Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Framework
V: Liberty
S: Resisting Oppression
The role of the ballot is remaining consistent with the best
liberation strategy for the oppressed
The debate space allows us to engage in discussion which
allows us to break down racism to make change in the
community
Smith 13 [Elijah Smith, A Conversation in Ruins: Race and Black Participation in Lincoln Douglas Debate,
Vbriefly, 9/4/13 http://vbriefly.com/2013/09/06/20139a-conversation-in-ruins-race-and-black-participation-in-lincolndouglas-debate/]
abstractions to distance the conversation from the material reality that black debaters are forced to deal with every day. One of the students I coached,
who has since graduated after leaving debate, had an adult judge write out a ballot that concluded by hypothetically defending my student
being lynched at the tournament. Another debate concluded with a young man defending that we can kill animals humanely, just like we did that guy
Troy Davis. Community norms would have competitors do intellectual gymnastics or make up rules to accuse black debaters of breaking to escape hard
the form debate gives to a conversation is not the same you would use to discuss race in general conversation with Bayard Rustin or Fannie Lou Hamer,
that is not a reason we have to strip that conversation of its connection to a reality that black students cannot escape.
Helms statement was an argument over the meaning of the UDCits members,
its actions, and its insignia. It was an ideological struggle to maintain silence about the members whiteness and its implications
speaking have symbolic impact and as such are both rhetorica l. When considering the dialectic of speaking and silence,
he thinks of silence as the absence of speech. Silence is active, not passive; it may be interpreted. Furthermore, silence and
Over the last several years, police brutality in the U.S. and across its boarders has gradually increased.32 Moreover,
the issues of race, language barriers, and gender closely shadow reoccurring incidents.33 In addition, the injustices
suffered by victims of racial discrimination are well known. Historically, racism has been defined as the belief that
race is the primary determinant of human capacities. In effect, racism suggests that individuals should be treated
The notion that police brutality of minorities is greater than compared to whites is not a new concept. Since the mid-1960s, there have been several
United States Federal Commissions that have studied the trend.95 Unfortunately, most of the findings in the Kerner Report,96 a study published 40 years
ago, in 1968, still holds true today.97 Their findings were unambiguous and to the point: hostility between the police and minority communities was not
only a contributing factor to urban unrest and violence, but in some places, it was the sole factor.98 As the Commission put it, "Negroes firmly believe that
police
brutality
and
harassment
occur
repeatedly
in
Negro
neighborhoods.99 This belief is unquestionably one of the major reasons
for intense Negro resentment against the police.100 Even if the nation had somehow managed in
the intervening decades to resolve its urban and racial challenges, this extraordinary document invites a historical reflection.101 Furthermore, the Kerner
did, in reality, reflect and express those ideas.103 The Report also discussed the double standard of the American
justice system, where there is one set of laws applicable to whites and another for ethnic minorities.104 The Report
stated,
Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white
separate and unequal. What white Americans have never fully understood
but what the Negro can never forget is that white society is deeply
implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions
maintained it, and white society condones it. 105 After the infamous Rodney King case of 1991,106
Report, this
report included Latinos and Asian-Americans in accordance with the changing demographics of the United
States.108 The Christopher Commission affirmed many of the findings of The Kerner Report; however , it delves further
another commission was formed to revisit the perception of police brutality in minority communities.107 Unlike the previous Kerner
Further, social scientists have demonstrated that there is a definite relationship between ones occupational
environment and the way one interprets events; an occupation may be seen as a major badge of identity that an
individual acts to protect as a facet of his or her selfesteem and person.91 An indispensable key in understanding
police motives, fears, aspirations, and the moral codes by which they judge themselves is to understand and
acknowledge how the police learn to see the world around them and their place in it.92 Thus, entry requirements,
training, and professional socialization produce homogeneity of attitudes that guide police in their daily work. 93
Policing generates powerful distinctive ways of looking at the world, cognitive and behavioral responses, which
when taken together, may be said to constitute, a working personality.94
This is where racism intervenes, not from without, exogenously, but from within, constitutively. For the
emergence of biopower as the form of a new form of political rationality, entails the
inscription within the very logic of the modern state the logic of racism. For
racism grants, and here I am quoting: the conditions for the acceptability of
putting to death in a society of normalization. Where there is a society of
normalization, where there is a power that is, in all of its surface and in first instance, and first line, a biopower, racism is indispensable as a condition to be able to put to death
someone, in order to be able to put to death others. The homicidal [meurtrire]
function of the state, to the degree that the state functions on the modality of
bio-power, can only be assured by racism (Foucault 1997, 227) To use the formulations from
his 1982 lecture The Political Technology of Individuals which incidentally, echo his 1979 Tanner Lectures the
power of the state after the 18th century, a power which is enacted through the police, and is enacted over the
population, is a power over living beings, and as such it is a biopolitics. And, to quote more directly, since the
population is nothing more than what the state takes care of for its own sake, of course, the state is entitled to
slaughter it, if necessary. So the reverse of biopolitics is thanatopolitics. (Foucault 2000, 416). Racism, is the
thanatopolitics of the biopolitics of the total state. They are two sides of one same political technology, one same
political rationality: the management of life, the life of a population, the tending to the continuum of life of a people .
And with the inscription of racism within the state of biopowe r, the long history
of war that Foucault has been telling in these dazzling lectures has made a new turn: the war of peoples,
a war against invaders, imperials colonizers, which turned into a war of races, to
then turn into a war of classes, has now turned into the war of a race, a biological unit, against its polluters and
foes, and if we understand society as a unity of life, as a continuum of the living, then these threat and foes are
biological in nature.
exploitation, caste and class systems, coerced sterilization of social misfits and undesirables, unprincipled medical
experimentation, the subjugation of wom[x]n, and the social Darwinists' theory justifying indifference to the poverty
What is to be done? Two hundred years ago, when the slaves in Haiti rose
up, they, of necessity, burned everything: They burned San Domingo flat so that at the end of the
war it was a charred desert. Why do you burn everything? asked a French officer of a prisoner. We have a right to
burn what we cultivate because a man [person] has a right to dispose of his
own labour, was the reply of this unknown anarchist. The slaves burned everything
because everything was against them. Everything was against the slaves,
the entire order that it was their lot to follow, the entire order in which
they were positioned as worse than senseless things, every plantation,
everything. Leave nothing white behind you, said Toussaint to those dedicated to the end of
white-over black. God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time. The slaves burned
everything, yes, but, unfortunately, they only burned everything in Haiti.
Theirs was the greatest and most successful revolution in the history of
the world but the failure of their fire to cross the waters was the great
tragedy of the nineteenth century. At the dawn of the twentieth century, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, The
colorline belts the world. Du Bois said that the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the colorline. The problem,
now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century is the problem of the colorline. The colorline continues to belt the
become our response to the call. Slaves are not called. What becomes of them? What becomes of the broken-hearted?
The slaves are divided souls, they are brokenhearted, the slaves are split asunder by what they are
called upon to become. The slaves are called upon to become objects but objecthood is not a calling. The slave,
then, during its loneliest loneliness, is divided from itself. This is schizophrenia. The slaves are not called, or, rather,
the slaves are called to not be. The slaves are called unfree but this the living can never be and so the slaves burst
apart and die. The
It is only
under conditions of freedom, of bourgeois legality, that the slave can
becomes the perfect slave at the end of the timeline, only under conditions of total juridical freedom.
perfect itself as a slave by freely choosing to bow down before its master.
The slave perfects itself as a slave by offering a prayer for equal rights.
The system of marks is a plantation. The system of property is a
plantation. The system of law is a plantation. These plantations, all part of
the same system, hierarchy, produce white-overblack, white-over-black
only, and that continually. The slave perfects itself as a slave through its prayers for equal rights.
The plantation system will not commit suicide and the slave, as stated
above, has knowing non-knowledge of this fact. The slave finds its way
back from the undiscovered country only by burning down every
plantation. When the slave prays for equal rights it makes the free choice to be dead, and it makes the free choice to not be.
Education is the call. We are called to be and then we become something. We become that which we make of ourselves. We follow