Root Cause Core

Root Cause Core
Capitalism
Cap A2 Fem
Capitalism is the root cause of patriarchy economic is used as a
weapon to maintain existing gender hierarchies
Pharr, 98. Suzanne Pharr. Homophobia as a Weapon of Sexism. Race, Class, and
Gender in the United States. 6th edition. http://books.google.com/books?
hl=en&lr=&id=9I7ExPk-
920C&oi=fnd&pg=PA160&dq=capitalism+root+cause+sexism+patriarchy&ots=r8Sy4j_
EAN&sig=G0z-DnqAQK7YeETkia0qO14HQ1Y#v=onepage&q&f=true clawan
Economics is the great controller in both sexism and racism. If a person can't acquire food, shelter,
and clothing and provide them for children, then that person can be forced to do many things in order to survive .
The major tactic, world- wide, is to provide unrecompensed or inadequately recompensed labor for the
benefit of those who control wealth. Hence, we see women performing unpaid labor in the home or
filling low-paid jobs, and we see people of color in the lowest-paid jobs available. The method is
complex: limit educational and training opportunities for women and for people of color and then withhold
adequate paying jobs with the excuse that people of color and women are incapable of filling
them. Blame the economic victim and keep the victim's self-esteem low through invisibility and distortion
within the media and education. Allow a few people of color and women to succeed among the
profitmakers so that blaming those who don't "make it can be intensified. Encourage those few who succeed
in gaining power now to turn against those who remain behind rather than to use their resources to make change for all. Maintain the
myth of scarcity that there are not enough jobs, resources, etc., to go around among the middle class so that
they will not unite with laborers, immigrants, and the unemployed. The method keeps in place a
system of control and profit by a few and a constant source of cheap labor to maintain it. If
anyone steps out of line, take her/his job away. Let homelessness and hunger do their work. The economic
weapon works. And we end up saying, I would do this or that be openly who l am, speak out against injustice, work for civil rights,
join a labor union, go to a political march, etc. if l didnt have this job. I cant afford to lose it." We stay in an abusive situation because we
see no other way to survive .... Violence
against women is directly related to the condition of women in a
society that refuses us equal pay, equal access to resources, and equal status with males. From this
condition comes men's confirmation of their sense of ownership of women, power over women,
and assumed right to control women for their own means. Men physically and emotionally abuse women because
they can, because they live in a world that gives them permission. Male violence is fed by their sense of their right to dominate and control, and
their sense of superiority over a group of people who, because of gender, they consider inferior to them.
AT: Intersectionality/Micropolitics
Material relations cannot be changed through personal action
culturalizing class relations displaces any serious challenge to capitalism
McLaren 4
, Distinguished Fellow Critical Studies @ Chapman U and UCLA urban schooling prof,
and Scatamburlo-DAnnibale, associate professor of Communication U Windsor
(Peter and Valerie, Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of
difference, Educational Philosophy and Theory Vol. 36, Issue 2, p. 183-199) //ghs-nr)
Eager to take a wide detour around political economy, post-Marxists tend to assume that
the principal political points of departure in the current postmodern world must
necessarily be cultural. As such, most, but not all post-Marxists have gravitated towards
a politics of difference which is largely premised on uncovering relations of power that
reside in the arrangement and deployment of subjectivity in cultural and ideological
practices (cf. Jordan & Weedon, 1995). Advocates of difference politics therefore posit
their ideas as bold steps forward in advancing the interests of those historically
marginalized by dominant social and cultural narratives. There is no doubt that post-
Marxism has advanced our knowledge of the hidden trajectories of power within the
processes of representation and that it remains useful in adumbrating the formation of
subjectivity and its expressive dimensions as well as complementing our understandings
of the relationships between difference, language, and cultural configurations. However,
post-Marxists have been woefully remiss in addressing the constitution of class
formations and the machinations of capitalist social organization. In some instances,
capitalism and class relations have been thoroughly otherized; in others, class is
summoned only as part of the triumvirate of race, class, and gender in which class is
reduced to merely another form of difference. Enamored with the cultural and
seemingly blind to the economic, the rhetorical excesses of post-Marxists have also
prevented them from considering the stark reality of contemporary class conditions under
global capitalism. As we hope to show, the radical displacement of class analysis in
contemporary theoretical narratives and the concomitant decentering of capitalism, the
anointing of difference as a primary explanatory construct, and the culturalization of
politics, have had detrimental effects on left theory and practice. Reconceptualizing
Difference The manner in which difference has been taken up within post-al
frameworks has tended to stress its cultural dimensions while marginalizing and, in some
cases, completely ignoring the economic and material dimensions of difference. This
posturing has been quite evident in many post-al theories of race and in the realm of
ludic1 cultural studies that have valorized an account of differenceparticularly racial
differencein almost exclusively superstructuralist terms (Sahay, 1998). But this
treatment of difference and claims about the relative autonomy of race have been
enabled by a reduction and distortion of Marxian class analysis which involves
equating class analysis with some version of economic determinism. The key move in
this distorting gesture depends on the view that the economic is the base, the
cultural/political/ideological the superstructure. It is then relatively easy to show that the
(presumably non-political) economic base does not cause the political/cultural/ideological
superstructure, that the latter is/are not epiphenomenal but relatively autonomous or
autonomous causal categories (Meyerson, 2000, p. 2). In such formulations the cultural
is treated as a separate and autonomous sphere, severed from its embeddedness within
sociopolitical and economic arrangements. As a result, many of these culturalist
narratives have produced autonomist and reified conceptualizations of difference which
far from enabling those subjects most marginalized by racial difference have, in effect,
reduced difference to a question of knowledge/power relations that can presumably be
dealt with (negotiated) on a discursive level without a fundamental change in the
relations of production (Sahay, 1998). At this juncture, it is necessary to point out that
arguing that culture is generally conditioned/shaped by material forces does not
reinscribe the simplistic and presumably deterministic base/superstructure metaphor
which has plagued some strands of Marxist theory. Rather, we invoke Marx's own
writings from both the Grundrisse and Capital in which he contends that there is a
consolidating logic in the relations of production that permeates society in the complex
variety of its empirical reality. This emphasizes Marx's understanding of capitalism and
capital as a social relationone which stresses the interpenetration of these categories,
the realities which they reflect, and one which therefore offers a unified and dialectical
analysis of history, ideology, culture, politics, economics and society (see also Marx,
1972, 1976, 1977).2 Foregrounding the limitations of difference and representational
politics does not suggest a disavowal of the importance of cultural and/or discursive
arena(s) as sites of contestation and struggle. We readily acknowledge the significance of
contemporary theorizations that have sought to valorize precisely those forms of
difference that have historically been denigrated. This has undoubtedly been an
important development since they have enabled subordinated groups to reconstruct their
own histories and give voice to their individual and collective identities. However, they
have also tended to redefine politics as a signifying activity generally confined to the
realm of representation while displacing a politics grounded in the mobilization of
forces against the material sources of political and economic marginalization. In their
rush to avoid the capital sin of economism, many post-Marxists (who often ignore
their own class privilege) have fallen prey to an ahistorical form of culturalism which
holds, among other things, that cultural struggles external to class organizing provide the
cutting edge of emancipatory politics.3 In many respects, this posturing, has yielded an
intellectual pseudopolitics that has served to empower the theorist while explicitly
disempowering real citizens (Turner, 1994, p. 410). We do not discount concerns over
representation; rather our point is that progressive educators and theorists should not be
straightjacketed by struggles that fail to move beyond the politics of difference and
representation in the cultural realm. While space limitations prevent us from elaborating
this point, we contend that culturalist arguments are deeply problematic both in terms of
their penchant for de-emphasizing the totalizing (yes totalizing!) power and function of
capital and for their attempts to employ culture as a construct that would diminish the
centrality of class. In a proper historical materialist account, culture is not the other of
class but, rather, constitutes part of a more comprehensive theorization of class rule in
different contexts.4 Post-al theorizations of difference circumvent and undermine any
systematic knowledge of the material dimensions of difference and tend to segregate
questions of difference from class formation and capitalist social relations. We therefore
believe that it is necessary to (re)conceptualize difference by drawing upon Marx's
materialist and historical formulations. Difference needs to be understood as the
product of social contradictions and in relation to political and economic organization.
We need to acknowledge that otherness and/or difference is not something that
passively happens, but, rather, is actively produced. In other words, since systems of
differences almost always involve relations of domination and oppression, we must
concern ourselves with the economies of relations of difference that exist in specific
contexts. Drawing upon the Marxist concept of mediation enables us to unsettle our
categorical approaches to both class and difference, for it was Marx himself who warned
against creating false dichotomies in the situation of our politicsthat it was absurd to
choose between consciousness and the world, subjectivity and social organization,
personal or collective will and historical or structural determination. In a similar vein, it
is equally absurd to see difference as a historical form of consciousness unconnected to
class formation, development of capital and class politics (Bannerji, 1995, p. 30).
Bannerji points to the need to historicize difference in relation to the history and social
organization of capital and class (inclusive of imperialist and colonialist legacies).
Apprehending the meaning and function of difference in this manner necessarily
highlights the importance of exploring (1) the institutional and structural aspects of
difference; (2) the meanings that get attached to categories of difference; and (3) how
differences are produced out of, and lived within specific historical formations.5
AT: Modern Oppression Disproves
Turn - trying to explain away the historical record of capitalism through
appeals to race is a main component of the neoliberal strategy of
sanitation
Reed 2013 professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing
in race and American politics. He has taught at Yale, Northwestern and the New School
for Social Research. An expert on racial and economic inequality, he is a founding
member of the Labor Party and a frequent contributor to The Nation (2/25, Adolph,
Nonsite, Django Unchained, or, The Help: How Cultural Politics Is Worse Than No
Politics at All, and Why, http://nonsite.org/feature/django-unchained-or-the-help-how-
cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why)
The tendency to craft political critique by demanding that we fix our gaze in the rearview
mirror appeals to an intellectual laziness. Marking superficial similarities with familiar
images of oppression is less mentally taxing than attempting to parse the multifarious,
often contradictory dynamics and relations that shape racial inequality in particular and
politics in general in the current moment. Assertions that phenomena like the Jena,
Louisiana, incident, the killings of James Craig Anderson and Trayvon Martin, and
racial disparities in incarceration demonstrate persistence of old-school, white
supremacist racism and charges that the sensibilities of Thomas Dixon and Margaret
Mitchell continue to shape most Americans understandings of slavery do important,
obfuscatory ideological work. They lay claim to a moral urgency that, as Mahmood
Mamdani argues concerning the rhetorical use of charges of genocide, enables
disparaging efforts either to differentiate discrete inequalities or to generate historically
specific causal accounts of them as irresponsible dodges that abet injustice by
temporizing in its face.38 But more is at work here as well. Insistence on the
transhistorical primacy of racism as a source of inequality is a class politics. Its the
politics of a stratum of the professional-managerial class whose material location and
interests, and thus whose ideological commitments, are bound up with parsing,
interpreting and administering inequality defined in terms of disparities among
ascriptively defined populations reified as groups or even cultures. In fact, much of the
intellectual life of this stratum is devoted to shoehorning into the rubric of racism all
manner of inequalities that may appear statistically as racial disparities.39 And that
project shares capitalisms ideological tendency to obscure races foundations, as well as
the foundations of all such ascriptive hierarchies, in historically specific political
economy. This felicitous convergence may help explain why proponents of cultural
politics are so inclined to treat the products and production processes of the mass
entertainment industry as a terrain for political struggle and debate. They dont see the
industrys imperatives as fundamentally incompatible with the notions of a just society
they seek to advance. In fact, they share its fetishization of heroes and penchant for
inspirational stories of individual Overcoming. This sort of politics of representation is
no more than an image-management discourse within neoliberalism. That strains of an
ersatz left imagine it to be something more marks the extent of our defeat. And then, of
course, theres that Upton Sinclair point.
AT: Permutation/Intersectionality
The permutaton is worse than the aff alone. Intersectionality strips a
class focus of its revolutionary potential by treating it as another form of
difference
McLaren 4
In stating this, we need to include an important caveat that differentiates our approach
from those invoking the well-worn race/class/gender triplet which can sound, to the
uninitiated, both radical and vaguely Marxian. It is not. Race, class and gender, while
they invariably intersect and interact, are not co-primary. This triplet approximates
what the philosophers might call a category mistake. On the surface the triplet may be
convincingsome people are oppressed because of their race, others as a result of their
gender, yet others because of their classbut this is grossly misleading for it is not that
some individuals manifest certain characteristics known as class which then results in
their oppression; on the contrary, to be a member of a social class just is to be oppressed
and in this regard class is a wholly social category (Eagleton, 1998, p. 289).
Furthermore, even though class is usually invoked as part of the aforementioned and
much vaunted triptych, it is usually gutted of its practical, social dimension or treated
solely as a cultural phenomenonas just another form of difference. In these instances,
class is transformed from an economic and, indeed, social category to an exclusively
cultural or discursive one or one in which class merely signifies a subject position. Class
is therefore cut off from the political economy of capitalism and class power severed
from exploitation and a power structure in which those who control collectively
produced resources only do so because of the value generated by those who do not
(Hennessy & Ingraham, 1997, p. 2). Such theorizing has had the effect of replacing an
historical materialist class analysis with a cultural analysis of class. As a result, many
post-Marxists have also stripped the idea of class of precisely that element which, for
Marx, made it radicalnamely its status as a universal form of exploitation whose
abolition required (and was also central to) the abolition of all manifestations of
oppression (Marx, 1978, p. 60). With regard to this issue, Kovel (2002) is particularly
insightful, for he explicitly addresses an issue which continues to vex the Leftnamely
the priority given to different categories of what he calls dominative splittingthose
categories of gender, class, race, ethnic and national exclusion, etc. Kovel argues that
we need to ask the question of priority with respect to what? He notes that if we mean
priority with respect to time, then the category of gender would have priority since there
are traces of gender oppression in all other forms of oppression. If we were to prioritize
in terms of existential significance, Kovel suggests that we would have to depend upon
the immediate historical forces that bear down on distinct groups of peoplehe offers
examples of Jews in 1930s Germany who suffered from brutal forms of anti-Semitism
and Palestinians today who experience anti-Arab racism under Israeli domination. The
question of what has political priority, however, would depend upon which
transformation of relations of oppression are practically more urgent and, while this
would certainly depend upon the preceding categories, it would also depend upon the
fashion in which all the forces acting in a concrete situation are deployed. As to the
question of which split sets into motion all of the others, the priority would have to be
given to class since class relations entail the state as an instrument of enforcement and
control, and it is the state that shapes and organizes the splits that appear in human
ecosystems. Thus class is both logically and historically distinct from other forms of
exclusion (hence we should not talk of classism to go along with sexism and
racism, and species-ism). This is, first of all, because class is an essentially man-made
category, without root in even a mystified biology. We cannot imagine a human world
without gender distinctionsalthough we can imagine a world without domination by
gender. But a world without class is eminently imaginableindeed, such was the human
world for the great majority of our species time on earth, during all of which
considerable fuss was made over gender. Historically, the difference arises because class
signifies one side of a larger figure that includes a state apparatus whose conquests and
regulations create races and shape gender relations. Thus there will be no true resolution
of racism so long as class society stands, inasmuch as a racially oppressed society implies
the activities of a class-defending state. Nor can gender inequality be enacted away so
long as class society, with its state, demands the super-exploitation of women's labor.
(Kovel, 2002, pp. 123124)
AT: Personal Experience
Experiential knowledge is valuable in its appliclation to a broader social
context, but fetishization of experience as a means to itself priveleges
personal relations over larger structures
McLaren 4
Another caveat. In making such a claim, we are not renouncing the concept of
experience. On the contrary, we believe it is imperative to retain the category of lived
experience as a reference point in light of misguided post-Marxist critiques which imply
that all forms of Marxian class analysis are dismissive of subjectivity. We are not,
however, advocating the uncritical fetishization of experience that tends to assume that
experience somehow guarantees the authenticity of knowledge and which often treats
experience as self-explanatory, transparent, and solely individual. Rather, we advance a
framework that seeks to make connections between seemingly isolated situations and/or
particular experiences by exploring how they are constituted in, and circumscribed by,
broader historical and social circumstances. Experiential understandings, in and of
themselves, are suspect because, dialectically, they constitute a unity of oppositesthey
are at once unique, specific, and personal, but also thoroughly partial, social, and the
products of historical forces about which individuals may know little or nothing
(Gimenez, 2001). In this sense, a rich description of immediate experience in terms of
consciousness of a particular form of oppression (racial or otherwise) can be an
appropriate and indispensable point of departure. Such an understanding, however, can
easily become an isolated difference prison unless it transcends the immediate perceived
point of oppression, confronts the social system in which it is rooted, and expands into a
complex and multifaceted analysis (of forms of social mediation) that is capable of
mapping out the general organization of social relations. That, however, requires a broad
class-based approach.
AT: Colorblindness
Prioritizing class in revolutionary movements does not diminish the
importance of identity Their cooption argument rests on the flawed
assumption that working class people see race as central to their identity
McLaren 4
A radical political economy framework is crucial since various culturalist perspectives

seem to diminish the role of political economy and class forces in shaping the edifice of
the socialincluding the shifting constellations and meanings of difference.
Furthermore, none of the differences valorized in culturalist narratives alone, and
certainly not race by itself can explain the massive transformation of the structure of
capitalism in recent years. We agree with Meyerson (2000) that race is not an adequate
explanatory category on its own and that the use of race as a descriptive or analytical
category has serious consequences for the way in which social life is presumed to be
constituted and organized. The category of racethe conceptual framework that the
oppressed often employ to interpret their experiences of inequality often clouds the
concrete reality of class, and blurs the actual structure of power and privilege. In this
regard, race is all too often a barrier to understanding the central role of class in
shaping personal and collective outcomes within a capitalist society (Marable, 1995, pp.
8, 226). In many ways, the use of race has become an analytical trap precisely when it
has been employed in antiseptic isolation from the messy terrain of historical and
material relations. This, of course, does not imply that we ignore racism and racial
oppression; rather, an analytical shift from race to a plural conceptualization of
racisms and their historical articulations is necessary (cf. McLaren & Torres, 1999).
However, it is important to note that race doesnt explain racism and forms of racial
oppression. Those relations are best understood within the context of class rule, as
Bannerji, Kovel, Marable and Meyerson implybut that compels us to forge a
conceptual shift in theorizing, which entails (among other things) moving beyond the
ideology of difference and race as the dominant prisms for understanding exploitation
and oppression. We are aware of some potential implications for white Marxist criticalists
to unwittingly support racist practices in their criticisms of race-first positions
articulated in the social sciences. In those instances, white criticalists wrongly go on
high alert in placing theorists of color under special surveillance for downplaying an
analysis of capitalism and class. These activities on the part of white criticalists must be
condemned, as must be efforts to stress class analysis primarily as a means of creating a
white vanguard position in the struggle against capitalism. Our position is one that
attempts to link practices of racial oppression to the central, totalizing dynamics of
capitalist society in order to resist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy more fully.7
We have argued that it is virtually impossible to conceptualize class without attending to
the forms and contents of difference, but we insist that this does not imply that class
struggle is now outdated by the politics of difference. As Jameson (1998, p. 136) notes,
we are now in the midst of returning to the most fundamental form of class struggle in
light of current global conditions. Today's climate suggests that class struggle is not yet a
thing of the past and that those who seek to undermine its centrality are not only
morally callous and seriously out of touch with reality but also largely blind to the
needs of the large mass of people who are barely surviving capital's newly-honed
mechanisms of globalized greed (Harvey, 1998, pp. 79). In our view, a more
comprehensive and politically useful understanding of the contemporary historical
juncture necessitates foregrounding class analysis and the primacy of the working class as
the fundamental agent of change.8 This does not render as secondary the concerns of
those marginalized by race, ethnicity, etc. as is routinely charged by post-Marxists. It is
often assumed that foregrounding capitalist social relations necessarily undermines the
importance of attending to difference and/or trivializes struggles against racism, etc., in
favor of an abstractly defined class-based politics typically identified as white. Yet,
such formulations rest on a bizarre but generally unspoken logic that assumes that racial
and ethnic minorities are only conjuncturally related to the working class. This stance is
patently absurd since the concept of the working class is undoubtedly comprised of men
and women of different races, ethnicities, etc. (Mitter, 1997). A good deal of post-Marxist
critique is subtly racist (not to mention essentialist) insofar as it implies that people of
color could not possibly be concerned with issues beyond those related to their racial or
ethnicdifference. This posits people of color as single-minded, one-dimensional
caricatures and assumes that their working lives are less crucial to their self-
understanding (and survival) than is the case with their white male counterparts.9 It
also ignores the fact that class is an ineradicable dimension of everybody's lives
(Gimenez, 2001, p. 2) and that social oppression is much more than tangentially linked to
class background and the exploitative relations of production. On this topic, Meyerson
(2000) is worth quoting at length: Marxism properly interpreted emphasizes the primacy
of class in a number of senses. One of course is the primacy of the working class as a
revolutionary agenta primacy which does not render women and people of color
secondary. This view assumes that working class means whitethis division between
a white working class and all the others, whose identity (along with a corresponding
social theory to explain that identity) is thereby viewed as either primarily one of gender
and race or hybrid [T]he primacy of class means that building a multiracial, multi-
gendered international working-class organization or organizations should be the goal of
any revolutionary movement so that the primacy of class puts the fight against racism and
sexism at the center. The intelligibility of this position is rooted in the explanatory
primacy of class analysis for understanding the structural determinants of race, gender,
and class oppression. Oppression is multiple and intersecting but its causes are not.
AT: Libido/Fanon/Psychoanalysis
Fanons theory of desire is based on flawed, deterministic
psychoanalysis that undermines agency
Gordon 1
(Paul, psycotherapist from the Philadelphia Assosiation, Psychoanalysis and
Racism: The Politics of Defeat, Race Class 2001 42: 17, accessed via sage //ghs-nr)
Fanon is sometimes held up as an example the example perhaps of how to approach
racism psychoanalytically, of the value of a psychoanalytic `reading' of racism. While it
is true that Fanon wrote in the introduction to his classic text that only a psychoanalytic
interpretation of `the black problem' could account for the structure of the complex, it
has to be stressed that his psychoanalysis is a highly idiosyncratic one.20 It is poetic,
informed by philosophy, particularly phenomenology, critically self-re exive, turned upon
itself. At one point, Fanon dismisses Freud's notion of a universal Oedipus complex, one
of the fundamental tenets of psychoanalysis: Ìt would be relatively easy for me to show',
he says, `that in the French Antilles 97 per cent of families cannot produce one Oedipal
neurosis.'21 Researchers, he comments, are so imbued with the complexes of their own
society that they feel compelled to nd them duplicated in the people they study. Fanon,
in other words, is very far from being an orthodox follower of psychoanalysis. In his
hands, psychoanalysis becomes something altogether different from the dogma that
prevailed either when he was alive or now. It is somewhat galling, therefore, to witness
attempts at the incor- poration and accommodation of this radical spirit and revolutionary
man into a psychoanalytic canon, even an àlternative' one, or his incarnation as some
kind of progenitor of `cultural studies'.22 Contemporary psychoanalysis The followers
of Freud since then have, with few exceptions, been remarkably silent on the matter of
racism. As for the exceptions, their thoughts are of little value, at best banal, at worst
insulting. Thus, we are told, racism is but a variant of group hatred or the release of
frustration against a socially permitted object or a form of sibling rivalry or a fear of shit,
and so on.23 At a more rareed level, the prominent French psychoanalyst Janine
Chasseguet-Smirgel nds the origins of the Nazi genocide in the Oedipus complex, an
actualisation, albeit an extreme one, of the supposed universal unconscious phantasy24 to
strip the mother's body of its contents in order to return to that place that one originally
inhabited. It is this phantasy, Chasseguet-Smirgel claims, that lies at the heart of Nazi
ideology and, in particular, the notion of a 1,000 year Reich cleansed of Jewry.25 As for
Joel Kovel's White Racism: a psychohistory, rst published in 1970, one must, I think,
applaud the ambitious attempt to produce a work rooted both in psychology,
psychoanalysis in particular, and in the material historical world.26 At the same time,
Kovel was, at the time he wrote the book, much too wedded to a highly orthodox reading
of psychoanalysis which, at times at least, seemed to offer no escape from a
psychoanalytic fatalism or determinism. In his preface to the 1984 edition, Kovel
distanced himself from his earlier position, rejecting any notion of an innate impulse
towards aggression and therefore racism and declaring in favour of the idea of a
`peculiarity in the state of being human which makes us so prone to racism', the degree of
susceptibility being socially, culturally and historically determined.27 Whatever the
limitations of his work, Kovel's remains a unique attempt to understand racism with a
foot in both camps that of the mind and that of society. Racism, the unconscious and
the body But in the thirty years since Kovel wrote, that attempt to relate mind and
society has been fractured by the advent of postmodernism, with its subsumption of the
material/historical, of notions of cause and effect, to what is transitory, contingent, free-
oating, evanescent. Psycho- analysis, by stepping into the vacuum left by the
abandonment of all metanarrative, has tended to put mind over society. This is
particularly noticeable in the work of the Centre for New Ethnicities Research at the
University of East London, which purports to straddle the worlds of the academy and
action by developing projects for the local community and within education generally.28
But, in marrying psychoanalysis and postmodernism, on the basis of claiming to be both
scholarly and action oriented, it degrades scholarship and undermines action, and finds
in discourse analysis a language in which metaphor passes for reality. The Centre's
director, Philip Cohen, who established it in 1992 as the New Ethnicities Unit, first set
out his project in systematic form in a lengthy contribution, entitled `The perversions of
inheritance: studies in the making of multi-racist Britain', to Multi-Racist Britain, a book
he co-edited with Harwant Bains in 1988.29 The crux of Cohen's position seems to be
this: racism does not become unconscious because it is institutionalised; rather, racism
becomes institutionalised because it operates unconsciously, `behind the backs' of the
subjects which it positions within these impersonal structures of power.30 His second key
point has to do with ideology. Cohen acknowledges that ideologies have a `material
history', a context of political and economic forces, but he does so only to dismiss such
material history with a theoretical sweep of his hand. What he calls `the deep structure
of ideology, its generative grammar', is, he makes clear, ìn no way dependent on these
factors'. It belongs, rather, to the language of the unconscious, the `discourse of the Other,
embodied in myths, rituals and fantasy'.31 Cohen's particular psychoanalytic framework
draws heavily on post-Kleinian developments and the idea of race as an èmpty category'
put forward by Michael Rustin, a colleague of Cohen's at the Univer- sity of East
London. Rustin, a sociologist considerably in uenced by psychoanalytic thought,
especially the work of Melanie Klein and the British Kleinian tradition, argues that
racism is what Kleinians call a psychotic attribute. This does not mean that such attributes
are held only or mainly by people designated psychotic, but that psychotic attributes of
mind are ùniversal, original and latent components of human mentality; never wholly
banished from the self; liable to become more salient in conditions of fear and anxiety
than in more benign settings; and of course more central and pathogenic in some
individuals than in others, sometimes for explicable reasons in an individual's psychic
history'. Racism is, in this schema, the expression of `powerful doses of bad psychic
stuff'. acism should be understood, Rustin says, as a state of mind rather than in terms of
its `phenomenal content' and, in this view, racist states of mind are but one of many
possible forms of irrational and negative projections of group feeling. `Race' is, as
mentioned above, an empty category which can be lled with whatever people want to
fill it with. Like Cohen, Rustin claims that racism's power lies at an unconscious level
and thus any attempt to challenge it `by anti-racist teaching or propaganda' is bound to
fail.32 For Cohen, one of the principal ways in which the racist imagination works is
through fantasies about the body. Popular racism, he writes, does not rely on theories
about society but is à behavioural ideology, one which works through everyday cultural
practices to shape basic bodily images of Self and Other'.33 In particular, Cohen argues,
racism operates through an idealised fantasy image of the white body and, the converse,
its `monstrous negation'. If I understand him cor- rectly and it must be said that much of
the time it is not at all clear what he is saying Cohen argues that the alienation involved
in labour `sets in motion' a compensatory desire for a different kind of body, one that is
self-generating and dependent on nothing outside itself. `The habitus is magically
transformed into a kind of second womb that will give birth to a new man or woman, the
embodiment of living labor freed once and for all from the dead hand of alienation.'34
What is being racialised or nationalised is the maternal body or, rather, the body in its
maternal functions related to the womb or the breast. As he says elsewhere, `the lethal
aspect of racial harassment is not the material damage done, but the hidden wounds in
icted as it sets in motion the ancient regression from room to womb and turns the womb
into a kind of tomb'.35
The libidinal explanation for racism removes a material problem and

individualizes it that precludes action
Gordon 1
Given that racism works at an unconscious level, it follows, in Cohen's view, that
strategies to challenge it at a conscious level are doomed to failure. They are bound to fail
precisely because they are rational and fail to appreciate that the power of racism lies in
the fact that it is unconscious. To deinstitutionalise racism `will not in itself abolish the
power of the racist imagination' which will continue to ourish through the media of
popular culture long after its state forms have withered away.42 Àll the evidence to date',
Cohen writes elsewhere, `shows that the racist imagination is not accessible to rationalist
pedagogies, and almost effortlessly resists their impact'. What is all this evidence?
Certainly it is neither presented nor cited.43 Rustin, too, claims that classroom teaching
can have the effect of ìncreasing kinds of defensive organisation'. But he cites no
evidence other than referring to Cohen's work and seems to believe that all ànti-
racism' in education is a matter of seeking to change attitudes, rather than opening up new
ways of looking at the world.44 In Cohen's schema, then, racism is taken out of society
and material reality and lodged very firmly in the minds, the unconscious minds, of
individual subjects. Although in his 1988 article, `The perversions of inheritance', he
distanced himself from a position that afforded absolute autonomy to the ideological, and
thus ran the risk, as he acknowledged, of `substituting changes in personal attitude or
societal values for structural reforms', this is, in fact, where he has ended up. As his work
has developed, there is less and less sense of any political project of anti-racism and an
almost exclusive concentration on dealing with the beliefs and attitudes of racists.
Ideology has become all. In placing racism in the unconscious, Cohen is very much in
line with the most orthodox of psychoanalysis which claims to nd ìnside' individuals
(whatever that might mean the notion of an ìnter- nal world' is always taken for
granted and never really put into question) what actually belongs in society, in what
psychoanalysis calls `the external world'. Indeed, one of the earliest Marxist critiques of
Freud's theories made precisely this point, accusing Freud of rendering individual what
was irredeemably social.45 In the same vein, and particularly germane to the present
discussion, the refusal of psychoanalysis to acknowledge social and political reality, to
see what is in front of it, is exemplied in the following story.
The application of psychoanalysis to race is false its based on

unverifiable pseudoscience their co-option arguments presents a one
dimentional, essentialist view of social relations
Gordon 1
Cohen's work unavoidably raises the question of the status of psychoanalysis as a social or
political theory, as distinct from a clinical one. Can psychoanalysis, in other words, apply to the social world
of groups, institutions, nations, states and cultures in the way that it does, or at least may do, to individuals? Certainly there is now a
considerable body of literature and a plethora of academic courses, and so on, claiming that psychoanalysis is a social theory. And, of course, in popular
discourse, it is now a commonplace to hear of nations and societies spoken of in personalised
ways. Thus `truth commissions' and the like, which have become so common in the past decade in countries which have undergone turbulent change,
are seen as forms of national therapy or catharsis, even if this is far from being their purpose. Never- theless, the question remains: does it make sense, as
Michael Ignatieff puts it, to speak of nations having psyches the way that individuals do? `Can a nation's past make people ill as we know repressed
memories sometimes make individuals ill? . . . Can we speak of nations ``working through'' a civil war or an atrocity as we speak of individuals working
The problem with the application of psychoanalysis to social
through a traumatic memory or event?'47
institutions is that there can be no testing of the claims made. If someone says, for instance, that
nationalism is a form of looking for and seeking to replace the body of the mother one has lost, or that the popular appeal of a particular kind of story
The pioneers of psychoanalysis, from
echoes the pattern of our earliest relationship to the maternal breast, how can this be proved?
Freud onwards, all derived their ideas in the context of their work with individual patients and their
ideas can be examined in the everyday laboratory of the therapeutic encounter where the validity of an interpretation, for example,
is a matter for dialogue between therapist and patient. Outside of the con- sulting room, there can be no
such verification process, and the further one moves from the individual patient, the less
purchase psychoanalytic ideas can have. Outside the therapeutic encounter, anything and everything can be true,
psychoanalytically speaking. But if everything is true, then nothing can be false and therefore nothing can be true. An example of Cohen's method is to
be found in his 1993 working paper, `Home rules', subtitled `Some re ections on racism and nationalism in everyday life'. Here Cohen talks about taking
a `particular line of thought for a walk'. While there is nothing wrong with taking a line of thought for a walk, such an exercise is not necessarily the same
as thinking. One of the problems with Cohen's approach is that a kind of free association, mixed with deconstruction, leads not to analysis, not even to
psychoanalysis, but to . . . well, just more free association, an endless, indeed one might say pointless, play on words. This approach may well throw up
some interesting associations along the way, connections one had never thought of but it is not to be confused with political analysis. In `Home rules',
anything and everything to do with `home' can and does nd a place here and, as I indicated above, even the popular lm Home Alone is pressed into
Cohen's method also relies to no little extent on various caricatures.
service as a story about `racial' invasion.
There is the parody of an undifferentiated anti-racism which is always crude and
simplistic in its explanations, always dogmatic and authori- tarian in its prescriptions. Ìt is no longer possible', Cohen claims at one
point, `to call a spade a spade . . . because the level of connotations, which is always open to multiple associations, including racist ones, has been shut
down ``By Order''.'48 No one would deny that much that is called anti-racism has been ill-considered or counter-productive or simple-minded, but to
suggest that this is the whole story and this is the picture one gets from Cohen's account appears simply bad faith. Nor does one get any sense from
his account that some forms of anti- racism have been subjected to the most rigorous critique from other anti-racists, notably in this journal. So, too,
there is the distorted depiction of teachers bearing the anti-racist message. In Cohen's world, they
are always middle class, relying on a `deficit model' of working-class culture, and
engaged in a `civilising mission', believing themselves to be `the bringers of reason and
tolerance to those gripped by unreason, prejudice and ignorance'.49 Doubtless such attitudes exist, but Cohen's depiction is so
one-dimensional; it has no room for complexity or difference. If it did, he could not take up the position that
he does, of the one who really knows. It is also a position that takes Cohen on to dangerous ground in which, at times at least, it seems as though all
authority is bad (in the language of Foucault, it is tutelary and constitutes surveillance) and all resistance to authority good, or at least understandable.50
This is the worst form of defeatism abandoning the potential for
collective action of the working class based on junk science makes
oppression inevitable
Gordon 1
Cohen is in many ways representative of those `radicals' who, in response to the setback
of the radical political project of the 1960s and 1970s, abandoned not just the Marxist
framework within which they had worked, but anything which they saw as in any way
connected to the idea of the Enlightenment. It is here, goes the thinking, that the roots of
so much that is wrong with radical politics are to be found, for it is with the
Enlightenment that men (yes, men) begin to think that they, rather than God or fate, may
be able to make history. But for the postmodernists, this is not only hubris, it is a hubris
that leads inexorably to the nightmares of the twentieth century, in particular the
Holocaust and the Gulag. Cohen adds to this the claim that the very notion of
ènlightenment' (his inverted commas) is deeply impli- cated in a practice of reason
which is historically rooted in certain dominant forms of European race thinking. Reason,
he appears to be saying, is racist.57 The postmodernists' problem is that they cannot live
with dis- appointment. All the tragedies of the political project of emancipation the
evils of Stalinism in particular are seen as the inevitable product of men and women
trying to create a better society. But, rather than engage in a critical assessment of how,
for instance, radical political movements go wrong, they discard the emancipatory
project and impulse itself. The postmodernists, as Sivanandan puts it, blame modernity
for having failed them: `the intellectuals and academics have ed into discourse and
deconstruction and representation as though to interpret the world is more important
than to change it, as though changing the interpretation is all we could do in a changing
world'.58 To justify their flight from a politics holding out the prospect of radical change
through self-activity, the disappointed intellectuals find abundant intellectual alibis for
themselves in the very work they champion, including, in Cohen's case, psychoanalysis.
What Marshall Berman says of Foucault seems true also of psychoanalysis; that it offers
à world-historical alibi' for the passivity and helplessness felt by many in the 1970s, and
that it has nothing but contempt for those naive enough to imagine that it might be
possible for modern humankind to be free. At every turn for such theorists, as Berman
argues, whether in sexuality, politics, even our imagination, we are nothing but prisoners:
there is no freedom in Foucault's world, because his language forms a seamless web, a
cage far more airtight than anything Weber ever dreamed of, into which no life can
break . . . There is no point in trying to resist the oppressions and injustices of modern
life, since even our dreams of freedom only add more links to our chains; however, once
we grasp the futility of it all, at least we can relax.59Cohen's political defeatism and his
conviction in the explanatory power of his new faith of psychoanalysis lead him to be
contemptuous and dismissive of any attempt at political solidarity or collective action.
For him, `communities' are always ìmagined', which, in his view, means based on
fantasy, while different forms of working-class organisation, from the craft fraternity to
the revolutionary group, are dismissed as `fantasies of self-sufficient combination'.60 In
this scenario, the idea that people might come together, think together, analyse together
and act together as rational beings is impossible. The idea of a genuine community of
equals becomes a pure fantasy, a `symbolic retrieval' of something that never existed in
the first place: `Community is a magical device for conjuring something apparently
solidary out of the thin air of modern times, a mechanism of re-enchantment.' As for
history, it is always false, since `We are always dealing with invented traditions.'61 Now,
this is not only nonsense, but dangerous nonsense at that. Is history àlways false'? Did
the Judeocide happen or did it not? And did not some people even try to resist it? Did
slavery exist or did it not, and did not people resist that too and, ultimately, bring it to an
end? And are communities always ìmagined'? Or, as Sivanandan states, are they beaten
out on the smithy of a people's collective struggle?Furthermore, all attempts to legislate
against ideology are bound to fail because they have to adopt `technologies of
surveillance and control identical to those used by the state'. Note here the Foucauldian
language to set up the notion that all `surveillance' is bad. But is it? No society can
function without surveillance of some kind. The point, surely, is that there should be a
public conversation about such moves and that those responsible for implementing them
be at all times accountable. To equate, as Cohen does, a council poster about `Stamping
out racism' with Orwell's horrendous prophecy in 1984 of a boot stamping on a human
face is ludicrous and insulting. (Orwell's image was intensely personal and destructive;
the other is about the need to challenge not individuals, but a collective evil.) Cohen
reveals himself to be deeply ambivalent about punitive action against racists, as though
punishment or other firm action against them (or anyone else transgressing agreed social
or legal norms) precluded ùnderstand- ing' or even help through psychotherapy.It is
indeed a strange kind of ànti-racism' that portrays active racists as the `victims', those
who are in need of `help'. But this is where Cohen's argument ends up. In their move
from politics to the academy and the world of `discourse', the postmodernists may have
simply exchanged one grand narrative, historical materialism, for another,
psychoanalysis.62 For psychoanalysis is a grand narrative, par excellence. It is a theory
that seeks to account for the world and which recognises few limits on its explanatory
potential. And the claimed radicalism of psychoanalysis, in the hands of the
postmodernists at least, is not a radicalism at all but a prescription for a politics of
quietism, fatalism and defeat. Those wanting to change the world, not just to interpret
it, need to look elsewhere.
AT: Ross
It is impossible to attribute symbolic racist motives to policy and

individuals in policy debates
Sniderman and Tetlock 86
[Paul M. Sniderman, Stanford University and UC Berkeley Survey Research Center, and
Philip E. Tetlock, UC Berkeley, 1986, Symbolic Racism: Problems of Motive
Attribution in Political Analysis, accessed 3/31/14]
At what point is one justified in concluding that racist motives determine a policy
preference? Not surprisingly, different groups set different thresholds of proof. Some civil
rights activists View opposition to affirmative action quotas as inspired in large part by
racism. Some conservatives see the same programs as threats to fundamental (nonracial)
values such as equality of opportunity. Dis- agreements of this sort, of course, are the
stuff of politics. One persons reason is frequently anothers rationalization (cf. Mills,
1940; Tetlock, 1985). Symbolic racism theory, in its fundamental sense, is an attempt to
apply the methods of social science. to the problem of political motive attribution. It is
therefore important to consider an especially basic question: to what extent are political
debates over the true motives" underlying racial policy preferences resolvable through
the techniques of causal analysis available to the social sciences? The answer to this
question is by no means obvious. Problems of political motive attribution may roughly be
divided into easy and hard cases. An example of the former is old-fashioned racism;
of the latter, symbolic racism. Consider old-fashioned racism: what analytical tools might
the investigator draw upon to determine whether traditional racism underlies opposition
to quotas? The classical strategy is to locate attitudes toward quotas in a nomological
network of relevant constructs-constructs that should theoretically relate to attitudes
toward quotas (cf. Cronbach & Meehl, 1955). Thus, one would explore the relations
among affect toward blacks, crude stereotyping of blacks, policy stands that
contemporary American political culture would label as unambiguously racist (erg.,
support for segregation), and policy stands whose meaning is politically controversial
(e.g., minority job quotas). Now a case such as this, though easy in principle, may in
practice be quite hard. (What third variables" moderate the relation between traditional
racism and opposition to quotas? To what extent does the relationship hold when one
controls for alternative explanations such as traditional values or attitudes toward the
federal government?) Even so, a hard case, such as symbolic racism, represents a quite
different order of difficulty. The difficulty is as follows: There is no nomological net in
the case of symbolic racism. Many of the motive attributions are contestable, not merely
by the person to whom they are attributed, but also by other analysts generally. And
they are inherently contestable because the symbolic racism approach begs the question
how, after all, is one to tell whether opposition to affirmative action is racist or not
when, in the case of symbolic racism, racism is not related to an agreed-on sign of
racism, for example, crude stereotyping? Lacking positive evidence of racist motivation,
one might turn to negative evidence. Perhaps one could infer racist motivation by a
process of elimina- tionby ruling out other plausible motives for, say, opposing
affirmative action. Thus, an investigator might propose that because the well-being of the
individual respondent is not directly threatened by quotas, the individual is not driven by
concern for his or her selfinterest. Negative arguments, however, are inherently weak
ways to resolve problems of motive attribution (cf. Tetlock & Manstead, i985). The
variety of alternative motives for taking a particular policy stand is practically endless.
How exactly should one go about operationalizing "self-interest"-objective life
circumstances (the presence or absence of a quota system in ones place of work),
perceived life circumstances (do the respondents believe, in competing for scarce societal
resources, they are at a comparative disadvantage by virtue of being white?), or the
perceived life circumstances of individuals or groups with whom the respondent
identifies (e.g., friends, family, neighbors)? Moreover, self-interest is only one class of
motivational counterhypothesis. Perhaps the respondent objects out of belief that color-
blind decision-making procedures provide the fairest method of guaranteeing equality of
opportunity (or social harmony) in the long run. Or perhaps the respondent perceives
quota systems as one more manifestation of an increasingly intrusive and legalistic
federal bureau- cracy that restricts individual freedom and market efficiency. Symbolic
racism researchers have only skimmed the surface of such potential motivational
counter-hypotheses. But, supposing they went deeper: Is the attribution of symbolic
racism falsiable? We believe not. The list of counter- hypotheses is, in principle, infinite.
Furthermore, the flow of causality, even when studied by the most sophisticated statistical
modeling procedures, will remain highly ambiguous as long as symbolic racism
researchers reserve the right to label a wide range of (nonracial) values and policy
preferences as racist. Suppose, for example, that one were to nd that all the variance in
white opposition to government assistance for blacks could be statistically explained as a
function of commitment to economic individualism, antipathy toward the federal
government, and the belief that market mechanisms are the most efficient method of
alleviating the plight of the poor. Assume, moreover, that affect toward blacks did not
even emerge as a significant predictor of opposition to government assistance to blacks.
Would this at first glance, quite devastating evidence count against the symbolic
racism thesis? Not necessarily. Symbolic racism researchers could respond that such data
only buttress their case. After all, the data reveal a connection between traditional values
(support for economic individualism and capitalism) and opposition to assistance for
blacks, and these traditional values are the very essence of symbolic racism. In short, as
currently formulated, symbolic racism theory fails the fundamental test expected of any
scientific theory falsifiability. It is unclear what evidence it would take to convince
symbolic racism researchers they are wrong.
Gender
Gender A2 Cap
Analyses of capitalism alone cannot confront gendered violence only
including interrogations of sexism can solve
Hartmann, 76. Heidi Hartmann. Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex.
Signs, Vol. 1, No. 3, Women and the Workplace: The Implications of Occupational
Segregation (Spring, 1976), pp. 137-169. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173001 clawan
The emergence of capitalism in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries threatened patriarchal
control based on institutional authority as it de- stroyed many old institutions and created
new ones, such as a "free" market in labor. It threatened to bring all women and children
into the labor force and hence to destroy the family and the basis of the power of men
over women (i.e., the control over their labor power in the family).2 If the theoretical
tendency of pure capitalism would have been to eradi- cate all arbitrary differences of
status among laborers, to make all laborers equal in the marketplace, why are women
still in an inferior position to men in the labor market? The possible answers are legion;
they range from neoclassical views that the process is not complete or is hampered by
market imperfections to the radical view that production requires hierarchy even if the
market nominally requires "equality."3All of these explanations, it seems to me, ignore
the role of men-ordinary men, men as men, men as workers-in maintaining women's
inferiority in the labor market. The radical view, in particular, emphasizes the role of men
as capitalists in creating hierarchies in the production process in order to maintain their
power. Capitalists do this by segmenting the labor market (along race, sex, and ethnic
lines among others) and playing workers off against each other. In this paper I argue that
male workers have played and continue to play a crucial role in maintaining sexual
divisions in the labor process. Job segregation by sex, I will argue, is the primary
mechanism in capitalist society that maintains the superiority of men over women,
because it enforces lower wages for women in the labor market. Low wages keep women
dependent on men because they encourage women to marry. Married women must
perform domestic chores for their hus- bands. Men benefit, then, from both higher wages
and the domestic division of labor. This domestic division of labor, in turn, acts to
weaken women's position in the labor market. Thus, the hierarchical domestic division of
labor is perpetuated by the labor market, and vice versa. This process is the present
outcome of the continuing interaction of two interlocking systems, capitalism and
patriarchy. Patriarchy, far from being vanquished by capitalism, is still very virile; it
shapes the form modern capitalism takes, just as the development of capitalism has trans-
formed patriarchal institutions. The resulting mutual accommodation between patriarchy
and capitalism has created a vicious circle for women. My argument contrasts with the
traditional views of both neoclassical and Marxist economists. Both ignore patriarchy, a
social system with a material base. The neoclassical economists tend to exonerate the
capitalist system, attributing job segregation to exogenous ideological factors, like
sexist attitudes. Marxist economists tend to attribute job segregation to capitalists,
ignoring the part played by male workers and the effect of centuries of patriarchal social
relations. In this paper I hope to redress the balance. The line of argument I have outlined
here and will develop further below is perhaps incapable of proof. This paper, I hope, will
establish its plausibility rather than its incontrovertability.
Gender A2 Race
Patriarchy root cause of racism differing gender relations causes
antagonism between racial groups
Ingraham, 94. Chrys Ingraham, July 1994. The Heterosexual Imaginary: Feminist
Sociology and Theories of Gender. Sociological Theory, Vol. 12, No. 2.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/201865 clawan
Patriarchy is also historically variable, producing a hierarchy of heterogender divisions
which privileges men as a group and exploits women as a group. It structures social
practices which it represents as natural and universal and which are reinforced by its
organizing institutions and rituals (e.g., marriage). As a totality, patriarchy organizes
difference by positioning men in hierarchical opposition to women and differentially in
relation to other structures, such as race or class. Its continued success depends on the
maintenance of regimes of difference as well as on a range of material forces. It is a
totality that not only varies cross-nationally, but also manifests differently across ethnic,
racial, and class boundaries within nations. For instance, patriarchy in African-American
culture differs significantly from patriarchy in other groups in U.S. society. Even though
each group shares certain understandings of hierarchical relations between men and
women, the historical relation of African-American men to African-American women is
dramatically different from that among Anglo-European Americans. Among African-
Americans, a group which has suffered extensively from white supremacist policies and
practices, solidarity as a "racial" group has frequently superseded asymmetrical divisions
based on gender. This is not to say that patriarchal relations do not exist among African
Americans, but that they have manifested differently among racial-ethnic groups as a
result of historical necessity. Interestingly, racism has sometimes emerged in relation to
criticisms of African-American men for not being patriarchal enough by Euro-American
standards. As a totality, patriarchy produces structural effects that situate men differently
in relation to women and to each other according to history.
Race
Race A2 Anthro
Conceptions of racism and the racial Other provide the foundation for
the oppression and exploitation of nonhuman animals perm is key
Eckersley, 98. ROBYN ECKERSLEY, Professor and Head of Political Science in the
School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Australia. Beyond
Human Racism. Environmental Values, Vol. 7, No. 2 (May 1998), pp. 165-182.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/30301627 clawan
In a recent critical examination of the anthropocentrism debate, Tim Hayward has suggested that the term anthropocentrism is something of a misnomer and that we need a more
appropriate vocabulary to capture the main gist of the critique (Hayward 1997, 49). It is certainly true that the terms anthropocentrism and non-anthropocentrism have generated as
much heat as light, and critics have continued to recycle a range of familiar arguments to show that non- anthropocentrism is impossible (how can we avoid being human-
centred?), unnecessary (Human Welfare Ecology can perform all the necessary work [e.g. Wells 1993]) and undesirable (non-anthropocentrism is an insult to humanism [e. g.
Bookchin l995]).2 Obviously, we cannot avoid being anthropocentric if all it is taken to mean is, without explanation and qualification, simply being human-centred in the sense
of perceiving and interpreting the world from a human vantage point. If it is accepted that we cannot break out of the hermeneutic circle, then it is naive to expect that we can
avoid being anthropocentric in this formal sense of the term. Thus, one might readily accept that humans are the source and centre of meaning in the world (that we are interpreting
animals), while rejecting the proposition that this must necessarily mean that humans are the sole centre of value or agency. However, this argument about the impossi- bility of
formal non-anthropocentrism misses the main point of the substantive, moral critique of anthropocentrism. Yet the confusion is perhaps understandable, since the core term
anthropocentrism carries multiple meanings. For this reason alone (although there are other reasons as well) we should probably dispense with it and find another that reduces the
The point, as Lynch himself has succinctly put it in another

considerable burden of explanation and qualification.
context, is to establish the possibility of a human point of view - a view of the world
possible to creatures like us - which does not place anything objectionably human at the
centre of concern (Lynch 1996, 152). By objectionably human I would suggest viewpoints which
reveal human prejudices based on some form of invidious comparison. Such viewpoints
can serve to legitimate the domination of both humans and nonhumans - a point which
connects human emancipatory movements with the radical ecology movement. What is
common to this broader emancipatory critique is a rejection of the view that the other
must in some way be like us before we accord him/her/them/it any recognition or respect.
Human chauvinism (coined by the Routleys [1979] and favoured by Hayward and many others) seems to come closest to describing the crux of the problem, although I am
suggesting here that human racism might possibly do better (at least descriptively - analytically they are the same) since the critique of human racism (and the defence of its
the particular kind of prejudice

corollary, nonracist humanism) is less likely to be misinterpreted as an attack on humanism per se. Moreover,
that is revealed in racism, while structurally similar to (and often linked with) the
hierarchical dualisms and logic of sexism, is often directed towards more radical forms of
difference or otherness (i.e, the differences between particular human races and cultures
can be much greater than the differences between men and women in any given race or
culture). This would seem to be more relevant to a discussion of the even more radical
forms of difference which may be found between humans and nonhumans. Whatever descriptive label
we might choose to replace anthropocentrism - human chauvinism, human racism, human speciesism or perhaps even human colonialism -the analytical point is the same. That is,
the excluded groups are excluded because they lack something that is possessed and
deemed by the more powerful group to be the measure of worth (such as reason,
civilisation, moral agency, or language). As Plumwood and many other ecofeminist philosophers have pointed out, these
comparisons reveal a deep structure of mastery based on self/other dualisms which
create a web of incorporations and inclusions (Plumwood 1993, 143). And it is therefore a fatal flaw , as Evemden (1985, 10) calls
it, for environmentalists to try to squeeze some of their moral constituency (say apes and some other mammals) into the dominant criteria, reckoning that saving some is better than
Conforming to the requirements and modes of rationality of the dominant culture

saving none.
has rarely served the interests of diverse minority cultures. Such a strategy is even less
likely to permit the flourishing of biological diversity. Now it must be emphasised that there is nothing in the critique of
human racism which demands that we cannot celebrate the dignity of each and every human, the achievements of humankind, and what is special about the human race, and we
may (indeed ought) go to great lengths to help our own kind. But we ought not, as part of those celebrations of specialness, belongingness and compassion for each other, thereby
The line
ignore the needs of other beings who are not like us when we have a choice, least of all persecute them, simply because they are not of our own kind.
between patriotism and xenophobia is sometimes a fine one and it is likewise not always
immediately obvious when the line between humanism and human racism is crossed. This is
because nowadays it is not so common to find environmental destruction justified in terms of a Promethean model of human destiny, a hierarchy of creation or as a means of
enlarging human empire vis-a-vis the rest of nature. Just as racism has become more subtle (for example, willful blindness or indifference
towards the structural disadvantage that is suffered by some racial minorities has tended to replace the more outlandish expressions of racial superiority of the nineteenth century),
so too has human racism become more subtle. These days, many unnecessary and
environmentally destructive developments are more usually justified as necessary to
create employment or improve human welfare in some way, in which case critics of
development are easily typecast as either indifferent or hostile to the needs of the
unemployed or humans generally. (Here the problem of invidious comparison takes a different form. We no longer persecute the other because it
is not like us. Instead, some of us are admonished for caring for nonhuman others because they are not like us.) Thus destructive development is justified as natural and
inescapable, since there are no viable alternatives. It is under circumstances such as these, when otherwise worthy humanist sentiments are made to perform an ideological
function (i.e., concealing and/or delegitimising alteratives) that humanism is transformed into human racism. That is, it is this refusal to make an effort to acknowledge or explore
alternatives which might possibly enable the mutual fulfillment of human and nonhuman needs that should alert us to the prejudice of human racism. IS IT HUMANS PER SE OR
THEIR CHARACTERISTICS? It is noteworthy that the form of reasoning employed by Lynch and Wells to undermine non-anthropocentrism (now read ecocentrism) is exactly
the reverse of the form of reasoning that has been typically employed to undermine anthropocentrism (now read human racism). That is, critics of
anthropocentrism or speciesism, such as the Singer (1975), Routleys (1979), Regan (1983), Rodman (1977), Evemden (1985), Noske (1989), Fox (1990),
Eckersley (1992) and Plumwood ( 1993) have pointed to the self-serving way in which a human racist morality selects certain special human characteristics or traits (language, tool
making, rationality, moral sensibility or whatever) as the basis of allocating moral considerability but nonetheless fails to systematically and consistently apply such criteria. That
is, when it is shown that some members of the human community lack the requisite characteristics or that some members of the nonhuman community possess them, there appears
to be no genuine attempt to adjust practices to live up to the moral criteria. In effect, the moral criteria is revealed to be an admit attempt to disguise what is really a basic
prejudice in favour of humans simply because of the fact of their humanness. And as we have seen, Lynch and Wells openly and wholeheartedly embrace this so-called
reject attempts to develop supposedly

prejudice, this simple fact of humanness, as the fundamental modality of moral concern. They also
more objective characteristics of moral considerability (such as sentience), because they wish to
avoid making moral choices on the basis of the presence or absence of such
characteristics. Indeed, they point out that to exclude certain humans from moral
considerability simply because they lack particular characteristics is to introduce a
hierarchy of moral worth among humans - something that most of us would find
repugnant. It is the fact of humanness which should count. Of course, not all of the critiques of human racism mentioned above are necessarily also suggesting that we
ought to rely on objective characteristics and thereby introduce a hierarchy of moral worth (only Singer and Regan do this). Rather, the primary point of the exercise has been to
expose the self-serving and inconsistent character of human racism. Nonetheless, defenders of ecocentrism face a real problem here, which has recently been noted by Tim
Hayward in his critical examination of the anthropocentrism debate. The problem as Hayward puts it, has to do with a lack of concern with nonhumans but the term
anthropocentrism can all too plausibly be understood as meaning an excessive concern' with humans (Hayward 1997, 57). Despite repeated attempts by ecocentric theorists to
emphasise that non-anthropocentrism should be understood as a more inclusive ethical orientation than humanism, critics have continued to interpret it as a perspective that is
opposed to humanism and as necessarily antihumanist or misanthropic. Why has this message been so difficult to convey? If there is a moral bedrock in western, post-
Enlightenment political thought, it is the idea of the inherent dignity and value of each and every human being. This is_ fundamental to the democratic revolution and to the
doctrine of human rights. As Agnes Heller explains, the very notion of humankind raises the claim that there are some common or universal norms which should apply to all
humans, something which links us in a moral, rather than merely species, sense. Indeed, the very idea of humankind is constituted by such norms; it is raising the claim that
humankind per se 'should become a social cluster (Heller 1987, 37). For example, the idea of crimes against humanity - central to the Nuremberg Trials - invokes the idea that
there are certain rights or entitlements which all humans should be free to enjoy qua humans. The verdict in those trials was widely accepted not simply as a matter of revenge
against the perpetrators but rather because it was considered just in some sublime sense - as a vindication and honouring of our commitment to the dignity and worthiness of the
human subject and to our collective moral connectedness. As Heller put it: We feel it; we are aware of it; we are committed to it. But we cannot explain it (Heller 1987, 37). It is
this moral commitment to the community of humankind, and each of its members, which lies behind the impulse to go to the aid of our own kind, and if necessary, save our own
kind ahead of other species. It is the same commitment which often feels some resistance to the idea that we should care more for other species, as if caring is a zero-sum game.
Caring more for other species - especially in situations of scarcity and conflict- is assumed to mean that we must care less for our own kind. It is the same commitment which lies
behind the moral indignation that is so widely expressed in relation to the idea that the pets of the affluent may be growing fat while many less fortunate humans are starving. And
it is the same commitment which informs the critique of deep ecology by social ecologists and many on the left. Bookchins recent book Reenchanting Human- ity is a typically
feisty and eloquent reiteration of the importance of our humanist heritage and a fierce tirade against any drift towards anything which might dilute this commitment. To Bookchin
and many others, humanism can never be arrogant, as David Ehrenfeld (1981) has suggested. However, this commitment to humanism need not be an impasse for ecocentrism, if
in most
ecocentrism is understood as a moral perspective that is opposed to human racism rather than humanism per se. In any event, as Hayward (1997, 57) notes,
cases of environmental conflict, the problem is not an excessive concern with humans but
rather a lack of concern for some humans and the rest of the environment by a privileged
minority of humans in positions of power - a point, Bookchin and many on the left have laboured. Val Plumwood - one of the pioneers of
the human chauvinist critique - has also rejected those critics of anthropocentrism who merely condemn a blanket
humanity in ways which obscure the fact that the forces directing the destruction of
nature and the wealth produced from it are owned and controlled overwhelmingly by an
unaccountable, mainly white, mainly male, elite (Plumwood 1993, 12). Seen in this light, the primary task of
ecocentric ethics and politics should be to cast the critique of human racism in terms
which expose these power relations while also exposing the limited moral horizons, or
lack of moral inclusiveness, which informs the exercise (or to follow Foucault, the
production) of power.
Note: the term human racism more closely means anthropocentrism, not normal
racism. When Eckersley uses the term racism alone, she means regular xenophobia-
type racism.
Contemporary movements against anthropocentrism are
overwhelmingly white only by integrating a discussion of race and
countering racism can the negs movement succeed
Hamanaka and Basile, 05. Sheila Hamanaka is a childrens book author and illustrator.
She has studied anti-racism with The Peoples Institute and is a member of the Justice and
Unity Campaign of WBAI. Her books include Grandparents Song, All the Colors of the
Earth, and The Journey: Japanese Americans, Racism and Renewal. She is currently
working on an animal liberation novel for children. Tracy Basile is a freelance journalist
who also teaches animal and nature courses at Purchase College, SUNY, and Pace
University. June/July 2005. Racism and the Animal Rights Movement. Satya
Magazine, A Magazine of Vegetarianism, Environmentalism, and Animal Advocacy.
http://www.satyamag.com/jun05/hamanaka.html clawan
We love animals. We hate racism. So whats to talk about? In fact, two South Asian
activists I interviewed both felt that they had not experienced any overt racism in the
animal rights (AR) movement. Yet, like the peace and environmental movements, the AR
movement is predominantly white and middle class. Andrew Rowan, a VP at the Humane
Society of the U.S., said surveys indicate the AR movement is less than three percent
people of color. In April, 316 people from over 20 states attended the first Grassroots AR
Conference in NYC, but the people of color caucus numbered only eight. If no one is
racist, why is the movement largely segregated? Is it us or them? Most of us want to
be inclusive. But why? Is it because it is the right thing to do? Because then our march
would look like a beautiful rainbow? Because we have to be diverse to get funding?
Pattrice Jones, a white AR activist who has a page about racism at bravebirds.org states,
The fact is that a predominantly white movement will not and indeed cannot bring about
animal liberation. Jim Mason, a well-known white AR activist and author of An
Unnatural Order (reprinted by Lantern Books, 2005) which looks at the history of racism
as part of dominionism, agrees. He feels the imbalance keeps AR from being a mass
movement. It adds to the perception that it is just another trivial concern of the
comfortable classes, which repels people who might otherwise be involved. But is it just
looking white that keeps people of color away from the movement? Or are white activists
who lack awareness making people of color feel uncomfortable? Patrick Kwan, founder
and Executive Director of the Student Animal Rights Alliance, said, At the first
demonstration I went to someone asked me Do you speak English?and that was in
New York City! Hes gotten these comments from white staffers of pretty big AR
organizations: I cant believe how Asians treat animals and I dont like Asians. Kris,
an African American activist, describes how it feels to experience tokenism: They
havent done outreach to the community, but they callHey we need a black face at the
protest. I go, but its not a unifying way, its a marginalizing way of organizing. Youre
not one of us, but we need you. Are AR Organizations Serious About Outreach?
According to Patrick, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is the only
major group doing active outreach into communities of color. A PETA employee concurs,
PETAwith its outreach to Hispanics, African Americans, and Indians, has made
fantastic inroads into those communities. PETA assigns several staff members to this
work and has two separate websites, one in Spanish and another, PETAWorld.com,
geared toward African Americans. On the other hand, Kris calls it lip service when one
organization failed to put the human capital and provide enough leadership into their
efforts to reach the African American community. Large organizations have no excuse,
says Patrick. Do People of Color Care About Animals? According to Patrick, there is a
preconception that people of color do not care about animals. But, he says, surveys have
shown that African Americans are actually more likely to consider vegetarianism than
whites after being informed about the plight of farmed animals. Surveys of Latinos and
Asians also show positive attitudes toward animal protection. Olivia, who grew up in the
projects and lives in Spanish Harlem, reports that people eagerly take her flyers. Another
African American activist found people snapped up samples of vegan cooking. A young
white woman active in the PETA KFC campaign noticed that older white men never
take our flyers. The people who show the most interest in talking to us are African
American men and women and Latino men and women, and young white people.
Another self-defeating attitude is that people of color are too busy organizing around civil
rights or other issues. But, as in the white communities, only a small percentage of people
are active. There are still millions of others out there. The Big Picture Its one thing for a
white person to pass out vegan flyers. But attempts by white AR activists to set the
agenda for other cultures bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the historical pattern of
suppression by dominant nations. Instead of exporting democracy, AR activists are
exporting their cultural concepts of the proper relationship between human and
nonhuman animals. Lets step back for a moment from what may seem to outsiders like a
tempest in a teapot. Okay, the AR movement needs to be more diverse, but whats all the
fuss about? Cant we all just get along? I opened with a quote from Sun Tzu because as
we see it, we are engaged in a battle for life. For the compassionate, it begins with the
lives of more than 52 billion land animals slaughtered globally every year, and expands to
the lives of millions of humans lost to the wars and privations of a vastly unequal society
where darker and poorer are often synonymous. Causing or benefiting from this
situation are powerful militarized states, multinational corporations, and an intricate web
of civil and penal institutions so heartlessly interlocked they are often referred to in
popular culture as one entity: The Machine. Its an unequal battle. Animals have no
power. Defending them are pockets of Indigenous peoples and a small AR movement.
The same could be said for every injustice: small groups confronting gargantuan tasks,
and sometimes, each other. Indian writer Arundhati Roy sagely notes what she calls the
N-G-O-ization of the movement. (NGO = Non-Governmental Organization.)
Governments and corporations, lacking roots in communities but needing to stem social
unrest, toss out thousands of carrots to activists who otherwise might have channeled
their anger into revolutionary movements. Closer to the ground and quicker on their feet,
they can perform social services more efficiently than huge government bureaucracies.
They tend to the sores of social injustice like overworked allopathic doctors: treating the
symptoms while, some observe, the patient dies. Racism = Racial Prejudice + Power
The Peoples Institute Given the sheer might of The Machine, youd think everyone
would be talking about how to get power. After all, it is power that keeps animals
oppressed. But is power just a numbers game? When a million people demonstrated for
peace in New York in February 2003 I was struck by two things: how white the crowd
was, and how the next day everyone was gone and the war in Iraq proceeded. David
Billings, a white anti-racist trainer with The Peoples Institute and historian of the
grassroots movement says, Nowadays we know how to mobilize, but not how to
organize. Racism is a powerful tool of disorganization that has been used against
potential allies for centuries. It justified the European invasion, enslavement and
genocide of Native Americans and Africans. Many immigrant European workers and
landless peasants traded their class consciousness for the fabricated notion of whiteness
and were rewarded with land grants and a chance to share in the profits of slavery. Even
now textbooks hide the long history of African, Indigenous, and multiracial rebellion. The
mid-19th century saw the rise of the Abolitionist movement as whites joined in; a few
privileged whites also formed the humane movement, which advocated for animals but
ignored the plight of slaves. Historically humane education was upheld as a means of
cultivating moral values amongst white children, especially boys who would become
tomorrows leaders. Is todays liberal commitment to help those less fortunate rooted in
this same racist, missionary tradition? Well-meaning whites, sometimes armed with the
comment I do not see colorwhich often causes people of color to smile inwardly
continue to build essentially segregated organizations because to them overcoming
racism is still about cultivating moral values and not sharing power. Whereas to
oppressed peoples of color, race has always been about power. They do not fight for
social justice to make white people feel better about themselves. The Machine also
understands that race is about power, and its generals also read Sun Tzu. Much the way
the suffering of animals is invisibilized, so too is the suffering of peoples of color and
Indigenous peoples. Beneath the radar of mainstream media, these groups more often get
the stick instead of the carrot. David Hilliard, one of the founders of the Black Panther
Party, recounted in his April 04 interview with Satya, some 40 are still in prison, 28 of
us were murdered. They were killed because they were black and wanted Power to the
People, not because they were vegetarian. In Colombia, almost 4,000 labor organizers
have been murdered in the last 15 years. In one state in India, 4,000 farmers committed
suicide between 1999-2004 in desperation over free trade and privatization policies. This
is a far cry from most large AR organizations, which model themselves after corporations
and in fact are characterized by the same institutional racism: no matter how colorful
their brochures, the vast majority of positions of power are held by white people, albeit
nice ones who like animals. According to one activist, outreach to communities of color
is approached like a marketing challenge, not as a desire to share power. A corporation is
a legal person, but without a mind. As such, no one is accountable for de facto
segregation unless someone is stupid enough to use the n word. The Peoples Institute,
in its Undoing Racism workshops, asks social workers and other participants Do you
make money off the poor? One by one, people nod their heads. Is it possible that AR
workersfrom the CEOs of large nonprofits who may make a third of a million dollars,
to grassroots grunts who make minimum wageare making money off of animals? The
Peoples Institute states: Any organization that is not intentionally anti-racist inevitably
benefits white people. Where Will We Find Power? Language to the contrary, white
people are the minority on the planet. As the minority it only makes sense to want to
hook up with the majority with great urgency, as if billions of lives, and the future of the
earth itself, were at stake. Global agribusiness, which feeds The Machine will only be
undone by a powerful global movement. The truth hidden by Eurocentric media is that
some of the most dynamic, holistic political organizing on the planet is happening in the
developing world. You should know these names: Vandana Shiva, Wangari Maathai,
Alfredo Palacio, Evo Morales, Lula da Silva. Twelve thousand landless peasants recently
marched in Brazil. The 2004 World Social Forum (WSF) in Mumbai, India drew 200,000
people. Across the street was another forum for groups excluded from the WSF for
political reasons. Some were militant revolutionary groups, some werent. The 2005 WSF
in Porto Alegre, Brazil heard Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela. Chavez, a former
military officer, is an advocate for the poor and landless. If the AR movement wants
power, it should study how President Chavez got it. It should join in on the ground floor
of the global peoples movement, which is inherently anti-agribusiness, to become part of
the agenda. Maybe, just maybe, power lies with the powerless. Asked how he would
build a united front with Indigenous cultures that might eat animals but who live in
balance with nature, Jim Mason replied: I would start with campaigning to insure their
survivalthe survival of their native lands, their natural habitat, their traditional ways of
living. The dominant cultures that are destroying the living world willif they ever wake
upneed to draw from the older cultures to make the changes in thinking needed to stop
the destruction and develop a culture of balance with nature. The dominant white culture
also writes humane history. It starts with European philosophers and reform movements.
Native concepts of human equality with, or even inferiority to, animals are omitted.
Indigenous cultures which do not divide humans and animals into classes, into exploiter
and exploited, do not have the need for the concept of animal rights. Tiokasin
Ghosthorse, producer of First Voices (WBAI, 99.5FM Thursdays at 10 a.m.) calls for
nature rights. Onondaga elder Oren Lyon says the term human rights is a misnomer.
In 1999, AR activists tried to physically stop the Makah people in the Pacific Northwest
from resuming their whale hunting after an endangered species ban was lifted. Kent
Lebsock, Executive Director of the American Indian Law Alliance, said non-Indian
activists focused not on commercial whalers but on people who were reclaiming their
traditional way of life. It was taken as a racist act of cultural suppression. They showed a
lack of understanding of what we have experienced in the last 500 years. Lebsock said,
During the incident, every Indian person I spoke to thought the Makah were right. This
bitter, complex dispute has many lessons. One is that there is a potential for alliances with
progressive, traditionalist groups which already exist within these communities, and
which could use the access to media, etc. that privileged whites often have. Because
racism in the movement goes unaddressed, we all lose and the animals lose.
Race A2 Fem
Color-blind critiques of patriarchy will inevitably fail only by
evaluating the effects of racism can feminists movements succeed
Roberts, 92. DOROTHY E. ROBERTS, Associate Professor, Rutgers University School
ofLaw-Newark. B.A. 1977, Yale Col- lege;J.D. 1980, Harvard Law School. RACISM
AND PATRIARCHY IN THE MEANING OF MOTHERHOOD. JOURNAL OF
GENDER & THE LAW. http://www.wcl.american.edu/journal/genderlaw/01/roberts.pdf
clawan
Understanding the connection between racism and patriarchy expands the feminist
project. Its goal cannot be to eliminate the sub- ordination of women, divorced from
issues of race. Racism subordinates women.198 "If feminism is to be a genuine struggle
to improve the lives of all women, then all feminists must assume re- sponsibility for
eliminating racism."' 99 The struggle against racism is also a necessary part of uniting
women in political solidarity. Ra- cism divides women. 20 0 Some feminists may find
their motivation to oppose racism within the dreams of feminism: "It can spring from a
heartfelt desire for sisterhood and the personal, intellectual realiza- tion that racism
among women undermines the potential radicalism of feminism. ' 2 I I do not mean that
feminists should see anti-racism as an important extra-curricular project. Because
racism is part of the structure of patriarchy in America, anti-racism is critical to
dismantling it.202 Difference is such a pleasant word. It applies to everyone. It does not
call anyone to action. We need only acknowledge that it exists, and then move on with
our preconceived plans. Racism is quite different. It destroys. It condemns. It speaks of
power. It demands a response. Adrienne Rich calls on feminists to use the word, racism:
If black and white feminists are going to speak of female accounta- bility, I believe the
word racism must be seized, grasped in our bare hands, ripped up out of the sterile or
defensive consciousness in which it so often grows, and transplanted so that it can yield
new insights for our lives and our movement .... I thought of trying to claim other
language in which to describe, specifically, the white woman's problem in encountering
the black woman; the differences that have divided black and white women; the misnam-
ing or denial of those differences in everyday life. But I am con- vinced that we must go
on using that sharp, sibilant word; not to paralyze ourselves and each other with
repetitious, stagnant doses of guilt, but to break it down into its elements, comprehend it
as a female experience, and also to understand its inextricable connections with
gynephobia.203 Acknowledging each other's differences is not enough.2 0 4 Rela-
tionshipsofpowerproduceourdifferences.205 We must face the awful history and reality of
racism that helps create those differences. We do not need to focus less on gender; we
need to understand how gender relates to race. If we see feminism as a "liberation
project" that seeks the emancipation of all women, then we must address the complexity
of forces that bind us.2 0
Contemporary feminism fails to take into account matters of race that
eliminates space for black female identity
Carby, 82. Hazel V. Carby is professor of African American Studies and of American
Studies at Yale University. White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of
Sisterhood. https://crabgrass.riseup.net/assets/163126/versions/1/carby%20white
%20woman%20listen.pdf clawan
Much contemporary debate has posed the question of the relation between race and
gender, in terms that attempt to parallel race and gender divisions. It can be argued that as
processes, racism and sexism are similar. Ideologically for example, they both construct
common sense through reference to "natural" and "biological" differences. It has also
been argued that the categories of race and gender are both socially constructed and that,
therefore, they have little internal coherence as concepts. Furthermore, it is possible to
parallel racialized and gendered divisions in the sense that the possibilities of
amelioration through legislation appear to be equally ineffectual in both cases. Michele
Barrett, however, has pointed out that it is not possible to argue for parallels because as
soon as historical analysis is made, it becomes obvious that the institutions which have to
be analyzed are different, as are the forms of analysis needed. We would agree that the
construction of such parallels is fruitless and often proves little more than a mere
academic exercise; but there are other reasons for our dismissal of these kinds of debate.
The experience of black women does not enter the parameters of parallelism. The fact
that black women are subject to the simultaneous oppression of patriarchy, class, and
"race" is the prime reason for not employing parallels that render their position and
experience not only marginal but also invisible. In arguing that most contemporary
feminist theory does not begin to adequately account for the experience of black women,
we also have to acknowledge that it is not a simple question of their absence, and
consequently the task is not one of rendering their visibility. On the contrary we will have
to argue that the process of accounting for their historical and contemporary position
does, in itself, challenge the use of some of the central categories and assumptions of
recent mainstream feminist thought. We can point to no single source for our oppression.
When white feminists emphasize patriarchy alone, we want to redefine the term and
make it a more complex concept. Racism ensures that black men do not have the same
relations to patriarchal/capitalist hierarchies as white men. In the words of the
Combahee River Collective: We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as
pervasive in Black women's lives as are the politics of class and race. We also often find
it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are
most often experienced simultaneously. We know that there is such a thing as racial-
sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape
of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression. Although we are
feminists and lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate
the fractionalisation that white women who are separatists demand. Our situation as
Black people necessitates that we have solidarity around the fact of race, which white
women of course do not need to have with white men, unless it is their negative solidarity
as racial oppressors. We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also
struggle with Black men about sexism. (Combahee River Collective 1983, 213) It is only
in the writings by black feminists that we can find attempts to theorize the
interconnection of class, gender, and race as it occurs in our lives, and it has only been in
the autonomous organizations of black women that we have been able to express and act
upon the experiences consequent upon these determinants. Many black women had been
alienated by the nonrecognition of their lives, experiences, and herstories in the Women's
Liberation Movement (WLM). Black feminists have been and are still demanding that the
existence of racism must be acknowledged as a structuring feature of our relationships
with white women. Both white feminist theory and practice have to rec- ognize that white
women stand in a power relation as oppressors of black women. This compromises any
feminist theory and practice founded on the notion of simple equality.
Race A2 Irigaray
Irigarays critique ignores the role of race in shaping gender relations
whiteness takes the place of masculinity
Hom, 13. SABRINA L. HOM, Lecturer of Philosophy at Georgia College. Between
Races and Generations: Materializing Race and Kinship in Moraga and lrigaray. Hypatia
vol. 28, no. 3 (Summer 2013) clawan
Mary Bloodsworth-Lugo argues that to claim an ontological status for sexual differ-
ence is to construct sexual difference as unmarked by race (Bloodsworth-Lugo 2007,
45); this claim is plausible only if sexual difference is taken as fixed rather than dynamic,
and it fails to acknowledge the ways in which race is materialized on and through the
sexed body. With Irigaray and Seshadri-Crooks, I will take sex as an irreducible,
ontological difference, but I will argue that it is marked and transformed through
racialization. Seshadri-Crooks argues for a Lacanian conception of race that at once
acknowledges the intricate relation between race and sex and recognizes important
differences between the workings of the two. She acknowledges that race is not like sex
in that sex is indeterminate and exceeds language (Seshadri-Crooks 2000, 4) and is in
the Real, sexual difference is significant and existent in human bodies before cultural
meaning is imposed upon them, as humans are always generated on the condition of the
existence of at least two sexes of human being, and 426 Hypatia always already marked
by this difference. Whereas Irigaray argues persuasively that we should take sex as
irreducible difference, the genesis of race in the history of colonialism attests obviously
to its arbitrariness.3 As theorists like Evelynn Hammonds and Sander Gilman
demonstrate, race is attributed through sexed means such as the miscegenation taboo and
the myth of black hypersexuality (among other means) (Gilman 1985; Hammonds 1994).
We should note, then, that Seshadri-Crooks agrees with the first clause of Irigarays
notoriously problematic claim in I Love to You that sexual difference is an immediate
natural given ... the problem of race is a secondary problem (Irigaray 1995, 47). It is the
second claim, that race can then be analytically separated from sex and subordinated as
a problem, that fails to comprehend the ways that racialization morphs the sexed body.
Seshadri-Crooks argues that race should be understood both as functioning through
sexual difference and as a consolation for the disappointments of sex (or, more precisely,
that whiteness is a consolation for the disappointments of masculinity) (Seshadri-Crooks
2000, 43; 59).4 Seshadri-Crooks and I follow theorists such as Lacan in taking
phallogocentric and racial dominance to be rooted in the specular; sexual and racial
hierarchies depend largely on visible differences, always read as lacks. In classical
psychoanalytic thought, the woman is always marked by the nothing to see, the visible
lack of a phallus. Sexual difference offers an inferior other that promises to shore up the
male ego, but since the spectacle of castration is simultaneously anxiety- producing (as
castration looms as a threat to masculinity) and mysterious (since the female sex is
marked not by a lack but by a genuine difference, one that may not be immediately
visible but that is nonetheless present as a troubling excess to the phallic system), sexual
difference is not fully successful as a means of assuring male wholeness and value.
Where language necessarily fails to capture the excess of sex, racial differen- tiation and
the logic of colonialism promise to present an other who can be wholly mastered.
Although the phallic ideal of power and hardness is ultimately impossible to sustain even
for a man, whiteness is posited as a new form of specular assurance. Here whiteness
signifies precisely the wholeness, value, and purity that, as Irigaray argues, the
imperfectly flat mirror of woman fails to project (Irigaray 1985). Femininity represents
lack because to specular logic women have nothing to see; the enigma of the female sex,
however, which would be better said to exceed the gaze, can of course be reappropriated
as a threat to phallic specularity. The rhetoric of race as visibility, however, promises an
unambiguous visual signifier of inferiority in the other; the inade- quacy of the non-white
subject is to be immediately and fully disclosed to the eye.5 Rather than taking race as a
secondary adjunct or perfect analog to sex, Seshadri- Crooks argues that whiteness
functions as a master signifier in its own right, signifying civilization, dominance, reason,
beauty, value, wholeness, and purity. This argument demands that psychoanalytic
feminists theorize race as well as sex, and that that these differences be theorized
intersectionally rather than assimilated to a single axis of hierarchy (that is to say, a
logic of the same). Clearly the addition of an other so-called phallus to the hierarchy of
sexual difference is transformative to the work of post-Lacanian theorists like Irigaray; as
with the recognition of other axes of difference, the hierarchy and array of subject
positions produced therein are greatly multiplied and complicated. Sabrina L. Hom 427
At least in our time, cognizant of our colonial location, we cannot speak of women, for
instance, or of relations between men and women, without recognizing that race and sex
together shape these in ways that exceed Irigarays account. Although many axes of
difference similarly index the field of sexual difference, probably few will do so as
deeply as does race, which at least in the current understanding has a stronger claim
than, say, class to be in the body not only as a visible mark but as a heritable quality in
the blood.6 This, after all, is the truth of any con- ventional description of racial passing:
he may look and act white, but hes really not that is to say, one or both of his parents
were non-white, and this characteristic is inherited in his blood if not on his skin. Hence
the importance of the rhetoric of purity as an element of whiteness (Haney-Lopez 2006);
this rubric is sometimes used to disavow and disinherit the children of mixed-race
relationships under the one-drop rule, at other times to juridically whiten mixed
children (see Lawrence 2003). At any rate, it functions, along with the miscegenation
taboo, to make sense of the otherwise obscure truth of blood that is, in the colonial
context, always already mixed. These legal conventions, along with the tortuous
discourse around authentic race in the blood, demonstrate that racialization is dependent
on controlling and rationalizing blood.
Race A2 Education
Current education privileges the white perspective and undermines the
success of nonwhite people
Marable, 98. Manning Marable. Racism and Sexism, chapter 16 in Race, Class, and
What are some other characteristics of the new racism we are now encountering? What
we see in general is a duplicitous pattern that argues that African Ameri- cans and other
people of color are moving forward, whereas their actual material conditions are being
pushed back. Look at Americas education system. The number of doctoral degrees
being granted to Blacks, for example, is falling. The Reagan administration initiated
budget cuts in education, replacing government grants with loans, and deliberately
escalated unemployment for low-income people, making it difficult to afford tuition at
professional schools. Between 1981 and 1995, the actual percentage of young African
American adults between the ages eighteen and twenty-six enrolled in colleges and
universities declined by more than 20 percent. A similar crisis is occurring in our public
school systems. In many cities, the dropout rate for nonwhite high school students
exceeds 40 percent. Across the United States, more than fifteen hundred teenagers of
color drop out of school every day. And many of those who stay in school do not receive
adequate training to prepare them for the realities of todays high-tech labor market.
Despite the curricular reforms of the 1970s and 1980s, American education re- tains a
character of elitism and cultural exclusivity. The overwhelming majority of faculty at
American colleges are white males: less than 5 percent of all college faculty today are
African-Americans. The basic pattern of elitism and racism in colleges conforms to the
dynamics of Third World colonialism. At nearly all white academic institutions, the
power relationship between whites as a group and people of color is unequal. Authority
is invested in the hands of a core of largely white male administrators, bureaucrats, and
influential senior faculty. The board of trustees or regents is dominated by white,
conservative, affluent males. Despite the presence of academic courses on minorities, the
vast majority of white students take few or no classes that explore the heritage or cultures
of non-Western peoples or domestic minorities. Most courses in the humanities and social
sciences focus narrowly on topics or issues from the Western capitalist experience and
minimize the centrality and importance of non-Western perspectives. Finally, the
university or college divorces itself from the pressing concerns, problems, and debates
that relate to Blacks, Hispanics, or even while working-class people. Given this
structure and guiding philosophy, it shouldnt surprise us that many talented nonwhite
students fail to achieve in such a hostile environment.
Straight-up Affs A2 Race
Political action is key to confront institutionalized racism individual
rejections fail to address forms of oppression such as drug policy
Marable, 98. Manning Marable. Racism and Sexism, chapter 16 in Race, Class, and
What else intensifies racism and inequality in the 1990s? Drugs. We are witnessing the
complete disintegration of America's inner cities, the home of millions of Latinos and
Blacks. We see the daily destructive impact of gang violence inside our neighborhoods
and communities, which is directly attributable to the fact that for twenty years the
federal government has done little to address the crisis of drugs inside the ghetto and
the inner city. For people of color, crack addiction has become part of the new urban
slavery, a method of disrupting lives and regulating masses of young people who would
otherwise be demanding jobs, adequate health care, better schools, and control of their
own communities. Is it accidental that this insidious cancer has been unleashed within the
very poorest urban neighborhoods, and that the police concentrate on petty street dealers
rather than on those who actually control and profit from the drug traffic? How is it
possible that thousands and thousands of pounds of illegal drugs can be transported
throughout the country, in airplanes, trucks, and automobiles, to hundreds of central
distribution centers with thousands of employees, given the ultra-high-tech surveillance
and intelligence capacity of law enforcement officers? How, unless crack presents a
systemic form of social control? The struggle we have now is not simply against the
system. It's against the kind of insidious violence and oppressive behavior that people of
color carry out against each other. What Im talking about is the convergence between the
utility of a certain type of commodity-addictive narcotics-and economic and social
problems that are confronting the system. That is, the redundancy, the unemployment of
millions of people of color, young women and men, living in our urban centers. The
criminal justice system represents one time of social control. Crack and addictive
narcotics represent another. If youre doing organizing within the Black community, it
becomes impossible to get people and families to come out to your community center
when there are crack houses all around the building. It becomes impossible to continue
political organizing when people are afraid for their own lives. This is the new
manifestation of racism in which we see a form of social control existing in our
communities, the destruction of social institutions, and the erosion of people's ability to
fight against the forms of domination that continuously try to oppress them.

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A radical political economy framework is crucial since various culturalist perspectives

The libidinal explanation for racism removes a material problem and

The application of psychoanalysis to race is false its based on

It is impossible to attribute symbolic racist motives to policy and

The point, as Lynch himself has succinctly put it in another

the particular kind of prejudice

Conforming to the requirements and modes of rationality of the dominant culture

reject attempts to develop supposedly

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