures so that to speak of the "gains" of a ban would be

to turn a blind eye to a very nasty black-market business.
It'd also create new
headaches for states: between the threat to public health posed by underground abortions, and the rise of teen
birth rates; the added economic burden on state social and health-care services;
the mockery it'd
make of public statistics; and their inherent racial and socio-economic

unfairness,
it's hard to see how abortion bans would advance anything except ideology.
The 1ac's silence on race IS OUR LINK -- racism permeates politics -- the
alternative is key starting point for countering anti-blackness
Bobo 13(Lawrence D. Bobo, is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at
Harvard University. He is a contributing editor for The Root., Quiet Bias: The Racism
of 2013 Straight Up: Let's get real -- and start talking -- about the anti-black
prejudice that infects the U.S. March 13, 2013 http://www.theroot.com/views/quietbias-racism-2013?page=0,1 , //AR)
Let's be honest: Our culture is still deeply suffused with anti-black bias, despite
an African-American president in office. National surveys (pdf) continue to
reveal commonly held stereotypes of African Americans as less
hardworking and less intelligent than whites. Political resentments of
blacks remain a centerpiece -- indeed, a genuine third rail -- of American domestic
politics: Do anything to seriously activate these resentments, and you run
the risk of immediate political electrocution . The last time we saw any major political figure come
close to touching the rail, of activating these political resentments against blacks, occurred when Obama offered his off-the-cuff
16/259
remarks about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Root's editor-in-chief, by the Cambridge, Mass., police. The level of negative
stereotypes and attitudes tapped in polls and surveys may only reveal the most easily observable symptoms of the illness .
A
number of powerful psychological experiments show the extent to which
blackness for Americans is intimately tied to images of violence and
danger. Indeed, one of the most depressing lines of research suggests a core underlining
psychological association of blackness with apes, an ugly, old racist trope
from the age of the Great Chain of Being, in which the African was seen as
closer to primitive animals in the hierarchy of species (pdf). To be sure, this whole
issue of racism had a more straightforward quality in the past. We did not have to resort to complex surveys and experiments to
reveal its depth. There used to be something loud and obvious and terrible about racism -- circumstances with some ironic virtues. A
visible and openly declared enemy is so much more directly confronted than one that operates stealthily.And that is the dilemma of
racism in our times.
We have hints, suggestions, indications, if you will, of racial

bias all around us today. But it is typically unspoken, if not altogether invisible, much of the time. And where
it's not invisible, there is often a plausible cover story that can be told as to why
racially differential treatment was somehow justifiable or legitimate. All of this
makes waging the fight against racism much tougher. It is now quiet -- or rationalized on some nonracial grounds and thereby
hidden in plain view -- and seemingly, as a consequence, perhaps not such a bad thing after all.But it is a bad thing. Let's be clear:
There is plenty of research showing that actual discrimination remains

remarkably common. For example, one major study of low-skilled workers in
New York found high rates of bias against black job applicants. Princeton
sociologist Devah Pager and her colleagues showed that otherwise
identical black job seekers were 50 percent less likely to achieve success
in a job search (pdf) than their white counterparts. The discrimination was so subtle that only
a systematic experiment could reveal it. This was not the loud de jure discrimination of the era of "no blacks need apply," but
instead today's quiet bias of "Oh, we already filled that position" or "We were actually looking for someone with more experience" or
wellknown practice of stop-and-frisk policing in New York. Absent a deep-rooted culture of

"Maybe you'd be better suited to this lower-paying job." There are few things as sickening as the ongoing,
anti-black bias, which is racism, the practice would not be tolerated, given the radically disproportionate intrusion
by state police power that it involves in identifiable minority communities. Records for 2011 show almost 700,000
In a city
where blacks make up just under a quarter of the population, blacks
constitute more than half of those so detained by police. Citywide polls show an
such incidents, with almost nine out of 10 incidents involving African Americans or Hispanics.
enormous gap between blacks and whites in approval of the stop-and-frisk practice, with a substantial number of
blacks, at 80 percent (and even a plurality of New York's whites: 48 percent), saying that the police are biased in
favor of whites. It
is unclear whether the tactic has any meaningful impact on
crime, but it is screamingly plain that it adds to racial tension and

misunderstanding while deepening minority cynicism about the police .
And so we get today's quiet bias of a major-city mayor and police
commissioner defending a dubious practice of aggressive state intrusion
into the lives of black and Hispanic youths on an astonishing scale. This quiet
bias is a routine feature of our national politics as well. We are all aware of how constrained President Obama is in
terms of what he can say or do regarding race. I believe that the culture of racism still alive in the U.S. remains
potent enough that Obama must, in fact, routinely accomplish a complex, three-part balancing act. He must
consistently rise above prevalent stereotypes of blacks as less capable and intelligent, thus always standing as the
exception to the assumed rule. He must never be seen as openly advocating policies that run against the third rail
of resentment against blacks as a sort of untouchable special-interest category in the body politic, who lack
legitimate claims on the nation's resources. And he must do all this while somehow keeping African Americans and
racism
remains a living and highly adaptive thing in our times. Yes, Jim Crow racism has
effectively been defeated. An insidious quiet bias remains today, however. And in this guise , racism is still
other people of color highly politically mobilized segments of his constituency. But make no mistake,
distorting American life.

Short History,
The late Stanford University historian George Fredrickson wrote in Racism: A
"The legacy of past racism directed at blacks in the United
States is more like a bacillus that we have failed to destroy, a live germ
17/259
that not only continues to make some of us ill but retains the capacity to
generate new strains of a disease for which we have no certain cure."
We
will make little or no progress against this underlying illness by becoming complicit in ignoring the deep-rooted
Racism is a
powerful word. Using it can quickly shut down a conversation. But such
sensitivity cannot excuse silence in the face of a real problem and ongoing
injustice. For me, a key element of the continued quest for racial justice in
America is the outing of today's "quiet bias." Like a patient told to take the full regimen of
character of anti-black bias in our culture and in so many everyday practices and habits.
antibiotics or run the risk of the ailment coming back even more strongly in the future, we must remain ready to
challenge racism no matter how discreetly or politely it presents itself.
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AltRejection/Recognition
As a KRejecting whiteness solves; As a PIKRecognition solves the K;
theres only a risk of a DA.
Mazzei 11 (Lisa A., Gonzaga U, Desiring Silence: Gender, Race, and
Pedagogy in Education, British Educational Research Journal, Vol. 37, No.
4, August 2011, p. 657-96)//LA
Returning to Jan's statements in the previous section, while she in some ways engages the
silence, and was in fact very progressive in many of her attitudes as
demonstrated in class and her field placement, she is also caught in the stratification that
threatens her survival, or rather, her survival within a plane of whiteness.
To encounter all of her inconsistencies, desires and silences at once is too
much and may result in a suicidal collapse of her subjectivity. It is not
possible for her, or the other students in my classes for that matter, to completely destratify
at once. But what is possible is that as teacher educators, we provide
opportunities that encourage a continual search for the potential
movements of deterritorialization or possible lines of flight that may, over
time, produce not a desiring silence, but the production of a desiring
pedagogy. If, as teacher educators, we fail to recognize how desire
functions with white preservice teachers by failing to attend to a desiring
silence, then students can resist and reassert their power. If, on the other
hand, we engage the silence, connect our desires with those of our
students, then students may still resist, but they may also begin to
destratify in ways that produce the possibility of deterritorialization, the
possibility of a desiring pedagogy. Judith Butler (2004) reminds us that in the Hegelian tradition,
desire is linked with recognition, 'claiming that desire is always a desire for recognition and that it is only through
the experience of recognition that any of us becomes constituted as socially viable beings' (p. 2). She goes on to
argue that while to some degree this is both alluring and true, it also confers 'humanness' on those with whom we
we continue to maintain a
normative distinction as defined by whiteness that refuses to be dislocated due to the regime of visibility. If white teachers name whiteness,
and name the silent desires that foster a clinging to this in/visible marker,
then the process of dis-location commences. There came a point in the semester with this
group of students when I recognized that I was complicit in a production of the desiring
silences, not just because I 'desired' acceptable responses from the
students that demonstrated their genuine affirmation of difference, but
also because I permitted the silences to be ignored for fear of what they
might reveal about me: as a teacher; as a white woman; and as a white
teacher educator. I had not yet thought of the silences as producing
privilege, but as masking that which was unthinkable, or unspeakable . I
can identify, consistent with Seshadri-Crooks's argument as to why
asked the students to complete two sentences: 'Sometimes I am silent because .. .' and 'Sometimes I am silent in
this class because .. .'. My methodological approach and analysis is detailed in a previous publication (Mazzei, 2008)
the simple act of

acknowledging the presence of a purposeful silence and confronting
their/our production of this silence permitted an opening up or rather
undoing of the desiring silence functioning to produce and maintain
privilege. Students think that by looking past skin colour they are above
racist attitudes and actions. 'Is it ever going to stop?' was a question asked by one of my students
so I will not repeat that in the present context; however, what is important is how
referring to the continued emphasis on multicultural education, racial identity and a corresponding need to discuss
Not allowing it to stop forces a move

that is a return to how our desire functions to produce 'accepted'
attitudes regarding gender, race and class inequities.
19/259
performances of whiteness and white teacher. In reading the standards for 'culturally
competent' (Ladson-Billings, 1994) teachers that guide the curriculum for many teacher preparation programmes,
How might we
offer opportunities for detertitorialization that don't mask 'unacceptable'
attitudes because silences function to preserve the system but, instead,
provide opportunities for a deterritorialization that 'outs' the silences
protecting the strata. Such a movement requires us to rethink desiring
silence as an investment in whiteness and its attendant privileges. It is a
recognition of these collective desires on the part of our students (and
ourselves) as producing a desiring silence that maintains and sustains
whiteness through a connection of desires, flows and intensities . To further
both in the USA and the UK, there is little tolerance for a voicing of racist and sexist attitudes.
understand how desires connect with one another to produce silences is to return once again to NietzSche. Leaning
on Nietzsche's theory of desire, we see the drives as always disquieted and destabilized. As such, we might ask,
how can desire desire its own transformation? And if so, how might
teacher educators further disquiet and destabilize a desiring silence
toward a production of the new? For, as O'Sullivan aand Zepke (2008) remind us, it is only
through an engagement with what is that we can produce something new.
If desire can desire its own transformation, perhaps it does so through
such engagement that produces a desiring pedagogy.
20/259
Project Team Link

Identifying this kind of round or this kind of team perpetuates
whiteness
Mazzei 8 (Lisa A., NowGonzaga U; ThenManchester Metropolitan U,
Silence speaks: Whiteness Revealed in the Absence of Voice, Teaching and
Teacher Education 24 (2008) p. 1125-1136)//LA
Reading Ladson-Billings (2001), she confirmed that this is not just the language of my students but of educators in
general. So prevalent is the language of at-risk-ness that it is not unusual for urban teachers to define their entire
class as at-risk (p. 15). What I find particularly troubling, however, is that even those who are not yet teachers
have appropriated this language. Citing Haberman, Ladson-Billings elaborated further when she asked, How
is
it possible for schools and teachers to define a majority of their clients as
people who shouldnt be there, or people they are unable to help? (p. 15). What does Cassidy mean
when she describes a field placement experience at an elementary school in the large
urban district as her first experience in this type of school setting [emphasis mine].
What are the differences, the at-risk-ness that are spoken between the words that
Cassidy articulates? When Cassidy and the other students speak between
words and make assumptions about their entire class using the language of at-riskness, they are talking about race, even if they do not notice it. They are
silently voicing a norming presence of whiteness that they risk losing if
the silences of race and of whiteness are noticed and articulated.
21/259
Dehumanization Impacts
Allowing Institutional racism allows for the dehumanization of blacks
Blow 9(CHARLES M. BLOW , Timess visual Op-Ed columnist, conducts a discussion
about all things statistical from the environment to entertainment and their
visual expressions., Cites studies written by Phillip Atiba Goff The Pennsylvania
State University Jennifer L. Eberhardt Stanford University Melissa J. Williams
University of California, Berkeley Matthew Christian Jackson The Pennsylvania State
University Not Yet Human February 25, 2009
http://blow.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/not-yet-human/, //AR)
Those following the New York Post cartoon flap might find this interesting. Six studies under the title
Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization, and
Contemporary Consequences were published in last Februarys Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology. Among the relevant findings: Historical representations explicitly depicting Blacks as apelike have
a mental association between Blacks and

apes remains. Here, the authors demonstrate that U.S. citizens implicitly
associate Blacks and apes. And After having established that individuals mentally associate
largely disappeared in the United States, yet
Blacks and apes, Study 4 demonstrated that this implicit association is not due to personalized, implicit attitudes
In Study 5, we demonstrated that, even

controlling for implicit anti-Black prejudice, the implicit association
between Blacks and apes can lead to greater endorsement of violence
against a Black suspect than against a White suspect. Finally, in Study 6, we
demonstrated that subtle media representations of Blacks as apelike are
associated with jury decisions to execute Black defendants. This may provide some
and can operate beneath conscious awareness.
context for considering the motives of the cartoonist and his editors, and for understanding the strong public
reaction.
Blacks are displayed as apes

Chan and Peters 9(SEWELL CHAN and JEREMY W. PETERS, Chimp-Stimulus
Cartoon Raises Racism Concerns, February 18, 2009,
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/chimp-stimulus-cartoon-raisesracism-concerns/, //AR)
Gov. David A. Paterson, Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, the Rev. Al Sharpton
and others expressed concern on Wednesday morning over an editorial cartoon
in The New York Post that showed a police officer telling his colleague who
just shot a chimpanzee, Theyll have to find someone else to write the
next stimulus bill. Critics said the cartoon, drawn by Sean Delonas, implicitly
compared President Obama with the primate and evoked a history of
racist imagery of blacks. The chimpanzee was an apparent reference to the 200-pound pet
chimpanzee that was shot dead by a police officer in Stamford, Conn., on Monday evening, after it mauled a friend
of his owner. Speaking at a conference of the New York Academy of Medicine on Wednesday morning, Mr. Paterson
said that while he had not seen the cartoon, he believed that The Post should explain it. Given the possibility that
some people could conclude the cartoon had a racial subtext, Mr. Paterson said the newspaper needed to clarify its
meaning. It would be very important for The New York Post to explain what the cartoon was intended to portray,
Mr. Paterson said in response to a question about whether the cartoons depiction of a monkey was racist, as Mr.
Sharpton has suggested. Obviously those types of associations have been made. They do feed a kind of negative
and stereotypical way that people think. But I think if its enough that people are raising this issue, I hope they
Senator Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, said in a statement:

I found the Post cartoon offensive and purposefully hurtful. This type of
cartoon serves no productive role in the public discourse. City Councilman Leroy
would clarify.
22/259
To run such a violent,

racist cartoon is an insult to all New Yorkers, he said in a statement. This was an
unfortunate incident in which a human being was seriously injured- not an
opportunity to sling dangerous rhetoric. It is my belief that The New York
Post owes an immediate apology to this city for demonstrating such
terrible judgment and insensitivity. Mr. Comrie urged New Yorkers to demonstrate their
G. Comrie Jr., a Queens Democrat, called for a boycott of the newspaper.
displeasure with the New York Post by writing letters to their advertisers and simply stop purchasing a publication
that clearly has no respect or sensitivity for people of color. On Wednesday evening, the Brooklyn borough
president, Marty Markowitz, also weighed in, saying: My office has received complaints about this so-called
cartoon, and I can see why. If its disturbing connection to reprehensible racial stereotyping was unintentional, it just
proves once again how disconnected The Post is from New York City and its residents. And for such a weak joke?
Theres no excuse. The editors overseeing such content should be ashamedand held accountable. The Post is
always quick on the attack, so now we ask that they do the right thing and apologize to all who were offended by
this tasteless cartoon. A newsroom employee at The Post, who spoke on condition of anonymity because
employees were not permitted to comment on the matter, said its newsroom received many calls of complaints on
Wednesday morning after the publication of the cartoon. Every line was lit up for several hours, the employee
said. The phones on the city desk have never rung like that before. Many Post staff members were dismayed by
the cartoon, the employee added. The cartoon was on Page 12 of Wednesdays edition, next to the papers Page
Six gossip column. On Page 11, the reverse side, was a photograph of President Obama signing the stimulus bill into
Mr. Sharpton, who has been an unflattering subject in cartoons drawn by Mr. Delonas in The
said in a statement on his Web site: The cartoon in todays New York Post is
troubling at best, given the racist attacks throughout history that have
made African-Americans synonymous with monkeys. One has to question
whether the cartoonist is making a less than casual inference to this form
of racism when, in the cartoon, the police say after shooting a
chimpanzee, now they will have to find someone else to write the
stimulus bill. Being that the stimulus bill has been the first legislative victory of President Barack Obama
law in Denver.
Post,
(the first African American president) and has become synonymous with him it is not a reach to wonder whether the
Post cartoonist was inferring that a monkey wrote it? In a statement, Col Allan, editor in chief of The Post, denied
Mr. Sharptons assertion that the cartoon was racially charged. Mr. Allan said: The cartoon is a clear parody of a
current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washingtons
efforts to revive the economy. Again, Al Sharpton reveals himself as nothing more than a publicity opportunist. A
2001 cartoon by Mr. Delonas depicted Fernando Ferrer, the Bronx borough president who was seeking the
Democratic nomination for mayor that year, kissing the buttocks of Mr. Sharpton a depiction that was widely
criticized as demeaning, and even racist. In a phone interview, Mr. Sharpton said he planned to hold a protest
What does shooting a chimpanzee

have to do with a stimulus bill? Mr. Sharpton said. This raises all the
racial stereotypes we are trying to get away from in this country. He added:
Im not speaking on behalf of the president or the chimpanzee. Im
speaking on behalf of the offended African-American community. Mr. Delonas
outside The Posts Midtown offices at noon on Thursday.
has drawn ire from a number of groups for past cartoons in The Post. In 2006, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against
Defamation denounced a cartoon of his that showed a man carrying a sheep wearing a bridal veil to a New Jersey
Marriage Licenses window, a reference to the State Supreme Courts ruling that year requiring the state to grant
Andrew
Rojecki, associate professor of communication at the University of Illinois
at Chicago and co-author of The Black Image in the White Mind (University of Chicago Press, 2000), a study
of racial attitudes and their relationship to mass media content, said he found the cartoon deeply
troubling. Of course I would say its racist, Professor Rojecki said in an
interview. Theres no question about it. He added, The cartoonist,
same-sex couples the same legal rights and benefits as heterosexual couples through civil unions.
whether he did this consciously or not, was drawing upon a very

historically deep source of images about African-Americans that AfricanAmericans do not have a lot of control over. Such images are harmful on a number of
Even people who do not harbor deep-seated prejudices,
because they have stereotypes deeply embedded in their consciousness,
may react unconsciously when those associations are triggered, he said.
levels, he said.
23/259
Professor Rojecki rejected Mr. Allans assertion that the cartoon was devoid of racial content. It strains credulity to
imagine that there is any association between a chimpanzee that was shot because it had attacked someone and a
bill that has successfully passed through Congress, he said. It makes no sense. What possible explanation could
there be? Jan Nederveen Pieterse, a professor of global studies and sociology at the University of California, Santa
Barbara, and author of White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (Yale University
Press, 1995), said, I agree the cartoon is racist, without a doubt. Professor Pieterse, who is Dutch, said that
portrayal of non-Westerners as primates became well-established in both the United States and Europe in the late
Its
absolutely outrageous, he said of the cartoon, and I think people are
concerned because it sets a nasty, mean, very aggressive tone. You cant
get any lower.
19th century, and has affected not only blacks, but also the Irish and Chinese, for example.
Racism has allowed blacks to be categorized into negative stereotypes

making it impossible for prosperity
Kaplan 9(Karen Kaplan | Kaplan is a Times staff writer, Racial stereotypes and
social status, December 9 2008 http://articles.latimes.com/2008/dec/09/science/scirace9, //AR
Barack Obama's election as president may be seen as a harbinger of a colorblind society, but a new study
suggests that derogatory racial stereotypes are so powerful that merely
being unemployed makes people more likely to be viewed by others -- and
even themselves -- as black. In a long-term survey of 12,686 people, changes in social
circumstances such as falling below the poverty line or being sent to jail
made people more likely to be perceived by interviewers as black and less
likely to be seen as white. Altogether, the perceived race of 20% of the people in the study changed
at least once over a 19-year period, according to the study published today in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences. "After [junk bond financier] Michael Milken goes to prison, he'll be no more likely to say he's
a black person or any less likely to say he's a white person," said Amon Emeka, a social demographer at USC who
was not involved in the study. "[U.S. Supreme Court Justice] Clarence Thomas might say he's transcended race, but
he wouldn't say that he's a white person, and certainly no one on the planet would say he's a white person."
Researchers have long recognized that a person's race affects his or her
social status, but the study is the first to show that social status also
affects the perception of race. "Race isn't a characteristic that's fixed at
birth," said UC Irvine sociologist Andrew Penner, one of the study's authors . "We're perceived a
certain way and identify a certain way depending on widely held
stereotypes about how people believe we should behave." Penner and Aliya
Saperstein, a sociologist at the University of Oregon, examined data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics'
National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Though the ongoing survey is primarily focused on the work history of
Americans born in the 1950s and 1960s, participants have also provided interviewers with information on a variety
of topics, including health, marital status, insurance coverage and race. On 18 occasions between 1979 and 1998,
interviewers wrote down whether the people they spoke with were "white," "black" or "other."
The
researchers found that people whom the interviewers initially perceived

as white were roughly twice as likely to be seen as nonwhite in their next
interview if they had fallen into poverty, lost their job or been sent to
prison . People previously perceived as black were twice as likely to
continue being seen as black if any of those things had happened to
them. For example, 10% of people previously described as white were reclassified as belonging to another race
if they became incarcerated. But if they stayed out of jail, 4% were reclassified as something other than white.
The effect has staying power. People who were perceived as white and
then became incarcerated were more likely to be perceived as black even
after they were released from prison, Penner said. The racial assumptions
affected self-identity as well. Survey participants were asked to state their own race when the study
24/259
began in 1979 and again in 2002, when the government streamlined its categories for race and ethnicity. Of the
people who said they were white in 1979 and stayed out of jail, 95% said they were white in 2002. Among those
The results
underscore "the pervasiveness of racial stratification in society ," said Emeka.
" The fact that both beholders and the observers of blackness attach
who were incarcerated at some point, however, only 81% still said they were white in 2002.
negative associations to blackness speaks volumes to the continuing

impact of racial stratification in U.S. society." But Robert T. Carter, a professor of
psychology and education at Columbia Teachers College in New York who studies race, culture and racial identity,
said he wasn't convinced that stereotypes had the power to change the perception of race. "It's not social status
that shapes race, it's race that shapes social status," he said. "Stratification on the basis of racial group
membership has been an integral part of our society since prior to the inception of the United States. It's been true
for hundreds of years." To see if the changes were the result of simple recording errors made when interviewers
filled out their surveys, the researchers checked how often a participant's gender changed from one year to the
next. They found changes in 0.27% of cases, suggesting that interviewers weren't being sloppy. They also looked
for subjects who were interviewed by the same person two years in a row. Even in those cases, the results were the
same. The researchers are examining whether other social stereotypes have a similar effect on perceived race.
People who have less education, live in the inner city instead of the suburbs and are on welfare are more likely to be
seen as black, Saperstein said. "The data is really interesting, but it doesn't allow us to say what was going on in
these people's heads," she said. "Our story is consistent with the story that there's implicit prejudice."
25/259
AT: Framework
Their presumptions of democratic deliberation presume that the agons
exist within a range of ontological equivalency which paves over the
fungible body
Brady 12 (Nicholas Brady, activist scholar, executive board member of Leaders of a
Beautiful Struggle, BA in philosophy from Johns Hopkins, PhD student at the
University of California-Irvine Culture and Theory program, 10-26-12, The Flesh
Grinder: Prosecutorial Discretion and the Terror of Mass Incarceration,
http://academia.edu/2776507/The_Flesh_Grinder_Prosecutorial_Discretion_and_the_
Quotidian_Terror_of_Mass_Incarceration) gz
If the prosecutor and the defense attorney are locked in an agonistic
sport, the black body is akin to a tennis ball. The prosecutor serves it to
the defense attorney, they smack it around until someone wins the point.
Then the ball is discarded and a new ball is brought out so the contest can
continue ad infinitum. In order for the sport of plea-bargaining to occur,
both sides must agree that the cases of the black are born dead. Once a
case is dead, then the very life of the supposed defendant becomes an object for the amusement of this criminal
What is revealed in the politics of the plea bargain is how the

pleasure of democracy is born from the agony of the black. Proponents of agonism,
justice club.
from Chambers to Laclau, posit this democratic ideology as the response to antagonism. Where antagonist are
different in such a way that one must kill the other, agonists are different in a way they can respect each other and
agonism, as a democratic way of

dealing with difference, requires an ontological equivalency that is only
produced in contradistinction to the antagonism of non-black-over-black.
To put it differently, the discursive conflicts happening in the world
between adversaries are secured and produced by the gratuitous violence
against blackness.
mutually grow from one another. The plea bargain reveals that
Ignoring issues of White supremacy perpetuates racial violence

Bogado 7/14 (Aura, The Nation, White Supremacy Acquits George Zimmerman,
7/14/13, http://www.thenation.com/blog/175260/white-supremacy-acquits-georgezimmerman#axzz2Z1gHXtGC)//LA
When Zimmerman was acquitted today, it wasnt because hes a so-called
white Hispanic. Hes not. Its because he abides by the logic of white
supremacy, and was supported by a defense teamand a swath of society
that supports the lingering idea that some black men must occasionally
be killed with impunity in order to keep society-at-large safe. Media on the
left, right and center have been fanning the flames of fear-mongering,
speculating that peopleand black people especiallywill take to the
streets. That fear-mongering represents a deep white anxiety about black
bodies on the streets, and echoes Zimmermans fears: that black bodies
on the street pose a public threat. But the real violence in those
speculations, regardless of whether they prove to be true, is that it
silences black anxiety. The anxiety that black men feel every time they
walk outside the doorand the anxiety their loved ones feel for them as well. That white
anxiety serves to conceal the real public threat: that a black man is killed
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every twenty-eight hours by a cop or vigilante. People will take to the

streets, and with good reason. Theyll be there because they know that,
yes, some people do always get awayand it tends to be those strapped
with guns and the logic of white supremacy at their side.
The negs attempt to bracket out our discussion perpetuates exclusionary
limitswe must expand our conceptions beyond the realm of evidencebased policy in order to effectively investigate
Mazzei 10 (Lisa A., Prof @ Gonzaga U, Thinking Data with Deleuze,
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Vol. 23, No. 5,
Sept-Oct 2010, p. 511-23)//LA
Positioned in an era of evidence-based policy and research-funding
practices, I follow Deleuzes practice of thinking with the object of cinema, and do so in a
productive resistance to those who wish to narrow notions of what counts
as research and evidence those who cling to a sameness perpetuated by
maintaining a distinction between the material and the discursive. What is
produced by my desire to think alternative imagings of voice, and further, what
might be gained from creative stuttering do I risk being trapped in a repetition of
consonants that evoke nonsense? Deleuze maintains that it is only out of nonsense
that thinking occurs. In this time of researching situations that we no
longer understand, situations which we no longer know how to react to,
in spaces which we no longer know how to describe (Deleuze 1985/1989, xi), how
can thinking with Deleuze help us create a language and a way of thinking
that are up to the task? It is hoped, for starters, that one may use such
thinking and straining to push against the limits of the present toward a
recognition of those limits that bind us and those limits which produce
productive resistances. What are the limits that we might make better use
of, or put differently, how might we think at the limit of voice2 toward new limits
that produce alternative imagings of voice? To further this blurring and to engage with Deleuze
and cinema is to think the speech-act as an image in keeping with the visual, because as he states, The heard
speech-act, as component of the visual image, makes something visible in that image (Deleuze 1985/1989, 223). If
from a
multi-dimensional perspective?3 Deleuze compares the components of the silent image with the
viewed as an image in the visual sense of the word, might it be possible to read the image of voice
talking image and in so doing makes it possible to question what is made visible in the image of voice, or the
speech-act broadly defined. Looking at voice in cinema, I navigate using Deleuzes map to think the following
questions: (1) What becomes naturalized and denaturalized in the transition from silent to talking films? How does a
repositioning of voice as direct in talking cinema change the way we think of voice? (2) What does it mean to see
a speech-act according to Deleuze and how does this inform methodological thinking that discards the
material/binary distinction? How do we account for doings and actions as constitutive of voice? (3) If we agree that
talking cinema is much more than filmed dialogue, then what implications does this have for how we film and treat
voice in qualitative inquiry? (4) How does a disequilibrium of voice occur in film and what is to be learned or
gained? Question 1: (de)naturalizing voice? Before pictures became talking, they still conveyed speech. The silent
film was not silent, but only noiseless (Deleuze 1985/1989, 216). In silent cinema, the visual image is presented
as naturalized and innocent. We view artifacts and objects used by the director that present us with the natural
the nature of discourse is indirect

or denaturalized. The visual image is constructed in such a way that it, points to an innocent physical
being of man in history or society (217). At the same time,
nature, to an immediate life which has no need of language, whilst the intertitle or piece of writing [used to transmit
It is this transmitted order, or

that is reinscribed when qualitative researchers privilege voice and
bestow upon it a similar naturalness or innocence in presenting the unadulterated voices of their
research participants. When pictures begin to talk with noise, an obvious observation is that the speech- act ...
dialogue] shows the law, the forbidden, the transmitted order (216).
voice as truth,
is no longer read but heard. It becomes direct, and recovers ... features of discourse which were altered in the
27/259
silent or written film (Deleuze 1985/1989, 217). What happens as a result is that the talking picture not only
naturalizes speech or voice, but it denaturalizes the visual image: in so far as it is heard, it makes visible in itself
something that did not freely appear in the silent film (218). Whereas before, interactions in the visual image
constituted speech-acts, they are now rendered by a spoken voice, robbing the framed image because we now see
If, in our
work as researchers, we seek data and meaning in the form of a text that
is directly communicated by participants, in other words, basing what we
know on what we hear, then we also fail to consider how what we know
and subsequently hear might be based on what we see. Not in a literal sense of what
we see, although this can be the case, especially if we are researching our Other, but in the sense that
we narrowly define voice and thereby consider only one aspect employed
by our research participants to convey meaning. Put differently, we focus
only on the scripted, spoken words or intertitles in our strategies to capture
data and make meaning, thereby limiting our understandings of what our
research participants are saying, or trying to say. We gather and produce
evidence of these voiced encounters in the form of transcripts that reproduce and
classify direct speech-acts. In a move to unloose such strictured notions of
voice, we can turn to a performative understanding of discursive
practices, which according to Barad (2008), if properly constructed, is not an invitation to turn
everything ... into words but is instead a contestation of the excessive power granted
to language to determine what is real (121). Such a move shifts the focus
method- ologically from questions of correspondence between
descriptions and reality ... to matters of practices/doings/actions (121). In
based on what we hear, rather than hearing based on what we see. Question 2: seeing speech?
silent pictures, the voice is not contained by a speaking subject because subjects speak only indirectly through the
use of intertitles, visual text in the form of written documents, and visually constituted speech-acts (e.g., gestures,
facial expressions, movements). The voices of the actors are communicated through the use of a seen image and
an intertitle that is read. The intertitles are thus used to convey in addition to other elements, speech-acts.
Deleuze continues to write that the silent film did not just call for the talkie but already implied it (Deleuze
Prompted by Deleuze, we might consider how our participants

give voice, not in ways that are deemed absent as silent, but in ways that
are meaningful as noiseless. By so doing, we begin to consider the
intertitles and images used by our participants that function to convey
voice. To consider the voices, both performed and projected through these
intertitles and images, is to consider what is missed if we only rely on one
or the other in the viewing of film (or encounter with research participants) as silent rather than
noiseless. If we depend on the filmed dialogue in the form of tapes and transcripts, then we miss the
1985/1989, 216).
noiseless properties of voice.
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AT: What about the Holocaust?

Despite the banality of the Holocaust as an atrocity, the markings of the
Jew are not ontological anti-Semitic violence is contingent rather than
structural while black lived experience is a daily horror of gratuitous
violence
Reece 13 (Charles Reece, film critic, 1-8-13, Snowballs Chance in Hell: Django
Unchained, http://hoodedutilitarian.com/2013/01/snowballs-chance-in-hell-djangounchained/) gz
Along with Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained forms something of a diptych for Tarantino insofar as both are
revenge fantasies set in two of historys greatest atrocities: the Holocaust and American chattel slavery. In the
interview he gave at the screening I saw last week, he certainly thinks of them that way. But before either film could
begin to be written, one crucial difference in their respective historical situations delimited the possibilities of
one can fantasize about the end of the Holocaust by killing the
highest members of the Nazi party, whereas there is no easily imagined
personalized end to slavery through a few targeted acts of vengeance.
Thus, the use of explosives against the Nazis seems a tactical act, a
logical means of warfare. The use of bombs against slavery would border
on what we call terrorism these days, or irrationally violent outbursts
against a society (targeting civilians who cant do anything to change the
way things are, or think of the portrayal of the Watts riots, for example:
why did they destroy property?). Slavery was a deeply structural violence,
an ontological domination of a people that didnt obtain in the instance of
the Holocaust. Any heroic narrative set in the slave-built Southern economy is going to have a major hurdle
to overcome: there is no real end in sight, the villain remains like the
renewable heads of a hydra, nor is there a place to go where the heros
limited victory will be recognized, much less celebrated (excepting the audience who
might applaud at the films end). As Frantz Fanon famously wrote in Black Skin, White Masks: The
Jewishness of the Jew, however, can go unnoticed. He is not integrally what he
is. We can but hope and wait. His acts and behavior are the determining factor. He
is a white man, and apart from some debatable features, he can pass
undetected. [...] Of course the Jews have been tormented what am I saying? They have been hunted,
exterminated, and cremated, but these are just minor episodes in the family history. The Jew is not liked
as soon as he has been detected. But with me things take on a new face.
Im not given a second chance. I am overdetermined from the outside. I
am a slave not to the idea others have of me, but to my appearance. I
arrive slowly in the world; sudden emergences are no longer my habit. I
crawl along. The white gaze, the only valid one, is already dissecting me. I
am fixed. Once their microtones are sharpened, the Whites objectively cut sections of my reality. I have
been betrayed. I sense, I see in this white gaze that its the arrival not of a
new man, but of a new type of man, a new species. A Negro, in fact! [p. 95]
fantasy:
That provides an alternative to the films plantation owner Calvin Candies theory as to why slaves dont rise up and
kill their masters. He posits phrenology, that the black skull is built to encase a servile brain. (Odd how the guy
doesnt know words like panache while being up to date on phrenology, but I digress .) Instead of racist science:
the slaves had little chance of escape only a minority could get to border countries and the free states would
return them without proof of freedman status (even freedmen had trouble fighting against a legal challenge to their
status). More fundamentally and universally, there was little possibility for or hope of fundamentally destroying the
system of white power that, as Fanon described, defined them on every level of civil society (including free states
Blackness was placed on the outside, no

place, as mere alterity to whiteness. It was not purely coincidence that
liberalism, the philosophy of liberty, developed alongside chattel slavery.
and the minds of many, if not most, abolitionists).
29/259
Slavery gave dialectical meaning to liberty by providing the liberals with

something to negate (e.g., the American colonies would not be the slaves to the English any longer). (I
highly recommend Domenico Losurdos Liberalism: A Counter-History, which provides a mountain of evidence for
liberalisms primary theorists either outwardly supporting or giving backhanded defense to slavery on such
blacks experienced a structural suffering that is

not analogous to the social oppression so many other groups have been
under throughout history. For hundreds of years, they were denied
ontological status, relegated to non-being. blackness constituted as a
comparison to whiteness i.e., what it meant not to be white or a subject
and, by extension, what it meant not to be free.
grounds.) In Frank B. Wildersons terms,
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AT: Link of Omissions Bad

New linkthe idea that omissions are unimportant causes greater harm
Hanson 6 (Jon Hanson & Kathleen Hanson Harvard Law School Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties
Law Review Summer, 2006)

Lerner's experiment indicates just how ready we are to short-circuit potential perceptions of injustice.
When behavior that causes harm is perceived as normal--part of the script ,

the way things are, the plan, nature, or an act of God--that behavior is less likely to be
viewed as blameworthy than is abnormal behavior. In a related phenomenon, we
often deem "omissions" that produce suffering far less culpable than
"acts" that lead to similar suffering. For example, some parents are reluctant
to vaccinate their child if the vaccination has some mortality risk, even if
the risk of death from foregoing the vaccination is substantially greater .
n22 Similarly, some people have argued that hurricanes should not be seeded, even if seeding would likely reduce
the storm's expected damage. n23 An unseeded hurricane is perceived as an act of nature or God, to which blame
does not generally attach. But a person or institution that actively seeded a hurricane would likely be considered
Thus risks "caused" by salient

individual action (choosing the vaccine or seeding a hurricane) are perceived as worse
than the greater risk posed by inaction (the virus or the flooded city). When
individual action is salient, we see choice (and sometimes intent n24) and
attribute causal responsibility accordingly, but where individuals fail to
act, the omissions tend to fade into the surrounding situation . n25 Policy and
policy analysis reflect that omission bias. For example, pharmaceutical
[*422]companies have never been held liable for failing to produce
vaccines, but have sometimes been liable for the harm caused even by
vaccines whose dangers are unavoidable. n26 Tort law traditionally has been reluctant
responsible for the actual harm that hurricane caused.
to impose responsibility for doing nothing n27 and generally imposes no duty to rescue. Thus, the
"sunbather who watches a child going under the waves has no duty to dive in the water, throw her a
life ring, or even notify a nearby lifeguard." n28 Similar techniques shield the legal
regime itself from responsibility. As Philip Bobbitt and Guido Calabresi have argued,
lawmakers engage in legitimating subterfuges to avoid explicitly making

"tragic choices" that would cause suffering or death. n29 Policies
ostensibly pursuing some justified end, but having untoward
consequences for some groups, typically are viewed less as actions
causing harm than as situationally excused omissions. n30 Of course, a
purported goal need not be the actual motivation for an act or a policy in
order to have the absolving effect. Often a "cover story" need not be very
strong to justify harmful conduct. In the Lerner experiment, the subjects without a salient choice
to end the shocking (the second group) could more easily excuse themselves from blame than the subjects who
were presented an alternative. The "optionless" subjects took cover behind their assigned roles in an ostensibly
valuable, scientific inquiry. Stopping the experiment would have required affirmative, abnormal actions--going
against the flow. In part because no one expects such actions to be taken, no blame attaches to not taking them.
And in part because such omissions would be blameless, no one acts. n31
31/259
Institutions Key
Race is the root cause of institutional analysisfailure to recognize this
perpetuates racism
Dutta 7/14 (Mohan, Purdue University, Health disparities: What the Florida rulings
teach us, 7/14/13the day after the Zimmerman verdict, http://culturecentered.blogspot.com/2013/07/that-addressing-health-disparities-in.html)//LA
However, there are much deeper structural inequities that are played out in
the very organisational structure of US society that often go unnoticed in
the calls for addressing health disparities that are rooted in these very
structures. These structural inequities are so fundamental, so normal to
the framework of American society that most efforts at addressing health
disparities unknowingly end up perpetuating them, often focusing on
individual behaviour change, building self efficacy, creating positive role
models etc., and at the same time being oblivious to the deeply pervasive
structures of racism in US society. What goes hidden in the mainstream
narrative of health disparities is the racism that is inbuilt into the processes,
institutions, and logics of mainstream American society. Everyday
conversations, expectations, values and principles governing everyday life
are built on the superiority of a White mainstream that dictates the rules
of representation, participation, and engagement. This structural inequity
in the organising of American society is well evident in the recent court
ruling in Florida that found the killer of Trayvon Martin, George
Zimmerman not guilty on the grounds that the shooting was an act of selfdefense. Trayvon, who had stepped out to buy iced tea and a bag of skittles, was followed and chased by
George Zimmerman. The shooting was an outcome of the fight that had ensued between Zimmerman and Martin.
Zimmerman, who was leading a neighborhood watch team, has since offered the explanation that Martin looked
threatening because he was wearing a hoodie and walking in an area where there have earlier been burglaries. The
accounts of the exact order of events remains contested and that eventually became the basis for the judgment.
Yet, what does remain clear is that Trayvon was profiled and chased, and ultimately shot by Zimmerman. Coming
what we learn from the

above example is the culture of profiling of African American youth that is
inherent in the assumptions of US society. That African Americans are
perceived as criminals is an organising frame that makes up the US; its
public policies, police surveillance, justice system, and jails are organised
around this racist logic of systematically criminalising African Americans,
and profiting from this process of criminalisation. This deep-rooted racism of American
back then to the fundamental structural inequities that constitute US society,
society is intrinsic to the large disparities in health outcomes that are experienced by Blacks compared to Whites.
The acknowledgment of this racism would push those of us doing health

disparities work toward transformative politics that takes as its starting point
the need to fundamentally rework American society, its expectations, and
its history of racism. Deep interrogation of health disparities work would
systematically guide social scientists toward examining the power exerted
by the gun industry, and the intrinsic relationship of this industry to
racism. In this sense then, the social sciences that are constituted within the broader
framework of health disparities would need to be fundamentally transformed, working
toward addressing the underlying racism of American society, culture,
legal system, educational system, housing, employment, gun regulation
and so on. To get here, we have to collectively fight the whitewashing that
is built into the funding agencies and federal structures that determine
what we do and how we do what we do.
32/259
33/259
Williams
Racism thrives in every core institution individual action is key to
breakdown the anti-black hegemonic system of the Status Quo
Williams 13 (Chris Williams, Writer, The Cancer of Racism Thrives in America
07/16/2013 3:53 pmhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-williams/the-cancer-ofracism-thri_b_3602319.html , //AR)
Famous literary stalwart James Baldwin once said, "I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this
reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."As the words "not guilty" fell from the lips of the six jurors in the
Trayvon Martin murder case on Saturday night, I thought to myself how those two words have never been applied to
African-American humanity in America.This opprobrious verdict reaffirmed everything AfricanAmericans thought about this country that our humanity and citizenship
isn't recognized under the laws of the United States. I've never been more disappointed in
the country of my birth. The American justice system continues to set a double
standard when it comes to dishing out prison sentences to AfricanAmericans and whites.As a young African-American man living in the
south, it made me pause and realize that this ruling can give anyone the
opportunity to take my life whenever they feel threatened because of my
skin color or how I walk, talk or dress. What is a black life worth? The answer was
already abundantly clear from history, but
those six jurors confirmed our deepest, darkest
suspicions. Since arriving on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia in 1619, AfricanAmericans have been convicted in the court of white supremacy as being
less than human. Our hellacious suffering provided whites the capital to
build a country based on the principles of white hegemony. African-Americans were
never part of their equation other than providing a consistent source of free labor. When the founding fathers were writing
the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, they couldn't fathom the
humanity of their slaves and their offspring. For 394 years, we've been America's doormat and
punching bag. The cancer of racism thrives in America because the ones with
the power refuse to acknowledge minorities as their equals.
Race was devised as a
social construct in order for whites to establish and maintain their dominance in political and economic affairs in America. The truth
is we've been living in two Americas based on race and class.
The United States of America is in

name only. If we were truly united, African-Americans wouldn't have to
endure systematic subjugation and degradation on a daily basis. The
cancer of racism thrives in the halls of Congress, state legislatures,
educational institutions, judicial proceedings, and the evidence can be
seen in the refusal to work with the first African-American president to

pass laws to uplift minorities out of their perilous conditions . If it's not
gerrymandering or redistricting to dilute our voting power, it's
constructing private prisons and using the War on Drugs as a conduit to
incarcerate African-Americans at an astronomical rate. If it's not closing
schools in impoverished neighborhoods across the nation, it's cutting
social programs that ease the strenuous burden put on our households
every day.Racism is as American as Uncle Sam and his red, white, and blue
outfit. Then, you wonder why African-Americans have the highest rates of
high blood pressure, prostate and breast cancer, diabetes, among other
ailments. It's because we're stressed out and tired of being confined in an
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unjust system that was never intended for us to become successful.
But it's a
testament to our character of how we've been able to rise above it and achieve numerous successes. There have been
countless examples ranging from police brutalities, murders, and passage

of laws that continue the troubling trend of psychological and physical
oppression. This white hegemonic system has stalled the progression of
African-Americans for far too long.
These latest atrocities of Jordan Davis, Marissa Alexander, and Gabby
Calhoun are an extension of this system, which is pervasive throughout our culture. Most of our white brethren still refuse to
Before we can fully

progress as a society, this ignorant denial has to cease. The cancer of racism fools poor
whites into voting for a political party that has no interest in solving their financial and social ills . The cancer of
racism makes voting damn near impossible in the south after the Voting
Rights Act was dismantled. The cancer of racism has the Republican Party wanting to turn the clock back to
acknowledge these facts as well as the statistics proving black disenfranchisement.
1913 through their divisive policies. The cancer of racism allows defense attorneys Don West and Mark O'Mara and jurors to exercise
The cancer of racism

provides the opportunity for police militarized states to stop and frisk
young African-American men every day. For every person in this society
their privilege in portraying Trayvon Martin as a criminal when he was an innocent child.
to begin receiving a fair shake, each one of us has to become proactive in

fighting on the side of right and not on the side of privilege . America will
never be a post-racial society unless serious dialogue and actions to
reform these inadequate measures begin. The work needs to take place
in American homes and to a larger extent our schools and lawmaking
bodies.
The responsibility of tackling this dreaded disease falls at the feet of Generations X and Y. To my white brothers and
The time has arrived for racism to be discussed,

denounced, and deposed of. No more standing on the sidelines. If our country is to
become truly united, these unlawful injustices and practices must be
addressed and policies must be enacted to curtail the centuries of damage
already done. African-Americans have been fighting on the battlefield of justice for as long as you've been conspiring
against us. While you hold the cards, we've more than earned our seat at the
playing table to start this process of gaining racial conciliation and
economic empowerment. The future of our society is contingent upon this potential of mutual respect. It's
2013, start treating us like family instead of like strangers. Otherwise, the cancer of racism will destroy
sisters, it must begin with you all.
this country.
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Simmerson-Gomes
Very powerful card on whiteness and Zimmermancritiques evidence and
racial minimizationwe dont defend ableist language
Simmerson-Gomes 7/14 (Matthew, MLitt Student @ U of Aberdeen, B.Th St Paul
University Ottowa, Early Modern Intellectual History Specialist, An open letter to
whites about the black community and the Trayvon Martin case on his Blog The
Molinist, 7/14/13the day following the George Zimmerman trial verdict,
http://themolinist.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/an-open-letter-to-whites-about-theblack-community-and-the-trayvon-martin-case/)//LA
This morning, I woke up to this. Like many, many people within and without the black community, I followed this
case intently and had (continue to have) definite opinions on them (the justice of those opinions is another matter)
I received the news not with anger or frustration but a sort of

quiet sadness that is difficult to explain. Im going to try, though, in the
hopes that I can share some insight into what this case, and this verdict,
mean for communities of colour in and outside the United States . I wasnt
present when George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin, so I dont know what transpired. I cannot peer into
George Zimmermans soul, so I dont know what he was thinking or with what
intent he followed Martin down the street. What I do know is what its like to be a Trayvon
Martin. To be suspect. I do know what its like to be followed by staff in a nice clothing
store; to be stopped by police for walking down the street; to endure the
thousand micro-aggressions and the hundred fearful looks , the patronising
and, like many,
astonishment coupled with quiet indignation at my education or erudition. I know, in other words, what it is to be a
While I cannot speak for my

community I am certain that I am not alone in the sense that what many of
us were hoping for with this case was a degree of vindication, a
recognition by the courts of a Western nation that the racism we face is a
real, day-to-day reality. I want racism to end but almost as much I want to stop being told by whites
that it has. I want every white person I ever complain to about the years of
piling slights, the extra hours at airport security, the half-seen glances from across the bus from
eyes that fearfully refuse to meet mine, to respond with compassion and credulity and
not to even think about explaining them away or informing me that
racism died with Rosa Park or MLK or whatever and they would know. I
want white people to stop questioning my experience of racism , to stop
defending every offender as just doing his job or just doing whatever. I want the excuses and the
explanations to stop. I know where they come from. I know you feel
accussed. I know you feel that you are not racist (after all, you have that black friend and
your maternal grandmother is Chinese). I know you think Im being too sensitive or too
quick to judge (after all, he didnt call me a nigger and you didnt notice any racism and you would know). I
person of colour in a world that privileges whiteness. Deafness
know that you feel like affirmative action gives me a leg up because you work just as hard and wheres your quota?
I know its easier to pretend that racism is a thing of the past because you
can get by just fine doing that so why cant I? But heres the thing: its not
about you. You are not the one who is slurred, youre not the one who is
refused service, and youre certainly not the one who is shot in the street.
Its about us. I want you to acknowlegde that fact. To recognise that I
experience racism. This case offered me some sliver of that recognition,
that vindication. The tantalising prospect that a white-passing man with a
white name would be found guilty of murdering an unarmed teenaged boy for
no other reason than his race and his hoodie filled me with hope that my plight
would no longer be so easily dismissed, hope that made the slights easier
36/259
to endure for its impending fulfillment and that prejudiced me against any
possibility of Zimmermans innocence in any trifling legal sense. That is, I think,
much of why this decision has been met with so much anger. Our hopes for a world where our
voices would be heard were dashed. Sight Karen Grigsby Bates observed today that this case
has confirmed for blacks and members of many other communities of colour, that we still need to wear protective
I have long
described to white friends the process of dressing (or otherwise selfpresenting) to white myself. The way I dress in an academic setting, the
way I speak and write, the extra-curricular activities I put on my resume
as a teenager, all carefully considered to avoid any shred of blackness.
Why? Because blacks with the gall to be black, to act and speak as you
have deemed black, are rarely deemed worthy of your respect. In this
world you have created for me my blackness is a handicap I must not
acknowledge, a loadstone around my neck that I dare not draw attention
to because then I will be the activist; the angry black guy who doesnt
know that MLK fixed the system, reshuffled the deck so now that everyone
gets the same hand but who still needs to be Snoop Dog; or worse yet I
will simply be criminal and suspect, a potential gangbanger who might be
carrying so we better stop him just in case. So I must perform if I am to
get ahead or even to get by. And perform I will, because I want nice clothes and good jobs
and to walk down the street unhindered by the authorities. I will do so to please you and you will think it right. On
the night he was killed, Trayvon Martin was dressed in a way that does not
please you. He wore his hoodie over his head. In words well-practised from the press conferences and talking
clothing. We must still, in her words, appear church-ready whenever we walk out the door.
heads sessions that follow every high-profile sexual assault, police officials and pundits suggested that Tayvon
Martins choice of clothing was a factor in his death. Some cried victim blaming, apologism. Others replied
prudence. Black voices intoned both. Whoever is right, Trayvon Martins clothing was not protective, instead it
painted a target on his back and hung around his neck a sign that read threat. Right or not, this ruling has
I have seen it
observed more times than I care to count today that justice is supposed to
be blind. This case, they say, was not about race. It was about a boy who
was killed and the man who killed him. It was about evidence. Lord, how I
wish I had the privilege of their naivet. Lady Justice may be blind but
George Zimmerman is not. If he were, maybe the sight of a teenaged boy wearing a hoodie after dark
would not have frightened him so severely that he decided to follow that boy with a firearm at the ready. If the
police were blind, maybe they would have charged a man who shot dead a
17 year old boy before mass protests forced them. If Lady Justice removed
her blindfold maybe she would have seen that her scales were weighted
against Trayvon Martin from his first breath. Maybe she would have known that by refusing
to see the racial dynamics of the case before her, she was blinding herself to the very substance of the case. Ra ce
was at the core of this case and race it why it became a symbol of such
great weight and meaning. To us Trayvon Martin was not just murdered,
he was martyred. In death he bore witness to the racism and oppression
that blacks and other people of colour experience every day. Why was
Trayvon Martin threatening to George Zimmerman? For the same reason
that I am threatening to the mothers who claw their children back when I smile and wave back to them
reminded me why I prefer to let the rain fall unhindered onto my head. Blindness
on the bus, the men who watch me like hawks when I pet their dogs on the street, and the staff who follow me in
Everywhere I go I am a threat, an outsider, an other. I am a threat

because you see me, or at least some of me, yet somehow you do not see
this. In Trayvon Martins death and George Zimmermans trial the world, for a moment, saw. For a few
short seconds all eyes turned upon a racially motivated crime, upon a
black boy killed for blackness itself. But now the world has turned away
because the court has comfortably ruled that blackness really is
their stores.
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threatening and you really are justified in keeping watch for it in your
communities and resisting it with deadly force. We were wrong, it seems.
You will not see. You will not see his martyrdom because it is woven into
the frabic of your privilege, the cloth that the world has tied around your
eyes. I will see it every time I look in the mirror, because in my brown skin
is the crime for which Trayvon Martin died. Speech Ive added my voice to the
cacophony of this verdict in the hopes of granting a little insight to those
outside my community to whom our response to the case has been
opaque. Ive done so knowing it will open me up to dismissal and scorn
(after all, who am I to accuse you?). Ive brought all my eloquence to bear
and had a friend copy-edit my words because I know all too well the lesson we all learned from Rachel Jeantel: that
black speech is suspect and blacks who speack publically on race

represent us all. In spite of that Ive spoken only for myself, only from my
own experience and perspective, because I can no more speak on behalf of
blacks than you can speak on behalf of whites (not least because to some, I am not one). I
pray that my words will not fall only on deaf ears and blind eyes.
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Loudmouthedbookworm
NOW IS KEYreject their evidentiary reformism in favor of pure RAGE
Anonymous 7/14 (Pseudonym Loudmouthedbookworm, A 20-something, KoreanAmerican, cisgender, male student at a private university in Boston majoring in
English with a possible double or minor in Latin American Studies.his own
description, To Anyone who Doubted (For Trayvon), 7/14/13the day after the
Zimmerman verdict, http://loudmouthedbookworm.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/toanyone-who-doubted-for-trayvon/)//LA
To Anyone Who Doubted: Last night, the American judicial system reiterated the
right of white and white passing citizens to murder people of color with
impunity in the name of security and property. Last night, the value of
white freedom and suspicions over black and brown death and childhood
was restated, plain as day. This is not about idiotic jurors. This is not about a stunning defense.
This is not about incontrovertible evidence, because none of that was
present. This is about white supremacy. It was about that from the moment Zimmerman
spotted Trayvon walking down the street at night in his own fathers neighborhood, because Trayvons
blackness marked him as a threat, a disturbance. It was about white
supremacy when Judge Debra Nelson refused to put Zimmerman on trial
for racial profiling by banning the phrase from her courtroom, because the
American courtroom is designed to uphold, not challenge, racism. It was
about white supremacy when the trial became about Zimmermans
capacity to prove he felt threatened by Trayvon, because white anxiety is
enough to justify black death. Now, a 17-year-old has been killed, his murderer acquitted, and his
family left heartbroken, all in the name of white supremacy; all for upholding the truth of the
threat black and brown bodies present to whiteness simply by and for
existing in public, and the legitimacy of violent, defensive action in
response to any suspicions held of suspicious bodies. To anyone who doubted this
was the case, and now finds they cannot doubt it anymore, hear this: this is not the time for guilt .
Privilege too often makes guilt seem redeeming; it is not. Your guilt will not
bring Trayvon back. Your guilt will not console his family. Your guilt will
not bring Zimmerman to justice. Your guilt will likely be just as useless to
the next person of color to be killed in America. It is also not a time to
bend to fear. The reason for that fear is ever-present. It was there long before the night
Trayvon went walking. It has been there all our lives. It is not the time for
these things. It is a time for other emotions. It is a time for grief . Grief for
Trayvon, his family, the innumerable flaws in the trial and system that managed the possibility of justice for him,
It is a time for rage . Even if black and brown grief and rage are
criminalized, unjustified, and unacceptable before the law and the White
Gaze, it is a time for these things because, above all, the time for
responsibility is here, and the urgency of now only grows with every
moment. Today, tomorrow, for every day of life that Trayvon, Emmett,
Brisenia, and countless unnamed children of color have been denied,
responsibility must manifest through our grief and rage . But I reiterate: It is not the
time for guilt. Guilt is paralyzing and uninspiring. Guilt will do nothing, can do
nothing. For you, for me, for these children, or for the unknowable
quantity of people of color whose death and prohibition from justice will
and ourselves.
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occur under similar circumstances. Guilt is useless, so let there be rage.

For Trayvon.
40/259
Pedagogy K
41/259
42/259
SilenceL/O
Failure to confront whiteness through an educational model prevents
productive pedagogythat's a prerequisite to chage
Since that initial research I have continued to explore the importance of racially
inhabited silence in classes with preservice teachers, particularly as it arises in
conversations regarding issues of diversity. This attention serves as a
means of both identifying and challenging responses to those who are
different or Other especially as those responses, both silent and
muted, serve to expose and solidify circumscribed perceptions. These
racially inhabited silences are particularly noticeable in settings where
white preservice teachers are challenged to deal with issues of diversity,
finding themselves uncomfortable in the context of a discourse of
diversity, especially when the conversation engages the social and
economic implications of racial diversity and when the critical gaze is
shifted from the racial object, i.e., the non-white Other, to the racial
subject, i.e., white self (Morrison, 1992). They will talk about difference, and
acknowledge that we must incorporate diversity into education classes,
but when asked to specifically discuss their perceptions or experiences
based on race and ethnicity, it is as if I have asked them to divulge the
password of a secret society. In the words of one student, Why do we
need to talk about it? Isnt it best if we dont notice it? Isnt it an issue
because we [You] keep making it an issue? This discussion then is
presented as a continuing engagement with those racially inhabited
silences in an attempt to further ascertain their relevance and to
formulate pedagogical responses so we can get students to talk about it.
So we can adequately prepare teachers to recognize when they are responding to their
students based on their own biases, stereotypes, and ignorance in order to help future teachers
not just mouth the mantra of a culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings,
1994, 2001), but actually mean it and enact it.
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Alt/Prior Question
The alternative is an uncomfortable recognition of whitenessonly
pedagogical spaces can reshape whiteness
It is my insistence, and I believe that chronicled by others in education (see for e.g.
Cochran-Smith, 2000; Valli, 1995; Villegas & Lucas, 2002), that change in
the arena of racial discourse comes by encouraging our students to brush
up against their own whiteness. For this to happen we must attempt to
develop pedagogical strategies that encourage the breaking of silences,
both our own and those of our students. But it is not as simple as distributing
note cards and assuming that a recognition of the silences on our part as
teacher educators will lead to a breaking of the silence on the part of our
students. As described in the previous section, there is the potential for much loss on
the part of our students, and to deny this loss is to fail to develop a
pedagogy that not only recognizes and confronts the silences, but also
accepts and acknowledges the fears associated with such a loss. Students
may resist breaking the silence, for to do so means they risk a loss of
privilege, identity and comfort. As educators, we can provide experiences
in our classrooms that are potentially transformative, but to do so, we
must admit the potential for loss that our students recognize and resist as
we challenge them to engage the silences. The loss of comfort, for example, when they are
forced to go into settings where they are not the majority, be it according to race, gender, sexual orientation, or
The loss of privilege when they begin to acknowledge the norming

presence of whiteness by which they are judged, and subsequently advantaged, but which serves to disadvantage their students because the
students cannot wear the same mask. A loss of identity when an undoing
of white privilege means that their unspoken, unacknowledged,
unnoticed position of whiteness is suddenly called into question and
redefined, reinscribed, or refuted. An awareness of loss might mean that
we recognize the loss and the fear inhabiting the silence and develop
pedagogical strategies that communicate to our students that we do not
discount the fear or the loss, but that we also refuse the silence on their
part as a strategy of avoidance. As acknowledged by Amanda, the issue of racism is
very much alive in schools today, and as future teachers they must
accept the potential loss of comfort and privilege toward a recognition
that they are as much a part of a racial or multicultural discourse as their
non-white students. The fact that racism is present in schools means that
they participate, whether knowingly or not, and a claiming of this
participation is also a claiming of innocence lost . In order that we not silence the fears
associated with these losses, our challenge as teacher educators is to engage these
losses and the silences that they inhabit.
social class.
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Prior Question
Questions of pedagogy come firstdetermines whiteness in the debate
space
They are not knowingly racist, in fact many are appalled at racist attitudes
and actions by others and sometimes angrily ask why we have to keep
talking about the inequities they believe are no longer important or relate
to them. They think that by looking past skin colour they are above racist
attitudes and actions. Is it ever going to stop? was a question asked by one of my
students referring to the continued emphasis on multicultural education, racial identity, and a corresponding need
to discuss attitudes regarding gender, race, and class inequities. It is a valid question and one which gives pause
such a day might come, but it will not arrive as long as teachers,
particularly white teachers, are unaware of our own socially constructed
attitudes and remain blind to our position as whites in a racial discourse,
or worse fail to see ourselves as raced thereby continuing a racial
discourse that identifies all non-whites as Other. We must seriously
expose and critique any position that fosters the view articulated by Frankenberg (1996),
to hope that
It is interesting that one can in fact (re)tell a white life through a racial lens y Seeing blackness was not seeing
whiteness (p. 5). When Margaret in another assignment for the Diversity and the Learner class wrote of her
impressions of a young woman with a Korean mother but who grew up in the United States, she revealed her
tendency to see life through a white racial lens. She made
assumptions about the Other from
an uncritical position of whiteness. I looked at her as the Korean girl. I didnt realize that she
grew up the same way as I did. I questioned her knowledge of American culture just because of the way her eyes
looked and the darkness of her hair. When Andrea wrote my life as a young, middle class, Caucasian American
provided advantages that were not there for others in minority cultures. These advantages were present in the
opportunities available to me. I was educated in Catholic schools. I had access to jobs that probably were not
she
acknowledged the advantage that white privilege and affluence afforded.
Yet, she unproblemmati- cally wrote in the same paper, Like so many other young
black males, John has no father in his everyday life. This statement reveals the unstated assumptions
that Andrea makes about black students (i.e., that they do not live with their fathers), and is
thereby silent regarding how such assumptions impact the ways in which
she makes judgements about the students and their families that she
works with. When Linda wrote multicultural students struggle most with communicating and making
available to people of other cultures. It is almost as if my success was jump-started from the beginning,
friends, she revealed two beliefs that are assumed but rarely stated by many white teachers. One, multicultural
education is for those who are other than white and is of most benefit for those students who are non- native
English speaking students. Two, these designated multicultural students are behind or lacking in some way. In a
review of educational research that focused on the preparation of teachers for urban schools of the 60s, 70s, and
80s, Weiner (1993) asserted that in each of the three periods, the discussion was framed as preparing teachers of
deprived, disadvantaged, or at-risk students (pp. 7273). Further she stated that since the early 1970s educators
began to describe urban school populations as multicultural, a label that ignored the absence of white students in
when Jennifer asks why [does] it matter to even

talk about race? Isnt it best if we dont notice it? we can no longer
remain silent or uncritical. We must understand that when we dont
notice or when we dont talk about it we, both teacher educators and
students, are talking about it. When one of the cooperating teachers responded to a question by
urban school systems (p. 73). Finally,
Linda that the Asian children struggle with the language arts but never the subject of math, and my student
we are
engaging in a racial discourse as experienced through a white lens. This
discourse, dependent on a racially inhabited silence that perpetuates
rationalized that this is because math is pretty universal and the English language is not, then
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stereotypes of the Other also serves to define different through a racial

lens which is both culturally determined by and uncritical of its racial
position.
Pedagogy is a prior questionits a crucial part of networks of Whiteness
More than a decade ago, I began a qualitative research project whose purpose was to consider how a group of white
teachers in an urban school district in the US understood their racial position and to examine how that
understanding impacted their curricular decisions and work as teachers. The two most notable learnings emerging
the white teachers who participated in

the study, including myself, had little or no experience of themselves as
having a racial position and that their experience of having lived in a
world of white privilege severely limited their ability to see or express
themselves as Other. This lack of awareness led to noticeable silences
in the conversations related to race,1 racial position, and racial identity,
subsequently reflected in the pedagogical and curricular decisions made
by these teachers. In the course of the research these silences were shown to be both
purposeful and meaningful in reaffirming the espoused perspective of the
participants. As a means of acknowledging the importance of these silences and addressing their relevance
from that initial research were the realization that
in circumscribing identity, a methodological strategy was developed to identify and examine the significance and
myriad meanings inhabiting the silences. While the research and teaching described in this article have occurred in
discussions and learnings have much wider implications.

and in particular whiteness, must be situated in
the global context (p. 117). And while the local context for my work is the Midwest region of the United
States, the global context for this work is teacher education that concerns
itself with the development of racially aware and culturally sensitive
teachers. Many who grew up in the US with white skin were taught not to notice or to mention ones skin colour
a US context, such
According to Leonardo (2004a), race,
for fear of being impolite or racist. I was carefully taught this by parents who did not wish for their children to
perpetuate much of what they had experienced as whites growing up long before civil rights and integration.2 So
what happens when we do not notice, or are taught not to notice, or

pretend not to notice? What can happen is that we lull ourselves into a
dream state induced by this soporific silence. A silence that shields and
veils until finally, something, someone, shatters the dream.3
Pedagogy comes first
Jennings and Lynn 5 (Michael E. and Marvin, UT San Antonio and U of
Maryland College Park, The House That Race Built: Critical Pedagogy,
African-American Education, and the Re-Conceptualization of a Critical
Race Pedagogy, Educational Foundations, Summer-Fall 2005, p. 15-32)//LA
Critical Pedagogy as a discourse on schooling and inequality relies mainly on
three theoretic and analytic strands of thought: (1) Social Reproduction Theory, (2) Cultural
Reproduction Theory, and (3) Theories of Resistance. These areas of study,
have contributed, in unique ways to the development of critical pedagogy.
Social Reproduction theorists believe that schools maintain the status quo by making
certain that existing social and economic relations remain constant . The work
of Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (1976) is largely based on five key principles that
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undergird their political economy of education. First, that market, property and power
relationships (p. 11) determine and shape the looming disparities in wealth that exist between the rich and the
the capitalist economy is responsible for creating and

maintaining widespread poverty and disenfranchisement among minorities and the
poor in most industrialized democracies. The second, and probably the most important principle is that
schools act as agents in the regeneration and solidification of existing
political, social, and economic arrangements by preparing students for
predetermined roles in the labor force. To that extent, students from working class families are
poor. In other words,
trained to work in low paying non-skilled jobs, since it is highly likely that they will attend schools that foster this
third principle recognizes that school professionals do not

necessarily reproduce social inequalities with malice of intent. Instead,
this principle recognizes the hierarchical structure of schooling and its
tendency to mirror the top-down structure of the labor market which
aids in the reproduction of social inequality. To the extent that school
officials and teachers work to maintain the bureaucratic structure of
schooling, they are implicated as agents of this capitalist domination . The
very basis of the argument here is that the U.S. economy is a formally totalitarian
system in which the actions of the vast majority (workers) are controlled
by a small minority (owners and managers) (Bowles & Gintis, 1976, p. 55). Moreover,
the U.S., with its run-a-way capitalist economy, allows the forces of the
market to dictate what happens in the rest of society. To that extent,
schools were designed for the purpose of maintaining current economic
relations. As a result, schools have not been instrumental in helping the
majority of poor and working class people achieve social mobility. Rather
schools have helped solidify poor peoples position at the bottom of the
economic hierarchy. In other words, Schooling has been...something done to the poor and not in the
interest of the poor (MacLeod ,1995, p. 29). The fourth principle is that schooling is
contradictory in nature (Bowles & Gintis, 1976). While schooling (in this sense) primarily
supports the aims of the dominant class, it can be credited with
contributing to the overall development of consciousness about social
inequalities. In other words, Bowles and Gintis also recognize that schools can
sometimes serve as sites where social awareness takes place. This idea is
further expounded upon in the work of resistance theorists, whose ideas we will
address later. The last principle is that the relationship between the organization of
schools and the structure of the labor market changes and shifts
according to the particular sociopolitical and historical context . In other words,
any critique of schools must be situated within an understanding of the
particular sociohistorical forces that have led to current conditions
within a given society. In this regard, Bowles and Gintis (1976) attempt to first understand the
kind of mentality. The
particular social, political and economic circumstances of the time period being described before undertaking an
Cultural Reproduction Theory offers

an important analysis of how schools, in fact, support particular patterns
of behavior in school. Cultural Reproduction (Bourdieu, 1977; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977) in education
refers to the ways in which schools and teachers reproduce social inequalities
through the promotion of certain forms of class-specific cultural
knowledge. This theory presents a departure from theories of social reproduction because it includes
an analysis, albeit a materialist one, of culture. It also looks more micro-analytically at the ways
in which school norms contribute to the systematic exclusion of ethnic
minorities and poor whites from the educational system. Bourdieu, the leading cultural reproduction
analysis of schooling as an agent of capitalist hegemony.
theorist, begins with the notion that students who lack the cultural capital or the requisite knowledge and skills with
which to successfully navigate the parameters of middle class culture inevitably fail at school (Bourdieu & Passeron,
1977). In this sense, cultural capital is a form of symbolic wealth that one acquires through membership and
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participation in the dominant or middle-class culture. The accumulation of cultural capital is also related to ones
degree of wealth in the sense that those who can afford it, participate, to a much greater degree, in the
Because schools are

established in relation to these norms and standards, they also legitimize
and therefore reinforce such standards while promoting the myth of
meritocracy (Bourdieu, 1977; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). Moreover, the economically
privileged utilize schools as a way in which to sustain and legitimate their
high- status knowledge which, helps to maintain existing social, political
and economic arrangements. This greatly disadvantages children from lower and working class
consumption of what is considered high culture or the arts (Bourdieu, 1977).
backgrounds who are not aware of the rules required for successfully working within the culture of power (Bourdieu,
1977; Delpit, 1995). The effects of cultural reproduction are mitigated, in some ways, by each individuals habitus,
or the way a culture is embodied within the individual (Harker, 1990, p. 118). Ones habitus refers to the specific
way in which an individual acts and responds to the system and the practices of those who maintain it. To this
the individual has some degree of agency in making choices that will
benefit him or her. In this instance, the habitus is indeed a mitigating factor. Bourdieu (1977) is
quick to point out, however, that ones agency is limited in a classstratified society especially if we consider that people cant teach what
[they] dont know (Howard, 1999). Consequently, since the majority of poor and working class students
extent,
have not had the same experiences as middle and upper class students, their habitus will be markedly different.
Therefore, while ones degree of agency is considered an important component, it is rendered nearly
inconsequential when we consider how economic, political and social structures shape and constrict individual
autonomy and agency (Bourdieu, 1977).
Pedagogy is key to interrogate power

Critical pedagogy has been widely characterized as a crucial construct in
challenging the inequalities that have evolved in the context of schooling
in the U.S. Evidence of this can be found in critical pedagogys attempt to
offer critique of the analytic connections between race and education
within the context of the African-American struggle for humanity . In particular,
critical pedagogy has functioned as a discourse on schooling and
inequality that has developed in tandem with theories of race and
pedagogical practice in ways that reflect the context of African-American
education. This work expounds upon our previous scholarship to offer a broadened
conception of critical race pedagogy that incorporates central aspects of
critical pedagogy but is drawn from African-American epistemological
frameworks. Origins of Critical Pedagogy within Critical Theory Critical pedagogy has
maintained its status as an important component of educational research
and inquiry since the early 1980s when critical educational theorist popularized the concept in academic
writing (Bennett & LeCompte, 1999; Sleeter & Bernal, 2004). Since that time, these theorists
have continued to struggle with the central question of critical pedagogy:
Whose interests are served? (Bennet & LeCompte 1999, p. 250). In answer to this
query, Gordon (1995) asserts that Critical theory seeks to understand the
origins and operation of repressive social structures. Critical theory is the
critique of domination. It seeks to focus on a world becoming less free, to cast doubt on claims of
technological scientific rationality, and then to imply that present configurations do not
have to be as they are (p. 190). Not only do critical theorists attempt to
discover why oppressive structures exist and offer criticisms of their
48/259
effects; they also explore the ways in which we can transform our society.
In this sense, critical theory is not simply a critique of social structures it is an
analysis of power relations that asks questions regarding: what
constitutes power; who holds power; and in what ways power utilized to
benefit those already in power.
Race and pedagogy are intertwined[also, link of omission]
First, critical race pedagogy must recognize and understand the endemic
nature of racism. Racism is a concept is played out world wide but has a
particularly significant meaning in the history of the United States (Feagin,
2001). Critical legal scholar Derrick Bell (1992) argues that racism is a permanent fixture of American society. That
racism is not an aberrant entity but is instead an integral part of the

American socio-political landscape. Being such an integral part of America
has allowed racism to shape and be shaped by the major institutions
within American society (Feagin, 2001; Hacker 1995). Among these institutions is the
compulsory public education system that developed from the Common School movement of the
19th century (Spring, 2005). This system is an integral part of American society and
has historically reflected the racialized nature of American society . In other
words, educational institutions in America have historically reflected the
same types of institutionalized racism that exist within multiple contexts
of American life. Racism and education are thus tightly interwoven in a
manner that is complex, pervasive and constantly evolving within and
across a variety of social contexts. It is an understanding of these
complexities that is necessary precursor for the existence of any Critical
Race Pedagogy. This is not meant to establish race as the only construct of importance when critiquing the
oppressive nature of schooling in American society. Any form of Critical Race Pedagogy must
be intimately cognizant of the necessary intersection of other oppressive
constructs such as class, gender and sexual orientation. Theorizing these
intersections is of high importance because individuals prioritizing one
facet of their identity over another can create a false dichotomy that does
not address the reality that we exist within society as subjective entities
whose identities are negotiated through multiple lenses that privilege
certain race, class, gender and sexual norms.
is,
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AT: We solve
Magnifies the linkany risk their pedagogy is flawed turns the case
makes it try or die for the alt
Resistance Theory expands these ideas in important ways. A theory of
resistance in education necessarily begins with a critique of theories of
social and cultural reproduction (Giroux, 1983; McLaren, 1998). Giroux (1983), Willis (1997) and
Morrow & Torres (1995) argue that these theories are overly deterministic because they fail to
adequately define the role of the oppressed actor in negotiating and
responding to structures of domination. Resistance theory (Giroux 1983) is grounded in the
notion that the oppressed have a degree of agency that allows them to
actively resist and sometimes collude with structures of domination. In
other words, resistance theory points to the dialectical nature of
oppression and sees domination as not only [the] result of the structural
and ideological constraints embedded in capitalist social relationships, but
also as part of the process of self-formation within the working class
itself (Giroux, 1983, p. 283). In other words, the social, economic, and political structure
does not act alone; it is supported by the actions of people who work to
maintain it or destroy it by resisting domination in myriad ways.
Therefore, resistance theory does not characterize all oppositional
behavior as counterhegemonic because it recognizes the potential for
some forms of resistance to authority to be connected to patriarchal and
racist motives. Giroux (1983), Willis (1977), Delgado Bernal (1997) and MacLeod (1995) argue that
certain forms of oppositional behavior or resistance can and often do lead
to greater degrees of social dislocation that delimits the actors potential
for further participation in liberatory practice and struggle . Ethnographic studies of
working class students illustrate Girouxs point clearly. The working class white male students in Paul Willis
work (1977), for example, resisted dominant modes of thinking through their
nonparticipation in and subsequent devaluation of academic work deemed
crucial by school authorities who symbolized the dominant culture. Jay
MacLeod (1987), in a similar study of white and African-American male working class youth, underscores
the importance of understanding the role of the oppressed in resisting and
accommodating to certain forms of oppression. In both studies, the
resistance of working class youth to structures of domination actually
served to further marginalize them. This, the authors argue, provides a
clear context for understanding the complex nature of the relationship
between structure and agency (MacLeod, 1995; Willis, 1977). Therefore, a resistance
model analyzes the ways in which social structures work to reproduce
inequalities and tries to understand how the complex web of
relationships between people can either counteract or support the aims of
the capitalist hegemony.
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Bussing Link
The affirmatives pedagogical strategy is analogous to integration by
bussingin their rush to resist whiteness in debate theyve forfeited the
revolutionary, pedagogical value of the 1AC
hooks 94 (bell, Prof @ Oberlin College, name intentionally left un-capitalized,
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, p. 3-4)//LA
Almost all our teachers at Booker T. Washington were black women. They
were committed to nurturing intellect so that we could become scholars,
thinkers, and cultural workers-black folks who used our "minds." We learned early that
our devotion to learning, to a life of the mind, was a counter-hegemonic
act, a fundamental way to resist every strategy of white racist colonization. Though they did not define or articulate these practices in theoretical terms, my teachers were
enacting a revolutionary pedagogy of resistance that was profoundly
anticolonial. Within these segregated schools, black children who were deemed exceptional, gifted, were
given special care. Teachers worked with and for us to ensure that we would
fulfill our intellectual destiny and by so doing uplift the race. My teachers were on a
mission. To fulfill that mission, my teachers made sure they "knew" us. They knew our parents, our economic
status, where we wor- shipped, what our homes were like, and how we were treated in the family. I went to school at
a historical moment where I was being taught by the same teachers who had taught my mother, her s1sters, and
My effort and ability to learn was always contextualized within the

framework of generational family experience. Certain behaviors, gestures, habits of being
were traced back. Attending school then was sheer joy. I loved being a student.
I loved learning. School was the place of ecstasy-pleasure and danger. To
be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and
brothers.
beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone. Home was the place where I was
forced to conform to someone else's image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget
School changed utterly with racial

integration. Gone was the messianic zeal to transform our minds and
beings that had characterized teachers and their pedagogical practices in
our all-black schools. Knowledge was suddenly about information only. It
had no relation to how one lived, behaved. It was no longer connected to
antiracist struggle. Bussed to white schools, we soon learned that
obedience, and not a zealous will to learn, was what was expected of us . Too
much eagerness to learn could easily be seen as a threat to white authority. When we entered racist,
desegregated, white schools we left a world where teachers believed that
to educate black children rightly would require a political commitment.
Now, we were mainly taught by white teachers whose lessons reinforced
racist stereotypes. For black children, education was no longer about the
practice of freedom. Realizing this, I lost my love of school. The classroom
was no longer a place of pleasure or ecstasy. School was still a political
place, since we were always having to counter white racist assumptions
that we were genetically infe rior, never as capable as white peers, even
unable to learn. Yet, the politics were no longer counter-hegemonic. We
were always and only responding and reacting to white folks.
that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself.
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Pedagogy Turns Case

MUST FOCUS ON PEDAGOGYthe use of educational spaces for
opportunistic attempts at material change makes impossible radical
liberation in the academy
hooks 94 (bell, Prof @ Oberlin College, name intentionally left un-capitalized,
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, p. 11-12)//LA
These essays reflect my experience of critical discussions with teachers, students, and individuals who have
these essays are meant to stand as

testimony, bearing witness to education as the practice of freedom. Long
entered my classes to observe. Multilayered, then,
before a public ever recognized me as a thinker or writer, I was recognized in the classroom by students -seen by
them as a teacher who worked hard to create a dynamic learning experience for all of us. Nowadays, I am rec-
the academic public that I encounter

at my lectures always shows surprise when I speak intimately and deeply
about the classroom. That public seemed particularly surprised when I
said that I was working on a collection of essays about teaching. This
surprise is a sad reminder of the way teaching is seen as a duller, less
valuable aspect of the academic profession. This perspective on teaching
is a common one. Yet it must be challenged if we are to meet the needs of
our students, if we are to restore to education and the classroom
excitement about ideas and the will to learn. There is a serious crisis in
education. Students often do not want to learn and teachers do not want
to teach. More than - ever before in the recent history of this nation,
educators are compelled to confront the biases that have shaped teaching
practices in our society and to create new ways of knowing, different
strategies for the sharing of knowledge. We cannot address this crisis if
progressive critical thinkers and social critics act as though teaching is not
a subject worthy of our regard. The classroom remains the most radical
space of possibility in the academy. For years it has been a place where
education has been undermined by teachers and students alike who seek
to use it as a platform for opportunistic concerns rather than as a place to
learn. With these essays, I add my voice to the collective call for renewal
and rejuvenation in our teaching practices. Urging all of us to open our
minds and hearts so that we can know beyond the boundaries of what is
acceptable, so that we can think and rethink, so that we can create new
visions' I celebrate teaching that enables transgressions-a movement
against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes
education the practice of freedom.
ognized more for insurgent intellectual practice. Indeed,
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Sexual Politics
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Top
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Sexual Politics K 1nc

The 1ACs starting point for political liberation is built upon the
subjugation of women; the political sphere is always already masculine
politics that doesnt begin with the question of sexuality is doomed to fail
Millett 69 (Kate Millett, Kate Millett, in full Katherine Murray Millett (born Sept. 14, 1934, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.), American feminist, author, and artist, an early and
influential figure in the womens liberation movement, whose first book, Sexual Politics, began her exploration of the dynamics of power in relation to gender and sexuality. Millett
earned a bachelors degree with honours in 1956 from the University of Minnesota, where she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Two years later she was awarded a masters degree
with first-class honours from the University of Oxford. After teaching English briefly at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Millett moved to New York City to pursue a career as
an artist. To support herself she taught kindergarten in Harlem. In 1961 she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University and also studied sculpting. By the time she
married Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in 1965, however, Millett was back in New York City, teaching English and philosophy at Barnard College. (The couple divorced in 1985.) At
the same time, she pursued a doctorate at Columbia University, and in 1970 she was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction. Her thesis, a work combining literary analysis with sociology and
anthropology, was published that same year as Sexual Politics. The book, which defined the goals and strategies of the feminist movement, was an overnight success, transforming
Millett into a public figure. The celebrity came at a personal cost, as Millett revealed in a 1974 autobiographical work, Flying, which explains the torment she suffered as a result of her
views in general and of her disclosure that she was a lesbian in particular. She wrote two more autobiographical books, Sita (1977) and A.D.: A Memoir (1995). The Basement (1979) is a
factual account of a young womans abuse, torture, and murder at the hands of a group of teenagers led by an older woman who had been appointed her protector. Milletts subsequent
books dealt with the political oppression in Iran after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Going to Iran, 1982), with her own personal experiences as a psychiatric patient (The Loony
Bin Trip, 1990), with the issue of cruelty in general (The Politics of Cruelty, 1994), and with the problems of aging, as seen through the struggles of her mother (Mother Millett, 2001).
This is from an actual book, Sexual Politics Ch. 2// SC)

The three instances of sexual description we have examined so far were remarkable for the large part which notions
Coitus can scarcely be said to take place in a vacuum; although of

set so deeply within the larger context
of human affairs that it serves as a charged microcosm of the variety of
attitudes and values to which culture subscribes. Among other things, it may serve
as a model of sexual politics on an individual or personal plane. But of course the
of ascendancy and power played within them.
itself it appears a biological and physical activity, it i s
transition from such scenes of intimacy to a wider context of political reference is a great step indeed. In
"Can the
relationship between the sexes be viewed in a political light at all?" The
introducing the term "sexual politics," one must first answer the inevitable question
answer depends on how one defines politics. [The American Heritage Dictionary's fourth definition is fairly
approximate: "methods or tactics involved in managing a state or government." One might expand this to a set of
stratagems designed to maintain a system. If one understands patriarchy to be an institution perpetuated by such
techniques of control, one has a working definition of how politics is conceived in this essay]. This essay does not
The term
"politics" shall refer to power-structured relationships, arrangements
whereby one group of persons is controlled by another. By way of parenthesis one
might add that although an ideal politics might simply be conceived of as the
arrangement of human life on agreeable and rational principles from
whence the entire notion of power over others should be banished , one must
confess that this is not what constitutes the political as we know it, and it is to this that we must address
ourselves. The following sketch, which might be described as "notes toward a theory of patriarchy," will
define the political as that relatively narrow and exclusive world of meetings, chairmen, and parties.
attempt to prove that sex is a status category with political implications. Something of a pioneering effort, it must
perforce be both tentative and imperfect. Because the intention is to provide an overall description, statements
must be generalised, exceptions neglected, and subheadings overlapping and, to some degree, arbitrary as well.
The word "politics" is enlisted here when speaking of the sexes primarily
because such a word is eminently useful in outlining the real nature of
their relative status, historically and at the present. It is opportune, perhaps today even
mandatory, that we develop a more relevant psychology and philosophy of power
relationships beyond the simple conceptual framework provided by our
traditional formal politics. Indeed, it may be imperative that we give some attention to defining a
theory of politics which treats of power relationships on grounds less conventional than those to which we are
accustomed. I have therefore found it pertinent to define them on grounds of personal contact and interaction
For it is
precisely because certain groups have no representation in a number of
recognised political structures that their position tends to be so stable,
their oppression so continuous. In America, recent events have forced us to acknowledge at last
that the relationship between the races is indeed a political one which
involves the general control of one collectivity, defined by birth, over another collectivity, also
defined by birth. Groups who rule by birthright are fast disappearing, yet there remains one ancient
and universal scheme for the domination of one birth group by another between members of well-defined and coherent groups: races, castes, classes, and sexes.
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the scheme that prevails in the area of sex. The study of racism has convinced us that a
truly political state of affairs operates between the races to perpetuate a
series of oppressive circumstances. The subordinated group has
inadequate redress through existing political institutions, and is deterred
thereby from organising into conventional political struggle and
opposition. Quite in the same manner, a disinterested examination of our system of sexual
relationship must point out that the situation between the sexes now, and throughout
history, is a case of that phenomenon Max Weber defined as herrschaft, a relationship of dominance and
subordinance. What goes largely unexamined, often even unacknowledged (yet is
institutionalised nonetheless) in our social order, is the birthright priority whereby males rule females. Through
this system a most ingenious form of "interior colonisation" has been
achieved. It is one which tends moreover to be sturdier than any form of
segregation, and more rigorous than class stratification, more uniform,
certainly more enduring.
However muted its present appearance may be, sexual dominion obtains
nevertheless as perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamental concept of
power. This is so because our society, like all other historical civilisations, is a patriarchy.
The fact is evident at once if one recalls that the military, industry, technology, universities, science, political office,
every avenue of power within the society, including the coercive force
is entirely in male hands. As the essence of politics is power, such realisation
cannot fail to carry impact. What lingers of supernatural authority, the Deity, "His" ministry, together
and finance - in short,
of the police,
with the ethics and values, the philosophy and art of our culture - its very civilisation - as T. S. Eliot once observed,
is of male manufacture. If one takes patriarchal government to be the institution whereby that half of the populace
which is female is controlled by that half which is male, the principles of patriarchy appear to be two fold:
male
shall dominate female, elder male shall dominate younger. However, just as with
any human institution, there is frequently a distance between the real and the ideal ;
contradictions and exceptions do exist within the system. While patriarchy as an
institution is a social constant so deeply entrenched as to run through all other political, social, or economic forms,
whether of caste or class, feudality or bureaucracy, just as it pervades all major religions, it also exhibits great
In democracies, for example, females have often held no office or do

in such minuscule numbers as to be below even token
representation. Aristocracy, on the other hand, with its emphasis upon the magic and dynastic properties
variety in history and locale.
so (as now)
of blood, may at times permit women to hold power. The principle of rule by elder males is violated even more
frequently. Bearing in mind the variation and degree in patriarchy - as say between Saudi Arabia and Sweden,
Indonesia and Red China - we also recognise our own form in the U.S. and Europe to be much altered and
attenuated by the reforms described in the next chapter.
The alt is to reject affirmative fiat and enable discussion to create a

political space of coherent groups and dismantle patriarchal norms that
reinforce oppression, sexism, and racism

Is it possible to regard the relation of the sexes in a political light at all? It depends
on how one defines politics. I do not define the political area here as that narrow
and exclusive sector known as institutional or official politics of the Democrat or
Republican we have all reason to be tired and suspicious of them. By politics I
mean power structured relationships, the entire arrangement whereby
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one group of people is governed by another, one group is dominant and

the other subordinate. It is time we developed a more cogent and relevant
psychology and philosophy of power relationships not yet considered in out
institutional politics. It is time we gave attention to defining a theory of politics
which treats of power relationships on the less formal than establishmentarian
grounds of personal intercourse between members of well defined and coherent
groups races, castes, classes and sexes. It is precisely because such groups
have no representation in formal political structures that their oppression
is so entire and so continuous. In the recent past, we have been forced to
acknowledge that the relationship between the races in the United States
is indeed a political one and one of the control of collectivity defined by birth,
or another collectivity also defined by birth. Groups who rule by birth are fast
disappearing in the West and white supremacists are fated to go the way of
aristocrats and other extinct upper castes. We have yet one ancient and
universal arrangement for the political exploitation of one birth group by
another in the area of sex. Just as the study of racism has convinced as that
there exists a truly political relationship between races, and an oppressive
situation from which the subordinated group had no redress through
formal political structures whereby they might organize into conventional
political struggle and opposition just so any intelligent and objective
examination of our system of sexual politics or sex role structure will prove that the
relationship between the sexes now and throughout history is one of what Max
Weber once termed Herrschaft or dominance and subordination the birthright
control of one group by another-the male to rule and the female to be ruled. Women
have been placed in the position of minority status throughout history and even
after the grudging extension of certain minimal rights of citizenship and suffrage at
the beginning of this century. It is fatuous to suppose that women white or black
have any greater representation now that they vote than that they ever did.
Previous history has made it clear that the possession of the vote for 100
years has done the black man precious little good at all. Why, when this
arrangement of male rule and control of our society is so obvious why is
it never acknowledged or discussed? Partly, I suspect because such
discussion is regarded as dangerous in the extreme and because a culture
does not discuss its most basic assumptions and most cherished bigotries.
Why does no one ever remark that the military, industry,the universities, the
sciences, political office and finance (despite absurd declarations to the contrary on
the evidence that some little old lady owns stock over which she has no control).
Why does no one ever remark that every avenue of power in our culture
including the repressive forces of the police entirely in male hands?
Money, guns, authority itself, are male provinces. Even God is male and a
white male at that. The reasons for this gigantic evasion of the very facts of
our situation are many and obvious. They are also rather amusing. Lets look at a
few of the thousand defenses the masculine culture has built against any
infringement or even exposure of its control: is to react with ridicule and the
primitive mechanism of laughter and denial. Sex is funny its dirty and it is
something women have. Men are not sexual beings they are people they are
humanity. Therefore, any rational discussion of the realities of sexual life
degenerate as quickly as men can make them into sniggering sessions,
where through clich so ancient as to have almost ritual value, women who might
be anxious to carry on an adult dialogue are bullied back into their place".
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Links
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Link Anti-Cap Affs

Focusing on class liberation without first addressing the subject position
of the female in the economy is doomed to fail and props up racism and
sexism

IV Class
It is in the area of class that the caste-like status of the female within patriarchy is
most liable to confusion, for sexual status often operates in a superficially confusing
way within the variable of class. In a society where status is dependent upon the
economic, social, and educational circumstances of class, it is possible for
certain females to appear to stand higher than some males. Yet not when
one looks more closely at the subject. This is perhaps easier to see by means
of analogy: a black doctor or lawyer has higher social status than a poor
white sharecropper. But race, itself a caste system which subsumes class,
persuades the latter citizen that he belongs to a higher order of life , just as
it oppresses the black professional in spirit, whatever his material success may be.
In much the same manner, a truck driver or butcher has always his "manhood" to
fall back upon. Should this final vanity be offended, he may contemplate more
violent methods. The literature of the past thirty years provides a staggering
number of incidents in which the caste of virility triumphs over the social
status of wealthy or even educated women. In literary contexts one has to deal
here with wish-fulfilment. Incidents from life (bullying, obscene, or hostile remarks)
are probably another sort of psychological gesture of ascendancy. Both convey more
hope than reality, for class divisions are generally quite impervious to the hostility
of individuals. And yet while the existence of class division is not seriously
threatened by such expressions of enmity, the existence of sexual hierarchy
has been re-affirmed and mobilised to "punish" the female quite
effectively. The function of class or ethnic mores in patriarchy is largely a matter
of how overtly displayed or how loudly enunciated the general ethic of masculine
supremacy allows itself to become. Here one is confronted by what appears to be a
paradox: while in the lower social strata, the male is more likely to claim
authority on the strength of his sex rank alone, he is actually obliged more
often to share power with the women of his class who are economically productive;
whereas in the middle and upper classes, there is less tendency to assert a
blunt patriarchal dominance, as men who enjoy such status have more
power in any case. It is generally accepted that Western patriarchy has
been much softened by the concepts of courtly and romantic love. While
this is certainly true, such influence has also been vastly overestimated . In
comparison with the candour of "machismo" or oriental behaviour, one realises how
much of a concession traditional chivalrous behaviour represents - a sporting kind of
reparation to allow the subordinate female certain means of saving face. W hile a
palliative to the injustice of woman's social position, chivalry is also a
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technique for disguising it. One must acknowledge that the chivalrous stance is
a game the master group plays in elevating its subject to pedestal level. Historians
of courtly love stress the fact that the raptures of the poets had no effect upon the
legal or economic standing of women, and very little upon their social status. As the
sociologist Hugo Beigel has observed, both the courtly and the romantic
versions of love are "grants" which the male concedes out of his total
powers. Both have had the effect of obscuring the patriarchal character of
Western culture and m their general tendency to attribute impossible virtues to
women, have ended by confining them in a narrow and often remarkably
conscribing sphere of behaviour. It was a Victorian habit, for example, to insist the
female assume the function of serving as the male's conscience and living the life of
goodness he found tedious but felt someone ought to do anyway. The concept of
romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male
is free to exploit, since love is the only circumstance in which the female is
(ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity. And convictions of romantic love are
convenient to both parties since this is often the only condition in which the female
can overcome the far more powerful conditioning she has received toward sexual
inhibition. Romantic love also obscures the realities of female status and
the burden of economic dependency. As to "chivalry," such gallant gesture as
still resides in the middle classes has degenerated to a tired ritualism, which
scarcely serves to mask the status situation of the present. Within patriarchy one
must often deal with contradictions which ale simply a matter of class style. David
Riesman has noted that as the working class has been assimilated into the middle
class, so have its sexual mores and attitudes. The fairly blatant male chauvinism
which was once a province of the lower class or immigrant male has been absorbed
and taken on a certain glamour through a number of contemporary figures, who
have made it, and a certain number of other working-class male attitudes, part of a
new, and at the moment, fashionable life style. So influential is this working class
ideal of brute virility (or more accurately, a literary and therefore middle-class
version of it) become in our time that it may replace more discreet and
"gentlemanly" attitudes of the past. One of the chief effects of class within
patriarchy is to set one woman against another, in the past creating a lively
antagonism between whore and matron, and in the present between career
woman and housewife. One envies the other her "security" and prestige, while
the envied yearns beyond the confines of respectability for what she takes to be the
other's freedom, adventure, and contact with the great world . Through the
multiple advantages of the double standard, the male participates in both
worlds, empowered by his superior social and economic resources to play the
estranged women against each other as rivals. One might also recognise subsidiary
status categories among women: not only is virtue class, but beauty and age as
well. Perhaps, in the final analysis, it is possible to argue that women tend to
transcend the usual class stratifications in patriarchy, for whatever the class
of her birth and education , the female has fewer permanent class association
than does the male. Economic dependency renders her affiliations with
any class a tangential, vicarious, and temporary matter. Aristotle observed that
the only slave to whom a commoner might lay claim was his woman, and the
service of an unpaid domestic still provides working-class males with a "cushion"
against the buffets of the class system which incidentally provides them with some
of the psychic luxuries of the leisure class. Thrown upon their own resources, few
women rise above working class in personal prestige and economic power ,
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and women as a group do not enjoy many of the interests and benefits any class
may offer its male members. Women have therefore less of an investment in the
class system. But it is important to understand that as with any group whose
existence is parasitic to its rulers, women are a dependency class who live on
surplus And their marginal life frequently renders them conservative, for like all
persons in their situation (slaves are a classic example here) they identify their
own survival with the prosperity of those who feed them . The hope of
seeking liberating radical solutions of their own seems too remote for the
majority to dare contemplate and remains so until consciousness on the
subject is raised. As race is emerging as one of the final variables in sexual
politics, it is pertinent, especially in a discussion of modern literature, to devote a
few words to it as well. Traditionally, the white male has been accustomed to
concede the female of his own race, in her capacity as "his woman" a
higher status than that ascribed to the black male. Yet as white racist
ideology is exposed and begins to erode, racism's older protective attitudes toward
(white) women also begin to give way. And the priorities of maintaining male
supremacy might outweigh even those of white supremacy; sexism may be
more endemic in our own society than racism. For example, one notes in
authors whom we would now term overtly racist, such as D. H. Lawrence - whose
contempt for what he so often designates as inferior breeds is unabashed instances where the lower-caste male is brought on to master or humiliate the white
man's own insubordinate mate. Needless to say, the female of the non-white
races does not figure in such tales save as an exemplum of "true"
womanhood's servility, worthy of imitation by other less carefully instructed
females. Contemporary white sociology often operates under a similar
patriarchal bias when its rhetoric inclines toward the assertion that the
"matriarchal" (e.g. matrifocal) aspect of black society and the "castration" of
the black male are the most deplorable symptoms of black oppression in
white racist society, with the implication that racial inequity is capable of
solution by a restoration of masculine authority. Whatever the facts of the
matter may be, it can also be suggested that analysis of this kind presupposes
patriarchal values without questioning them, and tends to obscure both
the true character of and the responsibility for racist injustice toward
black humanity of both sexes.
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Link Econ Education 1nc**

The Affs use of an educational space to advance an economic cause
overlooks the legacy of oppression of the feminine that always already
foregrounds that dialogue this promotes patriarchy and subjugation of
women

One of the most efficient branches of patriarchal government lies in the agency of
its economic hold over its female subjects. In traditional patriarchy, women, as
non-persons without legal standing were permitted no actual economic
existence as they could neither own nor earn in their own right. Since
women have always worked in patriarchal societies, often at the most routine or
strenuous tasks, what is at issue here is not labor but economic reward. In modern
reformed patriarchal societies, women have certain economic rights, yet the
"woman's work" in which some two thirds of the female population in most
developed countries are engaged is work that is not paid for. In a money economy
where autonomy and prestige depend upon currency, this is a fact of great
importance. In general, the position of women in patriarchy is a continuous function
of their economic dependence. Just as their social position is vicarious and achieved
(often on a temporary or marginal basis) though males, their relation to the
economy is also typically vicarious or tangential. Of that third of women who
are employed, their average wages represent only half of the average
income enjoyed by men. These are the U. S. Department of Labor statistics for
average year-round income: white male, $6704, non-white male $4277, white
female, $3991, and non-white female $2816. The disparity is made somewhat
more remarkable because the educational level of women is generally
higher than that of men in comparable income brackets. Further, the kinds of
employment open to women in modem patriarchies are, with few exceptions,
menial, ill paid and without status. In modem capitalist countries women also
function as a reserve labor force, enlisted in times of war and expansion and
discharged in times of peace and recession. In this role American women have
replaced immigrant labor and now compete with the racial minorities. In
socialist countries the female labor force is generally in the lower ranks as well,
despite a high incidence of women in certain professions such as medicine. The
status and rewards of such professions have declined as women enter them, and
they are permitted to enter such areas under a rationale that society or the state
(and socialist countries are also patriarchal) rather than woman is served by such
activity. Since woman's independence in economic life is viewed with distrust,
prescriptive agencies of all kinds (religion, psychology, advertising, etc.)
continuously admonish or even inveigh against the employment of middle-class
women, particularly mothers. The toil of working class women is more readily
accepted as "need," if not always by the working-class itself, at least by the middleclass. And to be sure, it serves the purpose of making available cheap labor in
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factory and lower-grade service and clerical positions. Its wages and tasks are so
unremunerative that, unlike more prestigious employment for women, it fails to
threaten patriarchy financially or psychologically. Women who are
employed have two jobs since the burden of domestic service and child
care is unrelieved either by day care or other social agencies, or by the
cooperation of husbands. The invention of labor-saving devices has had no
appreciable effect on the duration, even if it has affected the quality of their
drudgery. Discrimination in matters of hiring, maternity, wages and hours is very
great. In the U. S. a recent law forbidding discrimination in employment, the
first and only federal legislative guarantee of rights granted to American women
since the vote, is not enforced, has not been enforced since its passage,
and was not enacted to be enforced. In terms of industry and production, the
situation of women is in many ways comparable both to colonial and to
pre-industrial peoples. Although they achieved their first economic autonomy in
the industrial revolution and now constitute a large and underpaid factory
population, women do not participate directly in technology or in
production. What they customarily produce (domestic and personal service) has
no market value and is, as it were, pre-capital. Nor, where they do participate in
production of commodities through employment, do they own or control or even
comprehend the process in which they participate. An example might make this
clearer: the refrigerator is a machine all women use, some assemble it in factories,
and a very few with scientific education understand its principles of operation. Yet
the heavy industries which roll its steel and produce the dies for its parts are in
male hands. The same is true of the typewriter, the auto, etc. Now, while knowledge
is fragmented even among the male population, collectively they could reconstruct
any technological device. But in the absence of males, women's distance from
technology today is sufficiently great that it is doubtful that they could
replace or repair such machines on any significant scale. Woman's distance
from higher technology is even greater: large-scale building construction; the
development of computers; the moon shot, occur as further examples. If
knowledge is power, power is also knowledge, and a large factor in their
subordinate position is the fairly systematic ignorance patriarchy imposes
upon women. Since education and economy are so closely related in the
advanced nations, it is significant that the general level and style of higher
education for women, particularly in their many remaining segregated institutions,
is closer to that of Renaissance humanism than to the skills of mid-twentiethcentury scientific and technological society. Traditionally patriarchy permitted
occasional minimal literacy to women while higher education was closed to them.
While modern patriarchies have, fairly recently, opened all educational levels
to women, the kind and quality of education is not the same for each sex.
This difference is of course apparent in early socialisation but it persists and enters
into higher education as well. Universities, once places of scholarship and the
training of a few professionals, now also p roduce the personnel of a
technocracy. This is not the case with regard to women. Their own colleges
typically produce neither scholars nor professionals nor technocrats. Nor are they
funded by government and corporations as are male colleges and those coeducational colleges and universities whose primary function is the education
of males. As patriarchy enforces a temperamental imbalance of personality traits
between the sexes, its educational institutions, segregated or coeducational,
accept a cultural programming toward the generally operative division
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between "masculine" and "feminine" subject matter, assigning the humanities

and certain social sciences (at least in their lower or marginal branches) to the
female - and science and technology, the professions, business and engineering to
the male. Of course the balance of employment, prestige and reward at
present lie with the latter. Control of these fields is very eminently a
matter of political power. One might also point out how the exclusive
dominance of males in the more prestigious fields directly serves the
interests of {patriarchal power in industry, government, and the military.
And since patriarchy encourages an imbalance in human temperament along sex
lines, both divisions of learning (science and the humanities) reflect this imbalance.
The humanities, because not exclusively male, suffer in prestige: the sciences,
technology, and business, because they are nearly exclusively male reflect the
deformation of the "masculine" personality, e.g., a certain predatory or aggressive
character. In keeping with the inferior sphere of culture to which women in
patriarchy have always been restricted, the present encouragement of their
"artistic" interests through study of the humanities is hardly more than an
extension of the "accomplishments" they once cultivated in preparation for the
marriage market. Achievement in the arts and humanities is reserved, now, as it has
been historically, for males. Token representation, be it Susan Sontag's or Lady
Murasaki's, does not vitiate this rule.
66/259
Link Economics/Growth
The 1AC focuses on the national economy while overlooking the everyday
economies of violence that block female advancement and uphold
patriarchal dominance

III Sociological
Patriarchy's chief institution is the family. It is both a mirror of and a
connection with the larger society; a patriarchal unit within a patriarchal whole.
Mediating between the individual and the social structure, the family effects
control and conformity where political and other authorities are
insufficient. As the fundamental instrument and the foundation unit of patriarchal
society the family and its roles are prototypical. Serving as an agent of the larger
society, the family not only encourages its own members to adjust and
conform, but acts as a unit in the government of the patriarchal state
which rules its citizens through its family heads. Even in patriarchal societies
where they are granted legal citizenship, women tend to be ruled through the
family alone and have little or no formal relation to the state. As co-operation
between the family and the larger society is essential, else both would fall apart,
the fate of three patriarchal institutions, the family, society, and the state
are interrelated. In most forms of patriarchy this has generally led to the
granting of religious support in statements such as the Catholic precept that "the
father is head of the family," or Judaism's delegation of quasi-priestly authority
to the male parent. Secular governments today also confirm this, as in census
practices of designating the male as head of household, taxation, passports etc.
Female heads of household tend to be regarded as undesirable; the
phenomenon is a trait of poverty or misfortune. The Confucian prescription
that the relationship between ruler and subject is parallel to that of father and
children points to the essentially feudal character of the patriarchal family (and
conversely, the familial character of feudalism) even in modern democracies.
Traditionally, patriarchy granted the father nearly total ownership over wife or
wives and children, including the powers of physical abuse and often even those
of murder and sale. Classically, as head of the family the father is both begetter
and owner in a system in which kinship is property. Yet in strict patriarchy, kinship
is acknowledged only through association with the male line. Agnation
excludes the descendants of the female line from property right and often
even from recognition. The first formulation of the patriarchal family was made
by Sir Henry Maine, a nineteenth-century historian of ancient jurisprudence. Maine
argues that the patriarchal basis of kinship is put in terms of dominion rather
than blood; wives, though outsiders, are assimilated into the line, while sisters
sons are excluded. Basing his definition of the family upon the patria potestes of
Rome, Maine defined it as follows: "The eldest male parent is absolutely supreme in
his household. His dominion extends to life and death and is as unqualified over his
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children and their houses as over his slaves." In the archaic patriarchal family "the
group consists of animate and inanimate property, of wife, children, slaves, land and
goods, all held together by subjection to the despotic authority of the eldest male."
McLennon's rebuttal to Maine argued that the Roman patria potestes was an
extreme form of patriarchy and by no means, as Maine had imagined, universal.
Evidence of matrilineal societies (preliterate societies in Africa and elsewhere)
refute Maine's assumption of the universality of agnation. Certainly Maine's central
argument, as to the primeval or state of nature character of patriarchy is but a
rather naif rationalisation of an institution Maine tended to exalt. The assumption of
patriarchy's primeval character is contradicted by much evidence which points to
the conclusion that full patriarchal authority, particularly that of the patria potestes
is a late development and the total erosion of female status was likely to be gradual
as has been its recovery. In contemporary patriarchies the male's de jure
priority has recently been modified through the granting of divorce protection,
citizenship, and property to women. Their chattel status continues in their loss of
name, their obligation to adopt the husband's domicile, and the general legal
assumption that marriage involves an exchange of the female's domestic service
and (sexual) consortium in return for financial support. The chief contribution of the
family in patriarchy is the socialisation of the young (largely through the example
and admonition of their parents) into patriarchal ideology's prescribed attitudes
toward the categories of role, temperament, and status. Although slight differences
of definition depend here upon the parents' grasp of cultural values, th e general
effect of uniformity is achieved, to be further reinforced through peers,
schools, media, and other learning sources, formal and informal . While we
may niggle over the balance of authority between the personalities of various
households, one must remember that the entire culture supports masculine
authority in all areas of life and - outside of the home - permits the female none
at all. To insure that its crucial functions of reproduction and socialisation of the
young take place only within its confines, the patriarchal family insists upon
legitimacy. Bronislaw Malinowski describes this as "the principle of legitimacy"
formulating it as an insistence that "no child should be brought into the
world without a man - and one man at that - assuming the role of
sociological father." By this apparently consistent and universal prohibition
(whose penalties vary by class and in accord with the expected operations of the
double standard) patriarchy decrees that the status of both child and mother is
primarily or ultimately dependent upon the male. And since it is not only his
social status, but even his economic power upon which his dependents generally
rely, the position of the masculine figure within the family - as without - is
materially, as well as ideologically, extremely strong. Although there is no
biological reason why the two central functions of the family (socialisation
and reproduction) need be inseparable from or even take place within it,
revolutionary or utopian efforts to remove these functions from the family
have been so frustrated, so beset by difficulties, that most experiments so far
have involved a gradual return to tradition. This is strong evidence of how
basic a form patriarchy is within all societies, and of how pervasive its effects
upon family members. It is perhaps also an admonition that change undertaken
without a thorough understanding of the sociopolitical institution to be changed is
hardly productive. And yet radical social change cannot take place without
having an effect upon patriarchy. And not simply because it is the political
form which subordinates such a large percentage of the population (women and
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youth) but because it serves as a citadel of property and traditional

interests. Marriages are financial alliances, and each household operates as an
economic entity much like a corporation. As one student of the family states it, "the
family is the keystone of the stratification system, the social mechanism by which it
is maintained."
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Link Hegemony
Heg turn The declaration of being at war makes rape, assault, and
prostitution be ignored in the face of masculine propaganda about
castration of power

Because of the smoke-screen of masculine propaganda one hears endless
cant about castration whereas real and actual crimes men commit
against women are never mentioned. It is considered bad taste,
unsportsmanlike to refer to the fact that there are thousands of rapes or
crimes against the female personality in New-York City every year I speak
only of those instances which are reported probably one tenth of those which
occur. It is also generally accepted that to regard Richard Speck and so many others
like him in anything, but the light, of exceptional and irrelevant instances of
individual pathology, is another instance of not playing that Speck merely enacted
the presupposition of the majority male supremacists of the sterner sort and they
are -legion. That his murders echo in the surrealist chambers of masculine phantasy
and wish fulfillment is testified to by every sleazy essay into sadism and white slave
traffic on the dirty movie belt of 42nd St, and anti-social character of hard core
pornography. The Story of O tells it like it is about masculine phantasy better than
does Romeo and Juliet. So does the Playboy, chortling over the con-game he has
played on that Rabbit, he dreams of screwing the Bunny, or woman reduced
to a meek and docile animal toy. For the extent and depth of the male's hatred
and hostility toward his subject colony of women is a source of continual
astonishment.' Just as behind the glowing' mirage of darkeys" crooning in the
twilight is reality the block, the whip and the manacle, the history of women is full
of colorful artifact. ...the bound feet of all of old China's women women
deliberately deformed that they might be the better controlled (you can work
with those useless feet, but you cannot run away) the veil of Islam (or an
attenuated existence as a human soul condemned to wear a cloth sack over her
head all the days of her half-life); the lash, the rod, domestic imprisonment
through most of the world's history -rape, concubinage, prostitution . Yes,
we have our own impressive catalogue of open tyrannies . Woman are still sold in
Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. In Switzerland, they are even today
disenfranchised. And in nearly every rod of ground on this earth they live only via
the barter system of sex in return for food of the latter. Like every system of
oppression male supremacy rests finally on force, physical power, rape,
assault and the threat of assault. A final resource when all else has failed
the male resorts to attack. But the fear of force is there before every woman
always as a deterrent dismissal, divorce, violence personal sexual or economic.
As in any society in a state of war, the enforcement of male rule which
euphemism calls the battle of the sexes", is possible only through the
usual lies convenient to countries at war The Enemy is Evil the Enemy is
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not Human. And men have always been able to believe in the innate evil of
women. Studies of primitive societies just as studies of our own religious texts
illustrate over and over the innumerable instances of taboos practiced against
women. A group of aborigines agree with Judaism in the faith that a
menstruating, woman is unclean, taboo, untouchable. Should she have
access to weapons or other sacred and ritual articles the male, she will place a hex
or spell upon them that their masculine owners will not survive. Everything that
pertains to her physical make-up or function -is despicable or subversive.
Let side the village and inhabit a hut alone and without food during her period - let
her be forbidden the temple even those outer precincts assigned to her for aspecified number of-days after, as the Gospels-coolly inform us she has given birth
to the very savior of the world for she is still, dirty. Dirty and mysterious. Have you
ever thought it curious that nocturnal' emissions were not regarded as either dirty
or mysterious, that the penis was (until Industrialism decided to veil it again for
greater effect) never considered as dirty but so regal and imperious that its shape
is the one assigned to scepters, bombs, guns, and airplanes?
Demeaning patriarchal practices are used to justify fear of the other
Primitive peoples explain the phenomenon of the female's genitals in terms of a wound, sometimes reasoning that
she was visited by a bird or snake and mutilated into her present condition. Once she was wounded, now she
The Freudian description of the female

genitals is in terms of a "castrated" condition. The uneasiness and disgust
female genitals arouse in patriarchal societies is attested to through
religious, cultural, and literary proscription. In preliterate groups fear is also a factor, as in
the belief in a castrating vagina dentata. The penis, badge of the male's superior status in both preliterate and
civilised patriarchies, is given the most crucial significance, the subject both of endless
boasting and endless anxiety. Nearly all patriarchies enforce taboos against women touching ritual
bleeds. Contemporary slang for the vagina is "gash."
objects (those of war or religion) or food. In ancient and preliterate societies women are generally not permitted to
eat with men. Women eat apart today in a great number of cultures, chiefly those of the Near and Far East. Some of
In their
function of domestic servants, females are forced to prepare food, yet at
the same time may be liable to spread their contagion through ; A similar
situation obtains with blacks in the United States. They are considered
filthy and infectious, yet as domestics they are forced to prepare food for
their queasy superiors. In both cases the dilemma is generally solved in a deplorably
illogical fashion by segregating the act of eating itself, while cooking is carried on out of sight by
the very group who would infect the table. With an admirable consistency, some Hindu
the inspiration of such custom appears to lie in fears of contamination, probably sexual in origin.
males do not permit their wives to touch their food at all. In nearly every patriarchal group it is expected that the
dominant male will eat first or eat better, and even where the sexes feed together, the male shall be served by the
female. All patriarchies have hedged virginity and defloration in elaborate rites and interdictions. Among
71/259
virginity presents an interesting problem in ambivalence. On the one

hand, it is, as in every patriarchy, a mysterious good because a sign of property
received intact. On the other hand, it represents an unknown evil
associated with the mana of blood and terrifyingly "other." So auspicious is the
preliterates
event of defloration that in many tribes the owner-groom is willing to relinquish breaking the seal of his new
possession to a stronger or older personality who can neutralise the attendant dangers. Fears of defloration appear
Although any physical suffering

endured in defloration must be on the part of the female (and most societies cause
her - bodily and mentally - to suffer anguish), the social interest, institutionalised in patriarchal
ritual and custom, is exclusively on the side of the male's property interest,
prestige, or (among preliterates) hazard.
to originate in a fear of the alien sexuality of the female.
72/259
Link-LGBTQ CP
Societal practices towards homosexuals reveal the misogyny to justify
sexual politics

Considerable sexual activity does take place in the men's house, all of it, needless
to say, homosexual. But the taboo against homosexual behaviour (at least among equals) is almost
universally of far stronger force than the impulse and tends to effect a rechannelling of the libido into violence.
This association of sexuality and violence is a particularly militaristic habit

of mind. The negative and militaristic coloring of such men's house
homosexuality as does exist, is of course by no means the whole character of homosexual
sensibility. Indeed, the warrior caste of mind with its ultra-virility, is more incipiently homosexual, in its exclusively
the
heterosexual role-playing indulged in, and still more persuasively, the contempt in which the
younger, softer, or more "feminine" members are held, is proof that the actual
ethos is misogynist, or perversely rather than positively heterosexual. The true inspiration of
men's house association therefore comes from the patriarchal situation
rather than from any circumstances inherent in the homo-amorous
relationship. If a positive attitude toward heterosexual love is not quite, in Seignebos' famous dictum, the
invention of the twelfth century, it can still claim to be a novelty . Most patriarchies go to great
length to exclude love as a basis of mate selection. Modern patriarchies
tend to do so through class, ethnic, and religious factors. Western classical thought
male orientation, than it is overtly homosexual. (The Nazi experience is an extreme case in point here.) And
was prone to see in heterosexual love either a fatal stroke of ill luck bound to end in tragedy, or a contemptible and
brutish consorting with inferiors. Medieval opinion was firm in its conviction that love was sinful if sexual, and sex
Primitive society practices its misogyny in terms of taboo and mana

which evolve into explanatory myth. In historical cultures, this is transformed into ethical, then literary,
and in the modem period, scientific rationalisations for the sexual politic. Myth is, of
sinful if loving.
course, a felicitous advance in the level of propaganda, since it so often bases its arguments on ethics or theories of
origins. The two leading myths of Western culture are the classical tale of Pandora's box and the Biblical story of the
Fall. In both cases earlier mana concepts of feminine evil have passed through a final literary phase to become
highly influential ethical justifications of things as they are.
73/259
Link Pandoras Box

Pandoras Box and the Bible reinforce patriarchal religion and ethics,
blames the women for the burdens of humankind

Pandora appears to be a discredited version of a Mediterranean fertility goddess, for in Hesiod's Theogony she
wears a wreath of flowers and a sculptured diadem in which are caned all the creatures of land and sea. Hesiod
ascribes to her the introduction of sexuality which puts an end to the golden age when "the races of men had been
Pandora was
the origin of "the damnable race of women - a plague which men must live
with." The introduction of what are seen to be the evils of the male human
condition came through the introduction of the female and what is said to be her
unique product, sexuality. In Works And Days Hesiod elaborates on Pandora and what she represents - a
perilous temptation with "the mind of a bitch and a thievish nature," full of "the
cruelty of desire and longings that wear out the body," 'lies and cunning
words and a deceitful soul," a snare sent by Zeus to be "the ruin of men." Patriarchy
has God on its side. One of its most effective agents of control is the powerfully expeditious character of
living on earth free from all evils, free from laborious work, and free from all wearing sickness."
its doctrines as to the nature and origin of the female and the attribution to her alone of the dangers and evils it
imputes to sexuality. The Greek example is interesting here: when it wishes to exalt sexuality it celebrates fertility
through the phallus; when it wishes to denigrate sexuality, it cites Pandora .
Patriarchal religion and

ethics tend to lump the female and sex together as if the whole burden of
the onus and stigma it attaches to sex were the fault of the female alone.
Thereby sex, which is known to be unclean, sinful, and debilitating, pertains to the female, and the male
identity is preserved as a human, rather than a sexual one. The Pandora myth is
one of two important Western archetypes which condemn the female through her sexuality and explain her position
as her well-deserved punishment for the primal sin under whose unfortunate consequences the race yet labours.
The more sophisticated

vehicle of myth also provides official explanations of sexual history. In Hesiod's
Ethics have entered the scene, replacing the simplicities of ritual, taboo, and mana.
tale, Zeus, a rancorous and arbitrary father figure, in sending Epimetheus evil in the form of female genitalia, is
actually chastising him for adult heterosexual knowledge and activity. In opening the vessel she brings (the vulva or
the male satisfies his curiosity but sustains the discovery

only by punishing himself at the hands of the father god with death and the assorted calamities of
hymen, Pandora's "Box")
postlapsarian life. The patriarchal trait of male rivalry across age or status line, particularly those of powerful father
and rival son, is present as well as the ubiquitous maligning of the female. The myth of the Fall is a highly finished
version of the same themes. As the central myth of the Judeo-Christian imagination and therefore of our immediate
cultural heritage, it is well that we appraise and acknowledge the enormous power it still holds over us even in a
This
mythic version of the female as the cause of human suffering, knowledge,
and sin is still the foundation of sexual attitudes, for it represents the
most crucial argument of the patriarchal tradition in the West. The Israelites
rationalist era which has long ago given up literal belief in it while maintaining its emotional assent intact.
lived in a continual state of war with the fertility cults of their neighbours; these latter afforded sufficient attraction
to be the source of constant defection, and the figure of Eve, like that of Pandora, has vestigial traces of a fertility
goddess overthrown. There is some, probably unconscious, evidence of this in the Biblical account which
"Adam called his wife's name Eve;

because she was the mother of all living things." Due to the fact that the tale represents
announces, even before the narration of the fall has begun -
a compilation of different oral traditions, it provides two contradictory schemes for Eve's creation, one in which both
Eve is fashioned later than Adam, an

afterthought born from his rib, peremptory instance of the male's expropriation of the life force
sexes are created at the same time, and one in which
74/259
through a god who created the world without benefit of female assistance.
The tale of Adam and Eve is, among many other things, a narrative of how humanity invented sexual intercourse.
Many such narratives exist in preliterate myth and folk tale. Most of them strike us now as delightfully funny stories
of primal innocents who require a good deal of helpful instruction to figure it out. There are other major themes in
the story: the loss of primeval simplicity, the arrival of death, and the fist conscious experience of knowledge. All of
them revolve about sex. Adam is forbidden to eat of the fruit of life or of the knowledge of good and evil, the
warning states explicitly what should happen if he tastes of the latter: "in that day that thou eatest thereof thou
shalt surely die." He eats but fails to die (at least in the story), from which one might infer that the serpent told the
truth. But at the moment when the pair eat of the forbidden tree they awake to their nakedness and feel shame.
Sexuality is clearly involved, though the fable insists it is only tangential to a higher prohibition against disobeying
orders in the matter of another and less controversial appetite - one for food. Roheim points out that the
Hebrew verb for "eat" can also mean coitus. Everywhere in the Bible
"knowing" is synonymous with sexuality, and clearly a product of contact with the phallus,
here in the fable objectified as a snake. To blame the evils and sorrows of life - loss of Eden and the rest - on
sexuality, would all too logically implicate the male, and such implication is hardly the purpose of the story,
Therefore it is the
female who is tempted first and "beguiled" by the penis, transformed into
something else, a snake. Thus Adam has "beaten the rap" of sexual guilt, which appears to be why the
designed as it is expressly in order to blame all this world's discomfort on the female.
sexual motive is so repressed in the Biblical account. Yet the very transparency of the serpent's universal phallic
in her inferiority and

vulnerability the woman takes and eats, simple carnal thing that she is, affected by
flattery even in a reptile. Only after this does the male fall, and with him,
humanity - for the fable has made him the racial type, whereas Eve is a mere sexual type and, according to
tradition, either expendable or replaceable. And as the myth records the original sexual adventure, Adam was
seduced by woman, who was seduced by a penis. 'The woman whom thou gavest to be
value shows how uneasy the mythic mind can be about its shifts. Accordingly,
with me, she gave me of the fruit and I did eat" is the first man's defence. Seduced by the phallic snake, Eve is
convicted for Adam's participation in sex. Adam's curse is to toil in the "sweat of his brow," namely the labor the
Eden was a fantasy world without either effort or

activity, which the entrance of the female, and with her sexuality, has
destroyed. Eve's sentence is far more political in nature and a brilliant "explanation" of her inferior status. " In
sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. And thy desire shall be to thy
husband. And he shall rule over thee." Again, as in the Pandora myth, a proprietary father
male associates with civilisation.
figure is punishing his subjects for adult heterosexuality. It is easy to agree with Roheim's comment on the negative
attitude the myth adopts toward sexuality: "Sexual
maturity is regarded as a misfortune,

something that has robbed mankind of happiness . . . the explanation of
how death came into the world.'' What requires further emphasis is the responsibility
of the female, a marginal creature, in bringing on this plague, and the justice of her suborned condition as
dependent on her primary role in this original sin. The connection of woman, sex, and sin
constitutes the fundamental pattern of western patriarchal thought
thereafter
75/259
Link Race
Failure to interrogate gender makes understandings of racial inequity
impossibleTrayvon proves
Mata 12 (Eric, DePaul University, When Race and Gender Intersect: Trayvon Martin
and George Zimmerman(updated), on his blog, Against Me(n), 3/20/12,
http://ericmata.blogspot.com/2012/03/when-race-and-gender-intersecttrayvon.html)//LA
The death of Trayvon Martin is a travesty. Social media (at least those I follow) is up in arms
as to why George Zimmerman, the man who is said to have shot and killed Martin has not been arrested. Police say
they don't have enough evidence to arrest him. As I write this, the Justice Department and the FBI and looking into
the case to determine the next steps. My hope is that the family of Trayvon Martin get the justice they deserve to
Trayvon is dead because he is Black.

I truly believe that the combination of racial profiling and a neighborhood
watch system, coupled with conceal and carry laws is the reason he is
dead. At 17. Racism is still alive. We do not live in a post-racial society.
Barack Obama becoming president did not change the course for all Black
men and boys in this country. Trayvon is also dead because George
Zimmerman, although not White, lives in a country where Racism dictates
a lot of how he thinks about Black boys and men . It is Racism and white
privilege that caused Zimmerman to follow Trayvon. It is Racism and White
privilege that caused Zimmerman to call the police, to label him suspect,
to guess that he was on drugs. It is Racism and White privilege that made
Zimmerman confront Trayvon on that gated community sidewalk. Trayvon
is also dead because Zimmerman is a man. The notions of gender of
masculinity is what lead Zimmerman to a Neighborhood Watch group.
Notions of gender and masculinity drove Zimmerman to buy a gun, to
apply for and obtain a conceal and carry license. It is these notions of
gender and masculinity that drove Zimmerman to disobey the 911
operator, to confront Trayvon about his presence in that gated community.
And it is these notions of gender and masculinity that drove Zimmerman
to pull that trigger, to protect his community from what he determined,
through the lens of both race and masculinity , to be a threat. I don't want
us to overlook that race had a significant impact on the events of that evening. I do want us to
consider that gender, masculinity and maleness also had something to do
with Trayvon's death. But if we fail to look at gender also , we miss out on
an opportunity to highlight an extremely important component of this
atrocity. The intersection of White privilege and gender normative male
dominance is what drove Zimmerman to kill Martin. Yes, we must
definitely address the fact that Racism is still alive and breathing in our country. That
it defines and dictates the experiences of people in color in a very real,
and tangible way. We address that White privilege is also very real and
tangible and that too defines and dictates the experiences of White people in the US. We must also
stay to find some semblance of closure in this tragic event.
address the role that gender and masculinity play in the lives of men and
boys and how that sometimes leads to violence. It is Zimmerman having been impacted
by White privilege that led him to profile Trayvon, and it was his maleness that led him to confront and ultimately
shoot Trayvon.
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Its not just a question of race Marissa Alexander exists at the vertex of
race and gender but the latter is never investigated Alexander exists as
a gender transgressor and as such, was put in her place
CD 12 (CrimeDime, blog run by criminologists and criminal justice professionals, 528-12, Part I: Marissa Alexander Isnt Really About Stand Your Ground,
http://crimedime.com/2012/05/28/marissa-alexander-isnt-really-about-stand-yourground-part-i/) gz
In Alexanders case, she is middle class, educated with a masters degree,
and a mommy. Alexander is also black. Her race and ethnicity are powerful
variables which, in this case, may have been strong enough to override
her overall higher social status. Or, at the very least, it played a role. Imagine for a moment a
woman in an orange jumpsuit behind bars. Is it easier to picture that woman as white? Or as a person of color?
Alexanders race, in turn, is connected to the crime she committed. Was it something we think of as stereotypically
feminine like teen girls shoplifting? Or was it something we think of as more masculine, something involving
violence and a gun? To the extent that a woman or girl accused of committing a crime is still performing her
gender, she tends to still be treated reasonably fairly. Certain crimes are not exactly thought of as acceptable for
women to commit, but not serious affronts to the social order. These include things like shoplifting, passing bad
Violence in general, and guns

in particular, however, are primarily the social domain of men. Consider
infanticide. When women commit this crime, it is seen as an abomination,
fundamentally unnatural. We ask, how could a woman, a mother, do this
horrible thing, this crime against nature? And in the social imagination,
fueled by the inaccuracies of a public educated by the media, we tend to
think that women do this more than men. In fact, thats not true. Men
commit more infanticides than women, but it just doesnt capture our
attention in the same way. Because violence perpetrated by men is
treated as natural. Tragic, upsetting, but not unnatural. Not something
that shocks the social conscience, because weve more or less accepted
male violence as an unfortunate, but understandable, presence in our
society. Alexander got a gun to protect herself, knew how to use it, and
then did, in fact, fire the weapon to protect herself and her child. This is
not how women are supposed to behave. Guns are intrinsically associated
with masculinity, not femininity. Marissa Alexander did not act like a lady,
she did not cower in a corner, she did not submit to her husband. Marissa
Alexander was a gender transgressor, operating outside the proscribed
boundaries of acceptable female behavior. That transgression has helped
to cost her the next twenty years of her life.
checks, stealing from the petty cash or the supply room, and so on.
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Impact- VTL
Patriarchy kills value to life of the woman until she becomes the burden it
is said to be

Evidence from anthropology, religious and literary myth all attests to the politically expedient character of
patriarchal convictions about women. One anthropologist refers to a consistent patriarchal strain of assumption that
"woman's biological differences set her apart . . . she is essentially inferior," and since "human institutions grow
. socially
organised attitudes toward women arise from basic tensions expressed by
the male." Under patriarchy the female did not herself develop the
symbols by which she is described. AS both the primitive and the civilised
worlds are male worlds, the ideas which shaped culture in regard to the
female were also of male design. The image of women as we know it is an
image created by men and fashioned to suit their needs. These needs
spring from a fear of the "otherness" of woman. Yet this notion itself
presupposes that patriarchy has already been established and the male has
from deep and primal anxieties and are shaped by irrational psychological mechanisms . .
already set himself as the human form, the subject and referent to which the female is "other" or alien. What ever
its origin, the function of the
male's sexual antipathy is to provide a means of control

over a subordinate group and a rationale which justifies the inferior station of
those in a lower order, "explaining" the oppression of their lives. The feeling that
woman's sexual functions are impure is both world-wide and persistent. One sees evidence of it everywhere in
literature, in myth, in primitive and civilised life. It is striking how the notion persists today. The event of
menstruation, for example, is a largely clandestine affair, and the psycho-social effect of the stigma attached must
have great effect on the female ego. There is a large anthropological literature on menstrual taboo; the practice of
isolating offenders in huts at the edge of the village occurs throughout the primitive world. Contemporary slang
denominates menstruation as "the curse."
There is considerable evidence that such

discomfort as women suffer during their period is often likely to be
psychosomatic, rather than physiological, cultural rather than biological, in origin. That this may also
be true to some extent of labor and delivery is attested to by the recent experiment with "painless childbirth."
Patriarchal circumstances and beliefs seem to have the effect of poisoning

the female's own sense of physical self until it often truly becomes the
burden it is said to be.
Patriarchy forces women into being minorities by status not numbers- loss
of vtl
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The continual surveillance in which she is held tends to perpetuate the infantilisation of women even in situations
The female is continually obliged to seek survival or

advancement through the approval of males as those who hold power. She
such as those of higher education.
may do this either through appeasement or through the exchange of her sexuality for support and status. As the
cultural media, past

and present, have a devastating effect upon her self image, she is
customarily deprived of any but the most trivial sources of dignity or selfrespect. In many patriarchies, language, as well as cultural tradition, reserve the human condition for the male.
history of patriarchal culture and the representations of herself within all levels of its
With the Indo-European languages this is a nearly inescapable habit of mind, for despite all the customary pretence
that "man" and "humanity" are terms which apply equally to both sexes, the fact is hardly obscured that in practice,
general application favours the male far more often than the female as referent, or even sole referent, for such
designations. When in any group of persons, the ego is subjected to such invidious versions of itself through social
beliefs, ideology, and tradition, the effect is bound to be pernicious. This coupled with the persistent though
frequently subtle denigration women encounter daily through personal contacts, the impressions gathered from the
the discrimination in matters of behaviour,

employment, and education which they endure, should make it no very special
cause for surprise that women develop group characteristics common to those
who suffer minority status and a marginal existence. A witty experiment by Philip
images and media about them, and
Goldberg proves what everyone knows, that having internalised the disesteem in which they are held, women
despise both themselves and each other. This simple test consisted of asking women undergraduates to respond to
the scholarship in an essay signed alternately by one John McKay and one Joan McKay. In making their assessments
the students generally agreed that John was a remarkable thinker, Joan an unimpressive mind. Yet the articles were
women in patriarchy are

for the most part marginal citizens when they are citizens at all , their situation is
like that of other minorities, here defined not as dependent upon numerical size of the group,
but on its status. "A minority group is any group of people who because of
their physical or cultural characteristics, are singled out from others in the
society in which they live for differential and unequal treatment. " Only a handful
identical: the reaction was dependent on the sex of the supposed author. As
of sociologists have ever addressed themselves in any meaningful way to the minority status of women. And
psychology has yet to produce relevant studies on the subject of ego damage to the female which might bear
comparison to the excellent work done on the effects of racism on the minds of blacks and colonials. The
remarkably small amount of modern research devoted to the psychological and social effects of masculine
supremacy on the female and on the culture in general attests to the widespread ignorance or unconcern of a
conservative social science which takes patriarchy to be both the status quo and the state of nature.
Patriarchy denies minorities access to a better life creating a cycle of

wanting to be the fortunate who get to entertain the rulers- kills vtl

As with other marginal groups a certain handful of women are accorded higher status that they may perform a
species of cultural policing over the rest. Hughes speaks of marginality as a case of status dilemma experienced by
women, blacks, or second-generation Americans who have "come up" in

the world but are often refused the rewards of their efforts on the grounds
of their origins. This is particularly the case with "new" or educated women. Such exceptions are generally
obliged to make ritual, and often comic, statements of deference to justify their elevation. These characteristically
take the form of pledges of "femininity," namely a delight in docility and a large appetite for masculine dominance.
It is a common
trait of minority status that a small percentage of the fortunate are
permitted to entertain their rulers. (That they may entertain their fellow subjects in the process
Politically, the most useful persons for such a role are entertainers and public sex objects.
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Women entertain, please, gratify, satisfy and flatter men with

their sexuality. In most minority groups athletes or intellectuals are
allowed to emerge as "stars," identification with whom should content their less fortunate fellows.
is less to the point.)
In the case of women both such eventualities are discouraged on the reasonable grounds that the most popular
explanations of the female's inferior status ascribe it to her physical weakness or intellectual inferiority. Logically,
exhibitions of physical courage or agility are indecorous, just as any display of serious intelligence tends to be out of
Perhaps patriarchy's greatest psychological weapon is simply its

universality and longevity. A referent scarcely exists with which it might be contrasted or by which it
might be confuted. While the same might be said of class, p atriarchy has a still more tenacious or
powerful hold through its successful habit of passing itself off as nature.
place.
Religion is also universal in human society and slavery was once nearly so; advocates of each were fond of arguing
in terms of fatality, or irrevocable human "instinct" - even "biological origins." When a system of power is
thoroughly in command, it has scarcely need to speak itself aloud; when its workings are exposed and questioned,
it becomes not only subject to discussion, but even to change. Such a period is the one next under discussion.
Internal Links + Impacts
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81/259
Rape (IL)
I/l Patriarchys control over pornography exposes antagonism in the malereinforces masculine hostility

Hostility is expressed in a number of ways. One is laughter. Misogynist literature,
the primary vehicle of masculine hostility, is both an hortatory and comic
genre. Of all artistic forms in patriarchy it is the most frankly propagandistic.
Its aim is to reinforce both sexual factions in their status. Ancient, Medieval,
and Renaissance literature in the West has each had a large element of misogyny.
Nor is the East without a strong tradition here, notably in the Confucian strain which
held sway in Japan as well as China. The Western tradition was indeed
moderated somewhat by the introduction of courtly love. But the old
diatribes and attacks were coterminous with the new idealisation of woman. In the
case of Petrarch, Boccaccio, and some others, one can find both attitudes fully
expressed, presumably as evidence of different moods, a courtly pose adopted for
the ephemeral needs of the vernacular, a grave animosity for sober and eternal
Latin. As courtly love was transformed to romantic love, literary misogyny grew
somewhat out of fashion. In some places in the eighteenth century it declined
into ridicule and exhortative satire. In the nineteenth century its more acrimonious
forms almost disappeared in English. Its resurrection in twentieth-century
attitudes and literature is the result of a resentment over patriarchal
reform, aided by the growing permissiveness in expression which has
taken place at an increasing rate in the last fifty years. Since the abatement of
censorship, masculine hostility (psychological or physical) in specifically sexual
contexts has become far more apparent. Yet as masculine hostility has been
fairly continuous, one deals here probably less with a matter of increase than with a
new frankness in expressing hostility in specifically sexual contexts. It is a matter
of release and freedom to express what was once forbidden expression
outside of pornography or other "underground" productions, such as those of De
Sade. As one recalls both the euphemism and the idealism of descriptions of coitus
in the Romantic poets (Keats's Eve of St. Agnes), or the Victorian novelists (Hardy,
for example) and contrasts it with Miller or William Burroughs, one has an idea of
how contemporary literature has absorbed not only the truthful explicitness
of pornography, but its anti-social character as well. Since this tendency to
hurt or insult has been given free expression, it has become far easier to assess
sexual antagonism in the male.
Guilt of sexuality is placed upon women in the patriarchal system with
double standards on virginity and abortion
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The aspects of patriarchy already described have each an effect upon the psychology of both sexes. Their principal
result is the interiorisation of patriarchal ideology. Status, temperament, and role are all value systems with endless
psychological ramifications for each sex. Patriarchal marriage and the family with its ranks and division of labor play
a large part in enforcing them. The male's superior economic position, the female's inferior one have also grave
The large quantity of guilt attached to sexuality in patriarchy is

overwhelmingly placed upon the female, who is, culturally speaking, held to be the culpable
or the more culpable party in nearly any sexual liaison, whatever the extenuating circumstances. A tendency
toward the reification of the female makes her more often a sexual object
than a person. This is particularly so when she is denied human rights through chattel status. Even where
implications.
this has been partly amended the cumulative effect of religion and custom is still very powerful and has enormous
Woman is still denied sexual freedom and the biological

control over her body through the cult of virginity, the double standard,
the prescription against abortion, and in many places because
contraception is physically or psychically unavailable to her.
psychological consequences.
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Rape (!)
Patriarchy endorses dominance by forcing subjects into silence through
rape, pornography, and racism- affects sexual politics

Before assault she is almost universally defenceless both by her physical and
emotional training. Needless to say, this has the most far-reaching effects on
the social and psychological behaviour of both sexes. Patriarchal force
also relies on a form of violence particularly sexual in character and
realised most completely in the act of rape. The figures of rapes reported
represent only a fraction of those which occur, as t he shame of the event is
sufficient to deter women from the notion of civil prosecution under the
public circumstances of a trial. Traditionally rape has been viewed as an
offence one male commits upon another - a matter of abusing "his
woman." Vendetta, such as occurs in the American South, is carried out for
masculine satisfaction the exhilarations of race hatred, and the interests of property
and vanity (honour). In rape, the emotions of aggression, hatred, contempt,
and the desire to break or violate personality, take a form consummately
appropriate to sexual politics. In the passages analysed at the' outset of this
study, such emotions were present at a barely sublimated level and were a key
factor in explaining the attitude behind the author's use of language and tone.
Patriarchal societies typically link feelings of cruelty with sexuality, the
latter often equated both with evil and with power. This is apparent both in
the sexual fantasy reported by psychoanalysis and that reported by
pornography. The rule here associates sadism with the male ("the masculine role")
and victimisation with the female ("the feminine role''). Emotional response to
violence against women in patriarchy is often curiously ambivalent;
references to wife-beating, for example, invariably produce laughter and
some embarrassment. Exemplary atrocity, such as the mass murders committed
by Richard Speck, greeted at one level with a certain scandalised, possibly
hypocritical indignation, is capable of eliciting a mass response of titillation at
another level. At such times one even hears from men occasional expressions of
envy or amusement. In view of the sadistic character of such public fantasy as
caters to male audiences in pornography or semi-pornographic media, one might
expect that a certain element of identification is by no means absent from the
general response. Probably a similar collective frisson sweeps through racist
society when its more "logical" members have perpetrated a lynching.
Unconsciously, both crimes may serve the larger group as a ritual act,
cathartic in effect.
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Forced Sterilization
Institutional Racism allows for black women to be striped of their basic
rights
Fox 13 (Lauren R.D. Fox,writer, Female Prisoners Sterilized Without Consent In
California Prisons July 9th, 2013 http://madamenoire.com/285399/femaleprisoners-sterilized-without-consent-in-californiaprisons/#sthash.mL6VdbnY.dpuf, //AR)
During the years of 2006-2010, the California Department of Corrections
and Rehabilitation sterilized about 150 women without receiving approval
from the state. The sterilization process is also known as tubal ligation; the doctors who performed this
procedure were contracted by the CDCR. The doctors were funded through state funds to
perform the procedure, with expenses totaling up to $147,460. The state of California
made the practice of forced sterilization on prison inmates (especially
those who classify as mentally ill and poor ) illegal since 1979 . Also, it is
illegal for prisons to use federal funds to cover the costs of sterilization .
Prisons are able to find a loop-hole in this law by allowing doctors to visit
inmates. These visitations give doctors the opportunity to seek approval from inmates, even when they are in
labor. A former inmate, Christina Nguyen who worked at Valley State Prison
overheard medical staff persuading inmates who had several prison terms
to become sterilized: I was like, Oh my God, thats not right, said Nguyen, 28. Do they
think theyre animals, and they dont want them to breed anymore ? Inmates
told The Sacramento Bee: Michelle Anderson, who gave birth in December 2006 while at Valley State, said shed
had one prior C-section. Anderson, 44, repeatedly was asked to agree to be sterilized, she said, and was not told
what risk factors led to the requests. She refused. Nikki Montano also had had one C-section before she landed at
Valley State in 2008, pregnant and battling drug addiction. Montano, 42, was serving time after pleading guilty to
burglary, forgery and receiving stolen property.
The mother of seven children, she said

neither Heinrich nor the medical staff told her why she needed a tubal
ligation. I figured thats just what happens in prison that thats the best
kind of doctor youre going get, Montano said. He never told me nothing
about nothing . Although prison and medical staff members told female
inmates the sterilization would benefit them health wise, the underlying
tone and purpose of the procedure is being used against women who
would be labeled as second-class citizens . According to OB-GYN Dr. James
Heinrich: I provided an important service to poor women who faced health risks in future pregnancies
because of past Caesarean sections. Over a 10-year period , that isnt a huge amount of money
compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted
children
as they procreated more . Sterilization goes beyond medical
procedures; it becomes a race and economic issue between the

upper/lower class . During the mid-twentieth century, sterilization was tested upon African American and
Latino women. The women who were a part of these tests were not told the precautions of sterilization. At the time
most civil-rights leaders claimed
sterilization and even birth control was used to
regulate or reduce the number of births by women of color . With all the
advancements in family planning and contraception, do you think the medical procedure of sterilization should be
obsolete?
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Root Cause
Patriarchy is the most controlling form of dominance against subjectivity
and difference its a series of social patterns that can be challenged
effectively by fierce resistance

Patriarchal religion, popular attitude, and to some degree, science as well assumes these psycho-social distinctions
where culture is acknowledged as

shaping behaviour, it is said to do no more than cooperate with nature . Yet
the temperamental distinctions created in patriarchy ("masculine" and "feminine" personality traits)
do not appear to originate in human nature, those of role and status still less. The heavier
to rest upon biological differences between the sexes, so that
musculature of the male, a secondary sexual characteristic and common among mammals, is biological in origin but
is also culturally encouraged through breeding, diet and exercise. Yet it is hardly an adequate category on which to
base political relations within civilisation.
Male supremacy, like other political creeds, does not finally

reside in physical strength but in the acceptance of a value system which is not
biological. Superior physical strength is not a factor in political relations - vide those of race and class.
Civilisation has always been able to substitute other methods (technic, weaponry, knowledge) for those of physical
physical
exertion is very generally a class factor, those at the bottom performing the most strenuous
strength, and contemporary civilisation has no further need of it. At present, as in the past,
tasks, whether they be strong or not. It is often assumed that patriarchy is endemic in human social life, explicable
or even inevitable on the grounds of human physiology.
Such a theory grants patriarchy

logical as well as historical origin. Yet if as some anthropologists believe, patriarchy is not of
primeval origin, but was preceded by some other social form we shall call pre-patriarchal, then the argument of
physical strength as a theory of patriarchal origins would hardly constitute a sufficient explanation - unless the
male's superior physical strength was released in accompaniment with some change in orientation through new
values or new knowledge. Conjecture about origins is always frustrated by lack of certain evidence. Speculation
about prehistory, which of necessity is what this must be, remains nothing but speculation. Were one to indulge in
it, one might argue the likelihood of a hypothetical period preceding patriarchy. What would be crucial to such a
premise would be a state of mind in which the primary principle would be regarded as fertility or vitalist processes.
In a primitive condition, before it developed civilisation or any but the crudest technic, humanity would perhaps find
the most impressive evidence of creative force in the visible birth of children, something of a miraculous event and
It is possible that the

circumstance which might drastically redirect such attitudes would be the
discovery of paternity. There is some evidence that fertility cults in ancient society at some point took a
linked analogically with the growth of the earth's vegetation.
turn toward patriarchy, displacing and downgrading female function in procreation and attributing the power of life
to the phallus alone. Patriarchal religion could consolidate this position by the creation of a male God or gods,
demoting, discrediting, or eliminating goddesses and constructing a theology whose basic postulates are male
So much
for the evanescent delights afforded by the game of origins. The question
of the historical origins of patriarchy - whether patriarchy originated
primordially in the male's superior strength, or upon a later mobilisation
of such strength under certain circumstances - appears at the moment to
be unanswerable. It is also probably irrelevant to contemporary patriarchy, where we are left with the
supremacist, and one of whose central functions is to uphold and validate the patriarchal structure.
realities of sexual politics, still grounded, we are often assured, on nature. Unfortunately, as the psycho-social
distinctions made between the two sex groups which are said to justify their present political relationship are not
the clear, specific, measurable and neutral ones of the physical sciences, but are instead of an entirely different
character - vague, amorphous, often even quasi-religious in phrasing - it must be admitted that many of the
generally understood distinctions between the sexes in the more significant areas of role and temperament, not to
mention status, have in fact, essentially cultural, rather than biological, bases.
Attempts to prove that
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temperamental dominance is inherent in the male
(which for its advocates, would be
have
been notably unsuccessful. Sources in the field are in hopeless disagreement about the nature of
tantamount to validating, logically as well as historically, the patriarchal situation regarding role and status)
sexual differences, but the most reasonable among them have despaired of the ambition of any definite equation
between temperament and biological nature. It appears that we are not soon to be enlightened as to the existence
of any significant inherent differences between male and female beyond the bio-genital ones we already know.
Endocrinology and genetics afford no definite evidence of determining mental-emotional differences. Not only is
there insufficient evidence for the thesis that the present social distinctions of patriarchy (status, role,
temperament) are physical in origin, but we
are hardly in a position to assess the existing

differentiations, since distinctions which we know to be culturally induced
at present so outweigh them. Whatever the areal" differences between
the sexes may be, we are not likely to know them until the sexes are treated
differently, that is alike. And this is very far from being the case at present. Important new research not only
suggests that the possibilities of innate temperamental differences seem more remote than ever, but even raises
questions as to the validity and permanence of psycho-sexual identity. In doing so it gives fairly concrete positive
evidence of the overwhelmingly cultural character of gender, i.e. personality structure in terms of sexual category.
What Stoller and other experts define as "core gender identity" is now thought to be established in the young by
Dictionaries
stress that the major connotation of sex is a biological one, as for example, in the
the age of eighteen months. This is how Stoller differentiates between sex and gender:
phrases sexual relations or the male sex. In agreement with this, the word sex, in this work will refer to the male or
female sex and the component biological parts that determine whether one is a male or a female; the word sexual
will have connotations of anatomy and physiology. This obviously leaves tremendous areas of behaviour, feelings,
thoughts and fantasies that are related to the sexes and yet do not have primarily biological connotations. It is for
some of these psychological phenomena that the term gender will be used: one can speak of the male sex or the
one can also talk about masculinity and femininity and not
necessarily be implying anything about anatomy or physiology . Thus, while sex
and gender seem to common sense inextricably bound together, one purpose this study will be to confirm
the fact that the two realms (sex and gender) are not inevitably bound in anything like a
one-to-one relationship, but each may go into quite independent ways. In
cases of genital malformation and consequent erroneous gender
assignment at birth, studied at the California Gender Identity Center, the discovery was made that it is
easier to change the sex of an adolescent male, whose biological identity turns out to be
contrary to his gender assignment and conditioning - through surgery - than to undo the
educational consequences of years, which have succeeded in making the
subject temperamentally feminine in gesture, sense of self, personality and interests.
Studies done in California under Stoller's direction offer proof that gender identity (I am a girl, I am a boy)
is the primary identity any human being holds - the first as well as the most permanent
female sex, but
and far-reaching. Stoller later makes emphatic the distinction that sex is biological, gender psychological, and
therefore cultural: "Gender is a term that has psychological or cultural rather than biological connotations. If the
"masculine" and
"feminine"; these latter may be quite independent of (biological) sex. Indeed, so
arbitrary is gender, that it may even be contrary to physiology: ". . . a lthough the external genitalia
(penis, testes, scrotum) contribute to the sense of maleness, no one of them is
proper terms for sex are "male" and "female," the corresponding terms for gender are
essential for it, not even all of them together.
In the absence of complete evidence, I
agree in general with Money, and the Hampsons who show in their large series of intersexed patients that
gender role is determined by postnatal forces, regardless of the anatomy

and physiology of the external genitalia.'' It is now believed that the human fetus
is originally physically female until the operation of androgen at a certain
stage of gestation causes those with y chromosomes to develop into males. Psycho-sexually (e.g., in terms of
masculine and feminine, and in contradistinction to male and female) there is no differentiation
between the sexes at birth. Psycho-sexual personality is therefore
postnatal and learned. ... the condition existing at birth and for several
months thereafter is one of psycho-sexual undifferentiation. Just as in the embryo,
morphologic sexual differentiation passes from a plastic stage to one of fixed immutability, so also does psycho-
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so
strong and fixed a feeling as personal sexual identity must stem from
something innate, instinctive, and not subject to postnatal experience and
learning. The error of this traditional assumption is that the power and
permanence of something learned has been underestimated . The experiments of
sexual differentiation become fixed and immutable - so much so, that mankind has traditionally assumed that
animal ethologists on imprinting have now corrected this misconception. John Money who is quoted above,
believes that "the acquisition of a native language is a human counterpart to imprinting," and g ender
first
established "with the establishment of a native language.''
This would place the

time of establishment at about eighteen months. Jerome Kagin's studies in how children of pre-speech age are
handled and touched, tickled and spoken to in terms of their sexual identity ("Is it a boy or a girl?" "Hello, little
the most considerable emphasis on purely tactile

learning which would have much to do with the child's sense of self, even
before speech is attained. Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two
fellow," "Isn't she pretty," etc.) put
cultures and their life experiences are utterly different and this is crucial. Implicit in all the gender identity
development which takes place through childhood is the sum total of the parents', the peers', and the culture's
notions of what is appropriate to each gender by way of temperament, character, interests, status, worth, gesture,
Every moment of the child's life is a clue to how he or she must

think and behave to attain or satisfy the demands which gender places
upon one. In adolescence, the merciless task of conformity grows to crisis proportions, generally cooling and
settling in maturity. Since patriarchy's biological foundations appear to be so very
insecure, one has some cause to admire the strength of a "socialisation" which can continue a universal
and expression.
condition "on faith alone," as it were, or through an acquired value system exclusively. What does seem decisive in
assuring the maintenance of the temperamental differences between the sexes is the conditioning of early
childhood. Conditioning runs in a circle of self-perpetuation and self-fulfilling prophecy. To take a simple example :
expectations the culture cherishes about his gender identity encourage

the young male to develop aggressive impulses, and the female to thwart
her own or turn them inward. The result is that the male tends to have aggression reinforced in his
behaviour, often with significant anti-social possibilities. Thereupon the culture consents to believe the possession
of the male indicator, the testes, penis, and scrotum, in itself characterises the aggressive impulse, and even
vulgarly celebrates it in such encomiums as "that guy has balls." The same process of reinforcement is evident in
producing the chief "feminine" virtue of passivity. In contemporary terminology, the basic division of temperamental
trait is marshalled along the line of "aggression is male" and "passivity is female." All other temperamental traits
are somehow - often with the most dexterous ingenuity - aligned to correspond. If aggressiveness is the trait of the
master class, docility must be the corresponding trait of a subject group. The usual hope of such line of reasoning is
that "nature," by some impossible outside chance,
might still be depended upon to

rationalise the patriarchal system. An important consideration to be remembered here is that in
patriarchy, the function of norm is unthinkingly delegated to the male - were it not, one might as plausibly speak of
"feminine" behaviour as active, and "masculine" behaviour as hyperactive or hyperaggressive. Here it might be
added, by way of a coda, that data from physical sciences has recently been enlisted again to support sociological
arguments, such as those of Lionel Tiger who seeks a genetic justification of patriarchy by proposing a '"bonding
instinct" in males which assures their political and social control of human society. One sees the implication of such
a theory by applying its premise to any ruling group. Tiger's thesis appears to be a misrepresentation of the work of
Lorenz and other students of animal behaviour. Since his evidence of inherent trait is patriarchal history and
One can only advance

genetic evidence when one has genetic (rather than historical) evidence to
advance. As many authorities dismiss the possibility of instincts (complex inherent behavioural patterns) in
organisation, his pretensions to physical evidence are both specious and circular.
humans altogether, admitting only reflexes and drives (far simpler neural responses), the prospects of a "bonding
Should one regard sex in humans as a drive, it is

still necessary to point out that the enormous area of our lives, both in early "socialisation" and in
adult experience, labelled "sexual behaviour," is almost entirely the product of
learning. So much is this the case that even the act of coitus itself is the product of a long
series of learned responses - responses to the patterns and attitudes, even as to the object of sexual
choice, which are set up for us by our social environment. The arbitrary character of
patriarchal ascriptions of temperament and role has little effect upon their
power over us. Nor do the mutually exclusive, contradictory, and polar qualities of the categories
instinct" appear particularly forlorn.
"masculine" and "feminine" imposed upon human personality give rise to sufficiently serious question among us.
Under their aegis each personality becomes little more, and often less than half, of its human potential. Politically,
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the fact that each group exhibits a circumscribed but complementary personality and range of activity is of
secondary importance to the fact that each represents a status or power division. In the matter of conformity
patriarchy is a governing ideology without peer; it is probable that no

other system has ever exercised such a complete control over its
subjects.
Patriarchy creates gender inequality which helps fuel racism

What little literature the social sciences afford us in this context confirms the presence in women of
the expected traits of minority status: group self-hatred and self-rejection,
a contempt both for herself and for her fellows - the result of that
continual, however subtle, reiteration of her inferiority which she
eventually accepts as a fact. Another index of minority status is the fierceness with which all
minority group members are judged. The double standard is applied not only in cases of sexual conduct but other
contexts as well. In the relatively rare instances of female crime too: in many American states a woman convicted
of crime is awarded a longer sentence. Generally an accused woman acquires a notoriety out of proportion to her
acts and due to sensational publicity she may be tried largely for her "sex life." But so effective is her conditioning
toward passivity in patriarchy, woman is rarely extrovert enough in her maladjustment to enter upon criminality.
Just as every minority member must either apologise for the excesses of a
fellow or condemn him with a strident enthusiasm, women are
characteristically harsh, ruthless and frightened in their censure of aberration among
their numbers. The gnawing suspicion which plagues any minority member,
that the myths propagated about his inferiority might after all be true often reaches
remarkable proportions in the personal insecurities of women. Some find their subordinate position so hard to bear
that they repress and deny its existence. But a large number will recognise and admit their circumstances when
they are properly phrased. Of two studies which asked women if they would have preferred to be born male, one
found that one fourth of the sample admitted as much, and in another sample, one half. When one inquires of
children, who have not yet developed as serviceable techniques of evasion, what their choice might be, if they had
one, the answers of female children in a large majority of cases clearly favour birth into the elite group, whereas
The phenomenon of parents' prenatal

preference for male issue is too common to require much elaboration. In the light of the
boys overwhelmingly reject the opinion of being girls.
imminent possibility of parents actually choosing the sex of their child, such a tendency is becoming the cause of
some concern in scientific circles. Comparisons such as Myrdal, Hacker, and Dixon draw between the ascribed
blacks and women reveal that common opinion associates the

same traits with both: inferior intelligence, an instinctual or sensual
gratification, an emotional nature both primitive and childlike, an
imagined prowess in or affinity for sexuality, a contentment with their own
lot which is in accord with a proof of its appropriateness, a wily habit of
deceit, and concealment of feeling. Both groups are forced to the same accommodational
attributes of
tactics: an ingratiating or supplicatory manner invented to please, a tendency to study those points at which the
dominant group are subject to influence or corruption, and an assumed air of helplessness involving fraudulent
appeals for direction through a show of ignorance. It is ironic how misogynist literature has for centuries
concentrated on just these traits, directing its fiercest enmity at feminine guile and corruption, and particularly that
element of it which is sexual, or, as such sources would have it, "wanton."
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Death penalty
Patriarchy deprives women of control on their own body results the death
penalty of the woman and fetus

We are not accustomed to associate patriarchy with force. So perfect is its system
of socialisation, so complete the general assent to its values, so long and so
universally has it prevailed in human society, that it scarcely seems to require
violent implementation. Customarily, we view its brutalities in the past as exotic or
"primitive" custom. Those of the present are regarded as the product of individual
deviance, confined to pathological or exceptional behaviour, and without general
import. And yet, just as under other total ideologies (racism and colonialism are
somewhat analogous in this respect) control in patriarchal society would be
imperfect, even inoperable, unless it had the rule of force to rely upon,
both in emergencies and as an ever-present instrument of intimidation.
Historically, most patriarchies have institutionalised force through their
legal systems. For example, strict patriarchies such as that of Islam, have
implemented the prohibition against illegitimacy or sexual autonomy with a death
sentence. In Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia the adulteress is still stoned to death
with a mullah presiding at the execution. Execution by stoning was once common
practice through the Near East. It is still condoned in Sicily . Needless to say there
was and is no penalty imposed upon the male correspondent. Save in recent
times or exceptional cases, adultery was not generally recognised in males except
as an offence one male might commit against another's property interest. In
Tokugawa Japan, for example, an elaborate set of legal distinctions were made
according to class. A samurai was entitled, and in the face of public knowledge,
even obliged, to execute an adulterous wife, whereas a chonin (common citizen) or
peasant might respond as he pleased. In cases of cross-class adultery, the lowerclass male convicted of sexual intimacy with his employer's wife would, because he
had violated taboos of class and property, be beheaded together with her. Upper
strata males had, of course, the same license to seduce lower-class
women as we are familiar with in Western societies. Indirectly, one form of
"death penalty" still obtains even in America today. Patriarchal legal
systems in depriving women of control over their own bodies drive them
to illegal abortions; it is estimated that between two and five thousand
women die each year from this cause. Excepting a social license to physical
abuse among certain class and ethnic groups, force is diffuse and generalised
in most contemporary patriarchies. Significantly, force itself is restricted to the
male who alone is psychologically and technically equipped to perpetrate physical
violence? Where differences in physical strength have become immaterial through
the use of arms, the female is rendered innocuous by her socialisation.
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Battle of the sexes

Patriarchy puts the sexes at war justifying heinousness activities against
woman by making her an inferior species

The history of patriarchy presents a variety of cruelties and barbarities:
the suttee execution in India, the crippling deformity of foot-binding in
China, the lifelong ignominy of the veil in Islam, or the widespread
persecution of sequestration, the gynaecium, and purdah. Phenomenon such
as clitoridectomy, clitoral incision, the sale and enslavement of women under one
guise or another, involuntary and child marriages , concubinage and
prostitution, still take place - the first in Africa, the latter in the Near and Far
East, the last generally. The rationale which accompanies that imposition of
male authority euphemistically referred to as "the battle of the sexes"
bears a certain resemblance to the formulas of nations at war, where any
heinousness is justified on the grounds that the enemy is either an inferior
species or really not human at all. The patriarchal mentality has concocted a
whole series of rationales about women which accomplish this purpose tolerably
well. And these traditional beliefs still invade our consciousness and affect our
thinking to an extent few of us would be willing to admit.
Alt Solvency
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Castration Alt
The alt is a rejection of the affs ideology to metaphorically castrate them
of the patriarchal status quo

At the level of common attitude sex and particularly that very explosive subject of
the relationship of the sexes is a subject closed to intelligent investigation and
accessible only to persiflage and levity. The second evasion our culture has
evolved is via folk myth. From Dagwood to the college professor, sex is folklore
and the official version of both is that the male is the victim of a widespread
conspiracy. From the folk figure of Jiggs or Punch to the very latest study of the
damage which mothers wreak upon their sons, we are assailed by the bogey of the
overbearing woman woman as some terrible and primitive natural evil our
twentieth-century remnant of the primitive fear of the unknown, unknown
at least to the male, and remember, it is the male in our culture who
defines reality. Man is innocent, he is put upon, everywhere he is in danger of
being dethroned. Dagwood the archetypal henpecked husband is a figure of
folk fun only because the culture assumes that a man will rule his wife or cease to
be very much of a man. Like a dimwitted plantation owner who is virtually
controlled by his far-cleverer steward or valet, Dagwood is a member of the
ruling class held up both to scorn and to sympathy-scorn for being too human
or too incompetent to rule, yet sympathetic because every other member of the
privileged group knows in his heart how burdensome it is to maintain the
illusory facade of superiority over those who are your natural equals. The
phantasy of the male victim is not only a myth, it is politically expedient myth,
myth either invented or disseminated to serve the political end of a rationalization
or a softening and partial denial of power. The actual relation of the sexes in our
culture from the dawn of history has been diametrically opposite to the of official
cult of the downtrodden. Yet our culture seeks on every level of discussion to
deny logical charge of oppression which any objective view of the, sex structure
would bring up, masculine society has a fascinating tactic of appropriating
all sympathy for itself. It has lately taken up the practice of screaming out that it
is the victim of unnatural surgery ... it has been castrated". Even Albert Shanker
has discovered of late that black community control, the Mayor, and the Board of
Education have performed this abomination upon his person. To those in fear of
castration word one word of comfort. The last instance of its practice on a white
man in western culture was the late l8th century when the last castrati lost a vital
section of his anatomy in the cause of the art of music at the hands of another
male, I must add. For castration is an ancient cruelty which males practice on each
other. In the American South it was as a way to humiliate black victims of
the Klan. In the Ancient East it was a barbarous form of punishment for crime. In
the courts of the Italian Renaissance castration was a perverse method of providing
soprano voices for the Papal Choir. It was felt that women were too profane to sing
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the holy offices so to supply the demand for the higher musical register, eunuchs
were created through putting young men to the knife As the practice of physical
castration has been abolished clear that the word in current usage must
be accepted in a metaphoric rather than literal connotation , if we are to any
sense of the fantastic anxiety contemporary male egos, for on every hand, in the
media and in the culture both high and low, men today have come to see the
terrible specter of the castrating female all about them, their paranoiac delusions
are taken for social fact. Having in a confused way, associated his genitals
with his power, the male now bellows in physical pain and true hysteria
every time his social and political prerogatives are threatened. If by
castration is meant a loss through being forced to share power: with
oppressed groups deprived of power- or even of human status, then there
are many white men in America who will suffer this psychic operation, but
it will be the removal of a cancer in the brain and heart not of any.
pleasurable or creative organ. To, argue that any woman who insists on full human,
status is a castrating bitch or guilty of the obscure evil: of penis envy (only the
consummate male chauvinist could have imagined this term) is as patently silly as
to argue that dispossessed blacks want to become white men issue is not to be
Whitey, but to have a fair share of what Whitey has the whole world of human
possibility. While I am fully aware that equal rights entail equal responsibility
there are some things Whitey has which I- am very sure I dont want, for
example, a Green Beret, a Zippo for burning down, villages the ear of a dead of
peasant, the burden of the charred flesh a Vietnamese child. Nor do I have any
interest in acquiring the habits of violence, warfare (unless in the just cause of
self-defense a cause I cannot foresee ever happening in American foreign policy),
or the white man's imperialist racism, or rape or the capitalist exploitation
of poverty and ignorance.
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AT: Alt Fails

The alt. is possible, its a matter of us having it within our power to create
a world that is bearable, we hold fate in our hands

It is time we realized that the whole structure of male and female
personality is arbitrarily imposed by social conditioning a social
conditioning which has taken all the possible traits of human personality which
Margaret Mead once, by way of analogy, compared to the many colors of the
rainbow's spectrum and arbitrarily assigned traits into two categories; thus
aggression is masculine, passivity-feminine violence- masculine, tenderness
feminine, intelligence masculine and emotion feminine, etc., etc... arbitrarily
departmentalizing human qualities into two neat little piles which are
drilled into children by toys, games, the social propaganda of television
and the board of education's deranged whim as to what is proper male
female Role-Building. What we must now set about doing is to reexamine this
whole foolish and segregated house of cards, and pick from it what we can use:
Dante, Shakespeare, Lady Murasaki and Mozart, Einstein and the care for life which
we have bred into women and accept these as human traits. Then we must get
busy to eliminate what are not properly humane or even human ideas the warrior,
the killer, the hero as homicide, the passive, dumb cow victim. We must now begin
to realize and to retrain ourselves to see that both intelligence and a reverence for
life are HUMAN qualities. It is high time we began to be reasonable about the
relationship of sexuality to personality and admit the facts -the present
assignment of temperamental traits to sex is moronic, limiting and hazardous.
Virility - the murderer's complex- or self definition in terms of how many or how
often or how efficiently he can oppress his fellow - This has got to go. There is a
whole generation coming of age in America who have already thoroughly
sickened of the military male ideal, who know they were born men and don't have
to prove it by killing someone or wearing crew cuts. There is also a vast number of
women who are beginning to wake out of the long sleep known as cooperating in
one's own oppression and self-denigration, and they are banding together, in
nationwide chapters of the National Organization for Women in the myriad groups
of Radical Women springing up in cities all over the country and the world, in the
women's liberation groups of SDS and in other groups or, on campus, and they are
joining together to make the beginnings of a new and massive women's movement
in America and in the world to establish true equality between the sexes, to break
the old machine of sexual politics and replace it with a more human and civilized
world for both sexes, and to end the present system's oppression of men as well as
women. There are other forces at work to change thewhole face of
American society: the black movement to end racism, the student
movement with its numbers and powers for spreading the idea of a new society
founded on democratic principles, free of the war reflex. free of the economic and
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racial exploitation reflex. Black people, students and women that's alot of
people with our combined numbers it is probably 70% of the population or
more. It is more than enough to change the course and character of our
society surely enough to cause a radical social revolution. And maybe it will
also be the first Revolution to avoid the pitfall of bloodshed, a mere
change of dictators and the inevitable counter-revolution which follows
upon such betrayal and loss of purpose. We are numbers sufficient to alter
the course of human history -by changing fundamental values by affecting
an entire change of consciousness. We cannot have such a change of
consciousness unless we rebuild values -we cannot rebuild values unless we
restructure personality.' But we cannot do this or solve racial and economic
crimes unless we end the oppression of all people unless we end the idea
of violence, of dominance, of power, unless we end the idea of oppression
itself unless we realize-that a revolution in sexual policy is not only part of
but basic to any real change in the quality life . Social and cultural revolution
in America and the world depend on a change of consciousness of which a new
relationship between the sexes and a new definition of humanity and human
personality are an integral part. As we awake and begin to take action, there
will be enough of us and we will have both a purpose and a goal the first
truly human condition, the first really human society. Let us begin the
revolution and let us begin it with love: All of us, black, white, and gold, male and,
female, have it, within our power to create a world we could bear out of the
desert we inhabit for we hold our very fate in our hands.
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AT: Alt Causes/Alt Fails

Action now is key as students we live in a utopia of being almost treated
equally we can solve for a lack of representation and oppression

And now we have it we realize how badly we were cheated we had fought so long,
worked so hard, pushed back despair so many times that we were exhausted we
just said then give us that and we will do the rest ourselves. But -we didn't
realize, as perhaps blacks never realized until the Civil Rights Movement,
that the ballot is no real admission to civil life in America; it means
nothing at all if you are not represented in a representative democracy.
And we are not represented now any more than black people... both groups
have only one senator one Tom apiece. The United States has fewer women in
public office than hardly any nation in the world we are more effectively ostracized
from political life in this country than any other constituency in America and we
are 53% of its population. Political nominees announced their intention of helping
asthmatic children and the mentally retarded of every age, if elected but not a
word about women half the population- but not a word the largest minority
status group in history. But not one word. It is time the official fallacy of the
West and of the United States particularly - that the sexes are now equal
socially and politically - be exploded for the hoax it really is. For at present
any gainsaying of this piety is countered with the threat that women have got too
much power I they're running the world, and other tidbits of frivolity which the
speaker, strange as it may seem, might often enough believe. For the more petty
male ego(like that of the cracker or the Union man..in the North who voted for
Wallace) in his paranoia is likely to believe that because one woman or
one black man in millions can make nearly or even a bit more than he does
the whole bunch are taking over that sordid little corner of the world he
regarded as his birthright because the was white and male and on which he had
staked his very identity-just because it prevented him from seeing himself as
exploited by the very caste he had imagined he was part of and with whom, despite
all evidence to the contrary, he fancied he shared the gifts of the earth and the
American dream . Nightmare that it is. The actual facts of the situation of woman
in America today are sufficient evidence that, white or black, women are at the
bottom unless they sleep with the top. On their own they are Nobody and
taught every day they are Nobody and taught so well they have come to
internalize that destructive notion and even believe it. The Department of
Labor statistics can't hide the fact that this is a man's world a white man's
world: the average year-round income of the white male is $6,704, of a black male
$4,277, of a white I female $3,991, and of the black woman $2,816. A s students
you live in a Utopia enjoy it, for it is the only moment in your lives when
you will be treated nearly as equals. When you get married or get a job you will
be made to see where power is, but then it will be too late. That is why you
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should organize now: look at your curriculum and look at your housing rules,
that's a start at realizing how-you are treated unfairly. But the oppression of women
is not only economic; that's just a part of it. The oppression of women is Total
and therefore it exists in the mind, it is psychological oppression. L et's
have a look at how it works, for it works like a charm. From earliest childhood
every female child is carefully taught that she is to be a life-long incompetent at
every sphere of significant human activity therefore she must convert herself
into a sex object a Thing. She must be pretty and assessed by the world:
weighed, judged and measured by her looks alone. If she's pretty, she can marry;
then she can concentrate rate her energies on pregnancy and diapers. That's life
that's female life. That's what it is to reduce and limit the expectations and
potentialities of one half of the human race to the level animal behavior.
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Alt Solvency
The alt is key to other radical reforms
Baskerville 8
( Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.*Stephen Baskerville teaches political science at Patrick Henry College. He is the author of
Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland Books). http://profam.org/pub/fia/fia.2202.htm, "The Family in
America Online Edition Volume 22 Number 02)
// SC
Divorce also demonstrates how sexual radicalism reproduces itself in new forms. It has almost certainly led to same-sex marriage, which would not be an issue today if marriage had not already been
devalued by divorce. Commentators miss the point when they oppose homosexual marriage on the grounds that it would undermine traditional understandings of marriage, writes Bryce Christensen.
It is only because traditional understandings of marriage have already been severely undermined that homosexuals are now laying claim to it.[46] Though gay activists cite their very desire to marry
as evidence that their lifestyle is not inherently promiscuous, they also acknowledge that that desire arises only by the promiscuity permitted in modern marriage. Stephanie Coontz notes that gays are
attracted to marriage only in the form debased by heterosexual divorce: Gays and lesbians simply looked at the revolution heterosexuals had wrought and noticed that, with its new norms, marriage
Same-sex marriage is therefore only a symptom of the larger

politicization of private and sexual life. Further, just as the divorce revolution
led to same-sex marriage, so through the child abuse industry it has
extended this to parenting by same-sex couples. Most critiques of homosexual parenting have focused on the
could work for them, too.[47]
therapeutic question of whether it is developmentally healthy for children to be raised by two homosexuals.[48] Few have stopped to ask the more momentous political question of where homosexual
parents get children in the first place. Here the discussion does not require esoteric child-development theory or psychological jargon from academic experts. It can readily be understood by any
parent who has been interrogated by Child Protective Services. The answer is that homosexuals get other peoples children, and they get them from the same courts and social service bureaucracies
While attention has been focused on sperm donors and

surrogate mothers, most of the children sought by potential homosexual
parents are existing children whose ties to one or both of their natural
parents have been severed. Most often, this has happened through
divorce.[49] The question then arises whether the original parent or parents ever agreed to part with their children or did something to warrant losing them. Current law governing divorce
that are operated by their feminist allies.
and child custody renders this question open. The explosion of foster care and the assumed but unexamined need to find permanent homes for allegedly abused children provides perhaps the strongest
argument in favor of gay marriage and gay parenting.[50] Yet the politics of child abuse and divorce indicate that this assumption is not necessarily valid. The government-generated child abuse
epidemic, and the mushrooming foster care business which it feeds, have allowed government agencies to operate what amounts to a traffic in children. The San Diego Grand Jury reports a widely held
Introducing
same-sex marriage and adoption into this political dynamic could
dramatically increase the demand for children to adopt, thus intensifying
pressure on social service agencies and biological parents to supply such
children. While sperm donors and surrogate mothers supply some children for gay parents, in practice most are already taken from their natural parents because of divorce, unwed
perception within the community and even within some areas of the Department [of Social Services] that the Department is in the baby brokering business.[51]
parenting, child abuse accusations, or connected reasons. Massachusetts Senator Therese Murray, claiming that 40% of adoptions have gone to gay and lesbian couples, urges sympathy for children
who have been neglected, abandoned, abused by their own families.[52] But false and exaggerated abuse accusations against not only fathers but mothers too make it far from self-evident that these
the very issue of gay parenting has arisen as

the direct and perhaps inevitable consequence once government officials
got into the business which began largely with divorce of distributing
other peoples children.
children are in fact victims of their own parents. What seems inescapable is that
Answers To
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AT: Perm
Only rejection solvesany powerful circle is controlled by man including
politics means even if women initiate change it still imitates the males
efforts and methods

Patriarchal myth typically posits a golden age before the arrival of women, while its social practices permit males to
Sexual segregation is so prevalent in patriarchy that one

Nearly every powerful circle in contemporary
patriarchy is a men's group. But men form groups of their own on every level. Women's
groups are typically auxiliary in character, imitative of male efforts and methods on a
generally trivial or ephemeral plane. They rarely operate without recourse to male
authority, church or religious groups appealing to the superior authority of a cleric,
political groups to male legislators, etc. In sexually segregated situations the distinctive quality
be relieved of female company.
encounters evidence of it everywhere.
of culturally enforced temperament becomes very vivid. This is particularly true of those exclusively masculine
organisations which anthropology generally refers to as men's house institutions. The men's house is a fortress of
patriarchal association and emotion. Men's houses in preliterate society strengthen masculine communal
experience through dances, gossip, hospitality, recreation, and religious ceremony. They are also the arsenals of
sports and some other activities

provide males with a supportive solidarity which society does not trouble
to provide for females. While hunting, politics, religion, and commerce may
play a role, sport and warfare are consistently the chief cement of men's house comradery. Scholars of men's
male weaponry. David Riesman has pointed out that
house culture from Hutton Webster and Heinrich Schurtz to Lionel Tiger tend to be sexual patriots whose aim is to
justify the apartheid the institution represents. Schurtz believes an innate gregariousness and a drive toward
fraternal pleasure among peers urges the male away from the inferior and constricting company of women.
Notwithstanding his conviction that a mystical "bonding instinct" exists in males, Tiger exhorts the public, by
The institution's less genial

function of power center within a state of sexual antagonism is an aspect
of the phenomenon which often goes unnoticed. The men's house of Melanesia fulfil a
organised effort, to preserve the men's house tradition from its decline.
variety of purposes and are both armory and the site of masculine ritual initiation ceremony. Their atmosphere is
not very remote from that of military institutions in the modern world: they reek of physical exertion, violence, the
aura of the kill, and the throb of homosexual sentiment. They are the scenes of scarification, head-hunting
young men are to be "hardened" into manhood.

the term
"wife" implying both inferiority and the status of sexual object. Untried youths
celebrations, and boasting sessions. Here
In the men's houses boys have such low status they are often called the "wives" of their initiators,
become the erotic interest of their elders and betters, a relationship also encountered in the Samurai order, in
oriental priesthood, and in the Greek gymnasium.
Preliterate wisdom decrees that while

inculcating the young with the masculine ethos, it is necessary first to
intimidate them with the tutelary status of the female . An anthropologist's comment
on Melanesian men's houses is applicable equally to Genet's underworld, or Mailer's U. S. Army: "It would seem that
the sexual brutalising of the young boy and the effort to turn him into a woman both enhances the older warrior's
desire of power, gratifies his sense of hostility toward the maturing male competitor, and eventually, when he takes
The
derogation of feminine status in lesser males is a consistent patriarchal
trait. Like any hazing procedure, initiation once endured produces devotees who will ever after be ardent
him into the male group, strengthens the male solidarity in its symbolic attempt to do without women."
initiators, happily inflicting their own former sufferings on the newcomer. The psychoanalytic term for the
generalised adolescent tone of men's house culture is "phallic state." Citadels of virility, they reinforce the most
saliently power-oriented characteristics of patriarchy. The Hungarian psychoanalytic anthropologist Geza Roheim
stressed the patriarchal character of men's house organisation in the preliterate tribes he studied, defining their
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communal and religious practices in terms of a "group of men united in the cult of an object that is a materialised
penis and excluding the women from their society." The tone and ethos of men's house culture is sadistic, power-
The men's house

inference that the penis is a weapon, endlessly equated with other
weapons is also clear. The practice of castrating prisoners is itself a comment on the cultural confusion
of anatomy and status with weaponry. Much of the glamorisation of masculine
comradery in warfare originates in what one might designate as "the
men's house sensibility." Its sadistic and brutalising aspects are disguised in military glory and a
oriented, and latently homosexual, frequently narcissistic in its energy and motives.
particularly cloying species of masculine sentimentality. A great deal of our culture partakes of this tradition, and
one might locate its first statement in Western literature in the heroic intimacy of Patroclus and Achilles. Its
The tradition still

flourishes in war novel and movie, not to mention the comic book.
development can be traced through the epic and the saga to the chanson de geste.
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AT: Framework
Focusing on policy at the expense of sexual politics is a form of violence
through demanded consent and dominance

Hannah Arendt has observed that government is upheld by power supported either
through consent or imposed through violence. Conditioning to an ideology amounts to the
former. Sexual politics obtains consent through the "socialisation" of both
sexes to basic patriarchal polities with regard to temperament, role, and
status. As to status, a pervasive assent to the prejudice of male superiority guarantees superior status in the
male, inferior in the female. The first item, temperament, involves the formation of
human personality along stereotyped lines of sex category ("masculine" and
"feminine"), based on the needs and values of the dominant group and dictated by what its members cherish in
themselves and find convenient in subordinates: aggression, intelligence, force, and efficacy in the male; passivity,
ignorance, docility, "virtue," and ineffectuality in the female. This is complemented by a second factor, sex role,
decrees a consonant and highly elaborate code of conduct, gesture

and attitude for each sex. In terms of activity, sex role assigns domestic service and attendance upon
infants to the female, the rest of human achievement, interest, and ambition to the male. T he limited role
allotted the female tends to arrest her at the level of biological
experience. Therefore, nearly all that can be described as distinctly human rather than animal activity (in
which
their own way animals also give birth and care for their young) is largely reserved for the male. Of course, status
one might designate

status as the political component, role as the sociological, and temperament as the psychological
- yet their interdependence is unquestionable and they form a chain. Those
awarded higher status tend to adopt roles of mastery, largely because
they are first encouraged to develop temperaments of dominance. That this
is true of caste and class as well is self-evident.
again follows from such an assignment. Were one to analyse the three categories
*AFFSexual Politics
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A2: Prior question

Criticism of feminist thought is a prior question
Baskerville 8
// SC
All politics is on one level sexual politics. George Gilder, 1986 Four decades into the boldest social experiment ever undertaken
in the Western democracies, the full impact of what was once quaintly known as womens liberation is at last becoming clear. The
political class of both the Left and Right have colluded to limit the debate to a series of innocuous controversies: job discrimination,
equal pay, affirmative action. Only abortion has any depth, and that debate has been mired in stalemate. Meanwhile,
beneath the political radar screen, the real consequences are finally
emerging: a massive restructuring of the social order, demographic trends
that threaten the very survival of Western civilization, and perhaps least noticed, an exponential growth in the size and power of the
state the state at its most bureaucratic and tyrannical. Feminism has now positioned itself as the vanguard of the Left, shifting the
political discourse from the economic and racial to the social and increasingly the sexual. What was once a socialistic assault on
property and enterprise has become a social and sexual attack on the family, marriage, and masculinity. This marks a truly new kind
of politics, the most personal and thus potentially the most total politics ever devised: the politics of private life and sexual relations.
Sexual politics is both feminist and homosexual, with no distinct line

separating them. Feminism has been the more overtly political doctrine. Until recently, gays asked mostly to be left
alone and as such gained widespread sympathy. Many homosexuals, especially males, probably do not consciously think about their
sexuality in expressly political terms. Yet homosexuality in itself can be a political statement, especially lesbianism, which for many
constitutes the personal dimension of feminist ideology. Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice, in words attributed to Ti-
lesbianism is far more than a sexual orientation or even a preference. It is,

an ideological, political, and philosophical means of
liberation of all women from heterosexual tyranny.[1] For sexual activists, sex itself is not
Grace Atkinson. For many of todays feminists,
as students in many colleges learn,
a private but a political act. Recalling Henry Adams definition of politics as the systematic organization of hatreds, it requires little
imagination to see that this rebellion against sexual tyranny has politicized and transformed sex, an act associated at its most
sublime with love, into what may yet prove historys purest distillation of hate. No
sexual ideology has ever

appeared before, and its unprecedented power is at once obvious and
disguised. Obvious, because it is not difficult to see that politicizing sex
and sexual relations potentially penetrates far deeper into the human
psyche, unleashes energies and emotions, and disrupts relationships and
institutions far more fundamental than those attacked by radical
ideologies of the past. The capacity for intrusion into the private sphere of life is unrivalled since the bureaucratic
dictatorships of the last century and potentially surpasses even them. Radical feminism is the most destructive and fanatical
movement to come down to us from the Sixties, writes Robert Bork. This is a revolutionary, not a reformist, movement, and it is
it is deeply antagonistic to traditional

Western culture and proposes the complete restructuring of society,
morality, and human nature.[2] Yet how precisely the scenario is playing out is far less clear and, indeed, has
meeting with considerable success. Totalitarian in spirit,
escaped most observers. The grip that sexual politics already commands over our political culture is so profound that its most
few have even

singled out sexual politics for focused critical attention . It is bemoaned as simply another
facet of leftist politics, like socialism and racial nationalism. But it is much more. Sexual politics is the most complex
destabilizing features are often undetected even by its harshest critics. Apart from its advocates,
and subtle political ideology today. On the one hand, the excesses of organized feminisms formal agenda no longer command
serious respect. Many assume it is spent as a political force, that feminism is dead and we live in a post-feminist age. At the
same time, unspoken feminist assumptions no longer hover in the political margins; they have permeated the mainstream and thrive
105/259
unchallenged and unchallengeable on the Left, the Center, and even the Right. The danger is not the absurdities of its extremists,
whom few now regard, but the steady erosion of social cohesion, civic freedom, and above all privacy, as well as the politicization of
Perhaps the
greatest danger is the absence of coherent opposition. For more than any
other political movement, feminism neuters, literally emasculates its
opposition.
personal life by a sexual ideology that has so mesmerized us all that we are largely immune from realizing it.
106/259
AT: Poverty/ Racism= root cause

The alt makes the skwo violence worse surpassing race and poverty
Baskerville 8
// SC
It is well documented that virtually

every social pathology today including violent crime and the drug abuse driving much of it is
attributable to single-parent homes and fatherless children more than any
other factor, far surpassing race and poverty.[80] That toxic environment is usually and
More crimes than these may be attributable to sexualized public life.
resignedly attributed to paternal abandonment, with the only available response being ever-more repressive but ineffective child-
If instead we see single parenthood as the deliberate product

of the feminist revolution, then the explosion of crime, addiction, and
truancy and with them the massive expansion of the penal system and state apparatus
generally takes on new significance. It is then far from fanciful to suggest that sexual militancy also
support crackdowns.
lies behind larger trends in actual violent crime and incarceration. Solid research links the nightmarish increases in crime and
violence among young people between 1960 to 1990 to the entry of large numbers of mothers into the work force [and] the rise in
Feminism may be driving not only the

criminalization of the innocent but also the criminality of the guilty. We
are thus fighting a losing battle against crime, incarceration, and
expanding state power generally until we confront the role of sexual
ideology in family breakdown and the social anomie that ensues. While increased
single-parent households, Bryce Christensen points out.[81]
police and penal measures are usually associated with right-wing politics, it is becoming clear that the long-term force is sexual
radicalism. Marie Gottschalk describes how womens organizations played a central role in the dramatic rise of the carceral state.
[82] Gottschalk laments that her fellow feminists who demand more incarceration of men have entered into some unsavory
coalitions with conservative law-and-order groups. But conservatives might ask if their own legitimate concern about crime has
led them to serve inadvertently as the unwitting instruments of a repressive ideology.[83] For ever-more-draconian police measures
will only create a fortress state. No free or civilized society can survive the mass criminalization of its male population. Indeed, the
fortress state may be developing externally as well as internally. Indications exist that recent Islamic militancy is fueled in large part
the
future may belong to hawks like Phyllis Chesler and Hillary Clinton, who
push war as an instrument of worldwide womens liberation and pressure
governments to justify military policies in feminist term s. Sexuality transforms military
from perceptions of Western sexual decadence.[84] Conversely, while many feminists identify with the antiwar Left,
life in complex ways. Bork criticizes feminism for weakening our military readiness, emphasizing the dangers of women in combat
a more far-reaching consequence may be how divorce debilitates

military men. Men are increasingly aware how easily they can be divorced
unilaterally while serving their country, lose their children and everything else they possess, and even
roles.[85] Yet
return home to face criminal penalties if they cannot pay child support imposed in their absence.[86]
107/259
Alt fails
The alt prevents the guilty from being punished while the innocent fall
victim to the blame
Baskerville 8
// SC
feminism extends the

socialist logic and may actually exceed its intrusive potential. Womens liberation, if
Many have discerned a similarity between feminism and Marxism, but few appreciate how
not the most extreme then certainly the most influential neo-Marxist movement in America, has done to the American home what
communism did to the Russian economy, and most of the ruin is irreversible, writes Ruth Wisse of Harvard. By defining relations
between men and women in terms of power and competition instead of reciprocity and cooperation, the movement tore apart the
most basic and fragile contract in human society, the unit from which all other social institutions draw their strength.[3]
Politicizing sex takes the logic of class conflict a great leap forward. The
charge of oppression is leveled not at broad, impersonal social classes but at the most
intimate personal relationships. The oppressor is not the entrepreneurial class or entrepreneur
but the husband (or intimate partner), the father, even the son. To relieve
the oppressed, the all-powerful state nationalizes not only the private firm but the
private family. Human intimacy the individuals last refuge from state power is not only a
collateral casualty but a targeted enemy. The danger therefore comes not so much from the assault
on freedom generally (which traditional tyrannies also threaten) but specifically from the attack on private life, especially family life
(which traditional dictatorships usually left alone). Radical feminism is totalitarian because it denies the individual a private space;
every private thought and action is public and, therefore, political, writes Bork. The party or the movement claims the right to
control every aspect of life.[4] Daphne Patai also perceives this hostility to privacy
. Feminism today, in its
erasure of the boundaries between public and private, is writing a new chapter in the
dystopian tradition of surveillance and unfreedom, she observes, ...whereby ones every gesture, every
thought, is exposed to the judgement of ones fellow citizens. [5] This
attack on privacy is especially dangerous, because today many
conservatives those otherwise most likely to challenge feminism themselves do not value privacy
and civil liberties. By a destructive irony, feminists have already
appropriated privacy as a rationale for abortion in legal cases like Roe v. Wade, leading conservatives (who at
one time extolled the virtues of private life) to abandon the concept itself. Many conservatives also dismiss civil liberties as a pretext
for acquitting criminals. This leaves the Left with a monopoly as guardians of the Bill of Rights
. The guilty do indeed
go unpunished, but partly because the innocent are convicted in their

place. As we will see, the principal political force driving incarceration today
both the innocent and the guilty is politicized sexuality. Revolutions are very hard indeed on privacy,
of
observes our leading sociologist of revolution.[6] That the totalitarian governments of the twentieth century intruded themselves into
the most intimate corners of personal life, politicized the private, and destroyed much of family life is well known.[7] But even they
did not usually make the destruction of private life their explicit aim. Modern sexual politics, by contrast, specifically targets privacy,
and especially family privacy. Political theorist Carol Pateman insists that denying the
dichotomy between the

public and the private...is, ultimately, what the feminist movement is about,
and two prominent feminists sneer at the ideology of the family as a bastion of privacy.[8] Feminisms fundamental principle
tha
t the personal is political
is so obviously totalitarian that historian Eugene Genovese (himself a former
Marxist) has termed it Stalinist.[9] Again, this potential is obvious theoretical. What is seldom appreciated is how far the potential
has been realized. Radical feminists must regard it as unfortunate that they lack the power and mechanisms of the state to enforce
their control over thoughts as well as behavior, muses Bork. However,
the movement is gradually
108/259
gaining that coercive power in both private and public institutions. [10]
Actually, they have it now
The alt creates more single mother homes increasing the likely hood of
child abuse and murder
Baskerville 8
// SC
The divorce machinery intertwines the personal and the political as nothing before, and its personal dimension is precisely what
disguises the intrusiveness of its political power. Divorce injects state power including the penal apparatus with its police and
The personal is political is no longer a

theoretical slogan but a codified reality institutionally enforced by new and
correspondingly feminist tribunals: the family courts. These bureaucratic pseudo-courts permit politicized wives to
prisons directly into private households and private lives.
subject their husbands to criminal penalties for their personal conduct, without having to charge the men with any actionable offense
for which they can be tried in a criminal court. To enforce this, divorce vastly expanded the cadres of feminist police child
protective services plus domestic violence and child support enforcement agents that target men almost exclusively and operate
outside due process protections. To
justify its growth and funding, this government

machinery in turn generated a series of hysterias against men and fathers
so inflammatory and hideous that no one, left or right, dared question
them or defend those accused: pedophilia, wife-beating, and nonpayment
of child support. While family law is ostensibly the province of state government, Congress heavily subsidizes family
dissolution through child abuse, domestic violence, and child support enforcement programs. It invariably approves these by near-
Each of
these hysterias originated in welfare, each is propagated largely by
feminist social workers and feminist lawyers who receive the federal
funding, and each is closely connected with divorce. Child abuse hysteria targets both men
unanimous majorities, fearing feminist accusations of being soft on pedophiles, batterers, and deadbeat dads.
and women, as we have seen. Yet most accusations are leveled against fathers in divorce cases. The irony is that it is easily
demonstrable that child abuse is almost entirely a product of feminism itself and its welfare bureaucracies. The
growth
of child abuse coincides directly with the rise of single-mother homes
which are the setting for almost all of it. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) figures
demonstrate that children in single-parent households are at much higher risk for physical violence and sexual molestation than
A British study found that children are up to thirtythree times more likely to be abused in single-mother homes than in intact
families.[54] The principal impediment to child abuse is thus precisely the first person the feminist bureaucracies remove: the
those living in two-parent homes.[53]
father. The presence of the father...placed the child at lesser risk for child sexual abuse, concludes one study, defensively. The
protective effect from the fathers presence in most households was sufficiently strong to offset the risk incurred by the few paternal
perpetrators.[55] In fact, the risk of paternal perpetrators is miniscule, since it is well established that not married fathers but
single mothers are most likely to injure and kill their children. [56] Sexual abuse,
much less common than severe physical abuse, is perpetrated mostly by boyfriends and stepfathers, though government figures
often include them as fathers to disguise the fact that biological fathers are the least likely child abusers.[57] A 2005 PBS
documentary asserts without evidence that Children are most often in danger from the father. Feminist child protection agents
implement this propaganda as policy. A San Diego grand jury found that false accusations during divorce were not only tolerated but
encouraged. The
system appears to reward a parent who initiates such a

complaint, it states, describing allegations which are so incredible that authorities should have been deeply concerned for
the protection of the child.[58]
109/259
This movement makes the government corrupt and makes the welfare
state dangerous
Baskerville 8
// SC
Child support was originally rationalized (and federalized) as a means of recovering welfare costs from allegedly absconding lowincome fathers. Feminists transformed it into a huge subsidy on middle-class divorce. A child support schedule will tell a mother
exactly how large a tax-free windfall she can force her husband to pay her simply by divorcing, regardless of any fault on her part (or
absence of fault on his). The amount is set by enforcement agents and collected at gunpoint if necessary. Mothers are not the only
. Governments also generate revenue from child

support and therefore from breaking up families. State governments
receive federal funds for every child support dollar collected, incentivizing
them to create as many single-mother households as possible. Mothers are
ones who profit by creating fatherless children
encouraged to divorce and governments simultaneously maximize revenue by setting support at levels that are generous for mothers
and onerous for fathers. While little government revenue is generated from the impecunious young unmarried fathers who hold most
By
including middle-class divorcees, the welfare machinery became a means
not of distributing money but of collecting it, and governments began
raising revenue which they can add to their general funds and use to
expand their overall operations by promoting single motherhood among
the affluent.[79] This marked a new stage in the expansion and redefinition of the welfare state: from distributing
child support debt (and for whom the system was ostensibly created), middle-class divorced fathers offer deeper pockets to loot.
largesse to collecting it. The result is a self-financing machine, generating government profits through expanded police actions by
The welfare state has become a selffinancing perpetual growth machine for destroying families, bribing
mothers, rendering children fatherless, plundering family wealth, eroding
due process, and criminalizing fathers.
proliferating single-parent homes and fatherless children.
110/259
Alt=Utopian
The alt is dangerously utopian it causes us to be immunized from
recognizing the real thing
Baskerville 8
// SC
This points to feminisms most institutionalized and destructive legacy: not
eliminating gender roles, which it has not done and can never do, but politicizing the feminine. While some
among feminisms elites moved into traditional male occupations, many more women entered the
workforce at functions that extended the domestic roles with which they
were comfortable. Thus rather than caring for their own children within the family, women began working in new
professions where they care for other peoples children as part of the public economy: daycare, early education, and social
services. This transformed child-rearing from a private familial into a public communal and taxable activity, expanding the tax base
and with it the size and power of the state, while also driving down male wages. Soon, a political class paid from those taxes began
to take command position in control of vastly expanded public education and social services bureaucracies, where they supervise
other women who look after other peoples children, further expanding the size and scope of the state into what had been private
life. This
trend renders the dream of a more caring public sphere through

feminism not only nave but dangerously utopian. For as feminists correctly pointed out, the
feminine functions were traditionally private. Politicizing the feminine has therefore meant politicizing and bureaucratizing private
This is how the totalitarian potential which Bork and others perceive is already being realized in ways
even they may have yet to grasp. Though many overuse this term, one danger of loose
usage is to immunize us from recognizing the real thing. For long recognized as a
life.
defining feature of totalitarianism is that it is specifically bureaucratic dictatorship, which is precisely what the ideological politics of
Controversies over equal pay and affirmative action

have diverted attention from the massive feminist breakthrough in the hidden
Marxism-feminism have produced.
realm of bureaucratic politics, where it encountered virtually no opposition or even notice. With striking resemblance to Djilas new
class of apparatchiks, what the institutional Left generally and feminism in particular are constructing today is not simply tyranny
Far from softening

the hard edges of power politics, feminism has merely inserted
calculations of power into the most private corners of life. It has subjected family life
to increasing political and bureaucratic control. It has decimated families through twin processes whose direct
connection with feminism have not been fully appreciated: the weakening of parents and the politicization of children. The
most obvious example, as Bork and others point out and where, again, some opposition has arisen is in
the politics of schooling. Public schools were the earliest triumph of socialism and of the states gradual
but bureaucratic tyranny, tyranny no individual consciously planned and no individual can stop.
usurpation of parental roles within the liberal democracies. The ideological foundation of public education in weakening parental
authority and transferring it to the state emerges in the words of a political scientist: Children are owed as a matter of justice the
capacity to choose to lead lives adopt values and beliefs, pursue an occupation, endorse new traditions that are different from
those of their parents. Because the child cannot him or herself ensure the acquisition of such capacities and the parents may be
opposed to such acquisition, the state must ensure it for them. The state must guarantee that children are educated for minimal
autonomy.[27] What
has not been appreciated again, even by critics such as private school and
is that the schools were the first triumph of not simply the welfare state
but the welfare state matriarchy. Connected to this matriarchy is another that has become even more
homeschool advocates
powerful and authoritarian because it has grown up upon less resistant low-income communities and, until recently, was largely
hidden from the middle class: the massive and constantly expanding political underworld of the social services bureaucracies.
111/259
Ironically, two leftist authors have perceived the danger more readily than most conservatives. They even adopt Djilas term,
describing a new class of professionals social workers, therapists, foster care providers, family court lawyers who have a vested
interest in taking over parental function. If children are the clients, parents can quite easily become the adversaries, write Sylvia
Ann Hewlett and Cornel West, the people who threaten to take business away.[28] What Hewlett and West do not tell us is that
this new class is driven in addition to self-interest and bureaucratic

aggrandizement largely by feminist ideology. The power of this bureaucratic underworld
derives almost entirely from children. It is the world of social work, child psychology, child and family counseling, child care, child
protection, child support enforcement, and juvenile and family courts. Overwhelmingly, it is feminist-dominated. This is not always
obvious, because its matriarchs are not necessarily Vassar womens studies majors indulging in tedious dorm-room debates about
whether feminists may wear lipstick. But what it lacks in ideological purity it more than makes up for in coercive power. Its
operatives are quasi-police functionaries with an agenda, and they are concerned less with ideological consistency than with political
power. These
feminists created and now control the vast and impenetrable

social services industries that most journalists and scholars find too
dreary to scrutinize. They dominate the $47 billion federal Administration for Children and Families, itself part of the
gargantuan $700 billion Department of Health and Human Services. They are both dispensers and recipients of its $200 billion grant
program (larger than all other federal agencies combined, according to HHS) among local human services or social services
bureaucracies probably the largest patronage machine ever created in the Western world, reaching virtually into every household
in the land and one that makes the former Soviet nomenklatura look ramshackle. They created and control the family law sections
of the bar associations and the family courts, which they modified into their image from an earlier incarnation as juvenile courts
(themselves created from compassion). And they dominate the forensic psychotherapy industry, with its close ties to the courts,
social work agencies, and public schools. By no means are they all doctrinaire devotes of The Feminine Mystique or The Female
when push comes to shove, they know their power comes from
being female. And again, their most potent source of power is children.
Eunuch. But
112/259
Loss of vtl
The alt is a worse form of living, the skwo feminist movement has already
left children without vtl and parents a guilt free conscious
Baskerville 8
// SC
The matriarchal logic of the welfare state became apparent as it expanded, perhaps inexorably, into the middle class. This was
effected through what is by far the most subtle and potent weapon ever devised in the arsenal of sexual warfare, the one which
brought underclass problems (and the state welfare machinery that had grown up to address them) to the middle class: divorce.
Divorce has never been analyzed politically. Not generally perceived as a political issue or a gender battleground, and never one they
divorce became the most

devastating weapon in the arsenal of gender warriors, because it brought
the gender war into every household in the Western world. What media accounts
wished to advertise (largely because they triumphed without opposition),
facetiously laugh off as an amusing battle of the sexes is in reality an intrusive, lethal political apparatus whose fallout is hate,
poverty, violence, and incarceration. Conservatives have seriously misunderstood the divorce revolution. While they bemoan mass
divorce, they also refuse to confront its political causes. Maggie Gallagher once attributed this silence to political cowardice:
Opposing gay marriage or gays in the military is for Republicans an easy, juicy, risk -free issue, she complained. The message [is]
that at all costs we should keep divorce off the political agenda. The first and foremost assault on marriage came not from gays but
from feminists. Michael McManus of Marriage Savers writes that divorce is a far more grievous blow to marriage than todays
challenge by gays. No American politician of national stature has seriously challenged involuntary divorce. Democrats did not want
to anger their large constituency among women who saw easy divorce as a hard-won freedom and prerogative, writes Barbara
Dafoe Whitehead. Republicans did not want to alienate their upscale constituents or their libertarian wing, both of whom tended to
favor easy divorce, nor did they want to call attention to the divorces among their own leadership.[38] In his famous denunciation of
single parenthood, Vice President Dan Quayle was careful to make clear, I am not talking about a situation where there is a
divorce.[39] The exception proves the rule. When the late Pope John Paul II spoke out against divorce in January 2002, he was
attacked from the right as well as the left.[40] To the extent that conservatives have addressed divorce at all, they tend to parrot the
feminist line that divorce is perpetrated by philandering men who inflict hardship on women and children. Yet feminists long ago
, divorce has represented female

rebellion: The association of divorce with womens freedom and prerogatives, established in those early days, remained an
recognized its political power. As early as the American Revolution
enduring and important feature of American divorce, writes Whitehead. Into the nineteenth century, divorce became an
increasingly important measure of womens political freedom as well as an expression of feminine initiative and independence.[41]
But it was in the twentieth century that feminists teamed up with trial lawyers and other legal entrepreneurs to institutionalize nofault divorce a measure that subtly but decisively amounted, no less, to the abolition of marriage as a legally enforceable
contract, in Gallaghers phrase. The National Association of Women Lawyers (NAWL) claims credit for pioneering no-fault divorce as
early as 1943, which it describes as the greatest project NAWL has ever undertaken. By 1977, the ideal of no-fault divorce became
the guiding principle for reform of divorce laws in the majority of states.[42] Today, divorce stands as the proudest celebration of
feminine power. Exactly the thing that people tear their hair out about is exactly the thing I am very proud of, says Germaine Greer.
[43] Contrary to popular belief, the overwhelming majority of divorces are filed by women. Few involve grounds, such as desertion,
adultery, or violence. Nebulous justifications suffice: growing apart, not feeling loved or appreciated.[44] This includes divorces
.
demonstrates how the hoax of paternal abandonment
is an optical illusion, for today it is not fathers who are abandoning both
their marriages and their children en masse. A glance at our social infrastructure reveals that,
under feminist influence, it is mothers. We have created a panoply of mechanisms and
institutions allowing divorcing mothers to rid themselves, temporarily or
permanently, of inconvenient children: safe havens have legalized child abandonment by
involving children Divorce
113/259
; daycare is tailored to the needs of mothers, not children; foster care

relieves single mothers who cannot provide basic care and protection; CHINS petitions allow single mothers to turn over
unruly adolescents to the care and custody of social workers; SIDS and in some countries infanticide laws have even made
the murder of children semi-legal. And then of course there is abortion. When one adds the extension and proliferation
mothers
of institutions not normally associated with divorce but whose purpose is to relieve parents in general and mothers in particular of
childrearing duties public schools, organized after-school activities, convenience and fast food, psychotropic drugs to control unruly
boys
we can begin to see how massively our society and economy have
been gearing up for decades to cater to divorce, facilitate single

motherhood, marginalize fathers, and generally render parents and
families redundant.[45]
114/259
Skwo solves
Skwo solves the focus of politics has shifted to the politics of maternity
Baskerville 8
// SC
Feminisms triumph has not come through its most extreme ideologues. Much as Stalinism inherited the methods and practices of
czarist absolutism and Russian nationalism, the triumphal phase of the new feminist and gay politics comes by commandeering and
politicizing the very institutions they once renounced: motherhood, marriage, the family, the church, the state. The early feminist
attack on marriage and the family is now largely forgotten or dismissed. We cant destroy the inequities between men and women
until we destroy marriage, Ms. magazine editor Robin Morgan wrote in her 1970 book, Sisterhood is Powerful.[11] Sheila Cronin,
head of the National Organization for Women, said that Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage.[12]
Linda Gordon elaborated in a famous 1969 article in WOMEN: A Journal of Liberation. The nuclear family must be destroyed, she
declared: The break-up of families now is an objectively revolutionary process. Families have supported oppression by separating
people into small, isolated units, unable to join together to fight for common interests. Families make possible the superexploitation of women by training them to look upon their work outside the home as peripheral to their true role. No woman
should have to deny herself any opportunities because of her special responsibilities to her children. Families will be finally
destroyed only when a revolutionary social and economic organization permits peoples needs for love and security to be met in ways
that do not impose divisions of labor, or any external roles, at all.[13] While such statements are often dismissed as the ranting of
extremists, a glance at the state of marriage and the family today reveals that this is precisely what feminists have achieved. But
they achieved it in ways much more subtle than these screeds indicate. While Germaine Greer famously urged women to refuse to
It was by participating in marriage that

feminists destroyed it. Homosexual activists are now simply following the feminists lead. The most extreme
marry, that strategy could achieve nothing.[14]
homosexual activists renounce marriage altogether and leave it in peace; it is the moderates who hope to transform marriage in
their image and thereby undermine it. Yet precisely because it is obvious, homosexual marriage is not the most dangerous threat to
marriage today; it has provoked vocal opposition. The really dangerous trends are more subtle and arouse little opposition; some
have even been enabled and abetted by conservatives. While feminism in its earliest, ideologically pure stage demanded equality
and rights, today, even as the ideological purists are relegated to the margins, it is nonetheless wheedling its way into the
mainstream and conservative culture by appropriating traditional morality, including the very feminine stereotypes against which it
initially rebelled. Feminisms current campaign to appropriate motherhood, for example, cynically but superficially exploits the pieties
Feminists like Ann Crittenden have

learned to extol motherhood, enabling them to pose as victims and gain
sympathy from the general public and even from conservatives. Waving
the banner of motherhood, feminists leave the patriarchy little defense.
But feminists are not defending motherhood; they are politicizing it. The
of traditional morality and the sentimentalities of uninformed conservative people.
feminists...want to thoroughly politicize the last bastion of personal life in our society: families, writes Wendy McElroy. They want to
wrest motherhood from its traditional right-wing associations and make it a left/liberal issue, with Mothers Are Victims writ-large on
Motherhood is no longer a private relationship

but a claim to political power and to marshal the coercive state apparatus against those depicted as the
its banner. The deception is subtle but profound.
oppressors of mothers. The feminization of a wide range of issues having no obvious connection with sexuality is now culminating in
the whole
agenda in the US is shifting towards the politics of maternity. [15] Not only
Code Pink, mobilized in opposition to the Iraq war, but more subtle are the Million Mom March (criminalizing
gun ownership), Mothers Against Drunk Driving (criminalizing private, nonviolent acts), and more recently
the militant Moms Rising, are variations on the theme. These pro-family women wish to harness what [Naomi] Wolf
what one newspaper calls the radicalization of Americas mothers: Some commentators argue that
115/259
calls the pissed-offedness of mothers in order to play hardball politics, says McElroy. Many are deceived into believing that
feminists have become the champions of traditional motherhood and families, when their actual agenda is to
make them dependants of the state. Crittenden indicts not feminism, but capitalism, and argues for
government to economically recognize motherhood so that women will
not be dependent upon husbands.[16] The deception succeeds because
motherhood is an easy claim to privilege and always has been. Crittendens 2002
book title, The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued, is itself a revealing sleight-ofhand. If anyone has devalued motherhood, of course, it is feminists. Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels demonstrate with their
own book title, registering precisely the opposite gripe: The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has
Undermined Women. Apparently opposites, these authors all share the conviction that mothers are oppressed by something. The two
titles succinctly convey feminisms determination to depict everything pertaining specifically to women as oppression and highlight
feminist complaints as a strategy to, as they say, have it all without regard for consistency or logic. This points to a trait feminism
shares with all radical ideologies but carries much further: the capacity to expand its own power and that of the state by creating the
very problems about which it complains. Mothers do not receive sufficient respect from society, McElroy paraphrases Crittenden,
as if feminism werent largely to blame. This is potent because it politicizes the private and cynically exploits societys natural
sympathy for women. The older battle cries of liberal feminism, opposing traditional gender roles or promoting equal pay, have given
The shift was almost

imperceptible but profound, for the victim posture exploits, rather than renounces,
womens traditional weaknesses, which are also and always have been claims to privilege: motherhood, children,
domesticity, sex. Feminists have turned these into claims to state intervention by posing as victims of not just
an impersonal society but newly invented or redefined crimes of which only
women can be victims and that only men can commit: rape, sexual
harassment, domestic violence, child abuse, nonpayment of child support
(plus lesser, more vague offenses like aggressive driving). These new crimes politicize precisely
the spheres of life that normally we are at pains to protect from politics and the
competition for power: home, family, children and the criminal justice system. They succeed because they
exploit the natural desire of both men and women to protect and provide
for women. (Though here too, homosexuals are following the feminists lead with demands for hate crimes laws that
way to victim feminism which insists that women are by definition victims.
likewise politicize criminal justice.)
Impact defense
116/259
117/259
Rape
Rape impact is flawed- rape is one of the most falsely reported and
fabricated crimes
Baskerville 8
// SC
These are all appeals to female fear. Ironically, they are also appeals to male chivalry, to rescue damsels in distress, to display
masculinity (an emergent theme in conservative literature) by creating occasions for combat with other men. But in contrast to
traditional chivalry, this gallantry does not proceed from personal duty and requires no risk, courage, or self-sacrifice. The chivalry
politicized
chivalry, displayed not by individual men but by cadres wielding state power such as
police and plainclothes quasi-police functionaries. This is evident in the campaign for
feminists demand is bureaucratic, exercised by officials with a professional or pecuniary interest. It is
victims rights. This began as an effort by conservatives to provide more effective recourse to crime victims, largely in response to
liberal moves to weaken punishments. President Reagans 1982 Task Force on Victims of Crime led to the creation of US Justice
Departments Office of Victims of Crime. A glance at that agencys website reveals that the campaign has been hijacked by feminists,
and most of the crimes have been redefined in feminist terms: the victims are mostly women, the perpetrators are mostly men,
and the crimes are mostly political.[17] The
politicization of criminal justice is seen in the

redefinition of rape and explosion of false rape accusations. Legal theorists like
Catherine MacKinnon, who asks whether consent is a meaningful concept and who has repeatedly suggested that virtually
all heterosexual intercourse amounts to rape, have been highly influential at law schools
throughout the United States and with the governments of individual states and Canada. Any honest veteran sex assault
investigator will tell you that
rape is one of the most falsely reported crimes, says Craig
Silverman, a former Colorado prosecutor known for his zealous pursuit of alleged rapists.[18] Purdue University sociologist Eugene
Kanin found that 41%
of the total disposed rape cases were officially declared

false during a 9-year period, that is, by the complainants admission
that no rape had occurred and the charge, therefore, was false. Unrecanted
accusations mean the actual percentage of false allegations is almost certainly higher. Kanin concluded that these false
allegations appear to serve three major functions for the complainants: providing an alibi,
seeking revenge, and obtaining sympathy and attention. [19] The Center for Military
Readiness provides additional motivations: False rape accusations also have been filed to extort
money from celebrities, to gain sole custody of children in divorce cases, and even to escape military
deployments to war zones.[20] Almost daily we see men released after decades in prison because DNA testing
proves they were wrongly convicted. And they are the fortunate ones. While DNA testing has righted some wrongs, the corruption of
the rape industry is so systemic that, as last years Duke University case shows, hard evidence of innocence is no barrier to
feminist crime lab technicians fabricate and

doctor evidence to frame men they know to be innocent.[21] Yet there has been no
prosecution and conviction. It is well documented that
systematic investigation by the media or civil libertarians as to why so many innocent citizens are regularly incarcerated on
fabricated allegations and evidence. The exoneration of the Duke lacrosse players on an obviously trumped-up charge has resulted in
few attempts to determine how widespread such rigged justice is against those not wealthy or fortunate enough to garner media
attention.[22] Even conservative critics studiously avoided acknowledging feminisms role in the accusations at Duke but instead
emphasized race a minor feature of the case but a much safer one to criticize. There is little indication that white people are
being systematically incarcerated on fabricated accusations of non-existent crimes against blacks. This is precisely what is happening
both white and black, accused of the kind of gender

crimes that feminists have turned into a political agenda.
to men (and even some women),
118/259
Poverty
The alt. normalizes poverty as means of sexual freedom
Baskerville 8
// SC
The growing political power of this bureaucratic underworld is manifested today in the rise of what amounts to a plainclothes feminist
Child Protective Services, who seldom see a

child that is not abused. During the 1980s and 1990s, waves of child abuse hysteria swept America and other
countries, resulting in torn-apart families, hideous injustices, and ruined lives. Parents were unjustly
separated from their children and incarcerated by setting aside
constitutional safeguards while the media and civil libertarians looked the
other way.[29] Feminist prosecutors like Nancy Lamb in North Carolina whipped up public invective against parents they
police force: the dreaded, federally funded
had jailed yet knew to be innocent. The press was transfixed by Lamb, writes William Anderson, with her flashing eyes and bobbed
hair. Lamb was speaking for the children, you see, and the press adored her. That she was making preposterous claims and
attempting to destroy the lives of seven people despite all good evidence to the contrary was not even discussed. As with false
rape accusations, the politicization of child abuse reached its apogee in the Clinton administration Justice Department. From Janet
Renos infamous prosecutions of Grant Snowden in Florida...to the McMartin case in Los Angeles, to Wenatchee, Washington, writes
Anderson, the Edenton case was part of a line of what only can be called witch hunts in which state social workers badgered very
young children until they came up with lurid tales after having denied that those things occurred.[30] It was also during the
Clinton years that child protection was elevated to a paramilitary operation, when Attorney General Reno used unsubstantiated child
abuse rumors to justify a violent assault against American citizens in Waco, Texas, resulting in the deaths of 24 children whom she
was ostensibly protecting. This militarization of child protection was seen more recently in the largest seizure of children in American
history, also in Texas, when almost five hundred children were seized from their polygamous mothers in the Fundamentalist Church of
A night-time raid with tanks, riot

police, SWAT teams, snipers, and cars full of Texas Rangers and sheriffs
deputies that is the new face of state child protection, writes attorney Gregory
Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, also without any evidence of abuse.
Hession, social workers backed up with automatic weapons. The role of feminist ideology was downplayed by the media but
revealed by a spokeswoman for the state agency, who justified seizing the children because of a mindset that even the young girls
report that they will marry at whatever age, and that its the highest blessing they can have to have children. As Hession comments,
encouraging respect for motherhood is abuse.[31] The witch hunts were carried into adulthood through recovered memory
therapy, another feminist innovation whereby wild tales of childhood sex crimes were manufactured from a psychological theory. In
Victims of Memory, Mark Pendergrast shows how the recovered memory hoax destroyed families, ruined lives, and sent innocent
parents to prison, though as the price of getting published Pendergrast bends over backward to insist, defensively and contrary to his
own evidence, that this was not driven by feminism.[32] Sexual Politics and the Welfare State Though child abuse officials now
target middle-class families, bureaucratic child protection originated in welfare. And indeed, the earliest institution of sexual politics
was the welfare state. The welfare state has traditionally been regarded as the landmark triumph of class politics within the liberal
democracies the one successful achievement of social democracy that has grown and survived even in countries, like the United
the welfare state stands as the first

salvo of gender politics, the first social experiment of government growth following the enfranchisement of
States, which avoided such terms. Yet from todays perspective,
feminists.[33] Each stage of welfare state expansion has been justified not simply for the poor but specifically for poor children. The
interests of these children could also be gradually divorced from their parents, though in practice they tended to be identified with
The proliferation of
single-mother homes lent plausibility to the feminists new rallying cry,
the feminization of poverty, that shifted poor relief from a socialist to a
feminist crusade.[34] But the feminization of poverty was a deception from the start a creation of ideology rather
the mothers who claimed to be the guardians of those interests: increasingly, single mothers.
119/259
than of any objective social phenomena and another example of ideology creating its own grievance. Originally justified to provide for
the families of men who had been laid off during economic downturns or killed in war, the welfare state quickly became a subsidy of
single-mother homes and fatherless children. It had immediately set in, that is, to expand precisely the problem it claimed to be
alleviating. To justify this sleight-of-hand, the architects of welfare state expansion needed a rationale, and they found it in one of
the most potent and destructive falsehoods ever foisted on a well-meaning but gullible public, a falsehood that has served, directly or
indirectly,
to justify the exponential expansion of not only the welfare state

but the scope and power of government in many other spheres. This is the
falsehood that government must provide for massive numbers of women and children whose men have abandoned them.[35] With
the abrupt reversal of an airbrushed Kremlin photograph, the welfare states rationalizing figure was demoted from a hero to a villain.
The same working men who had been valiantly dying in imperialisms wars or laid off as innocent victims of heartless capitalism were
suddenly and ignominiously absconding from the bastards they had sired. The destructive force of this untruth is incalculable. Accept
it, and virtually every expansion of both social welfare spending and law-enforcement authority is readily justified and indeed,
unanswerable. Women and children are being abandoned by irresponsible men: What politician could resist that appeal? But the
No evidence indicates that the ongoing crisis of fatherless

children is caused primarily by fathers abandoning their children .[36] It is now
very clear that it has been driven throughout by feminist policies and programs. Single mothers were not
being thrown into poverty by absconding men; they were choosing it
because it offered precisely the sexual freedom that was feminisms seminal urge, regardless of the
truth was very different.
consequences for their children. Single motherhood is feminisms most potent and most destructive accomplishment, and before the
right audience feminists not only concede but boast about it. Single Mothers By Choice expresses this boast organizationally, and
when pressed, most single mothers will insist that that is precisely what they are. While feminists readily pose as the champions of
when it comes to perpetuating welfare dependency, it is clear that,

beneath the rhetorical fluff, the exhilarating power accruing to single
mothers is more than adequate compensation for pulling their children
into poverty. In fact, the very feminist intellectuals who popularized the term feminization of poverty have acknowledged
as much: Independence, even in straitened and penurious forms, write Barbara
Ehrenreich and her colleagues, still offers more sexual freedom than affluence gained
through marriage and dependence on one man.[37] The myth of the absconding father
children
provided a means to leverage a massive expansion of state power through emotional blackmail. It was also a declaration of
bureaucratic war against what is after all the first and foremost feminist enemy, the literal embodiment of the hated patriarchy:
fathers. So long as the principal engine for creating single-mother homes was welfare, the abandonment myth was only implied
Everyone knew that welfare was subsidizing and proliferating singlemother homes in the inner cities, but until money became contentious no
one was greatly bothered with assigning blame. Most welfare mothers producing fatherless
children were never married, so no documentation attested to who was breaking up a family that had seldom really existed in
intact form As the phenomenon spread to the middle class (today the fastest-growing sector of unwed childbearing), the engine
driving single-mother homes was not so much welfare as divorce. Here the implicit became explicit with an open assault on two
closely connected institutions that had quietly ceased to exist in the welfare underclass but which were still thriving in the middle
class: fatherhood and marriage.
120/259
Domestic Violence
The negs understanding of domestic violence is flawed
Baskerville 8
// SC
Seldom does public policy stand in such direct defiance of undisputed truths, to the point where the cause of the problem is
Judges are not unaware that the most dangerous

environment for children is precisely the single-parent homes they create
when they remove fathers in custody proceedings. Yet they seldom hesitate to remove them,
knowing they will never be held accountable for harm to the children. On the contrary, if they do not they may
be punished by feminist-dominated bar associations and social work
bureaucracies whose business and funding depend on a constant supply of
abused children. Bureaucracies often expand by creating the very problem they exist to solve. Appalling as it sounds,
the conclusion is inescapable that we have created an army of officials with a vested
interest in child abuse. Child abuse is not the only family violence to be
exacerbated and politicized by feminists. The mammoth domestic
violence industry arose largely as a means of evicting divorced fathers
from their homes. Its an easy way to kick somebody out, says one family law specialist.[59] Like child
abuse, domestic violence has no precise definition. It is adjudicated not as violent assault
presented as the solution, and vice-versa.
but as conflict among intimate partners. It therefore obliterates the distinction between crime and disagreement and need not be
violent or even physical. Definitions from the US Justice Department include jealousy and possessiveness, name calling and
constant criticizing, and ignoring, dismissing, or ridiculing the victims needs.[60] For such crimes men are jailed without trial.
Such definitions circumvent due process protections. With child abuse

and spouse abuse you dont have to prove anything, a seminar leader instructs divorcing
mothers. You just have to accuse.[61] One scholar calls it an area of law mired in
intellectual dishonesty and injustice and a due process fiasco.[62] Feminists portray
domestic violence as a political crime to perpetuate male power. Yet the
scholarly literature has long established that men and women commit
domestic violence in comparable numbers.[63] More important than
achieving gender balance, however, is to understand how the explosion in
accusations is connected almost entirely with family dissolution. [64]
Practitioners and scholars now readily report that patently trumped-up accusations are routinely used, without punishment, in
custody proceedings to separate children from fathers who have
committed no actionable offense.[65] Open perjury is readily acknowledged,[66] and bar associations and
even courts actively counsel mothers on how to fabricate accusations. [67]
Domestic violence is a backwater of tautological pseudo-theory, write Donald Dutton and Kenneth Corvo. No other area of
established social welfare, criminal justice, public health, or behavioral intervention has such weak evidence in support of mandated
practice.[68] Feminists acknowledge that most cases arise during custody battles.[69] Yet they strenuously oppose divorce and
custody reform,[70] and their literature is dominated by complaints not that violent convicts are walking the streets but that fathers
convicted of no infraction retain access to their children after their wives divorce them.[71] Restraining orders separating fathers
Due process
procedures are so routinely ignored that one judge told his colleagues
not to become concerned about the constitutional rights of the man that
youre violating.... We dont have to worry about the rights. [73] Specialized
from their children are routinely issued during divorce proceedings without any evidence.[72]
domestic violence courts are mandated not to dispense impartial justice but, says New Yorks openly feminist chief judge, to make
121/259
batterers and abusers take responsibility for their actions.[74] These courts may seize property, including homes, without the
accused being convicted or even formally charged or present to defend themselves. This bill is classic police-state legislation, one
scholar concludes.[75] Toronto lawyer Walter Fox calls them pre-fascist: Domestic
violence courts...are
designed to get around the protections of the criminal code. The burden of
proof is reduced or removed, and theres no presumption of
innocence.[76] Forced confessions are also routine. Fathers are summarily incarcerated
unless they sign confessions stating, I have physically and emotionally battered my partner. The father must then describe the
violence, even if he insists he committed none. I am responsible for the violence I used, reads one form. My behavior was not
provoked.[77] The deadbeat dad is another figure largely manufactured by the divorce machinery. He is far less likely to have
voluntarily abandoned the offspring he callously sired than to be an involuntarily divorced father who has been forced to finance the
filching of his own children.[78]
122/259
Extinction
The same ideological interests of the k caused the housing bubble
collapse and will lead to the collapse of civilization
Baskerville 8
// SC
the housing bubble was the

result of welfare-state agencies pushing home ownership as an
entitlement on low-income families. We do not know how many of these were single parents
The latest manifestation may be the credit crisis. As Star Parker points out,
subsisting not on productive labor but on other entitlements, but for intact, two-parent families home ownership is not usually an
impossibility at some point in life. As
the institution of government grows, we sadly

watch the collapse of the institutions that really sustain growth of home
ownership: American marriage and families, writes Parker, citing Census Bureau figures that
homeownership overwhelmingly (86.3%) occurs among married-couple families.[89] Decades before the family
crisis became obvious, sociologist Carle Zimmerman demonstrated that
family atomization preceded civilizational collapse . Zimmerman showed
how Greek and Roman decline was preceded by a renunciation of family
life, first by educated elites and then others, and argued that our own
civilization is on a similar trajectory. Zimmerman was writing during the post-war baby boom before
second wave feminism, no-fault divorce, same-sex marriage, and demographic winter when the family was generally assumed
to be stable. Yet he predicted these developments based on long-range trends mostly elite intellectual fashions whose
significance few others grasped. Indeed, Zimmerman emphasized how difficult the decline is to perceive while it is taking place:
Today, even as the family

crisis becomes undeniable, there is still little awareness of its full
ramifications and how close we are to the point of no return. Modern
sexual ideologies are much more militant than anything in Greece or Rome
and more self-consciously hostile to the family . The bureaucratic machinery they have
These changes came about slowly, over centuries, and almost imperceptibly.[90]
constructed around the family is also much more vast and entrenched than any in those civilizations. Indeed, it is the most intrusive
and repressive government apparatus ever created in the United States. Yet todays most outspoken family advocates show little
awareness of it, and few seem disposed to confront it or organizationally prepared to resist it. The
sexualization of
public life stands behind every major threat to our civilization. Unless we
summon the courage to confront it directly, Western society will become
increasingly emasculated and will not survive. This is what Zimmerman warned in the halcyon
days of 1947, and since then his warnings have only been vindicated.
123/259
Double bind
Double bind either the neg gives up all their power for equality or
gendered roles continue in order to gain feminist power
Baskerville 8
// SC
Power is the alpha and the omega of contemporary Communism, wrote Milovan Djilas during the repression of the 1950s. Ideas,
philosophical principles, and moral considerations... all can be changed and sacrificed. But not power.[23] Something similar can
be said about todays feminism, an ideology with no fixed principles, as evidenced by its capacity to spawn interminable discussions
about its true nature: At times all gender differences are social constructions; at other times women have special needs.
Women are oppressed by gender roles, but those same roles confer a
claim to moral superiority because they make women more caring and
compassionate. Men and women must compete on equal terms, except when men must be excluded from certain
competitions so that women can win. Fathers should share equally in rearing children, but custody (and the power and money that
accompany it) must always go to mothers. Alison Jaggar, author of Living with Contradictions, proclaims unashamedly that feminists
Feminists should embrace both horns of this

dilemma, she writes. They should use the rhetoric of equality in situations where womens interests clearly are being
should insist on having it both ways:
damaged by being treated either differently from or identically with men.[24] Her words are revealing. This rhetoric of equality is
just that: rhetoric. As with Humpty Dumpty, words like equality change meanings when convenient; interests alone endure. As
Jaggar admits,
it proceeds from no principles other than power: to increase the power not so
much of women, as of those who claim to speak on behalf of the rest. This is revealed by the fashionable euphemism used to
disguise it: empowerment. The shift from liberal demands for unisex equality to claims of a positively superior politics
characterized by greater caring and sensitivity than traditional masculine power politics carried far-reaching implications.
What might appear as a moderating compromise with traditional gender

roles was in reality a modest sacrifice of ideological purity in exchange for
power. Political theorist Kathy Ferguson envisions a world where male-dominated power politics would be supplanted with
this feminine politics of empowerment. Male power brokers would be
replaced by quasi-Platonic female caretakers whose claim to leadership would be their
compassion. In this feminist utopia the only remaining problem would be who
would minister to the needs of these saintly souls. For a feminist community, then, Platos
question Who will guard the guardians? might be rephrased as, Who will care for the caretakers?[25]
Professor Ferguson would have been less visionary but more perspicacious if she had asked, Who will guard the caretakers? For her
dream of a syndicalist rule by caretakers is now the reality, and the caretakers have run amok. Caretakers routinely drug foster
children runs a headline in the Los Angeles Times. Children under state protection in California group and foster homes are being
drugged with potent, dangerous psychiatric medications, at times just to keep them obedient and docile for their overburdened
caretakers.[26]
124/259
Links to politics
The k links to immigration
Baskerville 8
// SC
Immigration pressure may also be traced to sexualized government
institutions. Immigrant families attracted to welfare are increasingly
single mothers or become single mothers soon after arriving. In Europe,
immigration is now creating a welfare underclass similar to that familiar in
the United States, which is itself expanding through immigration. The principal
rationalization for relaxing immigration standards low birth rates and the perceived need for younger workers and taxpayers is
another consequence of the sexual revolution, one threatening Western civilization itself. The welfare state itself, with its offer of a
universal retirement pension, certainly reduced the need for large families as an insurance policy for old age. Yet even more direct is
sexual liberation, including contraception and abortion which shifted reproductive decisions from the family unit to the individual
woman.[87] Here too divorce may be the decisive factor (and again the most neglected) not only breaking up families early but
also generating fear of marriage and procreation among men.[88
125/259
Latino Identity
126/259
127/259
Trayvon L
Black-White binaries ignore an intersectional approach to Latino identity
Nopper 12 (Tamara, U Penn, 20 Years in the Making: George Zimmermans
Minority Defense and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, 4/20/12,
http://tamaranopper.com/2012/04/20/george-zimmermans-minority-defense-andthe-1992-los-angeles-riots/)//LA
In some accounts, Zimmermans interracial lineage as well as his being Latino
exemplified the browning of America. According to this framework, the
increasing Latino population in the United States will change not only the
racial and cultural demographics of the the country but also how we as a
nation think about race, identity, and being American. Just as internal
diversity among Latinos by color, nationality, migration histories, and class
reportedly makes it difficult for some Latino immigrants and their
descendants to determine who they are, or what box to check on the
U.S. census, non-Latino Americans will also have to question long standing
assumptions about what race is and how it operates in the face of
increasing diversity. Such sentiment was expressed in discussions about Zimmerman. For example, in an
article in The Washington Post titled Who is George Zimmerman? (and republished by The Seattle Times under
the headline Florida shooter George Zimmerman not easily pigeonholed), the reporters write, There may be no
box to check for George Zimmerman, 28, no tidy way to categorize, define and sort the man whose pull of a trigger
on a Sanford, Fla., street is forcing America to once again confront its fraught relationship with race and identity. In
some authors were less ambivalent about Zimmermans race and

declared him white. One striking example of this was an op-ed published in The Orlando Sentinel written
other writing,
by Leonard Pitts, in which he responded to one readers frustration at his not identifying Zimmerman as Hispanic in
a previous columnMr. Zimmerman was Hispanic not White plez do your homework before writing your
Pitts begins his column with: Im here to explain why George

Zimmerman is white. Pointing out that according to the U.S. census,
Hispanic is an ethnicity and not a race, Pitts draws from academic
scholarship on what has come to be known as whiteness studies, which
seeks to destabilize whiteness as the normative racial position by tracing
how whiteness developed as a social and legal category and how whites
became dominant in the U.S. racial hierarchy. Specifically, Pitts cites David Roediger, the
column!!!!
historian famous for drawing from W.E.B. Du Boiss psychological wage of whiteness concept outlined in his 1935
classic Black Reconstruction in America and repackaging it as the wages of whiteness. Recounting Roedigers
basic premise that European immigrants became white after coming to the United States and learning, as James
Baldwin famously put it, that the price of the ticket for whiteness is to distance oneself from Blacks, Pitts also
whiteness is
not simply color, but privilegethe privilege of being seen, of having
your worth presumed, of receiving the benefit of the doubt and some
human compassion, of being treated as if you matter. Pitts concludes
that for these reasons, Zimmerman is white. Similarly, Isabel Wilkerson, in a New York
defines being white as having your suffering and perspective matter in the world. As he puts it,
Times essay on Martins murder and the city of Sanfords racial history, employs aspects of whiteness studies in her
discussion. For example, discussing how unprecedented numbers of Latino immigrants have arrived at a place still
scarred by the history of a vigilante-enforced caste system and the stereotypes that linger from it, she concludes,
In this context, newcomerslike previous waves of immigrants in the pastmay feel pressed to identify with the
dominant caste and distance themselves from blacks, in order to survive. Wilkersons commentary suffers from
one of the major limitations of some of the most popular work grouped under whiteness studies (such as that by
Roediger, Baldwin, Noel Ignatiev, and Timothy Breen), which is the assumption that certain European immigrants or
poor white Americans (or in Breens case, white indentured servants) had at one point a shared, or at least similar
status with African Americans in the race and class hierarchy in relation to white elites. In doing so, Wilkerson
discursively transforms the descendants of African slaves into immigrants. She writes: One of the great tragedies
of the last century was the pitting of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe against African-Americans who
had migrated from the rural South to the industrial North. Both groups were seeking the same thing and were pretty
much the same peoplepeople of the land trying to make a way for their families in forbidding and alien places.
128/259
Unlike the European immigrants, who chose whiteness, Latinos,

according to Wilkerson, may be forging a different path : Despite all that has gone
before, there is reason for optimismThe arrival of a new kind of immigrant to a
country that has endured so much discord offers a chance for reexamination and redemption. Thus, one of the most encouraging signs ,
Wilkerson asserts, is that Latinos are increasingly choosing to be identified as
other rather than black or white on the U.S. census and thus may reject the pattern
of European immigrants who became white by distancing themselves from Blacks. What this debate about
Zimmermans racial identity and Black-Latino relations demonstrates is that w ith
few exceptions, we
have no intellectual vocabulary to adequately discuss the racial position of
non-Black people of color (NBPOC) in relation to African Americans in the
U.S. racial order. Instead, as in the case of Zimmerman, we have the
following options: argue that Latinos are acting white, that George Zimmerman is
a white Latino (although I think he could easily be read as a Brown Latino), or discuss the internal
diversity of Latinos in terms of color, language, and nativity and simply
hope that their so-called internal conflicts (which are really structural) get worked
out soon. Overall, there is a difficulty, which appears to be both
conceptual and emotional (or at the very least ethical), to say that as a
Latino and thus someone who exists in the world politically as Brown,
Zimmerman or other Latinos can be anti-Black and more importantly, have
political and social power over Blacks (in the United States and in Latin
America) independent of identifying with whiteness or being socially or
legally classified as white. So what does all of this have to do with the 1992 Los Angeles Riots and
more specifically, what do I mean when I write that Zimmermans minority defense was 20 years in the
making? In brief, some of the major patterns of progressive race scholarship emerging after, and to large degree in
response to the riots, contribute to the logic of Zimmermans minority defense. Post-1992 Los Angeles Riots Race
scholars argued that its multiethnic composition,

as well as the changing demographics of the United States (think of the
projection of the coming white minority), necessitated that political
conversations about, and research on race go beyond examining white
Americas treatment of African Americans, a sentiment expressed in the
slogan beyond Black and white. Some scholars claimed that the Blackwhite model of race relations was inadequate for analyzing what some (mis)labeled
Scholarship In the wake of the riots,
Americas first multiethnic riot. Whereas previous urban rebellions have been characterized by African Americans
looting or destroying white owned-businesses in response to police brutality and economic and political conditions,
the 1992 riots involved primarily Black and Latino rioters, with Korean immigrant-owned businesses the hardest hit.
Some scholars, denying the material basis of conflict, went so far as to suggest that one of the reasons Korean
immigrants were targeted was because they were the victims of Blacks misdirected anger partially caused by their
if there had been more

attention given to the experiences of other racial minority groups in public
discourse and scholarship prior to the riots, Blacks would have been less likely to
be susceptible to negative images of Korean immigrants circulated in the media and would
have thus directed their anger at another and more appropriate target
purported ignorance of Korean history, people, and culture. In other words,
(interestingly, Latino rioters are generally not depicted as targeting Korean storeowners for the same reason).
And so it began: going beyond Black and white would not only help us
better identify what caused the 1992 riots but also prevent, through
educational measures, future multiracial explosions (and more specifically,
Black (misdirected) rage). More research on the shared racial
oppression and community building between people of color would
presumably thwart the dividing and conquering of oppressed peoples. In this
spirit, a growing body of work examining the experiences of NBPOC and inter-minority relations has been published
in the last 20 years. Within this scholarship there are two patterns I want to emphasize that are relevant to
Zimmermans minority defense.
129/259
AT: Latinos were enslaved/Race Ks about LA

You cant group Black and Latino identityslavery is unique
Nopper 12 (Tamara, U Penn, 20 Years in the Making: George Zimmermans
Minority Defense and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, 4/20/12,
http://tamaranopper.com/2012/04/20/george-zimmermans-minority-defense-andthe-1992-los-angeles-riots/)//LA
Pattern 1: Comparative Racialization The first pattern is that scholars claimed Asian Americans and
Latinos have unique racial experiences that cannot be adequately
understood using the Black-white framework. This work of comparative
racialization sought to identify differences among people of color while
still retaining the notion that all non-whites have a shared racial status
under white supremacy. Much of this research traces its roots to Michael Omi and Howard
Winants book Racial Formations (1986, 1994)treated as the bible among many progressive race scholars
which posits the primacy of race as a determinant of inequality and
proposes that each group has a particular racial formation. This approach
provided the best of both worlds for NBPOC progressive scholars: it
rejected arguments, growing in popularity among a wide spectrum of
ideological voices, that class, not race was the primary factor shaping life
chances while not indicting any particular NBPOC group as dominant in
relationship to African Americans. The employment of the racial
formations approach resulted in an (unstated) return of sorts, to Robert
Blauners colonialism model published in his book Racial Oppression in America. Blauners
framework examines the particular structural degradation of each
minority group in the United States, such as slavery, colonialism,
genocide, exclusion, or contract labor, while positing a shared oppressed
status as non-white. From this perspective we could conclude that
Zimmerman, as a Spanish speaking minority and son of a Peruvian
mother, also knows discrimination and thus, was more like the boy he
killed than people thought. George was a minoritythe othertoo. While
these words were actually penned by writers of the aforementioned Washington Post article, they could easily come
Yet the return to a

Blaunerian approach, by way of racial formations, ignored one of the most
from the pages of an academic monograph by a comparative racialization scholar.
important points of Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamiltons 1967 book Black Powerwhich preceded the publication
of Blauners Racial Oppression by five yearsin which they applied the colonial model to African Americans in U.S.
While scholars have rightfully addressed the limitations of the

colonial analogy for dealing with the afterlife of slavery , it is telling that
urban ghettoes.
contemporary scholarship is most likely to resemble Blauners approach than that of Ture and Hamiltons. Perhaps
analogizing African Americans and

immigrant groups, even with the hesitance Blauner expresses in his work,
will always be flawed. As they put it, When some people compare the
black American to other immigrant groups in this country, they overlook
the fact that slavery was peculiar to the blacks. No other minority group in
this country was treated as legal property. In these two sentences, Ture
and Hamilton anticipated and provide a critique of the racial formations
approach as well as whiteness studies aforementioned claim that nonBlack groups could have a shared starting location on the bottom with
African Americans despite not having been enslaved. Unfortunately, today, Ture and
this is because, as Ture and Hamilton suggest,
Hamilton tend to be cited by an aging group of (primarily African American) scholars whereas Omi and Winants
racial formations and its variants have continued to be popular among a broad array of progressives (for a clue on
130/259
why this may be so, consider the epilogues of both books second versions as they each address the 1992 riots in
ways that demonstrate competing political orientations).
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AT: Grade it like a Paper
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Shell
This approach is exclusionarymust open spaces for safe pedagogical
investigation
Omolade 87 (Barbara, CUNY and Consortium of black womens organizers in
Brooklyn, A Black Feminist Pedagogy, Womens Studies Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 3/4,
p. 35-6, JSTOR)//LA
However, when I assign a scholarly paper, I must assume the politically
problematic role of evaluator. My standards of judgment are dictated by
the purpose and rationale of a college education: to produce students who
can enter the professional and managerial class because they have and
can communicate useful knowledge and information. When students fail to
write and read up to par, they become nonstudents, incapable of
participating in the very medium and work of the academy . In the past, these
students, i.e., Black working-class women, never came into the academy unless they had exceptional literacy skills.
Literacy itself has further class connotations because it also means having the time and space
to read and write, usually in isolation from one's family and kin. Literacy necessarily distances
and separates people: the learner from the doer, the scholar from the
worker. But the challenge of a Black feminist pedagogy is to use literacy to
connect people with ideas and histories across racial, gender, and class
boundaries and to further connect Black women to each other and to their
unique history. By making available knowledge of their own history as well as that of the ruling elite,
knowledge of men and women and Black and white people, we can give students a sense of their worth and their
power to affect their position and condition. The worker can become a scholar who does not have to abandon her
The process of evaluation, of correcting and

measuring the written and spoken skills of students, has usually been
used in racist and sexist and elitist ways, which serve to diminish
students' integrity and humanity. But a liberal feminist stance should not
be used to deny the students an honest appraisal of their learning and
skills. I used to err on the side of liberalism and promoted sisterly rapport instead of directly grappling with the
difficulty of teaching scholarly writing skills and critical thinking . Such skills can
assist Black women in gaining an overall and coherent way of analyzing
the information they receive in the classroom and from the experiences
of their lives. In attempting to avoid making Black women students feel
uncomfortable, I tried to protect those who wrote poorly and analyzed
superficially from feeling a sense of failure. In the beginning, I assigned
papers but did not rigorously grade them, satisfied that students expressed themselves and
tried hard. Then, I gave double grades on term papers: one for ideas and one
for grammar, stupidly separating content from process. When my grades accurately
reflected their work, I felt that I had abandoned all my sisterly values. The double grade process,
however, protected me from guilt about grading their papers at all, and
helped me avoid the truth about their writing skills and course
performances. By avoiding the struggle to face the weaknesses of my
Black women students, I also avoided the essentials of the learning process. All teaching and learning involve tensions and discomfort, as students
unlearn and replace old ideas and limited understandings with newer, and,
one hopes, better, information. The solution lay not in attempting to
remove the discomfort and tension, but in creating a learning environment
where Black women could feel safe about making mistakes and taking
chances. Students have to be taught to honestly evaluate failure and turn
class in order to become educated.
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mistakes into lessons as they face the difficulties associated with learning
mathematics, history, paper writing, or speaking in class.
Dont baby the [Aff/Neg]only rejecting their flawed model can produce
material change [Doubles as Pedagogy 1st card]
Omolade 87 (Barbara, CUNY and Consortium of black womens organizers in
Brooklyn, A Black Feminist Pedagogy, Womens Studies Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 3/4,
p. 38-9, JSTOR)//LA
The struggle at Medgar Evers College revealed the responsibility of Black women
academicians to develop the meaningful content of a pedagogy that
makes rigorous academic demands and the political aim of liberating
working people, especially Black women, from ignorance and
powerlessness. Then, along with those students, Black women
academicians must struggle for the power to implement their pedagogy.
Black women instructors and students who participated in the Medgar Evers College sit-in have
developed the framework of that pedagogy: a Black feminist set of
academic themes that centers on the research, study, and development
of Black women. In order to assume power in the urban areas of the
United States, which are increasingly populated by women and men of
color, the continually exploited and oppressed peoples, especially Black
women, must develop the skills to take over and run urban institutions. In
order to transform current conditions and positions of powerlessness,
those people must have the capacity to run them differently and
humanely. The development of these leadership skills requires that
students learn differently within a liberatory classroom environment.
Class- room instructors must be more like consultants to, rather than
controllers of, the learning process. Although some educators advance a
pedagogy that proposes to do away with all structures such as course outlines, the
absence of structure leaves students without a clear sense of where a
course is going. It is like telling students to drive to California from New York without knowing how to drive
very well and without a road map. The instructor, on the other hand, has many maps and drives very well. No one
can teach students to "see," but an instructor is responsible for providing the windows, out of which possible angles
The classroom process is one

of information-sharing in which students learn to generalize their
particular life experiences within a community of fellow intellectuals. The
breadth of material students receive about the diverse perspectives of
women and men all over the world should give them new ideas and new
models of scholarship. This is especially critical for Black women students, since Black women's
of vision emerge from a coherent ordering of information and content.
experiences and Black female scholarship are seldom placed within the syllabi of the academy's courses.
Without an explicit pedagogy, Black women and all other working-class

students will continue to be disregarded as participants in the learning
environment. They will learn in a fairy land, with the good fairy
godmothers (who are Black) giving them solace and approval without
wisdom, and the bad fairy godfathers (who are white) denying them both
humanity and useful information. Neither fairy godmothers nor godfathers
can be equal partners with students engaged in a political struggle to
learn enough and know enough to transform our mutual futures within
and without the academy.
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Quar
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Intersectionality
Intersectionality is inevitableto focus on ones own specific oppression
makes impossible wider struggles for liberation
Green and Ellison 7/4 (Kai M. and Treva, Black, queer, trans, and anti-capitalist
scholars, activists, and artists based in Los Angelestheir byline, Dispatch from
the Very House of Difference: Anti-Black Racism and the Expansion of Sexual
Citizenship OR We Need to Do So Much Better at Loving Each Other, The
Feminist Wire, 7/4/13, http://thefeministwire.com/2013/07/dispatch-from-the-veryhouse-of-difference-anti-black-racism-and-the-expansion-of-sexual-citizenship-or-weneed-to-do-so-much-better-at-loving-each-other/)//LA
The productive tension between sexual citizenship and expansion of
militarism, surveillance, policing, and incarceration rely on a discursive
and material separation of race from sexuality. This is why for example, queer youth of
color can be exposed to extreme police harassment and interpersonal harm even in so-called gay ghettos. The
very question of whether gay is the new black requires and enacts a
unconscionable forgetting of the systems of domination and creative
destruction that operate in part through a construction of gay and Black
as mutually exclusive. These kinds of representational traps attempt to
make equality for queer racialized sexualities unintelligible and unthinkable as
they support the kinds of relations that perpetuate harm and violence ,
sometimes against the very people they purport to protect. These harmful
dichotomies arent just uni-directional in flow; they dont just come from
politicians and the HRC but also from us, from how we narrate and define our
struggles. In the November 1978 November issue of The Black Panther journalist Reggie Major wrote a
commentary titled The Privileged Oppressed, in which he criticizes White gay male gentrification in Alamo
Square, Haight-Fillmore, and the Mission District. Majors notes that some Blacks take issue with the equation of
the gay rights struggle with the Black liberation struggle saying: One of the reasons for this objection is the fact
that many gays are involved in exercising White male privilege at the very time they are claiming to be members of
an oppressed group,[3] Majors points out that White gay males have benefited from racist housing and loan
policies by receiving bank loans, which were previously formally denied to Blacks, and taking advantage of the fact
that Black-owned properties in Black neighborhoods were appraised at lower values. He makes a call for White gays
to be in solidarity noting that Black organizations spoke out against the Briggs Initiative, which sought to bar gays
and lesbians from working in California schools. Majors ends the article with a call for solidarity: There has to be a
broad front that pushed for increased human and civil rights for all citizens, and Blacks and gays should be
The disaggregation of race from gender and sexuality

evinced in the separation of gay and Black helps to cohere the
polemic and call to action but also participates in a framework of
intelligibility that renders black queerness unthinkable and ignores how
White gay gentrification impacts LGBT people of color and poor White
LGBT people. When we frame our struggles in ways that ignore the various
and complicated ways that harm and violence circulate, it becomes
difficult for people to show up as themselves or in some cases to show up
at all. Desires for equality have a tendency to move people to become
more invested in sameness instead of thinking about the reality of
difference. We are not the same. Audre Lorde told us this. Toni Cade Bambara told us this. Gloria
Anzalda told us this. Marlon Riggs told us this. We are not the same and it is our differences that
give us strength. It is our ability to see that our freedoms are all
connected and of equal value, but our oppressions while linked are not the
same. We must not allow one kind of oppression to displace another in our
political imaginaries, especially if that displacement is more of an
ideological fallacy than a material reality. For those who understand
members of that front,[4].
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oppression through one dominant identity, say as a white woman, it might

be easy to come together as women to rally around how this society devalues womens lives
and labor, but it might not be so easy to see the ways in which as a white
women you can create systems that are oppressive and closed to women
of color or people of color in general. We have to do better. Our lenses
must be broadened so that at all times we are not only aware of our
particular positions of oppression, but also our relative positions of
privilege. Understanding privilege is not about guilt, though this is what seems to be happening these days. I
dont need you to feel bad about what happened during slavery or whats happening with the expansion of the
prison industrial complex. Guilt is paralyzing and it doesnt produce much movement or change, its just stifling.
Relinquish your guilt and use your privilege to change the structures that
produce that privilege. Dont include me in your privileged ranks, it means
nothing if I cant take my people with me. Barack Obama as first Black president means
nothing if Black people as a class remain in crises. This essay begins with recounting places and moments of injury.
These stories are the kinds of stories that become unspeakable and
unknowable in a discursive order and model of reform that privileges
single-issue politics over mobilizing around the material conditions that
produce trauma, vulnerability and death. There are certainly reforms to be made, but we
need to become more aware of the places and people we are asked to give up in order to receive something that
We dont have to become Black. We dont have to become

gay. But we must be able to build beyond our own individual positions
whether we stand in the intersection or not, we have to develop a model
for recognizing the intersection, these moments when race, gender, class,
citizenship, sexuality and ability collide (and they are always colliding). We
must look for those who are lost; those who weve been asked to forget about because they are not our own. To
dwell in the house of difference is to think, plan, and create with the
intersection in mind and in heart. The dispatch has been sent. Will you heed the call?
could easily be retracted.
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Sheshadri-Crooks K
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1NC
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1NC Shell
Fighting racism in the name of race only reifies normative racial historicity
turns the case
Seshadri-Crooks 2k (Kalpana, Boston College, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian
Analysis of Race, p. 6-9)//LA
I am suggesting two things: first, the order of racial difference attempts to compensate for sex's failure in language;
second, we must not therefore analogize race and sex on the sexual model of linguistic excess or contradiction.
The signifier Whiteness tries to fill the constitutive lack of the sexed
subject. It promises a totality, an overcoming of difference itself. For the
subject of race, Whiteness represents complete mastery, self-sufficiency,
and the jouissance of Oneness. This is why the order of racial difference must be distinguished
from, but read in relation to, sexual difference. If sex is characterized by a missing signifier, race, on the contrary,
is not and cannot be organized around such an absence- a missing signifier- that
escapes or confounds language and inter-subjectivity. Race has an all-toopresent master signifier- Whiteness- which offers the illegal enjoyment of
absolute wholeness. Race, therefore, does not bear on the paradigm of failure or success of intersubjectivity on the model of the sexual relation. The rationale of racial difference and its organization can
be understood as a Hobbesian one. It is a social contract among potential adversaries secured to
perpetuate singular claims to power and dominance, even as it seeks to contain the
consequences of such singular interests. The shared insecurity of claiming absolute
humanness, which is what race as a system manages, induces the social
and legal validation of race as a discourse of neutral differences. In other
words, race identity can have only one function-it establishes differential relations
among the races in order to constitute the logic of domination . Groups
must be differentiated and related in order to make possible the claim to
power and domination. Race identity is about the sense of one's
exclusiveness, exceptionality and uniqueness. Put very simply, it is an identity that, if it is
working at all, can only be about pride, being better, being the best. Race is inextricably caught up in a Hobbesian
discourse of social contract, where personal (or particular) interest masquerades as public good. Sexual difference,
The values attached to male and

female are historically contingent as feminists have long suggested, but power cannot
be the ultimate cause of sexual difference. Racial difference, on the other
hand, has no other reason to be but power, and yet it is not power in the
sense of material and discursive agency that can be reduced to historical
mappings. If such were the case, as many have assumed, then a historicist
genealogy of the discursive construction of race would be in order:
Foucault not Lacan, discourse analysis not psychoanalysis. But race organizes
difference and elicits investment in its subjects because it promises access to being itself. It
offers the prestige of being better and superior; it is the promise of being
more human, more full, less lacking. The possibility of this enjoyment is at
the core of "race." But enjoyment or jouissance is, we may recall , pure
unpleasure. The possibility of enjoyment held out by Whiteness is also
horrific as it implies the annihilation of difference. The subject of race
therefore typically resists race as mere "social construction," even as it holds on
to a notion of visible, phenotypal difference. Visible difference in race has a contradictory
function. If it protects against a lethal sameness, it also facilitates the
possibility of that sameness through the fantasy of wholeness. Insofar as
Whiteness dissimulates the object of desire, 10 any encounter with the
historicity, the purely symbolic origin of the signifier, inevitably produces anxiety. It is
necessary for race to seem more than its historical and cultural origin in
on the other hand, cannot be founded upon such a logic.
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order to aim at being. Race must therefore disavow or deny knowledge of

its own historicity, or risk surrendering to the discourse of exceptionality, the possibility of wholeness and
supremacy. Thus race secures itself through visibility. Psychoanalytically, we
can perceive the object cause of racial anxiety as racial visibility, the socalled pre-discursive marks on the body (hair, skin, bone), which serve as the
desiderata of race. In other words, the bodily mark, which (like sex) seems to be more than symbolic,
serves as a powerful prophylactic against the anxiety of race as a discursive construction. We seem to need such a
race should not be

reduced to racial visibility, which is the mistake made by some wellmeaning and not-as-well-meaning advocates of a color blind society.
Racial visibility should be understood as that which secures the much deeper
investment we have made in the racial categorization of human beings. It is
refuge in order to preserve the investment we make in the signifier of Whiteness. Thus
a lock-and-key relation, and throwing away the key of visibility because it happens to open and close is not going to
make the lock inoperable. By interrogating visibility we can ask what the lock is preserving, and why. Th e
capacity of visibility to secure an investment in identity also distinguishes

race from other systems of difference such as caste, class, ethnicity, etc. These latter
forms of group identity, insofar as they cannot be essentialized through bodily marks, can be easily historicized and
visibility maintains a
bulwark against the historicity and historicization of race. (In fact, Brennan suggests that the
textualized. Nothing prevents their deconstruction, whereas in the case of race,
"ego's era" is characterized by a resistance to history.) It is this function of visibility that renders cases of racial
that the category of race is inherently a

discourse of supremacy may seem inattentive to the advances that our
legal systems and liberal social ideologies have made precisely in relation
to "racism" and "racist" practices. Modern civil society refuses to permit
its subjects the enjoyment of supremacist rhetoric , the rhetoric of exceptionality, by
distinguishing between race and racism. It draws this distinction between
a supposed ontology (the study of physical or cultural differences) and an epistemology
(discriminatory logic) in the name of preserving a semblance of inter-subjectivity.
Race, it suggests, is a neutral description of human difference; racism, it
suggests, is the misappropriation of such difference. The liberal consensus
is that we must do away with such ideological misappropriation, but that
we must "celebrate difference." It is understood as a "baby and the bath
water" syndrome, in which the dirty water of racism must be eliminated,
to reveal the cleansed and beloved "fact" of racial identity. This rather
myopic perspective refuses to address the peculiar resiliency of "race,"
the subjective investment in racial difference, and the hyper-valorization
of appearance. It dismisses these issues or trivializes them because race seems a
historical inevitability. The logic is that people have been constituted for material and other reasons as
black and white and that this has had powerful historical consequences for peoples thus constituted. Whether
race exists or not, whether race and racism are artificial distinctions or
not, racialization is a hard historical fact and a concrete instance of social
reality. We have no choice, according to this reasoning, but to inhabit our
assigned racial positions. Not to do so is a form of idealism, and a
groundless belief that power can be wished away. In making this
ostensibly "pragmatic" move, such social theorists effectively reify "race."
passing fraught and anxious. My contention
Lukacs, who elaborated Marx's notion of reification in relation to the commodity form in History and Class
Consciousness, is worth recalling here: Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing,
and thus acquires a 'phantom objectivity,' an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to
To arrest analysis
of race at the point where one discerns and marks its historical effects is
to reproduce those very relations of power that one intends to oppose. It
is to render race so objective that it is impossible to conceive human
conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people. (1923:89)
144/259
difference or inter-subjectivity anew. Modern civil society engages in such

reification because ultimately its desire is to keep the dialectic between
races alive. It must thus prohibit what it terms "racism" in order to
prevent the annihilation not so much of the "inferior" races but of the
system of race itself. This is how the system of "desiring Whiteness"
perpetuates itself, even in the discourses that are most pragmatically
aimed against racism. The resilience and endurability of race as a
structure can thus be attributed to its denials and disavowals. On the one hand,
it is never in the place that one expects it to be: it disavows its own historicity in order to hold out the promise of
being to the subject- the something more than symbolic- a sense of wholeness, of exceptionality. On the other
as a social law, it must disavow this object in order to keep the system
viable and to perpetuate the dialectic: the race for Whiteness. Exploring the
hand,
structure of race requires a toleration of paradox, an appreciation of the fact that it is an inherently contradictory
discourse, and a willingness to see beyond relations of power in order to mine the depth of subjective investment in
it.
The alternative is to release the racial signifier from its historical mooring
in a signified; their approach only reifies racism and hopeless opposition
In presenting my hypothesis to various interlocutors in formal and informal settings, I have been asked
how my theory of race as a symbolic system sustained by a regime of
visibility translates into social policy. How does it affect our thinking about
affirmative action, about anti-discrimination legislations, about those particularly powerful modes of
political mobilization that have aggregated around identity? It is sophisticated and
easy to be dismissive of "identity politics" because it seems naive and
essentialist. But the immeasurable weightiness of, say, the black power
movement or the women's rights movement in pushing back the forces of
exploitation and resuscitating devalued cultures through the redefinition
of identity must give us pause. Identity politics works. However, the
argument of this book is that it also ultimately serves to reinforce the
very system that is the source of the symptoms that such politics
confines itself to addressing. It is race itself that must be dismantled as a
regime of looking. We cannot aim at this goal by merely formulating new
social policies . In fact, my theory is anti-policy for two reasons: first, any
attempt to address race systematically through policy, and by that I mean
state policy, will inevitably end up reifying race. Second, the only effective
intervention can be cultural, at the "grassroots" level. Such intervention
can and should work, sometimes in tandem and at others in tension with
state policy, but the project of dismantling the regime of race cannot be
given over to the state. Gramsci speaks of the necessity of transforming the cultural into the political;
where race is concerned, it is imperative that we turn what is now
"political," an issue of group interests, into the "cultural," an issue of
social practice. We must develop a new adversarial aesthetics that will
throw racial signification into disarray. Given that race discourse was
produced in a thoroughly visual culture, it is necessary that the visual
itself be used against the scopic regime of race. I have laid the basis for such an
aesthetics in Chapters 4 and 5, where the relation of the bodily mark to the signifier is
thrown into perplexity. In Suture, we as spectators are asked to give up our
investment in Whiteness, the signifier that promises access to absolute
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humanness. The film puts pressure on the purely symbolic origins of race by unraveling the relation between
racial gestalt and one's identity. Clay is Vincent if he takes up his place in the signifying chain. Similitude is
established not on the basis of the body's gestalt, but the part object-ears, eyes, etc. In Toni Morrison's "Recitatif," it
racial reference that is called into question. As with Suture, the relation between
visibility and the signifier is refused , but for another purpose. By emptying the
racial signifier of its properties, so that white and black have no
connotations, Morrison renders meaningless the relations among the
signifier, the body, and identity. For Morrison, it is such emptiness that makes love approachable. I
am proposing an adversarial aesthetics that will destabilize racial looking
so that racial identity will always be uncertain and unstable. The point of
such a practice would be to confront the symbolic constitution of race and
of racial looking as the investment we make in difference for sameness.
The confrontation has to entail more than an exploration of the fantasy ,
is
which process I detailed in Chapter 2 on "The secret sharer." There we took measure of the fantasy of wholeness as
A simple rejection of this

fantasy of selfinflation on a political or ethical basis, such as the repugnance we see exhibited
by Orwell, in Chapter 3, cannot be adequate. In Orwell's case, his liberal rejection of
mastery can only lead to the reproduction of the system of race . For it is not
enough to be aware of the affect of anxiety that race invariably generates.
One must traverse the fundamental fantasy of singular humanity upon
which racial identity is founded. It is a question of resituating oneself in
relation to the raced signifier. Such a practice would not aim so much at a crossthe obliteration of difference that Whiteness holds out to the subject of race.
identification, such as ticking the "wrong" box on a questionnaire, or passing for another race. It would
confound racial signification by stressing the continuity, the point of doubt

among the so-called races, to the extent that each and every one of us
must mistrust the knowledge of our racial belonging. The idea would be to
void racial knowledge by releasing the racial signifier from its historical
mooring in a signified. Such practices can only be, and must be
representational, as what they necessitate is a radical intervention into
language and signification. This entails the reinvention of culture as
organized by differences based on other kinds of "reasonings" than race.
Every medium of representation can and must be harnessed for such a
practice. In addition to those I have cited earlier such as film, painting and literature, we must consider the
possibilities presented by that other mode of representation, namely representation by proxy. The
possibility of unsettling political representation, for instance, or procedures of
verification based on race such as the passport, the visa and the driver's license may renew
and refresh questions of identity what is worth preserving, what is not.
The idea is not to erase identity, even if such a preposterous act were
possible. Rather, we must rethink identity in tension with our usual habits
of visual categorization of individuals. Ideally, the practice that I am
advocating will deploy the visual against the visual. Such redefinition is
thinkable only as a collective and normalizing project; it should be aimed
at infiltrating normative bourgeois self-definition. The practice of
"discoloration" will be more effective if it is not restricted to particular
intellectual groups or artists. Gramsci suggests that a philosophical movement, even as it
elaborates a form of thought superior to "common sense" and coherent on a scientific plane .... never forgets to
remain in contact with the "simple" and indeed finds in this contact the source of the problems it sets out to study
we cannot voluntarily abandon the

quotidian logic of race. To do so would be a form of vanguardism that will
only reinforce the system as the necessary point of differentiation. Rather,
it is to the common sense of race that we must appeal. Otherwise, we will
fail to address social contradiction in its specificity. Thus producing a suband to resolve. (Gramsci 1971 :330) In other words,
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culture of "discolorationists" or encouraging subjects voluntarily to refuse

racial identity (as advocated for "white" people by the journal Race Traitor) possibly will not be
effective. An anti-race praxis must aim at a fundamental transformation of
social and political logic. It cannot be a mere "phenomenon of individuals" which, as Gramsci reminds
us, only marks the "'high points' of the progress made by common sense" (1971 :331 ). As a praxis,
psychoanalysis is the most appropriate discourse for the examination of
why we or certain groups may resist such an adversarial aesthetics.
Working through our fantasies will involve the risk of desubjectification
that many of us dread. Such dread, such an encounter with our own limit,
is the only means of articulating the possibility of an ethics beyond the
specious enjoyment promised by Whiteness.
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2NC
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2NC Thesis [MUST READ]

The 1AC affirmed WHITENESS as MASTER SIGNIFIER, the point from which
their whole system may be defined. In so doing they come to define
themselves and others based upon the absolute power of the master
signifierthis turns the case because theyll come to desire wholeness
through the suturing of the lack
The striking phrase "the visible absence of color" refers to Whiteness as the
simultaneous presence and absence of a certain substance. It is precisely
the indefniteness, the ambivalence, the mute meaningfulness, the
colorless, all-color of Whiteness that fascinates and mesmerizes the
subject as the promise of being itself. For Melville, it is the absent cause of perceptible hues of
nature which are but "the subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without" ( 186).
This cause is the "great principle of light" which "for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating
without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tingepondering all
Whiteness here is the great and

immanent absence that sustains the system of chromatism; it actually
enables one to see, even as it presents a threat to ordinary vision. As the
cause of color, of visibility itself, Whiteness as light is beyond mere
perception; he who looks upon it would, in Melville's terms, end as "the wretched infidel [who] gazes himself
blind" (l86). Melville's notion of Whiteness as the formless and dangerous
essence of visibility is wholly compatible with the view of Whiteness as
the master signifier of race that I have been delineating so far. In the last
chapter, my emphasis was on the capacity of Whiteness to engender the structure of racial
difference. Here, I will focus on the lethal and illegal fantasy of sameness
and mastery that Whiteness offers as the real yet concealed motivation
for the maintenance of race. The master signifier makes difference
possible, but it is also excluded from the play of signification that it
supports. In Lacan's terms, we could propose that the dual character of Whiteness, as support and panicthis, the palsied universe lies before us as a lepe1" ( 186).
inducing kernel, exists in a relation of "extimacy" (Lacan's term for the paradox of the excluded interior) to the
This signifier, in its awesome and terrifying aspect,

discloses itself as something inassimilable to the very system that it
causes and upholds. In our terms, Whiteness engenders the scale of human
difference as racial embodiment, but this ostensibly " neutral" system of
differences is organized around the exclusion of Whiteness, particularly
the terror that it presents as pure and blinding light, which would
annihilate and erase difference. I argue that this " terror" should be
understood as the raison d'etre for race itself- the will to preeminence, to
mastery, to being- which must necessarily be prohibited by social and
juridical law. This ineffable and excluded power of Whiteness, as that
which makes perception possible but is itself the blinding possibility
beyond the visible, should be explored as the " lure" that fuels and perpetuates racial visibility
while holding out a promise of something beyond the empirical mark. I suggested in the previous chapter that the
visible bodily marks of race serve to guarantee Whiteness as something
more than its discursive construction. Whiteness, I argue, attempts to
signify being, but this audacious attempt is impossible because of the
simple fact that Whiteness is only a cultural invention. This impossibility,
based on the historicity of Whiteness, generates anxiety. But anxiety in
symbolic system it engenders.
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race identity is endemic insofar as Whiteness tries to fill a space which

must remain empty, or unsignified. This is where so-called ordinary visible difference,
telling people apart on basis of bodily detail, comes to sustain the regime of race. If
we can find a non-discursive basis (the marks on the body) for our faith in race,
then the function of Whiteness, as the unconscious promise of wholeness,
is preserved. Our investment in phenotype actually serves a dual function.
On the one hand, it allows the co-existence of race as social construction,
which serves to defend against the jouissance of Whiteness. On the other,
it preserves that fantasy of wholeness by valorizing phenotype as
something pre-discursive. In this chapter, I explore the lethal fantasy at
the core of race, which is the possibility of transcending or reaching
beyond the visible phenotype. It is the possibility of being itself, where
difference and lack are wholly extinguished. As the master signifier of
race, Whiteness maintains the structure of (visible) diffe rence- the chain of metonymic substitutions
which locates the subject as desiring (thus eternally lacking) Whiteness. The
fantasy of encountering Whiteness would be, for the subject of race, to
recover the missing substance of one's being. It would be to coincide, not with a
transcendental ideal, some rarefied model of bodily perfection, but with the "gaze," that void in the
Other, a piece of the Real, that could annihilate difference. The Lacanian view
about our general sense of visual reality or conscious perception is that it is itself subtended by our drive to search,
what we take to be the evidence of

our eyes, the fruit of our active looking, is largely caused by an
unrecognized and underlying need to encounter that which Lacan terms "the gaze."
recognize and recover the object of desire. In other words,
The gaze is "that which always escapes the grasp of that form of vision that is satisfied with imagining itself as
beyond reality and visual perception which, as Freud established,

founded on language and thought. The gaze is of the order of the Real,
because it directly addresses lack- the lack in the Other and the lack in the
subject. Encountering it would be lethal, insofar as it is contingent on the
subject's constitutive lack or castration (XI: 73), the subject as manque a etre (or subject as a
want-to-be.) To encounter the gaze would be to relinquish one's subject status,
to give up meaning for being. The gaze promotes the fantasy of
wholeness, but at the price of one's distinctive subject status. The gaze
thus causes desire, it is the consummate version of the objet petit a, and more importantly
it is the object of the scopic drive. Translated or extended to the sphere of race, it
is Whiteness as being itself that functions as the lure-the gaze that causes
desire and is at the center of the drive's trajectory. Put more starkly, it is
our drive for supremacy, for the jouissance of absolute humanness, that
sustains our active looking. Setting aside the historical fact that such a goal is
impossible because race has no purchase on the body's jouissance, or in
anything beyond its own cultural origins, we must nevertheless take up
the persistence of the fantasy of Whiteness.
consciousness" (XI: 74). It is
are
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2NC Prior Question

The normative conclusions of the aff all presume a relationship to
Whiteness as a master signifierthe K comes first
Seshadri-Crooks 2k (Kalpana, Boston College, Desiring Whiteness: A
Lacanian Analysis of Race, p. 34-5)//LA
The above view of the ego and the body image raises the question of the relation of the
ego ideal to race. What is the status of the master signifier of race in the
constitution of the bodily ego? If we agree that the body image is constituted with the help of the
signifier, then are all body images necessarily raced? Is Whiteness a founding
signifier for the subject as such, and of his/her ego? Is the racial signifier necessary
for the constitution of the bodily ego? It is important that we not mistake
the moment of the constitution of the bodily ego as the necessary moment
when the body becomes racially visible. To do so would not be a sufficient
departure from the erroneous belief that race is purely a question of
misrecognition or identification with a mirror image. We would merely have added the factor of the racial
signifier to the account of the mirror stage. There is no doubt that one can be constituted as a subject with a
"unified" bodily ego without necessarily identifying with a racial signifier, or seeing oneself as racially marked. (The
race is not like sex. Not all are subject to the racial
signifier.) We only have to consider the numerous accounts from literature and autobiography that enact the
large point here is that
scene of becoming racially visible to oneself. Besides Fanon, who speaks of discovering that he is "black" during his
first visit to France, there is Stuart Hall, who in "Minimal selves" says that for many Jamaicans like himself, " Black
is an identity which had to be learned and could only be learned in a

certain moment" ( 1996b: 116). This process of introjecting the signifier is repeated by other characters
such as Janie in Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, James Weldon Johnson's protagonist in
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and by Oulaudah Equiano in his autobiographical narrative. There are
The fact that the secondariness of

race seems to apply only to so-called "people of color," and that there are
rare, or virtually no instances of a socalled "white" person discovering his
or her race may lead to several specious speculations such as: "black"
people identify with "whites" as the latter are more powerful and define
the norm. Such misidentification on the part of "blacks" leads to trauma
when they discover the reality of their blackness (Fanon's thesis). Other
problematic views might be that "white" people impose an identity upon
those they have colonized in order to justify their dominance, or "whites"
have no race or race consciousness; "whites" are not racially embodied,
and this is an index of their transparency and power, etc. While some of
these propositions might make some ideological sense, all of these
doubtless numerous other examples that one could cite.
conclusions nevertheless presume the pre-existence of "black" and

"white" as if these were natural and neutrally descriptive terms. I would
suggest that the difference among black, brown, red, yellow and white
rests on the position of each signifier in the signifying chain in its relation
to the master signifier, which engenders racial looking through a
particular process of anxiety. Perhaps the more effective ideological
stance may be not to raise race consciousness among so-called "whites,"
as scholars in Whiteness studies suggest, but to trouble the relation of
the subject to the master signifier. One must throw into doubt the
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security and belief in one's identity, not promote more fulsome claims to
such identity.
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2NC Turns Case

Their failure to interrogate Whiteness as master signifier turns the case
perpetuates a racist system
Guillaumin 's terms are useful not so much in distinguishing between premodern and contemporary notions of race,
as she suggests, but rather in discerning the emergence of race through the self-splitting referred to earlier.
Guillaumin 's failure to discern the notion of Whiteness as the organizing principle of Eurocentrism (as distinguished
from "banal ethnocentrisms") enables her to exonerate both ethnocentrism and aristocratism as not "true racism."
But proper attention to the crucial element of class at play in Whiteness reveals that it is not about aristocratism,
but about "the people"the volk, with precisely the sense of its "own naturalness" that Guillaumin disavows as an
element in auto-referential systems. I would also suggest that the altero-referential system does not so much
displace but is founded on the auto-referential notion of Whiteness. Thus the discourse of race as we understand it
The structure of
race is totalizing, and attempts to master and overcome all difference
within its boundaries. The dichotomy of self and other is within Whiteness in the competition over who
today is an effect of that internal splitting that we identified earlier as the cause of race.
properly possesses Whiteness, or sovereign humanness. H.F. K.Gunther's ( 1927) classification along physiognomic
lines is a part of the logical nucleus of racial visibility grounded in "the narcissism of small differences" that grounds
racial visibility. Thus in Gunther's classification, "other" European races such as the Mediterranean can carry the
The signifier Whiteness is about gaining

a monopoly on the notion of humanness, and is not simply the
displaceable or reversible pinnacle of the great chain of being Y However, one
must not forget that as the unconscious principle or the master signifier of
the symbolic ordering of race, Whiteness also makes possible difference
and racial inter-subjectivity. It orders, classifies, categorizes, demarcates
and separates human beings on the basis of what is considered to be a
natural and neutral epistemology. This knowledge is also the agency that
produces and maintains differences through a series of socially instituted
and legally enforced laws under the name of equality, multiculturalism,
anti discrimination, etc. Anti-racist legislations and practices, in other
"Negro strain," or the Tartar may carry the "Asiatic."
words, work ultimately in the service of race , which is inherently,

unambiguously, structurally supremacist. The structure of race is deeply
fissured, and that is discernible in the constitutive tension, or
contradiction between its need to establish absolute differences, and its illegal
desire to assert sameness. In fact, race establishes and preserves difference for the
ultimate goal of sameness, in order to reproduce the desire for
Whiteness . As Foucault might have put it, race separates in order to
master. However, unlike the technologies of power that Foucault so
painstakingly detailed, the analysis of race cannot be exhausted through
its historicization. Race produces unconscious effects, and as a hybrid
structure located somewhere between essence and construct, it
determines the destiny of human bodies. It is our ethical and political
task to figure out how destiny comes to be inscribed as anatomy, when
that anatomy does not exist as such.
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Their analysis makes racial visibility an inevitable aspect of critiquemust

endorse a Lacanian investigation
Subjective memory works like an automaton, marking and manipulating the subject even as it produces
him or her in one's particularity. In relation to race, this model is again useful in catalyzing a major shift
from essentialist, or even historicist notions of "racial memory," as hoary
contents coded genetically, spiritu ally, discursively, culturally, in particular groups characterizing identity, to
memory of race as contentless signifiers, a chain of difference reproduced
mechanically by the function ing of language. How does such an
understanding of the "memory" of race affect analysis? First, it must be
acknowledged that the account I have given of "the subject of race" using Lacan's model of the symbolic is too
The subject is not simply the figure that emerges

when all the dots are connected; the subject is also constituted or
determined by the not fully inscribed page- the gaps in the chain that
connect the pieces. This is a fundamental proposition in Lacan , and it is not the
question of a shift in emphasis referred to earlier. What the unconscious also registers is the
lack or the desire of the subject that can never be fully expressed in
language. "The unconscious is, in the subject, a schism of the symbolic system, a limitation, an alienation
induced by the symbolic system" (I: 196). This discovery of fundamental disjunction in
the subject, that he/she merely marks a place between signifiers in a chain of signifiers, is the aim of
analysis. The subject goes well beyond what is experienced "subjectively" by the individual, exactly as far as
deterministic . It is also incomplete.
the truth he is able to attain .... Yes, this truth of his history is not all contained in his script, and yet the place
marked there by the painful shock he feels from knowing only his own lines, and not simply there, but also in pages
whose disorder gives him little comfort. (E: 55) In the deployment of Lacan's theory of the subject of the symbolic to
it is necessary to inquire what the subject of race desires.

Also, what kind of access does race, as a chain of signifiers that
determines the symbolic subject, have to "being," or that which is
excluded by the chain? I will be suggesting that racial visibility is to be located precisely at
this point of interrogation: it is the level at which race, or more properly its master
signifier "Whiteness" aspires to being. The above questions suggest that the model of
the subject as determined by a chain of signifiers is necessarily
incomplete insofar as it cannot account for sexual difference or more properly for the
body. More questions emerge: If the unconscious is structured like a language, then how is the body constituted?
"the subject of race,"
If sexual difference is merely a question of the signifier, how do we account for the body's drives, or for sexuality
to stop with the account

of the symbolic function of Whiteness would be too premature, for it does
not address the issue of visibility, or the relation of the signifier to the
visible body, which is, after all, the inaugural point of this inquiry. In order
to take up in earnest the question of the body and of its constitution as
raced, it is necessary to clarify the relation between the ego as body
image and racial visibility. First, one must repudiate the notion that race is
merely a process of specular identification, where a pre-discursive and
pre-raced entity assumes a racial identity on the basis of certain familial others whose image
that is often at odds with the logic of sexual difference? In relation to "race,"
it identifies with in a mirror relation. Such a notion is based on a simplified account of Lacan 's concept of the
imaginary and the mirror stage. I undertake the following discussion of the imaginary for two reasons: to suggest
insofar as the symbolic underwrites the imaginary, race must be

understood as a symbolic phenomenon. It is a logic of difference
inaugurated by a signifier, Whiteness, that is grounded in the unconscious
structured like a language. This signifier subjects us all equally to its law
regardless of our identities as "black," "white," etc. Racial visibility is a remainder
that
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of this symbolic system. Second, the process of becoming racially visible is not coterminous with
the organization of the ego or the acquisition of the body image. In other words, the visibility of the
body does not necessarily have to be a racial visibility. It is important that
one disarticulate the two processes; otherwise racial visibility will seem to
be an ontological necessity that is a universal verity of subjective
existence as such.
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2NC Link (Whiteness)

Whiteness predetermines discussions of racial differencetheir normative
approach will only retrench master signifiers
race
aims for the body in its otherness15 by disavowing its own historicity . For
what the racial symbolic promises the subject is precisely access to being.
Whiteness offers a totality, a fullness that masquerades as being. Thus for
the raced subject, to encounter the historicity of Whiteness is particularly
anxiety-producing. In other words, the cause of the raced subject is its
own disavowed historicity. I refer not so much to the fact that race is
historicizable (that it has at its origin some historical, cultural or social cause) but rather to the
phenomenon of its historicity (which is the delimitation of race as a regulative norm at the expense
of its natural universality) that radically exposes the subject to its own linguistic
limit. To encounter one's subjectivity as an effect of language , and not as an
enigma, is anxiety-producing not because one is reduced to a construct (what
would that really mean experientially?) but because it implies the foreclosure of desire
and the possibility of being. It is to discover that the law of racial
How does race articulate itself with sex? How does it produce extra-symbolic effects? I would suggest that
difference is not attached to the Real . What the raced subject encounters,
in a given moment of anxiety, is the law as purely symbolical. This is to
confront the utter groundlessness of the law of racial difference, to
discover that the question of one's being is not resolved by Whiteness, but
that Whiteness is merely a signifier that masquerades as being and
thereby blocks access to lack. To pose the question of being in relation to
race is to face that there is not one. It is here that we must situate social
and juridical laws against discrimination as well. Like the prohibition against
miscegenation, our legal prohibitions, couched in the language of respect for
difference, ultimately serve to protect the paradox of Whiteness. The
paradox is that Whiteness attempts to signify the unsignifiable, i.e.
humanness, in order to preserve our subjective investment in race. The
Other of race, in short, is not lacking; there is no "hole" where being could
be promising jouissance. All of race is expressed and captured by
language.
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2NC Link (Topic)

The aff is the ultimate manifestation of Whiteness as Master Signifierthe
impact is colonialism and violence on the colonially raced other
It is to Hannah Arendt ( 1973) that we owe the remarkable insight that the practice of imperialism
entailed the development of two "devices"- race and bureaucracy. Arendt's
great achievement is her delineation of the convergence of these two
discourses, which she suggests were independently discovered, but begin
to dovetail with the progress of domination. Arendt characterizes the discourse
of race as "the emergency explanation of human beings whom no European or
civilized man could understand, and whose humanity so frightened and
humiliated the immigrants that they no longer cared to belong to the same
human species" (Arendt 1973: 185). Bureaucracy, on the other hand, she suggests, was
founded on "legend," the "quixotic" (21 0) notion of the white man's burden to slay the
dragon of primitive superstition, which deteriorated rapidly into boyhood ideas of adventure as selfless service to
of Empire (209- 1 0). Arendt's analysis of bureaucracy is particularly

illuminating for an understanding of the relationship of colonial discourse
to the order of Whiteness (or race). Citing the influential colonial administrator Lord Cromer
as a model of the colonial bureaucrat who articulated a " theory" of bureaucracy, Arendt argues that his gradual
persuasion to the method of a "hybrid form of government" entailed the governance of subject
territories through what he termed "personal influence," without accountability to a legal or
political policy or treaty. Cromer's perspective, which was to prove definitive for colonial
rule in general, recommended that the bureaucrat, who worked anonymously
behind the scenes, be freed from any form of accountability to public
institutions such as Parliament, the law courts or the press (21 4 ). Such a form of
bureaucracy, Arendt suggests, through her reading of Cromer's letters and speeches, was the
outcome of his realization of the essential contradiction of colonial rule,
the impossibility of cultivating democracy, and in his own words, of governing "a people by a
people-the people of India by the people of England" (cited in Arendt 1973:214). Thus the
transformation of the administrator as (the great English) apostle of the rule of law to one
who "no longer believed in the universal validity of law, but was convinced
of his own innate capacity to rule and dominate" (221 ), meant that the
surreptitious exertion of violence, termed "administrative massacres"
(216) in lieu of the "civilizing mission," was now a "realistic" alternative
for containing the natives. But such a subversive efflorescence at the very heart of the great project
the cause
of freeing the natives from the shackles of their "cruel superstitions" brought bureaucracy in opposition to the
It is at this moment, of the loss of faith in the so-called English

ideals of parliamentary democracy and rational government, that Arendt
marks the convergence of the device of bureaucracy with the practices of
race. This does not mean that she proposes adherence to English ideals as a norm from which colonial discourse
has deviated. If anything, Arendt's thesis is that every discourse of progress always carries
within it its own negation in the form of a "subterranean" current . In her
foundations of colonial law.
preface to the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism, she writes that her book assumes that progress and
Doom are two sides of the same medal; that both are articles of superstition, not of faith ... The conviction that
everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by
commonplaces . . .. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the
This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all

efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still
intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are in vain.
dignity of our tradition.
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Arendt's analysis of the confluence of colonial bureaucracy

and race enables us to discover the contradictions built into colonial
discourse. It is these contrad ictions that Homi Bhabha ( 1994) elaborates as structural
ambivalence- an ambivalence that splits the discourse between official claims to
the rule of law as a rationalization of colonial power and its practical
underside- that is the impossibility of "justice" in an inherently unstable
and disoriented political situation. While Bhabha pinpoints this ambivalence under various termsmimicry, sly civility and hybridity- what is significant is the fact that the contradiction within the
order of race- as the institution of difference and the desire for samenessis best discerned in the field of colonialism. As a concrete utilization of the
logic of "race," colonial discourse, as the agency of a naming and an
ordering of difference, inevitably produces, or more properly is founded
upon, a residue, namely what Arendt terms bureaucracy, the material practice
entailed by the "desire" of Whiteness for absolute mastery. But
bureaucracy must not be understood as a simple and correctable error of
colonial discourse; rather, it must be understood as the "symptom" of the
inherently contradictory claims of the rhetoric of colonialism (the
impossibility of the rule of law) engendered as it is by an impossible
desire. Slavoj Zizek's formulation of the symptom is useful here; he suggests that it is in a given discourse "the
(Arendt 1973: vii-ix)
point of exception functioning as its internal negation" ( 1989:23). And basically, for the symptom to function as the
The unconscious aspect of

Whiteness guarantees just such a non-knowledge, while its illegal desire,
articulated in the symptom of lawless bureaucracy in the scene of
colonialism, supported by the latent equation of Whiteness with
humanness, remains repressed and unacknowledged only to return in an
uncanny encounter. My literary example in the last chapter, Conrad's "The secret sharer" ( 1966),
necessary contradiction, the subject must have no knowledge of its logic.
illustrated the fantasy of Whiteness fulfilling its promise and delivering a lethal enjoyment that logically and
existentially would be impossible. Such an assertion then raises the question of that impossibility, how is it
What does it mean for Whiteness as wholly

symbolic or bound by language (in the sense that race is "successful" and is not missing a
signifier) to fulfill or attempt to fulfill its promise as the master signifier?
What is the consequence of its failing to do so because of its "success"?
How does historicity expose the "success" of race? How does the anxiety
that ensues at such exposure manifest itself? How can we map or discover such a
successful failure? Since we are dealing here with the unconscious function of
the signifier in the constitution of the subject of race, it is incumbent on
us to turn to the formations of the unconscious, i.e., dreams, parapraxes, slips of the
encountered, and with what consequences?
tongue, jokes, etc. Jokes, and humor in general, are a particularly useful site for probing the working of the signifier,
as they are less particularized than dreams and the lapses of speech, and since they can only be told in a public
context, inter-subjectivity is an indispensable element to them. Jokes need at least three people, and exploring this
triangular relation in the context of colonialism may lead us to discern the anxious function of Whiteness. In the
following I use George Orwell's anecdotes of his experience as a policeman in Burma and as a visitor in Morocco as
texts of the failure of Whiteness. Orwell's pieces are particularly useful because in their attempt to be confessional,
to speak the truth about difference and prejudice under the guise of a liberal faith in race, they display an anxiety
that divulges all .
Link XT/Answers
158/259
159/259
Black Link
Identifying individuals as Black or White is not neutralits part of a
system of racial biologism based on the Master Signifier Whiteness
Racial identity, too, I would like to suggest- i.e., words like black and
white, when used as nouns- works like names.10 That is, they are rigid
designators- they are signifiers that have no signified. They establish a
reference, but deliver no connotations or meaning whatsoever. We can , of
course, reasonably argue that race does not exist insofar as the identity of a
person as "black" or "white" is contingent upon a cluster of concepts that
are themselves too protean to be able to uphold anything like a necessary
truth. We can cite historical evidence to show that groups that were once considered white are
no longer classified as such for this or that reason, etc. But as my discussion in Chapter l specified, arguments
leveled at race theory are highly ineffectual and possess insufficient
explanatory power. Thus rather than lapse into the historicist argument, it
may be more productive to view racial color designators as operating not
unlike proper names. The proper name is neither wholly one's own (i.e., we are
all named by others) nor is it meaningful. One inhabits the name as the reference
of oneself, and as Kripke asserts, it bears no relation to a set of properties that establish either its meaning or
its reference: Nixon is Nixon, or as he says, quoting Bishop Butler, "everything is what it is and not another thing"
for "black" and "white"? If someone is designated as

one or the other, there is a necessary truth to that designation, but does it
mean? What would be the cluster of concepts that could establish such an
identity? Even in identity statements such as "blacks are people of African descent" or "whites
are people of European descent," though the predicates supposedly define and give
the meaning of black and white, establishing the necessity of these
concepts in every counter-factual situation will not be possible if only
because national designations, and the notion of descent, are historically
volatile and
. 11 As Kripke says, it is not how the speaker thinks he got the reference, but the actual
(Kripke 1982:94). Is this not true
chain of communication, which is relevant .... Obviously the name is passed on from link to link. But of course not
every sort of causal chain reaching from me to a certain man will do for me to make a reference. There may be a
causal chain from our use of the term "Santa Claus" to a certain historical saint, but still the children, when they use
this, by this time probably do not refer to that saint. ... It seems to me wrong to think we give ourselves some
properties which somehow qualitatively uniquely pick out an object and determine our reference in that manner.
(Kripke 1982:93-4) If we substitute "black" or "white," etc. for Santa Claus in the above quotation, we discern two
first, the paradigm of "black" as reaching back to "Africa," as

is the source of an insurmountable confusion in
critical race theory. The idea that "black" means "people of African
descent" leads into the thicket of debates about biological descent, which
will inevitably run into the false contradiction between culture and
biology. Second, we can now see that the notion of racial passing is nothing but
an intervention into the passing of the name from link to link. Changing
one's identity from black to white, or viceversa, means that one passes
from one chain of communication to another. For instance, when the "Ex-Colored Man" in
things immediately:
Santa Claus could to a medieval saint,
James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man decides to pass from black to white, he does so by
passing from one chain to another: "I finally made up my mind that I would neither disclaim the black race nor claim
the white race; but that I would change my name, raise a mustache, and let the world take me for what it would"
Kripke himself suggests the possibility

of "black" and "white" as rigid designators by advocating the view that
(Johnson 1995:90, emphasis added). In his last lecture,
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terms for natural kinds are much closer to proper names than is ordinarily
supposed ... Perhaps some "general" names ("foolish," "fat," "yellow") express properties. In
a significant sense, such general names as "cow" and "tiger" do not, unless being a cow counts trivially as a
property. Certainly "cow" and "tiger" are not short for the conjunction of properties a dictionary would take to define
them. (Kripke 1982: 127- 8) It should be noted that Kripke's use of "yellow" in the above quotation is a reference to
In this
context, we can understand the utterance "black is beautiful" not as an
attempt at substituting a negative cluster of concepts with a positive one
in order to reclaim the properties attached to "black" identity; rather, it is
intelligible as an attempt to preserve the rigid designation of "black," by
displacing its so-called properties onto black as a color, to mark its
function as a general name, than as a property of group identity. We must
ask what consequence race names as rigid designators have for the
psychoanalytic examination of race identity. I suggest that insofar as race
identity, unlike sexual identity, has no bearing on the real, such rigid
designation is better understood not as an indication of the "failure" of
the symbolic (a symptom that escapes meaning or the possibility of interpretation), which would be
the Lacanian translation of rigid designation, but of its agency. Black and
white and other racial signifiers do not fail to signify properties (as "the" woman
does in her position as objet a or the symptom); they perform the only function they can:
they designate rigidly this or that individual ("everything is what it is and not another
color and not to a human race, which could not, according to the above logic, express properties.
thing"). Does this mean that race names as rigid designators cannot be translated into Lacanian terms, that they
That race names are rigid designators is, first of all,

a counterintuitive claim. If we consider how and why racial signifiers are
used in everyday speech, we encounter not only the ideological production
of specific racial content (usually referred to as stereotypes), but the fraught status of
the racial referent as such. One points with a word- black man, white woman- but
this pointing cannot be "innocent" in the sense that it "merely" establishes
reference as in: "no other than Nixon might have been Nixon" (Kripke 1982:48). The pointing in this
case involves the whole regime of racial visibility which, as I have been
delineating it, is founded on a certain anxiety. This relation between racial
naming as meaning, or the description of properties, and racial naming as
reference, or pure designation, is not one of misreading the logical
functioning of names; rather, I suggest that racial naming as referring to
properties (or the stereotype) acts as an envelope, a cover for the anxiety
of racial reference which literally means nothing. (This is the very definition of the
stereotype as a form of discourse that attempts to produce meaning where none is possible.) There is
something anxiety-producing about the fullness of the signifier/referent
relation that bypasses the signified, or the concept, that would properly
produce meaning and thus desire.
have no psychoanalytic valence?
Black=Linkit socially constructs race reps

Analysis of Race, p. 155)//LA
What kind of an identity statement is "Maggie is black"? I have cited
Kripke's thesis regarding names as rigid designators, and we have
extended that thesis to race designators such as "black" and "white" to
suggest that these nouns also function as names, insofar as they merely
determine reference without recourse to qualitative descriptions that may
161/259
serve as criteria for identity. Like proper names, "black" and "white" have
no meaning, and neither is their reference determined through a cluster of
concepts such that they are true in all situations. Race identity, then, is
not contingent; it is necessary, even "essential," insofar as it is a rigid
designation without qualitative criteria that can be true in all situations.
We have further extended the absence of the signified in this notion of the signifier to Lacan's notion of identity,
If
the signified is a symbolic construct, it is precisely in its absence or failure
that identity is made possible. With reference to woman and sexual difference, this is the excluded
possibility of jouissance, the lack in the Other, that determines the subject of desire as
such. However, racial identity insofar as it is entirely symbolic has no
particularly in relation to the place of "woman" in sexual difference, as something that exceeds the symbolic.
bearing on the lack in the Other . Thus the absence of the signified here
does not mean that the symbolic has failed; it is rather that it has
succeeded too well . There is no question of mapping racial difference
onto the graph of sexual difference. "Black," "white," etc. are rigid
designators, and whatever qualities or signifieds we may attempt to
attach to them will be determined by history . This does not mean that
racial identity is contingent; it is so only if we think of identity in
qualitative terms . And as Kripke says, everyone knows that there are contingent
identities. Racial identity is necessary in that it rigidly designates a
referent without need of qualitative properties. To return to the context of the story, what
does it mean to say that Maggie is black? What effect does it have, especially in relation to the fact that such
reference is precisely refused, by the narrator, for Twyla and Roberta? I have suggested that one of the effects of
such narrative reticence is to exemplify racial names as rigid designators without qualitative properties. Therefore
trying to decode the narrative to read one of the other characters as black or white is to elide the fundamental
proposition of the story: racial signifiers do not mean anything in the strong sense of having "no sense." Therefore,
what is the effect of Roberta's fixing of Maggie as black, given that Twyla was unaware of Maggie's identity as
black?
Their terminology PROVES the Kif language didnt shape identity they
wouldnt use Black as a descriptive term
Using the racial signifier to designate a person ("the black guy over there")
or appending it to a name ("so-and-so, the black poet") is a dominant
mode of establishing identity, especially in the absence of visual evidence such as a photograph.
However, it has of late become a questionable practice, at least in the news media,
to cite someone's race when the story is apparently "neutral."' One may
refer to a person's race only when the story warrants it. We have thus
learnt to be uncomfortable in invoking racial identity unnecessarily , especially
when recounting an unsavory narrative. Most polite and "sensitive" speakers prefer the
ethnic or pseudo-technical term such as "African-American" or
"Caucasian." This is perhaps because color identities aim at a descriptive
accuracy that never finds their mark. Nevertheless, it is still fairly routine
to use racial signifiers as a necessary means to establish identity. Personal ads
that use abbreviations such as SWF or DBM, or references to achievements such as "Arthur Ashe, the first black
Wimbledon champion," seem to indicate that these signifiers are doing some work. But what do we know, really,
when we learn that someone has been designated as the "first black" to win a tennis trophy, or when the "fit, dog
lover" declares herself a SWF? Are "black" and "white" in these statements on par with "tennis champion" and
are "black" and "white"

descriptions, or are they names? Are names descriptions? That is, of
"single, female, dog lover," or with Ashe and anonymous? In other words,
162/259
course, the more fundamental question. Actually, as descriptions, black

and white do not say much about identity, though they do establish group
and personal identifications of the subjects involved. It is customary in
most cultural theory to distinguish between identity and identification as
social and psychical phenomena respectively. In psychoanalysis,
identification is the more privileged term and is elaborated as a set of
finite or incomplete processes by which identity is constituted. Freud refers to
identification in several related domains. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud proposes
identification as "the earliest and original form of emotional tie" (Freud 1921 :39). The division in psychology
between group formations and the constitution of the "individual" subject, he suggests, is artificial and untenable.
For such an opposition to work, it would entail the irreducibility of a notion such as "social instinct," or "herd
Thus, even
though identities such as racial, ethnic, national and cultural are primarily
social or group phenomena, Freud suggests that their composition is derived from
the modes of libidinal ties, or identifications, that subjects effect with
certain objects that replace their ego ideals.2 Freud 's examples of such potentially lethal
instinct," which Freud demonstrates can always be broken down to its individual libidinal origins.
ties, or identifications, are of being in love and hypnosis, themes that Lacan takes up in Seminar XI in relation to
transference and the gaze as objet a. Elsewhere, Freud invokes the concept of identification in relation to objects of
Identification is the key term

in conversion hysteria and obsessional neurosis, and it is not a negligible
term in his theory of other pathologies, including the perversions and
psychoses.3 In all of these discussions, identity is contingent on the
vagaries of unconscious identification and is not determined by either
anatomy (biological differences) or destiny, as in one's birth.
the drive, in mourning, in narcissism, in the formation of symptoms.
163/259
Race=Master Signifier
Whiteness is a master signifierthere is no referent by which we can
understand racethis makes the 1ACs interrogation unproductive
Racialist common sense asserts that race is a familial matter because we inherit our parents' physical features: little Koen looks different from Teun his
twin brother. Thus the site where race as biological inheritance seems most insistent, and that which obsesses contemporary racialized societies, is visible
difference. However insignificant it may be scientifically or philosophically, it seems to be of crucial significance psychically. This accounts for the
bifurcation in the rhetoric of race between designations that are dependent upon a "theory"- philological, anthropological, or biological- of human
difference such as Indo-European or Mongoloid, and the more commonplace designations of color, often correlated with cultures or nations (white, black,
brown, red and yellow), which entirely flout "theory." What matters in racial practice today is visibility- the supposed evidence of the eyes- surface not
depth.6 Racial practice is ultimately an aesthetic practice, and must be understood above all as a regime of looking. It is necessary to focus on the way we
reproduce the visibility of race as our daily common sense, the means by which we "tell people apart," a logic that is best enshrined in the Canadian
phrase "visible minorities." To focus on racial visibility is not to suggest that race refers to brute marks on the body that are legible transhistorically and
transculturally. As a first step, we must acknowledge that nothing about the body, its functions, its marks, or its sensations can be expected to carry stable
meanings across time or space. It is neither "essential," something pre-given in nature, nor is it purely "cultural," comparable to other marks of difference
displayed through clothing by members of religious orders, or class differences asserted through symbols by the aristocracy, or the branding of slaves and
convicts.7 Unlike these categories, race is a less determinate concept that invokes a system of classification according to "somatic/morphological criteria"
which presumes that the bodily mark precedes the classification (Guillaumin 1995: 140). Though it is possible to retrace the genealogy of the visibility of
race as manufactured out of purely contingent historical and material interests, these factors have only a partial explanatory power. While the visible
references of race can realign visibility according to historical need , the fact of visibili ty itself remains constant. This intransigence is an outcome of the
fact that the visible reference of race makes a claim to nature- it is about "telling," like "sex," who is this or that.8 Unlike other forms of socially
constructed difference, such as class or ethnicity, "race," like sex, appears as a fundamental and normative factor of human embodiment, something that
one inherently is from birth. Thus, despite historicist arguments about its social construction, which may or may not be valid, there is a powerful
semblance of necessity built into race that makes it ultimately intractable to constructionist claims. "Race," because it calls upon kinship, functions with
almost as powerful a sense of constraint as sex, that great category of human difference whose analysis, whether biological, psychical, or cultural, is
inevitably relegated to or grounded in the domain of the family. But one must be cautious about analogizing race with sex, a temptation that would greatly
simplify one's analysis. To assume such symmetry would be to risk eliding the particular mode of embodiment entailed by race that only psychoanalysis
can properly reveal. It would also foreclose our attempts to grasp race in its historicity, and its protean capacity to insert itself along with sex into the
there is no denying the fact that race is after all a historical

invention, and that like most inventions it veils the artifice of its origins.
But that in itself is not interesting, for as I have already suggested,
uncovering "race's" genealogy is not to address racial practice. What is
confounding about race is its successful grafting to nature. Thus we must
ask how race appears as the logic of human difference itself. Why do we
allocate difference along certain conventional lines of looking? How do we
come to be racially embodied? What is the structure of racial difference,
and what insights can psychoanalysis offer in the study of the raced
subject? Argument I propose the following working definition: the structure of racial
difference is founded on a master signifier- Whiteness- that produces a
logic of differential relations. Each term in the structure establishes its
reference by referring back to the original signifier. The system of race as
differences among black, brown, red, yellow, and white makes sense only
in its unconscious reference to Whiteness, which subtends the binary
opposition between "people of color" and "white." This inherently asymmetrical and
hierarchical opposition remains unacknowledged due to the effect of
difference engendered by this master signifier, which itself remains
outside the play of signification even as it enables the system . 2 In order to
understand how the signifier impacts the body, or how it institutes a regime of visibility, I
will be interested in how race confronts its own historicity . The problem is not
structure of the subject.
For
simply a question of race disavowing the conditions of its historical emergence, which then implies that our task is
ideological critique is indispensable, it does not

adequately account for the effects of nature that race produces. Rather
than reduce race to the workings of power, I will focus on how race
transmutes its historicity, its contingent foundations, into biological
necessity. It is this process, a process that depends upon and exploits the structure of sexual difference, that
to expose that process. While such
one must grasp. 3 Lacan's theory of sexual difference as that which marks the breakdown of language, thereby
indexing the subject of the unconscious as more than his/ her symbolic determination, provides the analytical tools
by which we may discern the subject of race. Race depends upon the sexed subject for its effectivity; the
164/259
indeterminacy of the sexed subject is the fulcrum around which race turns. The signifier Whiteness attempts to
signify the sexed subject, which is the "more than symbolic" aspect of the subject. 4 We infer the audacious
workings of the signifier from moments when such signifying ambition fails. By focusing on moments of racial
affect is usually produced in relation to the subject's

encounter with the historicity of Whiteness. The major consequence of
such anxiety is the production of an object: the marks on the body that
appear as pre-discursive. Racial visibility, I contend, is related to an
unconscious anxiety about the historicity of Whiteness. This anxiety is the
inevitable result of being subjected to the fraudulent signifier (Whiteness)
which promises everything while disavowing its symbolic origins. These
anxiety, we can discern that such
relations among historicity, the signifier, and anxiety are not necessarily causal. A briefer statement of the
Race is a regime of visibility that secures

our investment in racial identity. We make such an investment because
the unconscious signifier Whiteness, which founds the logic of racial
difference, promises wholeness. (This is what it means to desire Whiteness: not a
desire to become Caucasian [!] but, to put it redundantly, it is an "insatiable desire" on the part
of all raced subjects to overcome difference.) Whiteness attempts to
signify being, or that aspect of the subject which escapes language.
Obviously, such a project is impossible because Whiteness is a historical
and cultural invention. However, what guarantees Whiteness its place as a
master signifier is visual difference. The phenotype secures our belief in
racial difference, thereby perpetuating our desire for Whiteness. We
cannot reach an understanding of this all-important factor of racial
visibility without clarifying the status of the signifier in the constitution of
the subject. What is the relevance here of Lacan's axiom that the unconscious is structured like a language?
argument of this book could be made as follows:
Is he suggesting that the signifier is the foundation of the subject? It is worthwhile to sort out this issue in the
context of a discussion about race, as it will lead to an insight into the difference and implication of race and sex in
terms of the body. Therefore, in the following,
I take up the function of the signifier in the constitution of the

situate Whiteness as the master signifier of
racial difference, and then go on to pose the question of the relation
between the signifier and the body, which is the proper site of our
interrogation of racial visibility.
subject as the subject of the unconscious,
165/259
AT: Historicity
The argument isnt that their analysis is wrong, but rather that its not
productivebiologism is ever-present
While both Appiah and Goldberg offer persuasive analyses of the
(academic) discourse of race, as representatives of what are now entrenched positions on the race
term, they fail to confront the fact that racial practice is not fully covered by
racial theory. There is a hiatus between racial theory and practice in that
the two can function quite independently of each other. Thus to proceed
as if an engagement with racial theory were to undermine the foundations
of racial practice is to misrecognize the structure of the discourse of race.
Etienne Balibar suggests that we regard "shifts in doctrine and language [in race theory] as relatively incidental
matters," given the fact that from the point of view of the victims of racist practice, "these justifications simply lead
This does not mean that race theory is

irrelevant, or that we must focus entirely on racism and racist practice at
the cost of ignoring its more institutionalized forms. Rather, as a first
step, we must begin to recognize the double-edged aspect of the rhetoric
of race, where so-called theory and practice do not always coincide to
produce the effect of causality. The inadequacy of critical race theory with
reference to practice is most evident in relation to cases such as that of little Koen, with which I
to the same old acts" (Bali bar 1991: 18).
began. Interestingly, what is precisely at play in this case is nature and culture, or biology and the social problems
of inclusion and exclusion that Appiah and Goldberg focus on respectively. For instance, given Appiah's view that
race evaporates with the exposure of race's scientific or genetic fallibility, it is, interestingly enough, genetics itself
which is at the heart of this little racial "mistake." In his argument with the Dutch-African-American philosopher
race cannot be invoked, except through a

specious use of genetics, to define the destiny of a so-called people, or to
delineate group aspirations. However, what Koen as a Dutch-Afro-Caribbean child seems to
W.E.B.Du Bois, Appiah demonstrates that
represent is precisely the relation between genes and destiny. At one level, we may say that at the age of eight
months, he has already been disqualified to borrow at a bank. But more seriously, the irony of this particular case is
that genetic theory here does not serve to discredit racial identity; rather, the DNA test establishes Koen as "black"
boy (though born of a "white" mother). Admittedly, Koen's parents are not suggesting that Koen is inherently
incapable of borrowing at a bank, and neither is the DNA test a verification of race as much as of paternity;
identity and destiny here are socially interpreted rather than genetically
determined . However, the issue remains that destiny is not uncorrelated
to genetics. And no amount of argumentation disarticulating the two will
do away with the fact that because something is inherited as "race," your
life is predetermined for you. As the Dutch parents testify, most of us continue to
harbor deep-seated notions of racial inheritance, despite its scientific
untenability simply due to genetic theory's claims to heritabilty as such .
Some of us, as committed social constructionists, may perhaps disclaim this notion because science tells us that
the relation between genes and racial identity and destiny is not one of simple predication. DNA tests can establish
parentage, but they cannot establish a trans-historical racial identity. Nevertheless, the DNA test in this case does
determine Koen's racial identity (and his non-creditworthiness), though not directly. The relation between genes and
identity/destiny is no longer one of predication but implication. The notion of race as genetic inheritance can
continue to be entertained when mediated by kinship relations: Koen 's father is a "black man" from Aruba. It is a
question, it seems of the signifier, of the Name of the Father, which imparts not only sexual and familial identity,
but also racial. Thus the signifier establishes race at the same moment that genetics establishes kinship, and it is
this synchrony that enables the simultaneous articulation of genes and identity/ destiny, though not causally. None
of this alters the fact that the bottom line in both arguments, whether that of predication or articulation, is of
genetic inheritance. Thus I would affirm Appiah 's argument that race is inextricably linked to inheritance. If we
reduce the position of DuBois and that of Koen's father into simple propositions, we see their logical similarity:
"Black people (because they are born 'black') have an inherently valuable message for the world" (as this message
is a factor of their racial inheritance); and "Black people (because they are born 'black') will always be poor" (which
is a factor of their social inheritance based on their racial identity). Both statements leave intact the implication of
166/259
my skepticism is directed not at the contents

of Appiah's argument but at its utility. Appiah's impulse to undermine race
by interrogating its scientific grounds is academically valuable, but it does
not address the way in which race recoups inheritance through other
rhetorical means, such as articulation with kinship and recourse to
visibility. It seems that, given the power of the notion of heritability as
such, no amount of disputation with racial theory can dislodge the
association one makes of race with inheritance. Race will continue to be
articulated with kinship, with ethnicity, with culture, in ways that will
require repeated purges of its claims to inheritance. Theoretical
expurgations may be useful at one level, but they do not undercut the
emotional force of an ethnos that race so effectively and resiliency
enables. I argue that this effect is made possible primarily through race's ability to combine with narratives of
the family and kinship in order to appear as a factor of inheritance. Race, then, derives its power
not from socially constructed ideologies, but from the dynamic interplay
between the family as a socially regulated institution, and biology as the
site of essences and inheritances. In fact, the more one attempts to
render race as merely a social construct, the more it contributes towards
the naturalization of that construct.
race as inheritance and destiny. However,
167/259
AT: Race=Biology/Appearance
Their understanding is historicistprevents productive critique
Most contemporary debates over the definition of cultural identities and
psychical identifications, whether racial , ethnic or sexual, seem to lapse invariably
into the opposition between biological essence and social construction.
Where race is concerned, however, the opposition, when examined closely, is more
over the terms of the debate- i.e. the deployment of the term " race"
itself-than over ontological considerations. Few if any liberally inclined
persons today will hold that "race," as it was theorized in the nineteenth century, as a concept
referring to the aspirations and abilities of a homogeneous group, is an inherited biological
essence. In fact, the scientific bases of race have been thoroughly
discredited, as have the philosophical, to the point that race is now considered a "folk" belief.2
However, this has not meant the disappearance of race from science .3 It
persists, for instance, in medical literature as a means to map the demography of diseases and symptoms. But, if
one applies some pressure to the medical category of race, one discovers that it has none of the cultural valence
associated with "race"; rather, it is a diffused concept that
refers mostly to "human diversity"

not group essence.4 Race is also frequently equated nowadays with the term
"phenotype" as an acceptable term to denote what are supposedly "gross morphological differences," or
(irrelevant visible marks of skin color, hair texture and bone structure. Nevertheless, despite (or perhaps
because of) the scientific evisceration of race as meaningful, and the narrowing of its reference to mere bodily
race has never been more reified as a factor of

it continues to
influence social legislation. In our unexamined effort to perpetuate race as
meaningful , the debate over hereditary race has today been displaced
onto questions of identity politics. Should the term race be conceived as a
neutral concept designating "human diversity," which is therefore worth
salvaging for its emancipatory power? Can or should race be separated from its history of
signifiers with no signifieds, or meanings,
cultural identity. As a concept it is acknowledged to matter in ever more important ways as
racist practice and doctrine? Can group identity organized along the lines of racial difference ever overcome the
pernicious exclusivism endemic to the concept? Among the most vocal figures representing the two sides of this
debate within the academy in the US today are Anthony Appiah and David Goldberg.
According to
Appiah (1992), any invocation of racial identity, even when it claims to be a "sociohistorical" notion, and open to affiliations, etc., is always biologically grounded. In "Illusions of
race" Appiah examines Du Bois' categorization of human races and his claim that the "Negro" race, "generally of
Appiah rightly characterizes

Du Bois' supposedly culturalist definition of race as produced in and as a
dialectical opposition that invariably relies on the scientific or biological
view which it contests. Delving into contemporary biological literature on "race," Appiah further
common blood and language," has a special message for the world.
elucidates the speciousness of genetic theories of racial difference.5 Separating the "visible morphological
characteristics of skin, hair, and bone" ( 1992: 35) from inherited "characterological" traits supposedly coded in
genes, Appiah is at pains to disarticulate appearance, conceived as pure contingency, from destinypathological or
political. "The truth," Appiah concludes, is that there are no races: there is nothing in
the world that can do all we ask race to do for us .... Talk of race is particularly distressing for those of us who take
culture seriously. For, when race works- in places where "gross differences" of morphology are correlated with
"subtle differences" of temperament, belief, and intention- it works as an attempt at metonym for culture, and it
Thus, for Appiah,

invocations of racial belonging, whether Anglo-Saxon or African, are
always false if not dangerous, insofar as they are grounded in an implicit
biologism that is scientifically untenable. But Appiah's examination of the gene theory of
does so only at the price of biologizing what is culture, ideology. (Appiah 1992:45)
168/259
races, to prove that so-called racial characteristics (such as aesthetics, aspirations, potentialities) are not heritable,
overlooks an important point. Discrediting the scientific validity of race based on the relative invariability of genetic
characteristics among so-called racial populations cannot in itself obliterate race or scientific interest in it. For as
Colette Guillaumin suggests, scientific racial theory fixes on various localities of the body at different times,
deploying signifiers that map the body according to convenience: "Rooted at first in the body or the blood, this
ideology later shifted to the brain and nervous system, and has now taken refuge in the genetic and chromosome
potential" (1995:63). And at present that too has given way after The Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray 1996) to
arguing with science is only to displace race

onto another locus of scientific investigation. Insofar as race is
perpetuated as a meaningful category in our language, science will
continue to furnish explanations of it. Arguing with race is at some level
always a futile activity. As Guillaumin says with regard to such exorcising gestures: "Negations are not
the measurement of IQ. In other words,
recognized as such by our unconscious mental processes. From this point of view, a fact affirmed and a fact denied
exist to exactly the same degree, and remain equally present in our affective and intellectual associative networks"
It is precisely this unconscious resiliency of race that invites

psychoanalytic exploration. For Goldberg ( 1993), on the other hand, race
is not necessarily a biological phenomenon. It is a virtually "empty concept" that articulates
( 1995: 105).
group identity for the sake of exclusion and inclusion and can overlap with any number of discourses on community,
including ethnicity and nation. "Race has been able, in and through its intersections with other forms of group
identity, to cover over the increasing anonymity of mass social relations in modernity" (1993:81 ). Thus
Goldberg insists that race must be grasped as a historically fluid concept

that signifies differently according to the historical and material interests
of the time. For him a key question is whether any generally abstract characterization approaching definition
can be given to the concept of race. It should be obvious from all I have said that race cannot be a static, fixed
entity, indeed, is not an entity in any objective sense at all. I am tempted to say that race is whatever anyone in
using that term or its cognates conceives of collective social relations. It is, in this sense, any group designation one
ascribes of oneself as such (that is, as race, or under the sign) or which is so ascribed by others. Its meanings, as its
forces, are always illocutionary. (ibid.) When using "race," Goldberg suggests, we must be clear about which
signification we are employing. Quite predi ctably, Goldberg criticizes Appiah's view (that all references to race are
always grounded in a covert biologism) as being too narrow and thus as overlooking race's productive aspect as a
discourse of power (1993 :86). Classification, valuation, and ordering are processes central to racial creation and
construction. The ordering at stake need not be hierarchical but must at least identify difference; and the valuation
need not claim superiority, for all it must minimally sustain is a criterion of inclusion and exclusion. (1993:87)
For
Goldberg, race can be logically separated from racism, that is, from its
legacy of racist practice. He writes: Race has been conceptually well-placed to characterize freedom's
routes, to channel freedom's mobility, and so to thrive in this age of ambiguity, for as I have made clear it is by
nature (insofar as it has one) a concept virtually vacuous in its own right. Its virtual conceptual emptiness allows it
parasitically to map its signification of naturalized differences onto prevailing social views . .. to articulate and
extend racialized exclusions . . .. This prevailing historical legacy of thinking racially does not necessitate that any
conceptual use of or appeal to race to characterize social circumstance is inherently unjustifiable .... What
distinguishes a racist from a non-racist appeal to the category of race is the use into which the categorization
enters, the exclusions it sustains, prompts, promotes, and extends .... Though race has tended historically to define
conditions of oppression, it could, under a culturalist interpretation . .. be the site of a counterassualt, a ground of
field for launching liberatory projects or from which to expand freedom(s) and open up emancipatory spaces.
Goldberg's insistence on the emptiness of the concept of

race is at first glance refreshing, in that the vacuity seems to account for the inexhaustible
capacity of race to reproduce itself. However, by suggesting that "race is whatever
anyone in using that term or its cognates" means by it, and that it is any "group
designation" ascribed by oneself or by others, he elevates the term to a universal
generality that evacuates it of its linguistic specificity. His view that cognates of
(Goldberg 1993:210-ll)
"race," for instance, mean the same thing as "race," completely elides the hegemony of linguistic categories. It
renders languages wholly commensurate with one another, and

hypostasizes race itself as a "natural" element of difference that
languages name in various ways. Goldberg's overtly Foucauldian emphasis
on the productivity of race may appear potentially useful. However, his
focus on the socio-historical formation of "racialized discourse," which
refers to race as "meaning different things at different times," combined
with his inattention to the specificity of language, is problematic. It
169/259
serves to undermine his project, which is to argue for the political nature
of "race ." By universalizing race, Goldberg in effect conflates the
Foucauldian notion of power itself with race as the effect and cause of
discourse, thus making it impossible to pose the question of the
historicity of "race."
There is first the sociolinguistic counterargument, also a historicist one, that we
must take seriously. As Guillaumin and others have argued, the concept of race is specific to Europe and was
invented in the late eighteenth to nineteenth century. Goldberg courts the danger of reifying race by universalizing
it as the governing epistemological paradigm, when he ascribes racial thinking to groups that conceive their
Moreover, by
separating race from racism and attempting to deliver it to a culturalist
reinterpretation, Goldberg reproduces the very problems of biologism that
Appiah critiques with reference to Du Bois. But even more importantly, by
abstracting the concept from its historical or linguistic practice, Goldberg
dislodges race from any mooring in history or language, thus rendering it,
in effect, a catch-all term for difference as such. Why race should be salvaged as the only
identities on the basis of other terminologies of difference (Guillaumin 1995:61).
term that can offer emancipatory possibilities despite its execrable history is never clear.
170/259
AT: Whiteness is real

Whiteness is a system of ordering, not a description
Analysis of Race, p. 97)//LA
The issue here is not so much that of Orwell's identification with his own
Whiteness. Such a reading would merely reproduce the colonialist
presumption about "race." It is more interesting to note that Orwell is not
speaking in terms of his belonging to Whiteness. Rather, underlying his
more commonplace designation of white versus non-white people, he
speaks of Whiteness not merely as a property of particular human beings,
but as a technicality- that is, a system of ordering the world, a discourse of
differences which institutes a regime of looking. Also, in "A hanging," Orwell is surprised
by his own responses when he recognizes the humanity of the emaciated native prisoner. Walking ahead on his way
to the gallows, the man avoids a puddle, and Orwell is astonished by this simple human gesture in the face of
death: "It is curious," he admits, "but till that moment I had never realised what it means to destroy a healthy,
conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable
wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive"
(1968a: 45). What Orwell articulates repeatedly in his brief essays about his tenure as a police officer in colonial
Burma and his sojourn in Morocco is the uncanny surprise and shock at his own responses in discovering a shared
humanity. Orwell's essays are not naive articulations about encountering the humanity of the "other," in which case
the horror of difference (the fetishizing of hair, skin and bone) would have been the predictable response. Rather,
the shock is in discovering that the continuity of humanness can be surprising, thus signalling the profound
in the
extremity of the colonial context, Orwell seems to risk encountering the
aspiration at the heart of the system of race, and that is founded on a core
notion of wholeness (promised by the signifier "Whiteness") that
mandates the very notion of humanness. In other words, what is uncanny
for a subject such as Orwell is the discovery that at the core exists the
untenable, unassimilable notion that the very assumption of a human
subject position is to be implicated in a racial economy of meaning.
alienation or split within his own psyche between what he recognizes and what he knows. In other words,
*AFFPsychoanalysis
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172/259
Psychoanalysis=Bad
Psychoanalysis results in fatalism, passivity, and inaction
Gordon 1 (Psychotherapist Paul, Psychoanalysis and Racism: The Politics of Defeat,
Race Class 2001 42: 17)
The postmodernists' problem is that they cannot live with dis appointment. All the
political project of emancipation the evils of Stalinism in particular
tragedies of the
are seen as the
inevitable product of men and women trying to create a better society. But,
rather than engage in a critical assessment of how, for instance, radical
political movements go wrong, they discard the emancipatory project and
impulse itself. The postmodernists, as Sivanandan puts it, blame modernity for having failed them:
`the intellectuals and academics have fled into discourse and deconstruction and
representation -- as though to interpret the world is more important than to
change it, as though changing the interpretation is all we could do in a
changing world'. 58 To justify their ight from a politics holding out the prospect of radical change through
self-activity, the disappointed intellectuals find abundant intellectual alibis for
themselves in the very work they champion, including, in Cohen's case,
psychoanalysis. What Marshall Berman says of Foucault seems true also of
psychoanalysis; that it offers à world-historical alibi' for the passivity and
helplessness felt by many in the 1970s, and that it has nothing but contempt for those naive enough
to imagine that it might be possible for modern human kind to be free . At every turn for such
theorists, as Berman argues, whether in sexuality, politics, even our imagination , we are nothing
but prisoners: there is no freedom in Foucault's world, because his language forms a seamless web, a cage
far more airtight than anything Weber ever dreamed of, into which no life can break . . . There is no point in
trying to resist the oppressions and injustices of modern life, since even our dreams of freedom only add more
links to our chains; how ever, once we grasp the futility of it all, at least we can relax. 59 Cohen's political
defeatism and his conviction in the explanatory power of his new faith of psychoanalysis lead him to be
contemptuous and dismissive of any attempt at political solidarity or collective action. For him, `communities'
are always ìmagined', which, in his view, means based on fantasy, while different forms of working-class
organisation, from the craft fraternity to the revolutionary group, are dismissed as `fantasies of self-sufcient
combination'. 60 In this scenario, the idea that people might come together, think together, analyse together
and act together as rational beings is impossible. The idea of a genuine community of equals becomes a pure
fantasy, a `symbolic retrieval' of something that never existed in the rst place: `Community is a magical
device for conjuring something apparently solidary out of the thin air of modern times, a mechanism of reenchantment.' As for history, it is always false, since `We are always dealing with invented traditions.' 61 Now,
this is not only non sense, but dangerous nonsense at that. Is history àlways false'? Did the Judeocide happen
or did it not? And did not some people even try to resist it? Did slavery exist or did it not, and did not people
resist that too and, ultimately, bring it to an end? And are communities always ìmagined'? Or, as Sivanandan
states, are they beaten out on the smithy of a people's collective struggle? Furthermore, all attempts to legislate
against ideology are bound to fail because they have to adopt `technologies of surveillance and control identical
to those used by the state'. Note here the Foucauldian language to set up the notion that all `surveillance' is
bad. But is it? No society can function without surveillance of some kind. The point, surely, is that there should
be a public conversation about such moves and that those responsible for implementing them be at all times
accountable. To equate, as Cohen does, a council poster about `Stamping out racism' with Orwell's horrendous
prophecy in 1984 of a boot stamping on a human face is ludicrous and insulting. (Orwell's image was intensely
personal and destructive; the other is about the need to challenge not individuals, but a collective evil.) Cohen
reveals himself to be deeply ambivalent about punitive action against racists, as though punishment or other
rm action against them (or anyone else transgressing agreed social or legal norms) precluded ùnderstand
ing' or even help through psychotherapy. It is indeed a strange kind of ànti-racism' that portrays active racists
as the `victims', those who are in need of `help'. But this is where Cohen's argument ends up. In their move
from politics to the academy and the world of `discourse', the postmodernists may have simply
exchanged one grand narrative, historical materialism, for another,

psychoanalysis. 62 For psychoanalysis is a grand narrative, par excellence. It is a theory that seeks to
account for the world and which recognises few limits on its explanatory potential. And the claimed
radicalism of psycho analysis, in the hands of the postmodernists at least, is
not a radicalism at all but a prescription for a politics of quietism, fatalism and
defeat. Those wanting to change the world, not just to interpret it, need to look
elsewhere.
173/259
Psychoanalysis only explains individual decisionsnot applicable to social

experiences
Gordon 1 (Psychotherapist, Paul, Psychoanalysis and Racism: The Politics of Defeat,
Race Class 2001 42: 17)
The problem with the application of psychoanalysis to social institu tions is that there can be no testing of the
claims made. If someone says, for instance, that nationalism is a form of looking for and seeking to replace the
body of the mother one has lost, or that the popular appeal of a particular kind of story echoes the pattern of
our earliest relationship to the maternal breast, how can this be proved? The pioneers of
psychoanalysis, from Freud onwards, all derived their ideas in the context of their
work with individual patients and their ideas can be examined in the everyday
laboratory of the therapeutic encounter where the validity of an interpretation,

for example, is a matter for dialogue between therapist and patient . Outside of the con sulting
room, there can be no such verification process, and the further one moves
from the individual patient, the less purchase psycho analytic ideas can have.
Outside the therapeutic encounter, anything and everything can be true,
psychoanalytically speaking. But if every thing is true, then nothing can be
false and therefore nothing can be true.
Zero truth value to psychoanalysis cant make truth claims, encourages

infinite regress and transforms even the clearest components of reality
into a poetic phantasmagoria
Perpich 5 (Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt, Diane, Figurative Language and

the "Face" in Levinas's Philosophy, Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 38, No. 2, p. 103121)
Levinas's hesitations about the value of psychoanalysisindeed, what might be called his allergic reactions to
psychoanalysisare similarly based. Psychoanalysis, he writes, "casts a basic suspicion on
the most unimpeachable testimony of self-consciousness " (1987b, 32). Psychological
states in which the ego seems to have a "clear and distinct" grasp of itself are reread by psychoanalysis as
symbols for a "reality that is totally inaccessible" to the self and that is the expression of "a social reality or a
historical influence totally distinct from its [the ego's] own intention" (34). Moreover, all of the ego's
protests against the interpretations of analysis are themselves subject to

further analysis, leaving no point exterior to the analysis: "I am as it were shut up in my
own portrait" (35). Psychoanalysis threatens an infinite regress of meaning, a recursive
process that leads from one symbol to another, from one symptom to another
with no end in sight and no way to break into or out of the chain of signifiers in
the name of a signified. "The real world is transformed into a poetic world, that is,
into a world without beginning in which one thinks without knowing what one [End Page 111] thinks" (35). Put
less poetically, Levinas's worry is that psychoanalysis furnishes us with no fixed point or
firm footing from which to launch a critique and to break with social and
historical determinations of the psyche in order to judge society and history
and to call both to account. Indeed, his uncharacteristic allusion to "clear and distinct" ideas betrays
his intention: to seek, against both religious and psychoanalytic participations, for a relationship in which the
ego is an "absolute," "irreducible" singularity, within a totality but still separate from it, that is, still capable of a
relation with exteriority. To seek such a relation is, Levinas says, "to ask whether a living man [sic] does not have
the power to judge the history in which he is engaged, that is, whether the thinker as an ego, over and beyond
all that he does with what he possesses, creates and leaves, does not have the substance of a cynic" (35). The
naked being who confronts me with his or her alterity, the naked being that I am myself and whose being
"counts as such" is now naked not with an erotic nudity but with the nudity of a cynic who has thrown off the
cloak of culture in order to present him- or herself directly and "in person" through "this chaste bit of skin with
brow, nose, eyes, and mouth" (41). Levinas picks up the thread of this worry about psychoanalysis in "Ethics and
Discourse," the main section of "The Ego and the Totality." To affirm humankind as a power to judge history, he
claims, is to affirm rationalism and to reject "the merely poetic thought which thinks without knowing what it
things, or thinks as one dreams" (40). The impetus for psychoanalysis is philosophical ,
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Levinas admits; that is, it shares initially in this affirmation of rationalism insofar as it affirms the need for
reflection and for going "underneath" or getting behind unreflected consciousness and thought. However,
if
its impetus is philosophical, its issue is not insofar as the tools that it uses for
reflection turn out to be "some fundamental, but elementary, fables . . . which,
incomprehensibly, would alone be unequivocal, alone not translate (or mask or
symbolize) a reality more profound than themselves " (40). Psychoanalysis
returns one, then, to the irrationalism of myth and poetry rather than liberating one from
them. It resubmerges one within the cultural and historical ethos and mythos in
a way that seems to Levinas to permit no end to interpretation and thus no power to judge. He
imagines psychoanalysis as a swirling phantasmagoria in which language is all
dissimulation and deception. "One can find one's bearings in all this phantasmagoria, one can
inaugurate the work of criticism only if one can begin with a fixed point. The fixed
point cannot be some incontestable truth, a 'certain' statement that would always be subject [End
Page 112] to psychoanalysis; it can only be the absolute status of an interlocutor, a being, and not a
truth about beings" (41). In this last claim, the fate of Heideggerian fundamental ontology that is an
understanding of Being rather than a relation to beings (or to a being, a face) is hitched to the fate of
psychoanalysis and both linked to participation, the "nocturnal chaos" that threatens to drown the ego in the
totality.
175/259
Psychoanalysis=Bad Policy
Psychoanalytic affirmation does not spill over to government policy
Rosen-Carole 10 (Professor of Philosophy @ Bard, Adam Rosen-Carole 10, Visiting
Professor of Philosophy at Bard College, 2010, Menu Cards in Time of Famine: On
Psychoanalysis and Politics, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Vol. LXXIX, No. 1, p. 205207)
On the other hand, though in these ways and many others, psychoanalysis seems to promote the
sorts of subjective dispositions and habits requisite for a thriving democracy, and though in
a variety of ways psychoanalysis contributes to personal emancipation say, by releasing individuals from selfdefeating, damaging, or petrified forms action and reaction, object attachment, and the likein light of the very
uniqueness of what it has to offer, one cannot but wonder: to what extent, if at all, can the
habits and dispositionsbroadly, the forms of lifecultivated by psychoanalytic
practice survive, let alone flourish, under modern social and political
conditions? If the emancipatory inclinations and democratic virtues that psychoanalytic practice promotes
are systematically crushed or at least regularly unsupported by the world in which they would be realized, then
isnt psychoanalysis implicitly making promises it cannot redeem? Might not massive social and political
transformations be the condition for the efficacious practice of psychoanalysis? And so, under current
conditions, can we avoid experiencing the forms of life nascently cultivated by psychoanalytic practice as
something of a tease, or even a source of deep frustration? (2) Concerning psychoanalysis as a politically
inclined theoretical enterprise, the worry is whether political diagnoses and proposals
that proceed on the basis of psychoanalytic insights and forms of attention

partake of a fantasy of interpretive efficacy (all the worlds a couch, you might say), wherein
our profound alienation from the conditions for robust political agency are registered and repudiated? Consider,
for example, Freud and Bullitts (1967) assessment of the psychosexual determinants of Woodrow Wilsons
political aspirations and impediments, or Reichs (1972) suggestion that Marxism should appeal to
psychoanalysis in order to illuminate and redress neurotic phenomena that generate disturbances in working
capacity, especially as this concerns religion and bourgeois sexual ideology. Also relevant are Freuds,
ieks (1993, 2004), Derridas (2002) and others insistence that we draw the juridical and
political consequences of the hypothesis of an irreducible death drive , as well as
Marcuses (1970) proposal that we attend to the weakening of Eros and the growth of aggression that results
from the coercive enforcement of the reality principle upon the sociopolitically weakened ego, and especially to
the channeling of this aggression into hatred of enemies. Reich (1972) and Fromm (1932) suggest that
psychoanalysis be employed to explore the motivations to political irrationality, especially that singular
irrationality of joining the national-socialist movement, while Irigaray (1985) diagnoses the desire for the Same,
the One, the Phallus as a desire for a sociosymbolic order that assures masculine dominance. iek (2004)
contends that only a psychoanalytic exposition of the disavowed beliefs and suppositions of
the United States political elite can get at the fundamental determinants of the
Iraq War. Rose (1993) argues that it was the paranoiac paradox of sensing both that there is every reason to
be frightened and that everything is under control that allowed Thatcher to make this paradox the basis of
political identity so that subjects could take pleasure in violence as force and legitimacy while always locating
real violence somewhere elseillegitimate violence and illicitness increasingly made subject to the law (p.
64). Stavrakakis (1999) advocates that we recognize and traverse the residues of utopian fantasy in our
contemporary political imagination.1 Might not the psychoanalytic interpretation of powerful figures (Bush, Bin
Laden, or whomever), collective subjects (nations, ethnic groups, and so forth), or urgent political situations
register an anxiety regarding political impotence or castration that is pacified and modified by the fantasmatic
frame wherein the psychoanalytically inclined political theorist situates him- or herself as diagnosing or
interpretively intervening in the lives of political figures, collective political subjects, or complex political
situations with the idealized efficacy of a successful clinical intervention? If so, then the question is: are the
contributions of psychoanalytically inclined political theory anything more than tantalizing menu cards for meals
it cannot deliver? As I said, the worry is twofold. These are two folds of a related problem, which is this:
might the very seductiveness of psychoanalytic theory and practice

specifically, the seductiveness of its political promiseregister the lasting
eclipse of the political and the objectivity of the social, respectively? In other words,
might not everything that makes psychoanalytic theory and practice so
politically attractive indicate precisely the necessity of wide-ranging
social/institutional transformations that far exceed the powers of
psychoanalysis? And so, might not the politically salient transformations of subjectivity to which
psychoanalysis can contribute overburden subjectivity as the site of political transformation, blinding us to the
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necessity of largescale institutional reforms? Indeed, might not massive institutional transformations be
necessary conditions for the efficacy of psychoanalytic practice, both personally and politically? Further, might
not the so-called interventions and proposals of psychoanalytically inclined political theory similarly sidestep the
question of the institutional transformations necessary for their realization, and so conspire with our blindness to
the enormous institutional impediments to a progressive political future? The idea, then, is to use the limits of
psychoanalytic practice and psychoanalytically inclined political theory as a form of social diagnosis. I want to
read the limits of psychoanalytically inclined political theory for what they can tell us about the lasting eclipse of
the political, and so, inversely, for what they can tell us about what a viable political culture requires, just as I
want to read the limits of the political efficacy of psychoanalytic practice for what
they can tell us about what would be required for their successful realization .2
Attaching the plan to psychoanalytic prescriptions is particularly

dangerous
Rosen-Carole 10 (Professor of Philosophy @ Bard, Adam Rosen-Carole 10, Visiting
Professor of Philosophy at Bard College, 2010, Menu Cards in Time of Famine: On
Psychoanalysis and Politics, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Vol. LXXIX, No. 1, p. 226229)
The second approach to the problem has to do with psychoanalytic contributions to
political theory that avoid Freuds methodological individualism, but nevertheless run into the same
problem. An expanding trend in social criticism involves a tendency to discuss the
death or aggressive drives, fantasy formations, traumas, projective identifications,
defensive repudiations, and other such psychic phenomena of collective subjects as
if such subjects were ontologically discrete and determinate. Take the following
passage from iek (1993) as symptomatic of the trend I have in mind: In Eastern Europe, the West
seeks for its own lost origins, its own lost original experience of democratic
invention. In other words, Eastern Europe functions for the West as its Ego-Ideal (Ich-Ideal): the point from
which [the] West sees itself in a likable, idealized form, as worthy of love. The real object of fascination for the
West is thus the gaze, namely the supposedly naive gaze by means of which Eastern Europe stares back at the
West, fascinated by its democracy. [p. 201, italics in original] Also, we might think here of the
innumerable discussions of Americas death drive as propelling the recent

invasions in the Middle East, or of the ways in which the motivation for the Persian Gulf Wars of the
1990s was a collective attempt to kick the Vietnam War Syndrome that is, to solidify a national sense of
power and prominence in the recognitive regard of the international community or of the
psychoanalytic speculations concerning the psychodynamics of various nations involved in the
Cold War (here, of course, I have in mind Segals [1997] work), or of the collective racist fantasies and paranoiac
traits that organize various nation-statess domestic and foreign policies.7 Here are some further
examples from iek, who, as a result of his popularity, might be said to function as a barometer of incipient
trends: What is therefore at stake in ethnic tensions is always the possession of the national Thing. We always
impute to the other [ethnic group, race, nation, etc.] an excessive enjoyment: he wants to steal our enjoyment
(by ruining our way of life) and/or he has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. [1993, pp. 202-203]
Beneath the derision for the new Eastern European post- Communist states, it is easy to discern the contours of
the wounded narcissism of the European great nations. [2004, p. 27, italics added] There is in fact
something of a neurotic symptom in the Middle Eastern conflicteveryone recognizes the way to get rid of the
obstacle, yet nonetheless, no one wants to remove it, as if there is some kind of pathological libidinal profit
gained by persisting in the deadlock. [2004, p. 39, italics added] If there was ever a passionate attachment to
the lost object, a refusal to come to terms with its loss, it is the Jewish attachment to their land and Jerusalem . .
. . When the Jews lost their land and elevated it into the mythical lost object, Jerusalem became much more
than a piece of land . . . . It becomes the stand-in for . . . all that we miss in our earthly lives. [2004, p. 41]
Rather than explore collective subjects through analyses of their individual members, this type of
psychoanalytically inclined engagement with politics treats a collective subject

(a nation, a region, an ethnic group, etc.) as if it were simply amenable to explanation, and
perhaps even to intervention, in a manner identical to an individual psyche in a
therapeutic context. But if the transpositions of psychoanalytic concepts into
political theory are epistemically questionable, as I believe they are,8 the question is: why
are they so prevalent? Perhaps the psychoanalytic interpretation of collective subjects (nations, regions, etc.), or
even the psychoanalytic interpretation of powerful political figures, registers a certain anxiety regarding political
impotence and provokes a fantasy that, to an extent, pacifies and modifiesdefends againstthat anxiety.
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Perhaps such engagements, which are increasingly prevalent in these days of excruciating political
alienation, operate within a fantasmatic frame wherein the anxiety of political
exclusion and castrationthat is, anxieties pertaining to a sense of oneself

as politically inefficacious, a non-agent in most relevant sensesis both
registered and mitigated by the fantasmatic satisfaction of imagining oneself
interpretively intervening in the lives of political figures or collective political
subjects with the efficacy of a clinically successful psychoanalytic
interpretation. To risk a hypothesis: as alienation from political efficacy increases and becomes more
palpable, as our sense of ourselves as political agents diminishes, fantasies of interpretive intervention abound.
Within such fantasy frames, one approaches a powerful political figure (or
collective subject) as if s/he were on the couch, open and amenable to ones
interpretation. 9 One approaches such a powerful political figure or ethnic group or nation as if s/he (or it)
desired ones interpretations and acknowledged her/his suffering, at least implicitly, by her/his very involvement
in the scene of analysis. Or if such fantasies also provide for the satisfaction of
sadistic desires provoked by political frustration and castration (a sense of oneself as
politically voiceless, moot, uninvolved, irrelevant), as they very well might, then ones place within
the fantasy might be that of the all-powerful analyst, the sujet suppos savoir, the analyst
presumptively in control of her-/himself and her/his emotions, etc. Here the analyst becomes the
one who directs and organizes the analytic encounter, who commands
psychoanalytic knowledge, who knows the analysand inside and out, to whom the analysand must
speak, upon whom the analysand depends, who is in a position of having something to offer, whose advice
even if not directly heededcannot but make some sort of impact, and in the face of whom the analysand is
quite vulnerable, who is thus powerful, in control . . . perhaps the very figure whom the psychoanalytically
inclined interpreter fears. Minimally, what I want to underscore here is that (1) a sense of political
alienation may be registered and fantasmatically mitigated by treating political

subjects, individual or collective, as if they were on the couch; and (2) expectations
concerning the expository and therapeutic efficacy of psychoanalytic
interpretations of political subjects may be conditioned by such a fantasy .
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Loren and Metelmann
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Wilderson Link
Their conceptualization of race and racism links to this argument.

Wilerson 10 (Frank B., Their Author, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure
of US Antagonisms, Duke U Press, p. 101-104)//LA
Jacques Lacan and Frantz Fanon grappled with the question what does it mean
to be free? and its corollary what does it mean to suffer? at the same moment in
history. To say that they both appeared at the same time is to say that they both have, as their intellectual condition
of possibility, Frances brutal occupation of Algeria. It is not my intention to dwell on Lacans lack of political
My intention is to interrogate the

breadth of full speechs descriptive universality and the depth of its
prescriptive cureto interrogate its foundation by staging an encounter between, on the
activism or to roll out Fanons revolutionary war record.
one hand, Lacan and his interlocutors and, on the other hand, Fanon and his interlocutors. To this end alone do I
note the two mens relation to French colonialism, as the force of that relation is felt in their texts. Frantz Fanons
psychoanalytic description of Black neurosis, hallucinatory
whitening, and his prescriptions for a

and the end of the world (BSWM 96) resonate with
Lacans categories of empty speech and full speech. There is a
monumental disavowal of emptiness involved in hallucinatory whitening,
and disorder and death certainly characterize decolonization. For Fanon the
trauma of Blackness lies in its absolute Otherness in relation to Whites.
That is, White people make Black people by recognizing only their skin
color. Fanons Black patient is overwhelmed...by the wish to be white (BSWM 100). But unlike Lacans diagnosis
cure, decolonization
of the analysand, Fanon makes a direct and self-conscious connection between his patients hallucinatory whitening
and the stability of White society. If Fanons texts ratchet violently and unpredictably between the body of the
subject and the body of the socius, it is because Fanon understands that outside [his] psychoanalytic office, [he
must] incorporate [his] conclusions into the context of the world. The room is too small to contain the encounter.
As a psychoanalyst, I should help my patient to become conscious of his unconscious and abandon his attempts at
Here we have a dismantling of all the fantasms that

constitute the patients ego and which s/he projects onto the analyst that
resonates with the process of attaining what Lacan calls full speech. But
Fanon takes this a step further, for not only does he want the analysand to
surrender to the void of language, but also to act in the direction of a
change...with respect to the real source of the conflictthat is, toward the
social structures (BSWM 100). As a psychoanalyst, Fanon does not dispute Lacans claim that suffering
a hallucinatory whitening...
and freedom are produced and attained, respectively, in the realm of Symbolic; but this, for Fanon, is only half of
The other half of suffering and freedom is violence. By

the time Fanon has woven the description of his patients condition (i.e., his
own life as a Black doctor in France) into the prescription of a cure (his commitment to armed
struggle in Algeria), he has extended the logic of disorder and death from the
Symbolic into the Real. Decolonization, which sets out to change the order
of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder ...[I]t is the meeting of
the modality of existence.
two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature...Their first encounter was marked by violence and their
existence together...was carried on by dint of a great array of bayonets and cannons...[T]his narrow world, strewn
with prohibitions, can only be called in question by absolute violence. (The Wretched of the Earth 36-37) This is
structural, or absolute, violence or what Loic Wacquant calls the carceral

continuum, is not a Black experience but a condition of Black life. It remains
constant, paradigmatically, despite changes in its performance over
time slave ship, Middle Passage, slave estate, Jim Crow, the ghetto, the prison industrial complex.xxviii
There is an uncanny connection between Fanons absolute violence and
Lacans Real. Thus, by extension, the grammar of suffering of the Black
because the
itself is on the level of the Real.
In this emblematic passage,
Fanon does for violence what
181/259
Lacan does for alienation: namely, he removes the negative stigma such a term would otherwise incur in the hands
raises within Lacans

schema of suffering and freedom a contradiction between the idea of
universal un-raced contemporaries and two forces opposed to each other,
whose first encounter and existence together is marked by violence. In
short, he divides the world not between cured contemporaries and
uncured contemporaries, but between contemporaries of all sorts and
slaves. He lays the groundwork for a theory of antagonism over and above a theory of conflict. If Lacans
full speech is not, in essence, a cure but a process promoting psychic
disorder, through which the subject comes to know her/himself, not as a
stable relation to a true selfthe Imaginarybut as a void constituted
only by language, a becoming toward death in relation to the Otherthe
Symbolicthen we will see how this symbolic self-cancellation (Silverman, Male
Subjectivity...63-65, 126-128) is possible only when the subject and his
contemporaries (Lacan, Ecrits 47) are White or Human.xxix The process of full
speech rests on a tremendous disavowal which re-monumentalizes the
(White) ego because it sutures, rather than cancels, formal stagnation by fortifying and extending
the interlocutory life of intra-Human discussions. I am arguing that (1) civil society, the terrain upon which
of theorists and practitioners who seek coherence and stability. He also
the analysand performs full speech, is always already a formally stagnated monument; and (2) the process by
which full speech is performed brokers simultaneously two relations for the analysand, one new and one old,
The process by which full speech is performed brokers a (new)

deconstructive relationship between the analysand and his/her formal
stagnation within civil society and a (pre-existing or) reconstructive
relationship between the analysand and the formal stagnation that
constitutes civil society. Whereas Lacan was aware of how language
precedes and exceeds us (Silverman 2000: 157), he did not have Fanons
awareness of how violence also precedes and exceeds Blacks. An awareness of
this would have disturbed the coherence of the taxonomy implied by the personal pronoun us. The
trajectory of Lacans full speech therefore is only able to make sense of
violence as contingent phenomena, the effects of transgressions (acts
of rebellion or refusal) within a Symbolic Order. Here, violence, at least in
the first instance, is neither sense-less (gratuitous) nor is it a matrix of
human (im)possibility: it is what happens after some form of breach
occurs in the realm of signification. That is to say, it is contingent.
respectively.
182/259
Impact/Alt Cards
The 1A/NC posits racism as the Lacanian Realthis is backwards and

makes racism an inevitabilityonly shifting our conceptualization to place
RACE in the realm of the Real and RACISM in that of representation can
solve
Loren and Metelmann 11 (Scott and Jrg, University of St. Gallen, Whats the
Matter: Race as Res, Journal of Visual Culture, 10(3), p. 397-405)//LA
As such, race might be thought of as having a relay function. It is a medium , so
to speak, through which meaning and relations native to various social spaces
are given utterance, visualized, imagined and imaged, and thereby negotiated. As a
medium, race performs the functions of vision and division. It gives form to perception and
does so through differentiation. Race might thus be thought of as a
conceptual icon, an image of the mind. Thought of within the framework of visual
culture, one might claim that according to Mitchells argument, race performs the work
of a visual medium in so far as ideas and perceptions are not merely given
form through the visual, but are themselves formed through the visual.
This is visualization as the sorting and mapping of social reality, making
visualization through race an essentially political act. In order to properly classify and
understand race as a conceptual icon with a politico-structural function, Mitchell proposes an inversion of the usual
grammar of race as it has been mapped onto Lacans ontological registers of the real, the imaginary and the
symbolic. How is this done? First, Mitchell alters Lacans triadic syntax by extending a fourth axis upward, above
and between the symbolic and the imaginary in order to indicate that this is the space of representation (Figures 2
and 3). Below the symbolic and the imaginary is the location of the real, of non- representation, of dumb, pre-
Mitchells argument assumes that the real is

the locus race has previously been linked to. He claims, though, that if
race is a medium, a location for the generation and transfer of meaning, then it
must be moved away from the mute material of pre-symbolic nature, of the real, into the
realm of representation. Accordingly, what we need to reconceptualize in
its place is racism. Thus, an inversion calls for moving race to the location of
representation and racism to the location of the real, implying that race
would have previously been associated with the real and racism with
representation. Incredibly stubborn, engendering trauma, an enduring thing in need of (the right kind of)
mediation, some of racisms characteristics lend themselves to association
with the Lacanian real. Race, on the other hand, is the iconic location
where the mediation necessary for sense-making takes place. The intentions
motivating this inversion of grammar is one we support: at first sight it appears without a
doubt preferable not to have racism as that which mediates race. We have
seen too much of race projected through the lens of racism. Nevertheless,
placing racism at the locus of the Lacanian real gives way to a variety of
complications. Though it is important to iterate that traumatic encounters with the
real can very well be generated through racism (racist acts of physical or
political violence, for example), placing racism per se within the register
of the Lacanian real is an impossibility. Thought alongside Linda Williams work on race, such
symbolic material, the Kantian Ding an sich.
an inversion also runs the risk of falling into the melodramatic trap of classifying through Manichaean binaries.
There are more effective ways to stress the signifying magnitude of race as a medium and to theorize the tenacious
and socially traumatic potential of racism through Lacanian theory. First, we would like to propose that
Mitchells own argument can only be fortified by not inverting races

grammar mapped onto the Lacanian registers, but by aligning race with
the mute material of the real and locating racism within representation ,
albeit a very particular type of representation. In order to do so without compromising the useful notion of race as a
183/259
we need to distinguish between two separate racial orders: race in

its mute material form and race in its meaning-making, socially significant
(in all possible senses) capacity. Race as the Lacanian real does not signify
anything. It might be thought of as the pre-symbolic material of bodily fluids, flesh and
bone, of genetic coding, but certainly not as history, genealogy, culture, etc. Strictly speaking, this is
race as a non-ontology, or rather as ontos (of being) without logos (speech, discourse, representation).
Against the tendency of putting race in scare quotes because of a lack of consensus on what the term signifies, it
is this first order of race in its mute material capacity that we might leave in scare
quotes precisely because of its connection to the real. If we are to
maintain theoretical rigor regarding the Lacanian register of the real, we
should claim that there is no race. Race is a lack around which various
discourses are constructed. As such, racism must continue to be thought
of as one possible attempt at articulating this lack. There is nothing mute nor material
about racism. It has no ontos without logos, but rather comes into being through
expression, as speech, as discourse, as representation, as action. This is
one reason it cannot be placed at the locus of the Lacanian real. If we want to
medium,
indulge a certain theoretical flexibility and conceive of the Lacanian real not as mute material, but as a combination
of Hegelian second nature linked with the Lacanian reals capacity to engender trauma (if we are not mistaken, it is
understand racism as real), we not only risk taking

recourse to a form of essentialism; we risk making racism immovable. This
is a second reason for not linking racism with the Lacanian real . Before going on
thus that Mitchell wants us to
to talk about how to usefully theorize racism in the field of representation, wed like to clarify second order race:
Thinking about race as a potential medium, a

relay for meaning, can help us get beyond the discussion of the presymbolic real, which has limited and perhaps more importantly limiting use in theorizing
social discourses. In order to make this transition, we will continue to think about race and the Lacanian
real in semiotic terms, thereby linking first and second order race: race as dumb matter, as res,
and race as lack. These orders are inherently linked as dumb matter and
lack are both void of meaning. For Lacan, the kernel around which
language and the entirety of the symbolic order are constructed is lack.
Meaning is always in a state of negotiation, with constant slippage in the
chain of signification. How to avoid, though, the postmodern swamp of
unending fluidity in meaning? Lacan proposes the point de capiton (quilting point): certain
signifiers have a greater organizing function than others (Lacan, 1993). These
signifiers would have a markedly larger cluster of associations directly
attached to them, stopping up the fluidity and slippage in signification and
helping to fix meaning. If one were to visualize these, in particularly if one were to visualize race as a
point de capiton, it would probably look a lot like Mitchells graph of race as a medium. If we are to
mobilize race in a meaningful way through Lacanian theory, we suggest
designating a first order race, race as res, and a second order race,
race in the signifying function of a point de capiton. What, though, to do
with racism? If it is not placed in the realm of the real, which we view as
both an ontological impossibility and a counterproductive means of
indicating its traumatic potential, then it must be within representation.
race in its meaning- making capacity.
With our claim that racism re-presents race, it is essential to distinguish between the structures and functions of
Lacans symbolic and imaginary registers.
Instead, one should place racism in the realm of the Symboliconly this
disavows the inevitability of Racism and makes possible change
184/259
The phantasmatic content and context of racism become evident in the
discourses of potential loss it constructs. Tenacious adherence to the
imaginary is symptomatic of a refusal to acknowledge the lack
constituting the signifier, and by extension constituting community. One might thus claim
that whereas the nature of the symbolic also serves to narrate and
visualize lack in the real, strong adherence to the imaginary is not only a defense
against castration (or lack); it makes fully apparent the anxiety of castrative loss . One
must point out that, as with the lack that constitutes the signifier, the anxiety of
castrative loss generally directs itself at something always already lost
and produces a denial of loss/lack as a symptom. Racist anxieties about
loss might concern the loss of jobs, land, capital, the stability of socioeconomic or political hierarchy, of exclusive access to metaphysical truths,
of power, etc. It is not surprising that these are all things colonialism made such
strident efforts to accumulate. It is precisely indulgence in imaginary
fantasies of wholeness which in psychoanalytical terms might be thought of as a refusal to
forgo the object of desire, and should within the context of race be
thought of as a refusal to forgo exceptionalist status in the face of
difference that constitutes socio-pathological behavior. Lacan suggests that the
psychotic is he who is trapped within the phantasmatic relay of imaginary
desire in an attempt to block out the condition of lack and threat of castration.
Racism is thus better placed at the location of the imaginary, where it has
the function of re-presenting the real and of covering over lack, but the
fault of neglecting to recognize its own split status as a social fiction and
not an essentialist truism. Such classification helps to explain the tenacity
of racism, its capacity for engendering trauma, and its need of further
mediation, all of which Mitchell sought to achieve by placing it in the real. It is the role of the
symbolic as mediator of imaginary dualisms that establish the symbolic as
the true realm of the political. How, then, can we achieve the proper mediation
and politicization of racism within the Lacanian schema of the three registers structuring ontology?
By linking processes of racialization to the symbolic. In order to keep race
from becoming or remaining an imaginarily bound idol of the mind, we might
borrow Jamesons injunction to always historicize and claim that one should always
racialize: making sense of and within the social through the concept of
race becomes a process of racialization. Accordingly, we suggest the mapping of race as an
ontology onto the Lacanian registers as shown in Figure 5.
Turns the casemakes racism inevitable and prevents productive

scholarship
Beyond the noted benefits of placing racism in the order of the imaginary,
this kind of structure resolves an additional complication that arises if we
place racism in the real. One of the points raised during Mitchells talk was that if racism were
to act as a kind of ontological basis for race, then race would necessarily
always be linked to a pejorative nature. That is, with racism as the real
and race as the derivative term, not only would racism take on an
185/259
immovable and essentialist quality: race would also always be an

extension of this pejorative essentialism. The structure presents us with a variation on the
Amfortas question: Race, what are you suffering from? Race would be interminable suffering
as a derivative of racism. Here, we can see how the notion of racism as
immovable, traumatic real is not only problematic in a strictly Lacanian or
social constructivist sense, but troublesome from within race theory ;
particularly in the context of Linda Williams linking of melodrama and race. Racism as an immovable
pejorative that serves as the foundation for concepts of race within
representation feeds into the archetypal Manichaean structure central to melodrama: the
eternal battle between good and evil. Mitchells re-articulation of the Lacanian triad might be
seen as a theoretical version of the American melodramatic racial fix that Williams put forth in her seminal book,
Playing the Race Card (2001). She argues that since the mid-nineteenth century, melodrama has been, for better
or worse, the primary way in which mainstream American culture has dealt with the moral dilemma of having first
It is through
forms of racial victimization within the melodramatic mode the beaten/tortured black male body
and the threatened/raped white female body that the white supremacist American
culture first turned its deepest guilt into a testament of virtue (Williams, 2001:
enslaved and then withheld equal rights to generations of African Americans (2001: 44).
44). After Harriet Beecher Stowes articulation of sympathy for black suffering (Tom, Eliza), Dixon and Griffith
trumped Stowes race card by inverting its racial polarities to show white women threatened by emancipated black
men (Williams, 2001: 5). There is not just one race card to be played, but different versions of racial victimization
and vilification played out over time. Taking recourse to Lauren Berlants theory that individual citizens are not
identified through a universalist rhetoric, but through their capacity for suffering and trauma (Williams, 2001: 43),
Williams mobilizes the logic of pain as the core of personhood by applying it to the melodramas of racially beset
victims. It is this essential link between wound/trauma (in Greek it is literally the same), race and the paradoxical
What does it mean

against this background to position racism within the traumatic real? Does
it not imply that we simply have to accept the wounds that white hands
inflict on black bodies, that imperialist cultures inflict on colonized
cultures? If racism is an essentialist truth, an immovable matter of fact,
then the tortures will go on forever. The problem with Mitchells proposition is the following:
What starts as an effort to prevent cultural studies from the overly hasty
and perhaps naive move to hail the end of race threatens to default into a
melodramatic reaffirmation of binaries on the basis of the classic victim
paradigm. As, for example, the case of Rodney King and the trial of O.J. Simpson have shown, there is an
location of strength in weakness that we want to stress in our response to Mitchell:
ongoing melodramatic Manichaean split of race into Tom and anti-Tom lenses. This could be fully consistent with
Mitchells claim that race is itself the medium if he were not to give in to the melodramatic temptation to
completely section off racism from its societal negotiations. As Williams ends her
book by advocating intellectual rigor in the analysis of melodrama whenever it appears, we would like to point to
calling into question the overhasty proclamations of a post-racial era should not lead us to a new fixing
of racial realities that we have to accept with all of their hatred and pain .
This, we know, was not Mitchells intention. Seeing race, not racism, as the matter that on
the one hand has to be socially negotiated and, on the other, acts as a
lens for social negotiation, is crucial for understanding the durable, and in
Lacanian terms imaginary, nature of racism. Because the imaginary is
inherent in the seeable, the scrutiny of imaginary projections where they
meet social ontologies might be understood as one of the important
political functions of visual culture studies.
the possible dangers of Mitchells re-articulation of race and racism:
186/259
Hammersley
187/259
188/259
1NC Shell
The affirmatives arguments about epistemology reveal an instrumentalist
mindsetthey judge the VALIDITY of arguments based on the VALUE, not
their empirical basis
Hammersley 93 (Martyn, Prof @ Open University, Research and 'anti-racism': the
case of Peter Foster and his critics, British Journal of Sociology, 44.3, 429-448,
JSTOR)//LA
Finally, there is instrumentalism. Here, the validity of knowledge is
defined solely according to whether action on the basis of it has desirable
effects. We can find this idea among pragmatist philosophers like James and Dewey, as well as in Marxism,
Critical Theory and some forms offeminism.21 The implication of this position is that
research must be pursued in close association with practical activities and
judged in terms of its contribution to those activities. If it facilitates their
success it is true, if it does not it is false. Thus, the validity of Foster's
work could be assessed in terms of whether or not it serves the fight
against racism. And, indeed, some of the criticism of his work does focus on its
assumed consequences in this respect. 22 I will consider such arguments as they apply to the
issue of the relevance or value of his work later; here I am concerned simply with the
epistemological interpretation of instrumentalism. And this seems to me
to be decidedly weak. While we may recognise that the value of academic
work should be judged partly in terms of its political and social relevance,
the claim that its validity should be judged in these terms is much more
questionable. In so far as the production of desirable consequences is
taken as defining validity, this position proposes a replacement for the correspondence theory
of truth, yet implicitly relies on that theory. This is because claims about the effects of acting on the beliefs being
cannot themselves be judged instrumentally (otherwise we are in an

infinite regress). Where instrumentalism implies treating desirable
consequences as an indicator of validity, this assumes a much stronger
relationship between the truth of a belief and the practical consequences
of acting on it than is justifiable: it is clear, I think, that validity is neither
a necessary nor a sufficient condition of practical success . So, to summarise, there
assessed
is apparently intractable disagreement at the level of substantive and methodological arguments between Foster
and his critics. And it seems that this probably results, in part at least, from some more profound differences of
differences that are indicated by what I have called meta-methodological

criticisms, criticisms that challenge the methodological framework on
which Foster is assumed to be operating. Effectively, he is accused of
empiricist foundationalism, a position that does not seem to be
defensible. I examined three currently fashionable alternatives to this view, traces of which can be found in
the writings of Foster's critics. But I argued that none of these alternatives is sound. This clearly leaves
view,
us with a problem, and it is my task in the next section of this paper to try to show how it might be resolved, and
the implications of this for the debates around Foster's work.
Reject the affour argument isnt that WEVE sufficiently undermined

their epistemology but that their stance with respect to our arguments
prevents the possibility of productive racial scholarship
JSTOR)//LA
189/259
It would be a mistake, then, it seems to me, for 'anti-racists' to dismiss Foster's

work. To the extent that it throws doubt on the accuracy of some of the
assumptions on which they operate, they ought to consider its validity
seriously and not simply ignore, reject or even try to suppress it .45 It may
point to a necessary reconstruction of 'anti-racism'. This might be required
if it were true that racism on the part of British teachers was not widespread or that it did not play a
significant role in the generation of 'racial' inequality. Accepting this
would not involve a denial that there may be features of the British education
system and society that generate the underachievement of black pupils. Indeed, Foster
himself suggests one mechanism for this: the allocation of black pupils to schools that are less effective
there still remains the question of what level or sort of

evidence should persuade 'anti-racists' that Foster is right . I do not want to
speculate about this here, merely to point out that there should be some level of confirming
evidence at which 'anti-racists' would accept his arguments. And even if
Foster does not provide that level of evidence, his work could be accepted
by them as making a potential contribution to increasing the effectiveness
of their activities.47 In my view these considerations should outweigh any
negative propaganda effects that Foster's work is likely to have. After all, racists have
educationally.46 Of course,
seldom found it difficult to invent arguments and evidence to support their position, and have generally shown
scant regard for the difference between such inventions and more soundly based scientific conclusions. I want to
'anti-racists' are unwise to reject

the conventional model of research in favour of an activist conception. One
conclude by going even further than this and suggesting that
reason for this is that the propaganda capacity of research is to a large extent parasitic upon the conventional
Once research becomes seen as geared to the pursuit of particular

political goals, with research results being selected, even in part, according to their suitability for
propaganda purposes, its propaganda value is gone. There are also dangers in
integrating research with other sorts of practical activity. It is likely to be
difficult for practitioners of 'anti-racist' education, as for practitioners of
other kinds engaged in pressure group politics, to give separate consideration
to the informational and the propaganda implications of arguments and evidence. The virtue
of the research community is that it is, or ought to be, concerned
exclusively with the validity of those findings, not with their propaganda
significance. And while the judgments of the research community in this respect are no substitute for
model.
practitioners making their own assessments, they can make an important contribution to those assessments.
190/259
2NC Empiricism
The 1AC is not falsifiabletheres no way to determine the truth value of
responses to their conception of society
JSTOR)//LA
In the discussions of non-foundationalist philosophers of science and others we can identify an
empirical model of how scientists actually judge claims in the absence of a
foundation.23 This involves a process in which consistency with existing
beliefs plays a key role. While this model does not rule out the acceptance
of new ideas that are incompatible with existing beliefs, it may make this
less likely than on the foundationalist model, where these would simply be
accepted if supported by decisive evidence. Ideas that are in conflict with
existing beliefs will be initially resisted and subjected to severe scrutiny,
however apparently strong the evidence available in support of them.
Obversely, the non-foundationalist model makes the acceptance of new
ideas that are consistent with existing beliefs easier than it would be on
the basis of foundationalism: in this case little evidence may be needed.
This model can be elaborated by the addition of a distinction (or, better, a
dimension) between core and peripheral beliefs. Where new ideas threaten
relatively peripheral existing beliefs, change may occur without much
resistance. However, where new ideas challenge core beliefs change is
much less likely. What distinguishes core and peripheral beliefs is the
extent to which other beliefs depend on them, so that if they are modified
much of the rest of the belief system will need to change. Ease of
acceptance is an inverse product of how much reassessment and
reorganisation of what is currently taken to be established knowledge
would be required to accept the new claim and retain overall consistency.
Furthermore, defensive cognitive strategies may be developed specifically to protect the core from criticism. 24 An
obvious implication of this model is that evidence running counter to
accepted core beliefs may not be taken seriously. Kuhn, for instance, argues that over a
period when scientific work in a particular field is dominated by a single paradigm, anomalous evidence
(that is, evidence that cannot be accounted for within that paradigm) accumulates but is ignored. It only
becomes significant if and when an alternative paradigm is identified that
looks as though it may be able to account for all the evidence covered by
the old one and the anomalies; at which point there may be a scientific
revolution leading to paradigm change, though even this usually depends on generational
replacement of the 'old guard' by the new.25 If we apply this to the multi-paradigmatic
case of the social sciences, where there are debates among parties
adopting sharply discrepant assumptions, we can see why discussions
among them may well be inconclusive, or at least will take a very long time to resolve.26 Thus,
the goal of the early advocates of the foundationalist model, to find a method that would terminate debate by
necessarily convincing anyone relying solely on reason, seems to be beyond reach. If we look at the case ofF oster
On the foundationalist
model, whether others would accept Foster's arguments would depend
entirely on whether he shows that the findings of the studies he criticises
do not derive logically from brute data and that those of his own study do.
But, given the absence of any foundation of absolutely certain knowledge,
and his critics from this point of view, I think we get the following result.
191/259
Foster can only do the former not the latter. And once we switch to a nonfoundationalist position, we no longer have an absolute standard by which
to decide even whether Foster's criticisms of others' work are sufficiently
convincing to be accepted. Whether or not they are accepted will depend
in part on judgments about the relative benefits and costs of accepting
them, in terms of the reorganisation of existing beliefs, and this will vary
among audiences. (Of course, exactly the same applies to his critics'
substantive and methodological questioning of Foster's own empirical
research.)
192/259
AT: Racism=RC
This doesnt disprove anything weve saidthe burden of proof is on them
here to justify foundationalism over micro-empiricism
JSTOR)//LA
In part, what seems to be implied in these arguments is that the evidence
which Foster offers in his study, and his questioning of the findings of
other studies, must be rejected because they are incompatible with the
widely accepted theory that racism is institutionalised in British society, that it is
part of the fundamental structure of that society. On this basis his critics
argue that while discrimination may not seem to be occurring in some
particular setting, once we view this setting in the context of British (or English)
society as a whole it will be seen to form part of a larger pattern of
racism. So, here Foster's claims are being questioned on the grounds of
his presumed commitment to an inadequate methodological framework,
one which gives a misleading priority to micro-empirical evidence at the
expense of macro-theoretical perspective. This can be summarised as the
charge that Foster's work is empiricist. 12 And, of course, this argument connects with much
discussion of the methodology of qualitative research today, in which the empiricism of quantitative research, and
What is
being rejected here can be more usefully (because more specifically) referred to as a
foundationalist epistemology. This is the notion that research conclusions
are founded, in some rigorously determinate fashion, on a body of
evidence whose own validity is beyond question (for example, because it consists of
of some qualitative work, is challenged on the basis of alternative epistemological assumptions. 13
reports of intersubjectively observable behaviour). Thus, Troyna criticises Foster for 'methodological purism', which
he interprets as requiring evidence that rules out all possible alternative interpretations. 14
Foundationalism has, of course, been subjected to very damaging criticism

in philosophy, as well as in the social sciences , over the past 30 or 40 years, and I think
it is clear that it is not defensible. There is no single, agreed alternative to
foundationalism, but we can identify three radical alternatives that have become
increasingly influential in social research in recent years; and whose influence is detectable in the writings of some
These alternatives are: relativism, standpoint theory, and

instrumentalism. These are not always clearly distinguished, and they are sometimes used in combination.
However, I will try to show that none of them is very satisfactory.
of Foster's critics.
193/259
AT: Your epistemology is bad cuz youre white

They say our epistemology is bad because of our standpointtheyre in a
double bind between relativism and standpoint epistemology
A. Relativism means they lose on presumption
JSTOR)//LA
Applying relativism to the case under discussion, it would be argued that the validity of Foster's
appeal to the canons of good research is relative to a particular
methodological framework, namely positivism or post-positivism; and that
other frameworks would produce different conclusions . We may, for instance, decide
to treat the claims of some black pupils that they and others have been subjected to racist treatment by teachers
as necessarily true in their own terms, as reflecting their experience and the framework of assumptions that
Something like this

may underlie Connolly's question: 'how can Foster as a White middle class
male construct his own definition of racism to then use to judge the
accuracy of Black working class students' definitions?' 15 If treated as
valid, this argument has the effect of apparently undercutting Foster's
empirical research in the sense that it need no longer be treated by others
as representing reality. Yet, at the same time, from this point of view
Foster's arguments remain valid in their own terms; in fact, they remain as
valid as those of his critics. This seems to lead to a sort of stalemate. And, of
course, there is the problem that relativism is self-undermining: if it is true, then in its
own terms it can only be true relative to a relativist framework; so that
from other points of view it remains false. 16 As a non-relativist, this leaves
Foster free to claim quite legitimately (even from the point of view of
relativism) that his views represent reality, whereas a relativist critic could not make the
constitute it, that framework being incommensurable with the one adopted by Foster.
same claim for her or his views but must treat them simply as representing a particular framework of beliefs to
which he or she happens to be committed.
B. Standpoint epistemology is silly (like clowns)

JSTOR)//LA
The second view I want to consider is sometimes associated with versions of the first, but must be kept
separate because it involves a quite distinctive and incompatible element. I will refer to this as standpoint
theory. Here people's experience and knowledge is treated as valid or
invalid by dint of their membership in some social category . 17 Here again
Foster's arguments may be dismissed because they reflect his background
and experience as a white, middle class, male teacher. However, this time
the implication is that reality is obscured from those with this background
because of the effects of ideology. By contrast, it is suggested, the
oppressed (black, female and/or working class people) have privileged insight into the
nature of society. This argument produces a victory for one side, not the
stalemate that seems to result from relativism; the validity of Foster's
views can therefore be dismissed. But in other respects this position is no
more satisfactory than relativism. We must ask on what grounds we can
194/259
decide that one group has superior insight into reality. This cannot be
simply because they declare that they have this insight; otherwise
everyone could make the same claim with the same legitimacy (we would be back
to relativism). This means that some other form of ultimate justification is
involved, but what could this be? In the Marxist version of this argument the working class (or, in
practice, the Communist Party) are the group with privileged insight into the nature of social reality, but it is Marx
and Marxist theorists who confer this privilege on them by means of a dubious philosophy of history. 18
Something similar occurs in the case of feminist standpoint theory, where

the feminist theorist ascribes privileged insight to women, or to feminists
engaged in the struggle for women's emancipation. 19 However, while we must
recognise that people in different social locations may have divergent
perspectives, giving them distinctive insights, it is not clear why we
should believe the implausible claim that some people have privileged
access to knowledge while others are blinded by ideology. 20
195/259
AT: Your scholarship=racist/politically motivated

Burden of proof is on themclaiming scholarship to be bad because of its
motivations requires PROOF and isnt in of itself a reason to reject its
empirical validity
JSTOR)//LA
The practical value criticisms made by Foster's critics are concerned with
his intentions, with some features of his research practice, and with what
they see as the consequences of the publication of his work. He has been
accused, for instance, of lacking proper commitment to racial equality,
indeed of producing work that is racist.33 It has also been claimed that one of the interview
questions he used with teachers invited them 'to articulate racist stereotypes', and thereby gave these
it is suggested that he can and will be read as 'blaming the

victim' ;35 and that the publication of his work plays into the hands of
those who seek to deny the existence of racism for political reasons,
thereby undermining the efforts of 'anti-racist' activists: it is 'disabling
rather than enabling'.36 In terms of the model of the research community I outlined in the previous
section, these practical value criticisms are only directly relevant if they
indicate deviation on Foster's part from the proper orientation of the
researcher specified in that model. This orientation involves researchers
being primarily committed to the discovery of the truth by means of
rational discussion, being prepared to offer evidence for their claims
where there is disagreement, being willing to change their views on the
basis of compelling evidence, and assuming that all this is true of other
researchers unless strong evidence to the contrary emerges. Some of the
practical value criticisms of Foster imply such deviation, suggesting for instance that he 'has not
stopped to critically examine the ideology which informs his own practice'
and that in his empirical research he was 'keen to demonstrate that (the)
teachers were not racist'.37 The implication here seems to be that he had
a hidden political agenda. Convincing evidence is required to establish
this claim, of course, and dismissal of Foster's work on these grounds without
strong evidence is itself a breach of the norms. 311 Most of the value
criticisms of Foster's work, however, fall outside of what is directly relevant according to
the model outlined in the previous section. Examples are the charges that he 'lacks
commitment to racial equality' and that his research 'disables' those
fighting racism. 39 This does not mean that these criticisms should automatically be ruled out of account
respectability.34 Finally,
by those operating on the basis of the model, however. There are two indirect ways in which ethical issues can still
be relevant.
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AT: Judge evidence by its activist potential

EVEN IF this is the model you use to evaluate evidence, we can access all
our arguments.
JSTOR)//LA
Nevertheless, I think questions can be raised about the practical value criticisms
made of Foster's work even from the point of view of this activist
conception of social research. Central here is a distinction between two
ways in which research may serve practical purposes. First, it may provide
information about the world in which a practical activity is carried out and
on the basis of which its goals and means should be developed, reviewed
and perhaps changed. Second, it may serve a propaganda role, it may be
used to legitimate the goals and means adopted or to criticise those of
opponents. Much political activity involves debate between opponents,
and while no-one would suggest that conflicts are usually resolved in a
purely discursive way, propaganda is a factor that has some weight (especially
in liberal democratic societies), not least in mobilising the support of others. Now, of
course, the same research findings may serve both of these functions, but
how findings are assessed by political activists will usually vary depending
on which function is treated as primary. If the first is dominant, there will
be particular concern with the accuracy and relevance of the information
provided. While I do not assume that for action to be successful it must be
based on true assumptions, nor that true assumptions will automatically
lead to success, I do believe that there is a positive relationship between
the two. By contrast, from a propaganda point of view the truth of the
findings is less significant than whether relevant others regard them as
true and what they take their implications to be. What is important here is
what role the findings can play in the propaganda war. Recognising the
propaganda role of information involves a view of political debate and
conflict that places it at a considerable distance from the sort of rational
discourse that is central to the model of the research community which I outlined in the previous
section. In such debate dissembling, the suppression of evidence, the
dismissal of opponents' views on the basis of their motives, accusations of
ideology and racism etc. may be rational techniques, at least from a shortterm and partisan perspective. This is not a novel view of politics, of course. And it matters
not at all for my argument here whether this is taken to be the universal
character of politics or whether it is specific to a particular historical
period.42 Let us simply accept, for the sake of argument, that this is how politics is today. Looking at the
critical response to Foster's work in the light of this, I think we need to
recognise that the judgments that 'anti-racist' activists will and should
make about the validity, or at least the implications, of Foster's work may
be different to those that researchers (on my model) should make. Not
only may the belief in widespread teacher racism be more deeply
entrenched for them than it is for some researchers, on the basis of
practical experience and commitment, but also they are not under the
same obligation as researchers to treat as in need of supporting argument
all that the research community does not currently accept as beyond
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reasonable doubt. Of course, in discourse with fellow practitioners, and with those with whom they must
deal in the course of their practice, they will need to take account of what is and is not shared knowledge. However,
this may be different to what is accepted by researchers, especially where

the boundaries of the practitioner community are politically defined, as
they are in the case of 'anti-racism'. Furthermore, in such contacts practical considerations will
be most salient, including for instance the costs of different sorts of error. Finally, disagreements may
be resolved (legitimately or illegitimately) by other means than rational
discussion, including coercion, manipulation, negotiation, delegation,
democracy, market forces etc. 43 This is not to say that practitioners, such as
'anti-racist' educators, should simply ignore the findings of research. The
point is rather that they should judge those findings in relation to their
own practical knowledge and according to what is required to pursue their
work well. On this basis it might be quite reasonable for 'anti-racists' to continue with their campaign against
racism among teachers despite the doubts that Foster has raised; though they would be foolish to completely
ignore those doubts.
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199/259
Quiet K
200/259
Quashie
201/259
Aesthetics 1NC
The 1AC represents Blackness as resistancethis narrow view precludes
the possibility of a more capacious understanding of Black subjectivity
rather, we should affirm an Aesthetics of Quiet that makes possible a more
productive relationship to Blackness
Quashie 12 (Kevin Everod, Smith College, The Sovereignty of Quiet:
Beyond Resistance in Black Culture, p. 3-9)//LA
This book explores what a concept of quiet could mean to how we think about black culture. The
exploration is a shift in how we commonly understand blackness, which
is often described as expressive, dramatic, or loud. These qualities inherently reflect the
equivalence between resistance and blackness. Resistance is, in fact, the
dominant expectation we have of black culture. Indeed, this expectation is so
widely familiar that it does not require explanation or qualification; it is practically
unconscious. These assumptions are noticeable in the ways that blackness
serves as an emblem of social ailment and progress. In an essay from his 1957
collection White Man Listen!, Richard Wright captures this sentiment, noting that "The Negro is America's
metaphor" (109). Wright's comment might be hyperbolic, but it also summarizes the exceptional role that black
Blackness here is not a term of intimacy

publicness. One result of this dynamic is a quality of selfconsciousness in black literature, a hyper- awareness of a reader whose presence-whether critical
experience has played in American social consciousness:
or human vagary but of
or sympathetic- shapes what is expressed. Such self-consciousness is an example of the concept of doubleness that
black culture is
celebrated for the exemplary ways it employs doubleness as well as for its capacity to
manipulate social opinion and challenge racism. This is the politics of
representation, where black subjectivity exists for its social and political
meaningfulness rather than as a marker of the human individuality of the
person who is black. As an identity, blackness is always supposed to tell
us something about race or racism, or about America, or violence and
struggle and triumph or poverty and hopefulness. The determination to see
blackness only through a social public lens, as if there were no inner life,
is racist- it comes from the language of racial superiority and is a practice
intended to dehumanize black people. But it has also been adopted by
black culture, especially in terms of nationalism, but also more generally: it creeps into the
consciousness of the black subject, especially the artist, as the imperative to
represent. Such expectation is part of the inclina- tion to understand black
culture through a lens of resistance, and it practically thwarts other ways
of reading. All of this suggests that the common frameworks for thinking about
blackness are limited. Resistance is hard to argue against, since it has
been so essential to every black freedom movement. And yet resistance is
has become the preeminent trope of black cultural studies. The result is that
too broad a term- it is too clunky and vague and imprecise to be a catch-all for a whole range of behaviors and
not nuanced enough to characterize the totality of black culture

or expression. Resistance exists, for sure, and deserves to be named and studied. And still, sometimes,
ambitions. It is
when the term ''resistance" is used, what is being described is something finer. There is an instructive example of
this tension in Stephanie Camp's Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in rhe Piamarion
Sortr/1, a compelling work on the lives of black women during slavery. As Camp's title suggests, the frame for the
book is resistance, the ways that black women's everyday lives ("private, concealed, and even intimate worlds" [3])
constitute a defiance of the vagaries of enslavement. Like Deborah Gray White and others before her, Camp notices
acts of resistance appear in day-today activities as much as

(if not more than) in formal planned rebellions or revolts. And yet even
how black women's
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Camp realizes that the meaning of black women's everyday lives was not
shaped entirely by their engagement with and resistance to the
institution of slavery-that black women and men who were enslaved grew
gardens and decorated their living spaces and organized parties in the
woods (the chapter "The Intoxication of Pleasurable Amusement: Secret Parties and the Politics of the Body" is
beautifully imagined and written). The point here is not to dismiss the intensity and
vulgarity of slavery's violence on black people, but instead to restore a
broader picture of the humanity of the people who were enslaved. Under
Camp's careful eye, these women's everyday lives are brought into fuller relief, and even if Camp reads these lives
The case
for quiet is, implicitly, an argument against the limits of blackness as a
concept; as such, this book exists alongside many others that have questioned the boundaries of racial identity.
as moments of resistance, their aliveness jumps out beyond that equation to offer something more.
These include recent scholarly work by Robert Reid-Pharr, Paul Gilroy, Thomas Holt, Michelle Wright, Gene Andrew
Jarrett, Kenneth Warren, Kimberly Nichele Brown, Hazel Carby, Trey Ellis, Thelma Golden, and especially David
Lionel Smith, whose essay "What Is Black Culture?" is dazzling and indispensible. There is also a large body of work
by black women scholars, especially since the 1970s, that has posed consistent challenges to the singularity of
The specific concern about the dominance of resistance as a

framework, however, is exposed by black artists who have always struggled with the politics of
race.
representation. From Zadie Smith, Afaa M. Weaver, and Rita Dove, to Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and
Ralph Ellison, the black artist lives within the crosshairs of publicness and, if she or he is to produce meaningful
work, has to construct a consciousness that exists beyond the expectation of resistance. Inspired by these artists,
quiet aims to give up resistance as a framework in search of

what is lost in its all-encompassing reach.4 Resistance, yes, but other
capacities too. Like quiet. The idea of quiet is compelling because the term is not fancy- it is an
this argument for
everyday word-but it is also conceptual. Quiet is often used interchange- ably with silence or stillness, but the
Quiet, instead, is a
metaphor for the full range of one's inner lifeone's desires, ambitions,
hungers, vulnerabilities, fears. The inner life is not apolitical or without
social value, but neither is it determined entirely by publicness. In fact,
the interior- dynamic and ravishing- is a stay against the dominance of the
social world; it has its own sovereignty. It is hard to see, even harder to describe, but no less
potent in its ineffability. Quiet. In humanity, quiet is inevitable, essential. It is a
simple, beautiful part of what it means to be alive. It is already there, if
one is looking to understand it. An aesthetic of quiet is not incompatible
with black culture, but to notice and understand it requires a shift in how
we read, what we look for, and what we expect, even what we remain
open to. It requires paying attention in a different way. This point about how we read
notion of quiet in the pages that follow is neither motionless nor without sound.
is especially relevant to the image in the frontispiece, Whitfield Lovell's KIN Vll (Scent o[Mt~gnolia). Lovell is a giant
in contemporary art, a 2007 MacArthur fellow whose work has been show- cased at the Smithsonian, the Whitney,
the MOMA, and in various other locations in the United States and abroad. His most well-known exhibits, Whispers
from the Walls and Sanctuary. consist of a series of tableaux and full-room installations that display the daily lives of
anonymous African Americans. In these installatio ns, charcoal drawings of posed studio photo graphs found at flea
markets or town archi\es (largely from the 1900s to the 1940s) are paired with various objects (boxing gloves, a
knife, barbed wire, a bucket). The drawings are made on pieces of wood- parts of fences or walls-and seem to bring
domestic scenes to life. More recently, in a stunning collection entitled Kin, Lovell has cont inued d rawing portraits
o f anonymous black people, though this time on paper; these figures are made from identification photographs
(headshots from passports or mug shots, for example) and are often paired with an object. Critics note the dignity
of Lovell's figures, which is a tribute to his skill in drawing: His portraits render their subjects in terrific clarity (the
intensity in the eyes, the defined neck and cheek, the textured quality of the hair). His use of shadow is astute, and
the result is images of people who look like people- not symbols of a discourse of racism, but people in the
everyday, wary and resolute, alive. They look familiar to us even if it is rare to see black faces represented in such a
studied, elegant way. But the dignity is related also to the pairing of image and artifact, the clean juxtaposition of
locating each near the other without abrasion or overlap. This doesn't really create a sense of doubleness because
the portrait is intended to be prominent; still proximity is contagion, and the artifact insinuates itself on the portrait.
In KIN VII (Scent of Magnolia), the cloth wreath becomes part of the male figure's body, making the place where one
might expect a shirt collar, a piece of jewelry, the outline of a chest. Localized and domesticated, the wreath's
randomness becomes specific to this bold beautiful black face. And the subject is clarified by the artifact: Are these
flowers from his room, a private and unusua l explosion of color? The flowers he gave to a date or the ones he
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brought to a funeral? A sign of his desire to visit all the world's spectacular gardens? We might pick up the title's
reference to Billie Holiday's thick voice on "Strange Fruit" ("scent of magnolia sweet and fresh/the sudden smell of
burning flesh") which might lead to a more ominous reading- his killed body marked by a wreath- but it is
unsatisfying to be so singular and definitive with this image. Because of the flowers, he can be a subject more than
an emblem; we can wonder if he loved pink and purple tones, without ignoring the possibility of racist violence.
'Whatever the story, the flowers are a surprise that interrupt the dominant narratives that might be ascribed to the
profile of a black man of that age. The foreboding is there to be read in some of the objects in Lovell's work- chains,
barbed wire, targets, rope- which is as it would be, o ften is, for a black person in the United States. And still,
foreboding is only part of one's life story, and it should not overwhelm how we think of the breadth of humanity.
Lovell seems to aim for a balance between the social or public meaning of a person or object, and its intimacy, its
human relevance. Where his earlier work created tableaux using full-bodied figures, the aesthetic of juxtaposition
in these more recent pieces is what evokes narrative, as if we are seeing the unfolding of a scene of human life, as
if more and more of the image will manifest if you look long enough. (This is especially true of Lovell's drawings that
The key is to let the unexpected be possible. We might want

to read a narrative of resistance on KIN \riT (Scent of Magnolia), but there is something else there:
a ravishing quiet. Quiet is antithetical to how we think about black
culture, and by extension, black people. So much of the discourse of
racial blackness imagines black people as public subjects with identities
formed and articulated and resisted in public. Such blackness is dramatic,
symbolic, never for its own vagary, always representative and engaged
with how it is imagined publicly. These characterizations are the legacy of
racism and they become the common way we understand and represent
blackness; literally they become a lingua franca. The idea of quiet, then, can shift
attention to what is interior. This shift can fed like a kind of heresy if the
interior is thought of as apolitical or inexpressive, which it is not: one's
inner life is raucous and full of expression, especially if we distinguish the term "expressive"
from the notion of public. Indeed the interior could be understood as the source of
human action- that anything we do is shaped by the range of desires and
capacities of our inner life. This is the agency in Lovell's piece, the way that what is implied is a full
lack a corresponding artifact.)
range of human life: that we don't know the subject just by looking at him or noticing the artifact; that his life is
wide-open and possible; that his life is more than familiar characterizations of victimization by or triumph over
sure, the threat and violence of racism is one story, as is the grace
and necessity of the fight. But what else is there to black humanity, this
piece seems to ask. The question is an invitation to imagine an inner life
of the broadest terrain. It is remarkable for a black artist working with black subjects (and in a visual
racism. For
medium) to restore humanity without being apolitical. It is remarkable, also, to make the argument that Lo vell
what is black is at once particular and universal,

familiar and unknowable. This is challenging territory to navigate, given
the importance of resistance and protest to black culture. But the intent
here is not to disregard these terms, but to ask what else--what else can
we say about black culture, what other frameworks might help to
illuminate aspects of the work produced by black writers and thinkers?
How can quiet, as a frame for reading black culture, expose life that is not
already determined by narratives of the social world? After all, all living is
politicalevery human action means somethingbut all living is not in
protest; to assume such is to disregard the richness of life. In humanity,
quiet is inevitable, essential. It is a simple beautiful part of what it means
to be alive. It is already there, if one is looking to understand it. There are many
makes so well with his work- that
books on black expressiveness and resistance; there will be-and should be-many more. This, however, is not one of
them. This book is about quiet.
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2NC Perm
The logic of the aff exists only insofar as it ensures effective resistance
that already precludes an effective investigation of interiority
Quashie 9 (Kevin Everod, Smith College, The Trouble with Publicness: Toward a
Theory of Black Quiet, African American Review, 43(2-3), Summer/Fall 2009, p. 32943)//LA
In this way, expressiveness has been vital to promoting black culture and
liberation; in fact it is not an overstatement to say that it is closely linked to
every black civil rights effort, and is the ultimate archetype of the culture.
The case could even be made that black expressiveness, rather than being
a function of the public sphere, is an African cultural retention , which is what
Robert Farris Thompson proposes in Flash of the Spirit. (Vlach himself argues convincingly that the aesthetic
Yet
this appreciation leaves untouched the ways that the relationship between
blackness and publicness overdetermines how expressiveness is read,
what expressiveness means. In light of the discourse of publicness,
expressiveness is reduced to being contrarian and resistant. There is little
liberty or reason to consider other kinds of expressivities, ones that are
animated less by a sense of audience and more by the wide range of
human impulses. Indeed this failure to imagine other expressivities
obscures and even disavows manifestations of black culture that fall
outside the aesthetic that publicness has either made, or made possible. As a
consequence of this historical significance of public expressiveness,
resistance becomes the dominant idiom for reading and describing black
culture. One result of this dominance is that the major concepts used to
discuss black culture (for example, doubleness, signifying, the mask) are engaged largely
for their capacity to support the idea of resistance. In this light, these
concepts say less about the interior of black subjectivity, and leave us
without a general concept that aims to describe or reference the inner life.
expressiveness found in early black folk art is both a retention and a functional reality of enslaved people.)
NOTE: [Remember to say that the K only rejects the affs aesthetics, not necessarily
their advocacy statement. This means Aesthetics 1 st is also an answer to the perm]
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2NC Alt/FPIK
Reject the affs simplistic conception of Black interiority in favor of a new
aesthetics of Quietthis doesnt preclude resistance to racism, but rather
just the affs public conception of resistance
NOTE: [this is distinct from the perm because it rejects PUBLICNESS, while the
permutation would include it or else they sever]
Exploring the connection between the discourse of resistance and the
notion of publicness is important to understanding how it is that
resistance manifests as both the (sole?) subject and intent of black
aesthetics. None of this is intended to dismiss the importance of
resistance in black culture. The point is more simply that resistance alone
is not (or is no longer) a sufficient frame for understanding black culture.
Black culture, and the lives it represents, is richer, fuller, more
complicated than a discourse of resistance can paint.21 Hence quiet, this
thing that is sublimeinexpressible, thunderous, full of awe. In humanity, quiet
is inevitable and essentialit is our dignity. It is represented by our
interior, that place in us below our hip personality that is connected to our breath, our words, and our death
(Goldberg 28). In its magnificence, it is an invitation to consider cultural
identity from somewhere other than the conceptual places that we have
come to accept as definitive of black culturenot the hip personality
exposed to and performed for the world, but the interior charisma, the
reservoir of human complexity that is deep inside. Quiet compels us to
explore the beauty of the quality of being human, not only our lives
weighed down by the suppositions of identity, and in doing so, honors
the contemplative quality that is also characteristic of black culture .22 It is
this exploration, this reach toward the inner life, that an aesthetic of quiet
makes possible. It is this that is the path to a sweet freedom: a black
expressiveness without publicness as its forebear, a black subject in the
undisputed dignity of its humanity.23
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AT: You Talk, Bro

Brief explanation of alt vs aff
This characterization of waiting as a quiet expressiveness is a rejection of
publicness, a decided step away from the tone and topic and advice that one might
expect of an essay on being young, a woman and colored. 20 Bonner
doesnt offer a public call to arms or a private rant; she doesnt present
her protagonist as bothered and bothersome. Instead, her subject is free,
or wants to be, and her freedom informs the narrative choices of her
poetic and wandering essay.
Quiet is not silenceits a productive window into the interiorthe
distinction isnt whether we use words is HOW we use themfor an
INTENTIONAL purpose or as a mere EXPLORTATION of Black interiority
What, then, would a concept of expressiveness look like if it were not
tethered to publicness? The performative aspects of black culture are well
noted, but what else can be said here? Could the concept of quiet help to
articulate a different kind of expressiveness, or even stand as a metaphor
for the interior? In everyday discourse, quiet is synonymous with silence
and is the absence of sound or movement, but for the idea of quiet to be
useful here, it will need to be understood as a quality or a sensibility of
being, as a manner of expression. Such expressiveness is not concerned
with publicness, but instead is the expressiveness of the quiet symbolizes
and if interrogated, expressessome of the capacity of the interior. This
notion of the interior is elusive but is nonetheless important to understanding quiet. Most simply, interiority
is a quality of being inward, a metaphor for life and creativity beyond
the public face of stereotype and limited imagination (Alexander x). This latter
description is from Elizabeth Alexanders collection Black Interior, and it captures precisely the value of the
concept of the interiorthat it gestures away from the caricatures of racial
subjectivity that are either racist or intended to counter racism, and
suggests what is essentially and indescribably human. The interior is the
inner reservoir of thoughts, feelings, desires, fears, ambitions that shape
a human self; it is both a space of a wild self-indulgence and the locus at
which selfinterrogation takes place (Spillers 383; original emphasis). Said another way, the
interior is expansive, voluptuous, creative, impulsive, dangerous, and not
subject to ones controlit has to be taken on its own terms. It is not to be
confused with intentionality or consciousness, since it is something more
chaotic than that; it is more akin to hunger, memory, forgetting, the edges
of all the humanity one has. Despite its name, the interior is not unconnected to
the world of things (the public or political or social world), nor is it an
exact antonym for exterior. Instead, the interior shifts in regard to lifes
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stimuli but it is neither resistant to nor overdetermined by the vagaries of

the outer world. The interior has its own ineffable integrity .12 There is in trying to
describe the interior a predicament of expression since the interior is not really discursiveit
cannot be represented fully and is largely indescribable. Furthermore, the
interior is largely known through language or behavior, through exterior
manifestations, and is therefore hard to know on its own terms. At best, it
can be approximated or implied, but its vastness and wildness escape
definitive characterization. Yet the interior is expressive; it is articulate
and meaningful and has social impact. It is indeed the combination of the
interiors expressiveness, and the inability to articulately it fully, that
makes interiority such a meaningful idiom for rethinking the nature of
black expressiveness. Quiet, then, is the expressiveness of this interior, an
inexpressible expressiveness that can appear publicly, have and affect
social and political meaning, and challenge or counter social discourse,
though none of this is its aim or essence. That is, since the interior is not essentially
resistant, then quiet is an expressiveness that is not consumed with
intentionality. It is in this regard that the distinction between quiet and
silence is more clear: silence, in a purely denotative sense, implies
something that is suppressed or repressed, an interiority that is about
withholding, something hidden or absent; quiet, more simply, is presence.
(One can, for example, describe a sound or prose as quiet.) It is true that
silence can be expressive, but its expression is often based on refusal or
protest, not the abundance of the interior described above. The
expressiveness of silence is often aware of an audience, a watcher or
listener whose presence is the reason for the withholding. This is a key
difference between the two terms because in its inwardness, the aesthetic
of quiet watcher-less. Finally, quiet is not necessarily or essentially
stillness; in fact quiet, as the expressiveness of inner life, can encompass
and represent wild motion.13 The Signifying Subject and the Aesthetic of Quiet The idea of an
aesthetic of quiet is foreign to but not incompatible with black cultural
studies. For example, the trope of signifying is widely considered distinctive of black cultural expression. Based
on the verbal art of ritualized insult in which the speaker puts down, needles, or talks about someone, to make a
point or sometimes just for fun, the concept of signifying celebrates the use of humor, indirection, and word play
verbal signifying has three rhetorical

componentswhat is said, what is unsaid, and the relationship between
the two. The piece that is said is often demonstrative, conscious of the listening
audience, and contrasts with the silence of what is unspoken. The power of
signifying as a rhetorical act lies in the third componentthe dialectic
produced between what is spoken and what is notas irony, indirection
and juxtaposition coalesce to create meaning that is complicated and
subtle, even surprising. In fact, it is never assured that the act of signifying
will yield, for the reader or listener, the desired expression. In this regard, signifying is a
transcendent expressiveness, relying unreliably on prolific interplay
between said and unsaid, public and private; one cannot appreciate it by
only paying attention to what is said, explicitly or directly. Nevertheless,
the general discussion of signifying as verbal exchange tends to focus on
its public dimension, on the demonstrative and cocksure exteriority of the
trope rather than its capacity to serve as an idiom of interiority. This
emphasis categorizes signifying as an essentially public expressivity, for
even when the act of signifying is not in reference to a discourse of
(Smitherman, Black Talk 207). Conceptually,
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resistance, the meaningfulness of the signifying act depends on the

concept of publicness (e.g., audience).14
209/259
AT: Must Resist

We dont preclude the possibility of breaking down dominant structures or
white supremacyits just that our strategy cannot be one of resistance
an aesthetics of Quiet is preferable
The interest in quiet arrives because of the trouble posed by public
expressiveness, particularly the assumption that black culture is
predominantly resistant. This characterization is so ordinary that it ends
up simplifying blackness. Furthermore, because the characterization is
supported by the political and historical reality of black people for example, the
important role expressiveness plays in the struggles for civil rights it goes largely unchallenged.
The problem here is not expressiveness per se, but that black
expressiveness is so tethered to what is public and to a discourse of
resistance. As it is engaged, this concept of public expressiveness
presumes to know and to say everything, clearly and definitively. This is
why it is useful to political discourse, because it can allow a group to speak with a sense of
singular purpose. In this regard, public expressiveness is the workhorse of
nationalism, and is vital to any marginalized population. Perhaps this makes sense,
since there is no question about the meaningfulness of race and especially racism in American culture, the way
racism influences and shapes black culture; there is also no question that resistance, as individual and collective
But there is
still an important question about the other qualities of black culture that
are overwhelmed by the dominance of resistance as an aesthetic. Simply,
what else beyond resistance can we say about the shape and meaning of
black culture and subjectivity?16 The contention is in the way publicness
has a chokehold on black culture and identity. It is hard to imagine a
conceptualization of blackness that does not already envision itself and the
humanness of its struggle to be free within the context set by publicness: as a
subjectivity whose expressiveness is demonstrative and resistant . Hortense
action or as an aesthetic, is a meaningful part of black culture, historically and in the present.
Spillers is right when she notes that every feature of social and human differentiation disappears in public
This is precisely the need for a concept of

interiority, so that it may support representations of blackness that are
irreverent, messy, complicatedrepresentations that have greater human
texture and specificity than the broad caption of resistance can offer. We
should be wary of the dominance of expressiveness as a black aesthetic
and of the easy conclusions that it makes possible.17 This interior expressiveness is
discourses regarding African-Americans (224).
already present in Smiths and Carloss protest, if we can remember to ask questions about their hearts in excited
flutter, their heads bowed, the inwardness of their bodies in prayer. Part of what makes their protest so striking is its
stark contrast with another iconic image of black publicnessthe black body hanging from a tree. The magnitude of
the contrast is heightened by the aesthetic similarity between photographs of their 1968 protest and images of
lynched bodies. But even at its most horrible, the image of the lynchee is one of silence and speaks through the
alphabet of violent repression. Smiths and Carloss image, on the other hand, is alive, is articulate in its quiet;
though they do not speak, their language is a generous vocabulary of

humanity. In this context, Smith and Carlos are a triumphant, beautiful
alternative.18 But there is also a danger in only reading their moment for
the way it counters the violence of white supremacy, as an alternativeto
do so is to disregard the evidence of their humanity for its own sake, that
they are strong but also vulnerable, two people in a moment of grace, all
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thrill and tremble and loveliness. It is not only the explicit public argument
that they are making about racism and poverty that should be important
to us, or even their implied contrast with untold numbers of murdered
others. What must also matter is the argument announced in their posture
of surrender, the glimpse of their exquisite interiors. Their protest is more
fluent because of this expressiveness that is not dependent on publicness;
they are compelling as much for their quiet as for the very publicity of
their expression.
211/259
Brown
212/259
Brown 1NC
The 1AC is symptomatic of the modern liberal orders fetishization of
breaking silencethis aesthetic is flawed and will only retrench systems of
domination
Brown 5 (Wendy, Prof @ UC Berkeley, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and
Politics, Freedoms Silences, p. 83-97)//LA
As freedom is both realized and negated by choice, so is silence convened, broken, and organized by speech. Silence and speech are not only
constitutive of but also modalities of one another. They are different
kinds of articulation that produce as well as negate each other. Si- lence
calls for speech, yet speech, because it is always particular speech, vanquishes other
possible speech, thus canceling the promise of full representation
heralded by silence. Silence, both constituted and broken by particular speech, is neither more nor less
truthful than speech is, and neither more nor less regulatory. Speech harbors silences; silences
harbor meaning. When silence is broken by speech, new silences are
fabricated and enforced; when speech ends, the ensu- ing silence carries
meaning that can only be metaphorized by speech, thus producing the
conviction that silence speaks. The belief that silence and speech are
opposites is a conceit underlying most contemporary discourse about censorship and silence. This
conceit enables both the assumption that censorship converts the truth of
speech to the lie of silence and the assumption that when an enforced
silence is broken, what emerges is truth borne by the vessel of
authenticity or experience. Calling these assumptions into question means
not only thinking about the relation between silence and speech
differently but also rethinking the powers and potentials of silence. Here is the
way this problem unfolds politically: insurrection requires breaking silence about the
very existence as well as the activity or injury of the collective
insurrectionary subject. Even dreams of emancipation cannot take shape unless
the discursively shadowy or altogether invisible character of those subjects, wounds, events, or
activities is redressed, whether through slave ballads, the flaunting of forbidden love, the labor theory of
value, or the quantification of housework. Nor are the silences constituted in discourses
of subordination broken forever when they are broken once. They do not
shatter the moment their strategic function has been exposed, but must
be as- saulted repeatedly with stories, histories, theories, and discourses in alternate registers until
the silence itself is rendered routinely intelligible as a historically
injurious force. In this way, those historically excluded from liberal
personhood have proceeded against the spectrum of silences limning the
universal claims of humanist discourse for the past several centuries. Jews,
immigrants, women, people of color, homosexuals, the unpropertied: all have pressed themselves
into civic belonging not simply through asserting their personhood but
through politicizingarticulatingthe silent workings of their internally
excluded presence within prevailing notions of personhood. But while the
silences in discourses of domination are a site for insurrectionary noise ,
while they are the corridors to be filled with explosive counter tales, it is also possible to make a
fetish of breaking silence. It is possible as well that this ostensible tool of
emancipation carries its own techniques of subjugationthat it converges
with une- mancipatory tendencies in contemporary culture, establishes
regulatory norms, coincides with the disciplinary power of ubiquitous confessional
213/259
in short, it may feed the powers it meant to starve. Neither a defense of

this essay interrogates the presumed authenticity
of voice in the implicit equation between speech and freedom entailed in
practices;
silence nor an injunction to silence,
contemporary affirma- tions of breaking silence. Borrowing tacitly from Foucaults theorization of confessional
discourse, Joan W. Scotts problematization of experience, and Shoshana Felmans and Dori Laubs identification of
our time as the age of testimony,1 the essay asks whether our contemporary crisis of truth has not been displaced
words about ourselves, words that presume to escape

epistemological challenges to truth because they are personal or
experiential. It asks as well whether this stream of words does not perpetuate the
crisis of which it is a symptom. In the course of this inquiry, silence is
considered as not simply an aesthetic but a political value, a means of
preserving certain practices and dimensions of existence from regulatory
power, from normative violence, as well as from the scorching rays of
public exposure. A link is examined, too, between, on the one hand, a contemporary tendency concerning
into an endless stream of
the lives of public figuresthe confession or extraction of every detail (sexual, familial, therapeutic, financial) of
private and personal lifeand, on the other, a putatively countercultural or emancipatory practice: the
compulsive putting into public discourse of heretofore hidden or private experiences, from catalogues of sexual
pleasures to litanies of sexual abuses, from chronicles of eating disorders to diaries of home births and gay
parenting. In linking these two phenomenathe privatization of public life via the mechanism of public exposure of
private life on the one hand, and the compulsive and compulsory cataloguing of the details of marginalized lives on
the otherI
want to highlight a modality of regulation and depoliticiza- tion

specific to our age that is not simply confessional but empties private life
into the public domain. The effect is both to abet the steady commercialization and homogenization of
intimate attachments, experiences, and emotions already achieved by the market and to usurp public space with
rendering the political personal in a fashion that leaves

injurious social, political, and economic powers unremarked and
untouched. In short, while intended as a practice of freedom (premised on the
modernist conceit that the truth makes us free), these productions of truth may have the
capacity not only to chain us to our injurious histories as well as the
stations of our small lives, but to instigate the further regulation of those
lives while depoliticizing their conditions.
often trivial matters,
214/259
2NC Silence Solves

The kritik is the debate equivalent of the 5th amendmentsilence makes
possible resistance to the structures of power
The paradoxical capacity of silence to engage opposites with regard to
powerboth to shelter power and to serve as a barrier against poweris
rarely accented in Foucaults thinking as a consequence of his emphasis
(elsewhere) on discourse as a vehicle of power. In casting silence as a potential
refuge from power, I do not think he is reneging on this emphasis or
suggesting a prediscursive existence to things. Critical here is the
difference between what Foucault calls unitary discourses, which regulate and
colonize, and those that do not perform these functions with the same
social pervasiveness, even while they do not escape the tendency of all
discourse to establish norms by which it regulates and excludes. Through this
distinction one can make sense of Foucaults otherwise inexplicable reference to sex in the eighteenth century as
being driven out of hiding and constrained to lead a discursive existence, or his troubling example of the village
simpleton whose inconsequential sexual game with a little girl was suddenly subjected to medical, judicial, and
popular scrutiny and condemna- tion.9 Neither in these cases nor in others where Foucault seems to imply a
freer, because prediscursive, existence to certain practices does he appear to mean that they really occurred
they had not yet been brought into the pervasive disciplinary or biopolitical discourses of the agescience, psychiatry, medicine, law, pedagogy.10 Silence, as Foucault affirms it, is then
identical neither with secrecy nor with not speaking. It instead signifies a
particular relation to regulatory discourses, as well as a possible niche for
the practice of freedom within those discourses. Put differently, if discourses
posit and organize silences, then silences themselves must be understood
as discursively produced, as part of discourse, rather than as its
opposite. Hence silences are no more free of organization by power than
speech is, nor are they any more inventable or protectable by us than
speech is. Yet, and paradoxically, silenceeven that produced within
discoursemay also function as that which discourse has not penetrated,
as a scene of practices that escape the regulatory functions of discourse.
It is this latter function that renders silence itself a source of protection
and potentially even a source of power. The Fifth Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution may be understood as mobilizing precisely this power
against discourse, even as the amendment itself functions discursively
and leads a distinctly discursive life.
outside discourse; the point is rather that
215/259
2NC Turns Case

Speaking out makes liberation impossible and turns the caseendorse
instead a productive silence with the potential to actualize freedom
This problem is not specific to MacKinnons work nor even to feminist legal reform, although it emerges with
efforts at bringing subjugated

discourses into the law merely constitute examples of what Foucault identified as
the risk of recodification and recolonization of disin- terred knowledges
by those unitary discourses, which first disqualified and then ignored
them when they made their appearance. These efforts suggest how the work of
breaking silence can metamorphose into new techniques of domination , how
our truths can become our rulers rather than our emancipators, how our
confessions become the norms by which we are regulated. Though this
kind of regulatory function is familiar enough to students of legal and
bureaucratic discourse, it is less frequently recognized and perhaps more
disquieting in putatively countercultural discourse, when confessing injury
can become that which attaches us to the injury, paralyzes us within it,
and prevents us from seeking or even desiring a status other than that of
injured. In an age of social identification through attributes marked as culturally significant gender, race,
sexuality, and so forthconfessional discourse, with its truth-bearing status in a postepistemological
particular acuteness in both. Rather, MacKinnons and kindred
universe, not only regulates the confessor in the name of freeing her, as Foucault described that logic, but
extends beyond the confessing individual to constitute a regulatory truth

about the identity group: confessed truths are assembled and deployed as
knowledge about the group. This phenomenon would seem to undergird a range of recurring
troubles in feminism, from the real woman rejoinder to poststructuralist decon- structions of her to totalizing
descriptions of womens experience that are the inadvertent effects of
various kinds of survivor stories. Thus, for example, the porn star who feels miserably exploited,
violated, and humiliated in her work invariably monopolizes the feminist truth about sex work, as the girl with math
anxieties constitutes the feminist truth about women and math; eating disorders have become the feminist truth
about women and food, as sexual abuse and violation oc- cupy the feminist knowledge terrain of women and
sexuality. In other words, even as feminism aims to affirm diversity among women and womens experiences,
confession as the site of production of truth, converging with feminist suspicion and de-authorization of truth from
the story of greatest suffering

becomes the true story of woman. (This may constitute part of the rhetorical purchase of
other sources, tends to reinstate a unified discourse in which
confessional discourse in a postfoundational epistemological era: confession substitutes for the largely discredited
charge of false consciousness, on the one hand, and for generalized truth claims rooted in science, God, or nature
on the other.) Thus, the adult who does not manifestly suffer from her or his childhood sexual experience, the
lesbian who does not feel shame, the woman of color who does not primarily or correctly identify with her
marking as suchthese
figures are excluded as bona fide members of the

identity categories that also claim them. Their status within these
discourses is that of being in denial, of suffering from false
consciousness, or of being a race traitor. This is the norm-making
process in traditions of breaking silence, which, ironically, silence and
exclude the very persons these traditions mean to empower . While these
practices tacitly silence those who do not share the experiences of those whose suffering is most marked (or
whom the discourse produces as suffering markedly), they also con demn those whose sufferings
they record to a permanent identification with that suffering . Here, there is a
temporal ensnaring in the folds of our own discourses insofar as our manner of identifying ourselves in speech
speech and silence arent

really opposites? Indeed, what if to speak in- cessantly of ones suffering is to
condemns us to live in a present dominated by the past. But what if
216/259
silence the possibilities of overcoming it, of living beyond it, of identifying

as something other than it? What if this incessant speech overwhelms not
only the experiences of others but also alternative (unutterable , traumatized,
fragmentary, or unassimilable) zones of ones own experience? Conversely, what if a certain
modality of silence about ones sufferingand we might consider modalities of silence to be
as varied as modalities of speecharticulates a variety of possibilities not otherwise
available to the sufferer?
217/259
General Impact to Identity

The aff ontologizes identity as monolithicthis locks in racism and makes
resistance to domination impossible
Brown 6 (Wendy, Prof @ UC Berkeley, Regulation Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of
Identity and Empire, p. 143-4)//LA [NOTE: MOT = Museum of Tolerance]
Fourth, this amalgamation of differences facilitates slides between them; for example, the United Farm Workers
struggle can be included under tolerance because this economic justice project happens to attach to brown bodies.
amalgamation makes possible an especially pernicious

interchangeability between religion, culture, ethnicity, and race, and
interchangeability that isnt entirely reducible to analytic sloppiness or to the
effect of extending the model of Judaism to everything else. Rather, these categories become
fungible when identity is ontologized such that belief and practice are
derived from blood or phenotype. This ontologization is what makes
perversely intelligible the inclusion of racial difference as a candidate for
tolerance within a definition of tolerance as the acceptance of beliefs and practice that differ from ones
The
own. It also permits the slip from religion to race when the Millennium Machine video on terrorism asks viewers
The
implication is that people of a certain phenotype or appearance inherently
hew to a particular set of beliefs and that those beliefs, in turn, can
produce a certain set of diabolical practices. Once culture, ethnicity, race, and religion are
all part of the generic problem of difference, and once identity itself is ontologized, this
chain of logic becomes possible. Yet this derivation of belief and practices
from race is what the MOT elsewhere defines as stereotyping and
condemns as an enemy of tolerance. Moreover, the naturalization and
amalgamation of difference inscribes the very racism, sexism, and
homophobia is purports to redress. It makes identity ontological rather
than as an effect of the powers that produce itindeed, that produce
every Us and Them, whether women and men, Korean and black, homosexual and heterosexual, or Jew or
Christian. In casting difference as an inherent ground of hostility, this logic
affirms the tribalism it claims to deplore. But this is also the logic that permits a definition of
whether racial profiling is an acceptable security measure in the aftermath of an attack by Islamic terrorists.
tolerance as the acceptance of beliefs and practices that differ from ones own to be sustained when dealing with
categories such as race and gender that would seemingly undermine it. I f
difference is natural and

deep, then it contours belief and practice even where these do not take expressly religious or
cultural shape. So race and gender, as sites of deep difference, constitute the
basis for disparate beliefs and practices; in the process, sexism and
racism are reduced to the failure to treat difference with respect, to
accord it human dignity despite its strangeness. In this radically
depoliticized account of subordination and domination, hegemony and
marginalization, the natural diffidence of difference becomes the engine of
human history.
218/259
*AFFNo Alt Solvency

Your author concludes affsilence doesnt solve oppression
It is tempting to end on this note. But it favors one side of a paradox about silence and silencing without recalling
the other. For while
silence can be a mode of resistance to power, including to

our own productions of regulatory power, it is not yet freedom precisely
insofar as it constitutes resistance to domination rather than its own
discursive bid for hegemony. Put another way, one challenge to the convention
of equating speaking with power and silence with powerlessness pertains to the practice of refusing to speak as a mode of resistance. Here,
even as silence is a response to domination, it is not enforced from above
but rather deployed from below: refusing to speak is a method of refusing
colonization, of refusing complicity in injurious interpella- tions or in subjection through regulation. Yet it
would be a mistake to value this resistance too highly, for it is, like most
rights claims, a defense in the context of domination, a strategy for
negotiating domination, rather than a sign of emancipation from it. In The
Alchemy of Race and Rights, the black legal scholar Patricia Williams coins a provocative phrase that captures this
feature of silence as discourse. Following a disturbing encounter with some ob- noxious young students who
jostled her off the sidewalk in a largely white college town, she speaks of pursuing her way, manumitted into
silence.23 In this paradoxical locution, Williams intimates that pur- chased emancipation from slavery conferred a
right to silence, one to which, however, she is also condemned. Manumitted
into silence
emancipated into silenceno longer a subject of coerced speech, no
longer invaded in every domain of her being, yet also not heard, seen,
recognized, wanted as a speaking being in the public or social realm . Perhaps
then, one historical-political place of silence for collective subjects
emerging into history is this crossed one: a place of potentially
pleasurable reprieve in newly acquired zones of freedom and privacy, yet
a place of freedom from that is not yet freedom to make the world.
219/259
Hundleby
220/259
Routes of the Oppressed 1NC

The aff reveals the perspective of the oppressed, and in so doing shares
their secretsthis undermines the potential for resistance, turning the
case
Hundleby 5 (Catherine, U of Windsor, The Epistemological Evaluation of
Oppositional Secrets, Hypatia, 20(4), Fall 2005, p. 44-58)//LA
I keep secrets. Even though I am told over and over by white feminists that we
must reveal ourselves, open ourselves, I keep secrets. Disclosing our secrets
threatens our survival. Maria Lugones Postcolonial and other oppositional
literature introduces many readers to secrets from the social margins,
sometimes only mentioning them, sometimes sharing their content.
Moving beyond colonialism and other forms of oppression is as much a
goal as a description of this writing. Because survival may be threatened,
the question arises in what circumstances feminists should expect the
secrets of oppressed people to be shared, and so in what circumstances
we should investigate or reveal them. This issue seems to confound the
central claim of standpoint epistemologistspostcolonial , feminist, or
otherwisethat there is cognitive value in learning from peoples
experiences of oppression (Harding 1991; Hartsock 1986; Mills 1998). Whether or not one
shares similar experiences, standpoint theorists argue, to begin thought
from the perspective of others and other others, as Sandra Harding puts it, provides
an epistemic advantage. Secrets concerned with resistance, such as in the
Underground Railroad, womens shelters, and lesbian passing, must be especially
valuable and relevant to developing knowledge from a standpoint , because
activism is supposed to be necessary to acquire the advantage. Yet, revealing aspects of
resistance so vulnerable that they are kept secret threatens to undermine
the potential of those secrets for resisting and opposing oppression. Thus,
the epistemological value of oppositional secrecy seems to conflict with
standpoint theorists advice of emancipatory activism . The case of oppositional
secrecy seems to indicate an exception to standpoint theory, a case in
which emancipatory politics does not encourage but prohibits sharing
understanding. However, as I argue in this essay, the need to preserve oppositional secrecy is not an
exception to, but only a limited case of, standpoint epistemology. Political considerations do not
bar some of the understandings that might be gained, but political
distinctions do indicate when and where the cognitive value of such
understandings tapers off. The cognitive significance of exposing hidden
understanding reduces in cases of extreme political vulnerability that
morally require secrecy.
221/259
Turns Case
Secrets are a prerequisite to liberationrevealing them endangers the
lives and freedoms of the oppressed
Given the two distinguishable forms of oppositional secrecy, the question remains what political
reasons generally keep people who oppose oppression from revealing or
investigating the secrets of the oppressed despite the potential
understanding to be gained. How does a person guided by standpoint
theory decide when an oppositional secret may be revealed? How does an
intellectual activist against oppression, who may or may not share a
particular experience of oppression, know when to resist revealing or
investigating politically justified secrecy? Whether one shares the
particular experience of oppression, or shares the secret itself, the most
obvious reasons for respecting the secrets of the oppressed rely on moral
and political considerations. The political project of emancipation
depends on keeping the secret , at least to some extent or in some way, and so an
inquirer must be aware that violating that secrecy jeopardizes those who
participate in it. The cost may be even their lives . Clearly, no foreseeable substantial
moral or political threat to the participants in a secret can result from a permissible revelation. How is the threat to
the oppositional project recognized and evaluated? People tend to resolve such dilemmas by seeking out those who
In the wrong
hands, secrets are dangerous, can be misused, and indeed can reinforce
the circumstances of oppression, however noble ones intentions. The
type of ignorance encouraged by social privilege may make a knower
unaware of the dangerous implications of a particular piece of knowledge
for the welfare of marginalized people. Consider how white or straight folks may be oblivious
as they out and thus endanger a person who is passing. To ward off potential danger, one
appeals to the immorality of disrespecting the secrets of others. The
decision of when and how to reveal a secret is left as much as possible to
the judgment of those whose secret it is.4 The more removed one is from
the content being hiddenwhether or not the circumstance involves
oppression, but with special care if it doesthe less political authority one
has to evaluate that circumstance and to investigate or share the secret .5
share in the form of oppression, and those who are already trusted in sharing the secret.
So, one avoids revealing or inquiring into the sexual or racial identity of others. The person or people in question
judge best the full practical and political import of open identification.
222/259
AT: But our project is important

All the reasons why your project is important are reasons to keep it secret
comparative evidence
The very nature of secrecy makes it difficult to find examplesand so much
the worse because suppression and underdevelopment make
understanding from an oppressed perspective difficult to recognize . However,
even a thoroughly privileged Western feminist can discern two forms of oppositional secrecy. First, oppressed
people build covert networks to escape or mitigate oppression, as in the
Underground Railroad or illegal systems providing contraceptive information and services. Second, people belonging to an oppressed group may
pass as having a more politically central identity. For instance, blacks may pass as
white, or gays and lesbians pass as straight; indeed, all sorts of passing is possible through marriage and name-
a casual form of
secret arises when people covertly share information by using a language
different from the politically dominant tongue . Francophones in anglophone Canada and
Latino/as in the United States occasionally make use of this tool for secrecy, and we can consider it an
ad hoc networking provision, an Underground Railroad in microcosm. The
goal is to secure safe passage, not of whole people or physical provisions, but of
information alone, just as some birth control networks provide. Some oppositional secrets combine the two
strategies of passing and networking. Passing as a typical house or generic institution
may be important for a womens shelter, but this requires a network of support by volunteers,
changes. These two types of oppositional secrecy take special forms. For instance,
and strict privacy policies that keep the shelter beyond easy access by abusers; all this together makes it possible
for residents to hide their identities. (More completely covert networks may be necessary for highly endangered
clients.) Likewise, same-sex couples in the United States seeking access to marriage may use networks to provide
temporary addresses and pass as residents of states that provide access to legal marriage; and in Japan, they may
pass as parent and child to gain access to the property rights otherwise afforded to couples (Maree 2004). Another
hybrid of passing and networking that disrupts oppression is secret sabotage, including feigned helplessness, an
underground activity that depends on passing. A slave who intentionally damages farm machinery to provide
another slave time to recuperate from an illness wishes to pass as a dutiful slave but also to negotiate systematic
reprieve for the other (Douglass 1995). Appearing dutiful is also necessary for the unhappy mother who
behavior provides
reprieve from the indignity that can infect mothering, a reprieve provided by
demonstrating to herself her own measure of independence (Lugones 2003, 56). The effects
of secrecy vary according to context and are difficult to predict. What is
meant to be oppositional may instead be collaborative, and generally
involves both. Any oppositional activity is likely to be curdled, that is, both
blended with repressive aspects and ambiguous in the face of interlocking
oppressions (Lugones 2003, 816). On the oppositional side, consider how passing tends be more useful for
intentionally asks nonsensical questions, or burns dinner and breaks dishes. Her
lesbians than gay men who may confront het- erosexism without the complications of sexism (Card 1995). Yet, for
lesbians, passing entails a special risk of collaboration: the invisibility of lesbian identity encourages neglect of
lesbian issues and dismissal of specific lesbian concerns as merely personal or at best marginal and insignificant.
invisibility can perpetuate lesbians minority status; indeed, any

case of passing can perpetuate servility to the dominant culture and so
undermine personal dignity (Card 1995, 120). So, the strategy of passing is easily
corrupted. Note how passing as white is fraught for African Americans seeking the benefits of skin privilege,
who may therefore perceive themselves and be perceived by others as traitors. Unintentional
collaboration in oppressive systems is less a danger for deliberate
underground avenues of resistance. Admittedly, a casual linguistic secret or
underground network depends on those in power being substantially ignoThus, lesbian
223/259
rant, and ignorance of marginalized lives can be a source of oppression.2 The occupation of
separate physical and linguistic domains may support oppressive social
systems. Yet employing the marginalized environment as an avenue for
resistance need not validate the system of privilege in the same way or to
nearly the same degree as acquiring the privileges of the political center
by passing. The ignorance that makes possible underground networks
does not directly create the oppressive environment . In no immediate sense does a
slave owners ignorance of how to survive in the wild oppress the slaves, or a Canadian anglophones ignorance of
collaboration may result indirectly

from even the most pointed of oppositional actions, and thus to hidden
emancipatory networks. The success of the Underground Railroad was double-edged, as abolitionist
the French language oppress francophones.3 However,
and escaped slave Frederick Douglass warned. Of course, some slaves gained hope and abolitionists gained
inspiration from hearing of it. However, even the very limited awareness of it available to slaveholders, an
awareness that might be dismissed as rumor, could make the slaveholders extra vigilant, and may ultimately have
Despite such frequently

ambiguous implications of political secrecy, it certainly can be very
effective, and it is not a strategy unique to the oppressed. Covert
networks and disguises also undermine legitimate forms of social control.
served their interests more than the slaves (Douglass 1995, 60).
Still, underground systems of prisoners whose social suppression is politically warranted can be left out of this
discussion, at least insofar as we can distinguish between oppression and politically warranted suppression. Inmates
in a prison may find means of sharing drugs and weapons, and for continued illegal and immoral behavior, means
revealing unjust
networks poses no problem for standpoint theory. The relevant difference
is not the materials exchanged and particular activities of networks, which
only illustrate the contrast with networks mobilized against oppression.
What morally distinguishes the casesor aspects of the cases, as they are
curdledis the purpose for the form of underground network, whether
the goal is politically justified. People imprisoned as a result of racist or
classist social policies that may, for instance, lead them to steal in order to eat,
have oppositional knowledge. Their perspective provides cognitive
advantage, productive alternative perspectives. As for networks, so for passing. Consider
that resemble those of Jews in a concentration camp for sharing food and water; yet
the moral dilemmas of blacks passing as white in the Harlem renaissance that provide the backdrop for Nella
Larsens novella Passing (1997). Gertrudes passing as white motivated by love is sympathetic, and so it is
interesting for standpoint theory. By contrast, standpoint theorists can find little of cognitive significance in
Gertrudes friend Clare passing as white insofar as it is motivated by luxury. Straightforward social climbing is not
Apparent similarities between

oppositional secrets and other forms of secrecy need not confound people
who use standpoint epistemology.
politically justified and reflects only a mainstream perspective.
224/259
Impact Calc/AT: Case OWs

The K outweighstheres no risk that the political efficacy of the aff
outweighs its epistemic harmsdefault to EXPLICIT impact comparison
Can cognitive advantage to the general community be sufficient to
outweigh the political disadvantage of marginalized people losing a
strategic secret? Does it make sense to think this way? On the one hand, weighing
cognitive against political values seems like comparing apples with oranges. On the other hand, spe aking as if
cognition can be wholly separated from and contrasted with political or
ethical values not only sounds crass but can only be a heuristic for identifying
conflicting interests. Such dichotomies are denied by feminist philosophers of
science (Longino 1997; Nelson and Nelson 1995), and particularly by standpoint theorists (Hartsock
1983; Rose 1983), who maintain that the cognitive value to accrue from
obtaining an oppositional standpoint is always politically dependent. If the
secrets are used to resist oppression, the political interests clearly take
priority, but it is not clear just how much priority relative to the
epistemological interests. Yet an account of the intersection between
political and epistemological interests can aid responsible inquiry, both
personal and scientific. Distinguishing epistemological concerns may be
artificial, but still informative, if only because people tend to divide up
human interests by separating cognitive from ethical and political values .
The epistemological value of a standpoint depends on there being a political center and contrasting social margins.
Without the existence of oppression, no perspective provides a special

epistemological advantage. A certain cognitive value derives from a particular form of oppression up
until the point at which we eradicate it. With the achievement of social justice comes the elimination of what made
Without oppression,
understanding from a particular social perspective is no longer
underdeveloped or suppressed, and so it brings no special cognitive
advantage (Figure 1). Epistemological Value I suggest that just as for both suppressed and underdeveloped
knowledge, political conditions can be portrayed in epistemological terms in
the case of oppositional secrecy. There are both cognitive and political
that perspective demand special political and cognitive attention.
reasons for respecting the authority of those experiencing oppression.

This means that decisions about investigating or revealing secrets can be
covered in the terms of a standpoint epistemology, and are not simply a
matter of the political values outweighing the epistemological. What
appears to be an ethical trumping of cognitive interests is simply a
nonstarter in cognitive terms that cannot motivate the revelation of
politically necessitated secrets. Little potential for gaining understanding
about the world can arise from perspectives that are extremely vulnerable
because of political circumstances. Admittedly, secrecy restricts access to certain information
and cognitive skills, detracting from the flow of information that makes multiple perspectives available, and which
For those who dont share the secret, and especially

for those whom are pointedly deceivedthe slaveholders, batterers, and
homophobesthe withheld wisdom could be very valuable .
benefits a community in general.
225/259
2NC Link
Revealing the secrets of the oppressed destroys the value to life and turns
the caseany risk of a link outweighs since minor revelations snowball
The benefit for an outsiders understanding of the world diminishes with
the preciousness of the secret. Such understandings are not merely
suppressed or underdeveloped, but valuable because of and therefore
contingent on the possibility of social change. If an understanding is
extremely vulnerable in the current political climate, there is only a small
chance that it will bear out. The project served by the secret is likely to
fail. For instance, sharing knowledge of the existence of a secret may
encourage others to seek out further details, and endanger the plans and
corresponding projection of the world, as Douglass worried. Whatever aspect of a
secret is revealed, revelation of the information tends to change the
political nature of the world and can undermine the secrets cognitive
potential if that potential is fragile. Fresh scrutiny will face the sabo- taging wife should others
become aware that there is some secret regarding her behavior. Their watchful eyes will make it
difficult for her to continue to act out, and so will amplify the oppression she
experiences. The extreme case of genocide demonstrates vividly how political
necessity mitigates epistemological values. There approaches nothing to
learn of the future world from the understandings of peoples who do not
survive. Although there is much to learn from them about their
oppression, that oppression stops being part of the world as those
oppressed people stop being part of the world. The world becomes less
the world those people lived in and understood, and 7 their perspectives
decline in relevance and epistemological value.
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*AFFCase OWs
Case comes firstsecrets are only relevant if the oppressed have value,
and only the aff can maintain that
Whatever motivation there is for secret understandings, their cognitive
value largely depends on how the world is shaped by politics now and in
the possible future. The more access abusers have to their victims, the less difference the victims
meager secrets can make, even to the victims themselves, and the less real is the content of those secrets, in both
a literal and a psychological sense. It is less possible for gays and lesbians to pass, and so less informative that they
do, so long as they are persecuted. The more thoroughgoing and accepted is slavery, the less the Underground
The
knowledge kept secret by people who suffer these forms of oppression is
useful and true only to the extent that the world might support the value
and the legitimacy of those peoples lives, a possibility that is threatened
and undermined by oppression. Secrets of the oppressed are meaningful
views of the world and have cognitively important consequences
especially to the extent that those secrets support an otherwise
endangered moral status and provide for political emancipation, which is
to say, to the extent that they have morally desirable consequences.
Likewise, to the extent that oppositional politics require secrecy on moral
grounds, the cognitive returns of revealing those secrets diminish and
little is told of the present world.
Railroad can work to develop and preserve African Americans culture, self-esteem, and individual lives.
227/259
Nuclear Racism
228/259
229/259
Cards
The acceptable risk mentality of the affirmative is a tacit endorsement

of this racism
Green 99 (Jim Green is the national anti-nuclear campaigner with Friends of the
Earth Australia and Australian coordinator of the Beyond Nuclear Initiative.[1] Green
is a regular media commentator on nuclear waste issues.[2] He has an honors
degree in public health and was awarded a PhD in science and technology
studies for his analysis of the Lucas Heights research reactor debate Radioactive
racism http://www.reocities.com/jimgreen3/racism.html)//BK
"Racism makes the continuing production of nuclear waste possible. If the
white people who make decisions about nuclear waste felt that the people of
color in poor areas are as valuable as the decision makers' own mothers and
fathers and sons and daughters, would they continue to dump nuclear waste in
those areas? If tailings from uranium mining were located next to the homes of
investment bankers instead of the homes of indigenous people, would uranium
mining continue? The continuation of the nuclear fuel cycle depends ... on the
practice of human sacrifice. It depends on affluent whites deciding to risk the
health and lives of people who are not affluent or white. This is what
'acceptable risk' often means in practice."
Racism must be rejected in every instance

Barndt 91 (Joseph R. Barndt co-director of Ministry Working to Dismantle Racism
"Dismantling Racism" p. 155)//BK
To study racism is to study walls. We have looked at barriers and fences, restraints and limitations,
ghettos and prisons. The prison of racism confines us all, people of color and white
people alike. It shackles the victimizer as well as the victim. The walls forcibly keep
people of color and white people separate from each other; in our separate prisons we are all prevented from
achieving the human potential God intends for us. The limitations imposed on people of color
by poverty, subservience, and powerlessness are cruel, inhuman, and unjust;

the effects of uncontrolled power, privilage, and greed, whicha are the marks of
our white prison, will inevitably destroy us as well. But we have also seen that
the walls of racism can be dismantled. We are not condemned to an inexorable
fate, but are offered the vision and the possibility of freedom. Brick by brick,
stone by stone, the prison of individual, institutional, and cultural racism can
be destroyed. You and I are urgently called to joing the efforst of those who
know it is time to tear down, once and for all, the walls of racism. The danger
point of self-destruction seems to be drawing even more near. The results of
centuries of national and worldwide conquest and colonialism, of military
buildups and violent aggression, of overconsumption and environmental
destruction may be reaching a point of no return. A small and predominantly
white minority of the global population derives its power and privelage from
the sufferings of vast majority of peoples of all color. For the sake of the world
and ourselves, we dare not allow it to continue.
It is no accident that Nuclear plants are located in minority communities -
230/259
NY Times 97 (Power Plant Is Rejected Over Racism Concerns

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/04/us/power-plant-is-rejected-over-racismconcerns.html)//BK
The commission's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, in a decision issued on
Friday, said its own staff must more thoroughly examine accusations that
Louisiana Energy Services purposely chose to locate the plant close to poor, black
neighborhoods in northern Louisiana. ''Certainly the possibility that racial
considerations played a part in the site selection cannot be passed off as mere
coincidence,'' the board wrote. Three years ago, President Clinton ordered Federal
agencies to protect minorities from disproportionately large exposure to
pollution. If Mr. Clinton's order is to have any weight, the board said, ''the staff must lift
some rocks and look under them.'' The consortium chose in 1989 to build the plant
about 40 miles northeast of Shreveport, between Forest Grove, population 150,
founded by freed slaves, and Center Springs, population 100, founded around the
turn of the century.
These waste sites will inevitably create health problems for future
generations all the result of attempts to increase profits.
Brook 98 [Daniel, Environmental Genocide: Native Americans and Toxic Waste,
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 57, No. 1, Jan., pp. 105-113,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3487423.pdf]
it is a sad but true fact that "virtually every landfill leaks, and every
incinerator emits hundreds of toxic chemicals into the air, land and water" (Angel
1991, 3). The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency concedes that "[e]ven if the . . . protective
systems work according to plan, the landfills will eventually leak poisons into
the environment" (ibid.). Therefore, even if these toxic waste sites are safe for the
present generation-a rather dubious proposition at best-they will pose an increasingly
greater health and safety risk for all future generations. Native people (and
others) will eventually pay the costs of these toxic pollutants with their lives,
"costs to which [corporate] executives are conveniently immune" (Parker 1983, 59).
In this way, private corporations are able to externalize their costs onto the
commons, thereby subsidizing their earnings at the expense of health, safety,
and the environment.
Unfortunately,
231/259
232/259
Yancy
233/259
1NC (unfinished)
(Frantz Fanon, philosopher, revolutionary, all around cool dude, 1952, Black Skin,
White Masks, translated by Charles Lam Markmann, p 84) gz
Look, a Negro! It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I
passed by. I made a tight smile.
Look, a Negro! It was true. It amused me.
Look, a Negro! The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of
my amusement.
Mama, see the Negro! Im frightened! Frightened! Frightened!
Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh
myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible
If you think this story is rooted solely in the past youve got another
thing coming this accusation is an act of performative policing by
white civil society the lived experience of the black subject
becomes simultaneously dangerous and fungible this reality is not
contingent but rather a structural ontology imposed on black
experience that unlocks gratuitous violence
Yancy 12 (George Yancy, PhD in philosophy from Dusquesne University, professor
of philosophy at Dusquesne University, 2012, Look a White! pp 2-5) gz
Note the iterative Look, a Negro! It is repetitive and effectively
communicates something of a spectacle to behold. Yes. Its a Negro! Be careful!
Negroes steal, they cheat, they are hypersexual, mesmerizingly so, and
the quintessence of evil and danger. The tight smile on Fanons face is a forced smile,
uncomfortable, tolerant. Fanon feels the impact of the collective white gaze. He is,
as it were, strangled by the attention. He has become a peculiar thing.
He becomes a dreaded object, a thing of fear, a frightening and ominous
presence. The turned heads and twisted bodies that move suddenly to
catch a glimpse of the object of the white boys alarm function as
confirmation that something has gone awry. Their abruptly turned white
bodies help to materialize the threat through white collusion. The white
boy has triggered something of an optical frenzy. Everyone is now looking,
bracing for something to happen, something that the Negro will do. And
given his cannibal nature, perhaps the Negro is hungry. Fanon writes, The little
white boy throws himself into his mothers arms: Mama, the niggers going to eat me up.2 Fanon has done
nothing save be a Negro. Yet this is sufficient. The Negro has always
already done something by virtue of being a Negro. It is an anterior guilt
that always haunts the Negro and his or her present and future actions.
After all, this is what it means to be a Negroto have done something
wrong. The little white boys utterance is felicitous against a backdrop of white lies and myths about the black
body. As Robert Gooding-Williams writes, The [white] boys expression of fear posits a typified image of the Negro
as behaving in threatening ways. This image has a narrative significance, Fanon implies, as it portrays the Negro as
acting precisely as historically received legends and stories about Negros generally portray them as acting.3 One
the pointing is not

only an indicative, but the schematic foreshadowing of an accusation, one
which carries the performative force to constitute that danger which it
fears and defends against.4 The act of pointing is by no means benign; it
takes its phenomenological or lived toll on the black body . As Fanon writes, My
body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in
can imagine the innocent white index finger pointing to the black body. Here
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mourning in that white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is
bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look, a nigger .5 Fanon is clear that the
white boy, while not fully realizing the complex historical, psychological,
and phenomenological implications, has actually distorted his (Fanons)
body. Look, a Negro! is rendered intelligible vis--vis an entire play of
white racist signifiers that ontologically truncate the black body; it is an
expression that calls forth an entire white racist worldview. The white boy,
though, is not a mere innocent proxy for whiteness. Rather, he is learning,
at that very moment, the power of racial speech, the power of racial
gesturing. He is learning how to think about and feel toward the so-called
dark Other. He is undergoing white subject formation, a formation that is
fundamentally linked to the object that he fears and dreads. To invoke Fanon, the
[white] collective unconscious is not dependent on cerebral heredity; it is the result of what I shall call the
the white boys racial practices are

learned effortlessly, practices that are always already in process. In short, the
white boys performance of whiteness is not simply the successful result
of a superimposed superstructural grid of racist ideology. Rather, the
white boys performance points to fundamental ways in which many white
children are oriented, at the level of everyday practices, within the world,
where their bodily orientations are unreflected expressions of the
background lived orientations of whiteness, white ways of being, white
modes of racial and racist practice.7 It is a process, though, where the white embodied subject
unreflected imposition of a culture.6 Or, as I would argue,
is intimately linked to the black embodied subject. Therefore, as Mike Hill argues in reference to Toni Morrisons
insightful concept of American Africanism, the
distance implicit in presumptive white

purity is false, and covers an occluded racial proximity .8 Look, a Negro!
draws its force from collective fear and misrecognition. Although Fanon does grant
that, within the field of culturally available racial descriptors, it is true that he is a Negro, he recognizes how the
term is fundamentally linked to various racist myths. This is why Fanon also writes, Dirty
nigger! Or
simply, Look, a Negro!9 There is no distinction here within the context
of the white gaze. To see a Negro is to see a nigger; it is to see a
problema problem that is deemed, from the perspectives of whites,
ontological. In the face of so many white gazes, one desires to slip into
corners.10 Yet as Fanon makes clear, it is not easy to hide. Metaphorically, he describes how his long
antennae pick up the catch-phrases strewn over the surface of thingsnigger underwear smells of nigger nigger
He cannot live a life of

anonymity, etymologically, without a name or nameless. Apparently,
only whites have that wonderful capacity to live anonymously,
thoughtlessly, to be ordinary qua human, to go unmarked and unnamed
in essence, to be white.12 They are like Clint Eastwoods white stock characters in his Western
shoot-em-up movies who come into town nameless and mysterious. Indeed, Eastwoods central
character is the man with no name. This is the portrayal of white
liberalism perhaps at its best. The black lone figure already has a name.
Indeed, he has multiple names: nigger, rapist, savage. The white
townspeople become fearful as he moves through the street ; they know that even
teeth are whitenigger feet are bigthe niggers barrel chest.11
as a man of the law, as shown in the comedy Blazing Saddles (1974), he is on the verge of whipping it out. Fanon
writes, The
Negro is the incarnation of a genital potency beyond all

moralities and prohibitions. 13 To be the black or the Negro, then, is to be
immediately recognized and recognizable. One is in clear view: Look, a
Negro-nigger! There is no escape; there are no exceptions; it is a
Sisyphean mode of existence. Fanon writes, When [white] people like me, they
tell me it is in spite of my color. When they dislike me, they point out that
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it is not because of my color. Either way, I am locked into the infernal

circle.14 Yet this infernal circle is not of Fanons doing. It is the social world of white
normativity and white meaning making that creates the conditions under
which black people are always already marked as different/deviant/
dangerous. Look, a Negro! (or perhaps, simply, Look, the wretched and forlorn nigger!) has
the perlocutionary power to incite violence, violence filled with white
desire and bloodlust. Call: Look, a Negro! Response: Rape the black
bitch! Call: Look, a Negro! Response: Get a rope! Call: Rape!
Response: Castrate the nigger! The black body is deemed a threat vis-vis the virgin sanctity of whiteness,15 something to be marked,
sequestered, and in many cases killedjust for fun. In fact, in 2011 in Jackson,
Mississippi, a forty-nine-year-old black man, James Craig Anderson, was targeted primarily by a white eighteen-yearold male, who, according to law enforcement officials, said to his white friends, Lets go fuck with some niggers.
On seeing a black man standing in a parking lot (Look, a Negro!), the group first repeatedly beat him. It is alleged
that the expression White Power! was also yelled out by one of the white youth. As Anderson staggered, he was
then brutally run over by a truck driven by the white eighteen-year-old, an event captured on surveillance tape.
After driving over and killing Anderson, the white male, who since has been indicted on charges of capital murder
and a hate crime, allegedly said to his friends, I ran that nigger over.16 While many of the details of this crime are
still unknown as of this writing, the racist narrative is certainly consistent with the historical legacy of whiteness in
North America as it relates to black people. As I write about this incident, I hear the words of many of my white
students: But our generation has changed when it comes to racism. Call: Look, a Negro! Response: Run the
nigger over!
Its time to flip the script vote aff/neg to affirm a counter-gift that
reveals the invisible practices of whiteness
Yancy 12 (George Yancy, PhD in philosophy from Dusquesne University, professor
of philosophy at Dusquesne University, 2012, Look a White! pp 5-12) gz
Look, a Negro! is a form of racist interpellation that, when examined
closely, reveals whites to themselves. One might say that the Negro is
that which whites create as the specter/phantom of their own fear.17 Thus,
I would argue that the whites who engage in a surveillance of Fanons body
dont really see him; they see themselves. James Baldwin, speaking to white
North America with eloquence and incredible psychological insight, says, But you
still think, I gather, that the nigger is necessary. But hes unnecessary to me, so he
must be necessary to you. I give you your problem back. Youre the nigger, baby; it
isnt me.18 What is so powerful here is the profound act of transposition.
One might ask, Will the real nigger please stand up? Ah, yes, Look, a
white! Such naming and marking function to flip the script. Flipping the
script, which is a way of changing an outcome by reversing the terms or, in
this case, recasting the script19 of those who reap the benefits of white
privilege says, I see you for what and who you are! Flipping the script
is, one might say, a gift offering: an opportunity, a call to responsibility
perhaps even to greater maturity. Look, a white! is disruptive and clears
a space for new forms of recognition. Public repetition of this expression
and the realities of whiteness that are so identified and marked is one way
of installing the legitimacy that there is something even seeable when it
comes to whiteness. Moreover, public repetition functions to further an
antiracist authority over a visual field20 historically dominated by whites.
It is important to note, though, that the subject of the utterance, Look, a
white! is not a sovereign, ahistorical, neutral subject that has absolute
control over the impact of the utterance. Look, a Negro! is already
embedded within citationality conditions that involve larger racist
assumptions and accusations as they relate to the black body that shape
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the intelligibility, and the meaningful declaration, of the utterance. Look,

a Negro! presupposes a white subject who is historically embedded
within racist social relations and a racist discursive field that preexists the
speaker. As a form of repetition, one that would be cited often and by
many, Look, a white! has the potential to create conditions that work to
install an intersubjective intelligibility and social force that effectively
counter the direction of the gaze, a site traditionally monopolized by
whites, and perhaps create a moment of uptake that induces a form of
white identity crisis, a jolt that awakens a sudden and startling sense of
having been seen. In response, one might hear, You talkin to me? But unlike
the scenario played out in Taxi Driver (1976), where Robert De Niro poses this
question, in this case the mirror speaks back: Youre damn right. Indeed, I am!
Look, a white! returns to white people the problem of whiteness. While I
see it as a gift, I know that not all gifts are free of discomfort.21 Indeed, some are
heavy laden with great responsibility. Yet it is a gift that ought to engender a
sense of gratitude, a sense of humility, and an opportunity to give thanks
not the sort of attitude that reinscribes white entitlement. As bell hooks
writes, Those white people who want to continue the dominant
subordinate relationship so endemic to racist exploitation by insisting that
we serve themthat we do the work of challenging and changing their
consciousnessare acting in bad faith.22 The gift is not all about you. As
white, you are used to everything always being about you. We have heard, as Du
Bois writes, your mighty cry reverberating through the world, I am white! Well and
good, O Prometheus, divine thief.23 But your cry to the world was followed by
exploitation, dehumanization, and death. I am white! was egomaniacal and
thanatological; it was a process of self-naming that functioned to
justify, through racial myth making, the actions of whites in their quest
to dominate those backward and inferior others. This process of selfnaming was not a gift but a manifestation of white messianic imperialism.
In this case, it was a deathdealing superimposition of white power. As
Steve Martinot notes, As a gift, it must see the world as other, against
which it demands of its own citizens (the white members of the white
nation) that they stand in allegiance and solidarity, and that the other on
whom the gift is bestowed (imposed) be grateful.24 Flipping the script,
within the context of this book, however, is about uscollectively. Sara Ahmed
writes, It has become commonplace for whiteness to be represented as
invisible, as the unseen or the unmarked, as non-colour, the absent
presence or hidden referent, against which all other colours are measured
as forms of deviance.25 According to George Lipsitz, Whiteness is
everywhere in U.S. culture, but it is very hard to see.26 He goes on to say,
As the unmarked category against which difference is constructed,
whiteness never has to speak its name, never has to acknowledge its rule
as an organizing principle in social and cultural relations.27 Richard Dyer
writes, In fact, for most of the time white people speak about nothing but white
people, its just that we couch it in terms of people in general.28 Finally, as
Terrance MacMullan sees it, White people remain ignorant of white privilege
because of the fact that all aspects of our livesour institutions,
practices, ideals, and lawswere defined and tailored to fit the needs,
wants, and concerns of white folk.29 But to whom is whiteness invisible?
Ahmed is clear that whiteness is invisible to those who inhabit it,30 to those
237/259
who have come to see whiteness and what it means to be human as

isomorphic. For them, it has become a mythical norm.31 This does not
mean, however, that whites who choose to give their attention to thinking
critically about whiteness are incapable of doing so, though it does mean
that there will be white structural blinkers that occlude specific and
complex insights by virtue of being white. Therefore, people of color are
necessary to the project of critically thinking through whiteness,
especially as examining whiteness has the potential of becoming a
narcissistic project that elides its dialectical relationship with people of
colorthat is, those who continue to suffer under the regime of white
power and privilege. Pointing to the importance of Audre Lordes work, which
emphasizes the importance of studying whiteness and its significance to antiracism,
Ahmed argues that if the examination of whiteness is to be more than
about whiteness, [it must begin] with the Black critique of how
whiteness works as a form of racial privilege, as well as the effects of that
privilege on the bodies of those who are recognized as black.32 The fact of
the matter is that, for white people, whiteness is the transcendental norm in
terms of which they live their lives as persons, individuals. People of color,
however, confront whiteness in their everyday lives, not as an abstract
concept but in the form of embodied whites who engage in racist practices
that negatively affect their lives. Black people and people of color thus
strive to disarticulate the link between whiteness and the assumption of
just being human, to create a critical slippage. By marking whiteness,
black people can locate whiteness as a specific historical and ideological
configuration, revealing it as an identity created and continued with alltoo-real consequences for the distribution of wealth, prestige, and
opportunity.33 The act of marking whiteness, then, is itself an act of
historicizing whiteness, an act of situating whiteness within the context of
material forces and raced interest-laden values that reinforce whiteness
as a site of privilege and hegemony. Marking whiteness is about exposing
the ways in which whites have created a form of humanism that
obfuscates their hegemonic efforts to treat their experiences as universal
and representative. According to bell hooks, Many [whites] are shocked that
black people think critically about whiteness because racist thinking
perpetuates the fantasy that the Other who is subjugated, who is
subhuman, lacks the ability to comprehend, to understand, to see the
working of the powerful.34 On this score, then, black subjectivity poses a
threat to the invisibility of whiteness. Yet this is a specific type of threat.
Because of the profound relational reality of whiteness to the nonwhite
Other, whites are not the targets of their own whiteness, so the reality of
the invisibility of whiteness, its status as normative, does not affect them
in the same way. In fact, this is impossible, for as whites continue to strive
to make whiteness visible, they do so from their perspective (which is
precisely embedded within the context of white power and privilege), not
from the perspective of those who constitute the embodied subjectivities
that undergo the existential traumas due to whiteness (the terror of
whiteness, the colonial desires of whiteness, the possessive investments
in whiteness that perpetuate problematic race-based economic orders,
residential orders, judicial orders, somatic orders, etc.). Speaking directly to
the ramifications of this specific threat, Crispin Sartwell writes, One of the major
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strategies for preserving white invisibility to ourselves is the silencing, segregation,

or delegitimation of voices that speak about whiteness from a nonwhite location.35
While it is true that not all people of color have the same understanding of the
operations of whiteness, at all levels of its complex expression, this does not negate
the fact that people of color undergo raced experiences vis--vis whiteness that
lead to specific insights that render whiteness visible. Being a wise Latina
woman,36 for example, is one mode of expression of such raced experiences,
experiences that have deep socio-ontological and epistemic implications. Yet how
can people of color not have this epistemic advantage? After all, black people and
people of color, when it comes to white people, are bone of their thought and flesh
of their language.37 As Du Bois writes, I see these souls [that is, white souls]
undressed and from the back and side. I see the working of their entrails. I know
their thoughts and they know that I know. This knowledge makes them now
embarrassed, now furious!38 Ahmed, hooks, and Du Bois emphasize the necessity
of a black countergaze, a gaze that recognizes the ways of whiteness, sees beyond
its invisibility, from the perspective of a form of raced positional knowledge. The
black counter-gaze is a species of flipping the script. Indeed, the expression, Look,
a white! presupposes this counter-gaze. I encourage my white students to mark
whiteness everywhere they recognize it. Of course, thinking critically with them
about whiteness enables these students to become more cognizant of the
obfuscatory ways in which whiteness conceals its own visibility. The critical process
creates a more complex epistemic field, as it were, in terms of which whiteness
becomes more recognizable in its daily manifestations. After taking my courses,
many white students say, I cant stop seeing the workings of race. Its
everywhere. One often gets the impression that they would rather return to a more
innocent time, before taking my course, before they learned how to see so much
more. The reality is that the workings of race are precisely what people of color
see/experience most of the time. Important to this learning process, though, is
reminding my white students that they are white, that they are part of the very
workings of race that they are beginning to recognize.39 For most of my white
students, before taking my course their own whiteness is just a benign phenotypic
marker. Indeed, for most of them, whiteness has not really been marked as a raced
category to begin with. They do not recognize the normative status of whiteness
that the marking is designed to expose. For them, to be white means I am not
like you guysthose people of color. Whiteness as normative and their whiteness
as unremarkable thus remain in place, uninterrogated, unblemished. Sara Ahmed
writes, There must be white bodies (it must be possible to see such bodies as white
bodies), and yet the power of whiteness is that we dont see those bodies as white
bodies. We just see them as bodies.40 In short, the process of disentangling the
sight of white bodies from the sight of such bodies as just bodies is not easy, but it
is necessary. For many whites, the process of marking the white body (Look, a
white!) is not just difficult but threatening. The process dares to mark whites as
racists, as perpetuators and sustainers of racism. Furthermore, the process dares to
mark whites as raced beings, as inextricably bound to the historical legacy of the
workings of race. Hence, the process encourages a slippage not only at the site of
seeing themselves as innocent of racism but also at the site of seeing themselves
as unraced.41 As Zeus Leonardo and Ronald K. Porter write, Hiding behind the veil
of color-blindness means that lifting it would force whites to confront their selfimage, with people of color acting as the mirror. This act is not frightening for
people of color but for whites.42 It is frightening because whites must begin to see
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themselves through gazes that are not prone to lie/obfuscate when it comes to the
workings of race qua whiteness. Indeed, there is no real need to lie about
whiteness. People of color have nothing to lose; whites have so much to protect. Yet
what do they have to protect? As Richard Wright notes, Their constant outwardlooking, their mania for radios, cars, and a thousand other trinkets, made them
dream and fix their eyes upon the trash of life, made it impossible for them to learn
a language that could have taught them to speak of what was in theirs or others
hearts. The words of their souls were the syllables of popular songs.43 The use of
the mirror is effective as a metaphor. White people see themselves through
epistemic and axiological orders that reflect back to them their own normative
status and importance. Indeed, the script has already been written in their favor. It
is time for the mirror to speak through a different script, from the perspective of
lived experiences of those bodies of color that encounter white people on a daily
basis as a problem or perhaps even as a site of terror. The mirror will tell the truth:
No, damn it! Snow White is not the fairest of them all. She is precisely the
problem! This returns us to the issue of the gift. Seeing whiteness from the
perspective of, in this case, black people functions as an invitation to see more, to
see things differently. It is a special call that reframes, that results in a form of
unveiling, of seeing, and of recognizing a different side. It is a gift that invites an
opening, perhaps having a Hubble telescopelike impact: I had no idea that there
was so much more to see, and with such clarity! I have had this experience while
reading works by feminist theorists. I have dared to see the world and my identity
through their critical analyses, from their experiences of male dominant culture,
from their mirror. Damn, what a sexist! I overlooked that one. Yet I am thankful for
their gift. And while it is true that I always fail to comprehend the sheer complexity
of what it is like to be a woman in a world that is based on male patriarchy, and the
multiple forms of male violence toward women, I can use that mirror to make a
difference. I can see me differently; I can see the operations of male hegemony
differently, in ways that implicate me. And as a gift, I treat it as such. I am humbled
by it. Whites must also be humbled by the gift of seeing more of themselves, more
of the complex manifestations of their whiteness, as seen through black
experiences of whiteness. As whites use the mirror to see and name whiteness, they
do not magically become black. Indeed, accepting the gift ought to involve the
recognition of important boundaries. There is no room for white territorialization or
white appropriation, features that are symptomatic of whiteness itself. To go it alone
implies that whites themselves can solve the problems of whiteness. It would be like
men getting together by themselves to solve the historical problem of male
hegemony and sexism without the critical voices of women. Within the context of
whiteness, after the gift has been given, one still remains white, ensconced within a
white social structure that not only continues to confer privileges but also militates
against one even knowing that [whiteness] is there to be shown.44 As stated
previously, Look, a white! presupposes a black counter-gaze. Moreover, it is this
black gaze that I encourage my white students to cultivate. Look, a white! is a
way of engaging the white world, calling it forth from a different perspective, a
perspective critically cultivated by black people and others of color. It is a
perspective gained through pain and suffering, through critical thought and daring
action. Seeing the world from the perspective of a flipped script (Look, a white!)
does not, however, reinscribe a form of race essentialism. In Fanons case, Look, a
Negro! was never intended as a gift; it functioned as a penalty. For the object so
identified, this phrase meant that there was a price to be paid. The public
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declaration was designed to fix the black body racially, to forewarn those whites
within earshot that a beastly threat was near. Look, a white! is not meant to seal
white bodies into that crushing objecthood45 that Fanon speaks of vis--vis the
white gaze. There is no desire to fix white people in the sense in which a chemical
solution is fixed by a dye.46 Instead, Look, a white! has the goal of complicating
white identity. It has the goal of fissuring white identity, not stabilizing it according
to racist myths and legends. To say, Look, a white! is an act of ostension, a form
of showing, but it is not limited to phenotype, though this necessarily shows up in
the act of ostension. Look, a white! points to what has been deemed invisible,
unremarkable, normative. As children, some of us liked counting anything at all,
chairs, passing cars, birds on a rooftop. And we counted them partly because we
just loved to count. But we also had this ability to notice so many things that adults
had relegated to the background. As adults, we count our money, we count the days
of the weekthe things that apparently really matter. Look, a white! tells us to
be attentive to what has become the background. As a powerful act of pointing,
Look, a white! brings whiteness to the foreground. Whiteness as a site of privilege
and power is named and identified. Whiteness as an embedded set of social
practices that render white people complicit in larger social practices of white
racism is nominated. It is about turning our bodies (and our attention) in the
direction of white discourse and white social performances that attempt to pass
themselves off as racially neutral, and it is about finding the courage to say, Look,
a white! As Christine E. Sleeter writes, While in an abstract sense white people
may not like the ideas of reproducing white racism, and in a personal sense, do not
see themselves as racist, in their talk and actions, they are.47 Look, a white! also
points to the historical white regulatory, antimiscegenation norms that produced
white bodies. Look, a white! points to the [white racist] discursive rules and
regulations that dictated the biological chain that produced these hands, these
eyes, and skin tone48 that have become privileged as beautiful, normative, white.
Look, a white! assiduously nominates white bodies within the context of a stream
of history dominated by white racism. Look, a white! unveils the ways in which
white bodies are linked to white discursive practices and racist power relations that
define those white bodies. Look, a white! signifies compulsory repetitions [that]
construct illusory origins of [whiteness] that function as regulatory regimes to keep
[whites] within a particular grid of intelligibility by governing and punishing
nonnormative behavior, interpellating [whites] back into the normative discourse
[and back into normative spaces]. 49 Look, a white! dares to mark those whites
who deem themselves ethically superior because they have a better grasp of
the operations of white racism than those other complacent whites. Look, a white!
marks those whites who see themselves as radically progressive now that they
are able to confess their racism publicly or because they publicly demonstrate
intellectual savvy in how they engage whiteness with sophistication. As intimated
previously, Look, a white! militates against its reduction to identifying singular,
individual, intentional acts of racism only. Instead, Look, a white! also identifies
what one is in a social framework or system of social categorizations.50 In this
way, Look, a white! does not open the door to facile claims about symmetrically
hurtful racial stereotypes, reverse discrimination, and the rhetoric of a so-called
color-blind, perpetrator perspective. Look, a white! marks such moves as sites of
obfuscation, revealing them as forms of mystificatory digression from the clearly
asymmetrical and enduring system of white power itself.51 Look, a white! flags
whiteness in the form of colonialism and imperialism, which function as forms of
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gluttony and fanaticism that would dare to consume the entire earth. Du Bois asks,
But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it? Then always,
somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is
the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!52 I want my white students to
shout, Look, a white! on a daily basis, to call whiteness out, publicly. I encourage
them to develop a form of double consciousness, one that enables them to see
the world differently and to see themselves differently through the experiences of
black people and people of color. On this score, Look, a white! becomes a shared
perspective, a shared dynamic naming process, buttressed and informed by the
insights regarding whiteness that black people and people of color have acquired.
The strategy is to have my white students see the white world through our eyes, a
perspective that will challenge whiteness, not deteriorate into white guilt or take
new forms of white pity to help the so-called helpless. Look, a white! is meant to
be unsafe, indeed, to be dangerous to whites themselves. By dangerous I mean
threatening to a white self and a white social system predicated on a vicious lie that
white is rightmorally, epistemologically, and otherwise.
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Ontological Whiteness
243/259
244/259
1NC
[AT: Yancy] The judges perspective will inevitably intervene into the affs
projectthat perpetuates racism and whiteness. White guilt and shame
only recreate the systems of domination that created racism in the first
place.
Sullivan 12 (Shannon, Penn State U, On the Need for a New Ethos of White
Antiracism, philoSOPHIA vol. 2 Issue 1, project MUSE)//LA
Today, however, guilt and especially shame, rather than fear, hatred, and greed, tend to be
the recommended affects for white people who care about racial justice . As
Alexis Shotwell (2010, 73) claims, A certain kind of feeling bad can be important for producing meaningful
solidarity across difference, particularly for individuals who benefit from racist social/political structures. Some of
those bad feelings might include guilt, anger, sadness, panic, shame, embarrassment, and other emotions not
easy to name (2010, 74; see also Bartky 1999, Macmullan 2009, Morgan 2008, and Sedgwick 2003). In my view,
however, affects
of white guilt and shame ultimately tend to be

counterproductive for antiracist movements. This is for two reasons. First,
in the case of white peoples contributions to racial justice movements, I
am skeptical that guilt and shame can sustain the ongoing, difficult
political work of changing institutional structures and practices that
perpetuate white privilege and domination. The personal , here in the form of affect
and ontology, is related to the political, and negative affects generally are
insufficient for motivating and sustaining meaningful efforts on the part of
dominant groups to make political change. Guilt and shame about white racism might lead,
and sometimes have led white people to do something to fight white racism. But I am doubtful that
guilt and shame can support much more than a brief gesture that
ultimately serves more to relieve white people of their racially affective
burdens than to further racial justice. White guilt and shame about white racism are not a
radical difference in kind from the negative affects that historically have constituted white people: white hatred and
fear of people of color. Guilt and shame represent merely a difference of degree of the negative affects with which
white people are racially constituted.4 Whether the negative affects in question are white guilt and shame or white
the issue of negative versus positive affects is not one of

personal feelings at the expense of political action. The question of which
affects constitute white people is intimately connected, not antithetical to
the issue of white peoples ability to help bring about institutional and
political change regarding race. In my view, positive affects, such as bestowing self-love, tend to
provide the affective soil in which the roots of effective white action for racial justice best grow. The second
reason that I think promoting white guilt and shame generally is
counterproductive to racial justice movements is that these affects tend to
turn white antiracist efforts into a narrow quest for white moral salvation.
Rather than the achievement of racial justice, relief from racial guilt and
shame seems to be what is at stake for many white people in their
dealings with people of color. This is an inappropriate and unfair burden for
hatred and fear, however,
white people to ask them to bear. As Thurgood Marshall once said, You know, sometimes I get awfully tired of
trying to save the white mans soul (quoted in Hobson 1999, 17). [End Page 25] White peoples souls may indeed
need saving, but to demand that black and other nonwhite people be the vehicle for white salvation merely
replicates the racial inequalities and abuses that led to their damnation. As feminist sociologist Sarita Srivastava
has documented in her research on white feminists in antiracist organizations, white women in particular tend to
become mired in self-examination and stuck in deliberations on morality and salvation. Not surprisingly, this
ethical self-transformation is still framed by the poles of good versus evil, newly interpreted as the fraudulent
nonracist versus the authentic antiracist (Srivastava 2005, 50). Ill return later to the point about the ethical
framing of good versus evil in the context of white antiracism. Here I want to point out that self-examination can
take many different forms, not all of which result in a mired or stuck self. The turn to oneself (self-examination)
that I wish to encourage here is a process through which a white person would reconstitute and transform herself,
not a self-examination undertaken to reassure her existing self by satisfying her desire for innocence (2005, 45).
245/259
Instead of being constituted primarily by white guilt and shame, white

people who want to work toward racial justice need to be fueled by a
bestowing love for or affirmation of themselves and other white people . I
deliberately say love themselves and other white people, rather than love other people, white and nonwhite
because Im concerned about cross-racial, universal love being used by white people as an evasion of the meaning
Let me be clear that I

am not arguing that white people and people of color should never love
each other. What I am arguing is that white people need to stop overly
focusing on people of color when they consider how to combat racial
injustice. More than anything, white people need to turn to themselves and clean
up their own house. I realize that this suggestion might seem to only
exacerbate white domination, white racism, and the specific problem of
the white quest for racial salvation. Arent white people already too
focused on themselves? Dont they need to think more about the plight and lives of people of color?
Wont loving or affirming themselves only increase the amount of white
hubris, white pride, white selfishness, and white supremacy that exists in
the world today? The answer to these questions is no, or at least, not necessarily. This
and effects of their whiteness and thus as an extension of their white privilege.
is not because white people have nothing in their racial past or present to feel ashamed about. They do. I am not
claiming that white people should never feel guilty or ashamed about their whiteness or their white history. What I
guilt and shame should not be the primary affects that

constitute a white persons relationship to her racial identity . While white people
am claiming is that
myopically have engaged in what Adrienne Rich (1979, 306) calls white solipsism, in which only white people and
the best corrective for white solipsism is

not necessarily for white people to do the opposite and selflessly focus
only on people of color. [End Page 26] White self-denial and self-hatred can be
the flip side of the same coin of white solipsism , after all. What is needed
instead is for white people to develop a different kind of relationship to
their whiteness. In my view, an increase of white selfishness is needed to help prevent white
their interests are recognized or seen as important,
involvement in antiracist movements from becoming a disguised form of condescending charity toward people of
the selflessness of those who would try to help

others first often is a covert form of self-hatred. Speaking to the weak, Zarathustra
color. As Nietzsches Zarathustra explains,
charges your love of your neighbors is your bad love of yourselves. You flee to your neighbor away from yourselves
and would like to make a virtue of it; but I see through your selflessness (Nietzsche 1969, 86). Nietzsches harsh
indictment of Christian forms of charity is echoed by W. E. B. Du Boiss scathing criticism of white philanthropists
who think of themselves as uplifting poor, ignoble people of color across the world. As Du Bois (1999, 1819)
bitingly charges, these worthy souls in whom consciousness of high descent brings burning desire to spread the
gift abroad receive a great deal of mental peace and moral satisfaction when humble black folk, voluble with
when black recipients of

white charity begin to challenge white authority and accept white gifts
sullenly rather than gratefully, then the spell is suddenly broken and the
true, even if unconscious purpose of white charity is revealed (1999, 19).
It has very little to do with genuinely increasing the flourishing of black
people, and everything to do with covertly using black people to generate
white peoples moral sense of goodness.
thanks, receive barrels of old clothes from lordly and generous whites. But
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Fanon Cards
247/259
248/259
Psychology
The consciousness of the past shapes the consciousness of the future,

therefore we must reject the consciousness of the past and shape a new
consciousness
Fanon 8 (Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and author, Black
Skin; White Masks, p. 64 Written in 1952, new edition published in 2008)//BG
There are times when the black man (person) is locked into his (their) body.
Now,
for a being who has acquired consciousness of himself and of his body, Who has attained to the dialectic of
subject and obj ect, the body is no longer a cause of the structure of consciousness,
it has become an object of consciousness. The Negro, however sincere, is the slave
of the past. None the less I am a man, and in this sense the Peloponnesian War is as much mine as the
invention of the compass. Face to face with the White man, the Negro has a past to legitimate, a Vengeance to
exact; face to face With the Negro, the contemporary White man (person) feels the need
to recall the times of cannibalism. A few years ago, the Lyon branch of the Union of Students From
Overseas France asked me to reply to an article that made jazz music literally an irruption of cannibalism into
the modern World. Knowing exactly what I Was doing, I rejected the premises on which the request was based,
and I suggested to the defender of European purity that he cure himself of a spasm that had nothing cultural in
it. Some men Want to H11 the World with their presence. A German philosopher described this
mechanism as the pathology of freedom. In the circumstances, I did not have to take up a
position on behalf of Negro music against white music, but rather to help my brother to rid himself of an
attitude in which there was nothing healthful. The problem considered here is one of time. Those Negroes
and White men (people)Will be disalienated Who refuse to let themselves be

sealed away in the materialized Tower of the Past. For many other Negroes, in
other Ways, disalienation will come into being through their refusal to accept the
present as dehnitive.
The black human carries the black mans burden, a burden to prove
themselves human
Fanon 8 (Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and
author, Black Skin; White Masks, p. 178-179 Written in 1952, new edition
published in 2008)//BG
The black man Wants to be like the White man . For the black man there is only one destiny.
And it is White. Long ago the black man admitted the unarguable superiority of the
White man, and all his efforts are aimed at achieving a White existence. Have I no
other purpose on earth, then, but to avenge the Negro of the seventeenth century? In this World, which is
already trying to disappear, do I have to pose the problem of black truth? Do I have to be limited to the
justification of a facial conformation? I as a man of color do not have the right to seek to know in what respect
my race is superior or inferior to another race. I as a man of color do not have the right to
hope that in the White man there will be a crystallization of guilt toward the
past of my race. I as a man of color do not have the right to seek Ways of stamping down the pride of my
former master. I have neither the right nor the duty to claim reparation for the domestication of my ancestors.
There is no Negro mission; there is no White burden. I find myself suddenly in a World
in which things do evil; a World in which I am summoned into battle; a World in

which it is always a question of annihilation or triumph. I find myself-I, a man-in a World
Where Words Wrap themselves in silence; in a World Where the other endlessly hardens himself. No, I do not
have the right to go and cry out my hatred at the White man. I do not have the
duty to murmur my gratitude to the White man. My life is caught in the lasso of
existence. My freedom turns me back on myself. No, I do not have the right to be a Negro. I
do not have the duty to be this or that .... If the White man challenges my humanity, I Will
impose my Whole Weight as a man on his life and show him that I am not that sho good
eatin that he persists in imagining.
249/259
Solving the problem of racism does not mean to rewrite history,

but rather to redraw the image of the black being
author, Black Skin; White Masks, p.179 Written in 1952, new edition
There is no White World, there is no White ethic, any more than there is a
White intelligence. There are in every part of the World men who search. I am not a prisoner of history. I
should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny. I should constantly remind myself that the real leap
consists in introducing invention into existence. In the World through which I travel, I am
endlessly creating myself. I am a part of Being to the degree that I go beyond

it. And, through a private problem, We see the outline of the problem of Action. Placed in this
World, in a situation, embarked, as Pascal would have it, am I going to gather Weapons? Am I going to ask the
contemporary White man to answer for the slave-ships of the seventeenth century? Am I going to ask the
contemporary white man to answer for the slave-ships of the seventeenth century? Am I going to try by every
possible means to cause Guilt to be born in minds? Moral anguish in the face of the massiveness of the Past? I
am a Negro, and tons of chains, storms of blows, rivers of expectoration flow down my shoulders.But I do not
have the right to allow myself to bog down. I do not have the right to allow the
slightest fragment to remain in my existence. I do not have the right to allow
myself to be mired in what the past has determined .I am not the slave of the
Slavery that dehumanized my ancestors.
The black being has no home because their civilization has been ruined
author, Black Skin; White Masks, p. 180 Written in 1952, new edition
To many colored intellectuals European culture has a quality of exteriority. What is more, in human relationships,
the Negro may feel himself a stranger to the Western World. Not Wanting
to live the part of a poor relative, of an adopted son, of a bastard child,
shall he feverishly seek to discover a Negro civilization? Let us be clearly
understood. I am convinced that it Would be of the greatest interest to be able to have contact with a Negro
literature or architecture of the third century before Christ. I should be very happy to know that a correspondence
had flourished between some Negro philosopher and Plato. But I can absolutely not see how this fact would change
anything in the lives of the eight-year-old children who labor in the cane fields of Martinique or Guadeloupe.
We must free ourselves from the chains of history

Fanon 8 (Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and author, Black
Skin; White Masks, p. 178-179 Written in 1952, new edition published in 2008)//BG
No attempt must be made to encase man (humans), for it is his (their) destiny
to be set free. The body of history does not determine a single one of my
actions. I am my own foundation. And it is by going beyond the historical, instrumental
hypothesis that I Will initiate the cycle of my freedom. The disaster of the man of color lies
in the fact that he was enslaved. The disaster and the inhumanity of the White man lie in
the fact that somewhere he has killed man. And even today they subsist, to
organize this dehumanization rationally. But I as a man of color, to the extent that it becomes
possible for me to exist absolutely, do not have the right to lock myself into a World of retroactive reparations.
I, the man of color, Want only this: That the tool never possess the man. That
the enslavement of man by man Cease forever. That is, of one by another. That it be possible
for me to discover and to love man, Wherever he may be.
250/259
Economics
We must free ourselves from the chains of history

author, Black Skin; White Masks, p. 178-179 Written in 1952, new edition
The major purpose of this manuscript has been to reconstruct the sociology of entrepreneurship by giving a
special consideration to the Afro-American experience. The sociology of entrepreneurship,
which is concerned with the relationship between ethnicity and business

activity, has almost completely ignored the Afro-American experience. Thus, the
sociohistorical examples which interact with theoretical ideas have stressed
the ethnic experience. Although this is certainly fine, it is quite ironic that most of the major ideas
developed in theories-such as middleman, ethnic enclave, and collectivism-were already prevalent in old books
and manuscripts written about the Afro-American experience. Thus, not only is the Afro-American
experience overlooked in the sociology of entrepreneurship, but scholarshipmostly by Afro-Americans-has also been overlooked. This, in itself; is an
interesting comment on American societv, race. and scholarship. This manuscript has
also argued that, although all Afro-Americans have had to face racism, prejudice, and discrimination, those of
today who can trace their roots back to entrepreneurship and the self-help experience possess a set of values
which are similar-if not identical-to middleman ethnic groups. Such an approach means that we
must reconstruct how we think about race and economics in America, and
about policy which relates to that experience.
Economics are rooted in race

Butler 5 (John Sibely Butler, Professor John Sibley Butler holds the Gale Chair in
Entrepreneurship and Small Business in the Graduate School of Business
(Department of Management). He is the Director of the Herb Kelleher Center for
Entrepreneurship and the Director of the Institute for Innovation, Creativity and
Capital (IC). His research is in the areas of organizational behavior and new venture
development. For the last eight summers Professor Butler has occupied the
Distinguished Visiting Professor position at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo
Japan, and this year holds the same status at Peking University in China,
Entrepreneurship and Self-Help among Black Americans A Reconsideration of Race
and Ethics, Volume II, p.328, Google Books)//BG
business activity, in the form of economic enclaves, was part of
the Afro-American experience as early as the 1700s. Mainly because of scholarship done
We have shown that
on Afro-American entrepreneurs bejinre the Civil War, we were able to show the development of economic
enclaves during that time period in such cities as Philadelphia and Cincinnati. ln Philadelphia, AfroAmericans were instrumental in the development of service enterprises. This was
also true in Cincinnati, which was actually one of the stronger cities for enterprise before the Civil War. In New
York City one ofthe best restaurants in the Wall Street area was owned by Afro-Americans. Even in the South,
the pattern of small business activity, for the generation of economic activity,
was very prevalent among free Afro-Americans before the Civil War. Their clients
were not limited to Afro-Americans, but included people of European descent, as well. One can say without a
doubt and based on available data, that they controlled service enterprises during this time period. As with
other middleman groups who have played this role throughout history, they
operated under racial hostility. This pattern of business activity, especially as regards clientele,
changed due to the immigration of other ethnic groups in large numbers to the northeastern part of the
United States and the influences of increased racial discrimination.
Economic engagement is based off of the institution of slavery,

entrenching racist ideals
251/259
Butler 5 (John Sibely Butler, Professor John Sibley Butler holds the Gale Chair in
Entrepreneurship and Small Business in the Graduate School of Business
(Department of Management). He is the Director of the Herb Kelleher Center for
Entrepreneurship and the Director of the Institute for Innovation, Creativity and
Capital (IC). His research is in the areas of organizational behavior and new venture
development. For the last eight summers Professor Butler has occupied the
Distinguished Visiting Professor position at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo
Japan, and this year holds the same status at Peking University in China,
Entrepreneurship and Self-Help among Black Americans A Reconsideration of Race
and Ethics, Volume II, p.328, Google Books)//BG
Also discussed was the rich and interesting data on Afro-America
entrepreneurship under the institution of slavery. Even while in bondage,
some Afro-Americans showed a propensity to enter enterprise in order to
generate income. Sometimes this income was used for the purchase of
their loved ones' freedom from slave masters, while at other times it was
used to enhance their own plantations. In addition, Afro-Americans were quite active in
inventing new products which were-and still are-important in this country. This activity in itself was a
significant entrepreneurial one, representing adjustment under severe
conditions of racism and discrimination. After the Civil War , Afro-Americans were
faced with the problem of adjusting to hostility in both the North and the South. In the South, those who had fought
so strongly against America during the Civil War developed laws to exclude Afro-Americans from full participation in
The systematic conscious

program of Jim Crow segregation was designed to re-create the analog of
slavery.
that society, although the latter clearly fought on the side of the Union.
252/259
Debate Key
The debate space is key to stopping racism- it begins with ending

intellectual alienation
author, Black Skin; White Masks, p. 61 Written in 1952, new edition
In this connection, I should like to say something that I have found in many other Writers: Intellectual
alienation is a creation of middle-class society . What I call middle-class society
is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding
all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middleclass a closed society in
which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men (people) are corrupt. And I think that a
man (person) who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a
revolutionary.
The debate space has failed in breaking down the structures of race by
excluding discussion-now is the time for change to occur
Brinkley 12 (Dr. Shanara Reed-Brinkley, An Assistant Professor in the Department
of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh, where she also serves as the
Director of Debate for the William Pitt Debating Union. She is a national award
winner for her published work on critical theory, black feminist theory, gender, black
culture and history, and hip hop culture and theory, Resistance and Debate, An
Open Letter to Sarah Spring
http://resistanceanddebate.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/an-open-letter-to-sarahspring/)//BG
Lack of community discussion is neither random nor power-neutral. We have
tried to have discussions. These discussions have been regularly derailedin
wrong forum arguments, in the demand for evidence, in the unfair burdens
placed on the aggrieved as a pre-requisite for engagement. Read the last ten years of
these discussions on edebate archives: Ede Warner on edebate and move forward to Rashad Evans diversity
discussion from 2010 to Deven Cooper to Amber Kelsies discussion on CEDA Forums and the NDT CEDA
Traditions page. We have been talking for over a decade, we have been reaching out for years, we have been
listening to the liberal, moderate refrain of we agree with your goals but not with your method. We will no
longer wait for the community to respond, to relinquish privilege, to engage in

authentic discussion, since largely the community seems incapable of
producing a consensus for responding to what we all agree is blatant
structural inequity. It seems that meta-debates/discussions about debate are generally met with denial,
hostility andmore oftensilence. This silence is in fact a focused silence. It is not people in the Resistance
Facebook group that comprise these silent figuresit is (as has been described) the old boys club. We
have been quite vocaland we believe that it is this very vocalness (and the
development of a diversity of tactics in response to status quo stalling tactics)
that has provoked response when response was given. Sarah Springs cedadebate post is
a case in point. The decision to change our speaker point scale is not in order to produce a judging doomsday
apparatus (this kind of apocalyptic rhetoric might more aptly be applied to the
current racist/sexist/classist state of affairs in this community), though we must admit
that we are flattered that our efforts have affected the community enough to result in such a hyberbolic
labeling. It indicates that civil disobedience is still an effective tactic; the debate community should
take it as an indication that our calls for change are serious. We will continue to
innovate and collaborate on tactics of resistance. This crisis in debate has no end in sight. The rationale for
changing the point scale was not simply to reward people for preferring the unpreferred critic. We recognize
that MPJ produces effects, and we hoped that changing our point scale was a small but significant tactic that
was available to the disenfranchised in this community. MPJ: A) Limits judging opportunities for blacks, browns,
and womyn B) Limits opportunities for debaters who are (and are not) black, brown, and womyn to be judged
253/259
by such critics. The effect is: A) That the evaluations of these categorically marginalized critics are deemed
not valuable or costly. B) That the debate efforts of categorically marginalized debaters are deemed not
valuable. We believe that debaters deserve to have black, brown, and womyn critics (in general debaters should
be judged by multiply situated critics across varying social locations). We think the community deserves to know
what we have to say. Therefore, it seemed appropriate in this context to play the discriminative logics at work
against themselves by demonstrating just what value or cost our evaluations could have. We worked with
the limited options available to us. It seems this system works as long as it is comfortable
for the majority or the major powerbrokers. The community pays lip service to,
or simply ignores, the concerns of those for whom this system is not working.
Now it is everyones concern. To be clear: we did not alter our point scale because we believe we are not
preferred for unjust reasons (we know we are not preferred for unjust reasons), but because the system
produces the effect of magnifying and enforcing on a social scale the delegitimation of blacks, browns, and
womyn. We think this is a question of ethics and a question of pedagogy; it is something that stunts the growth
of all members of this community regardless of identity or social positioning.
There is a crisis in the community because of the self-segregation-only

discussions can solve
Stuart Hall said crisis
occur when the social formation can no longer be reproduced

on the basis of the pre-existing system of social relation. This community is in
crisis because the reality of debate has changed. The backlash we have faced in response
to this crisis (breaking up with the K, unethical engagements with arguments, resentment, refusing to listen to
certain arguments, and even refusing to listen to particular teams, etc.) is reactionary conservativism.
Blacks, browns, and womyn face micro-aggressions in this activity constantly.

Sometimes it is outright hostility. We are always already uncomfortable in this space that many so
easily call a community. We are always already aware that this community would prefer an empty celebration of
diversity without the critical re-interrogation of the activity that our very presence demands. In these kinds
of hostile environments, self-segregation is a self-protective measure. We

produce safe-spaces where we may gather, discuss, regroup, lift spirits and
figure out how to resist while maintaining sanity. We see nothing wrong with this. In fact,
any review of the history of social movements and activism would demonstrate the necessity of building spaces
for the disenfranchised to speak and plan resistance to a powerful majority. The Resistance Facebook group is
such a forum. To even describe the gathering of people in the group as a clique demonstrates the very
invisibility and lack of concern that people of color face in this community. Our experiences of discomfort and
horror stories of blatant hostility are invisible in this framing. If our experiences were real to the majority, rather
than just what some students are using to win debate rounds, then the necessity for the Resistance Facebook
group would be clear. The group is a forum for ally building. Often it is a rare place where the K v K or
Performance v Performance debate can be considered in its practical and ethical implications. It is precisely the
kind of place for open discussion that Sarah Spring calls forthe kind of place where discussion that needs to
take place often does. But those discussions also do not stop there. Discussions that begin in the
group are often taken to wider groups within the debate community to broaden
the discussion and yet they are often derailed and then we must retreat and
regroup, review our strategies, discuss potential options, and seek advice. Note
that the example of the active and lively debate about the hotel architecture at the Clay mentioned in Sarahs
post, was hashed out for months on the resistance page before many of us began to speak publicly about the
issue. It was through that vibrant debate in the Resistance Facebook group that produced the very conditions for
the open discussion you mention. The Resistance Facebook page is a response to the
increasing ghettoization of some bodies and some discursive forms in debate

not the other way around. The fact that the existence of the group was what
was critiqued rather than the necessity of the group is deeply troubling to us.
254/259
It is the job of the whites to solve for the social segregation

It is unclear what the bright line is between group discussions or backchannels or facebook groups and a
discussion group (articulated as closed backroom discussion which is by the way, homophobic) which
produces disenfranchized discussion As far as we can tell, Sarah Spring is upset that she has not been able to
see what mischief the slaves are hatching in the slave quarters on the plantation. The Resistance Facebook
group has a wide range of members. It includes current debaters, former debaters, coaches, judges, high school
students, academics (with no relationship to debate), radical community activists. All members of the group are
granted administrative access once they are admitted, so people request admission through the relationships
they have cultivated with already existing members. If someone has not been invited to the group, it is because
they lack authentic relationships with any of the membersperhaps the perceived secrecy of the group could be
better understood as a symptom of the lack of social relations you have with a wide group of differently situated
people. The argument here is likened to the question, why are all the black kids
sitting together in the cafeteria?an argument meant to imply that it is the

burden of the black students to make friends with the whites, and that the
whites cannot be faulted for choosing to maintain distance. There are a number of
issues that marginalized members of the community simply do not know about. For example, many of us did
not discover the existence of Sarahs post until the last round of the evening, although we have since learned
that people have been talking about it (not to us) throughout the day. If you are excluding yourself
from usvia MPJ, on the quad, in the hallway, at the hotelthen you should hold yourself
accountable, not us. We are not secret. We are not hiding. We are just
invisible to you P.S. It is no longer called the Dixie Classic.
Tag
Johnson & Henerson 5
(E. Patrick Johnson, E. Patrick Johnson is the Carlos Montezuma Professor

of Performance Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University. A scholar/artist, Johnson
performs nationally and internationally and has published widely in the areas of race, gender, sexuality and
performance, Mae G. Henderson, professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is
the author of numerous articles on pedagogy, diasporic writing and performance, cultural studies and cultural
criticism, as well as black feminist criticism and theory, including the widely anthologized essay, "Speaking In
Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition." She is editor of Black Queer
Studies: A Critical Anthology (2005), Borders, Boundaries and Frames (1995), and co-editor (with John
Blassingame) of the five-volume Antislavery Newspapers and Periodicals: An Annotated Index of Letters, 18171871 (1980). Henderson has also published the Critical Foreword and Notes to the Modern Library edition of
Nella Larsen's Passing (2002).Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, 2005, p.4)//BG
Given the status of women (and class not lagging too far behind) within black studies, it is not surprising that
sexuality, and especially homosexuality, became not only a repressed site of study within the Held, but also one
with which the discourse was paradoxically preoccupied, if only to deny and disavow its place in the discursive
sphere of black studies. On the one hand, the category of (homo)sexuality, like those of gender and class,
remained necessarily subordinated to that of race in the discourse of black

studies, due principally to an identitarian politics aimed at forging a unified
front under racialized blackness. On the other hand, the privileging of a racialist discourse demanded the deployment of a sexist and homophobic rhetoric in order
to mark, by contrast, the priority of race. While black (heterosexual) womens
intellectual and community work were marginalized, if not erased,
homosexuality was effectively theorized as a White disease that had infected the black community? In fact, sexuality as an object of discourse
circulated mainly by way of defensive disavowals of sexual deviance, fre-quently
framed by outspoken heterosexual black male intellectuals theoriz-ing the black male phallus in relation to
255/259
the black (w)hole and other priapic riffs sounding the legendary potency of the heterosexual black man or,
alternatively, bewailing his historical emasculation at the hands of over-bearing and domineering black
women.4 It would be some time, as Audre Lorde discovered in the bars of New York during her sexual
awakening, before black studies would come to realize that [its] place was the very house of difference rather
than the security of any one particular difference.
Tag
Johnson & Henerson 5
(E. Patrick Johnson, E. Patrick Johnson is the Carlos Montezuma Professor

of Performance Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University. A scholar/artist, Johnson
performs nationally and internationally and has published widely in the areas of race, gender, sexuality and
performance, Mae G. Henderson, professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is
the author of numerous articles on pedagogy, diasporic writing and performance, cultural studies and cultural
criticism, as well as black feminist criticism and theory, including the widely anthologized essay, "Speaking In
Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition." She is editor of Black Queer
Studies: A Critical Anthology (2005), Borders, Boundaries and Frames (1995), and co-editor (with John
Blassingame) of the five-volume Antislavery Newspapers and Periodicals: An Annotated Index of Letters, 18171871 (1980). Henderson has also published the Critical Foreword and Notes to the Modern Library edition of
Nella Larsen's Passing (2002).Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, 2005, p.4)//BG
Despite its theoretical and political shortcomings, queer studies, like black studies, disrupts
dominant and hegemonic discourses by consistently destabilizing fixed notions

of identity by deconstructing binaries such as heterosexual/homosexual, gay/
lesbian, and masculine/ feminine as well as the concept of heteronormativity in
general. Given its currency in the academic marketplace, then, queer studies has the potential to transform
how We theorize sexuality in conjunction with other identity formations? Yet, as some theorists have noted ,
the deconstruction of binaries and the explicit unmarking of difference (e.g.,
gender, race, class, region, able-bodiedness, etc.) have serious implications for
those for whom these other differences matter.9 Lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and
transgendered people of color who are committed to the demise of oppression
in its various forms, cannot afford to theorize their lives based on singlevariable politics. As many of the essays in this volume demonstrate, to ignore the
multiple subjectivities of the minoritarian subject within and without political movements
and theo-retical paradigms is not only theoretically and politically naive, but also
potentially dangerous. In the context of an expansive American imperialism in which the
separation of church and state (if they ever really were separate) remains so only by the
most tenuous membrane and in which a sitting president homophobically refers to as
sinners certain U.S. citizens seeking the protection of marriage, the so-called axis of evil
is likely to cut across every identity category that is not marked White, Anglo-Saxon,
Protestant, heterosexual, American, and male.
Tag
256/259
FW Cards
Chase & Dowd 12
(Megan M. Chase, Doctoral student at the Center for Urban Education, Rossier
School of Education, University of Southern California, Los Angeles Alicia C. Dowd, associate professor of education
at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education and co-director of the Center for Urban
Education. Dr. Dowd's research focuses on political-economic issues of public college finance equity, organizational
effectiveness, and accountability and the factors affecting student attainment in higher education, Educational
Policy Transfer Equity for "Minoritized" Students: A Critical Policy Analysis of Seven States, p.5, 7 December 2012,
http://rossier.usc.edu/faculty/Educational%20Policy-2012-Chase-0895904812468227.pdf)//BG
Traditional methods of policy analysis, referred to as rational scientyic approaches, treat
policy creation as a logical step-by- step process in which facts are analyzed to
arrive at the best policy solution (Bacchi, 1999). Proponents of this approach assume that policy
creation and analysis are value-neutral processes (Allan, Iverson, & Roper-Huilman, 2010; Martinez-Aleman,
2010). Until the mid- 1980s, the most influential approach for understanding the policy process was the stages
heuristic or textbook approach (J. Anderson, 1975; Nakamura, 1987). This approach divided the policy
process into a series of stages-typically agenda setting, policy for-mulation and legitimation, implementation,
and evaluation (Sabatier, 2007, p. 6). Researchers working from this perspective focused on the technical
properties of the policy or the extent to which a policy is delivered to the targeted population in the mamier
intended by policy designers (ODom1ell, 2008; Plunty, 1985). This approach allowed for the examination
of distinct decision-making moments (Mulholland & Shakespeare, 2005), but often neglected the
policys social or cultural context (Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1988). More specifically,
traditional policy approaches tended to view the actor from the political
economy perspective, which assumed the actors behavior was guided by
weighing costs and benefits and using information in a rational way to
maximize material self-interest (Ostrom, 1999). Such an actor used information as a
tool to ensure beneficial economic outcomes tor the self Rarely had weight
been given to the actors values, beliefs, resources, information, information
processing capabilities, or their external environment (Ostrom, 1999). Although a
thorough discussion is beyond the scope of this article; in the past 30 years, a number of new theoretical
frameworks of the policy process have either been developed or modified to address the criticisms of the
textbook approach to policy research (Baumgartner & Jones, 1993; Kingdon, 1984; Ostrom; 1999; Sabatier &
Jenkins-Smith; 1988). These frameworks have since moved away from the more functionalist
views; adding more complexity to how actors create and implement policy. For
example multiple streams theory (Kingdon, 1984), views policy as being unpredictable and complicated to
manage, and suggests that policy streams come together during windows of opportunity. The punctuated
equilibrium theory (Baumgaltner & Jones, 1993) attempted to explain how policy domains are characterized by
long periods of stability and incremental change but still experience short periods of great change. Finally, the
advocacy coalition framework (Sabatier &. Jenkins-Smith, 1988) focuses on the interaction of advocacy
coalitionseach consisting of actors from a variety of institutions who share a set of policy beliefs-within a policy
subsystem. These, along with other contem-porary policy frameworks, still rely on several rationalist
undertones, fail to capture the full complexity of policy environments, and do not
account for all the components that influence policy creation and
implementation over time. More specifically, these frameworks have been critiqued
for failing to account for the oppression and often marginalization of racialized
populations written into policies (Marshall, 1997; Spillane, Reiser, & Reimer, 2002; Stein,
2004).The more traditional approaches assume that race and ethnicity are not
rele-vant in policy, and thus camouflage the differential impact of educational
policy on minoritized and White students (Iverson, 2007; Parker, 2003; Rivas, Prez, Alvarez, &
Solorzano, 2007; Young, 1999).
Tag
Chase & Dowd 12
(Megan M. Chase, Doctoral student at the Center for Urban Education, Rossier
School of Education, University of Southern California, Los Angeles Alicia C. Dowd, associate professor of education
at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education and co-director of the Center for Urban
Education. Dr. Dowd's research focuses on political-economic issues of public college finance equity, organizational
257/259
effectiveness, and accountability and the factors affecting student attainment in higher education, Educational
Policy Transfer Equity for "Minoritized" Students: A Critical Policy Analysis of Seven States, p.6, 7 December 2012,
http://rossier.usc.edu/faculty/Educational%20Policy-2012-Chase-0895904812468227.pdf)//BG
critical policy analysis (CPA), have been advanced to

acknowledge policy as a political and value-laden process (Allan et al., 2010, p. 22).
Alternative models, such as
The critical approach to educational policy emerged in the 1980s as a critique of social reproduction and
discourse and detines policy as the practice of power (Levinson, Sutton, & Winstead, 2012). Critical
researchers tend to view the process of knowledge generation as subjective,

where truth is believed to be socially constructed, usually in a manner that
supports certain racial, classes, and gender groups ( Crotty, 2003; Dumas &Anyon,
2006). This policy approach has been used to study multiple issues pertaining
to education, such as social reproduction (Bowles & Gintis, 1976), welfare and other reform (Shaw,
2004), university diversity policy (Iverson, 2007), school finance (Aleman, 2007), boys education policy
(Weaver-Hightower, 2008), community college mission statements (Ayers, 2005), tracking (Oakes, 1985),
and cultural assumptions within the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (Stein, 2004).
Critical policy analysts work to illuminate the ways in which power operates through policy by drawing attention to hidden assumptions or policy
silences and unintended consequences of policy practices (Allan et al., 2010, p.
24). Pusser and Marginson (2012) argue that, to date, scholars have gener-ally failed to understand
postsecondary higher education due to a lack of attention to theories that address the nature and sources
of power (p. 2). Rather than focusing policy analysis on how to create more
effective policies, applying a critical perspective requires analysts to assess

policy by asking questions such as Who benefits?, Who loses?, and How
do low-income and minoritized students fare as a result of the policy? (Bacchi,
1999; Marshall, 1997). Young (i 1999) demonstrates the limitations of the traditional rationalist approach to
policy analysis in her bi-theoretical study ofthe failure of a parental involvement policy . The rationalist
approach did not reveal, as her critical analysis, how the inequitable distribution of
power and knowl-edge of parents at the school was implicated in the policys
failure.
Critical policy analysis exposes the

Chase & Dowd 12 (Megan M. Chase, Doctoral student at the Center for Urban
Education, Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California,
Los Angeles Alicia C. Dowd, associate professor of education at the University of
Southern California's Rossier School of Education and co-director of the Center for
Urban Education. Dr. Dowd's research focuses on political-economic issues of public
college finance equity, organizational effectiveness, and accountability and the
factors affecting student attainment in higher education, Educational Policy
Transfer Equity for "Minoritized" Students: A Critical Policy Analysis of Seven
States, 7 December 2012, p.7, http://rossier.usc.edu/faculty/Educational%20Policy2012-Chase-0895904812468227.pdf)//BG
using CPA is especially important in a
highly stratified society like the United States because otherwise the impact of
status differentials such as race, class, and gender remain hidden. For scholars
The work of Young (1999) and others demonstrates how
concerned with exposing and ameliorating the ways in that educational policy and practice subordinate racial
and ethnic minority groups, CPA provides a lens to formulate research questions, interpret data, and propose
changes to policies, practices, and institutions (Heck, 2004) . A critical analysis is useful because
it provides a lens that helps us see the ways in that everyday policies and
practices, such as those having to do with transfer, perpetuate racial and
gender inequity (Harper, Patton, & Wooden, 2009). For example, Iverson (2007) conducted a study that
exam-ined how university diversity policies shape the reality of students of color on campus. She found that the
dominant discourses in diversity plans construct students of color as outsiders,

concluding that such policies serve to (re)pro-duce the subordination of
258/259
students of color. In addition, Shaw (2004) ana-lyzed welfare reform legislation from a critical policy
perspective, where she found that welfare policy perpetuates social stratification by
creating onerous barriers to education for women on welfare. These examples
highlight how utilizing a critical policy framework can aid researchers in
understanding how well-intentioned policy can potentially harm marginalized
populations.
Only a critical approach to policy making can solve for racial equality
States, p. 7 December 2012, http://rossier.usc.edu/faculty/Educational%20Policy2012-Chase-0895904812468227.pdf)//BG
A critical approach to policy analysis emphasizes the need to counter the
policies, structures, practices, and allocation of resources that result in or
reinforce racial inequity (Chesler & Crowfoot, 2000). As Chesler and Crowfoot (2000) argue our
history of racial injustice is maintained through contemporary policies and practices, and is reflected in the
dramatic dif-ferentials . . _ in opportunity and other outcomes that still exist between people of color and White
persons (ip. 436). From this view, transfer poli-cies and practices can be discriminatory
and function as a form of institutionalized racism, where institutionalized

racism is defined as racism that occurs in structures and operations at the
organizational level (Jones, 2000). This notion emphasizes how large-scale
institutional structures and policies operate to pass on and reinforce historic
patterns of privilege and disadvantage, such as deciding which groups gain access to the
baccalaureate and which do not (Chesler & Crowfoot, 2000, p. 441). However, it is important to note that
institutionalized racism in the form of policy is most often uninten-tional. Referred to as indirect
institutionalized discrimination, this form of racism occurs with no prejudice or

intent to harm, despite its negative and differential impacts on minoritized
populations (Chesler & Crowfoot, 2000). Chesler and Crowfoot (2000) note that,organizational
procedures can have discriminatory impact even if individual actors are
unaware of such impacts or are non-discriminatory in their personal beliefs,
and even if their behavior appears to be a fair-minded application of raceneutral or color-blind rules (p. 442).
Policy making omits the fact that it is institutionalized and racist

States, 7 December 2012, p.8 http://rossier.usc.edu/faculty/Educational%20Policy2012-Chase-0895904812468227.pdf)//BG
259/259
Racism in organizational policy can also include acts of omission,
such as failing to
recruit minority students or hiring policies that exclude scholars of color. As an example, transfer policies can be
enacted without conscious discriminatory intent, yet can produce results with inequitable and negative effects
on students of color. Demonstrating how to critically evaluate policies in terms of
their potential for discriminatory impact provides the basis for redesigning
policies in a more equitable manner. In this study, CPA includes the examination of state transfer
policies with the goal of understanding if such policies are a form of institutionalized rac-ism. CPA was chosen as
the preferred method of analysis because, as other authors have indicated, written texts contribute
to the construction of social reality; thus, by analyzing texts (in the case of this study,
written policies), we were able to examine what is missing from enacted policy and
who is privileged as a result (Allan et al., 2010; Fairclough, 1989). In addition, CPA is used to
identify indirect forms of institutional discrimination. Knowing that policies do

not fully drive behaviors, we recognize problem identification is a necessary
but insufficient step toward reducing structural barriers to transfer for
minoritized students.

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there is potential for resistance. My

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The call to arrest and charge George Zimmerman brought our

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the prosecutors agency is assembled where black matter no

In terms of drug crimes, according to a comprehensive report by

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A group of black men were brought on charges of

the Supreme Court ruled in favor of

Blackness is social death and unimaginable exclusion

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we understand that death or killing to be prefigured by mass or

The paradox or impossibility is that if blackness is both sin and sign of

from the perspective of the

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2NC Silence Link

the notion of desire has to do with drive. 'What we call

What is desire? If desire does not begin from lack, in other

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writes, 'life strives to preserve and enhance itself and does so by

But whatever you make of those topline numbers, one

thing seems certain: an abortion ban would disproportionately affect

Race File 7wS BFJR 2013

to a 12 percent decrease in abortion rates, the researchers wrote. The challenges

race serves as a crude proxy for socio-economic

Where they agree is that the

official abortion figures so that to speak of the "gains" of a ban would be

It'd also create new

the mockery it'd

make of public statistics; and their inherent racial and socio-economic

Race File 7wS BFJR 2013

We have hints, suggestions, indications, if you will, of racial

There is plenty of research showing that actual discrimination remains

wellknown practice of stop-and-frisk policing in New York. Absent a deep-rooted culture of

is unclear whether the tactic has any meaningful impact on

crime, but it is screamingly plain that it adds to racial tension and

distorting American life.

The late Stanford University historian George Fredrickson wrote in Racism: A

"The legacy of past racism directed at blacks in the United

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the simple act of

Not allowing it to stop forces a move

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Race File 7wS BFJR 2013

Project Team Link

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a mental association between Blacks and

In Study 5, we demonstrated that, even

Blacks are displayed as apes

Senator Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, said in a statement:

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To run such a violent,

What does shooting a chimpanzee

whether he did this consciously or not, was drawing upon a very

Race K's - Michigan7 2013

Race K's - Michigan7 2013