1nc vs Chris and Julius K Af

Framework
a) Our interpretation is that topical affirmatives must
provide a normative answer to the question of the
resolution and instrumentally defend it the role of the
ballot is to vote on a yes/no question of whether the af is
a topical action
1) Resolved denotes a proposal to be enacted by law
Words and Phrases 64 Permanent Edition
Definition of the word resolve, given by Webster is to express an
opinion or determination by resolution or vote; as it was resolved
by the legislature; It is of similar force to the word enact, which
is defined by Bouvier as meaning to establish by law.

2) USFG is the federal government of the USA, based in

DC
Dictionary of Government and Politics 98 (Ed. P.H. Collin, p. 292)
United States of America (USA) [ju:naitid steits av emerike] noun
independent country, a federation of states (originally thirteen, now fifty in
North America; the United States Code = book containing all the permanent
laws of the USA, arranged in sections according to subject and revised from
time to time COMMENT: the federal government (based in Washington D.C.) is
formed of a legislature (the Congress) with two chambers (the Senate and
House of Representatives), an executive (the President) and a judiciary (the
Supreme Court). Each of the fifty states making up the USA has its own
legislature and executive (the Governor) as well as its own legal system and
constitution

3) should reflects an immediate normative mandate, not

personal speculation
Summers 94 (Justice Oklahoma Supreme Court, Kelsey v. Dollarsaver
Food Warehouse of Durant, 1994 OK 123, 11-8,
http://www.oscn.net/applications/oscn/DeliverDocument.asp?
CiteID=20287#marker3fn13)
"Should" not only is used as a "present indicative" synonymous
with ought but also is the past tense of "shall" with various shades
of meaning not always easy to analyze. See 57 C.J. Shall 9, Judgments 121 (1932).
13

O. JESPERSEN, GROWTH AND STRUCTURE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (1984); St. Louis & S.F.R. Co. v.
Brown, 45 Okl. 143, 144 P. 1075, 1080-81 (1914). For a more detailed explanation, see the Partridge
quotation infra note 15.

Certain contexts mandate a construction of the term

"should" as more than merely indicating preference or desirability.

Brown, supra at 1080-81 (jury instructions stating that jurors "should" reduce the
amount of damages in proportion to the amount of contributory negligence of

was held to imply an obligation and to be more than

advisory); Carrigan v. California Horse Racing Board, 60 Wash. App. 79, 802 P.2d 813 (1990) (one of
the plaintiff

the Rules of Appellate Procedure requiring that a party "should devote a section of the brief to the request
for the fee or expenses" was interpreted to mean that a party is under an obligation to include the

("should" would mean

the same as "shall" or "must" when used in an instruction to the jury which tells the triers they
"should disregard false testimony"). 14 In praesenti means literally "at the present
time." BLACK'S LAW DICTIONARY 792 (6th Ed. 1990). In legal parlance the phrase denotes
that which in law is presently or immediately effective , as opposed to
requested segment); State v. Rack, 318 S.W.2d 211, 215 (Mo. 1958)

something that will or would become efective in the future

[in futurol]. See

Van Wyck v. Knevals, 106 U.S. 360, 365, 1 S.Ct. 336, 337, 27 L.Ed. 201 (1882).

4) Domestic surveillance is intelligence gathering that

means collecting non-public information concerning U.S.
persons for intelligence purposes.
Small, 8 Operations Analyst at the United States Air Force (Matthew, His
Eyes are Watching You: Domestic Surveillance, Civil Liberties and Executive
Power during Times of National Crisis
http://cspc.nonprofitsoapbox.com/storage/documents/Fellows2008/Small.pdf
Before one can make any

sort of

assessment of domestic surveillance

policies, it is first necessary to narrow the scope of the term

domestic surveillance . Domestic surveillance is a subset of
intelligence gathering. Intelligence, as it is to be understood in this context, is information that meets
the stated or understood needs of policy makers and has been collected, processed and narrowed to meet those needs

domestic surveillance is a means to an end; the

end being intelligence. The intelligence community best understands
domestic surveillance as the acquisition of nonpublic information
concerning United States persons (Executive Order 12333 (3.4) (i)). With this definition
domestic surveillance remains an overly broad concept. This papers analysis, in terms
(Lowenthal 2006, 2). In essence,

of President Bushs policies, focuses on electronic surveillance; specifically, wiretapping phone lines and obtaining caller

the USA Patriot Act of 2001 defines electronic

surveillance as: [T]he acquisition by an electronic, mechanical, or other surveillance device of the
contents of any wire or radio communication sent by or intended to be received by a
particular, known United States person who is in the United States, if the contents are acquired
by intentionally targeting that United States person, under circumstances in which a person
has a reasonable expectation of privacy and a warrant would be
required for law enforcement purposes; Adhering to the above definition
allows for a focused analysis of one part of President Bushs domestic
surveillance policy as its implementation relates to the executives ability to abridge certain civil liberties.
information from phone companies. Section f of

However, since electronic surveillance did not become an issue of public concern until the 1920s, there would seem to be
a problem with the proposed analysis.

b) Violation the affirmative does not advocate curtailing

the United States federal governments domestic
surveillance
c) Vote neg
Three IMPACTS:
FIRST bounded discussion They explode the number of
potential afs removing the incentive for the neg to
conduct in-depth pre-round research which is debates
primary benefit. Externally constrained discussions force
creativity, while preserving avenues for non-traditional
forms of evidence.
SECOND competitive equity the resolution is
purposefully designed to be imperfect. They stack the
deck by reducing the affirmative burden to defending
their claim of choice. This is a prior question, because all
substantive questions are influenced by their unilateral
decision to determine negative ground.
THIRD - Institutional competence:
A) Absent state reforms, surveillance will create a
chilling efect on society wrecks dissent and social
change
Schneier, 15, fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at
Harvard Law School, a program fellow at the New America Foundation's Open
Technology Institute, a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
an Advisory Board Member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and
the Chief Technology Officer at Resilient Systems, Inc (Bruce, Data and
Goliath: the Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your
World, Ch. 7)//AK
Surveillance has a potentially enormous chilling efect on society. US
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor recognized this in her
concurring opinion in a 2012 case about the FBIs installing a GPS tracker
in someones car. Her comments were much broader: Awareness that the
Government may be watching chills associational and expressive
freedoms. And the Governments unrestrained power to assemble
data that reveal private aspects of identity is susceptible to abus e.
The net result is that GPS monitoringby making available at a relatively low cost such a
substantial quantity of intimate information about any person whom the Government, in its unfettered
discretion, chooses to trackmay

alter the relationship between citizen and

government in a way that is inimical to democratic society . Columbia
University law professor Eben Moglen wrote that omnipresent invasive listening creates fear. And that

fear is the enemy of reasoned, ordered liberty. Surveillance is a

tactic of intimidation. In the US, we already see the beginnings of this

chilling efect. According to a Human Rights Watch report, journalists covering

stories on the intelligence community, national security, and law
enforcement have been significantly hampered by government
surveillance. Sources are less likely to contact them, and they themselves are worried about being
prosecuted. Human Rights Watch concludes that stories in the national interest that need to be reported
dont get reported, and that the public is less informed as a result. Thats the chilling effect right there.
Lawyers working on cases where there is some intelligence interestforeign government clients, drugs,
terrorismare also affected. Like journalists, they worry that their conversations are monitored and that

Post-9/11
surveillance has caused writers to self-censor. They avoid writing about and
discussions with their clients will find their way into the prosecutions hands.

researching certain subjects; theyre careful about communicating with sources, colleagues, or friends
abroad. A Pew Research Center study conducted just after the first Snowden articles were published found

nearly half of
Americans have changed what they research, talk about, and write
about because of NSA surveillance. Surveillance has chilled Internet
use by Muslim Americans, and by groups like environmentalists,
gun-rights activists, drug policy advocates, and human rights
workers. After the Snowden revelations of 2013, people across the world were less likely to search
that people didnt want to talk about the NSA online. A broader Harris poll found that

personally sensitive terms on Google. A 2014 report from the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights
noted, Even

the mere possibility of communications information being

captured creates an interference with privacy, with a potential
chilling efect on rights, including those to free expression and association. This isnt
paranoia. In 2012, French president Nicolas Sarkozy said in a campaign speech, Anyone who
regularly consults internet sites which promote terror or hatred or violence will be sentenced to prison.
This fear of scrutiny isnt just about the present; its about the past as well. Politicians already live in a
world where the opposition follows them around constantly with cameras, hoping to record something that
can be taken out of context. Everything theyve said and done in the past is pored through and judged in
the present, with an exactitude far greater than was imaginable only a few years ago. Imagine this being
normal for every job applicant. Of course, surveillance doesnt affect everyone equally. Some of us are
unconcerned about government surveillance, and therefore not affected at all. Others of us, especially

those of us in religious, social, ethnic, and economic groups that are

out of favor with the ruling elite, will be afected more . Jeremy Benthams
key observation in conceiving his panopticon was that people become conformist and compliant when they
believe they are being observed. The panopticon is an architecture of social control. Think of how you act
when a police car is driving next to you, or how an entire country acts when state agents are listening to
phone calls. When we know everything is being recorded, we are less likely to speak freely and act
individually. When we are constantly under the threat of judgment, criticism, and correction for our actions,
we become fearful thateither now or in the uncertain future data we leave behind will be brought back
to implicate us, by whatever authority has then become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts.

We lose our individuality, and society

stagnates. We dont question or challenge power. We become
obedient and submissive. Were less free. INHIBITING DISSENT AND SOCIAL
CHANGE These chilling efects are especially damaging to political
discourse. There is value in dissent. And, perversely, there can be value in
lawbreaking. These are both ways we improve as a society.
Ubiquitous mass surveillance is the enemy of democracy, liberty,
freedom, and progress. Defending this assertion involves a subtle argumentsomething I
In response, we do nothing out of the ordinary.

wrote about in my previous book Liars and Outliersbut its vitally important to society. Think about it this

Across the US, states are on the verge of reversing decades-old

laws about homosexual relationships and marijuana use. If the old
laws could have been perfectly enforced through surveillance,
society would never have reached the point where the majority of
citizens thought those things were okay. There has to be a period where they are
way.

still illegal yet increasingly tolerated, so that people can look around and say, You know, that wasnt so

but its a process that cant happen without

lawbreaking. Frank Zappa said something similar in 1971: Without deviation from
the norm, progress is not possible. The perfect enforcement that
comes with ubiquitous government surveillance chills this process.
We need imperfect securitysystems that free people to try new
things, much the way of-the-record brainstorming sessions loosen
inhibitions and foster creativity. If we dont have that, we cant slowly move from a
bad. Yes, the process takes decades,

things being illegal and not okay, to illegal and not sure, to illegal and probably okay, and finally to legal.

Freedoms we now take for granted were often at

one time viewed as threatening or even criminal by the past power
structure. Those changes might never have happened if the authorities had been able to achieve
social control through surveillance. This is one of the main reasons all of us should care
about the emerging architecture of surveillance, even if we are not personally
chilled by its existence. We suffer the effects because people around us will be less
likely to proclaim new political or social ideas, or act out of the ordinary. If J.
Edgar Hoovers surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. had been
successful in silencing him, it would have afected far more people
than King and his family. Of course, many things that are illegal will rightly remain illegal
This is an important point.

forever: theft, murder, and so on. Taken to the extreme, though, perfect enforcement could have
unforeseen repercussions. What does it mean for society if the police can track your car 24/7, and then
mail you a bill at the end of the month itemizing every time you sped, ran a red light, made an illegal left
turn, or followed the car in front of you too closely? Or if your township can use aerial surveillance to
automatically fine you for failing to mow your lawn or shovel your walk regularly? Our legal systems are
largely based on human judgment. And while there are risks associated with biased and prejudiced
judgments, there are also risks associated with replacing that judgment with algorithmic efficiency.

Ubiquitous surveillance could lead to the kind of society depicted in the

2002 Tom Cruise movie Minority Report, where people can become the subject of
police investigations before they commit a crime. Already law
enforcement agencies make use of predictive analytic tools to
identify suspects and direct investigations. Its a short step from
there to the world of Big Brother and thoughtcrime. This notion of making certain crimes
impossible to get away with is newa potential result of all this new technologyand its something we
need to think about carefully before we implement it. As law professor Yochai Benkler said, Imperfection is
a core dimension of freedom.

B) Promoting interim gains is essential, it allows for the

rupture in power relations necessary for revolutionary
change, the affirmatives plan cedes to the right
Connolly 13 Professor of Political Science @ JHU
(William, The Fragility of Things, p. 36-42)
we
do not know that confidence, in advance of experimental action, just how far or fast
changes in the systemic character of neoliberal capitalism can be made. The structures often
seem solid and intractable, and indeed such a semblance may turn out to be true. Some may seem solid, infinitely absorptive, and
intractable when they are in fact punctuated by hidden vulnerabilities,
soft spots , uncertainties , and potential lines of flight that become
A philosophy attending to the acceleration, expansion, irrationalities, interdependencies, and fragilities of late capitalism suggest that

apparent when they are subjected to experimental action , upheaval,

testing, and strain. Indeed no ecology of late capitalism, given the variety of forces to which it is connected by a thousand
pulleys, vibrations, impingements, dependencies, shocks, and threads, can specify with supreme confidence the solidity or potential flexibility
of the structures it seeks to change. The strength of structural theory, at its best, was in identifying institutional intersections that hold a
system together; its conceit, at its worst, was the claim to know in advance how resistant such intersections are to potential change. Without

it seems important to pursue possible sites of

strategic action that might open up room for productive change . Today it
adopting the opposite conceit,

seems important to attend to the relation between the need for structural change and identification of multiple sites of potential action. You

do not know precisely what you are doing when you participate in such
a venture. You combine an experimental temper with the appreciation that living and acting into the future inevitably contain a
shifting quotient of uncertainty. The following tentative judgments and sites of action may pertinent. 1) Neither neoliberal theory, nor
socialist productivism, nor deep ecology, nor social democracy in its classic form seems sufficient to the contemporary condition. This is so in
part because the powers of market self-regulation are both real and limited in relation to a larger multitude of heterogeneous force fields
beyond the human estate with differential power of self-regulation and metamorphosis. A first task is to challenge neoliberal ideology through
critique and by elaborating and publicizing positive alternatives that acknowledge the disparate relations between market processes, other
cultural systems, and nonhuman systems. Doing so to render the fragility of things more visible and palpable. Doing so, too, to set the stage

Those who seek to

reshape the ecology of late capitalism might set an interim agenda of radial
reform and then recoil back on the initiatives adopted to see how they work. An interim agenda
for a series of intercoded shifts in citizen role performances, social movements, and state action. 2)

is the best thing to focus on because in a world of becoming the

more distant future is too cloudy to engage. We must , for instance, become
involved in experimental micro-politics on a variety of fronts, as we participate in role
experimentations, social movements, artistic displays, erotic-political shows, electoral campaigns, and creative interventions on the new
media to help recode the ethos that now occupies investment practices, consumption desires, family savings, state priorities, church
assemblies, university curricula, and media reporting.

It is important to bear in mind how extant

commitments to state action

ideologies, established role performances, social movements, and

intersect. To shift some of our own role performances in the zones of travel, church participation, home energy use, investment, and
consumption, for instance, that now implicate us deeply in foreign oil dependence and the huge military expenditures that secure it, could
make a minor difference on its own and also lift some of the burdens of institutional implication from us to support participation in more
adventurous interpretations, political strategies, demands upon the state, and cross state citizen actions. 3) Today perhaps the initial target
should be on reconstituting established patterns of consumption by a combination of direct citizens actions in consumption choices, publicity
of such actions, the organization of local collectives to modify consumption practices, and social movements to reconstitute the current stateand market-supported infrastructure of consumption. By the infrastructure of consumption I mean publicly supported and subsidized market
subsystems such as a national highway system, a system of airports, medical care through private insurance, agribusiness pouring high sugar,
salt, and fat content into foods, corporate ownership of the public media, the prominence of corporate 403 accounts over retirement pension,
and so forth that enable some modes of consumption in the zones of travel, education, diet, retirement, medical care, energy use, health, and
education and render others much more difficult of expensive to procure. To change the infrastructure is also to shift the types of work and
investment available. Social movements that work upon the infrastructure and ethos of consumption in tandem can thus make a real
difference directly, encourage more people to heighten their critical perspectives, and thereby open more people to a more militant politics if

a cross-state citizen goal should be to

construct a pluralist assemblage by moving back and forth between experiments in role performances, the
and as the next disruptive event emerges. Perhaps

refinement of sensitive modes of perception, revisions in political ideology, and adjustments in political sensibility, doing so to mobilize enough

The aim of such an

event would be to reverse the deadly future created by established patterns of climate change by fomenting
significant shifts in patterns of consumption, corporate policies , state law , and the priorities of interstate
collective energy to launch a general strike simultaneously in several countries in the near future.

organizations. Again, the dilemma of today is that the fragility of things demands shifting and slowing down intrusion: into several aspects of
nature as we speed up shifts in identity, role performance, cultural ethos, market regulation, and state policy. 4) The existential forces of
hubris (expressed above all in those confident drives to mastery conveyed by military elites, financial economists, financial elites, and CEOs)
and of ressentiment (expressed in some sectors of secularism and evangelicalism) now play roles of importance in the shape of consumption
practices, investment portfolios, worker routines, managerial demands, and the uneven semen of entitlement that constitute neoliberalism.
For that reason activism inside churches, schools, street life, and the media must become increasingly skilled and sensitive. As we proceed,
some of us may present the themes of a world of becoming to larger audiences, challenging thereby the complementary notions of a
providential world and secular mastery that now infuse too many role performances, market practices, and state priorities in capitalist life. For
existential dispositions do infuse the role priorities of late capitalism. Today it is both difficult for people to perform the same roles with the
same old innocence and difficult to challenge those performances amid our own implication in them. Drive by evangelists, the media,
neoconservatives, and the neolibreal right to draw a veil of innocence across the priorities of contemporary life make the situation much
worse. 5) The emergence of a neofascist or mafia-type capitalism slinks as a dangerous possibility on the horizon, partly because of the
expansion and intensification of capital, partly because of the real fragility of things, partly because the identity needs of many facing these
pressures encourage them to cling more intensely to a neoliberal imaginary as its bankruptcy becomes increasingly apparent, partly because
so many in America insist upon retaining the special world entitlements the country achieved after World War II in a world decreasingly
favorable to them, partly because of the crisis tendencies inherent in neoliberal capitalism, and partly because so many resist living evidence
around and in them that challenges a couple of secular and theistic images of the cosmos now folded into the institutional life of capitalism.
Indeed the danger is that those constituencies now most disinclined to give close attention to public issues could oscillate between attraction
to the mythic promises of neoliberal automaticity and attraction to a neofascist movement when the next crisis unfolds. It has happened
before. I am not saying that neoliberalism is itself a form of fascism, but that the failures and meltdowns it periodically promotes could once

The
state, while it certainly cannot alone tame capital or reconstitute the ethos and infrastructure of consumption, must
play a significant role in reconstituting our lived relations to climate,
again foment fascist or neofascist responses, as happened in several countries after the onset of the Great Depression. 6)
democratic

weather, resource use, ocean currents, bee survival, tectonic

instability, glacier flows, species diversity, work, local life,
consumption, and investment, as it also responds favorable to the public
pressures

A new, new left will thus experimentally enact new intersections

outgrow its old disgust with the very idea of
the state, and remain alert to the dangers states can pose. It will do so because,
as already suggested, the fragile ecology of late capital requires state interventions of
several sorts. A refusal to participate in the state today cedes too much
hegemony to neoliberal markets, either explicitly or by implication. Drives to fascism, remember, rose the
we must generate to forge a new ethos.

between role performance and political activity,

last time in capitalist states after a total market meltdown. Most of those movements failed. But a couple became consolidate through a series
of resonances (vibrations) back and forth between industrialists, the state, and vigilante groups, in neighborhoods, clubs, churches, the police,

You do not fight the danger of a new kind of neofascism by

withdrawing from either micropolitics or state politics. You do so through a multisited politics designed to
the media, the pubs.

infuse a new ethos into the fabric of everyday life. Changes in ethos can in turn open doors to new possibilities of state and interstate action,
so that an advance in one domain seeds that in the other. And vice versa. A positive dynamic of mutual amplification might be generated here.
Could a series of significant shifts in the routines of state and global capitalism even press the fractures system to a point where it hovers on

That is one reason it is important to focus on

interim goals . Another is that in a world of becoming, replete with periodic and surprising shift in the course of events, you
cannot project far beyond an interim period. Another yet is that activism needs
to project concrete, interim possibilities to gain support and propel itself
forward. That being said, it does seem unlikely to me, at least, that a positive interim future includes either socialist productivism or
the world projected by proponents of deep ecology. 7) To advance such an agenda it is also imperative to
negotiate new connections between nontheistic constituencies who care about the
future of the Earth and numerous devotees of diverse religious traditions who fold positive spiritualties into their creedal
the edge of capitalism itself? We dont know.

practices. The new, multifaceted movement needed today, if it emerges, will take the shape of a vibrant pluralist assemblage acting at a
multiple sites within and across states, rather than either a centered movement with a series of fellow travelers attached to it or a mere
electoral constellation.

Electoral victories are important , but that work best when they touch priorities

already embedded in churches, universities, film, music, consumption practices, media reporting, investment priorities, and the like. A related
thing to keep in mind is that the capitalist modes of acceleration, expansion, and intensification that heighten the fragility of things today also
generate pressures to minorities the world along multiple dimensions at a more rapid pace than heretofore. A new pluralist constellation will
build upon the latter developments as it works to reduce the former effects. I am sure that the forgoing comments will appear to some as
optimistic or utopian. But optimism and pessimism are both primarily spectatorial views. Neither seems sufficient to the contemporary

pessimism, if you dwell on it long, easily slides into cynicism, and

cynicism often plays into the hands of a right wing that applies it
exclusively to any set of state activities not designed to protect or
coddle the corporate estate. That is one reason that dysfunctional
politics resounds so readily to the advantage of cynics on the right who work to promote
it. They want to promote cynicism with respect to the state and
innocence with respect to the market. Pure critique, as already suggested, does not suffice either.
Pure critique too readily carries critics and their followers to the edge of cynicism. It is
condition. Indeed

also true that the above critique concentrates on neoliberal capitalism, not capitalism writ large. That is because it seems to me that we need
to specify the terms of critique as closely as possible and think first of all about interim responses. If we lived under, say, Keynesian capitalism,
a somewhat different set of issues would be defined and other strategies identified. Capitalism writ largewhile it sets a general context that
neoliberalism inflects in specific wayssets too large and generic a target. It can assume multiple forms, as the difference between Swedish
and American capitalism suggest the times demand a set of interim agendas targeting the hegemonic form of today, pursued with heightened

The point today is not to wait for a revolution that

overthrows the whole system. The system, as we shall see further, is replete
with too many loose ends, uneven edges, dicey intersections with nonhuman forces, and
uncertain trajectories to make such a wholesale project plausible. Besides, things are too urgent
and too many people on the ground are sufering too much now. The
need now is to activate the most promising political strategies to the contemporary condition out
militancy at several sties.

of a bad set. On top of assessing probabilities and predicting them with secret relish or despairactivities I myself pursue during the election
seasonwe must define the urgent needs of the day in relation to a set of interim possibilities worthy of pursuit on several fronts, even if the
apparent political odds are stacked against them. We then test ourselves and those possibilities by trying to enact this or that aspect of them
at diverse sites, turning back to reconsider their efficacy and side effects as circumstances shift and results accrue.

In so doing

we may experience more vibrantly how apparently closed and ossified

structures are typically punctuated by jagged edges, seams, and
fractures best pried open with a mix of public contestation of established interpretations,
experimental shifts in multiple role performances, micropolitics in churches, universities , unions, the
media, and corporations,

state actions , and large-scale, cross-state citizen actions.

C) Attitude and information alone are irrelevant only

tying legal goals to political actors translates knowledge
into power
Hodson 10 - professor of education Ontario Institute for Studies @
University of Toronto
(Derek, "Science Education as a Call to Action," Canadian Journal of Science,
Mathematics and Technology Education, 10.3)
The final (fourth) level of sophistication in this issues-based approach is concerned with students findings
ways of putting their values and convictions into action, helping them to prepare for and engage in
responsible action, and assisting them in developing the skills, attitudes, and values that will enable them
to take control of their lives, cooperate with others to bring about change, and work toward a more just

Socially
and environmentally responsible behavior will not necessarily follow
from knowledge of key concepts and possession of the right attitudes. As
and sustainable world in which power, wealth, and resources are more equitably shared.

Curtin (1991) reminded us, it is important to distinguish between caring about and caring for. It is almost
always much easier to proclaim that one cares about an issue than to do something about it. Put simply,

our values are worth nothing until we live them. Rhetoric and
espoused values will not bring about social justice and will not save the planet.
We must change our actions. A politicized ethic of care (caring for)
entails active involvement in a local manifestation of a particular
problem or issue, exploration of the complex sociopolitical contexts in which the problem/issue is
located, and attempts to resolve conflicts of interest. Writing from the perspective of environmental
education, Jensen (2002) categorized the knowl- edge that is likely to promote sociopolitical action and
encourage pro-environmental behavior into four dimensions: (a) scientific and technological knowledge
that informs the issue or prob- lem; (b) knowledge about the underlying social, political, and economic
issues, conditions, and structures and how they contribute to creating social and environmental problems;
(c) knowledge about how to bring about changes in society through direct or indirect action; and (d)
knowledge about the likely outcome or direction of possible actions and the desirability of those outcomes.
Although formulated as a model for environmental education, it is reasonable to suppose that Jensens
arguments are applicable to all forms of SSI-oriented action. Little needs to be said about dimensions 1
and 2 in Jensens framework beyond the discussion earlier in the article. With regard to dimension 3,

students need knowledge of actions that are likely to have positive

impact and knowledge of how to engage in them . It is essential that
they gain robust knowledge of the social, legal, and political
system(s) that prevail in the communities in which they live and
develop a clear understanding of how decisions are made within local,
regional, and national gov- ernment and within industry, commerce, and the military. Without
knowledge of where and with whom power of decision making is
located and awareness of the mechanisms by which decisions are
reached, intervention is not possible. Thus, the curriculum I propose requires a
concurrent program designed to achieve a measure of political literacy, including knowledge of how to
engage in collective action with individuals who have different competencies, backgrounds, and attitudes

includes knowledge of
likely sympathizers and potential allies and strategies for
but share a common interest in a particular SSI. Dimension 3 also

encouraging cooperative action and group interventions. What Jensen did

not mention but would seem to be a part of dimension 3 knowledge is the nature of science-oriented
knowledge that would enable students to appraise the statements, reports, and arguments of scientists,
politicians, and journalists and to present their own supporting or opposing arguments in a coherent,
robust, and convincing way (see Hodson [2009b] for a lengthy discussion of this aspect of science
education). Jensens fourth category includes awareness of how (and why) others have sought to bring
about change and entails for- mulation of a vision of the kind of world in which we (and our families and
communities) wish to live. It is important for students to explore and develop their ideas, dreams, and
aspirations for themselves, their neighbors and families and for the wider communities at local, regional,
national, and global levelsa clear overlap with futures studies/education. An essential step in cultivating
the critical scientific and technological literacy on which sociopolitical action depends is the application of
a social and political critique capable of challenging the notion of techno- logical determinism. We can
control technology and its environmental and social impact. More significantly, we can control the
controllers and redirect technology in such a way that adverse environmental impact is substantially
reduced (if not entirely eliminated) and issues of freedom, equality, and justice are kept in the forefront of
discussion during the establishment of policy.

Evaluate this debate based on pedagogical

interpretations of debate, not the substance of the 1ac
alone its a logical consequence of their choice to ignore
the topic in this debate.

Public Forum CP
Nick and I counter advocate to reject the affirmative
within the realm of a competitive debate round we
believe the better way to confront Antiblackness is to
host a public forum wherein we could discuss the issue of
antiblackness
The Counterplan is mutually exclusive because any
permutation will have to include the affirmatives 1AC
advocacy in this debate, which is the link to our ofense.
Fundamentally, we are ofering an approach to
antiblackness and they are defending that they should
win this debate round. These approaches are not
compatible and if we win the disadvantages to using the
competitive format and solvency for our counterplan then
you vote negative.
Also, their Wilderson 10 ev from the 1ac says that debate
should be a public forum to challenge Americas
legitimacy
The Counterplan solves the case better for two reasons:
Attempting to create recognition through a competitive
debate round is structurally flawed since there are no
written records of decisions and there is little collective
memory of what happened in any given debate
Atchison and Panetta, 09
(Jarrod Atchison, Phd Rhetoric University of Georgia, Assistant Professor and
Director of debate at Wake Forest University, and Edward Panetta, Phd
Rhetoric Associate Professor University of Pitt and Director of Debate at
Georgia, Intercollegiate Debate and Speech Communication, Historical
Developments and Issues for the Future, "Intercollegiate Debate and Speech
Communication: Issues for the Future," The Sage Handbook of Rhetorical
Studies, Lunsford, Andrea, ed. (Los Angeles: Sage Publications Inc., 2009) p.
317-334) //NM

In addition to the structural problems,

the collective forgetfulness of the debate

community reduces the impact that individual debates have on the

community. The debate community has a high turnover rate . Despite the
fact that some debaters make their best effort to debate for more than four years, the debate
community is largely made up of participants who debate and then
move on. The coaches and directors that make up the backbone of the community are the people with
the longest cultural memory, but they are also a small minority of the community when considering the
number of debaters involved in the activity. We do not mean to suggest that the activity is reinvented
every yearcertainly there are conventions that are passed down from coaches to debaters and from

the fact that there are virtually no

transcriptions available for everyone to read, it is difficult to assume
that the debate community would remember any individual debate.
Additionally, given the focus on competition and individual skill, the
community is more likely to remember the accomplishments and
talents of debaters rather than what argument they won a particular round
on. The debate community does not have the necessary components
in place for a strong collective memory of individual debates . We believe
that the combination of the structures of debate and the collective forgetfulness means that any
strategy for creating community change that is premised on winning
individual debates is less efective than seeking a larger community
dialogue that is recorded and/or transcribed. The second major
problem with attempting to create community change in individual debates is that the
debate community is made up of more individuals than the four
debaters and one judge that are a part of every debate. The coaches and
debaters to debaters. However, given

directors that make up the backbone of the community have very little space for engaging in a discussion
about community issues. We suspect that this helps explain why so few debaters get involved in the

Coaches and directors dominant this forum

because there is so little public dialogue over the issues that directly
afect the community that they have dedicated so much of their
professional and personal lives. This is especially true for coaches and directors that are
not preferred judges and therefore do not even have a voice at the end of a debate. Coaches and
directors should have a public forum to engage in a community
conversation with debaters instead of attempting to take on their
opponents through the wins and losses of their own debaters.
edebates over activist strategies.

The plea for change through winning the ballot not only
fails to inculcate communal response but also reentrenches the very evil they criticize by reproducing
antagonism rather than coalitions
Atchison and Panetta, 09 (Jarrod Atchison, Phd Rhetoric University of
Georgia, Assistant Professor and Director of debate at Wake Forest University,
and Edward Panetta, Phd Rhetoric Associate Professor University of Pitt and
Director of Debate at Georgia, Intercollegiate Debate and Speech
Communication, Historical Developments and Issues for the Future,
Intercollegiate Debate and Speech Communication: Issues for the Future,
The Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, Lunsford, Andrea, ed. (Los Angeles:
Sage Publications Inc., 2009) p. 317-334)

Competition has been a critical component of the interest in

intercollegiate debate from the beginning, and it does not help further the goals of the debate
community to dismiss competition in the name of community change. The larger problem
with locating the "debate as activism" perspective within the
competitive framework is that it overlooks the communal nature of the
community problem. If each individual debate is a decision about how the debate community should

the losing debaters become collateral damage in

the activist strategy dedicated toward creating community change. One
frustrating example of this type of argument might include a judge voting for an
activist team in an effort to help them reach elimination rounds to
generate a community discussion about the problem. Under this scenario, the
losing team serves as a sacrificial lamb on the altar of community
change. Downplaying the important role of competition and treating
opponents as scapegoats for the failures of the community may increase
the profile of the winning team and the community problem, but it does little to generate
the critical coalitions necessary to address the community problem,
because the competitive focus encourages teams to concentrate on
how to beat the strategy with little regard for addressing the
community problem. There is no role for competition when a judge decides that it is important
approach a problem, then

to accentuate the publicity of a community problem. An extreme example might include a team arguing
that their opponents' academic institution had a legacy of civil rights abuses and that the judge should not
vote for them because that would be a community endorsement of a problematic institution. This scenario
is a bit more outlandish but not unreasonable if one assumes mat each debate should be about what is
best for promoting solutions to diversity problems in the debate community.

Cap K
Race and class are dialectically conjoined in the
reproduction of capitalist relationscapitalism racializes
subjects to entrench competition and destroy universal
consciousness as well as sustains white racism as a
method of papering over contradictions.
San Juan 3
[E., Fulbright Lecturer at Univ of Leuven, Marxism and the Race/Class Problematic: A Re-Articulation, p.
online]
It seems obvious that racism cannot be dissolved by instances of status mobility when sociohistorical
circumstances change gradually or are transformed by unforeseen interventions. The black bourgeoisie
continues to be harassed and stigmatized by liberal or multiculturalist practices of racism, not because

Class exploitation
cannot replace or stand for racism because it is the condition of
possibility for it. It is what enables the racializing of selected
markers, whether physiological or cultural, to maintain, deepen and reinforce
alienation, mystifying reality by modes of commodification, fetishism, and reification
characterizing the routine of quotidian life. Race and class are dialectically
conjoined in the reproduction of capitalist relations of exploitation
and domination. 30. We might take a passage from Marx as a source
of guidelines for developing a historical-materialist theory of
racism which is not empiricist but dialectical in aiming for theorizing
they drive Porsches or conspicuously flaunt all the indices of wealth.

conceptual concreteness as a multiplicity of historically informed and configured determinations. This

passage comes from a letter dated 9 April 1870 to Meyer and Vogt in which Marx explains why the Irish
struggle for autonomy was of crucial significance for the British proletariat:
. . . Every industrial and
commercial center in England possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English
proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor
who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling
nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland,
thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices
against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the 'poor whites' to the
'niggers' in the former slave states of the USA. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own
money. He sees in the English worker at once the accomplice and stupid tool of the English rule in
Ireland. This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic
papers, in short by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of
the impotence of the English working class, despite its organization. It is the secret by which the
capitalist class maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it (quoted in Callinicos 1993). Here

Marx sketches three parameters for the sustained viability of

racism in modern capitalist society. First, the economic competition among
workers is dictated by the distribution of labor power in the labor-market
via differential wage rates. The distinction between skilled and unskilled
labor is contextualized in difering national origins, languages and
traditions of workers, which can be manipulated into racial
antagonisms. Second, the appeal of racist ideology to white
workers, with their identification as members of the "ruling nation" affording--in W.E.B. DuBois's
words--"public and psychological wage" or compensation. Like religion, whitesupremacist nationalism provides the illusory resolution to the
real contradictions of life for the working majority of citizens.
Third, the ruling class reinforces and maintains these racial

divisions for the sake of capital accumulation within the framework of its
ideological/political hegemony in the metropolis and worldwide.
31. Racism and
nationalism are thus modalities in which class struggles articulate
themselves at strategic points in history. No doubt social conflicts in recent
times have involved not only classes but also national, ethnic, and religious groups, as well as feminist,

The concept of "internal

colonialism" (popular in the seventies) that subjugates national minorities,
as well as the principle of self-determination for oppressed or
"submerged" nations espoused by Lenin, exemplify dialectical attempts
to historicize the collective agency for socialist transformation.
ecological, antinuclear social movements (Bottomore 1983).

Within the framework of the global division of labor between metropolitan center and colonized
periphery, a Marxist program of national liberation is meant to take into account the extraction of
surplus value from colonized peoples through unequal exchange as well as through direct colonial
exploitation in "Free Trade Zones," illegal traffic in prostitution, mail-order brides, and contractual
domestics (at present, the Philippines provides the bulk of the latter, about ten million persons and

National oppression has a concrete reality not entirely

reducible to class exploitation but incomprehensible apart from it ;
growing).

that is, it cannot be adequately understood without the domination of the racialized peoples in the
dependent formations by the colonizing/imperialist power, with the imperial nation-state acting as the
32. Racism arose with the
creation and expansion of the capitalist world economy (Wolf 1982;
Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991). Solidarities conceived as racial or ethnic
groups acquire meaning and value in terms of their place within
the social organization of production and reproduction of the ideologicalpolitical order; ideologies of racism as collective social evaluation of solidarities arise
to reinforce structural constraints which preserve the exploited
and oppressed position of these "racial" solidarities. Such patterns of
exploiting class, as it were (see San Juan 1998; 2002).

economic and political segmentation mutate in response to the impact of changing economic and
political relationships (Geshwender and Levine 1994). Overall, there is no denying the fact that
national-liberation movements and indigenous groups fighting for sovereignty, together with
heterogeneous alliances and coalitions, cannot be fully understood without a critical analysis of the
production of surplus value and its expropriation by the propertied class--that is, capital accumulation.
As John Rex noted,
different ethnic groups are placed in relations of cooperation, symbiosis or
conflict by the fact that as groups they have different economic and political functions.Within this
changing class order of [colonial societies], the language of racial difference frequently becomes the
means whereby men allocate each other to different social and economic positions. What the type of
analysis used here suggests is that the exploitation of clearly marked groups in a variety of different
ways is integral to capitalism and that ethnic groups unite and act together because they have been
subjected to distinct and differentiated types of exploitation. Race relations and racial conflict are
necessarily structured by political and economic factors of a more generalized sort (1983, 403-05,

Hence race relations and race conflict are necessarily

structured by the larger totality of the political economy of a
given society, as well as by modifications in the structure of the world economy. Corporate
profit-making via class exploitation on an international/globalized
scale, at bottom, still remains the logic of the world system of
finance capitalism based on historically changing structures and
retooled practices of domination and subordination.
407).

The determinism of capital is responsible for the

instrumentalization of all lifeit is this logic that
mobilizes and allows for the 1acs scenarios in the first
place
Dyer 99
[Nick, Prof at U. of Western Ontario, Cyber Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology
Capitalism ]

For capitalism, the use of machines as organs of will over nature

is an imperative. The great insight of the Frankfurt Schoolan insight subsequently improved
and amplified by feminists and ecologistswas that capitals dual project of
dominating both humynity and nature was intimately tied to the
cultivation of instrumental reason that systematically
objectifies, reduces, quantifies and fragments the world for the
purposes of technological control. Businesss systemic need to cheapen labor, cut
the costs of raw materials, and expand consumer markets gives it an inherent bias toward the piling-up

This priorityenshrined in phrases such as progress, efficiency,

an automatism that is
used to override any objection or alternative, regardless of the
environmental and social consequences. Today, we witness global vistas of
of technological power.

productivity, modernization, and growth assumes

toxification, deforestation, desertification, dying oceans, disappearing ozone layers, and disintegrating

all interacting in ways that perhaps threaten the very

existence of humynity and are undeniably inflicting social
collapse, disease, and immiseration across the planet . The degree to
immune systems,

which this project of mastery has backfired is all too obvious.

Vote Negative to validate and adopt the method of

structural/historical criticism that is the 1NC.
This is not the alternative, but in truth the only option
method is the foremost political question because one
must understand the existing social totality before one
can act on itgrounding the sites of political contestation
or knowledge outside of labor and surplus value merely
serve to humynize capital and prevent a transition to a
society beyond oppression
Tumino 1
[Stephen, Prof English at Pitt, What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it Matters Now More than Ever, Red
Critique, p. online]

efective political theory will have to do at least two things: it will have to
ofer an integrated understanding of social practices and, based
on such an interrelated knowledge, ofer a guideline for praxis. My main argument
here is that among all contesting social theories now, only Orthodox Marxism has
been able to produce an integrated knowledge of the existing
social totality and provide lines of praxis that will lead to building
a society free from necessity. But first I must clarify what I mean by Orthodox Marxism.
Any

Like all other modes and forms of political theory, the very theoretical identity of Orthodox Marxism is
itself contestednot just from non-and anti-Marxists who question the very "real" (by which they mean
the "practical" as under free-market criteria) existence of any kind of Marxism now but, perhaps more
tellingly, from within the Marxist tradition itself. I will, therefore, first say what I regard to be the
distinguishing marks of Orthodox Marxism and then outline a short polemical map of contestation over
Orthodox Marxism within the Marxist theories now. I will end by arguing for its effectivity in bringing
about a new society based not on humyn rights but on freedom from necessity. I will argue that

to

know contemporary societyand to be able to act on such

knowledgeone has to first of all know what makes the existing
social totality. I will argue that the dominant social totality is based on inequalitynot just
inequality of power but inequality of economic access (which then determines access to health care,

systematic inequality cannot be

explained by gender, race, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, or
nationality. These are all secondary contradictions and are all determined
education, housing, diet, transportation, . . . ). This

by the fundamental contradiction of capitalism which is inscribed in the relation of capital and labor. All

modes of Marxism now explain social inequalities primarily on the

basis of these secondary contradictions and in doing so and this is my
main argumentlegitimate capitalism. Why? Because such arguments
authorize capitalism without gender, race, discrimination and thus
accept economic inequality as an integral part of humyn societies.
They accept a sunny capitalisma capitalism beyond capitalism.
Such a society, based on cultural equality but economic inequality, has always been
the not-so-hidden agenda of the bourgeois leftwhether it has been called
"new left," "postmarxism," or "radical democracy." This is, by the way, the main reason for its
popularity in the culture industryfrom the academy (Jameson, Harvey, Haraway, Butler,. . . ) to daily

For all, capitalism is

here to stay and the best that can be done is to make its cruelties
more tolerable, more humyne. This humynization (not eradication) of capitalism is the sole goal
of ALL contemporary lefts (marxism, feminism, anti-racism, queeries, . . . ). Such an
understanding of social inequality is based on the fundamental
understanding that the source of wealth is humyn knowledge and
not humyn labor. That is, wealth is produced by the humyn mind and is thus free from the actual
objective conditions that shape the historical relations of labor and capital. Only Orthodox
Marxism recognizes the historicity of labor and its primacy as the
source of all humyn wealth. In this paper I argue that any emancipatory
theory has to be founded on recognition of the priority of Marx's labor theory of
value and not repeat the technological determinism of corporate theory
("knowledge work") that masquerades as social theory .
politics (Michael Harrington, Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson,. . . ) to. . . .

Case

Bad for Race Discussion

Using a competitive forum to discuss race is flawed
limits and devalues conversation
Bankey 13
Brendon Bankey is a PhD student at Kansas and has a MA in
communication from Wake Forest University. He debated for Trinity
University. THE FACT OF BLACKNESS DOES NOT EXIST: AN
EVOCATIVE CRITICISM OF RESISTANCE RHETORIC IN ACADEMIC POLICY
DEBATE AND ITS (MIS)USE OF FRANTZ FANONS BLACK SKIN, WHITE
MASKS, August 2013, Pg. 51-52, AFGA)
The other problem this understanding of privilege creates is the idea that
individual debate competitions are the ideal place to do the work of
community building. There exist a range of options for
communicating diference to each other in spaces of the debate community. To isolate
the importance of this task to debate competitions dismisses the
community element entirely. It also raises the question of why
young people searching for the proper script to articulate their
social position must ofer it forth for a judge to evaluate its
accuracy. Even if an opponent is seeking to engage authentically , it
is the person sitting in the back of the room that has the final say in
the matter. Moreover, I am curious how supporters of strategies designed at confronting whiteness
expect debaters to accomplish the task of exposing ones privilege during a three-minute
cross-examination period, which is the only time in debate that places
teams in conversation with each other. On this subject of competition, I am concerned
that supporters of resistance will take the success of teams like West Georgia and Emporia at CEDA and
the NDT to mean that meaningful black participation can only occur in policy debate through competitive
means. This is not some backhanded way of saying non-traditional debaters should be content with losing
debates; every collegiate debater dreams of winning the NDT. But are we willing to say that if a student
does not ever win a debate at the NDT or even qualify for the NDT their presence in the community was

in the rush to disidentify with policy debate I worry

that supporters of resistance will overlook the meaningful black
participation that did occur by debaters who did not choose to
engage in strategies of signifyin(g) or genre violation in the 2012-2013
not meaningful? Moreover,

season.

Bad For Change

Debate rounds are inefective sites of change lack of
audience and transcription
Bankey 13
Brendon Bankey is a PhD student at Kansas and has a MA in
communication from Wake Forest University. He debated for Trinity
University. THE FACT OF BLACKNESS DOES NOT EXIST: AN
EVOCATIVE CRITICISM OF RESISTANCE RHETORIC IN ACADEMIC POLICY
DEBATE AND ITS (MIS)USE OF FRANTZ FANONS BLACK SKIN, WHITE
MASKS, August 2013, Pg. 50-51, AFGA)
Atchison and Panettas scholarship investigates the general stubbornness to respond to forms of activism
within policy debate, challenging the notion that any individual debate can affect the capacity to

They attribute this inefectiveness of focusing

on individual debates as a site of activism to the structural
problems inherent in individual debates and the collective
forgetfulness of the debate community. From a structural
perspective, individual debates generally lack the necessary
audience to attract attention to coalesce community opinion toward
a certain teams criticism of marginalizing debate practices. While this
generate community change.

observation is called into question by the efforts made to record debates at the 2013 NDT, the majority of
elimination debates do not provide for a much better audience because debates still occur
simultaneously, and travel schedules dictate that most of the participants have left by the later elimination

Because of the sheer number of debates that occur throughout

a given season and the lack of eforts to transcribe them, Atchison
and Panetta propose a model for creating community change that
requires public argument striving toward a larger community
dialogue that is recorded and/or transcribed as an alternative to
strategies of resistance premised on winning individual debates to
resolve a community problem. Their proposal recognizes the importance of
reinvigorating methods of accessible public argument often disregarded in
competitive debate. At the same time, however, they remain concerned
that individual debate competitions do not represent the best environment
for community change.
rounds.

TVA
Next, The speech act of the 1ac can solve all their ofense
while pedagogically advocating an institutional
curtailment of state surveillance they can discuss both
institutionalized racism and how Blacks have responded welfare searches, stop-and-frisk, public housing
surveillance, stop-and-snif, and motor vehicle stops are
all topical policy proposals that solve
Bailey, Chicago-Kent law assistant professor, 2014 (Kimberly
D., Watching Me: The War on Crime, Privacy, and the State, University of
California Davis Law Review, Vol. 47, January 2014,
http://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=3395&context=fac_schol, p. 1555-1561, IC)
poor and people of color continue to have
the least amount of privacy in our society and, therefore, they are still the most
vulnerable to more extreme state social control policies.101 Some argue
Scholars have documented the fact that the

that welfare is still a means of regulating the sexual behavior of many poor, single women.102 Indeed,
many women currently must participate in mandatory paternity proceedings in order to be entitled to
benefits, and many jurisdictions impose family caps, which limit cash benefit increases for any children
conceived while the mother is receiving welfare benefits.103 Recipients of state funded prenatal care often
have to endure highly embarrassing and intrusive questions about their parenting history, criminal history,
immigration status, contraceptive use, and finances, which middleand upper-class women simply do not

the Supreme Court has held that welfare

recipients are not entitled to Fourth Amendment rights when it
comes to searches in their homes.105 Social workers can stop by and search a
have to endure.104 Furthermore,

recipients home and interview her with no warning or warrant. As will be discussed more fully below, the
privacy invasions that result from current criminal justice policies also contribute to greater social control
of poor people of color because of the chilling effects they have on selfdetermination, freedom of
association, and freedom of expression. In addition to making poor people of color more vulnerable to

the war on crime has also created serious

dignitary harms. When the state curtails privacy, it sends a powerful
message: an individual cannot be trusted to use his privacy in legitimate ways.106
oppressive state social control,

For example, parents tend to give their children less privacy because they do not yet trust that the children
have the maturity and wisdom not to make choices that could potentially harm themselves or others.

we limit the privacy of prisoners is because their past

acts suggest that we cannot trust them not to engage in criminal and potentially
dangerous activities, at least for a set period of time. The lack of trust expressed by the
state through the war on crime, therefore, at best resembles a form of
paternalism; at worst, it resembles a form de facto criminalization of
individuals simply because they are poor and of color .107 These individuals
Likewise, one reason

logically conclude that the state does not respect them nor does it view their identities and viewpoints as
equal to those of white and wealthier citizens.108 B. The War on Crimes Impact on Individual Privacy 1.
Stops-and-Frisks and Motor Stops The myopic focus of the war on drugs on arrest and conviction rates,

police officers
feel free to subject poor urban African-Americans and Latinos to
intrusive stops-and-frisks on a daily basis.109 In 2011, 84% of stops-andfrisks conducted in New York were on African-Americans and Latinos.110 Eightyeight percent of these stops did not result in an arrest or a summons being given.111 Contraband
combined with the racialized view of illegal drug use, creates an environment where

was found in only 2% of these stops.112 In other words, although the vast
majority of residents of poor urban neighborhoods are law-abiding citizens, many of
them still have to tolerate these intrusions.113 Indeed, particularly for
young, African-American and Latino males, they are a regular part of
life.114 For example, between January 2006 and March 2010, the police stopped 52,000 individuals in an
eight-block minority area in Brooklyn.115 This amounted to an average of one stop per resident per
year.116 The average increased to five stops per person for males fifteen to thirty-four years of age.117

Some of those who have been stopped by the New York Police Department describe a
hornet-like invasion where they are barraged with questions such as wheres the weed? and
wheres the guns?118 These exchanges are sometimes laced with profanity,
racial epithets, and name-calling like immigrant, old man, or
bro.119 Other exchanges are more polite where the police officer asks whether they can talk with the
individual; asks him a series of questions such as what he is doing, where he lives, and whether he has
anything on him; and then lets the individual go.120 In either type of exchange,

the subjects of

these stops often report feeling intruded upon and humiliated. 121 A college
student from Brooklyn describes, They talk to you like youre ignorant, like youre an animal.122
Another man from Queens describes feeling belittled, even though he once experienced a more polite
exchange.123 Individuals often feel shame after these interactions and fear that others who witness the
stop-andfrisk will assume that they are criminals.124 Even young children are not immune from this
practice. One New Yorker reporters, Theres a junior high school [where] almost all the kids are either of
Arabic [sic] descent or Latino. There [were] days when youd see all these little kids lined up, with their
legs spread, holding [onto] the wall, and the cops are going through their pockets and stuff. Its just like a

police often engage in abusive

and inappropriate behaviors via the stop-and-frisk including forcibly
stripping individuals down to their underclothing in public,
inappropriate touching, physical violence and threats, extortion of
sex, sexual harassment and other humiliating and degrading
treatment.126 Objecting to inappropriate touching can lead to a charge of resisting arrest.12 What
is most striking about this practice is that residents of particular communities have had to
modify their everyday activities in order to lessen the risk
associated with police encounters.128 New Yorkers of color describe refraining from wearing
terrible, disgusting, horrible thing to see.125 Furthermore,

stereotypical ethnic clothing and hair styles to make themselves less likely to be accosted by the
police.129 They also describe taking public transportation and avoiding walking altogether to avoid
encounters with law enforcement on the street.130 Others describe how young people have to stay
indoors and cannot play outside.131 Adults feel like they cannot sit on the porch or go to the store or

police have particularly focused on public

housing sites for heightened surveillance,133 but the city of New York also has a
interact with their neighbors.132 The

special program, Operation Clean Halls, which involves private buildings.134 Under this program, owners
of private buildings sign contracts with the New York Police Department, which allows the police to patrol

African-Americans and Latinos are disproportionately

stopped by police as part of this program.136 In order to avoid the accusation of
these buildings.135

trespassing, many New Yorkers report always carrying identification or a piece of mail verifying that they
live in a particular building.137 Some report that residents of a building may even have to produce a lease
in order to avoid arrest.138 For many, they daily must endure police inquiries of, Do you live here?139
New Yorkers report that they also carry pay stubs to prove that they have a legitimate source of

police cars patrol public housing projects and when

they stop, every young African-American man in the area automatically
places his hands against the car and spreads his legs to be
searched.141 This automatic reflex to assume the position happens in poor
communities of color across the nation,142 and it underscores how constant police
income.140 In Chicago,

presence and surveillance have become woven into the everyday fabric of poor, urban life. It is not

residents in these communities describe this

constant presence as a type of military occupation143 or outside
surprising, therefore, that

prison.144 A variation of

the stop-and-frisk is the stop-and-snif. New York

police officers will stop individuals drinking from cups in public.145 They then ask to sniff the contents of
the individuals cup to see if it contains alcohol.146 If it smells like alcohol, they are issued a summons for
public drinking.147 The penalty for the offense is small at twentyfive dollars per ticket, but the real
purpose for these stops is to have an excuse to check to see if an individual has any outstanding
warrants.148 As is the case with stop-and-frisk practices, residents are angry and resentful when police

85% of the
summonses that were issued during one month in Brooklyn were to AfricanAmericans
and Latinos.150 Just as is the case with stops-and-frisks, motor vehicle stops are a
numbers game.151 As a result, tens of thousands of innocent individuals are pulled over every
year as part of the war on drugs.152 Unfortunately, a disproportionate number of these
individuals are African-American and Latino.153 Indeed, many are familiar with
the terms driving while black or driving while brown, which refer
to the disproportionate efects of traffic stops on African-Americans
and Latinos.154 Some New Yorkers report that they avoid driving altogether and opt for public
officers demand to sniff the contents of their cups.149 Furthermore, one judge found that

transportation in order to avoid these confrontations.155

Institutions card
Calls to interrogate anti-blackness do nothing to stop
real-world violence only practical politics can solve
FRIEDERSDORF 5/22
(Conor,Atlantic, Police Brutality and 'The Role That Whiteness Plays'
5/22/2015 http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/05/policebrutality-and-the-role-that-whiteness-plays/393713/?utm_source=SFTwitter)

Last week, Gawker interviewed Robin DiAngelo, a professor of multicultural education at Westfield State
University. She discussed aspects of her thinking on whiteness, which are set forth at length in her book,
What Does it Mean to be White? Ive ordered the book. Meanwhile, her remarks on police brutality piqued
my interest. Some of what Professor DiAngelo said is grounded in solid empirical evidence: blacks and
Hispanics are disproportionately victimized by misbehaving police officers; there are neighborhoods where
police help maintain racial and class boundaries. And if our culture, which she calls the water we swim
in, contained fewer parts racism per million, I suspect that police brutality would be less common. But a
core part of her analysis is very much at odds with conclusions that Ive drawn after years of writing
against police misconduct and pondering how to reduce it. First, consider her remarks with an open
mind. Interviewer Donovan X. Ramsey asked, What have been your thoughts on the national
conversation happening around police brutality and the role that whiteness plays into it? She answered
as follows: We have to change the water officers swim in. We can bring in different tools, even officers of
color, but if we dont change the water that they swim in, that we all swim in. The water is the unexamined
whiteness, the everyday whiteness. Unexamined whiteness is right now probably the most hostile for
people of color. There are the extreme incidents of violent and explicit racism that we take note of, but the
everyday racism is also so toxic. I think our everyday coded language around good neighborhoods and
bad neighborhoods is what allows for tremendous violence to happen... When you label a neighborhood
bad and avoid it, then you dont know and dont see what goes on there. And theres no human face to
interrupt that narrative. So, we see outrage around figures like Michael Brown because suddenly theres a
face. But, for the most part, we dont know and we dont care as long as the police keep them from us,
so our schools can be better and we can feel safe at the top of the hierarchy. I think we use the police to
maintain those boundaries. While Professor Di Angelo and I are both eager to pursue a course that would
decrease police brutality and both agree that its intersection with racism is a significant part of the
problem, the notion of would-be reformers focusing scarce energy on changing the water that we all swim
in strikes me as a misguided approach. Heres my thinking:

While it would be fantastic

to reduce racism in America, and while policing might then improve

along with other aspects of life, no one knows how to achieve that
goal. But we do know how to mandate body cameras that have been
shown to reduce use-of-force; how to put disciplinary decisions in
the hands of civilian review boards rather than police unions and the
municipal officials that they bankroll; that proper rules for Taser use
can lead to less loss of life; that arrestees with medical problems
can be taken to the hospital instead of being refused care; and that
whistleblowers can be protected, not persecuted. The urgent need is
for civic pressure to enact concrete, specific reforms.

Best practices,

however defined, are so far from being in place in the typical police department that focusing on

Even if racism disappeared

tomorrow, police brutality and misbehavior would persist, because
racism is just one of many factors that can contribute to it. There are
lots of examples of white police officers brutalizing white people. There are
cities, like Ferguson, Missouri, where police departments run by white people
amorphous cultural change is dubious triage at best.

brutalize a city disproportionately populated by black people; but

there are also cities like Baltimore where black officials oversee a
racially diverse police department where brutality is regularly
perpetrated by white and black officers. And while black police officers are not
always immune to anti-black prejudice, one need only study a place like Tijuana, where
Mexican cops routinely brutalize Mexican people, to see that police brutality is
often driven by something other than Americas racial atmosphere. Policies like Stop and
Frisk or the War on Drugs are going to victimize people in the
neighborhoods where they are focused even if policymakers have no
racist intent and police officers on the ground are angels. And
repealing those policies is a far more realistic project than
changing the water we all swim in in the hopes that the attendant
enlightenment would lead to repealing those policies. Even if broad
cultural change was a manageable project, is the water that we all swim in the relevant ecosystem? I
inhabit a bunch of different subcultures. But nothing I do in any of them seems to have much influence on
the subculture of police officers in cities that have a police brutality problem. Policing reforms are needed
precisely because we dont know how to change that subculture. That is partly because most would-be

I wonder if there is an even deeper flaw in the

change the water approach: to attempt it would seem to require a
large coalition that agrees on hotly contested questions about the
nature of race in America and how it intersects with policing. I do
not think as diverse a country as ours will ever come to agreement
on those subjects. Even the small subset of people eager to reform
policing dont agree on them. Take the assertion that the water we all swim in is
reformers dont swim in it.

unexamined whiteness. There are many Americans whove spent very little time thinking about
whiteness. On the other hand, nearly everyone in my age and educational cohort attended colleges where
whiteness was explicitly interrogated by multiple professors and administrators; read all sorts of journalism
that examines whiteness (for starters, youre presently reading a magazine that chose The End of White
America as a cover story); grew up listening to Jay-Z, Eminem and Prairie Home Companion; helped make
stars of Chris Rock and Louis C.K.; and watch popular TV shows including The Wire, The Sopranos, and The
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Our concepts of whiteness are so varied that some of us must be wrong
about parts of it. Even so, whiteness is far from unexamined in our subculture. Now lets imagine
someone in a different age and educational cohort. Hes a decade younger than me. At 25, he recently
started patrolling Harlem as an NYPD officer. Before that, he was in the NYPD academy; before that he was
in the U.S. army sitting in meetings with Pashtun elders and patrolling Afghan towns; he attended a Los
Angeles high school that was 30 percent white, 33 percent Asian, 25 percent Hispanic, and ten percent
black. He played football and tennis there. So the water through which he has swum isnt accurately
described by the unexamined whiteness, the everyday whiteness. His world has never been
predominantly white, and while his views on race might be enlightened, bigoted or neither, his whiteness
is very likely to have been examined regularly. He surely understands many things better than Professor
DiAngelo, or me, or anyone older than 30, or people whove never seen identity operate outside the United
States. Perhaps he doesnt understand some nuance of race in America that reflection in an academic
setting would reveal. Maybe his parents were able to co-sign on the mortgage for his first condo with
home-equity they earned from a house that appreciated during the boom years in a neighborhood where
their black peers werent able to move in the 1970s. Like Professor DiAngelo, I think there is value in
knowledge like that. It isnt clear to me how or why that knowledge would make him a better policeman or

For what does the

degree to which one has examined whiteness really tell us anyway?
Calls to interrogate or examine race often seem to presume that this
will produce views on race more closely aligned with those of the
person advocating the reflection. But some of the most virulent
racism in America comes from people who are deeply obsessed with
their whiteness. Its their favorite thing to examine. They spend their days trying
to prove the genetic superiority of the white race or persuading
why it would make a different person reconsider their views on policing.

themselves that whites are better than whatever immigrant group

theyre intent on excluding. They examined themselves and found
others wanting. In comparison to them, we would surely prefer white Americans whove spent
little if any time reflecting on their racial identity, but who nevertheless abhor police misconduct, speak up
against racism when they encounter it, raise their children to abhor racial prejudice, and vote for
candidates in part based on the policing reforms that they promise. Those people are improving society,

If a person like that asked me whether they should

spend a spare 5 hours in their weekly routine volunteering at a
community center for disadvantaged youth, canvassing their
neighborhood for a ballot measure to reform drug sentencing, or
examining their whiteness with as much intellectual rigor as
possible, I would advise them that the last option would do the least
to improve the world. Again, I dont mean to say that such reflection has no value. Another
not adding to its problems.

example: a moment of racial self-reflection might inspire the white owner of a small company to recognize
that implicit bias may be unfairly disadvantaging job applicants with traditionally black names, spurring
him to implement name-blind resume reviews. Yet an individual who is totally averse to reflecting on her
own whiteness might come to that same insight about the need for name-blind resume reviews in a
different way. Reflecting on what it really means to treat people as individuals might do the trick. Zooming

it seems to me that there is no one correct theory of race in the

United States, at least not one that even the most brilliant individual could comprehend. And if
someone wants to be the best human being that they can be, there is no one answer
about how much time and intensity they should dedicate to
reflecting on their racial identity. That might depend on the racial makeup of their
out,

community and their vocation and how much empathy for others they get intuitively and whether racial
prejudice was socialized into them during their upbringing and whether they learn better via facts or
experiences and a million other factors. Decreasing police brutality is an urgent issue. It may be the one I
write about more than any other. I do not imagine the particular reform priorities Ive put forth in some

the right approach cannot be

tantamount to, First, a majority should accept my ur-theory of race
in America, and only once theyre thus enlightened will the
conditions be right for reforms. No one is saying exactly that, but
its part of the subtext of more writing on the subject than Id like,
sometimes from people whose ur-theory of race in America I largely
share. Many of Professor DiAngelos thoughts are engaging and valuable, whether or not one agrees
with them. But lets not pretend that any highly contested humanities
theory on race in America is a plausible foundation for policing
reform, no matter how insightful it seems to a slice of the ideological
spectrum, which is free to pursue it in parallel but should not
attempt to put it at the center of this issue. A successful reform
coalition must encompass people with wildly different views on race in America, joining to stop
behavior that they agree is bad by urging specific reforms.
articles and implied in others are infallible. But