Abolition K - Session 2 - UTNIF 2017

UTNIF 17 Abolition K
Session II
Abolition GRIPE Core
This file is lovingly brought to you by: Adnan, Alix C., Anna B., Arianna, Brayden,
Elana, Emma L., Estelle, Esther, Han, Iman, Jasmyne, Julia, Justin, Katie P., Kayla,
Marissa, Paige, Rahel, Vilma, Yashvi, Zaiana, Zooey, Sarah V., Katie P., Hex and Amber
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Abolition Index
Abolition GRIPE Core ........................................................................................................................................ 1

Abolition Index ................................................................................................................................................... 2
***Topshelf*** ................................................................................................................................................. 7
1NC: Shell - Generic................................................................................................................................... 8
1NC: Vs SP1 ............................................................................................................................................ 15
1NC: Vs SP1 (Model Minority) .................................................................................................................. 32
1NC: Vs SP2 ............................................................................................................................................ 54
1NC: Vs SP3 ............................................................................................................................................ 69
1NC: Vs Deschooling TRI ......................................................................................................................... 81
1NC: Vs Gibson-Graham .......................................................................................................................... 93
1NC: Vs Coop Federalism ...................................................................................................................... 102
***Links*** .................................................................................................................................................. 114
LinkAgamben ...................................................................................................................................... 115
LinkAnti-Bully Discourse ..................................................................................................................... 122
LinkBiopolitical Discourse ................................................................................................................... 125
LinkCap First - Wang ........................................................................................................................ 129
LinkCap First Stein ........................................................................................................................ 130
LinkCap First Dillon........................................................................................................................ 132
LinkCap First Wilderson ................................................................................................................. 135
LinkChild Protection ............................................................................................................................ 138
LinkCurriculum Change....................................................................................................................... 140
LinkHate Crimes - El-Amins Story ...................................................................................................... 143
LinkHumanist Opposition/Civil Society ................................................................................................ 144
LinkCapitalocentrism ........................................................................................................................... 147
LinkEconomy ...................................................................................................................................... 149
LinkEcon ............................................................................................................................................. 152
LinkEd Reform .................................................................................................................................... 154
LinkEd-Reform - Wilderson ................................................................................................................. 158
LinkEqual Education Access............................................................................................................. 161
LinkFeminist Carcerality ................................................................................................................... 163
LinkFigure of the Good Student ........................................................................................................ 165
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LinkGood Intensions ......................................................................................................................... 166
LinkHegemony/U.S. Exceptionalism ................................................................................................... 168
LinkIdentity.......................................................................................................................................... 171
LinkImmigration................................................................................................................................... 172
LinkLGBT Inclusion ............................................................................................................................. 179
LinkLiberalism Bobby London .......................................................................................................... 183
LinkPolitics of Innocence..................................................................................................................... 185
LinkFederalism.................................................................................................................................... 194
LinkLegal Reform Farley .................................................................................................................. 197
LinkLGBT Rights ................................................................................................................................. 199
LinkEmpire .......................................................................................................................................... 201
LinkMilitary .......................................................................................................................................... 202
LinkSeparation of the Prison ............................................................................................................... 205
LinkSexual Citizenship ........................................................................................................................ 208
LinkSchools=School2Prison Pipeline .................................................................................................. 210
LinkSchooling ..................................................................................................................................... 233
LinkSTIs ............................................................................................................................................. 236
LinkSex Ed.......................................................................................................................................... 237
LinkSTEM Race-Neutrality ............................................................................................................... 241
LinkSTEM Military Industrial Complex .............................................................................................. 245
LinkSTEM Turns Aff ......................................................................................................................... 247
LinkSTEM Model Minority Module .................................................................................................... 250
LinkTech ............................................................................................................................................. 256
LinkTemporality/Progress ................................................................................................................... 258
LinkRadical Pedagogy ...................................................................................................................... 264
LinkModel Minority - Rodriguez ........................................................................................................... 268
LinkModel Minority Local Experience Good ................................................................................... 273
***Impacts*** .............................................................................................................................................. 276
ImpactAbleism .................................................................................................................................... 277
ImpactAlienation ................................................................................................................................. 287
ImpactDisability Incarceration ............................................................................................................. 290
ImpactEpistemic Innocence ................................................................................................................ 294
ImpactEmpire Capacity to Expand ...................................................................................................... 296
ImpactGlobal War ............................................................................................................................... 298
ImpactRacialized Criminalization ........................................................................................................ 300
ImpactSexual Violence........................................................................................................................ 301
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ImpactS2P .......................................................................................................................................... 307
ImpactPolitical Prisoner Imprisonment ................................................................................................ 308
ImpactPenal Neoslavery ..................................................................................................................... 311
ImpactAnti-Black Sexual Violence ....................................................................................................... 312
ImpactAppartus of Humanness ........................................................................................................... 313
ImpactAnti-Blackness.......................................................................................................................... 315
ImpactLibidinal Economy .................................................................................................................... 316
ImpactAnti-Queer Violence ................................................................................................................. 318
ImpactBiometrics DA........................................................................................................................... 320
ImpactWar Inev ................................................................................................................................... 323
ImpactSelf-Defense Criminalization .................................................................................................... 324
ImpactAfro-Pess Anti-Black Fungibility ................................................................................................ 325
ImpactAfro Pess Lethal Violence...................................................................................................... 327
ImpactAfro Pess Social Death .......................................................................................................... 328
ImpactAfro Pess Plantation .............................................................................................................. 330
ImpactModel Minority Kills Dissent ................................................................................................... 332
ImpactModel Minority - Racism ........................................................................................................... 335
ImpactModel Minority State Reform Bad .......................................................................................... 339
ImpactModel Minority Yu .................................................................................................................. 342
ImpactModel Minority Rodriguez ...................................................................................................... 345
ImpactModel Minority Escobar ......................................................................................................... 348
ImpactModel Minority Mahmud ........................................................................................................ 352
ImpactModel Minority = Anti Blackness ............................................................................................... 363
ImpactModel Minority Harms Low Income API .................................................................................... 368
***Alts*** .................................................................................................................................................... 369
AltAbolitionist Pedagogy - Rodriguez .................................................................................................. 370
AltAbolition Gossett .......................................................................................................................... 373
AltAbolition Meiners ......................................................................................................................... 383
AltAbolition Critical Criminology ....................................................................................................... 384
AltAbolition Dillion ............................................................................................................................ 387
AltImaginative Abolition ....................................................................................................................... 389
AltEveryday Abolition .......................................................................................................................... 391
AltIntimate Abolition ............................................................................................................................ 392
AltAbolition-Study................................................................................................................................ 395
AltBlack Studies .................................................................................................................................. 397
AltBlack feminism................................................................................................................................ 398
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AltQueer of Color Critique ................................................................................................................... 402
AltBlack Rage ..................................................................................................................................... 403
AltBlack Trans Rage ........................................................................................................................... 406
AltQueer Insurrectionism ..................................................................................................................... 409
AltQueer Insurrectionism vs Marxism .................................................................................................. 411
AltRefusal ........................................................................................................................................... 412
AltHip Hop Pedagogy .......................................................................................................................... 414
AltAfro-Pess/Radical Demands ........................................................................................................... 418
AltRefusal/Pathology of Blackness ...................................................................................................... 420
AltViolent Revolution ........................................................................................................................... 422
AltAbolition is Complete Disorder ........................................................................................................ 423
AltEnd of the World ............................................................................................................................. 425
AltSolves Militarism ............................................................................................................................. 426
AltUptopianism Good .......................................................................................................................... 429
AltPerformance Good - Solvency ........................................................................................................ 430
AltModel Minority Asian Rage .......................................................................................................... 435
AltModel Minority Conscientization................................................................................................... 443
AltModel Minority Zheng .................................................................................................................. 447
AltModel Minority Asian-Black Solidarity .......................................................................................... 450
***A2:*** ..................................................................................................................................................... 454
A2: Framework Education ................................................................................................................. 455
A2: Framework- New Languages ........................................................................................................... 457
A2: Framework- Scholarship .................................................................................................................. 458
A2: Perm Refuse Compromise ............................................................................................................ 463
A2: Perm radical lefty politics ............................................................................................................... 464
A2: Perm Anti Black Fungibility ............................................................................................................ 466
A2: Perm Trade Off ............................................................................................................................. 468
A2: Perm Afro Pess ............................................................................................................................. 470
A2: Perm Studious Play ....................................................................................................................... 471
A2: Reform First ................................................................................................................................... 473
A2: Reform GoodQT Specific .............................................................................................................. 474
A2: Better Prisons ................................................................................................................................ 478
A2: Prisons Keep us Safe ....................................................................................................................... 481
A2: Rapists ............................................................................................................................................. 482
A2: Safety ............................................................................................................................................... 484
A2: Safe Spaces ..................................................................................................................................... 485
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A2: No Alternatives to Prison .................................................................................................................. 486
A2: Real politics ................................................................................................................................... 489
A2: Capitalism explains slavery .............................................................................................................. 490
A2: Antiblackness is contingent .............................................................................................................. 491
A2: Crime DA-Police are the Criminals ................................................................................................... 492
***Aff Answers*** ....................................................................................................................................... 495
PermReform and Abolition .................................................................................................................. 496
PermCritical AFF................................................................................................................................. 498
Alt BadReform First ............................................................................................................................. 501
Alt BadCrime....................................................................................................................................... 502
Alt BadNihilism .................................................................................................................................... 504
Alt BadIndividualism ............................................................................................................................ 506
SP2Aff First Step ................................................................................................................................ 508
SP2Perm Solves ................................................................................................................................. 509
SP2Aff as Transformative Justice ....................................................................................................... 510
Institutions Inevitable .............................................................................................................................. 511
Consequences Key ................................................................................................................................ 515
Extinction OW ......................................................................................................................................... 516
Reform Good - State Not Always Racist ................................................................................................. 517
Broad Coalitions Key .............................................................................................................................. 520
A2 Law Doesnt Change....................................................................................................................... 522
A2 Liberalism Bad ................................................................................................................................ 525
A2: Wilderson---Policy Key ..................................................................................................................... 529
A2: Revolution Backlash ...................................................................................................................... 530
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***Topshelf***
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1NC: Shell - Generic
The school is a prison. The institution of education cannot be disentangled from the
prison regime. The carceral schooling industrial complex has come to conceptualize
freedom safety and peace as compatible with state sanctioned white supremacy
and genocide.
Rodrguez 10 - Professor and Chair of Ethnic Studies @ UC Riverside [Dylan Rodrguez, The Disorientation of the Teaching Act: Abolition as
Pedagogical Position, Radical Teacher, Number 88 (Summer 2010)
The global U.S. prison regime has no precedent or peer and has become a primary condition of
schooling , education, and pedagogy in every possible site. Aside from its sheer accumulation of
captive bodies (more than 2.5 million, if one includes children, military captives, undocumented
migrants, and the mentally ill/disordered),1 the prison has become central to the (re)production and
(re)invention of a robust and historically dynamic white supremacist state: at its farthest institutional
reaches, the prison has developed a capacity to organize and disrupt the most taken-for-granted
features of everyday social life , including family, community, school, and individual social
identities. Students, teachers, and administrators of all kinds have come to conceptualize freedom,
safety, and peace as a relatively direct outcome of state-conducted domestic war (wars on crime,
drugs, gangs, immigrants, terror, etc.), legitimated police violence, and large-scale, punitive
imprisonment. In what follows, I attempt to offer the outlines of a critical analysis and schematic social theory that might be useful to two
overlapping, urgent tasks of the radical teacher: 1) to better understand how the prison, along with the relations of
power and normalized state violence that the prison inhabits/produces, form the everyday condition
of possibility for the teaching act ; and 2) to engage a historically situated abolitionist praxis that is, in this moment, primarily
pedagogical. A working conception of the prison regime offers a useful tool of critical social analysis as well as a theoretical framework for
In subtle distinction from the criminological, social
contextualizing critical, radical, and perhaps abolitionist pedagogies.
scientific, and common sense understandings of criminal justice, prisons/ jails, and the
correctional system, the notion of a prison regime focuses on three interrelated technologies and
processes that are dynamically produced at the site of imprisonment: first, the prison regime
encompasses the material arrangements of institutional power that create informal (and often
nominally illegal) routines and protocols of militarized physiological domination over human beings
held captive by the state. This domination privileges a historical anti-black state violence that is
particularly traceable to the latter stages of continental racial chattel slavery and its immediate epochal
aftermath in post-emancipation white supremacy and juridical racial segregation/apartheida
privileging that is directly reflected in the actual demography of the imprisoned population, composed
of a Black majority. The institutional elaborations of this white supremacist and anti-black carceral state create an overarching system of
physiological domination that subsumes differently racialized subjects (including whites) into institutional routines (strip searching and regular bodily
invasion, legally sanctioned torture, ad hoc assassination, routinized medical neglect) that revise while sustaining the everyday practices of genocidal
racial slavery. While there are multiple variations on this regime of physiological dominanceincluding (Latino/a, Muslim, and Arab) immigrant detention,
extra-territorial military prisons, and asylumsit is crucial to recognize that the genealogy of the prisons systemic violence is anchored in the normalized
Black genocide of U.S. and New World nation-building.2 Second, the concept of the prison regime understands the place of state-ordained human
capture as a modality of social (dis)organization that produces numerous forms of interpersonal and systemic (race, class, gender, sexual) violence
within and beyond the physical sites of imprisonment. Here, the multiple and vast social effects of imprisonment (from affective disruptions of community
and extended familial ties to long-term economic/geographic displacement) are understood as fundamental and systemic dimensions of the policing and
Third, the prison regime encompasses the
imprisonment apparatus, rather than secondary or unintended consequences of it.3
multiple knowledges and meanings that are created around the institutional site and cultural symbol of
the prison, including those that circulate in popular culture and among the administrative
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bureaucracies and curriculum of schools. Given this conception of the prison regime as a far-reaching
and invasive arrangement of social power, state violence, and human domination, we might better be
able to understand the significance of everyday routines of school-based discipline that imply the
possibility of imprisonment as the punitive bureaucratic outcome of misbehavior, truancy, and
academic failure. What, then, is the
We might depart from
condition of teaching in the context of a prison regime that is so relentless in its innovation and intrusiveness?
another critical premise: that the prison (jail, detention center, etc.) cannot be conceptualized as a
place that is wholly separate or alienated from the normalized intercourses of civil society or the free
world. Speaking more precisely to the concerns raised by this issue of Radical Teacher, the massive carceral-cultural form of
the prison has naturalized a systemic disorientation of the teaching act, so that teaching is no longer
separable from the work of policing, juridical discipline, and state-crafted punishment. Thus, I do not
think the crucial question in our historical moment is whether or not our teaching ultimately supports
or adequately challenges the material arrangements and cultural significations of the prison regime
just as I believe the central question under the rule of apartheid is not whether a curriculum condones
or opposes the spatial arrangements of white supremacy and intensified racist state violence. Rather,
the primary question is whether and how the act of teaching can effectively and radically displace the
normalized misery, everyday suffering, and mundane state violence that are reproduced and/or
passively condoned by both hegemonic and critical/counterhegemonic pedagogies. I am arguing that
our historical conditions urgently dictate that a strategic distinction must be drawn between liberal,
social justice, critical, and even radical pedagogies that are capable of even remotely justifying,
defending, or tolerating a proto-genocidal prison regime that is without precedent or peer, on the one
hand, and those attempts at abolitionist pedagogy thatin an urgent embracing of the historical
necessity of innovation, improvisation, and radical rearticulation are attempting to generate new
epistemic and intellectual approaches to meaning, knowledge, learning, and practice for the sake of
life, liberation, and new social possibilities. I am concerned with addressing a pedagogical tendency
that artificially separates the teacher-student relation and the school from the prison. Such
strategic distinctions are useful for delineating the ways that multiple pedagogical epistemes
(including otherwise critical and radical ones) operate from the a priori notion that prisons and policing
serve necessary, peace-and-safety making, and good social functions that are somehow separable
or recuperable from their historical primacy to socioeconomic/class repression, American apartheid,
racial slavery, indigenous land displacement and cultural genocide, and white supremacist
colonization.9 In other words, what might happen to the disoriented teaching act if it sere re-oriented against the assumptive necessity, integrity,
and taken-for-grantedness of prisons, policing, and the normalized state violence they reproduce? Schooling Regime The structural
symbiosis between schools and the racist policing/prison state is evident in the administrative, public
policy, and pedagogical innovations of the War on Drugs, Zero Tolerance, No Child Left Behind,
and the school-based militarizations of the school to prison (and military) pipeline.10 Angela Y. Davis
has suggested that when children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security
than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison .11 These
punitive iterations of an increasingly carceral schooling industrial complex , however, represent a
symptomatic reflection of how the racist stateand white supremacist social formation generallyare
producing new categories of social identities (and redefining older ones) that can only be taught
within a direct relationship to the regulatory mechanisms and imminent (state) violence of the prison
industrial complex and the U.S. prison regime. (Even while some are relatively privileged by the institutional logics of relative de-
criminalization, their bodily mobility and academic progression are contingent on the states capacity to separate and protect them from the
criminalized.) There are, at first, categories of social subjects that are apprehended and naturalized by the
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school-as-stategifted and talented, undocumented, gang affiliated, exceptional, at-risk, average
who are then, by ontological necessity, hierarchically separated through the protocols of pseudo-
standardized intelligence quotient, socioeconomic class, race, gender, citizenship, sexuality,
neighborhood geography, etc. This seemingly compulsory, school-sited reproduction of the deadly
circuits of privilege and alienation is anything but new, and has always been central to the routines of
the U.S. schooling regime, particularly in its colonialist and post-emancipationist articulations.12 The idea
of the U.S. prison apparatus as a regime, in this context, brings attention to how prisons are not places outside and apart from our everyday lives, but
instead shape and deform our identities, communities, and modes of social interaction. I have written elsewhere that the prison regime is an apparatus
of power/violence that cannot be reduced to a minor institution of the state, but has in fact become an apparatus that possesses and constitutes the
state, often as if autonomous of its authority.13 Here, I am interested in how this regime overlaps with and mutually nourishes the multiple schooling
regimes that make up the U.S. educational system. The U.S. prison, in other words, has become a model and prototype for power relations more
generally, in which 1) institutional authority is intertwined with the policing and surveillance capacities (legitimated violence) of the state, 2) the broadly
cultural and peculiarly juridical racial/gender criminalization of particular social subjects becomes a primary framework for organizing institutional access,
and 3) the practice of systemic bodily immobilization (incarceration) permeates the normal routines of the free world. To
trace the
movements of the prisons modeling of power relations to the site of the school is to understand that
policing/surveillance, criminalization, and immobilization are as much schooling practices as they are
imprisonment practices. The teacher is generally being asked to train the foot soldiers, middle
managers, administrators, workers, intellectuals, and potential captives of the school/prison
confluence, whether the classroom is populated by criminalized Black and Brown youth or white Ph.D.
candidates. Two thoughts are worth considering: the teaching act is constituted by the technologies of
the prison regime, and the school is inseparable from the prison industrial complex. The prison industrial
complex, in contrast to the prison regime, names the emergence over the last three decades of multiple symbiotic institutional relationships that
dynamically link private business (such as architectural firms, construction companies, and uniform manufacturers) and government/state apparatuses
(including police, corrections, and elected officials) in projects of multiply-scaled human immobilization and imprisonment. The national abolitionist
organization Critical Resistance elaborates that the prison industrial complex is a system situated at the intersection of governmental and private
In fact, as many abolitionist scholars have
interests that uses prisons as a solution to social, political, and economic problems.14
noted, the rise of the prison industrial complex is in part a direct outcome of the liberal-progressive
prison reform successes of the 1970s. The political convergence between liberals, progressives, and law and order
conservatives/reactionaries, located within the accelerating political and geographical displacements of globalization,15 generated a host of material
transformations and institutional shifts that facilitated in fact, necessitatedthe large-scale reorganization of the prison into a host of new and/or
qualitatively intensified structural relationships with numerous political and economic apparatuses, including public policy and legislative bodies, electoral
and lobbying apparatuses, the medical and architectural/construction industries, and various other hegemonic institutional forms. Concretely, the reform
of the prison required its own expansion and bureaucratic multiplication: for example, the reform of prison overcrowding came to involve an astronomical
growth in new prison construction (rather than decarceration and release), the reformist outrage against preventable deaths and severe physiological
suffering from (communicable, congenital, and mental) illnesses yielded the piecemeal incorporation of medical facilities and staff into prison protocols
(as opposed to addressing the fact that massive incarceration inherently creates and circulates sickness), and reformist recognition of carceral state
violence against emotionally disordered, mentally ill, and disabled captives led to the creation of new prisons and pharmaceutical regimens for the
criminally insane, and so on. Following the historical trajectory of Angela Y. Davis concise and accurate assessment that during the (American)
revolutionary period, the penitentiary was generally viewed as a progressive reform, linked to the larger campaign for the rights of citizens,16 it is crucial
to recognize that the prison industrial complex is one of the most significant reformist achievements in U.S. history and is not simply the perverse social
project of self-identified reactionaries and conservatives. Its roots and sustenance are fundamentally located in the American liberal-progressive impulse
toward reforming institutionalized state violence rather than abolishing it. The absolute banality of the prison regimes presence in the administrative
protocols, curricula, and educational routines of the school is almost omnipresent: aside from the most obvious appearances of the racist policing state
on campuses everywhere, it is generally the fundamental epistemological (hence pedagogical) assumption of the school that 1) social order (peace)
requires a normalized, culturally legitimated proliferation of state violence (policing, juridical punishment, war); 2) the survival of civil society (schools,
citizenship, and individual freedom) depends on the capacity of the state to isolate or extinguish the criminal/dangerous; and 3) the U.S. nationbuilding
project is endemically decent or (at least) democratic in spirit, and its apparent corruptions, contradictions, and systemic brutalities (including and
especially the racial, gender, and class-based violence of the prison industrial complex) are ultimately reformable, redeemable, or (if all else fails)
forgivable. It
is virtually indisputablethough always worth restatingthat most pedagogical practices
(including many critical/radical ones) invest in producing or edifying free and self-governing
citizen/subjects. The assumptive framework of this pedagogical framework tends to conflate civil
society with freedom, as if ones physical presence in civil society is separable from the actual and
imminent state violence of criminalization and policing. (Is a criminalized and policed person really
free?). This pedagogical approach also leaves unasked the question of whether the central premise of the teaching practice itselfthat a given
pedagogy is actually capable of producing free citizen/subjects under such historical conditionsmight implode if its conditions of possibility were
adequately confronted. To clarify: as teachers, our generic pedagogical assumption is that we are either teaching to free studentcitizens who must be
empowered and encouraged to live up to the responsibilities of their nominal freedom (a task that may be interpreted differently and contradictorily
depending on the teacher), or that our pedagogy intends to participate in the creation of free student-citizens who are capable of being trained to
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participate robustly in civil society, outside and apart from the social dominance and institutional violence of the prison regime. In
both
instances, the underlying task of the teacher is to train the student to avert direct confrontation with
the policing and imprisonment apparatus, and to remain un-incarcerated and relatively un-criminalized
by the state. Whether or not the teacher can claim to succeed in this task, a basic historical truth is
obscured and avoided: the structural symbiosis between the schooling and prison regimes has
already rendered the prevailing cultural and institutional rubrics freedom an utter sham, no less than the
Declaration of Independence was a pronouncement of displacement, liquidation, and enslavement for the majority of the continents inhabitants.
Within the schooling regime/prison regime nexus, many are taught into freedom in order to administer,
enforce, and passively reproduce the unfreedom of others , while some are trained into a tentative and
alwaystemporary avoidance of unfreedom, meagerly rewarded with the accoutrements of civic
inclusion (a job, a vote, a home address). Numerous others are trained to inhabit a space across or in between these fraudulent
modalities of freedom. If the radical teachers primary challenge does not initially revolve around the creation of pedagogical strategies that can produce
free, self-governing, critical student/ subjects, but instead centers on the structurally violent conditions of possibility for pedagogy itself, in what form
can critical, radical, liberationist teaching actually occur? To revise a previous question: how might the conceptual premises and practical premises of
classroom pedagogy be transformed, rethought, and strategically disrupted in order that an abolitionist reorientation of teaching becomes feasible and
effective?
(Insert Links)
Thus, our alternative affirms abolitionist pedagogies as the precondition to authentic

and liberatory social transformations. A world without war and genocide begins here
students and teachers are instrumental to the operative functions of the prison regime.
You should vote negative to refuse the formulaic and state-oriented approach of the
affirmative in favor of a revolutionary position of abolition.
The (Pedagogical) Necessity of the Impossible
A compulsory deferral of abolitionist pedagogical possibilities composes the largely unaddressed precedent of teaching in the current historical period. It
is this deferralgenerally unacknowledged and largely presumedthat both undermines the emergence of an abolitionist pedagogical praxis and
illuminates abolitionisms necessity as a dynamic practice of social transformation, over and against liberal and progressive
appropriations of critical/radical pedagogy. Contrary to the thinly disguised ideological Alinskyism that contemporary liberal, progressive, critical, and radical teaching generally and tacitly assumes in
what is usually required, and what usually works as a strategy for teaching against the carceral
relation to the prison regime,
common sense, is a pedagogical approach that asks the unaskable, posits the necessity of the impossible, and
embraces the creative danger inherent in liberationist futures. About a decade of teaching a variety of courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels
at one of the most demographically diverse research universities in the United States (the University [End Page 12] of California, Riverside) has allowed me the opportunity to experiment with the
curricular content, assignment form, pedagogical mode, and conceptual organization of coursework that directly or tangentially addresses the formation of the U.S. prison regime and prison industrial
Students are consistently (and often unanimously) eager to locate their studies within an abolitionist genealogyoften
complex.
understanding their work as potentially connected to a living history of radical social movements and
epistemological-political revoltand tend to embrace the high academic demands and rigor of these courses with far less
resistance and ambivalence than in many of my other Ethnic Studies courses. There are some immediate analytical and scholarly tools that form a basic pedagogical apparatus for
productively exploding the generalized common sense that creates and surrounds the U.S. prison regime. In fact, it is crucial for teachers and students to collectively understand that it is precisely the
circulation and concrete enactment of this common sense that makes it central to the prison regime, not simply an ideological supplement of it. Put differently, many students and teachers have a
tendency to presume that the cultural symbols and popular discourses that signify and give common sense meaning to prisons and policing are external to the prison regime, as if these symbols and
discourses (produced through mass media, state spokespersons and elected officials, right-wing think tanks, video games, television crime dramas, etc.) simply amount to bad or deceptive propaganda
that conspiratorially hide some essential truth about prisons that can be uncovered. This is a seductive and self-explanatory, but far too simplistic, way of understanding how the prison regime thrives.
What we require, instead, is a sustained analytical discussion that considers how multiple layers of knowledge
including common sense and its different cultural formsare constantly producing a lived truth of policing and prisons that has nothing at all
to do with an essential, objective truth. Rather, this fabricated, lived truth forms the template of everyday life through
which we come to believe that we more or less understand and know the prison and policing apparatus, and
which dynamically produces our consent and/or surrender to its epochal oppressive violence. As a pedagogical tool, this
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framework compels students and teachers to examine how deeply engaged they are in the violent common
sense of the prison and the racist state. Who is left for dead in the common discourse of crime, innocence, and guilt? How has the mundane institutionalized violence of
the racist state become so normalized as to be generally beyond comment? What has made the prison and policing apparatus in its current form appear to be so permanent, necessary, and immovable
within the common sense of social change and historical transformation? In this sense, teachers and students can attempt to concretely understand how they are a
dynamic part of the prison regimes production and reproductionand thus how they might also be part of its abolition
through the work of building and teaching a radical and liberatory common sense (this is political work that
anyone can do, ideally as part of a community of social movement). Additionally, the abolitionist teacher can prioritize a rigorousand
vigorouscritique of the endemic complicities of liberal/progressive reformism to the [End Page 13] transformation, expansion, and ultimate
reproduction of racist state violence and (proto)genocide; this entails a radical critique of everything from the sociopolitical
legacies of civil rights and the oppressive capacities of human rights to the racist states direct assimilation of 1970s-era prison reform agendas into the blueprints for massive
prison expansion discussed above.17 The abolitionist teacher must be willing to occupy the difficult and often uncomfortable
position of political leadership in the classroom. To some, this reads as a direct violation of Freirian conceptions of critical pedagogy, but I would argue that it is really
an elaboration and amplification of the revolutionary spirit at the heart of Freires entire lifework. That is, how can a teacher expect her/his students to
undertake the courageous and difficult work of inhabiting an abolitionist positionalityeven if only as an academic exercise
unless the teacher herself/himself embodies, performs, and oozes that very same political desire? In fact, it often seems
that doing the latter is enough to compel many students (at least momentarily) to become intimate and familiar with the
allegedly impossible. Finally, the horizon of the possible is only constrained by ones pedagogical willingness to locate a
particular political struggle (here, prison abolition) within the long and living history of liberation movements. In this context, prison abolition
can be understood as one important strain within a continuously unfurling fabric of liberationist political horizons, in which the imagination of the possible and the practical is shaped but not limited by the
specific material and institutional conditions within which one lives. It is useful to continually ask: on whose shoulders does one sit, when undertaking the audacious identifications and political practices
There is something profoundly indelible and emboldening in realizing that ones own
endemic to an abolitionist pedagogy?
political struggle is deeply connected to a vibrant, robust, creative, and beautiful legacy of collective
imagination and creative social labor (and of course, there are crucial ways of comprehending historical liberation struggles in all their forms, from guerilla warfare to dance).
While I do not expect to arrive at a wholly satisfactory pedagogical endpoint anytime soon, and am therefore hesitant to offer prescriptive examples of how to teach within an abolitionist framework, I also
There is, in the end, no teaching formula or pedagogical system that

believe that rigorous experimentation and creative pedagogical radicalism is the very soul of this praxis.
finally fulfills the abolitionist social vision, there is only a political desire that understands the immediacy of
struggling for human liberation from precisely those forms of systemic violence and institutionalized dehumanization that are most culturally and
politically sanctioned, valorized, and taken for granted within ones own pedagogical moment. To refuse [End Page 14] or resist this desire is to be unaccountable to the
historical truth of our moment, in which the structural logic and physiological technologies of social liquidation
(removal from or effective neutralization within civil society) have merged with historys greatest experiment in punitive human captivity, a
linkage that increasingly lays bare racisms logical outcome in genocide.18 Abolitionist Position and Praxis Given the historical context I
have briefly outlined, and the practical-theoretical need for situating an abolitionist praxis within a longer tradition of freedom struggle, I
contend that there can be no liberatory teaching act, nor can there be an adequately critical pedagogical practice, that does not also
attempt to become an abolitionist one. Provisionally, I am conceptualizing abolition as a praxis of liberation that is creative and experimental rather than formulaic and rigidly
programmatic. Abolition is a radical political position, as well as a perpetually creative and experimental pedagogy, because
formulaic approaches cannot adequately apprehend the biopolitics, dynamic statecraft, and internalized
violence of genocidal and proto-genocidal systems of human domination. As a productive and creative praxis, this conception of abolition
posits the material possibility and historical necessity of a social capacity for human freedom based on a cultural-economic infrastructure that supports the transformation of oppressive relations that are
abolitionist praxis does

the legacy of genocidal conquest, settler colonialism, racial slavery/capitalism,19 compulsory hetero-patriarchies, and global white supremacy. In this sense,
not singularly concern itself with the abolition of the prison industrial complex, although it fundamentally and
strategically prioritizes the prison as a central site for catalyzing broader, radical social transformations. In significant
part, this suggests envisioning and ultimately constructing a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscape of
locating abolitionist praxis within a longer political genealogy that anticipates the task of remaking the world under transformed material
our society.20 In
refracts the most radical and revolutionary dimensions of a historical Black freedom struggle
circumstances, this position
that positioned the abolition of slavery as the condition of possibility for Black hence humanfreedom. To
situate contemporary abolitionism as such is also to recall the U.S. racist states (and its liberal allies) displacement and effective political criminalization of Black radical abolitionism through the 13th
Amendments 1865 recodification of the slave relation through the juridical reinvention of a racial-carceral relation: Amendment XIII Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a
punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.21 [emphasis added] Given the institutional elaborations
racial criminalization, policing, and massive imprisonment that have prevailed on the 13th Amendments essential
of
authorization to replace a regime of racist chattel slavery with racist carceral state violence, it is incumbent on the radical
teacher to assess the density of her/his entanglement in this historically layered condition of [End Page 15] violence, immobilization, and capture. Prior to the work of formulating an effective curriculum
and teaching strategy for critically engaging the prison industrial complex, in other words, is the even more difficult work of examining the assumptive limitations of any radical pedagogy that does not
attempt to displace an epistemological and cultural common sense in which the relative order and peace of the classroom is perpetually reproduced by the systemic disorder and deep violence of the
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prison regime. In relation to the radical challenging of common sense discussed above, another critical analytical tool for building an abolitionist pedagogy entails
the rigorous, scholarly dismantling of the presentist and deeply ahistorical understanding of policing and prisons. Students
(and many teachers) frequently enter such dialogues with an utterly mystified conception of the policing and prison apparatus, and
do not generally understand that 1) these apparatuses in their current form are very recent creations, and have not been around forever; and 2) the rise of these
institutional forms of criminalization, domestic war, and mass-scale imprisonment forms one link in a historical
chain of genocidal and proto-genocidal mobilizations of the racist state that regularly take place as part of the deadly global process of U.S.
nation-building. In other words, not only is the prison regime a very recent invention of the state (and therefore is neither a permanent nor
indestructible institutional assemblage), but it is institutionally and historically inseparable from the precedent and
contemporaneous structures of large-scale racist state violence. Asserting the above as part of the core
analytical framework of the pedagogical structure can greatly enable a discussion of abolitionist possibility that
thinks of the critical dialogue as a necessary continuation of long historical struggles against land conquest,
slavery, racial colonialism, and imperialist war. This also means that our discussions take place within a longer temporal community with those liberation
struggles, such that we are neither crazy nor isolated. I have seen students and teachers speak radical truth to power under difficult
and vulnerable circumstances based on this understanding that they are part of a historical record. I have had little
trouble convincing most studentsacross distinctions of race, class, gender, age, sexuality, and geographyof the gravity and emergency of our historical moment. It is the analytical, political, and
practical move toward an abolitionist positionality that is (perhaps predictably) far more challenging. This is in part due to the fraudulent and stubborn default position of centrist-to-progressive
liberalism/reformism (including assertions of civil and human rights) as the only feasible or legible response to reactionary, violent, racist forms of state power. Perhaps more troublesome, however, is
resistance to engaging with abolitionist praxis seems to also derive from a deep and broad epistemological and cultural
that this
disciplining of the political imagination that makes liberationist dreams unspeakable. This disciplining is most overtly
produced through hegemonic state and cultural apparatuses and their representatives (including elected officials, popular political pundits and public intellectuals, schools, family units, religious
is also compounded through the pragmatic imperatives of many liberal and progressive nonprofit
institutions, etc.), but
organizations and social movements that reproduce the political limitations of the [End Page 16] nonprofit industrial
complex. 22 In this context, the liberationist historical identifications hailed by an abolitionist social imagination also require
that such repression of political-intellectual imagination be fought, demystified, and displaced. Perhaps, then, there is
no viable or defensible pedagogical position other than an abolitionist one. To live and work, learn and teach,
and survive and thrive in a time defined by the capacity and political willingness to eliminate and neutralize
populations through a culturally valorized, state sanctioned nexus of institutional violence, is to better understand why
abolitionist praxis in this historical moment is primarily pedagogical, within and against the system in
which it occurs. While it is conceivable that in future moments, abolitionist praxis can focus more centrally on matters of (creating and not simply
opposing) public policy, infrastructure building, and economic reorganization, the present moment clearly demands a
convening of radical pedagogical energies that can build the collective human power, epistemic and knowledge
apparatuses, and material sites of learning that are the precondition of authentic and liberatory social
transformations. The prison regime is the institutionalization and systemic expansion of massive human misery.
It is the production of bodily and psychic disarticulation on multiple scales, across different physiological capacities. The prison industrial complex is, in its logic of
organization and its production of common sense, at least proto-genocidal. Finally, the prison regime is inseparable fromthat is, present inthe
schooling regime in which teachers are entangled. Prison is not simply a place to which one is displaced and where ones physiological being is disarticulated, at the rule and whim of the state and its
designated representatives (police, parole officers, school teachers). The prison regime is the assumptive premise of classroom teaching generally. While many of us must live in labored denial of this fact
there are opportune moments in which it is useful to come

in order to teach as we must about American democracy, freedom, and (civil) rights,
clean: the vast majority of what occurs in U.S. classroomsfrom preschool to graduate schoolcannot
accommodate the bare truth of the proto-genocidal prison regime as a violent ordering of the world, a primary component
of civil society/school, and a material presence in our everyday teaching acts. As teachers, we are institutionally hailed to the service of genocide
management, in which our pedagogical labor is variously engaged in mitigating, valorizing, critiquing,
redeeming, justifying, lamenting, and otherwise reproducing or tolerating the profound and systemic violence of
the global-historical U.S. nation building project. As radical teachers, we are politically hailed to betray
genocide management in order to embrace the urgent challenge of genocide abolition. The short-term survival
of those populations rendered most immediately vulnerable to the mundane and spectacular violence of this system,
and the long-term survival of most of the planets human population (particularly those descended from survivors of enslavement, colonization,
conquest, and economic exploitation), is significantly dependent on our willingness to embrace this form of pedagogical
audacity . [End Page 17] pg. 12-17
13
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14
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1NC: Vs SP1
and genocide.
15
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16
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trace the
forgivable. It
17
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both
effective?
Prison is big business - Automation is not the key internal link to econ the prison
industrial complex is the prison industrial complex sustains neoliberal economic
growth even as it strips workers of jobs by shifting those jobs to prison slave labor
this evidence is specific to the aff prisoners are already doing the high skilled labor
the AFF shifts to
Goldberg and Evans 09 [Eve and Linda, members of Students for Democratic Society and radical
activists and political prisoners, The Prison Industrial Complex and the Global Economy, PM Press Pamphlet
Series v. 0004, pp. 13-5]
An American worker who once upon a time made $8/hour, loses his job when the company relocates to
thailand where workers are paid only $2/day. Unemployed, and alienated from a society indifferent to
his needs, he becomes involved in the drug economy or some other outlawed means of survival. He is
arrested, put in prison, and put to work. His new salary: 22 cents/hour. From worker, to unemployed, to criminal, to convict laborer, the cycle has
come full circle. And the only victor is big business. For private business, prison labor is like a pot of gold. No strikes. No union
organizing. No unemployment insurance or workers compensation to pay. No language problem, as in a foreign country. New leviathan
prisons are being built with thousands of eerie acres of factories inside the walls. Prisoners do data entry for Chevron, make telephone reservations
for TWA, raise hogs, shovel manure, make circuit boards, limousines, water- beds, and lingerie for
Victorias Secret. All at a fraction of the cost of free labor. Prisoners can be forced to work for pennies because they have no rights. Even the 14 [sic: 13 ] th th
Amendment to the Constitution which abolished slavery, excludes prisoners from its protections. And, more and more, prisons are charging inmates for basic necessitiesfrom medical care, to toilet paper, to use of the law library. Many states
are now charging room and board. Berks County jail in Pennsylvania is charging inmates $10 per day to be there. California has similar legislation pending. So, while government cannot (yet) actually require inmates to work at private industry
Inmates working at UNICOR (the federal prison industry

jobs for less than minimum wage, they are forced to by necessity. Some prison enterprises are state run.
corporation) make recycled furniture and work 40 hours a week for about $40 per month. The Oregon Prison Industries
produces a line of Prison Blues blue jeans. An ad in their catalogue shows a handsome prison inmate saying, I say we should make bell-bottoms. They say Ive been in here too long. Bizarre, but true. The promotional
tags on the clothes themselves actually tout their operation as rehabiliation and job training for prisoners, who of course
would never be able to find work in the garment industry upon release. Prison industries are often directly competing
with private industry. Small furniture manufacturers around the country complain that they are being
driven out of business by UNICOR which pays 23 cents/hour and has the inside track on government
contracts. In another case, U.S. Technologies sold its electronics plant in Austin, Texas, leaving its 150
workers unemployed. Six week later, the electronics plant reopened in a nearby prison. The
proliferation of prisons in the United States is one piece of a puzzle called the globalization of capital.
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Since the end of the Cold War, capitalism has gone on an international business offensive. No longer
impeded by an alternative socialist economy or the threat of national liberation movements supported
by the Soviet Union or China, transnational corporations see the world as their oyster. Agencies such
as the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, bolstered by
agreements like NAFTA and GATT are putting more and more power into the hands of transnational
corporations by putting the squeeze on national governments. The primary mechanism of control is debt. For decades, developing countries have depended on foreign loans, resulting in increasing vulnerability to the
transnational corporate strategy for the global economy. Access to international credit and aid is given only if governments agree to
certain conditions known as structural adjustment. In a nutshell, structural adjustment requires cuts in
social services, privatization of state-run industry, repeal of agreements with labor about working
conditions and minimum wage, conversion of multi-use farm lands into cash crop agriculture for
export, and the dismantling of trade laws which protect local economies. Under structural adjustment,
police and military expenditures are the only government spending that is encouraged. The sovereignty of nations is
compromised when, as in the case of Vietnam, trade sanctions are threatened unless the government allows Camel cigarettes to litter the country- side with billboards, or promises to spend millions in the U.S.-orchestrated crackdown on drugs.
The basic transnational corporate philosophy is this: the world is a single market; natural resources
are to be exploited; people are consumers; anything which hinders profit is to be routed out and
destroyed. The results of this philosophy in action are that while economies are growing, so is poverty,
so is ecological destruction, so are sweatshops and child labor. Across the globe, wages are
plummeting, indigenous people are being forced off their lands, rivers are becoming industrial
dumping grounds, and forests are being obliterated. Massive regional starvation and World Bank
riots are becoming more frequent throughout the Third World. All over the world, more and more people are
being forced into illegal activity for their own survival as traditional cultures and social structures are
destroyed. Inevitably, crime and imprisonment rates are on the rise. And the United States law enforcement
establishment is in the forefront, domestically and internationally, in providing state-of-the-art
repression. Within the United States, structural adjustment (sometimes known as the Contract With America) takes the form of welfare and social service cuts, continued massive military spending, and skyrocketing prison
spending. Walk through any poor urban neighborhood: school systems are crumbling, after-school programs, libraries, parks and drug treatment centers are closed. But you will see more police stations and more cops. Often, the only social
The dismantling of social programs, and the growing dominance of the right- wing
service available to poor young people is jail.
agenda in U.S. politics has been made possible, at least in part, by the successful repression of the civil rights
and liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s. Many of the leadersMartin Luther King Jr., Malcolm
X, Fred Hampton, and many otherswere assassinated. Others, like Geronimo ji Jaga Pratt, Leonard
Peltier, and Mumia Abu-Jamal, have been locked up. Over 150 political leaders from the black
liberation struggle, the Puerto Rican independence movement, and other resistance efforts are still in
prison. Many are serving sentences ranging from 40 to 90 years. Oppressed communities have been
robbed of radical political leadership which might have led an opposition movement. We are reaping
the results.
The School to prison pipeline criminalizes boys of color preparing students for
incarcerated life - STEMs emphasis on race-neutrality and the context neutrality that
erases the school to prison pipeline as a condition for safe spaces for mathematics
keeps boys of color locked in a system of criminalization regardless of STEM aptitude
Basile 15 [Vincent, PhD Ed. @ U Colorado-Boulder, Standin' Tall: (De)criminalization and Acts of
Resistance Among Boys of Color in an Elementary A er School STEM Program, Spring 1-1-2015, p. 19-24]
As we see boys of color subjected to these criminalizing processes in public spaces (Rios, 2011) and in the generational
in schools as well. Garland
reproduction of criminal identities (MacLeod, Truth, & Times, 2009), it is no surprise we see criminalizing processes
(2012) identifies it as a natural progression. Wacquant (2001) has viewed this kind of criminalization as a symbiosis
wherein schools in low-income neighborhoods have now taken on the same processes, apparatus and
treatments as prisons. In many urban schools employ police in addition to School Resource Officers
(SROs); private security guards now patrol hallways, students are searched and passed through metal
19
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detectors on their way into school, video surveillance monitors less public areas, dress codes and
sometimes uniforms are strictly enforced, bars adorn windows and exterior doors remain locked at all
times barring unapproved entrance and exit (Nolan, 2011). Even the presence of SROs originally assigned
to schools to promote positive anti-drug interactions with students - more often in low-income schools
- may be increasing the criminalization of boys of color through excessive hyper-policing and over-
monitoring of students, and in the recruitment of SROs to handle school discipline rather than school administrators (Theriot, 2009).
Further, in multi-racial schools, boys of color are often segregated out of standard classes, not only for
low academic performance but also for behavior, into alternative programs and schools which exhibit
more extreme examples of similarities to prisons. In Texas, for example, boys of color exhibiting low test
scores have increasingly been sent to alternative education programs originally designed and
intended for juveniles with criminal records and persistent delinquent behaviors (Reyes, 2001). More benign behaviors of
boys of color are hyper-policed and hyper-criminalized as well (Rios, 2006). Actions such as socializing, standing up, not looking
at the teacher and talking out of turn are all examples of some of the kinds of behaviors that are hyper-policed by
teachers, beginning in elementary school. Even potentially ambiguous behaviors, such as rolling
eyes or sighing are hyper-policed and criminalized when exhibited by boys of color (Langhout, 2005). The processes of criminalizing
boys of color begins in school (Noguera, 2009). By 4th and 5th grades, a troubling number of boys of color are already
labelled as criminals by teachers and administrators (Ferguson, 2001). Elementary school boys of color are referred to with
direct language indicating incarcerated futures. They are scolded, sent to backs of rooms, sent out of
rooms, sent home, isolated in the classroom and often not permitted to speak even when White peers
are allowed (Langhout, 2005). [Students of color] are disciplined and suspended more frequently than White students for subjective behaviors like
disrespect, excessive noise, threats, and loitering (Meiners, 2007, p. 33) (Winn & Behizadeh, 2011, p. 153). Teachers and administrators
have come to expect this disparity, producing a culture of normality with regard to the schoolprison
nexus (Brown, 2009; Hirschfield, 2008; Wacquant, 2001). Criminalization in schools has longitudinal consequences for youth of color, playing a
significant role in pushing them into the school to prison pipeline. The school to prison pipeline is a funnel which not only
sends boys of color to prison, but also directly prepares them for an incarcerated life (Hirschfield, 2008).
The School to Prison Pipeline is a nationwide system of local,

According to the New York Civil Liberties Union (2007):
state and federal education and public safety policies that pushes students out of school and into the
criminal justice system. This system disproportionately targets youth of color and youth with
disabilities. Inequities in areas such as school discipline, policing practices, high-stakes testing and
the prison industry contribute to the pipeline. The School to Prison Pipeline operates directly and
indirectly. Schools directly send students into the pipeline through zero tolerance policies that involve
the police in minor incidents and often lead to arrests, juvenile detention referrals, and even criminal
charges and incarceration. Schools indirectly push students towards the criminal justice system by
excluding them from school through suspension, expulsion, discouragement and high stakes testing
requirements. (p. 3) Further, although boys of color are hyper-criminalized in school and disproportionately punished, policed, and incarcerated,
they do not engage in violent behaviors or drug use any more than their more affluent White peers (Thompson, 2011; Winn & Behizadeh, 2011). Given
this disparate racialized practice, Hall (2010) identified the criminalization of boys of color as cruel and unusual punishment and a violation of the United
States Constitution. These practices have persisted since the advent of the Prison Industrial Complex, growing into what Rios (2006) calls a youth
control complex wherein boys of color are criminalized in ways that serve to levy constant control over bodies. While awareness has grown significantly
over the decades of these practices, there has been little to no meaningful state or federal legislative response to accompany that awareness (Boyd,
2007). Consequences of criminalization on STEM learning. Access to STEM education is a civil and legal right (Tate, 2001). A democracy demands that
its citizens make personal, community-based, and national decisions that involve scientific information (Michaels, Shouse, & Schweingruber, 2007, p.
3). As such, we can align criminalization in schools, the school to prison pipeline and the youth control complex to the systemic and acute practices
which deny access to STEM educational opportunities. Effective teaching in a STEM classroom requires equitable access to all aspects of learning,
building new knowledge from the previous knowledge students are bringing into the classroom (The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics,
2013). STEM classrooms should be regularly structured with students in small groups participating productively in STEM problem solving and engaging
in peer-to-peer discourse (Michaels et al., 2007). Students should collaboratively ask questions and search out plausible logical answers to those
questions via critical thinking and experimentation (The Board on Science Education, 2012). Connecting STEM teaching practices and criminalization.
As boysof color are consistently both formally and informally sent out of classrooms and denied use of
equipment, manipulatives, supplies and participation in small groups, for disciplinary infractions
which are no more frequent or severe than those of their White counterparts, we see how civil rights
are denied to boys of color in similar ways to post-incarceration denials of the right to vote, bear arms,
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etc. (Winn & Behizadeh, 2011).12 I use this criminalization framework to understand how STEM education practices, the value of STEM knowledge in
society, and the oppressive nature of the school to prison pipeline all closely interact. However, I still require a framework which allows me to unpack the
intricacies of the historical, pervasive and persistent racism that brings criminalization in STEM education to bear in disparate ways upon boys of color.
Critical Race Theory Because of its social construction, race is difficult to define. Omi and Winant (1994) state, Everyone "knows" what race is, though
everyone has a different opinion as to how many racial groups there are, what they are called, and who belongs in what specific racial categories" (p 3).
Offering an attempt at an academic definition, Omi and Winant state, ...race is a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by
referring to different types of human bodies. Although the concept of race invokes biologically based human characteristics (so-called "phenotypes"),
selection of these particular human features for purposes of racial signification is always and necessarily a social and historical process (p. 55). Keeping
this as undergirded to the notion of race, I move forward with the understanding that ...Whiteness racializes different groups of people in different ways
at different times in response to changing needs... (Basile & Lopez, 2015). Critical Race Theory (CRT) emerged out of critical legal studies in the 1970s
as a scholarly response to the lack of attention given to the roles race and racism play in societal structures (Crenshaw, 2011; Delgado & Stefancic,
2012). CRT scholars incorporate history, sociology, economics, political science and other disciplines to understand and ultimately to deconstruct the
ways in which systemic racism works to entrench, adapt and replicate itself (Decuir & Dixson, 2004; Gotanda, 1991; Leonard, et.al., 2009; Leonardo,
2011, 2012; Martin, 13 2006; Rosebery & Ogonowski, 2010; Stinson, 2008; Tate, 1994; Williams, 2008). Although arguably a relatively new concept, the
ideas and visions that compose CRT have been explored and written about for over a century, dating back to W.E.B. DuBois (1903) and Carter
Woodson (1933). CRT directly challenges the notion that we live in a post-racial society. It not only explicitly identifies the social facts of systemic racism
- i.e. higher loan rates provided to Peoples of Color (Cavalluzzo, Cavalluzzo, & Wolken, 2002), disparate educational resources, food deserts (Guthman,
2008; Slocum, 2010), etc. - but also argues that these conditions serve a purpose and did not occur by accident (Bell, 1992, 2004; Delgado, 2001).
Delgado and Stefancic (2012) identified six CRT tenets: (a) racism is ordinary and a part of the everyday lives of most People of Color in the United
States; (b) Interest Convergence - race and racism serve the material interests of Whiteness and the psychic interests of Peoples of Color; (c) the
concept of race is a social construction, not a biological one; (d) Differential Racialization - Whiteness racializes different groups of people in different
ways at different times in response to changing needs; (e) Racial Essentialism - dominant society works to ascribe both groups and individuals of color a
a single, easily stated, unitary identity; (f) scholars of color may be able to speak to issues of race and racism in ways White scholars may not. When
operationalized CRT has served as a powerful tool to help us understand and ultimately work to dismantle the practices of structural ideologies of
systemic and endemic14 racism in education practice and policy (Crenshaw, 2011), such as racial commodification, racial essentialism and differential
racialization (Basile & Lopez, 2015). CRT in Education Research CRT was not formally introduced as an explanatory and analytic tool into educational
research until 1995 by Ladson-Billings & Tate. Since then, CRT has established a strong and growing presence in the field (Bonilla-Silva, 1997; DeCuir
& Dixson, 2004; Ladson-Billings, 2005, 2012) and multiple scholars have utilized CRT to better understand racial structures in African-American,
Latino/a and Asian-American specific education research, as well as education pedagogy and policy research (Jain, et.al., 2011; Kohli & Solorzano,
2012; Leonard & Evans, 2008; Leonardo, 2011, 2013; Martin, Gholson, & Leonard, 2010; Solorzano & Ornelas, 2002; Yosso & Ravine, 2007; Yosso,
et.al., 2009; Yosso, 2005). Legal scholars such as Bell (1992, 2004, 2005), Delgado (1990, 2000, 2001, 2011), and Crenshaw (1995; 1991, 2011),
among others, have made significant contributions to the development of CRT in ways that have influenced its applications in education (Tate, 1997).
Education researchers have used CRT to expose the ways practices and procedures such as color-blind approaches to teaching, the obsession with
achievement gaps (Gutierrez, 2008; Rodriguez, 2001), and racialized tracking (DeCuir & Dixson, 2004) which have all worked to maintain and expand
racism and racialized power hierarchies. Solorzano and Yosso (2001) have identified five characteristics of CRT scholars and researchers in education:
(a) recognizing the centrality of race and racism as it intersects with other forms of oppression; 15 (b) challenging the dominant ideologies of objectivity,
color-blindness, science and mathematics for all rhetoric and other similar claims act as camouflage for continued replication and expansion of the
power and privilege of dominant structures and groups; (c) committing to continued work towards social justice; (d) recognizing and expressing the
central value of the experiential knowledge via interdisciplinary methods such as narratives, counter-storytelling, and histories that Students of Color
carry with them; (e) maintaining a trans-disciplinary perspective in understanding race and racism in education. CRT in education also functions with the
understanding that our society is based on property rights and Whiteness - that is the ability and privilege to own and operate material goods and
spaces, products of labor and intellectual property - is in and of itself a form of property, a privilege not historically afforded to Peoples of Color (DeCuir &
Dixson, 2004; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). The term Whiteness does not implicate any one individual but rather a system of structures and
perspectives that inform a dominant hegemonic project. Although White peoples (and other individuals afforded limited access to Whiteness) often
engage Whiteness in ways that benefit and privilege them, some individuals also engage Whiteness in critical, deconstructing ways - a necessary
component in beginning to dismantle the dominant hegemonic project (Leonardo, 2002, 2004). The notion of Whiteness as property is particularly salient
in STEM and STEM education because of the high value the United States places on STEM enterprises and knowledge. As such the material goods and
spaces, products of labor and intellectual properties of Peoples of Color in STEM fields often fall under the ownership of the owners and operators of
Whiteness through16 racial commodification (Basile & Lopez, 2015; Leonardo, 2013). Against these practices, CRT scholars in STEM education operate
with an expressed purpose to help create counternarratives to the dominant ideologies created and maintained in the main body of academic STEM
education research, also known as masternarratives. Challenging Masternarratives in STEM Education Beginning with the publication of the now-
renowned Coleman Report in 1966, the main body of education research, particularly in mathematics and science education, has created a
masternarrative of underachievement, limited persistence, and social and economic depravity of boys of color (Martin, 2003, 2006, 2007; Stinson, 2006;
Swanson et al., 2003). The arguments are often environmentally-based through an deficit achievement lens, and often with a Whiteness-at-the-center
point of view (Bell, 1992, 2004, 2005; D. Martin, 2003, 2007a). According to this masternarrative, boys of color have parents that lack the psychological
resources of their White counterparts (Swanson et al., 2003), are more sensitive to economic hardships (Swanson et al., 2003), and are particularly
depressed by the hardships of larger society (Noguera, 2003). These deficits have been placed into a historical context (Ladson- Billings, 1997) and as
such the achievement gap has become normal and an accepted component in education (Gutierrez, 2008). This normal decline in achievement in
boys of color in mathematics occurs as early as 4th grade (Davis, 2003) and possibly earlier. Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its related research
challenge this masternarrative. It offers instead a counternarrative based on research that focuses on the experiences and viewpoints of boys of color.
Using an oppressed-at-the center frame (Freire, 2000), and acknowledging that race is important (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995), the counternarrative
examines the ways boys of color form their identities, what those identities are and the ways in 17 which the dominant ideology affords and constrains
the opportunities for these identities to persist. Schools play a major role in both the academic and street identities of boys of color (Flores-Gonzalez,
2005) and as such the lack of opportunities for boys of color to form positive identities, particularly in mathematics disciplines, is largely the fault of the
schools treatment of them (Ladson-Billings, 1997). Research based in the larger Critical Race Theory and Methods traditions have begun to reveal a
counternarrative of boys of color as agents of resistance, forming identities to match. Using first person accounts, researchers have uncovered identities
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of participation and non- participation in schools that are often purposeful and based on individual agency (D. Martin, 2003, 2007b; Nasir & Hand, 2008).
Boys of color often develop identities of resistance in response to marginalized access to mathematics (D. Martin, 2003, 2006) and to the criminalizing
treatment of the education systems larger youth control complex (Rios, 2011). The formation of identities of resistance can become positive as they lead
to the development of a critical consciousness (Leonard & Evans, 2008; Stinson, 2008) which can ultimately strengthen a positive racial identity (D.
Martin, 2003, 2006, 2007a). Simultaneously, discourses of deficiency and rejection block the formation of other, and sometimes alternative, positive
identities (Stinson, 2006). Langhout (2005) conducted a salient study on how students in elementary school, and particularly boys of color, are made
invisible through stereotypes, and the ways students resist. In her research, Langhout identified multiple practices employed by teachers and
administrators used to enforce uniformity in actions and appearance such that the students behave. Significant energy, resources and time spent
policing the bodies of those students which is particularly important, as Langhout pointed out, when framed by the fact that students are not permitted
(by
18 law) to leave the classroom or school building. In this way, uniform masternarrative stereotypes are forced upon students as racial and gendered
collectives, such as abilities to read, access to food, and drive-by shootings. In doing so, the teachers erase the individual experiences of each student,
thus rendering them invisible as individuals. Langhout used hallway policing and enforcing as a particularly salient example. She detailed ways students
are lined up, silenced, made to walk evenly paced with each other, eyes set front and are punished - sometimes severely - for a lack of compliance. The
boys of color were particularly over-policed in these settings. Students however tended to not fully conform. Langhout found that the more students are
levied with this oppressive control, the more they (often subversively) resist: Childrens identities, especially the identities of boys of color, are
threatened via control and discipline. Here, children are rendered silent through controlling and disciplining their bodies in the hallways, through the
classroom behavior management system, and by teachers literally demanding silence. When childrens identities are threatened via control of their
values, motivations, goals or assumptions, they will resist. Their resistance can be verbal (e.g. talking about the [assistant] duty aid), non-verbal or
symbolic (e.g. littering in the classroom), targeted (e.g. drawing stickers on a behavior sheet) or diffuse (e.g. scratching the classroom floor), individual or
collective, authorized (e.g. drawing) or unauthorized (e.g. littering), facilitative (e.g. trying to reach the goal of behaving well), or oppositional (e.g.
working against a school assumption that all teachers are right). (p. 152) Here Langhout articulated a counternarrative with specific examples the ways
in which students engaged in actions that actively challenged and resisted the masternarrative, and the broader implications those acts have on their
own identities.19 Acts of Resistance In a broad sociological sense, resistance theorists examine the ways in which humans engage in defiance, the
affordances and consequences of those conscious and subconscious decisions, and how defiance affects identity and other outcomes. In education,
resistance theorists have focused on youth resistance, with an emphasis on socio-economic class and opposition (Bourdieu, 2000; DeMarrais &
LeCompte, 1999; Giroux, 1981, 1983). This literature has largely made the call to view acts of resistance from students as moral and political acts of an
oppressed working class (Abowitz, 2000). With a significant focus on socio-economic class, resistance theory has largely ignored issues of race (Akom,
2003), and in some cases has even openly dismissed race as a significant issue in resistance in the classroom. Critical scholars suggest the opposition
Students of Color perpetrate have been largely ignored and under-theorized. Utilizing work within and outside of education including sociology,
linguistics and critical race theory, critical scholars analyze findings from their own studies to challenge the more traditional masternarratives of
resistance: In other words, the majority of resistance studies provide information about how youth participate in oppositional behavior that reinforces
social inequality instead of offering examples of how oppositional behavior may be an impetus toward social justice (Solorzano & Bernal, 2001). Some
general themes that emerge from the scholars who have done this work include the notion that acts of resistance from boys of color are, as a collective,
acts of rebellion against an oppressive regime of punishment and marginalization. Acts of Resistance in Education ResearchParticularly in mathematics
education, the introduction of socio-cultural theories have created spaces to consider the entire social and cultural contexts within which students
engage20 mathematics and science, including issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and socio-economics (Gutierrez, 2010). Forays into this context include
CRT and other critical examinations of STEM education along with sociocultural and situative perspectives. While racialized histories of oppression and
marginalization may seem to be an obviously large component of the sociocultural and situative contexts of students of color when examining
resistance, it has been largely ignored save those scholars specializing in racial foci (Akom, Scott, & Shah, 2013; Akom, 2003). The sociocultural and
situative theorists who have examined resistance with regard to race have largely ignored the counternarratives and perspectives of the students of color
themselves. For example, Hand (Hand, 2009) examined opposition in low-tracked middle school mathematics classrooms using qualitative measures
interpreted with a situative perspective. Hand considered the ways in which teachers and students co-constructed opposition, and the ways in which
teachers resisted their students. She found that classroom opposition is fostered by weak opportunities for meaningful mathematical engagement and
the transformation of a polarized participation structure into an oppositional one (p. 97). An assumption made in this research, however, is that
college admission is the goal for students mathematics education. As such, Hand interpreted students oppositions as
meaningful, purposeful, and culture-rich, but also ultimately detrimental to their futures. This assumption and consequent negative view of opposition
represents a masternarrative in the academic body of work on resistance and opposition in understanding some of the causes, motives
and outcomes of the acts of resistance of boys of color. Recognizing this limitation in interpreting her data, Hand left unaddressed why boys
of color are openly and consistently resisting mathematics they have the ability to do and as such calls for
more research:21 The boys [of color] in the openly oppositional group did not appear to be significantly different from their peers in terms of their
capacity to understand mathematics. They were often left to their own devices to socialize and wander the class,
while the teacher directed his attention to the others. In reviewing their exams and working with them on a consistent basis
through-out the year, I observed that like other students in the class, they rarely turned in their work and received poor
grades because of this. However, they were often able to grasp mathematical concepts quickly,
compared to some of their peers. Thus, in this classroom, it did not appear to be the case that lack of
mathematical ability predicted oppositional behavior. This finding would be interesting to pursue in future research. (p. 116)
Here Hand indicated that the boys of color were able to do the math and potentially be academically successful but perplexingly still engaged in
consistent acts of resistance. Understanding and theorizing the ways in which acts of resistance intersect with criminalization in schools may provide the
counternarratives for socioculturalists to understand what it is that does predict opposition in boys of color and why they engage in acts of
resistance despite academic ability. McFarland (2001) disagreed that race plays a role in student resistance. McFarland positioned resistance
22
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as negative and undermining to teacher authority and acting against the teacher's will. Using regression analysis, he examined
science, mathematics and English high school classrooms quantifying many descriptors for students notably including the categories magnet minority,
broken home/nonnuclear family, parent occupational status, social hierarchical standing and physical attractiveness among others.
McFarland calculated that 22 race and class backgrounds do not matter in student resistance, whereas
gender and physical attractiveness do. In positioning his work, McFarland dismissed resistance and critical theorists for only having examined resistance
on an individual level and as such have missed the effects that social contexts and specific situations have on decisions to disrupt the class (p. 617). In
this research, McFarland assumed that resistance is a fully negative and undesirable occurrence that it works against the students best interests and
that it only undermines teacher authority and the teachers will. These
assumptions erase the differential lived experiences
of students of color by assuming that (White) teacher authority and the teachers will function in the
best interests of all students. Additionally, by creating a numerical scale of physical attractiveness based on consultation with specific
students in the study, McFarland effectively created a racialized hierarchy of physical attributes. CRT interpretations of his work may question not only
the morality of his methods, but also his motives for erasing race from his research frameworks. Rios (2006, 2011) has also looked closely at resistance
in boys of color and has detailed how the boys often acted in open defiance and at times subversively to the control exerted over their bodies,
sometimes resulting in increased monitoring and control. According to Rios, the boys do this to express control over their own bodies and minds,
choosing when and where to engage in resistive acts in an oppressive system which works to constantly monitor and exert control over the boys bodies.
Akom, Scott and Shah (2013) recently (re)theorized resistance in STEM education. They used an approach ...based in critical education, ethnic studies,
science, technology, engineering, math, environmental studies, sociology, history, law, and public policy- to better understand the social and material
conditions impacting Black working-class youth in STEM fields and how to 23 transform these conditions (p.164). With this
approach, they critiqued the dominant body of academic work on resistance theory and particularly in
STEM education as largely remaining silent on issues of race. They argued resistance theory in STEM education
has failed to address the deficit frameworks used to explain Black STEM educational
underachievement nor the deficit paradigms which have served the interests of Whiteness, making the
power, privilege, and self- interest of dominant groups invisible. Akom, Scott and Shah called for the creation of
counternarratives to hegemonic resistance theory, and claimed that in order to challenge oppressive structures and systemic
racism, youth of color engaging in structural resistance is necessary and healthy. While they did link race and
the accompanying socio-economic issues to power-privilege structures, dominant ideologies, and oppressive practices in STEM education, they did not
specifically consider the role of criminalization and the school-to-prison pipeline which significantly impacts youth of color.
The affirmatives Mello evidence from the CS advantage says that the CS workforce is
drawn from the national security, especially the military. This continues the close
relationship between the student and the military industrial complex perpetuating the
idea that educated students are just hired guns for the government.
Banks and Lachney 17 (David A. Banks is an interdisciplinary researcher, an organizing committee member
for Theorizing the Web and an editor of The Society Pages technology & society blog Cyborgology. His work
has also been featured in Real Life, The New Inquiry, Tikkun Magazine, The Baffler Blog, and McSweeneys
Internet Tendency. Davids work focuses on the intersections of digital networks, urban form, and structures of
power. He holds a PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Rensselaer Polytechnic institute and a B.A. in
Urban Studies from New College of Florida. His Erdos Number is 4, Michael Lachney is a PhD candidate in
Science and Technology Studies at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His research is at the intersection of
STEM education and critical pedagogy. Michaels work has appeared in Learning, Media and Technology,
Computational Culture: A Journal of Software Studies, Teaching the Non-neutral Engineer: Pathways Toward
Addressing the Violence of Engineering in the Classroom, ASEE, American Society for Engineering
Education, Accessed 7/26/17) //AC
In 2016, social scientists Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog published the controversial book,
Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection Between Violent Extremism and Education. As the title
suggests, the book probes why there is a sizable presence of people with engineering degrees in
right-wing fundamentalist groups, most notably Jihadi terrorists but also neo-Nazis and white
supremacists .6 While the book offers compelling evidence to support a correlation between violent
23
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fundamentalism and engineering education, it is primarily concerned with drawing connections between the
two based on the personality traits of individuals. This leaves the practices and curriculum of engineering
education black-boxed: are people with personalities prone to fundamentalism attracted to engineering, or do
engineering education programs actively foster sympathy for fundamentalist ideologies? By ignoring what
engineering actually looks like in the classroom, Gambetta and Hertog provide little insight into how
real-time education may actually reinforce violent and fundamentalist mindsets.7 Missing from their
understanding is literature on the neutrality problem in engineering education, which has long
revealed how curriculum and structure are entangled with violence . This literature is also normative,
offering avenues to challenge the violence perpetuated by those with the stance that engineering work is and
can achieve apolitical neutrality, a political position in and of itself.8 Dean Nieusma and Ethan Blue explain
the historically violent origins of the term engineer, as one who operates siege enginesearly
technologies of warfare.9 Tracing this to the present, they argue that militarism and cultures of
warfare have shaped the relationships between industry (directly connected to war and not) and
engineering education .10 At one level engineering labor is designed to fit into existing power structures and
organizational logics. David Noble explores the history of this fit in the U.S., tracing the curriculum and
structure of engineering education to military and commercial interests.11 While much has changed since then,
the legacy of command-and-control problem solvinga system of military planning that restricts
inquiry to strict causationpersists in engineering education today as the demarcations between the
social and the technical At another level, engineering epistemologies assume an apolitical and
neutral stance that much of this history is beside the point of present day practices. Leyden et al.
suggest that while many engineers assume that bias-free knowledge is possible by focusing on practices that
promote social cohesion and efficient, and interdependent functionality, this illusion of neutrality is only
possible because these practices are already so commonplace in the disciplines.13 Indeed, Donna Riley
points out that creating a dichotomy between engineering and politics is based in a political stance that
assumes it is possible to separate them in the first place.14 Alternatively, literature in Science and
Technology Studies (STS) reveals that knowledge production is always situated in socio-political
contexts.15 16 If we add the legacies of violence that persist in engineering education and industry, to
the present-day illusion of neutrality it becomes clear that the disciplines of engineering provide little
opportunity for practitioners to be reflective about their roles in perpetuating violence. Still, reflective
research on the intersections of engineering/liberal education and engineering/sustainability appears to be
growing.17 18 This research helps to support a vocal minority seeking alternative forms of engineering
education that are not rooted in violence. Upon recognizing the long-standing role of engineers as hired
guns for the military-industrial complex, these educators and researchers use frameworks of peace19
and critical pedagogy20 to propose reforms that help to realize the democratic possibilities of
engineering. The language of peace in these reform proposals prioritizes engineers social
responsibilities to the safety, health, and welfare of humans and the Earth over that of war and
corporate profit.21 22 This approach includes everything from practical advice on career paths and
how to decline working on ethically dubious projects, to more structural critiques of engineering firms
relationships to state violence. One of the most influential efforts to scale the language of peace into
engineering education and profession is George Catalanos 2004 proposition to modify the ABET Criterion 3,
which deals primarily with student learning outcomes such as ability to design and conduct experiments and
ability to communicate effectively.23 Catalano suggests reorganizing this section so that the ethics of
living in peace with others, the planet, and ourselves is brought to the forefront. Donna Riley and
Yanna Lambrinidou extend Catalanos peace paradigm into an ethical principle where engineers reflect
on their professions history with militarism and environmental destruction to ultimately resist
24
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historical repetition.24 For example, Muscat et al. document how engineers are often positioned within
violent conflict situations arising from geopolitical disputes, rival claims over resources, unequal distribution of
benefits and costs or power struggles.25 Consider the US Army Corps of Engineers role in the decision to
save $100 million at the cost of canal wall failures that resulted in the massive flooding of New Orleans from
hurricane Katrina;26 or the Corps role in house demolition post-Katrina, despite community protest. Critical
pedagogies are also at the center of alternative engineering education.27 28 29 Given the racialized
legacies of structurally excluding African Americans from the engineering profession 30 and the long-
standing struggles of women trying to enter the field,31 Riley proposes the use of feminist and critical
engineering pedagogies. These frameworks help address the need for all students to recognize the political
and non-neutral nature of engineering, while also being responsive to the needs of women and minority
students.
There is a biometrics DA the affirmative solidifies the militaristic deployment of

biometric practices in schools
Nguyen 14 (Nicole, an Assistant Professor of Social Foundations of Education who focuses on political
geography, critical education studies, and critical sociology, Chokepoint: Regulating US student mobility
through biometrics, pg 5)
As these examples show, biometric practices deployed in a growing number of US schools mimic the port of
entry militarized security technologies used to manage risk by anchoring identity in prediction,
prevention, and pre-emption at the border. The encoded risk profiles gathered and sequenced by
these public school districts enable school administrators to verify and sort bodies in order to govern
their mobility according to these risk profiles. Schools, in this way, operate as yet another site of
biometric bordering, using biometric technologies to "envisage...a clear, clean, and unambiguous line
between legitimate/low risk and illegitimate/high risk mobilities" through "verifiable identities" (Amoore,
2006, p. 51). Schools' adoption of these biometric devices illustrates one way the war on terror infiltrates everyday life in mundane ways (Amoore, 2006,
2009, 2011; Graham, 2009; Kaplan, 2006; Katz, 2007). Amoore (2009) refers to the banal deployment of these biometric-based
security networks as a kind of "algorithmic war" that not only militarizes society and commercializes
secu-rity, but also necessarily functions through "war-like architec-tures" that "play[ out in the politics
of daily life" (p. 49; p. 51). Risk management systems like RFID chips used in warzones that track the movement of goods to increase productivity
contribute to this algorithmic war, one form of Foucault's (2003) Clause-witzian inversion of the "continuation of war by other means" (1). 15). Connolly
(2005) articulates that such algorithmic-based tech-niques "resonate" between "internal security and external military action" (p. 51). Algorithmic war
processes quantifiable, predictive data based on probabilistic interpretations of deviance to pre-determined norms (e.g., number of visits to a Belleville
school bathroom) into "actionable intelligence" and, in turn, "actionable security decisions" (e.g., denial of entry to the bathroom) (Amoore, 2006, 2009,
2011; Amoore & Hall, 2009; Salter, 2006; Sparke, 2006). By using these data-mining tools and inferential, probabi-listic knowledges to map risk onto
particular bodies and to pro-duce a "screened geography of suspicion," algorithmic war "reinscribes the imaginative geography of the deviant, atypical,
abnormal 'other' inside the spaces of daily life," rather than simply "dwell[ing] in a represented outside in the geographies of Iraq or Afghanistan"
(Amoore, 2009, p. 56). This war by other means en-ters school space, sorting school bodies according to their risk profiles and mobilizing preemptive
as schools seek more precise
security arrangements like closing a school bathroom if too many students migrate there. Thus,
attendance records and to more accurately regulate mobility in the name of security, they increasingly
turn to these military resources and discourses which come to structure nonmilitary life "mystified in
the energetic `forgetting' of the military sources of technologies that many people enjoy or feel
required to use in everyday life" (Kaplan, 2006, p. 707).
25
Session II
The impact is RFID tags, iris scanners, student trackers and facial recognition that
send black people to juvie/prison
through biometrics, pages 4-5)
Given their perceived effectiveness and efficiency,school dis-tricts like Belleville increasingly turn to biometric devices to
mine information about school bodies in order to restrict, limit, and monitor mobility. AT&T, for example,
developed RFID tags to "help schools keep tabs" on students, staff, and laptops by "affixing tags to
such high-value assets" in order to "locate them quickly when they're needed" (AT&T, 2010). Exploiting a
previously untapped market, these profitable chips regulate mobility in schools. Pre-programmed chokepoints determine who
can access particular sites based on their identity and the movement of others, allowing teachers into
lounges and bathrooms while restricting students and visitors. Moreover, when teachers wear these
badges, schools can "clock them in and out of work" and "quickly find them when emergencies arise"
in addition to communicating to school au-thorities each time a "tagged asset" passes through
particular "chokepoints" like a school door, hallways, classroom, or bus (AT&T, 2010, pp. 1-2). Tracking and locating students as well as
limiting their movements, AT&T (2010) argues, helps increase school se-curity and commodity public schooling (Giroux, 1990; Manning, 1999; Saltrnan,
2000).
New Jersey's Plumstead Township School District installed iris scanners in its schools in 2002 through
what it calls a Teacher-Parent Authentication Security System (T-PASS) with the help of 21st Solutions Inc. When a
teacher, parent, or visitor arrives at a Plumstead school, a camera takes a close-up photo of the subject's iris. If the "iris
image in the database matches that of the person seeking entry to the school, the door automatically
unlocks. Typi-cally, access is allowed or denied in less than 2 seconds" (Jimenez, O'Connell, & Bolling, 2006, p. 53). Plumstead Township
School District also relies on this technology to "link student records with the iris records of parents
or guardians, giving school personnel positive identification of individuals picking children up from
school" (Jimenez et al., 2006, p. 53). Iris scans at Plumstead both determine if a visitor is "safe" to enter school space and verify the identity of
individuals as guardians authorized (or not) to pick children up from the school. Plumstead Superintendent Jerry North assured
the community that "What we're trying to do is just make it as safe as possible" (as quoted in Eyemetric Identity
Systems, 2002). Plumstead, one of the few white, middle class school dis-tricts to turn to biometrics, deploys these devices, rather than building
community relationships aimed at getting to know family members, for security.
That same year, another

New Jersey school district, Freehold Borough Schools, also implemented the T-
PASS visitor manage-ment system to the main entrances of three schools: "When picking up a child, the adult
provides a driver's license and then submits to an eye scan. If the iris image camera recognizes his or her eyes, the door clicks open. If someone tries to
slip in behind an authorized person, the system triggers a siren and red flashing lights in the front office" ("Eye scan technology comes to schools,"
2006). ABC News reported that Freehold's use of iris scanning contributes to the "new frontier in child protection" ("Eye scan technology comes to
both Plumstead and Freehold Superintendents justified the implementation of
schools," 2006). As we can see,
these iris scanners on the basis of school security, suggesting that these biometric devices could
accurately and efficiently sort visitors to the school as safe or unsafe.
Similarly, school
districts like Metropolitan Nashville ("Metro") have begun adopting facial recognition
software as a way to "sys-temically sort( ] pictures in a database [of people] and if someone is on the
school system's watch list, then an alarm will go off to a team of officials monitoring the computer
system" (NewsChannel 5, 2007). Armed with a watch list of people with outstanding war-rants and sex offenders, Metro argued that facial
recognition works to preemptively "prevent crimes that have happened at other schools across the
nation" (NewsChannel 5, 2007). Metro also maintains a set of guidelines pertaining to student identification badges, which require students to carry
their ID badges at all times and "present their ID badges to a school official upon request" (Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, 2011, p. 1). Students
who fail to do so, according to Metro's policy, may be subject to the denial of admission to school events, the library, food service, and other functions
(Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, 2011, p. 1). Repeated failure to carry an ID badge results in "more severe sanctions/consequences"
(Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, 2011, p. 1). Yet, Metro also renders those students who success-fully display their ID badges "eligible for random
incentives at school discretion" (Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, 2011, p. 1). In order to win buy-in from students, Metro created a system of
rewards and punishments, incentivizing compliance to the sub-mission of their data-selves to these devices.
26
Session II
In Texas, Northside Independent School District (NISD) sought to "harness[] the power of radio
frequency identification technol-ogy (RFID) to make schools safer, know where our students are while at
school, increase revenues, and provide a general purpose 'smart' ID card" (Northside Independent School District,
2013). For NISD, RF1D-equipped school IDs mean that teachers could "increase student safety and security" by
providing real-time locational in-formation on students at all times and by keeping "non-students" out
of their schools (Northside Independent School District, 2013).
The affirmative promotion of U.S. hegemonic control as a method of peacemaking is

premised on the categorical unfreedom of those immobilized by the U.S. prison
regime. Their pedagogical practice naturalize domestic state violence and constrains
the imaginative possibility of freedom for all. Only our praxis of abolition is capable of
building non-killing futures.
Loyd, 11 - Jenna M., (American Exceptionalism, Abolition and the Possibilities for Nonkilling Futures, In
Inwood, Joshua, and James Tyner, eds. Non-Killing Geographies. Honolulu: Center for Global Nonkilling, 103-
126)
The relative invisibility of domestic state violence vis--vis war constrains the imagination and
imperative for building just, free, and peaceful futures, internationally and domestically. Domestic practices of
state violence (namely policing and imprisonment) are frequently treated as inherently more legitimate than war-making because these practices are founded in popular
sovereignty. Yet,
these institutions reproduce racial, gender, class, and sexual relations of hierarchy and
domination that contribute to family separation, community fragmentation, labor exploitation and
premature death. Building a nonkilling future, thus, means challenging the states organization for
violence that are practiced domestically in the form of defense (military-industrial complex) and in the
form of prisons and policing as the answer to social and economic problems ranging from poverty,
to boisterous youth, to human migration, and drug use (Braz, 2008; Gilmore and Gilmore, 2008). It takes sustained
ideological work to contain war as the only form of state violence and to contain the good sense that
wars harms cannot be confined to weapons, neatly demarcated battlefields, and declarations of wars
conclusions. Building critiques of and movements against state violence means confronting
hegemonic frames that understand state violence as exceptional, rather than as normal practices
structuring both international relations and domestic governance. It means asking why denunciations
of the war at home sound hyperbolic to some Americans. It means asking in what ways domestic
practices of state violence are practiced elsewhere and international practices are imported. Such cross-
boundary traffic in practices (and personnel) of policing, imprisonment and war-making are important for showing that the lines between foreign and domestic, war and peace,
civilian and military are constantly blurred. This in turn highlights the tremendous ideological work that goes into maintaining these boundaries, and the material consequences
such geographical imaginations have on peoples lives and the places in which they live. This is not to say that the war at home and war abroad are the same or necessarily
As
have the same intensity. Rather it is to trace the frame of exceptionalism that structures the relations between these places in ways that facilitate violence in both places.
we have seen, the invisibility and naturalization of state violence in the form of the prison is one of the
most overlooked sites of American exceptionalism, critiques of US state violence, and of antiwar
efforts. For precisely this reason, attentions should be placed on challenging the prison regime as one aspect of
building nonkilling futures . For this historical moment, Dylan Rodrguez argues that undoing the naturalization of
such commonplace violence, centers squarely on an abolitionist pedagogy that works against the
assumptive necessity, integrity, and taken-for-grantedness of prisons, policing, and the normalized
state violence they reproduce (2010: 9). Dismantling prisons is about dismantling relations of white
supremacy, heteropatriarchy and economic exploitation that undermine the possibilities for freedom
and human flourishing. Prison abolition has an expansive antiviolence imperative that necessarily
demands an end to connected practices of war, colonial dispossession, and imperial rule. Abolitionist
27
Session II
imaginations challenge violent suppression of human freedom and offer important visions for forging
links among different sectors of anti-violence organizing. We might look for example to the nineteenth century international slavery
abolition movement or more recently to the nonaligned movement of (formerly) colonized nations, which regarded ending the Cold War as a condition for political autonomy
and fulfilling human needs (Prashad 2007). Likewise, for civil rights organizers in the US South, the abolition of Cold
War annihilation was predicated on domestic peace, which could only be won through freedom, that is
overthrowing the legal and extralegal relations of white supremacy (Loyd, 2011). Creating the possibilities for nonviolent
resolution of social conflict is a recognized aim of antiwar or peace organizing. Prison abolition too is premised on dismantling the
prison as a solution for social conflict and for creating the possibilities for freedom and human
flourishing. As Andrew Burridge, Matt Mitchelson, and I (2009-2010) write: Building economies and community institutions that foster creativity, care, self-
determination and mutual responsibility are among the abolitionist visions for a just society. That is, abolition is a vision for the future that can guide current action for making
communities that create real safety and meet peoples needs. Abolition links dreams of peace and freedom. Abolitionism
critically analyzes how dominant categorizations of governance and sovereignty are premised on
(categorical) unfreedom . Making these links in practice means recognizing how the prison underpins
violent domination on a world scale. Abolition is thereby offers imperative theoretical vision and
practical means for building nonkilling futures.

complex.
28
Session II
teachers and students can attempt to concretely understand how they are a
within the common sense of social change and historical transformation? In this sense,


strategically prioritizes the prison as a central site for catalyzing broader, radical social transformations . In significant
our society.20 Inlocating abolitionist praxis within a longer political genealogy that anticipates the task of remaking the world under transformed material
circumstances, this position refracts the most radical and revolutionary dimensions of a historical Black freedom struggle
that positioned the abolition of slavery as the condition of possibility for Blackhence humanfreedom. To
of
29
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that this

30
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31
Session II
1NC: Vs SP1 (Model Minority)
The AFFs focus on curriculum change disavows the explicit and hidden curriculum
that constitutes a racist texture of teaching constituted in an apparatus of punishment,
surveillance, and pathologization. This is a pernicious form of deskilling that produces
different achievement levels across race and ensures the continuation of the school to
prison pipeline
Garca & de Lissovoy 14 (Jose & Noah, Professor of Mexican American Studies at the University of
Texas at Austin, Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in Education at the University of Texas at Austin,
Doing School Time: The Hidden Curriculum Goes to Prison, Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies
Volume 11, Number 4, Aug 6, 2014, http://www.jceps.com/archives/453)//HL
Recent decades have seen the development of a hyperdisciplinary orientation in education, in which the process of punishment
insinuates itself ever more intimately into the texture of teaching, especially for students of color. In the
context of moral panics over youth, the broader penalization of society, and the ramification of security technologies, schools are
increasingly remade as occasions of enforcement rather than inquiry (Giroux 2009; Lipman 2004). The concern
with security has led to tighter links between schools and law enforcement and an aggressive surveillance culture that
criminalizes students without seeking to incorporate or rehabilitate them according to older disciplinary models
(Devine 1996). The emergence of the school to prison pipeline, as it has often been called, or the jailhouse track (Browne 2003) reconfigures Bowles
and Gintis correspondence theory in a sinister direction, as the
pathologization of students of color by the disciplinary
and security apparatuses of schools increasingly appears to set them on a path toward the criminal
justice system proper. Research shows that preferred disciplinary policies such as zero-tolerance act insidiously
to obstruct the educational opportunities of students (Browne, Losen and Wald 2001) even in the context of declining rates of
youth violence, and that disciplinary referrals and suspensions in schools continue to be disproportionately
applied to students of color (Skiba et al. 2011). Apart from the immediate injustice represented by this
intensification of the drive to punish, evidence suggests that it may be an important factor in producing
differing achievement levels between white students and students of color (Gregory, Skiba, and Noguera 2010).
However, critical accounts of hyperdisciplinarity also point to effects beyond and below the so-called achievement gap. Thus, Duncan (2000) argues
that the forms of pedagogy confronted by students of color work simultaneously to degrade their
economic competitiveness and to construct them as undesirable employees in an increasingly service-
oriented economy. In this way, the school to prison pipeline can be understood as an expression of the tacit
intentionality (Gillborn 2005) that structures schooling as an act of whiteness. In the racialized educational landscapes of
neoliberalism, then, the preparation of students through explicit and hidden curricula becomes paradoxically
a kind of pernicious deskilling that leaves them vulnerable to surveillance, detention and incarceration.
This is especially true in the context of STEM. STEMs emphasis on race-neutrality

and keeps boys of color locked in a system of criminalization, regardless of STEM
aptitude
in schools as well. Garland
reproduction of criminal identities (MacLeod, Truth, & Times, 2009), it is no surprise we see criminalizing processes
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As boysof color are consistently both formally and informally sent out of classrooms and denied use of
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(by
the transformation of a polarized participation structure into an oppositional one (p. 97). An assumption made in this research, however, is that
resistance despite academic ability. McFarland (2001) disagreed that race plays a role in student resistance. McFarland positioned resistance
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These assumptions erase the differential lived experiences
that it only undermines teacher authority and the teachers will.
The heirarchization of skilled students along lines of race is not accidental. The myth
of the Model Minority was invented in the 1960s as a weapon in the war against Black
liberation. The pitting of the skilled Asian American student against the failed Black
student belies the idea of an inclusive STEM curriculum that justifies extension of the
carceral in and out of school
Rodrguez 05 [Dylan, Asian-American Studies in the Age of the Prison Industrial Complex: Departures and
Re-narrations]
The conjoined rhetoric of the Moynihan-Lewis intellectual bloc was famously couched as an alleged social science of embedded Black=Negro (for
Moynihan) and Mexican=Puerto Rican (for Lewis) cultural pathology, and suggested the essentialized site of family structure as the source of a self-
perpetuating defeatism. Moynihans introduction pronounced, Thefundamental problem... is that of family structure. The
evidencenot final, but powerfully persuasiveis that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is
crumbling. The future U.S. Senators notorious ruminations on the Black familys Tangle of Pathology (see Chapter IV of The Negro Family)
helped shape a white civic consciousness that sought explanation for the persistent antagonismand lurking crisisthat poor urban Black communities
embodied within the white racial imaginary of American civil society. In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure
which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing
burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well. 15 Lewis similarly offered, The culture of poverty... is not only an
adaptation to a set of objective conditions of the larger society. Once it comes into existence it tends to perpetuate itself from generation to generation
because of its effect on the children.
By the time slum children are age six or seven they have usually absorbed the
basic values and attitudes of their subculture and are not psychologically geared to take full advantage
of changing conditions or increased opportunities which may occur in their lifetime. 16 Lewis extended
ruminations on matrifocality as a central element of various cultures of poverty echoed Moynihans contentions while supplementing them with a more
definitive set of conclusions. It appeared, for Lewis, that poor urban Puerto Ricans were an extrusive presence in white civil society, a population
that in his terms approximated a culturalism conception of racial pathology and incipient sub
humanity: [O]n the whole it seems to me that [the culture of poverty] is a relatively thin culture. There is a great deal of pathos, suffering, and
emptiness among those who live in the culture of poverty. It does not provide much support or long-range satisfaction and its encouragement of mistrust
tends to magnify helplessness and isolation. Indeed, the poverty of culture is one of the crucial aspects of the culture of poverty.17 [emphasis added] Crucial to
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the production of the academic and popular consensus around the culture of poverty was that it was embroidered onto the racial formation of the post
1960s White Reconstruction. Specifically, Moynihan and Lewis (and their ideological contemporaries in
academia, policy think tanks, and government) helped suture a white liberal common sense that
apprehended the persistence of Black=Brown poverty, disfranchisement, and structured vulnerability to premature death18 as
the inevitable (though tragic) production of self-defeating cultural values and a retarding matriarchal family structure. Lewis schematization
of a poverty of culture pervasive among the Black=Brown poor19 in this sense hinted at something
more ominous: to the extent that culture is commonly understood as the primary and constituent labor of human beings across varying scales
of community and social intercourse, Lewis implied that there were people in the United States that were simply ill-equipped to either contribute or
survive the rigors of the postwarand embryonic Cold Warnational telos. Enriching and broadening the scope of this
reconstituted racial common sense was the conspicuous proposition of an Asian immigrant model
minority, an image that obtained wide circulation with the paradigmatic U.S. News and World Report
article of 1966. At a time when Americans are awash in worry over the plight of racial minoritiesOne such minority, the nations 300,000
Chinese-Americans, is winning wealth and respect by dint of its own hard work. In any Chinatown from San Francisco to New York, you discover
youngsters at grips with their studies.... Still being taught in Chinatown is the old idea that people should depend on their own effortsnot a welfare
Visit Chinatown U.S.A. and you find an important racial minority
checkin order to reach Americas promised land.
pulling itself up from hardship and discrimination to become a model of self-respect and achievement
in todays America.20 Numerous Asian American Studies scholars and activists have examined the genesis of the contemporary model minority
racial imaginary as the (perhaps required) discursive complement to the sustained post-civil rights era subordination of Black and Brown populations.
a categorical problem
Vijay Prashad has gone so far as to attest that to the extent that Blacks constitute, in DuBois famous formulation,
for the racial formation of the United States, Asians (for Prashad, South Asians in particular) embody a
solution. Prashad writes, Many folks feel, it seems, that to make positive statements about what they consider to be a race is just fine.... These
are not only statements of admiration. Apart from being condescending, such gestures remind me that I am to be the perpetual solution to what is seen
as the crisis of black America. I am to be a weapon in the war against black America. 21 Robert S. Chang, staking a claim for a narrative space that
moves beyond a black-white racial paradigm, additionally argues that model minorityism has obscured the oppression of
Asian Americans. This history of discrimination and violence, as well as the contemporary problems of Asian Americans, are obscured by the
portrayal of Asian Americans as a model minority. Asian Americans are portrayed as hardworking, intelligent, and successful. This description
represents a sharp break from past stereotypes of Asians as sneaky, obsequious, or inscrutable. 22 Further positing the dual harm sustained by the
model minority rendition, Chang continues, In
addition to hurting Asian Americans, the model minority myth works a
dual harm by hurting other racial minorities and poor whites who are blamed for not being successful
like Asian Americans. African-Americans and Latinos and poor whites are told, look at those
Asiansanyone can make it in this country if they really try. This blame is justified by the
meritocratic thesis supposedly proven by the example of Asian Americans. This blame is then used to
campaign against government social services for these undeserving minorities and poor whites and
against affirmative action. To the extent that Asian Americans accept the model minority myth, we are
complicitous in the oppression of other racial minorities and poor whites.23 Notably, critics like Chang fail to
elaborate how the production of model minority discourse has informed and constituted an overlapping police-corrections agenda that funnels pre-
legitimated state violence (from preemptive police detention to street assassinations qua justifiable homicide) through the sieve of contemporary racial
profiling practices: that is, model minorities will (with relative exception) tend not to be the categorical racial targets of the militarized law and order
states most acute exercises of bodily violence and juridical punishment. To contest and revise Changs summation, far more is at stake than differential
there is truth to Prashads and
access to government social services and (a now non-existent) affirmative action. While
Changs assertions that the model minority imaginary amounts to a cynical, white supremacist
objectification of Asians as a political and cultural weapon against other racial minorities, (though I am
less inclined than Chang to contend that it is either similarly or significantly utilized against poor whites) what remains undertheorized in Asian
American critique is the historical linkage between model minorityism and the militarized cultural production of the law and order state. Such a theoretical
examination requires a particular focus on the political and cultural technology of criminalizationdefined here as the social and political apparatuses
through which (racial) categories of deviance and criminality are invented, refined, and formalized into the states mobilizations of policing and
jurisprudence. By way of example: the contemporary technology of criminalization has reached across the emergence of the Asian American model
minority figure in the genesis of a veritable war on young people of color, waged on the street and in the increasingly militarized sites of urban public
schools. Structurally and discursively linked to what scholar-activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the rise of domestic militarization, 24 the
school is
becoming a site of strategic penal management and social neutralization, and projects the racist law
and order imperative into an age-based preemptive strike: One way or another, if youre young, poor,
and of color, cops will find a way into your classroom. Cultural theorist and critical pedagogue Henry
Giroux, in an elaboration of Gilmores schematic, has suggested that the rise to prominence of school
based zero tolerance laws ought to be read as a material and juridical metaphor for hollowing out
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the state and expanding the forces of domestic militarization,26 further arguing that the popular cultural and ideological
effect of these laws is to mobilize racialized codes and race-based moral panics that portray black and brown urban youth as a new and frighteningly
violent threat.27 Here,
the technology of criminalization becomes the point of transfer for an institutional
transformation: schools simultaneously become sites of carceral militarization (against poor, racially
pathologized youth) and disciplinary youth interpellation. According to Giroux, While schools share some proximity to prisons
in that they are both about disciplining the body... little has been written about how zero tolerance policies in schools resonate powerfully with prison
practices that signify a shift away from treating the body as a social investment (i.e., rehabilitation) to viewing it as a threat to security, demanding
control, surveillance, and punishment.... [S]uch practices have exceeded the boundaries of the prison-industrial complex, providing models and
perpetuating a shift in the very nature of educational leadership and pedagogy. 28 The
cultural production and statecraft of the
Asian-American model minority, reproduced and institutionally inscribed by the administrative culture
of dominant schooling institutions (and accentuated in higher education), is wedged in a peculiar
symbiosis with this militarization and penal pedagogical shift in the war on poor urban Black and
Brown youth. The Asian-American model minority, as a cultural fabrication situated within a particular
historical conjuncture, is something even more than (as Prashad correctly asserts) a weapon in the war against
black America: it is both the condition of possibility and embodied site of reproduction of this
domestic war, a seminal move in the production of a national(ist) multiculturalism that fortifies and
extrapolates historical white supremacist social formationsincluding and especially the burgeoning
U.S. prison regime. As such, the Asian-Americanist contestation of the model minority myth as
inaccurate, deceptive, (anti-Asian) racist, and/or an erasure of the material subordination of poor and
disenfranchised Asian populations tends to elide critical confrontation with the militarized and
hegemonic discursive and social structure through which the myth itself has been articulated. Thus,
against both the patronizing liberal racist valorizations and Asian Americanist contestations of the
Asian model minoritys alleged scholastic, economic, and cultural achievement sits a durable (though
dynamic) contextual backdrop of state and state-sanctioned racial violence. The preliminary genealogy of post-
1970s technologies of criminalization that I am briefly outlining here suggests that the lever through which Asian-American decriminalization obtains its
social truthvis-a`-vis a self-fulfilling white social imaginary that claims to witness, and subsequently proclaims the creeping ascendance of studious,
law-abiding Asian minorities is the same cultural=political fulcrum that historically militarizes white civil society against its more ominous Black=Brown
racial antagonists and cultural pathogens. The rendition of the Asian immigrant model minority both facilitates and constitutes the expansion of state
capacities in the trajectory of mass-based Black=Brown punishment, providing the schema for an ascendantthough insistently multicultural white-
Asian alliance that manifests conspicuously in such instances as the 1980s and 1990s
neoconservative movement to end affirmative action policies (in which Asian Americans were
continuously solicited and foregrounded as allies of a white supremacist pro-meritocracy
argument)29 and the post-1992 rapprochement between the stubbornly brutal Los Angeles Police Department and prominent Korean=Asian-American
community leaders. The latter example provides an opportune moment of inquiry, if only because current
Asian Americanist formations (including Asian American Studies) have largely undertheorizedif not
altogether ignoredthe implications of such a political coalescence. Emblematic of this reactionary Korean American
LAPD coalition was a 2002 event entitled The March Against Crime, which occurred in the shadow of a massive and nationally publicized investigation
of LAPDs Ramparts Division, a scandal that revealed widespread corruption, brutality, and false testimony by LAPD officers resulting in up to 3000
wrongful convictions, an overwhelming number of which were Black, Chicana=o, Mexicana=o, and Latina=o.30 In the midst of these public revelations of
the Ramparts Division as the instantiation of a low-intensity, localized urban state terrorist campaign against Black=Brown communities in Los Angeles,
the Korean Youth & Community Center (KYCC) and the Los Angeles Police Department (Wilshire Division) widely circulated a flyer and email which
announced, in resonance with Goldwaters rhetorical precedent: 10 YEARS AFTER THE L.A. RIOTS Our City comes together to CLEAN our Streets.
The flyer=email additionally urged its readers to speak out AGAINST CRIME and GRAFFITI; and show our STRENGTH as a Community.
Contextualized by the heightened antagonism provoked by the Ramparts scandal, as well as the LAPDs infamous record of militarizedand often
spectacularviolence against racially profiled people and communities, this presumptive invoking of our Community extrapolates the limits of the Gold
fact, this Korean-American call for a police-powered street cleansing bespeaks
wateriest racial paradigm. In
the political logic of a multicultural civil alliance cut on the teeth of the states mobilization against its
non-Korean=Asian, racially pathologized Others. Chang, writing in the immediate aftermath of the 1992
Los Angeles insurrection, inscribes the context for this emergent white-Asian alliance in his
mystification of a Korean American positionality between racist whites and angry Blacks: This
resentment, fueled by poor economic conditions, can flare into anger and violence. Asian Americans, the model minority, serve as convenient
scapegoats, as Korean Americans in Los Angeles discovered during the 1992 riots. Many Korean Americans now view themselves as human shields
in a complicated racial hierarchy, caught between the racism of the white majority and the anger of the black minority. 31
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And, the prison industrial complex is the internal link to econ, not automation.
Precarity in the workforce is produced through competition with the prison slave, who
is already trained to engage in the high skilled tech labor produced by the AFF
Series v. 0004, pp. 13-5]

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the results.
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students.
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Nguyen 14 (Nicole, an Assistant Professor of Social Foundations of Education who focuses
on political geography, critical education studies, and critical sociology, Chokepoint:
Regulating US student mobility through biometrics, pg 5)
Nguyen 14 (Nicole, an Assistant Professor of Social Foundations of Education who focuses
on political geography, critical education studies, and critical sociology, Chokepoint:
Regulating US student mobility through biometrics, pages 4-5)
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2000).

Similarly, school

126)
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sovereignty. Yet,
As
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The Model Minority Myth is a tool of whiteness that makes Asian Americans complicit
in antiblack racism, fractures coalitions, and homogenizes asian identity only
engagement across communities of color and active reckoning with histories of
violence can solve
Kuo 15 (Rachel, asian american activist, 6 Reasons We Need to Dismantle the Model Minority Myth of
Those Hard-Working Asians, http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/04/dismantle-model-minority-myth/,
4/2/15)//MNW
We are threatened, unlike most whites, by efforts to use our race against us. Frank Wu Asians are
good at math and science. Theyre successful economically and academically. They are hard working
and high achieving . While these tropes may seem outdated, theyre still well known and recognizable.
For example, the other day, just to see what Google searches were most popular, I searched: Why are and the first thing that came up was: Why
are Asians so smart? Who are these Asians that people keep talking about? While these sorts of comments might seem like compliments or
affirmations, they are actually overly simplistic generalizations that reveal the devious and exploitative nature of race and racism in the United States.
model minority myth a stereotype that generalizes Asian Americans by depicting
And they all fall under the
them as the perfect example of an if-they-can-do-it-so-can-you success story. This myth is also a
political strategy that highlights the success of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian immigrants
with a specific professional and educational background. It is a historical and presently used tool
designed to protect institutionalized white supremacy and validate anti-black racism. For a long time, Asian
American activists have worked to debunk the model minority myth by discussing its negative consequences and impacts. By positioning of some Asian
American groups as a model of success in the United States, we also need to ask: A model for whom? Standing up against the myth has been a long-
time call to action that has recently been re-incited by non-indictment verdicts for the murders of Eric Garner and Mike Brown, as well as the murders of
many others in the Black community. This sentiment is currently amplified by social media movements like #ModelMinorityMutiny and
#StartTheConversation, which push for Asian Americans to stand in solidarity alongside other communities of color and to debunk the model minority
myth in everyday conversations about racism. Here are some ways to unpack why the model minority myth is used as a tool of oppression, especially
one that perpetuates anti-black racism. 1. The myth fosters internalized racism within certain Asian American
communities against other communities of color. In order to begin undoing the myth, we must also begin to tackle the ways
weve internalized anti-blackness. Often, our communities use racist rhetoric thats disguised as casual observation
or advice: They just need to work harder, dont date them, or dont go to their neighborhood. The myth can
be a protective buffer against the stigma of being seen as outsiders. Being cast as perpetual foreigners fueled a desire for
some Asian immigrants to survive by seeking ways to fit in and belong, to have access to the same
resources and privileges as those with the most economic and political power wealthy, white
Americans. As a result, we sometimes subconsciously and consciously act protective and proud of
that model status. If were the model of success, then surely well be free from the persecution of those who dont, wont, and cant adhere to
the standard? Right? But it is through this very orchestrated messaging that weve been conditioned to forget that America is
stolen land. It is occupied land. It is a country built on slave labor and the colonization of its
indigenous people. Yet, America, to some Asian Americans, is viewed as a promised land, and many of us came to the United States with a
belief that there were opportunities to live free from oppression. Moving forward, we need to re-examine who gives those
promises, recognize the villainy behind why they were offered, acknowledge whom we are truly taking
them from, and heal from the way they have hurt our diverse communities. We need stand up against the model
minority myth and demand resistance against white supremacy and that means letting go of the idea of the American Dream. 2. The model
minority myth divides people of color and specifically serves as a tool of anti-black racism. Racial myths and
stereotypes are often used as a wedge to divide groups, whether its creating unfair racial hierarchies or emphasizing elements of cultural and racial
superiority and/or inferiority. In this specific case,
the model minority myth is successful because it constructs Black people
as a problem minority. It teaches some Asian Americans to compare where we are and what weve
accomplished with where Black Americans are and what theyve accomplished. It turns us into juxtapositions and situates
us as racial binaries. Asian Americans have different histories of oppression than other communities, and its unfair to compare existing struggles. This is
some Asian immigrants were intentionally selected to be model
rarely talked about outside of activist communities, but
minorities, which well discuss more below. Rooted in the pull yourself up by the bootstraps ideology, the term model
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minority was popularized during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement this stereotype is racist to both Asian
Americans and Black Americans. By creating a narrative that hard work equates success, it negates past and
present structural barriers that interrupt success for different marginalized groups. The success of certain
groups of Asian Americans was contrasted with the failure of African Americans. The myth comes hand in hand with
other statements like, If Asians can be successful by working hard, why cant Black people? It serves as a functional stereotype that uplifted the
narrative of meritocracy and the American Dream. In witnessing family friends and relatives talk about their life experiences, themes of hard work and
sacrifice are the most salient. My own parents believe that they have worked hard to get to where they are. At some point since they immigrated here,
they have learned to believe in the narrative that anyone can find success if they just work hard enough. However, to accept any positive stereotype
about the model minority myth is to also comply with a racist system that favors and privileges whiteness and that is something that not only harms
other people of color, it hurts members in our own communities. 3. The myth also serves to create good immigrants and bad immigrants. The
myth creates the idea that some people deserve to be in the U.S. and some people dont . Some immigrants are lazy.
Some snuck in to take away jobs from hard-working Americans. Immigration policies purposefully included and excluded
certain groups. For example, the 1965 Immigration Act allowed Asians, specifically East Asians, of a certain
educational and class background into the United States. However, the model minority myth equates voluntary immigrant
experiences with the experiences of those who have descended from slavery and those who arrived
involuntarily and/or by force, such as a result of war or U.S. colonization and expansion projects abroad. My
parents immigrated to the U.S. seeking political freedom and better economic and educational opportunities. Yet, these freedoms and opportunities are
actually limited. They are offered as placations that obscure violent histories and institutions of slavery, colonialism, war, and genocide. These
opportunities selectively include and exclude different communities ability to participate. 4. The myth flattens and erases Asian American identity.
Asian American identities that dont abide by the model minority rulebook are deemed invalid. Our validity and value
is determined by our utility in preserving the racial hierarchy. Not only is it eugenic to ascribe character traits, like quiet, polite,
and obedient, to an entire racial group, the myth prevents coalition building within our diverse Asian American
communities. There are radically different histories, experiences, and oppressions across the Asian American diaspora, yet often, we are lumped
together as one ambiguous other. Whenever people think about Asian identities, they think specifically of East Asian identities, such as Chinese,
Japanese, or Korean. Other groups in the Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora are erased, and their lived realities and challenges are diminished.
Assuming all Asians are the same, the myth also creates a mono-dimensional Asian American without regard
to intersections. It does not take into account class, citizenship, language, gender, sexuality, ability, religion or
other social identities. 5. The model minority myth is used to deny racial justice. In invoking this myth, policymakers also
fail to recognize existing inequities and create access for Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) subgroups and other racial groups. The myth
makes the economic and educational struggles of low-income AAPI families, Pacific Islanders, Southeast
Asian refugees, undocumented immigrants, and other groups invisible its unambiguity and inaccuracy makes
it a convenient narrative that prevents solutions to racial and socioeconomic inequity. For example, only 12-
13% of Hmong, Cambodian, and Laotian Americans have a college degree and less than 10% of Samoan-
Americans do. 2.3 million Asian Americans are uninsured. AAPI groups suffer from physical and mental health
disorders due to lack of culturally competent care. Theyre left out of leadership roles at the top of
organizations. Many AAPI groups also live in poverty, face labor exploitation, and are disenfranchised from
the education system. Focusing on those that are doing well makes the issues of those who arent far less visible. We also need to begin to
understand different histories and state policies in order to tackle the construction of one model minority against a problem minority. Historically, the
By creating a racial hierarchy, the
myth was created to diminish the Black communitys demands for equal rights during the Civil Rights era.
myth also started to prevent solidarity movements between the two communities. 6. The model minority myth erases
shared histories of oppression and of solidarity. There is a long legacy of solidarity and shared oppression between Asian
immigrants and enslaved Black folks. Most versions of history disconnect the study of slavery from the study of Asian and Latinx
immigration, leaving out stories of transracial struggle. Asian immigrants, such as the Chinese, have historically and
strategically been thought of as both bridges and wedges between white folks and Black folks. For example,
throughout the 19th century, Chinese coolie laborers, lived in an intermediary position between slavery and
free labor. After the 1850s, labor became explicitly racialized when Britain brought Chinese laborers to the
Caribbean as a solution to suppress Black slave rebellion. The Chinese were given the social potential to form a middle class
family in order to create a racial hierarchy with White people at the top, Black people at the bottom, and Chinese people somewhere in between.
Black activists like Frederick Douglass link Black slavery and Chinese coolie labor together in system that
strategically separated and these two racial identities and then exploited these divisions. Some examples of
earlier solidarity movements that are erased from history books include: In the 1920s, the black Brotherhood of
Sleeping Car Workers issued a statement of solidarity with Filipino workers that were used to break a strike.
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During the 1930s, in Seattle, coalitions across Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino American communities
emerged to fight against bills that would have made interracial marriage illegal. In the Mississippi Delta,
Chinese workers were recruited to work cotton fields during the Reconstruction era. When contracts expired,
some stayed to open grocery stories these stores mostly sold to Black clientele and also offered an
alternative to commissaries run by former plantation owners. Civil Rights movements helped end racist
immigration laws against South Asians. In the late 1960s, Asian Americans were part of the Third World
Liberation Strikes in Berkeley that launched the Black Power movement and inspired the Yellow Power
movement. Asian American activists like Grace Lee Boggs and Yuri Kochiyama worked hard to build interracial
solidarity and worked closely with leaders like Malcolm X. As a way to destabilize the model minority myth and construct an
alternate history, historian Vivek Bald examined the relationship between Bengali migrants and the African American community in Harlem and showed
how racial lines between Asian-ness and Black-ness blurred. Bengali migrants experienced anti-black racism and witnessed black anti-racist
organizing. This history of cross-racial solidarity allows possibilities of a connected, holistic, radical movement towards racial justice. We can begin to
resist oppression by unlearning Euro-centric narratives of U.S. history. Although the myth has created incentives for silent complicity in a racial system
with winners and losers, this complicity costs us real solidarity and justice. How can we begin to act upon a commitment to social justice and build
solidarity with those that we have also oppressed in our own struggles? Drawing from the title of the critical transformative justice anthology, by Jai
Dulani, Ching-in Chen, and Leah Lahshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: The revolution starts at home . This begins with
reflecting on our own privilege, power, and identity. It means owning and admitting complicity in a
racist system that we may feel guilty or defensive about. It means having vulnerable and sometimes
difficult conversations with families, friends, and others that we love, respect, and trust. In beginning to have
conversations with others like my parents, I also have realized that not engaging in the conversation is an underestimation of them. Assuming that they
wont understand or wont care is an unfair and exclusionary characterization that they dont have a place in racial justice movements. Asian American
communities are not just bridges or wedges for other groups of color. Uniting under the term people of color allows for building solidarity between
movements that also allows for different racial histories. In
order to resist white supremacy in a meaningful way, we need
to build coalitions across communities of color in order to share and redistribute power and combat
racism rooted in anti-blackness and colonialism. Power can come from communities coming together to demand justice. This
solidarity can help us more equitably redistribute resources and labor, take care of ourselves and each other, and center the needs of those most
impacted by violence. By confronting the mutual enemy of systemic racism, these coalitions can disrupt history and cycles of oppression.
Partnerships that are fluid, critical, holistic, intersectional, and inclusive offer solutions that include
and address multiple perspectives and issues. We need to acknowledge past and present complicity
and complacency in perpetuating anti-black racism and moving past guilt and desire for forgiveness.
We need to truly want change. We can begin doing transformative, accountable work by knowing when to start
speaking up without usurping another voice. We can have diverse, horizontal leadership across
communities where all forms of contributions are valued. We can participate and show up the way
others ask us to. We can begin to self-reflect on different forms of privilege and power. For me, in standing up
against the model minority myth, I am also refusing further complicity in reinforcing anti-black racism.
The alternative is Asian rage, an embodied response to the manipulations of the white
supremacist carceral state bent on silencing our dissent. Our call for not in our
name breaks down white supremacy by producing new intra- and inter-racial
solidarities
Chandra 14 (Ravi, san fransico psychiatrist, Asian American Anger: Its A Thing!)=^.^=
Asian Americans very easily find themselves under threat as well. While we might call Rodgers anger self-
centered and say Asian American cultural anger responds to bigger threats, the latter still holds tensions that
must be reckoned with on a personal level. We might find cultural anger more justifiable, but it is tied to
identity struggles that impact relations between all individuals. We could cite a long and undeniable history of
racism and violence against Asian Americans in the U.S., from the earliest Chinese immigrants through
Japanese American internment to the continuing hate crimes against South Asians post 9-11. We recently
passed the 32nd anniversary of the murder of Vincent Chin in Detroit, a seminal moment in Asian American
history. There are still those who deny this was a hate crime, including one of the murderers yet the fact
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remains that Chins murderers got off essentially scot-free. A Chinese American mans life was worth only
three years of probation and a $3720 fine that was never even paid. The list goes on. Balbir Singh Sodi,
murdered days after 9-11 in Mesa, Arizona. Fong Lee, a 19-year old Hmong American man who was brutally
shot multiple times in the back while he was on the ground, by a Minneapolis police officer in 2006. Cau Bich
Thi Tran, a 25-year old Vietnamese American mother of two shot by a San Jose policeman in 2003 three
seconds after he entered her house responding to her own 911 call, claiming he mistook her vegetable peeler
for a weapon. Sunando Sen, an Indian immigrant pushed to his death on a New York City subway track in
2012 by a woman who stated she was retaliating for 9-11. The six people killed and four injured by a white
supremacist in the Oak Creek, Wisconsin Sikh Temple massacre in 2012. In 2012, at least 4.1% of hate crimes
reported to the FBI were against Asians and Pacific Islanders, but critics counter there is significant
underreporting. 54% of Asian American teens reported being bullied in a recent survey, far above the rates of
whites and other minorities. When we raise our voices in anger about violence and harassment targeting our
communities, we are not crying wolf. The isolated incidents are not isolated they are part of a pattern of
hatred directed against all minority groups. There is a serious and significant danger to which we remain alert
and sensitive. Asian Americans are victims of bias that renders them outsiders and others to be
discriminated against, harassed and even killed. Trauma can also be transmitted intergenerationally. There is
evidence that experiences of parents and ancestors leave their marks on gene expression and thus can
predispose children to anger and other difficult emotions and alter their response to stress. Men (and women)
also absorb the stories of their families and forebears struggles, here and abroad. In Korea and in Korean
Americans, for example, there is a word for this han a collective feeling of oppression and cultural suffering
that becomes woven into personal identity. As Asian Americans, we often think in terms of group identity and
affiliation so I think there is an Asian American han, which vies with cultural amnesia and dissociation from
the totality of the Asian American experience to define the Asian American soul. Some of us cant forget;
others try to flee into the supposed safety of the river of forgetfulness, and so perpetuate the problem. This is
all occurring at the same time that some Asian American groups are experiencing financial prosperity and
success. We are stereotyped as the Model Minority, which ignores the great diversity between groups
and also the complicated stories within groups and individuals (see Jenn Fangs and Marie Myung-Ok
Lees analyses at Reappropriate.com and Salon.com, respectively). Asians are seen as quiet, docile,
submissive, and silent worker drones who do their job without complaint, and for their service are held up as
ideals by even our own Amy Chua (in her recent book The Triple Package), causing a backlash of
resentment and hostility, as well as internal and external conflict as Asian Americans struggle to find and
assert their own identities. Anger arises in the context of discrimination, violence, racism, misunderstanding
and even dismissal of our perspectives, potentials, histories and individualities. Where financial success does
not occur, as in many parts of the Asian American experience, the complications of poverty and
disenfranchisement violence, mental and physical health problems, and so forth cause deep and
interlocking problems, and plenty of food for anger. Success might in itself be soothing but it is incomplete
and therefore, is not. Financial success, even when it occurs, cannot compete with relational or moral victory,
and does not translate into freedom from suffering. The successful Asian American man can feel excluded,
unrelated and demoralized everywhere from the big screen to the boardroom to the bedroom. When not
excluded, he and his cultures are openly mocked, stereotyped, appropriated and insulted, an
ignorance-fueled hazing by some in the white majority. Despite this, he is viewed as having no right
to be angry. All speak to a sense of emasculation and disempowerment, isolation and injustice, silencing,
marginalization and victimization. While it feels at times (for some of us) that the landscape is changing quickly,
we cannot feel distant to racial and cultural inequities. As human beings, no matter our socioeconomic status,
we remain sensitive to the suffering of not only our groups but all groups. The instant we become insensitive to
others suffering is the instant we become party to the perpetuation of that suffering. You may have heard this
slogan: If youre not angry, youre not paying attention. We cant help but pay attention, so anger is one of our
understandable reactions. We get to this feeling honestly. But in the end, the righteous anger of the socially
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conscious may be an aspirational anger, available only to those relatively unburdened by more proximal
issues, such as family conflicts. To paraphrase Tolstoy, happy families are all of a piece; unhappy ones tell
myriad dark tales. Yet there are themes common to the genesis of the frustrated, angry Asian American man.
All of us are victims, first, of our own families and their limitations. Children are always on the front line of their
familys issues from the time of birth. Amy Chua, for example, infamously promoted the Tiger Mom parenting
strategy, but she angered Asian American men and women who were harmed by harsh, critical parents. Dr. Su
Yeong Kim showed that harsh and tiger parenting led to higher rates of depression, lower self-esteem, and
poorer performance in school in Chinese American children. The ranks of the angry and suffering often come
saddled with issues created by their family situations. The children of immigrants are often frustrated by a large
generation and cultural gap with their parents. They can feel torn between worlds. Expectations for success
at school and work, for obedience can run high, leaving them in a double bind of both loving their parents
and being angry or disappointed with them, of trying to please parents and also trying to assert themselves.
Male children especially may be prized at home and put on a pedestal, yet feel alienated or socially stunted in
the outside world, feeling that their family situation didnt prepare them to relate to the broader American scene
and women in particular. Emotional growth may be devalued, and they are sometimes alienated from parents
who dont understand the pressures they experience due to race or class. Sexuality can be repressed at home,
and uncertain outside. Until recently, Asian males were categorically seen as less masculine, less powerful,
and thus less desirable to women, leading to self-esteem issues and understandable anger. Anecdotally, Asian
American males have longer periods of being single than either white males or Asian American women
leaving room for frustration and anger directed at Asian American women and whites. And of course, the man
who feels undesirable or disempowered might take out his frustrations on the nearest available person with
lower status his wife, girlfriend or women more generally. Men might seek power and control in their
relationship when unable to attain them outside the home. Patriarchy, more than culture, explains misogyny
and Asian families can be patriarchal, privileging men and boys and allowing them to feel entitled towards
women, or especially disappointed when spurned. Anger at controlling or smothering mothers may lead to
confusion and anger about identity and relationships. Anger at fathers complicates the assertion and
development of masculinity. Asian Americans may feel silenced by their own families, who value face over
dealing with conflicts or mental illness. Nerd, gaming and pop culture, including a subset of male Asian
Americans, is often particularly misogynistic, as Arthur Chu of recent Jeopardy-fame pointed out in the Daily
Beast recently. Frustration and aggression may be unchecked and in fact kindled and reinforced in this
alternate family that provides a validation of a kind of masculinity and an escape from isolation at the very
least. The Asian American man can feel not only relationship-less but stateless, a refugee adrift in a sea of
longings, unmoored and un-amoured, always on the edge of social defeat, scanning the horizons for some
island to call home. Perpetually estranged by the presumptions and rejections of others, the stereotypes and
gross and subtle racisms of a limited cultural imagination, he is always reminded of outsider status and
exclusion. To be unloved, to not be touched, to have your masculinity indicted first by your family, then popular
culture, then the women youre attracted to is a decidedly unpleasant and, even excruciating scenario. It is a
situation conducive to unhappiness, resentment, and alienation yet it is not uncommon for the young Asian
American man. Feeling frustration and anger is understandable, but it is complicated. Expressing it outwardly
towards more powerful targets invites blowback and retribution. Stifling it lends to passivity. Misogyny and
abuse become, then, a safe expression of power against an even more vulnerable victim. While Ive
highlighted the potential sources of conflict between Asian American men and women, I should point out that
many Asian American men are angry on behalf of women as well. Weve seen the abuse of our mothers,
witnessed mistreatment of our sisters, friends and colleagues, and carry anger towards the perpetrators. We
worry for our daughters. Our masculine rage and concern is protective and empathic, we aim to be responsible
and responsive to womens issues. But this doesnt immunize us from the problems of anger, or shield us from
sometimes also being hurt by and angry with the women in our lives. You can be enlightened to everyone but
your family, as the saying goes; thus anger enters our relationships and complicates them. Speaking for
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myself, as Ive witnessed the explosive effects of anger, I feel particularly self-conscious and wary of being in
angers grasp, even so-called righteous anger or moral outrage. But were still not free, either of the stimuli
for anger or the need for it. Poet and community activist Bao Phi says one thing that Ive been thinking about
lately is how other people can accept Asian peoples grief, but not our anger. Other people can accept, and in
many cases consume, the stories of tragedies and sorrow from Asian and Asian American people. They have
a harder time accepting, validating, or seeing our anger. Anger at injustice, at being silenced. Im a person that
accepts my anger, and is comfortable talking about it. Beyond that, theres not much to say, really. I mean, I
didnt become a poet to make friends. I didnt write about these things to be popular. If the goal was to be
popular, I wouldnt be a poet. I dont invite hatred, and I certainly dont enjoy being hated. But, as you say, the
people who take the time to really read my work understand that it comes from the challenge of love, and with
hope we can all be better. Including my own jagged, flawed self. As psychiatrists, we know the importance of
empathizing with and validating anger we know that it often comes from a place of hurt. Anger can be an
activator, empowering the angry person to take charge of their lives in a meaningful way. Anger in relationships
and human relations is unavoidable, at least on occasion, and provides an energy and intensity that might be
in some way necessary for the relationship. With perspective and mindfulness, conflict can help couples
become closer, better friends. Anger at society, when received with empathy, can lead to constructive change.
Phil Yus Angry Asian Man blog advances the cause of awareness and activism about issues of discrimination.
His yearly message in ads for the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival is Stay Angry,
CAAMFest! Indeed, the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) and many other non-profit institutions vital
to our communities were born out of a sense of disaffection with the status quo and a wish to change it. Anger
is necessarily part of what we bear, a marker of discontent. Anger resonates across Asian America, as it does
across all distressed and marginalized communities.
Asian rage is a praxis of intimate abolition. Our alternative attunes itself to contours of
the prison regime that operate in the here and nowthe intimate affects, desires and
ideologies central to state-sanctioned violence. Without the alt, the impact is slow
quiet, death for those targeted by the carceral regime.
Stephen Dillon 16 - assistant professor of Queer Studies at Hampshire, Can They Ever Escape? Foucault,
Black Feminism, and the Intimacy of Abolition, Chapter of Active Intolerance pp 259-276
The GIPs project of trying to render the biopolitical visible is foundational to the epistemological project of Black feminism. Black feminism emerged and expanded alongside the neoliberal-carceral state,
and, in the case of imprisoned writers like Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, and Safiya Bukhari, from within the prison. By analyzing race, gender, class, sexuality, and the state as interlocking and colluding
mechanisms of power, Black feminism can name the ways that multiply-determined difference is simultaneously central to and yet incessantly disavowed in the production and reproduction of power. 48
Black feminism names that which cannot be apprehended under normative ideals or hegemonic epistemologies. As a way of knowing, Black feminism names the repressed, the erased, and the expunged
For
at the very moment of their formation and articulation. 49 It engages the shadows and what is living there, naming what has never entered the archives that constitute evidence and fact. 50
Katherine McKittrick, Black feminism is fundamentally about showing how the erased, forgotten, and
destroyed are central to the visibility of what is normal and natural. Reconstructing what has been
erased requires seeing that which is both expunged and erasable. What remains invisible, and
forgettable, is part of a larger social, political, and geographic project that thrives on erasing and
displacing the gender and sexual life and social death of Blackness. 51 Turning to the imprisoned writings of Bukhari and Shakur can help
make the affinities and differences between the GIP and Black feminism clearer. In her 1979 essay, Coming of Age: A Black Revolutionary,
the Black Panther and Black Liberation Army member Safiya Bukhari writes from prison, The
maturation process is full of obstacles and entanglements for anyone, but for a black woman it has all
the markings of a Minotaurs maze. I had to say that, even though nothing as spectacular takes place in
the maturation process of the average black woman. 52 Like the writings of the GIP, Bukhari argues that everyday life
in the free world mimicked and replicated her experience of incarceration. She observes that the world
contains obstacles and entanglements for everyone, but she notes that a different and intensified
regime exists for Black women. For her, the racialization of gender and sexuality are central to how
freedom is imbued with the discipline and control of the carceral. The prison is embedded in the
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intimate so that life is prison and prison is life. The prison regime makes itself known in the ways that
Black womens lives are a story of humiliation, degradation, deprivation, and waste that [starts] in
infancy and [lasts] until deathin too many cases, at an early age. 53 In this way, Bukhari theorizes the
biopolitical as what Lauren Berlant calls slow death. 54 According to Berlant, slow death refers to the
physical wearing out of a population so that its deterioration is a defining condition of its experience
and historical existence. 55 Slow death does not occur in spectacular events like military aggression or
genocides, but in the temporal space of ordinariness itself. 56 Slow death does not arise from
spectacles of discipline, but from the banal contours of the intimacy of the everyday. For Bukhari, the
prisons power is not only attached to the law or even to concrete, identifiable structures of discipline
or control. Instead, her writing categorizes how death is produced by dispersed processes like humiliation,
degradation, deprivation, and waste. In other words, death makes itself known in ways that are diffuse, banal,
and unremarkable to normative epistemologies. In this context, the only way to achieve genuine liberation for
black women is to bring about the liberation of black people as a whole. 57 Thus, the end of
patriarchal regulation requires the end of anti-Blackness, and the end of anti-Blackness requires the
abolition of patriarchy. She declares that to slay the beast that is the racial state, Black women (and the Black liberation movement) must end racism, capitalism, and sexism. 58
In this way, anti-Blackness makes itself known as gender and sexual regulation, and gender and
sexual difference are produced by capitalism and racism. Black feminism documents how liberal
epistemology and revolutionary politics often occlude the centrality of race, gender, sexuality, and
capital to the formation and functioning of the social. 59 To miss one for the destruction of another is to
let regulation reproduce itself under the name of liberation. An abstract conception of the prisoners truth cannot name the forms of marginalization
central to the prison that collude with and deploy gender and sexuality. While Foucault and the GIP theorized the ways the prison structured freedom as unemployment and a criminal record, Bukhari
When she does describe the specific

leaves the specificities of the prison regime unspoken because its effects are too difficult to name and impossible to catalogue.
powers of the prison regime, she analyzes the medical treatment of imprisoned women in order to
describe how the intimate gender and sexual politics of incarceration are part of a larger program of
racialized state killing. For example, in discussing the prisons medical care, she notes that a prison doctor proscribed Maalox for a woman with a cold and diagnosed another
womans cancer as a sore throat. 60 These quasi-events or quiet deaths confound response because it is hard to
say exactly what happened and who caused it. 61 These events are forms of lethality composed of an
agentless slow death where the everyday drifts toward a premature ending: an incorrect diagnosis,
another malnourished meal, an unexpected sickness, a small pain in the chest. 62 According to Bukhari, unlike stories of
spectacular repression and brutality in the prison, the forms of subjection and subjugation produced by anti-Blackness and heteropatriarchy are so banal that metaphors fail to describe them. 63 For
her, the Greek myth of the Minotaurs maze describes the impossibility of escape that confronts Black
women and other people surrounded by capitalism, anti-Blackness, and heteropatriarchy. Yet the
analogy fails because the impossibility of escape is not isolated to a maze or a prisonit describes the
everyday structures of the world, processes left unthought under universal theories of the prison and
the prisoner. Assata Shakur, also a member of the Black Liberation Army, similarly describes the
prison as regime of dispersed racialized and gendered biopolitical power in her 1978 essay Women in
Prison: How We Are: For many the cells are not much different from the tenements, the shooting
galleries and the welfare hotels they live in on the street. Sick call is no different from the clinic or the hospital emergency room. The fights are the
same except they are less dangerous. The police are the same. The poverty is the same. The alienation is the same. The racism is the same. The sexism is the same. The drugs are the same and the
system is the same. Rikers Island is just another institution. In childhood school was their prison, or youth houses or reform schools or children shelters or foster homes or mental hospitals or drug
programs and they see all institutions as indifferent to their needs, yet necessary to their survival. 64 In this passage, Shakur centers gender and sexuality in an analysis of a racialized field of knowledge,
By repeating that the prisons power is the same

containment, and immobilization that manages populations subjected to assigned disposability. 65
as the hospital, racism, sexism, the police, schools, and so on, Shakur outlines a massive system of
biopolitical governance animated by anti-Blackness, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy. 66 This system
cannot be apprehended through ideologies of discreteness or universal knowledge. 67 Indeed, this is Shakurs point in writing about the particularities of the experiences of incarcerated women of color
And this attention to gender and sexuality allows her to highlight the intimate effects of
and queer women of color.
the prison regime. The symbiotic and productive relationship between freedom and the prison makes
itself visible on the bodies of the women with whom she is incarcerated: She is in her late thirties. Her
hands are swollen. Enormous. There are huge, open sores on her legs. She has about ten teeth left.
And her entire body is scarred and ashen. She has been on drugs about twenty years. Her veins have
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collapsed. She has fibrosis, epilepsy, and edema. 68 Her description of bodily disintegration captures
the intimacy of domination that orders the lives of Black women but that is invisible in its banality. For
Shakur, open sores, collapsed veins, and missing teeth are traces of powers presence. The prisons
power is visible and public, but it also shapes the contours of skin and memory. Critically, for Shakur and Bukhari, this
system targets those resistant to capitalism and those populations produced as capitalisms surplus. Because they focus heteropatriarchy and anti-Blackness in their theories of the prison regime, they
argue that the prison targets people and populations produced as nonnormative in a multiplicity of ways. For example, the imprisoned women of colorthe butches, fems, bulldaggers, and stud
broadsin Shakurs analysis of incarceration show the ways that heterosexism, white supremacy, and neoliberalism collude to immobilize poor queer women of color. Shakurs writing highlights the
centrality of gender, sexuality, and race to the ways that the neoliberal-carceral state renders socially and civically dead women of color and queer people of color who come from places where dreams
have been abandoned like the buildings. 69 In the following passage, she describes the significance of heteropatriarchy to the prison regime: There are no criminals here at Rikers Island Correctional
Institution for Women (New York), only victims. Most of the women (over 95 percent) are black and Puerto Rican. Many were abused as children. Most have been abused by men and all have been
abused by the system . . . Many are charged as accessories to crimes committed by men. The major crimes that women here are charged with are prostitution, pick pocketing, shoplifting, robbery, and
drugs . . . The women see stealing or hustling as necessary for the survival of themselves and their children because jobs are scarce and welfare is impossible to live on. 70 In this passage, Shakur makes
Can
clear how heteropatriarchy extends the carceral into the mundane contours of the lives of Black women and other women of color. When the GIP asked, Can they ever escape?, they meant,
the imprisoned ever be free of identifiable systems of carceral control? Shakur and Bukhari argue that
the racial terror of the carceral shapes the home, sex and sexuality, love, labor, interpersonal violence,
the contours of ones veins and the size of ones hands. In their theorization, the prisons power is
often exercised outside the law, through the intimate, the affective, the indescribable, and the
unknowable. They highlight how anti-Blackness and heteropatriarchy extend the carceral beyond the prison or even the police. As scholars like Beth Richie and Julia Sudbury have observed,
intimate forms of patriarchal violence often push women of color into regimes of confinement and capture. 71 These intimate forms of capture require
intimate and affective forms of abolition . Culture and the Intimate Politics of Abolition In Foucaults statement on the 1972 Nancy prison revolt, he shares a
powerful story about the role of knowledge and culture in the process of abolition. To make their list of demands known to the public, prisoners wrote them on leaflets. In order to distribute them, they
wrapped the leaflets around stones and threw them into the crowd of their supporters. The police worked furiously to collect all the leaflet-wrapped stones so that no one would know what the detainees
It also demonstrates that a struggle over

wanted. 72 For Foucault, this example demonstrates how dangerous the knowledge of the prisoner is to the state.
knowledge is foundational to the conflict between prisoners and the prison. This struggle over knowledge was central to how
Foucault and the GIP understood abolition. For them, abolition was a material and epistemological process. They wanted to defend the rights
of prisoners, abolish criminal records, counter the beatings occurring in police stations and prisons, and politicize detainees through the GIP or other organizations. They also wanted to destroy the
divisions the system establishes . . . the hierarchical divisions within prison and the isolation of families outside. 73 These material changes were tied to the epistemological change they worked toward.
They thus argued that their inquiry into the prison itself is a struggle. 74 The goal of the GIPs work was to attack oppressive
power, whether it went by the name justice, technique, knowledge, or objectivity. 75 Indeed, Foucault said he had no personal opinions about incarceration. Instead, he wanted to receive and
disseminate information. 76 Creating new forms of knowledge might create openings for challenging and undoing
the prison regime. For the GIP, if the prison regime was to end, it needed to be made visible, and
rendering it visible required new epistemologies constructed by the imprisoned. As Foucault put it plainly, We can respond
to the information on prison with revolt, with reform, or with the destruction of prisons. 77 But first, one needed information. In this way, the GIP understood culture
to be a repository of alternative memories and histories where new subjectivities, collectivities, and
forms of life could be imagined. 78 Black feminism has similarly centered culture and epistemology in its
understanding of creating a new world. However, it has not only critiqued an abstract conception of
the state and the prison, it has demanded the destruction of dominant epistemologies and
subjectivities. Thus, it has positioned abolition as material and epistemological, as well as intimate. In her
1970 essay, Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female, Francis Beale argues that Black feminism is a cultural force that will remake epistemologies and subjectivities. She argues that revolution is not a
single economic or political moment, but rather the transformation of knowledge and being: A peoples revolution that engages the participation of every member of society, man, woman, and child brings
about a certain transformation in the participants as a result of this participation. Once you have caught a glimpse of freedom, or experienced a bit of self-determination, you cant go back to old routines
For her, to die for the revolution is a one shot deal; to live for the revolution
established under a racist, capitalist regime. 79
means taking on the more difficult commitment of changing our day-to-day life patterns. 80 In this
formulation, Black feminism is a politics that creates a new world for everyone. For example, in their classic A Black
Feminist Statement, the Combahee River Collective writes, We might use our position at the bottom, however, to make a clear leap into revolutionary action. If Black women were free, it would mean that
everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression. 81 Similarly, Beale argues that it is essential for those who understand the
workings of capitalism and imperialism to realize that the exploitation of black people and women works to everyones disadvantage. 82 For her, the abolition of anti-Blackness and heteropatriarchy are
For the Black feminist thinkers discussed in this chapter, intersectionality is

stepping stones toward the liberation of everyone.
not an identitarian analytic. 83 Rather, it is a theory of race, gender, sexuality, the prison, and
capitalism as social processes that traverse time and space in ways that change even as they remain
the same. This epistemology provides a pathway for seeing both regulation in liberation and
marginalization in what might look like revolution or resistance. This means producing forms of
knowledge attuned to the prison regimes displays of spectacular repression, brutality, and regulation,
but it also means undoing the intimate effects of the prison regimeprocesses that can invade the
home, deteriorate the mind, and scar the skin. This is not a static analytic, but one attuned to
movement and change. In the cases of Shakur, Bukhari, and Angela Davis, this knowledge was
produced from within the prison, but also on the run. All three activists were not only imprisoned at
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one point, they also escaped or fled in order to disappear into the world of the underground. Yet,
running was not only physical. They have also been fugitives from normative modes of thought.
Whether fugitives or prisoners, they were trying to flee the forms of knowledge constitutive of the
racial state, the prison, heteropatriarchy, and new formations of global capitalism. For them, there
might not be a way out, but that doesnt mean you stay put. This is the lesson of the fugitive; a lesson
we must grasp if the intimate affects, desires, discourses, and ideas central to the prison are to end
along with its cages, corridors, and guard towers. The prisons end must exceed the institution. The
fugitive can lead the way. Even if escape is impossible, we still have to run.
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1NC: Vs SP2
and genocide.
54
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55
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To trace the
and 3) the practice of systemic bodily immobilization (incarceration) permeates the normal routines of the free world.
forgivable. It
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both
effective?
Sex-Education correctives to Abstinence-only relies on racialized connotations of

sexual health and innocence that vilifies Black men and pathologizes black women as
high risk populations
Fields, 05 (Jessica Fields is a Professor of Sociology. She is also Graduate Studies Coordinator in Sexuality Studies and Research Faculty at the Center for
Research and Education on Gender and Sexuality, Social Problems, Vol. 52, Issue 4, pp. 549571, ISSN 0037-7791, electronic ISSN 1533-8533. http://www.
ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm. , published May 30, 2014, DOA: 7/26/17) EL
As I discussed earlier, educators adultifying responses to African American boys misbehavior deny the boys the
protective mantle that childhood offers their Euro-American peers. Similarly, mainstream discourse and
institutions consistently deny African American girls both the troubled privilege of idealized childhood
innocence and the transitional moment of adolescence (Ferguson 2001; Roberts 1997). In the late twentieth century, unwed Euro-
American mothers became increasingly common and even accepted; their pregnancies were missteps from which they
could recover with the assistance of trusted adults and proper care services. On the other hand, social
rhetoric cast unmarried African American mothers as manifestations of an inherently corrupt sexuality
(Solinger 2000; see also Kunzel 1994). As Dorothy Roberts (2000) has argued, many continue to consider African American mothers
inherently unfit and even affirmatively harmful to their children (p. 179). The Moynihan Report (Moynihan 1965) and other culture-of-
poverty models have served as the basis for decades of research and policy that implicitly assigned responsibility for perceived social decay in the African American and larger communities to
Anti-welfare politics have increasingly linked
African American girls and women (Kaplan 1997:326; Luker 1996; Patton 1996; Rose 2003).
illegitimacy and dependency to unwed African American motherhood, assigning African American
women responsibility for the apparent weakening of conventional family structures, gender roles, and class systems
(Levenstein 2000; Males 1999; Mink 1998; Roberts 1997). Notions of vulnerable youth and children having children helped U.S. liberals shift the tone of discussions of youth sexuality in
the 1990s: while 20-60-20 cast some young people as unsalvageable, children having children evoked care for those who struggle. According to Mae Thompson, a Euro-American school
board member, young womens and girls sexual activity was a problem not because of its corrupting influence on impressionable Southern County youth but instead because pregnancies and
parenting cut childhoods short and required girls to prematurely bear the responsibilities of parenthood (interview). As Elaine Adams said, To me there is really a crisis. When you [have], you
know, young ladies who are beginning to become pregnant even in the sixth grade, we are in a crisis situation (interview). Adamss image of pregnant young
ladies, in contrast to that of opportunistic and corrupting welfare queens, suggested that Southerns children were modest,
pure, proper girls who found themselves pregnant, apparently through no action of their own. The pregnancies and promiscuity for which others might want to punish these girls were the
missteps of ill- informed and inexperienced children. These
villains are no more than babies; as Kristin Luker has noted, Babies who
[have] babies [are] themselves victims (1996:85). Adams and her allies called on others to act not on behalf of
young women engaged in illicit sexual activity but instead on behalf of guilelessand racelessgirls.
Ironically, as abstinence-plus advocates claimed innocence for Southern County youth, they implicitly, if
unwittingly, confirmed the guilt of African Americans. At-risk may be analytically specific in epidemiological and other social research; and
educators and advocates may speak of children having children entirely because of concern for young people. How- ever, the terms have come to function without specific content.
Relying on racialized ideological codes regarding sexuality and innocence, they are heavy with
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connotations in lay discussions. At-risk, for example, assumes enormous power to identify, explain,
and predict futures for young people in disadvantaged urban schools and neighborhoods (Ferguson 2001:91;
see also Males 1999). Similarly, the coded language of children having children allows liberals to talk about African
Americans and poor women . . . without mentioning race[, gender,] or class (Luker 1996:86; see also Males 1999).
Abstinence-plus advocates confirmed, in particular, the guilt of adult African American women. Abstinence-plus advocates did not address race directly. Their comments were most often race
neutral. However, in Southern County, pregnancy, poverty, and failing public schools were racialized social issues. Among Metropolitan Region counties, Southern County had a troubled
reputation and was home to the largest percentage of African Americans, Afri- can American public school students, young people living below the poverty level, and teen pregnancies (see
Tables 1, 2, and 3). In such a context, race-neutral comments could not remain neutral for long. Ultimately, this
multiracial coalition built its argument on
key myths (Rose 2003) about black womens sexuality and corresponding myths about white
innocence (Collins 2000; Jewell 1998). In particular, those promoting abstinence-plus built upon rhetoric that casts
black mothers as bad for their children. Their arguments contributed to a larger discourse about
black young people in which the focus is all too often on individual maladap- tive behavior and black
mothering as the problem rather than on the social structure (Ferguson 2001:78). Rather than confronting the
systemic racial inequities that characterized Southern County, abstinence-plus advocates elided such inequities in their
public statements and privately explained the missteps of African American girls as a function of the
presumably economically and emotionally impoverished homes they shared with their ill-equipped
mothers. As I discuss below, their rhetoric also implicitly vilified adult African American men, who appeared in
their tales as absent fathers, sexual predators, and little else .
The affirmatives investment in sexual education programs that emphasize agency,

desire, and pleasure for students disavows the structural entanglement between
sexual (un)freedom and the carceral regime. Queer and trans incarcerated people
experience a structural vulnerability to sexual violence that renders queer sex and
pregnancy itself illegal.
Fields and Toquinto, 17 Jessica Fields is an Associate Professor of Sociology at San Francisco State
University and Senior Researcher at the Center for Research on Gender and Sexuality and Signy M Toquinto,
University of California, San Francisco, SFGH-HIV/AIDS Department (Sexuality Education in the Context
of Mass Incarceration: Interruptions and Entanglements,
Despite the cultural authority that abstinence-only education has achieved in the last 30 years (Fine and
McClelland 2006 , p. 299), a feminist, queer, and anti-racist vision of sexuality education has found a voice in
many universities, academic journals, and advocacy organizations (Marsh and Fields 2014 ). As the
contributions to this volume attest, ongoing concerns about sexually transmitted infections (STIs),
unintended pregnancies, anti-gay violence, gendered sexual assault, and the possibility of liberation
have inspired innovative thinking about sexuality education. Over the last 30 years, sexuality education
research, curricula, and programming have emerged to interrupt constraining models of abstinence-
only education and to advocate gender, racial, and sexual justice in the lives of young people. These
same years of innovative thinking have been marked for many in the United States by widening
economic inequalities, starved social welfare systems, disparities in health care and outcomes, and a
punitive War on Drugs. One striking manifestation of the stark divide between the advantaged and disadvantaged is the mass incarceration of people of color
and poor people. Th e United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. According to Th e Sentencing Project, over 700 of every 100,000 people (about 0.7 %) in
this country are in prison or jail ( 2014 ). In 2012, approximately 1 of every 35 US adults (about 3 %) was court-involvedin jail, or prison, or on probation or parole. Over half
of the men and women in prisons and jails are Black or Latina (Bonczar 2003 ). One in three Black men and one in six Latino men can expect to go to prison in their lifetimes;
one of every seventeen white men can expect the same (Th e Sentencing Project 2013 ). While men are six times as likely as women to serve time in jail or prison, over the
last 30 years the rate of increase in incarceration rates for women has been more than one-and- a-half times that for men (Bonczar 2003 ; Th e Sentencing Project 2012 ).
Transgender people, particularly transgender people of color, face considerable social and economic
discrimination and are disproportionately arrested, convicted, and incarcerated (Tarzwell 2006 ). About one in
58
Session II
six transgender people have been incarcerated at some point in their lives, and nearly half of Black
transgender people have been incarcerated (Grant et al. 2011 ). Communities disenfranchisement in the face
of mass incarceration reflects a broader vulnerability to a host of social and sexual inequities,
including violence and coercion, HIV and other STIs, and unintended pregnancies. Imprisoned and
court-involved cisgender and transgender women and men typically live in areas of concentrated
poverty, lack formal education and work histories, and have neither aff ordable nor safe housing (Covington
and Bloom 2007 ; Freudenberg 2002 ; Haywood et al. 2000 ; Th e Sylvia Rivera Law Project 2007 ). Many are addicted to or using drugs, and many contend with serious
mental illness (Kantor 2003 ; McClelland et al. 2002 ). Violence and discrimination often continue during their incarceration at the hands of jail deputies and others (Beck et al.
2013 ; Human Rights Watch 1996 ). Th ese histories and experiences contribute to the likelihood of criminal behavior, court involvement, and poor sexual and reproductive
health. Th ey also render sexuality education and other eff orts to interrupt these entrenched conditions all the more important. Sexuality education has long aimed to prevent
poor health outcomes and promote social and moral well-being (Luker 2006 ; Moran 2000 ). And, as state-sponsored sexuality education
has focused on those whose health, morality, or intimate relationship seem to require some
intervention, it has often affirmed oppressive ideas about the sexual lives of youth, women, people of
color, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI) people (Fields 2008 ; Garca 2012 ).
As we noted at the opening of this chapter (and as other chapters in this volume suggest),
contemporary feminist, queer, and anti-racist researchers and advocates have resisted the pull of this
history, claiming instead that sexuality education which emphasizes agency, desire, and pleasure has
the potential to address and perhaps even reverse social inequities and injustices (Fine 1988 ; Fine and McClelland
2006 ). Surely, then, sexuality educators have an important role to play in addressing the profound injustices marking imprisoned peoples lives. Having been
pushed out of school and other social institutions offering care and education, people caught up in the
US carceral system do not have reliable access to any version of sexuality educationlet alone one
marked by a commitment to sexual and reproductive justice . They receive sexual and reproductive
health care and education while under state surveillance; only once they become involved with the
courts are they likely to receive sexual and reproductive health education and care. The question
becomes, what meaningful and effi - cacious teaching and learning are possible within the context of
racialized and gendered mass incarceration? Below we explore the possibilities for interrupting the inequalities and injustices that thread
through sexuality education available to those most aff ected by mass incarceration, focusing throughout on the tensions between education and punishment, intervention and
liberation. While
sexuality education gained through jails, prisons, and street outreach is an opportunity to
learn and to support agentic claims to ones own sexuality, this teaching and learning is always
encumbered with the demands of the carceral institution. Sites and Experiences of Incarceration and Vulnerability We approach
incarceration as a broad experience of court involvement that spans multiple settings and institutionsprisons, jails, parole, probation, and the streets. People in state and
federal prisons have been convicted of felonies and are serving sentences of more than one year. In contrast, jails are city and county facilities with prisoner stays typically
less than a year and as brief as 24 hours. Jailed people are either awaiting trial or sentencing (often without the resources to make bail) or serving shorter terms for
misdemeanor off enses. Someone on parole has been released from jail or prison before the completion of their original sentence. Th eir freedom is contingent upon meeting
the conditions of parole; these conditions often include reporting to a parole offi cer. Probation is a sentence in lieu of a prison or jail time: as long as someone adheres to the
terms of probation (e.g. abstaining from drug use or maintaining employment), they can avoid a jail or prison term. Many people chronically entangled with the criminal justice
system are released to probation or parole to live on the streetseither homeless or unstably housed. Frequent arrests mean that many court-involved people repeatedly
[go] in and out of the court system, [spend] nights in jail or in court pens at enormous expense, and [come] back out only to face the same situation, with no lasting change or
benefi t to these people or their surrounding community (Th e Urban Justice Center 2003 , p. 3). Just as the geography of mass incarceration extends across these sites and
environments, health risk and vulnerability travel across prison, jail, release, and street involvement (Cloud et al. 2014 ). While one in ten Americans contends with a
diagnosable substance use disorder, seven in ten people in jail and half those in prison contend with substance abuse (Fazel et al. 2006 ; Karberg and James 2005 ). Rates of
mental illness are two to four times higher in prisons than in the community at large (Prins 2014 ). Violence, injuries, and suicides are common occurrences inside jails and
prisons. And, while these sites, like the United States more broadly, have seen a decrease in HIV infections in recent years, HIV
infection remains two to
seven times as prevalent among incarcerated women and men in the United States as it is in the United
States in general (Spaulding et al. 2009 ). The entanglement of vulnerability, intimacy, and risk in incarcerated
womens lives leaves them particularly susceptible to poor health. Court-involved cisgender and
transgender women endure systemic and interpersonal violence and discriminationfor example,
physical, sexual, and emotional abuse at the hands of corrections offi cers and other incarcerated
persons (Arkles 2009 ). Many women face long-term (and even permanent) separations from their families when their children are placed into the foster care system
(Hines et al. 2004 ). Pregnant incarcerated women are subject to the continued practice of shackling during
childbirth and have experienced a long history of abusive sterilization practices (Daane 2003 ; Richie 1996 , 2002 ). Th
e rate of HIV and STI infection among women in jail or prison exceeds that of men (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2011 ; Maruschak 2005 , 2012 ). Women
whose partners share a history of incarceration are more likely to report histories of STIs and coerced sex (Kim et al. 2002 ). All womens lower earning power and lowered
economic status increases their vulnerability to HIV, limits their access to health care and education, and makes it diffi cult for them to leave relationships that compromise
their well-being (Wingood and DiClemente 2000 ). Women at risk for HIV infection have high prevalence rates of intimate partner violence (Cohen et al. 2000 ); this history of
59
Session II
abuse suggests that these women may have limited ability to negotiate sexual concerns with their partners (Gmez and Marn 1996 ; Melendez et al. 2003 ).
Heteronormative expectations compel the separation of women and men prisonersthe assumptions
being that women and men would become sexual partners if not separated and that separation from
the desired pool of heterosexual partners represents a signifi cant punishment. Ironically, sex
segregation allows for, and even facilitates, same-sex interactions and partnershipseven as sex
segregation also pathologizes these relationships as perverse responses to deprivation. And, the same
heteronormative expectations that compel sex segregation also render healthy and freely chosen LGBTQI genders and sexualities invisible to many sexuality and HIV
The
educators, care providers, and corrections offi cerseven those committed to advocating for prisoners rights (Richie 2005 ; Zierler and Krieger 1997 ).
condemnation and prohibition of sex between people in prisons and jails suggest queer sexuality, not
sexual violence, is the problem that [detention] administrators care about eliminating (Arkles 2009 , p. 536).
This implication has acute consequences for LGBTQI prisoners, who are frequently cast as the
perpetrators and thus face, on the one hand, disproportionate discipline and isolation and, on the
other, little help when they themselves are the victims of sexual violence (Tarzwell 2006 , p. 179). Transgender
and gender-nonconforming people also face repudiation of their gender identities, denial of health care
to which they are entitled, verbal abuse, and physical and sexual violence within prisons and jails. Most
facilities make gender classifications based on genitalianot gender identityand some facilities
segregate transgender individuals into solitary confinement or protected status simply because they
are transgender (Just Detention International 2013 ). Transgender people, convicted sex off enders, former gang members, and others share and, not surprisingly,
meet harm in this ostensibly protected space. Sexual violence and vulnerability extend across the landscape and logic of
mass incarceration . If overcrowding, extended periods of solitary confi nement, and sexual victimization at the hands of other prisoners or prison staff
characterize jails and prisons (Cloud et al. 2014 ), the street can off er respite from imprisonment and surveillance. On the streets, court-involved people may be able to
reunite with family or community and fi nd opportunities for personal autonomy. However, the street is often a site of vulnerability, violence, and marginalization. In the fi rst
two weeks following release from jail or prison, court-involved people are particularly vulnerable to homelessness and death (Weiser et al. 2009 ). Those who remain on the
street often participate in sex work, robbery, or petty theft; some sell or use illicit drugs. Th ese strategies may allow for survival, but they may also make it diffi cult to achieve
economic and social stability, cope with mental illness and substance use, and secure sexual and reproductive health. And, given the increasing criminalization of poverty and
homelessness, life on the street frequently results in subsequent incarceration.
Narratives of LGBT harm in the school is used as a pretext by the state to extend
punishing and policing practices in the name of LGBT inclusion this carceral
paternalism individuates structural cisheteronormativity and results in the further
criminalization of queers of color and queers engaged in sex work or other illegal
modes of survivalbullying legislation proves
Meiners 16 (Erica R, Meiners. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/48228) For the Children? University of Minnesota Press in Minneapolis, MN in 2016.
Erica R. Meiners is a Bernard J. Brommel Distinguished Research Professor at Northeastern Illinois University. She is the author of Right to Be Hostile:
Schools, Prisons, and the Making of Public Enemies (2007) and of articles in Meridians, Social Justice, Womens Studies Quarterly, In ese Times, and
Radical Teacher. She teaches womens and gender studies, justice studies, and educational studies and is a member of the labor union University
Professionals of Illinois. AB)
Harm experienced by LGBTQ youth is also used to expand punishment and to extend policing practices further
into schools. In 2008, a fifteen- year-old boy named Lawrence Larry King was shot in the head and killed in his middle school computer lab by a classmate, Brandon McInerney, aged fourteen (Cathcart 2008). Brandon was
horrified that Larry flirted with him in public. Kings murder was followed, in 2010, by a concentrated and well-publicized wave of suicides by gay youth, including Tyler Clementi, Seth Walsh, Asher Brown, and Billy Lucas. These
suicides, like Larrys murder, were preceded by intense sexuality- and gender-policing by peers and teachers and
triggered a series of antibullying initiatives. The high profile media attention that centered select (often white and
male) examples of antigay bullying spurred state legislatures to act. States that already had school antibullying programs, including character
education or legislation, broadened these policies. For example, in 2011, New Jersey implemented what has been described as the strongest anti-bullying legislation in the country after Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementis suicide (Education
Law Center 2013). Called the Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights, the New Jersey law requires teachers to report bullying
to administrators, requires school superintendents to report bullying to the state board of education,
and allows the suspension or expulsion of students accused of bullying (Friedman 2010). In 2012, a law criminalizing cyberbullying passed in
North Carolina. In an effort to protect school employees, this law makes it a crime for any student to post real images or make any
statement on-lineeven if it is truethat provokes harassment. Other prohibited acts by students are signing teachers up to receive junk mail, posting
pictures of teachers online, and making fake websites. In North Carolina, those who are sixteen are treated as adults under state law ;
60
Session II
despite the increased media
therefore, if convicted, a student could face thirty days in jail or a $1,000 ne (Miller 2013). As of 2015, all states have antibullying laws (Child Trends 2015). Meanwhile,
focus on particular kinds of youth violence and focused support for antibullying legislation, non-
gender-conforming and nonheterosexual young people continue to harm and be harmed in
classrooms, on playgrounds, and online. Stories splash across media outlets every day. A New York fourteen-year-old, Jamey Rodemeyer, contributed a video statement to the online It
Gets Better archive in May 2011 and, after experiencing physical, verbal, and online harassment about his perceived sexuality, hanged himself in September 2011 (Praetorius 2011). On June 5, 2012, Kardin Ulysse, a
New York City middle school student, was blinded in one eye after being assaulted by a group of boys
shouting antigay taunts in the cafeteria of Roy Mann Junior High School (Cannold 2012). Also in 2012, in New Jersey, Pine Lake Elementary
School student C.O. routinely returned from school bruised, crying, and depressed from being verbally and physically harassed about his perceived sexual orientation. His parents asked the school to intervene in a culture of pervasive
homophobia that included classmates yelling homophobic slurs at C.O. from his own front lawn, and being called gay, fag, and girl every day at school. C.O.s parents were told that he should attempt to make new friends. When C.O. was
While most of the attacks

assaulted on a school bus with a metal seat belt and the school and the district still refused to intervene, the family moved and C.O. transferred to a different school (Armstrong 2012).
that become high profile or receive media or other attention target cisgender boys, others, including
trans youth in particular, are certainly not exempt from violence. These acts of interpersonal and structural
heteronormativity or transphobia, of course, are neither new nor surprising. Heteronormativitythe
structures and systems that legitimize and privilege heterosexuality and heterosexual relationships
as fundamental and natural within society (C. Cohen 2005, 24)is pervasive in most institutions,
including schools. Fear of the queer, or all the meanings and associations attached to non-
heteronormativity, leads schools to suppress teachers and creates cultures that facilitate harm toward
non-gender-conforming and non- heteronormative youth. Instead of excavating heteronormativity in
schools, legislative responses to bullying define the problem narrowly and posit punishment and
criminalization as the response. These laws are predicated on the concept that if we removed or
changed the few bad kids, schools would be safer for queers. While this practice could purchase a temporary reprieve, a few bad kids in schools are not the root
problem. These initiatives are not capable of excavating heteronormativity. Beyond individuating what is in fact a structural and institutional
problem, anti- bullying laws and their accompanying punitive sanctions operate in already highly
attenuated spaces for surveillance and punishment that are neither race- nor gender-neutral. School
suspension rates for African Americans, in particular for African American males, are significantly
higher than for their white counterparts (Once for Civil Rights 2012; Losen and Skiba 2010; Skiba et al. 2002). Excessively punitive disciplinary measures that disproportionately target the
most marginalized students in school contexts (including queer youth) made national headlines in 2011, highlighting the educational cost to young people when they are pushed out of school (Losen and Skiba 2010; Phillips 2011; Schwarz 2011;
Given this preexisting landscape, when disruptive behavior and other are the
Himmelstein and Bruckner 2011).
dominant reasons for suspensions, it is not a stretch to predict that antibullying laws will be unevenly
implemented and that particular students will be disproportionately targeted and punished. While the majority of the
laws passed nationally are also intended to act preventively, the sanction and punishment measures are generally most powerful. In 2011, California made bullying illegal with the passage of Seths Law, yet all language requiring counseling or
restorative justice practices was pulled from the final version of the bill. Rather than being proactive, the bill is retroactively punitive, involving spot checks of schools to see if they are in compliance (Gould 2011). In 2011, New Jersey enacted its
Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights tightening the relationship between schools and local law enforcement. e law forces schools and officials to report incidents more quickly and to hire school- based antibullying specialists, and increases penalties for
bullying; it also provides for a Crimestoppers telephone line, which makes reporting easier, but . . . also ups the ante by involving law enforcement rather than resolving issues in the principals once (Hu 2011). In 2014, Car- son, California,
proposed charging anyone who cyberbullies or physically bullies anyone of school age, up to age twenty five, with a misdemeanor and/or fining them (C. Muhammad 2014). ese laws deepen already existing relationships to law enforcement and
also falsely assume that law enforcement is free of violence or bullying. Police and other security forces are often key perpetrators of sexual and other forms of violence (Richie 2012). The suicides of white male queer youth engender the most
public response, perhaps because of the images of the grief of white heterosexual parents. For example, in the deaths of Seth Walsh and Jamey Rodemeyer (and, earlier, the death of Matthew Shepard), the maternal and paternal losses are
mobilized to support antibullying or hate crimes legislation. After his 2009 murder by peers in Chicago, sixteen-year-old Derrion Albert was repeatedly identified in the national media as physically slight, an excellent student, and a
Grandmommas boy (C. Cohen 2012, 126). Mean- while, Alberts family was rarely visible in mainstream coverage; instead the media focused on violent, unruly black male youths. For dead white gay youths, the families loss is often highly
visible. LGBTQ young people face persistent violence in schools, and numerous reports highlight the interpersonal violence that non-gender- conforming and non-heteronormative students experience at the hands of peers, teachers, and other
staff members (Kosciw et al. 2010; Pascoe 2007; McCready 2010). Yet interpersonal violence is precipitated and shaped by state violence. A 2009 national study of LGBT students of color, Shared Differences: e Experiences of Lesbian, Gay,
Bisexual, and Transgender Students of Color in Our Nations Schools, identified the curricular and systemic erasure and marginalization of LGBTQ youth of color: Few LGBT students of color had access to LGBT-inclusive curricular resources in
school. Less than a h?? of students had been taught about LGBT-related people, history, or events in their classes, or had such information available in their textbooks (14% each). Furthermore, only 38% reported that they could access LGBT-
related resources in their school library. Less than a half of all LGBT students of color (18%) reported that their school had a comprehensive policy to address in-school harassment and assault, which provided specific protections based on
that the
sexual orientation and gender identity/expression. (Diaz and Kosciw 2009, 13) Violence is a problem, and yet the question gets framed very narrowly: If not antibullying laws, then what? This chapters analysis outlines
states responses to violence mask the problem. These laws transfer structural factors that perpetuate
and reward heteronormativity into individual pathologies and also suggest that the route to ending
homophobia is to punish perpetrators. The symbolic figure of the dead queer white male child and, as importantly, the kinship networks that the child is attached to are used to pass these
laws. Queer youth, who are often criminalized for their sexual practices, restricted by ordinances and
statutes that deny transgender and non-gender-conforming youth gender-harming bathroom access,
and can be placed on the sex offender registry for consensual sexual acts, appear to incite less
concern from the state while alive or when unharmed. Harm and violence experienced by the child, in conjunction with desires of communities for systemic change,
advance agendas that do little to make communities actually safer, particularly for those who are nonheterosexual and/or non-gender-conforming. An increase in criminalization means
that those most vulnerableincluding queers and those involved in survival economies such as the
sex and drug tradeswill be caught up in the criminal justice system. More people in the system
means more people subjected to racist, gendered, and heteronormative judicial proceedings.
Conviction means detention and confinement in institutions predicated on gender normativity,
compulsory heteronormativity, and racial oppression.
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Session II
The 1AC Shalet evidence advocates for anti-bullying legislation
Anti-bullying legislation will be implemented alongside comphensive sex ed three

impacts
1. facilitates heteronormativity by believing anti-gay bullying is a result of individual
pathologies
2. this evidence is a solvency take out there is no evidence that anti-bullying laws at
as a deterrent
3. put black students in juvie at 16x higher rate.
Quinn and Meiners, 13 - Therese Quinn is Associate Professor of Art History and director of the Museum
and Exhibition Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Erica R. Meiners is Professor of Gender
and Womens Studies and Education at Northeastern Illinois University (From Anti-Bullying Laws and Gay
Marriages to Queer Worlds and Just Futures, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Inaugural Issue, Fall
2013, Project Muse)
As is clear from the snapshots of research and media coverage we present, violence is a problem and queer
youth are targeted, and yet the question is framed narrowly: If not anti-bullying laws, then what? We suggest
that the states criminalizing responses mask the complex roots of queer violence and distract
audiences from understanding the importance of structural factors that facilitate and naturalize
violence targeted at queers. These anti-bullying laws overwhelmingly work to transfer structural
factors that perpetuate and reward heteronormativity into individual pathologies and also suggest
that the way to address homophobia is to punish individual perpetrators. The majority of responses to
harm in school do not make connections between forms of structural violence including the lack of LGBT
teachers and curriculaand forms of interpersonal violence. In a related area, a number of scholar activists
have come out in opposition to hate crimes legislation arguing that not only is there no evidence that the
existence of hate crimes legislation functions as a deterrent to reduce biased acts of violence, but that hate
crimes legislation supports a culture of punishment that distracts us from understanding how LGBTQ and other
folks have found themselves punished through hate crimes legislation.33 The Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a
national organization that works to ensure that all people are free to self-determine gender identity and
expression, in a statement opposing hate crimes legislation, states: The evidence . . . shows that hate crime
laws and other get tough on crime measures do not deter or prevent violence. Increased
incarceration does not deter [End Page 156] others from committing violent acts motivated by hate,
does not rehabilitate those who have committed past acts of hate, and does not make anyone safer. As
we see trans people profiled by police, disproportionately arrested and detained, caught in systems of poverty
and detention, and facing extreme violence in prisons, jails and detention centers, we believe that this system
itself is a main perpetrator of violence against our communities.34 In a culture of pervasive homo- and
transphobia, hate crimes laws, like anti-bullying laws, are seductive with their promise to punish
perpetrators and distract us from an examination of the complex roots of harm. Activist and journalist
Liliana Segura argues that politicians who voted in favor of the Matthew Shepard Act, the 2009 legislation that
amended the 1969 Hate Crimes Act to include sexual orientation and gender identity, many of whom also
voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, used their vote as an opportunity to appear tough on crime while also
appearing to support gay rights.35 Further, as social justice lawyer Andrea Ritchie has identified, anti-
bullying laws are mini hate crimes laws likely to both reflect and reinforce dominant sets of power
arrangements.36 In fact, recent research highlights that queer youth, the targets of hetero-norming
62
Session II
violence in schools, are also more severely punished in other institutional settings.37 Angela Irvines
research with the National Council on Crime and Delinquency demonstrates that queer youth are
disproportionately represented in juvenile justice systems: At least 15 percent of the population in juvenile
detention is LGBT. Dice the numbers according to gender and the statistics get worse: 27 percent of girls
booked into detention sites across the country disclosed lesbian or bisexual sexual orientations or otherwise
failed to conform to expectations of how girls should behave. Like kids of color, LGBT youth are punished more
often than their straight peers.38 Not only are LGBT youth overrepresented in justice systems, Irvines
multistate research shows that LGBT youth are targeted for harsher sanctions at every level of the system:
[LGB] and gender non-conforming youth in juvenile detention were twice as likely to have a history of home
removal by a social worker, placement in a group or foster home, or homelessness when compared with their
straight peers. Theyre also twice as likely to face detention in the juvenile justice system for running away,
prostitution, sex with someone of the same gender, and minor offenses like loitering and truancy. Lesbian, gay,
and bisexual (but not gender non-conforming) youth are also more likely than their straight peers to face
detention for a violent offense. The harshest disparities show up in punishments for running away: 28 percent
of gay and bisexual boys are detained for running away compared with 12 percent of straight boys, and 38
[End Page 157] percent of lesbian and bisexual girls are detained for running away compared with 17 percent
of straight girls.39 Not only is there no evidence that anti-gay bullying laws, like other forms of hate
crimes legislation, will act as a deterrent toward bias-related harm, this criminalizing response
circulates in a landscape where LGBT youth are already disproportionately punished by state entities
tasked with ensuring our collective safety and security. Strengthening a Punitive and Racialized Regime
Another gay win frequently identified is the increase in both the focus on bullying in schools and the resulting
attempts by schools to institute anti-bullying regulations. The rationale for anti-bullying laws, often presented as
necessary to protect children, is seemingly hard to contest. Yet, as previously noted, instead of excavating the
heteronormativity, trans- and homophobia in schools and communities, state responses to bullying define the
problem narrowly and posit punishment and criminalization as the response. Anti-bullying laws suggest that
if we removed the few bad kids that are causing problems, schools would be safer for queers .
However, these initiatives are not capable of identifying and addressing social inequality. For example,
a 2009 Gallup survey showed that 46 percent of those polled are not supportive of adoptive rights for gays and
lesbians, and 2012 polls showed that 46 percent of Americans oppose marriage for gay people.40 Attitudes
like these indicate the prevalence of social anxieties about queer people. In particular, nonnormative forms of
gender identity and expression continue to receive punishment.41 Without acknowledgement of the structural
and institutional contextforms of state violencethe individuated anti-bullying laws and other punitive
sanctions operating in schools will target those who are already suspect within national logics of race, class,
gender, and other marginalizing categories. For example, school suspension rates for African Americans,
and in particular for African American boys, are significantly higher than for their White
counterparts.42 As summarized in a 2010 article in an Educational Researcher article that surveyed all
available national research on disciplinary sanctions, Males of all racial and ethnic groups are more likely than
females to receive disciplinary sanctions. In 2004, only 1% of Asian Pacific Islander females were suspended,
compared with 11% of Asian Pacific Islander males. Expulsion data from that same year showed that White
females were half as likely to be expelled as White males (p < .001), and similarly, Black females were half as
likely to be [End Page 158] expelled as Black males (p < .05). Black males are especially at risk for
receiving discipline sanctions, with one study showing that Black males were 16 times as likely as
White females to be suspended.43 These gendered and racialized practices of removing students from their
educational settingsthe most dramatic educational sanction availablestart in preschools, as indicated in a
2005 survey of 40 states prekindergarten programs.44,45 It is important to note that available data on school
suspensions and expulsions shows that these practices do not improve youth academic or behavioral
performance, and suspensions are not reserved for acts of violence or actions that might be perceived as
63
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dangerous. In their review of the research on the reasons for suspensions, Losen and Skiba46 found wide
variations among the reasons students were suspended nationwide and identified that suspensions were not
the result of violent and serious behavior.47 In one state-wide study, only 5%ofall out-of-school suspensions
were issued for disciplinary incidents that are typically considered serious or dangerous, such as possession of
weapons or drugs. The remaining 95% of suspensions fell into two categories: disruptive behavior and
other.48 Excessively punitive school disciplinary measures that disproportionately target the most
marginalized in school contexts made national headlines in 2011, highlighting the educational cost to young
people when they are pushed out of school.49 Within this landscape, it is not a stretch to predict that anti-
bullying laws will be unevenly implemented and that certain students will continue to be disproportionately
targeted and punished. Although all laws are intended to prevent future harm, the measures that are most
powerful generally have sanction and punishment components. For example, in 2011 California made bullying
illegal with the passage of passed Seths Law, yet the final version of the bill was stripped of all language
mandating counseling or restorative justice practices. Rather than being proactive, the law is retroactively
punitive, involving spot checks of schools to see if they are in compliance.50 New Jerseys 2011 anti-
bullying legislation tightened relationships between schools and local law enforcement, forcing
schools and officials to report incidences more quickly, to create school-based anti-bullying
specialists, and to increase penalties for bullying. It also provides for a Crimestoppers telephone line,
to make reporting easier, but [which] also ups the ante by involving law enforcement rather than
resolving issues in the principals office.51 Because schools are sites of surveillance that are neither
race nor gender neutral, these laws entrench extant relationships to law enforcement.52
Criminalization in and outside of schools is a process of racialization , through which youth of color
are normalized as those who are bad and in trouble.53 These laws falsely assume [End Page 159]
that law enforcement is free of violence or bullying, yet police and other security forces are often key
perpetrators of sexual and other forms of violence.54 Finally, this turn to criminalization as a response to
homophobia and punishing gender normativity augments a carceral system that is deeply flawed,
fundamentally shaped by racism, and actively reproductive of heteronormativity and gender
conformity. Thus, it is a solution that fails to effectively address the immediate problem of anti-queer
school-based violence, which we argue is exacerbated by new forms of privatized schooling.
Child protection discourse produces an innocence/guilt binarism that criminalizes

queer students and queer students and students of color, and obscures and extends
the carceral logic of surveillance and punishment in school
Meiners 16 (Erica, Bernard J. Brommel Distinguished Research Professor at Northeastern Illinois University, For the Children?
https://muse.jhu.edu/book/48228 //AB)
These theorized examples of how representations and tropes of the child are deployed across contemporary carceral landscapes remind us that decarceration and movements against the prison-industrial
Abolition work also requires that

complex involve labor beyond closing prisons and opening the doors of other supposedly democratic institutions that have locked out too many.
we intimately reassess the foundational building blocks of how civic society is understoodfamily and
childto demonstrate how these supposedly neutral or private categories are used to require and
extend the carceral apparatus. With the perpetual faade of authenticity that places children outside history, the child redefines the category
of innocence and simultaneously protects this concept from critical engagement. Innocence is a
racialized, gendered, sexualized, and flexible construct, but the symbolic child is able to mask these genealogies
and distract audiences from seeing the histories of power and other political and economic forces that
literally stage manage and permit us to read the body. The symbolic child also shores up the
intertwined logics of punishment and protection. Child protection centers interpersonal violence while
obscuring state violence and the ties that suture these together. Adults feelings about the child and
the childs familial tiesas evidenced in the last example, anti-bullying legislation are used to
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support more punishment and policing, responses that perpetuate the conditions that actively create
more structural and interpersonal harm. Protection and innocence and consent are central to
discussions about children and are the foundation of other structures, namely our justice system. The
bright lines within our system used to ascertain and identify are innocence and consent. If these categories are lost for children, can this also affect wider justice frameworks? Despite these critiques, the
As 14 year olds are transferred to adult court, seven- and

categories of adult, childhood, and juvenile are used daily to shape peoples life pathways.
eight year olds are moved into juvenile detention, men and women over the age of 18 are consigned to
long prison terms, and those female, queer, and non-gender-conforming are targeted for containment
and sexual surveillance, it desperately matters who is viewed (or not) as innocent or disposable. My work in
movements is a crisp reminder that there are no pure places for organizing, research, and movement building. Yet, the analysis in this article clearly highlights that the construct of the
child is being remade and deployed right now. It is not possible to wait until the dust settles before
engaging. If anti-prison campaigners cannot reframe the terms of the debatethat is, deconstruct the centrality of white
supremacy, capitalism, or heteropatriarchy or reshape the relentless focus on interpersonal violence
over state violencethere should at least be a recognition of how these constructs are embedded and
masked. Though campaigners and scholars have critically deconstructed deficient tropes such as
family values, child protection has received less scrutiny. To leave no one behind, we must shift the organizing
focus away from individuals and begin to scrutinize what categories such as the child mask. Such
politics enable anti-prison organizers to move outside pro-prison expansion and policing narratives
that overwhelmingly revolve around the child and innocence. Parallel work is to meticulously and rigorously understand meanings in
particular contexts. As queer theorist Eve Sedgewick (1990, 27) did in relation to the categorization of the homosexual, we must ask who benefits from a classification, who does not, and why: Repeatedly
to ask how certain categorizations work, what enactments they are performing and what relations they are creating, rather than what they essentially mean, has been my principal strategy. Deconstructing
the uses of the symbolic child in contemporary incarceration offers insights into the most central questions in justice work todayspecifically, those surrounding tensions between reform work and
structural, systematic changes. This has material impacts on the lives of many, including children. These practices require a more rigorous
analysis that links this exactness to actions. For example, if children selectively can access rehabilitation, does that require adults to be constructed as static and therefore only targeted and eligible for
practices of child-
incapacitation? Does rehabilitation require a normativitysexual, developmental, or economic? If we cannot distinguish the construction of the child from histories and
saving that create bureaucratic and intimate surveillance systems, what are the local, narrow moves possible for those who work in
schools, detention centers, and courts? The time and space to ask these questions are not always available before actions are taken, but they eventually become
available later. Abolition work requires that this scrupulous labor be a central part of our movement work.
We dont want gay cops, politicians and CEOs the politics of assimilation is a device
used to withdraw from the struggle for liberation
The Mary Nardini Gang 2010 (Mary, criminal queers from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Toward the Queerest
Insurrection, 2010, https://itsgoingdown.org/wp-
content/uploads/2017/02/toward_the_queerest_insurrection_read.pdf)
If history proves anything, it is that capitalism has a treacherous recuperative tendency to pacify
radical social movements. It works rather simply, actually. A group gains privilege and power within a
movement, and shortly thereafter sell their comrades out. Within a couple years of stonewall, affluent-
gay-white-males had thoroughly marginalized everyone that had made their movement possible and
abandoned their revolution with them. It was once that to be queer was to be in direct conflict with the
forces of control and domination. Now, we are faced with a condition of utter stagnation and sterility. As
always, Capital recuperated brick-throwing street queens into suited politicians and activists. There are
logcabin-Republicans and stonewall refers to gay Democrats. There are gay energy drinks and a queer
television station that wages war on the minds, bodies and esteem of impressionable youth. The LGBT
political establishment has become a force of assimilation, gentrification, capital and state-power. Gay
identity has become both a marketable commodity and a device of withdrawal from struggle against
domination. Now they dont critique marriage, military or the state. Rather we have campaigns for queer
assimilation into each. Their politics is advocacy for such grievous institutions, rather than the
annihilation of them all. Gays can kill poor people around the world as well as straight people! Gays
can hold the reigns of the state and capital as well straight people! We are just like you.
Assimilationists want nothing less than to construct the homosexual as normal - white, monogamous,
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wealthy, 2.5 children, SUVs with a white picket fence. This construction, of course, reproduces the
stability of heterosexuality, whiteness, patriarchy, the gender binary, and capitalism itself. If we
genuinely want to make ruins of this totality, we need to make a break. We dont need inclusion into
marriage, the military and the state. We need to end them. No more gay politicians, CEOs and cops. We
need to swiftly and immediately articulate a wide gulf between the politics of assimilation and the
struggle for liberation.
Thus, vote negative to engage in a praxis of intimate abolition. Our alternative attunes
itself to contours of the prison regime that operate in the here and nowthe intimate
affects, desires and ideologies central to state-sanctioned violence. Without the alt, the
impact is slow quiet, death for those targeted by the carceral regime.
For
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Can
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racial state, the prison, heteropatriarchy, and new formations of global capitalism . For them, there
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1NC: Vs SP3
The 1ACs critique of schooling fails to understand the carceral schooling industrial
complex that situates the prison regime as the condition of possibility of schooling
and education. The radical pedagogy of the 1AC is capable of justifying, defending,
and tolerating a genocidal prison regime through its investment in the production of
free and self-governing citizen/subjects with their methodology. In other words, their
freedom requires the reproduction of the unfreedom of those held captive by the state.
Turns case.
imprisonment apparatus, rather than secondary or unintended consequences of it.3 Third, the prison regime encompasses the
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criminalized.) There
are, at first, categories of social subjects that are apprehended and naturalized by the
trace the
forgivable. It
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both
effective?
The 1ACs biopolitical analysis of the school-as-camp mobilizes the spectre of black
genocide to give coherence to their analysis of domination while simultaneously
footnoting black positionality at the level of the method this is a form of conceptual
black genocide that we must refuse Zero Tolerance laws, standardize testing,
policing in school are not merely techinques of biopolitical control imposed upon a
pre-existent space of education they are themselves the techniques of the prison
apparatus at work through education itself WE MUST BEGIN WITH THIS PREMISE:
THE SCHOOL IS THE PRISON. The school must destroy black life because the school
is the prison is the plantation: Biopolitical regulation is not external to the prison
regime but rather is given life through antiblackness we therefore start from the place
of refusing the 1AC investment in violent elaboration of black suffering that must
render chattel slavery invisible the school is the prison and the prison is antiblack
this is the starting point for any abolitionist politic
Dillon, 13 (Stephon, Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State //Daniels)
For Shakur, the regulations of a burgeoning neoliberal-carceral state possessed life in ways that rendered
the free world an extension of the prison. An assemblage of race, gender, capital, policing, and penal
technologies produced a symbiosis between the deindustrialized landscape of the late 20th century urban
United States and the gendered racisms of an emerging prison-industrial complex. Diffuse structural networks
of racism and sexism mimicked the steel bars of a cage. This is the complicity between freedom and captivity,
the entanglements between the living and the living dead, and the hemorrhaging of a buried past into the
imagined progress of the present. For Shakur, prison looked like and felt like nineteenth century chattel
slavery: We sit in the bull pen. We are all black. All restless. And we are all freezing.25 In the essay,
affect continually forces the past to open directly onto the present.26 The sensations and feelings of frozen
skin speaks in a way that words cannot. In prison, shivering black flesh weighted with chains looked like
slavery to Shakur. As a fugitive who now has political asylum in Cuba, she understands herself as a twenty-
first century runaway slave, a maroon woman.27 Although Shakurs essay does not name neoliberalism
explicitly, we can read it as a black feminist theorization of neoliberalism at the very moment of its
emergence. Indeed, it is a narration of the drastic racialized and gendered restructurings of social and
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economic life in the 1970s United States from the perspective of someone detained for resisting those
changes. Written by a captured member of the underground black liberation movement, the text names
the discourses and (state) violence neoliberalism requires yet erases. Neoliberalism is most certainly an
economic doctrine that prioritizes the mobility and expansion of capital at all costs, but its mechanisms exceed
the liberation of the market from the repression of the state. As Shakur indicates, one of the conditions of
possibility for the emergence of the neoliberal state is the kinship shared between the free world and the
prisonan affinity structured and produced by an anti blackness inaugurated under chattel-slavery. More over,
as Shakur argues throughout the essay, the technologies of immobilization utilized by the neoliberal state
specifically target black women, a process connected to the emergence of the black feminist. By reading black
feminist texts from the 1970s as implicit theories of neoliberalism, we can come to understand the formation
and implementation of neoliberalism in a new light. Shakur not only connects an emergent neoliberalism to
a rapidly expanding prison regime, she also links the contemporary prison to chattel slaveryan
institutional, affective, and discursive connection apprehended by Angela Daviss phrase, From the
prison of slavery to the slavery of prison.28 The connections made by Shakur between the prison and
neoliberalism, and between slavery and the prison, have been thoroughly explored by many scholars.29
Indeed, during the past two decades, a growing body of scholarship has affirmed and extended Shakurs
analysis of blackness, slavery, and the prison by exploring what Saidiya Hartman calls the afterlife of
slavery.
The 1AC biopolitical analysis is Eurocentric and disavows the racialized positionalities
that grant coherence to their analysis our mode of abolitionist study transforms the
human into a heuristic model that challenges biopoltiics better than Eurocentric
philosophy
Weheliye 2016 [Alexander, professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University where he
teaches black literature and culture, critical theory, social technologies, and popular culture. He is the author of
multiple books, Critical Ethnic Studies: Racializing Biopolitics and Bare Life,(p478-480)(Haq 7/3/2017)
Bare life and biopolitics discourse in particular is plagued by a strong anti-identity politics strain in the
Anglo-American academy in its positioning of bare life and biopolitics as uncontaminated by and prior
to reductive or essentialist political identities such as race and gender. Supposing that analyses of race and
racism are inherently essentialist whereas those concerning bare life and biopolitics are not because
they do not suitably resemble real-world identities ----allows bare life and biopolitics to appear
unelected by identarian locality and thus as proper objects of knowledge. is occurs because the ideas of white
European theorists are not regarded as affectable by a critical consciousness that would to open them up toward historical reality, toward society,
toward human needs and interests, to point up those concrete instances drawn from everyday reality that lie outside or just be-yond the interpretive
area.3 Traveling
theories, particularly those supposedly transparent and universal soldiers in Mans philosophical army, should be ex-
posed to and reconstructed not only according to the factors Edward Said mentions but also in concordance with a critical
consciousness that probes the conceptual constraints of these theories, especially as it pertains to the
analytics of race, and exhumes their historico-geographical aectability.4 Since bare life and biopolitics discourse largely
occludes race as a critical category of analysis (and not race as such), as do many other current articulations of critical theory,
it cannot provide the methodological instruments for diagnosing the tight bonds between humanity
and racializing assemblages in the modern era. the volatile rapport between race and the human is defined above all by two
constellations: first, there exists no portion of the modern human that is not subject to racialization, which determines the hierarchical ordering of the
Homo sapiens species into humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans; second, as a result humanity has held a very different status for the traditions
of the racially oppressed. Man will be abolished like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea only if we disarticulate the modern human (Man) from
different modalities of the human come to
its twin: racializing assemblages.5 My principal question, phrased plainly, is this: What
light if we do not take the liberal humanist figure of Man as the master subject but focus on how
humanity has been imagined and lived by those subjects excluded from this domain? Some scholars
associated with black and ethnic studies have begun to undertake the project of thinking humanity
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from perspectives beyond the liberal humanist subject, Man. 6 there humanity emerges as an object of knowledge, which
orders the means of conceptualizing how the human materializes in the worlds of those subjects habitually not thought to define or belong to this field.
the greatest contribution to critical thinking by black studies and critical ethnic studies more generally
is the transformation of the human into a heuristic model and not an ontological fait accompli, which
seems particularly important in our current historical moment. Through the human as a secular entity of scientific and
humanistic inquiry has functioned as a central topos of modernity since the Renaissance, questions of humanity have gained importance in the academy
and beyond in the wake of recent technological developments, especially the advent of biotechnology and the proliferation of informational media. These
discussions, which in critical discourses in the humanities and social sciences have relied heavily on the concepts of the cyborg and the posthuman,
largely do not take into account race as a constitutive category in thinking about the parameters of humanity. Reading thinkers such as Jacques Derrida,
Michel Foucault, or Louis Althusser today, one cannot help but notice the manifestolike character of their writings, historicizing the Western conception of
Man (Foucault) providing a more scientific, nonhumanist version of Marxism (Althusser), or attempting to think at the limits of humanism while being
aware that this just reinscribes the centrality of Man (Derrida). Going back further, the axial project of linguistic, anthropological, and literary structuralism
that emerged in the aftermath of World War II was to displace a holistic notion of the human through various structural features that constitute, frame,
and interpellate Man. We can also locate these tendencies in the German philosophical traditions that inspired a number of poststructuralist projects, or,
for that matter, in the works of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Ferdinand de Saussure. These thinkers, however, are hardly regarded as posthumanist
philosophers; instead they are classified as antihumanist.
We may all virtually be bare life, but we are not in fact all bare life. Agambens
purported stance against imperialism is the reason his theory must be subject to
critique --- the universalizing concept of homo sacer levels difference between distinct
manifestations of oppression. Their studious play cannot offer a solution to those who
cannot prefer not to engage with the police, but rather magenitize bullets.. Abolitionist
pedagogy prepares us for the rev while they play a game of checkers.
Schueller 9 [Malini Johar, Professor of English at the University of Florida, interventions Vol. 11(2), Decolonizing Global Theories Today: Hardt and Negri,
Agamben, Butler, p. 241-243]
Unlike Hardt and Negri's universalist rhetoric of empire, which accepts the premises of globalization theory, Agamben and Butler turn to the universal not as a philosophical
ally of globalization, but rather as a means of theorizing in what they see as a clearly imperial moment. But precisely because they are offered as
universalist analyses that critique imperialism, the status of the universal in these works demands
attention . I begin with Agamben because his concept of bare life as well as the related state of exception have been so widely used by philosophers, sociologists,
political theorists, and legal and cultural studies scholars that Agamben has become arguably one of the most influential of contemporary theorists. Slavoj Zizek (2002: 100),
for instance, sees Agamben as demonstrating the fact that in today's "'post-politics", the very democratic public space is a mask concealing the fact that, ultimately, we are all
Homo sacer.' Human rights theorists seek to explain terms of incarceration through the idea of people being reduced to bare life, an aspect that Judith Butler uses to
The attractiveness of Agamben's
understand the Bush administration's use of indefinite detention at Guantanamo (see Jenkins 2004; Butler 2004: 67).
conceptualization of bare life lies in its potential to explain the everyday workings of power in
contemporary liberal democracies, as well as in conditions of complete domination such as Guantanamo, and
to demonstrate the links between the two. And yet the foundations of bare life rest upon a
problematic Orientalism that has been unquestioningly accepted by the numerous scholars using
Agamben. Let us examine Agamben's theorization of bare life, which he develops most extensively in Homo Sacer, an attempt to understand the nature of sovereignty
in the West. Agamben derives his concept of bare life from the ancient Greek separation of life into zoe and bios. Zoe expresses the 'simple fact of living common to all living
beings (animals, men, or gods)' and bios, "the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group' (Agamben 1998: 1). In the classical world, zoe or sheer living was
excluded from the polis and relegated to the sphere of oikos or home (2). In contrast to Foucault, who distinguishes between biopolitical and sovereign power, Agamben
argues that what has always constituted sovereignty in the West is the biopolitical production of bare life, of subjects who can be abandoned by the state, whose exclusion
defines sovereign power. Agamben derives the concept of bare life from a figure from archaic Roman law: homo sacer or sacred man, who can be killed but not sacrificed, a
figure produced from the sovereign power to decide what constitutes bare life, life between zoe and bios. What constitutes modernity is that the exception, bare life or the life
of homo sacer, becomes the rule and starts to dwell in the political (9). And this bare life, as is seen in the idea of habeus corpus, becomes the basis for both control and the
idea of rights. Modern democracy therefore does not simply exclude bare life or the body of the homo sacer, but 'shatters it and disseminates it into every individual body'
(124). Bare life thus becomes the hidden foundation for the political order. The most extreme example of this new biopolitical sovereignty is the Jew under Nazism who, as
bare life, can be killed but not sacrificed (114). In camp, 'the most absolute biopolitical space', power and bare life confront each other without mediation and biopolitics
becomes politics (171). Agamben argues that the camp is the nomos or the hidden model of the modern, dictating not only visible cases such as refugees but extending
through society as a whole, making us all virtually homines sacri (175). Elaborating further on the idea of bare life in State of Exception, Agamben suggests how Bush's policy
of indefinite detention produces the idea of bare life in its maximum state of indeterminacy, which reaches its end point in Guantanamo (Agamben 2005: 3-4).
Agamben's articulation of the idea of bare life is powerful because it takes us from the tactics of power to their workings
in specific situations and moves us, as he says, from the Foucauldian prison of penal law to the camp of absolute
exception, from punishment to indefinite detention. And Agamben's work is particularly attractive in its use of the ideas of bare life and sovereign exception to analyse
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contemporary manifestations of exceptions such as refugees or foreigners in Europe. However, what is most interesting in Agamben's
theorizations is the sheer absence of colonialism to considerations of western sovereignty. In the
spirit of Agamben's critique of Foucault, then, we can say that we need to move not only from prison to
camp but also from prison and camp to colony. Such a move would not only illuminate the role of the
exception of colonial difference to the construction of modern biopolitical power, but also help
understand the construction of the western biopolitical subject. As postcolonial scholars have been
pointing out for some time now, the very construction of the subject in the West cannot be separated
from the construction of the Other in the colonies. Indeed, as Gauri Viswanathan persuasively argued in Masks of Conquest, the very
instruments of culture used to create obedient and exemplary British subjects in public schools were first tried out in the colonies. Numerous studies of gender and domesticity
have also established the intimate connections between metropolitan and colonial identities (e.g. Levine 2004; Stoler 2002). Can we, therefore, think of bare life as formulated
through the writ of habeus corpus in late seventeenth-century Europe without thinking of how the body in the West was itself being constructed through complex systems of
identification and disidentification from the bodies of the natives in North America? More importantly, can we think about the sovereign right to determine bare life between zoe
and bios without thinking about the systems of racial/human classification propounded by scientists such as Linnaeus, Buffon, and Blumenbach and which helped consolidate
colonialism? Indeed, one only has to remember the constant construction of natives as children in need of rescue to realize the centrality of colonial exclusion to the
construction of the western polis. My
point is obviously not to fault Agamben for simply not having colonization as
his subject matter, but rather for constructing, like Foucault, a West apart from the rest. Furthermore, if camp
is an extreme manifestation of the production of bare life, a place where bare life confronts power
without mediation, how does that explain whose bare life comes to be marked for a place such as the
camp? Why was it particularly the Jew who was marked as bare life in Nazi camps and why are Middle Easterners being marked as bare life today? We might all
be 'virutally' homines sacri, but only some of us are marked to be in the permanent state of
exception, a localization without order such as the camp (Agamben 1998: 175). The racial fracture at the core of
modernity and colonialism, in other words, needs to be addressed if theory put at the service of
addressing contemporary totalitarianism does not itself become imperial and universalizing.
Studious play becomes a form of innocence projection the child like politics of the
AFF really only work for those innocent enough to practice them this is a form of
covert white supremacy that reproduces the compliant citizen and results in a refusal
to hear the voices of those black and brown children who are too guilty approximate
the innocent passivity offerd by the AFF. Note the language of the Posorov evidence:
rather than reform apparatuses we should leave them to their self-destruction
erases the accumulation of capture for black and queer existence that is the target of
zero tolerance policing. Their passivity quickly becomes a moralism regarding the
right to violence that reproduces the sovereign decision between white students and
black students consigned to death and denied the right to self-defense.
Wang 12 (Jackie, a writer, poet, musician, and academic whose writing has been published by Lies Journal,
Semiotext(e), HTML Giant, BOMBlog, along with numerous zines, such as those by the Moonroot collective,
Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Safety)
AGAINST INNOCENCE The insistence on innocence results in a refusal to hear those labeled guilty or
defined by the State as criminals. When we rely on appeals to innocence, we foreclose a form of
resistance that is outside the limits of law, and instead ally ourselves with the State. This ignores that
the enemies in the War on Drugs and the War on Terror are racially defined, that gender and class
delimit who is worthy of legal recognition. When the Occupy movement was in full swing in the US, I often
read countless articles and encountered participants who were eager to police the politics and tactics of those
who did not fit into a non-violent model of resistance. The tendency was to construct a politics from the
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position of the disenfranchised white middle-class and to remove, deny, and differentiate the Occupy
movement from the delinquent or radical elements by condemning property destruction,
confrontations with cops, and in cases like Baltimore anti-capitalist and anarchist analyses. When
Amy Goodman asked Maria Lewis from Occupy Oakland about the violent protestors after the over 400
arrests made following an attempt to occupy the vacant Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center in Oakland, I was
pleased that Maria affirmed rather than excised peoples anger: AMY GOODMAN: Maria Lewis, what about
some of the reports that said that the protesters were violent? MARIA LEWIS: Absolutely. There was a lot of
anger this weekend, and I think that the anger that the protesters showed in the streets this weekend and the
fighting back that did take place was reflective of a larger anger in Oakland that is boiling over at the betrayal of
the system. I think that people, day by day, are realizing, as the economy gets worse and worse, as
unemployment gets worse and worse, as homelessness gets worse and worse, that the economic system, that
capitalism in Oakland, is failing us. And people are really angry about that, and theyre beginning to fight back.
And I think that thats a really inspiring thing. While the comment still frames the issue in terms of capitalist
crisis, the response skillfully rearticulates the terms of the discussion by a) affirming the actions immediately, b)
refusing to purify the movement by integrating rather than excluding the violent elements, c) legitimizing the
anger and desires of the protestors, d) shifting the attention to the structural nature of the problem rather than
getting hung up on making moral judgments about individual actors. In other words, by rejecting a politics
of innocence that reproduces the good, compliant citizen. Stokely Carmichael put it well when he
said, The way the oppressor tries to stop the oppressed from using violence as a means to attain
liberation is to raise ethical or moral questions about violence. I want to state emphatically here that
violence in any society is neither moral nor is it ethical. It is neither right, nor is it wrong. It is just
simply a question of who has the power to legalize violence.42 The practice of isolating morally
agreeable cases in order to highlight racist violence requires passively suffered Black death and
panders to a framework that strengthens and conceals current paradigms of racism. While it may be
factually true to state that Trayvon Martin was unarmed, we should not state this with a righteous
sense of satisfaction. What if Trayvon Martin were armed? Maybe then he could have defended himself
by fighting back. But if the situation had resulted in the death of George Zimmerman rather than of Trayvon
Martin, I doubt the public would have been as outraged and galvanized into action to the same extent. It is
ridiculous to say that there will be justice for Trayvon when he is already dead no amount of prison time for
Zimmerman can compensate. When we build politics around standards of legitimate victimhood that
requires passive sacrifice, we will build a politics that requires a dead Black boy to make its point. Its
not surprising that the nation or even the Black leadership have failed to rally behind CeCe McDonald,
a Black trans woman who was recently convicted of second degree manslaughter after a group of racist,
transphobic white people attacked her and her friends, cutting CeCes cheek with a glass bottle and provoking
an altercation that led to the death of a white man who had a swastika tattoo. Trans women of color who are
involved in confrontations that result in the death of their attackers are criminalized for their survival. When
Akira Jackson, a Black trans woman, stabbed and killed her boyfriend after he beat her with a baseball bat,
she was given a four-year sentence for manslaughter. Cases that involve an innocent (passive),
victimized Black person also provide an opportunity for the liberal white conscience to purify and
morally ennoble itself by taking a position against racism. We need to challenge the status of certain
raced and gendered subjects as instruments of emotional relief for white civil society, or as bodies that
can be displaced for the sake of providing analogies to amplify white suffering (slavery being the
favored analogy). Although we must emphasize that Troy Davis did not kill police officer Mark MacPhail,
maybe we also should question why killing a cop is considered morally deplorable when the cops, in the last
few months alone, have murdered 29 Black people. Talking about these murders will not undo them. Having
the right line cannot alter reality if we do not put our bodies where our mouths are. As Spivak says, it cant
become our goal to keep watching our language.43 Rejecting the politics of innocence is not about
assuming a certain theoretical posture or adopting a certain perspective it is a lived position.
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Thus, our alternative is abolition-study. The education-based regime of study is
configured by white supremacist colonialism. Abolition-study is the precondition for
studious play.
Meyerhoff, 13 Eli, Ph.D., Political Science, University of Minnesota (Political Theory for an Alter-
University Movement: Decolonial, Abolitionist Study within, against, and beyond the Education Regime,
DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF
MINNESOTA, September 2013)
Returning to the debate from the early 19th century on the question of what is to be done with freed
blacks, across the differences of all the participants in this debate the egalitarian elitists,
accommodating separatists, and the white, paternal liberals and conservativesthey shared a
commonality of promulgating narratives that reduced the possibilities for regimes of study to the
education-based one. Conversely, they neglected to consider alternative regimes of studydespite the
fact that the free blacks who were the objects of their debate were themselves already enacting such
regimes, such as in escaped slaves maroon communities. To break out of the current continuation of
such debates that limit themselves to such education-focused simplifying narratives, we need to take a
decolonial perspective on the epistemologies that are promoted or suppressed through education
institutions. Thus, as a way to redress the problems with the retention of modernist/colonialist assumptions in Olsons abolition-democracy, I complement it with an
approach of decoloniality, and what Mignolo calls decolonizing democracy, inspired by the autonomous indigenous self-governance in the Zapatista territories of Chiapas
(Mignolo 2011, 228). Further,
as a complement to Olsons approach that redresses his lack of attention to the
political constitution of knowledge, I advocate for both abolition-study and decolonial-study, that is,
critical investigation of the ways that white supremacy and coloniality intertwine in the education-
based regime of study and promotion of abolitionist/decolonial movement-embedded study. This view
can allow for seeing how abolitionist-study and decolonial-study can take place both within and
outside education institutions, while simultaneously confronting the white supremacist, colonial
configuration of study that is hegemonic within them. An examination of the often neglected history of
maroon communities offers an alternative regime of study: a model of intersecting abolition,
decolonial, and exodus types of study. Although Olson offers a narrative of abolitionist-democracy that varies from liberal democracy to certain
extents, by focusing on the history of formal abolitionism, thus overshadowing marronage, he limits the possible extent of his critique of the assumptions of liberal democracy
and, thereby, reproduces some of the aspects of that form of democracyparticularly some of its modernist assumptionsin his own alternative form of democracy, the
abolition-democracy. Thus,
as a way to extend his critique of liberal democracy in more radical directions, I
examine the hidden history of marronage with an eye toward theorizing its alternative, abolitionist,
decolonial forms of democracy, and especially highlighting the ways in which these involve forms of
study. The practices of maroon communities present the basis for articulating radically different
conceptions of democracy, equality, and freedom, ones that are not linked with states, capitalism,
racial divisions, or the categories of modernity (e.g., the nature/society, time/space, and primitive/modern dichotomies). Thus, I
characterize maroons as a decolonial option presenting alternative communal futures (Mignolo 2011). To
understand these maroon communities and marronage without falling back on modernist assumptions, in the following I theorize their contributions to abolitionist, decolonial,
The latter concepts provide a
exodus projects using the concepts of the common, commons, and undercommons, which are elaborated in Chapter 2.
way to highlight the importance of regimes of study in marronage that are alternative to that of the
education-based regime, and that are central for fugitive slaves to navigate the undercommons
relations within and against and with and forbetween their maroon commons and the white,
colonial, capitalist commons. This narrative approach provides an antidote to the normal use of
modernist assumptions, such as in the ideal of public education, that delegitimizes and suppresses
such alternatives.
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Our alternative attunes itself to contours of the prison regime that operate in the here
and nowthe intimate affects, desires and ideologies central to state-sanctioned
violence. Without the alt, the impact is slow quiet, death for those targeted by the
carceral regime.
For

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Can

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racial state, the prison, heteropatriarchy, and new formations of global capitalism . For them, there
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1NC: Vs Deschooling TRI
imprisonment apparatus, rather than secondary or unintended consequences of it.3 Third, the prison regime encompasses the
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academic failure. What, then, is the condition of teaching in the context of a prison regime that is so relentless in its innovation and
intrusiveness? We might depart from another critical premise: that the prison (jail, detention center, etc.)
cannot be conceptualized as a place that is wholly separate or alienated from the normalized
intercourses of civil society or the free world. Speaking more precisely to the concerns raised by this issue of Radical Teacher,
the massive carceral-cultural form of the prison has naturalized a systemic disorientation of the
teaching act, so that teaching is no longer separable from the work of policing, juridical discipline,
and state-crafted punishment. Thus, I do not think the crucial question in our historical moment is
whether or not our teaching ultimately supports or adequately challenges the material arrangements
and cultural significations of the prison regimejust as I believe the central question under the rule of
apartheid is not whether a curriculum condones or opposes the spatial arrangements of white
supremacy and intensified racist state violence. Rather, the primary question is whether and how the
act of teaching can effectively and radically displace the normalized misery, everyday suffering, and
mundane state violence that are reproduced and/or passively condoned by both hegemonic and
critical/counterhegemonic pedagogies. I am arguing that our historical conditions urgently dictate that
a strategic distinction must be drawn between liberal, social justice, critical, and even radical
pedagogies that are capable of even remotely justifying, defending, or tolerating a proto-genocidal
prison regime that is without precedent or peer, on the one hand, and those attempts at abolitionist
pedagogy thatin an urgent embracing of the historical necessity of innovation, improvisation, and
radical rearticulation are attempting to generate new epistemic and intellectual approaches to
meaning, knowledge, learning, and practice for the sake of life, liberation, and new social possibilities. I
am concerned with addressing a pedagogical tendency that artificially separates the teacher-student
relation and the school from the prison. Such strategic distinctions are useful for delineating the
ways that multiple pedagogical epistemes (including otherwise critical and radical ones) operate from
the a priori notion that prisons and policing serve necessary, peace-and-safety making, and good
social functions that are somehow separable or recuperable from their historical primacy to
socioeconomic/class repression, American apartheid, racial slavery, indigenous land displacement
and cultural genocide, and white supremacist colonization.9 In other words, what might happen to the disoriented teaching
act if it sere re-oriented against the assumptive necessity, integrity, and taken-for-grantedness of prisons, policing, and the normalized state violence
they reproduce? Schooling Regime The
structural symbiosis between schools and the racist policing/prison state
is evident in the administrative, public policy, and pedagogical innovations of the War on Drugs, Zero
Tolerance, No Child Left Behind, and the school-based militarizations of the school to prison (and
military) pipeline.10 Angela Y. Davis has suggested that when children attend schools that place a
greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are
attending prep schools for prison .11 These punitive iterations of an increasingly carceral schooling
industrial complex , however, represent a symptomatic reflection of how the racist stateand white
supremacist social formation generallyare producing new categories of social identities (and
redefining older ones) that can only be taught within a direct relationship to the regulatory
mechanisms and imminent (state) violence of the prison industrial complex and the U.S. prison regime.
(Even while some are relatively privileged by the institutional logics of relative de-criminalization, their bodily mobility and academic progression are
There are, at first, categories of social
contingent on the states capacity to separate and protect them from the criminalized.)
subjects that are apprehended and naturalized by the school-as-stategifted and talented, 82
Session II
undocumented, gang affiliated, exceptional, at-risk, averagewho are then, by ontological necessity,
hierarchically separated through the protocols of pseudo-standardized intelligence quotient,
socioeconomic class, race, gender, citizenship, sexuality, neighborhood geography, etc. This
seemingly compulsory, school-sited reproduction of the deadly circuits of privilege and alienation is
anything but new, and has always been central to the routines of the U.S. schooling regime,
particularly in its colonialist and post-emancipationist articulations.12 The idea of the U.S. prison apparatus as a
regime, in this context, brings attention to how prisons are not places outside and apart from our everyday lives, but instead shape and deform our
identities, communities, and modes of social interaction. I have written elsewhere that the prison regime is an apparatus of power/violence that cannot
be reduced to a minor institution of the state, but has in fact become an apparatus that possesses and constitutes the state, often as if autonomous of
its authority.13 Here, I am interested in how this regime overlaps with and mutually nourishes the multiple schooling regimes that make up the U.S.
educational system. The U.S. prison, in other words, has become a model and prototype for power relations more generally, in which 1) institutional
authority is intertwined with the policing and surveillance capacities (legitimated violence) of the state, 2) the broadly cultural and peculiarly juridical
racial/gender criminalization of particular social subjects becomes a primary framework for organizing institutional access, and 3) the practice of
To trace the movements of the
systemic bodily immobilization (incarceration) permeates the normal routines of the free world.
prisons modeling of power relations to the site of the school is to understand that
forgivable. It
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both
effective?
The absence of a theorization of anti-blackness in Affirmative ensures the reproduction

of anti-blackness in their politics they cannot respond to the condition by which
whites are deputized in the policing paradigm and black people magenetize bullets
their politics disavows the antiblackness at the heart of even leftist organizing and
crowds out alternative positions that start with the antiblack paradigm of police
Wilderson III 03 (Frank B., Professor of Drama and African American Studies at the University of California at
Irvine, The Prison Slave as Hegemonys (Silent) Scandal, 2/30/2003)//HL
It makes no difference that in the United States the casbah and the European zone are laid one on top of the other. What is being asserted here is an
isomorphic schematic relationthe schematic interchangeabilitybetween Fanons settler society and Martinots and Sextons policing paradigm. For
Fanon, it
is the policeman and soldier (not the discursive, or hegemonic, agents) of colonialism that make one town white
and the other black. For Martinot and Sexton, this Manichean delirium manifests itself by way of the U.S. paradigm of policing
that (re)produces, repetitively, the insideoutside, the civil societyblack world, by virtue of the
difference between those bodies that do not magnetize bullets and those that do. Police impunity
serves to distinguish between the racial itself and the elsewhere that mandates it . . . the distinction
between those whose human being is put permanently in question and those for whom it goes without
saying.7 In such a paradigm, white people are, ipso facto, deputized in the face of black people, whether they
know it (consciously) or not. Whiteness, thenand, by extension, civil society cannot be solely represented as some monumentalized
coherence of phallic signifiers but must first be understood as a social formation of contemporaries who do not magnetize bullets. This is the essence of
their construction through an asignifying absence; their signifying presence is manifested by the fact that they are, if only by default, deputized against
those who do magnetize bullets. In short, white people are not simply protected by the police. They arein their
very corporealitythe police. is ipso facto deputization of white people in the face of black people accounts for Fanons materiality and
political contestation
Martinots and Sextons Manichean delirium in America. What remains to be addressed, however, is the way in which the
between civil societys junior partners (i.e., workers, white women, and immigrants), on the one hand,
and white-supremacist institutionality, on the other hand, is produced by, and reproductive of, a
supplemental antiblackness. Put another way: How is the production and accumulation of junior partners social capital dependent on an
antiblack rhetorical structure and a decomposed black body? Any serious musing on the question of antagonistic identity
formationa formation, the mass mobilization of which can precipitate a crisis in the institutions and
assumptive logic that undergird the United States of Americamust come to grips with the
contradictions between the political demands of radical social movements, such as the large prison
abolition movement, which seeks to abolish the prison-industrial complex, and the ideological
structure that underwrites its political desire. I contend that the positionality of black subjectivity is at the heart of those
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contradictions and that this unspoken desire is bound up with the political limitations of several naturalized and uncritically accepted categories that have
their genesis mainly in the works of Antonio Gramsci namely, work or labor, the wage, exploitation, hegemony, and civil society. I wish to theorize the
symptoms of rage and resignation I hear in the words of George Jackson when he boils reform down to a single word, fascism, or in Assatas brief
the failure of radical social
declaration, I hated it, as well as in the Manichean delirium of Fanon, Martinot, and Sexton. Today,
movements to embrace symptoms of all three gestures is tantamount to the reproduction of an
antiblack politics that nonetheless represents itself as being in the service of the emancipation of the
black prison slave. By examining the strategy and structure of the black subjects absence in, and
incommensurability with, the key categories of Gramscian theory, we come face to face with three unsettling
consequences: 1. The black American subject imposes a radical incoherence on the assumptive logic
of Gramscian discourse and on todays coalition politics. In other words, she or he implies a scandal.
2. The black subject reveals the inability of social movements grounded in Gramscian discourse to
think of white supremacy ( rather than capitalism ) as the base and thereby calls into question their
claim to elaborate a comprehensive and decisive antagonism. Stated another way, Gramscian discourse and coalition
politics are indeed able to imagine the subject that transforms itself into a mass of antagonistic identity formationsformations that can precipitate a
crisis in wage slavery, exploitation, and hegemonybut they are asleep at the wheel when asked to provide enabling antagonisms toward
unwaged slavery, despotism, and terror. 3. We begin to see how Marxism suffers from a kind of
conceptual anxiety. There is a desire for socialism on the other side of crisis, a society that does away not with the category of worker but with
the imposition that workers suffer under the approach of variable capital. In other words, the mark of its conceptual anxiety is in its
desire to democratize work and thus help to keep in place and ensure the coherence of Reformation
and Enlightenment foundational values of productivity and progress. This scenario crowds out other
postrevolutionary possibilitiesthat is, idleness.
The impact is a form of epistemic innocence that requires the cleansing of black
contamination in the name of free learning
WHITE SPACE [C]rime porn often presents a view of prisons and urban ghettoes as alternate
universes where the social order is drastically different, and the links between social structures and
the production of these environments is conveniently ignored. In particular, although they are public
institutions, prisons are removed from everyday US experience.12 The spatial politics of safety organizes
the urban landscape. Bodies that arouse feelings of fear, disgust, rage, guilt, or even discomfort must be made
disposable and targeted for removal in order to secure a sense of safety for whites. In other words, the space
that white people occupy must be cleansed. The visibility of poor Black bodies (as well as certain non-
Black POC, trans people, homeless people, differently-abled people, and so forth) induces anxiety, so
these bodies must be contained, controlled, and removed. Prisons and urban ghettoes prevent Black
and brown bodies from contaminating white space. Historically, appeals to the safety of women have
sanctioned the expansion of the police and prison regimes while conjuring the racist image of the Black male
rapist. With the rise of the Womens Liberation Movement in the 1970s came an increase in public awareness
about sexual violence. Self-defense manuals and classes, as well as Take Back the Night marches and rallies,
rapidly spread across the country. The 1970s and 1980s saw a surge in public campaigns targeted at women
in urban areas warning of the dangers of appearing in public spaces alone. The New York City rape squad
declared that [s]ingle women should avoid being alone in any part of the city, at any time.13 In The Rational
Womans Guide to Self-Defense (1975), women were told, a little paranoia is really good for every woman.14
At the same time that the State was asserting itself as the protector of (white) women, the US saw the
massive expansion of prisons and the criminalization of Blackness. It could be argued that the State
and the media opportunistically seized on the energy of the feminist movement and appropriated
feminist rhetoric to establish the racialized Penal State while simultaneously controlling the movement
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of women (by promoting the idea that public space was inherently threatening to women). People of this
perspective might hold that the media frenzy about the safety of women was a backlash to the gains made by
the feminist movement that sought to discipline women and promote the idea that, as Georgina Hickey wrote,
individual women were ultimately responsible for what happened to them in public space.15 However, in In
an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement Against Sexual Violence, Kristin
Bumiller argues that the feminist movement was actually a partner in the unforeseen growth of a criminalized
society: by insisting on aggressive sex crime prosecution and activism, feminists assisted in the creation of a
tough-on-crime model of policing and punishment.16 Regardless of what perspective we agree with, the
alignment of racialized incarceration and the proliferation of campaigns warning women about the dangers of
the lurking rapist was not a coincidence. If the safety of women was a genuine concern, the campaigns would
not have been focused on anonymous rapes in public spaces, since statistically it is more common for a
woman to be raped by someone she knows. Instead, womens safety provided a convenient pretext for
the escalation of the Penal State, which was needed to regulate and dispose of certain surplus
populations (mostly poor Blacks) before they became a threat to the US social order. For Wacquant,
this new regime of racialized social control became necessary after the crisis of the urban ghetto
(provoked by the massive loss of jobs and resources attending deindustrialization) and the looming
threat of Black radical movements.17 The torrent of uprisings that took place in Black ghettoes between
1963-1968, particularly following the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968, were followed by a wave of prison
upheavals (including Attica, Solidad, San Quentin, and facilities across Michigan, Tennessee, Oklahoma,
Illinois, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania). Of course, these upheavals were easier to contain and shield from
public view because they were cloaked and muffled by the walls of the penitentiary. The engineering and
management of urban space also demarcates the limits of our political imagination by determining which
narratives and experiences are even thinkable. The media construction of urban ghettoes and prisons as
alternate universes marks them as zones of unintelligibility, faraway places that are removed from
the everyday white experience. Native American reservations are another example of a void zone
that white people can only access through the fantasy of media representations. What happens in these
zones of abjection and vulnerability does not typically register in the white imaginary. In the instance that an
injustice does register, it will have to be translated into more comprehensible terms. When I think of the
public responses to Oscar Grant and Trayvon Martin, it seems significant that these murders took
place in spaces that the white imaginary has access to, which allows white people to narrativize the
incidents in terms that are familiar to them. Trayvon was gunned down while visiting family in a gated
neighborhood; Oscar was murdered by a police officer in an Oakland commuter rail station. These spaces are
not alternate universes or void-zones that lie outside white experience and comprehension. To what extent is
the attention these cases have received attributable to the encroachment of violence on spaces that white
people occupy? What about cases of racialized violence that occur outside white comfort zones? When
describing the spatialization of settler colonies, Frantz Fanon writes about a zone of non-being, an
extraordinary sterile and arid region, where Black is not a man.18 In the regions where Black is not man,
there is no story to be told. Or rather, there are no subjects seen as worthy of having a story of their
own. TRANSLATION When an instance of racist violence takes place on white turf, as in the cases of
Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant, there is still the problem of translation. I contend that the politics of
innocence renders such violence comprehensible only if one is capable of seeing themselves in that
position. This framework often requires that a white narrative (posed as the neutral, universal
perspective) be grafted onto the incidents that conflict with this narrative. I was baffled when a call for a
protest march for Trayvon Martin made on the Occupy Baltimore website said, The case of Trayvon Martin
is symbolic of the war on youth in general and the devaluing of young people everywhere. I doubt George
Zimmerman was thinking, I gotta shoot that boy because hes young! No mention of race or anti-Blackness
could be found in the statement; race had been translated to youth, a condition that white people can
imaginatively access. At the march, speakers declared that the case of Trayvon Martin is not a race issue
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its a 99% issue! As Saidiya Hartman has asserted in a conversation with Frank Wilderson, the other must
be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced.19 In late 2011, riots exploded across
London and the UK after Mark Duggan, a Black man, was murdered by the police. Many leftist and liberals
were unable to grapple with the unruly expression of rage among largely poor and unemployed people of color,
and refused to support the passionate outburst they saw as disorderly and delinquent. Even leftists fell into
the trap of framing the State and property owners (including small business owners) as victims while
criticizing rioters for being politically incoherent and opportunistic. Slavoj iek, for instance, responded
by dismissing the riots as a meaningless outburst in an article cynically titled Shoplifters of the World Unite.
Well-meaning leftists who felt obligated to affirm the riots often did so by imposing a narrative of political
consciousness and coherence onto the amorphous eruption, sometimes recasting the participants as the
proletariat (an unemployed person is just a worker without a job, I was once told) or dissatisfied consumers
whose acts of theft and looting shed light on capitalist ideology.20 These leftists were quick to purge and re-
articulate the anti-social and delinquent elements of the riots rather than integrate them into their analysis,
insisting on figuring the rioter-subject as a sovereign deliberate consciousness, to borrow a phrase from
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.21 Following the 1992 LA riots,22 leftist commentators often opted to define the
event as a rebellion rather than a riot as a way to highlight the political nature of peoples actions. This attempt
to reframe the public discourse is borne of good intentions (the desire to combat the conservative
medias portrayal of the riots as pure criminality), but it also reflects the an impulse to contain,
consolidate, appropriate, and accommodate events that do not fit political models grounded in white,
Euro-American traditions. When the mainstream media portrays social disruptions as apolitical,
criminal, and devoid of meaning, leftists often respond by describing them as politically reasoned.
Here, the confluence of political and anti-social tendencies in a riot/rebellion are neither recognized nor
embraced. Certainly some who participated in the London riots were armed with sharp analyses of structural
violence and explicitly political messages the rioters were obviously not politically or demographically
homogenous. However, sympathetic radicals tend to privilege the voices of those who are educated and
politically astute, rather than listening to those who know viscerally that they are fucked and act without first
seeking moral approval. Some leftists and radicals were reluctant to affirm the purely disruptive perspectives,
like those expressed by a woman from Hackney, London who said, Were not all gathering together for a
cause, were running down Foot Locker.23 Or the excitement of two girls stopped by the BBC while drinking
looted wine. When asked what they were doing, they spoke of the giddy madness of it all, the good fun they
were having, and said that they were showing the police and the rich that we can do what we want.24
Translating riots into morally palatable terms is another manifestation of the appeal to innocence rioters,
looters, criminals, thieves, and disruptors are not proper victims and hence, not legitimate political actors.
Morally ennobled victimization has become the necessary precondition for determining which
grievances we are willing to acknowledge and authorize.
The affirmatives investment in liberal democracy works to negate alternative futures

and become the states first line of defense. Our position begins with a refusal of
liberalism.
London 16 - Bobby, writer and journalist (FUCK TRUMP, BUT FUCK YOU TOO: NO UNITY WITH
LIBERALS, FROM THE POLITICAL ARTISTRY OF BOBBY LONDON,
https://thisisbobbylondon.com/2016/11/17/fuck-trump/)//HEX
A cop begins swinging his baton at the protesters in front of me. A riot line begins to form and push
against the crowd as they chanted this is a peaceful movement. I began chanting fuck the police
cause thats what you do when cops start beingwell cops. Shhhh, a man I did not know said to me
while he put his hand in front my lips almost close enough to touch them. I told him to get his hand out of my face,
and was met with several other men pushing their bodies up against me, forming hearts with their hands while yelling at me this is a peaceful
movement. As that is happening, a white woman hits me in the head, knocking my hat off onto the
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ground. Where were my safety pin allies when I needed you then? The cop who was swinging his
baton watched as the crowd turned their anger on me instead, he smiled. Probably laughing on the
inside while the people he so badly wanted to hit made sure no one said, fuck the police. Funny enough,
earlier the predominantly white crowd was very eager to chant black lives, they matter here, just like they saw before on their computer screens when
black people took to the streets to protest the violence wielded by the police. What was made clear that night was that blue lives mattered more than
this black one. This is the anti-Trump movement, at least in Los Angeles. A bunch of white liberals with a fringe radical element who they continuously
silenced, policed, threatened, and attacked for pushing past the not my president narrative. While it is great that people are taking the streets, and that
protests have remained consistent since the election, it will be all in vain unless systemic issues are brought up and addressed within the movement. As
it stands, for radicals, specifically non-white anti-authoritarians, these actions hold the same element of danger as attending a Trump rally. For
a
white liberal may not shoot you, theyll just snitch on you to the cops who will. Theyll also wear a
safety pin to show how much of an ally they are, while shaking the hands of police officers at an
action, cause LAPD are good cops, better than those other ones. So while some may try to argue that there is room
for everyone in this movement, that we have more to gain from the masses than to be alone in our ideology. It often feels like people dont
understand the gravity of what is happening in this country and around the world. The danger and high
stakes we face for being a part of those marginalized groups liberals pretend to represent. They cant
understand what the reality is for undocumented people who are fearful of losing their DACA status
and be deported, for those with different abilities who depend on Obamacare and Medicaid, for trans
women who fear their name will be added to this years deadliest record of violent killings, for queer
people attacked and then later placed in an ICE detention center for being a queer immigrant in Orange
County, for Muslim women who are afraid to wear their hijab because people are setting them on fire,
and for black freshmen in college being put on a lynch lists, because now white people have gotten
their country back. Lets understand that all of this racism, hate, and violence was already true and
occurring in our lives before Trump. That these same oppressed groups have been ignored by those
same white liberals that are now consumed and overwhelmed with a need to take action. After they
have spent years ignoring us when we have screamed and stated openly that America is a racist,
white supremacist, fascist country, created through the genocide and physical erasure of indigenous
people, and built on the backs of Africans that were kidnapped and brought over here and forced into
slavery. Lets understand all of this, all that has happened and continues to happen, and respect the resistance that has existed and will continue to
exist even after Liberals leave because they become satisfied and content with Trump because gay marriage is protected and the Trans-Pacific
So while it might appear that the masses have awoken, what use are those masses
Partnership was killed.
when they are mostly white liberals filled with denial of their own complacency and contribution
towards maintaining the hierarchy of violence? The fight is against the state and all those who are in
place to protect it, liberalism in effect has become the states first line of defense. Their role is to funnel
dissent into the electoral process for the Democratic party, to keep us dependent on them through
funding, and to enforce that our tactics remain weak and passive. Movements do not move forward on
their own. They take a lot of labor, both emotional and physical. We stand on a foundation of
resistance built by the blood and hands of our ancestors, as well as those in recent years. People have
fought hard against co-optation and peace policing to get to the place we are now, where taking the
streets is a given and not a question, to the point where cops now preemptively block every freeway
entrance out of fear we will out maneuver them again. With each wave, the same debates resurface, no police are not your
friends, yes its okay to take the streets, no property destruction isnt violence this results in keeping us stagnant. What is the point of pushing the
line if we are only to end up back at the start due to the dominance of liberals in our movement? We might all hate Trump, we might all fear what his
presidency will bring, but we dont all have the same consequences of a Trump presidency, or any other president for that matter. There is a lot of talk
This must end, we
about unity right now, there is this desire by those who seek liberation and revolution to align themselves with liberals.
must stop chasing the masses, we must realize that we have to be the people we have been waiting for.
Debate as an example of deschooled society proves our point: debate is an epistemic
plantation that bars black enunciations of liberation through an investment in universal
Human capacity and civic spaces
Wilderson 14 (Frank B. Wilderson III, UC Irvine Round Robin Discussion, 2014)
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I want you to know that it is not my intention to single out the world of college debate as a peculiarly anti-black constellation or
institution of arrangements.Those who know my work know that I think the world is one big plantation. But the web of
institutional relations which we call college debate requires special attention for the simple fact that it represents
itself to itself as a bastion of consent. An institutional world which is as far removed from the
daily floggings and sexual violations and the injunction against Black intellectual interventions as it can be.
The past architects and present day guardians of college debate would have us belief that the world of
debate and the world in general can be reformed and indeed transformed if thoughtful, well meaning, and
liberal minded people engaged in reasoned, rational and above all, civil dialogue. The film 12 Years a Slave is not
as naive as that when Solomon Northup the protagonist in 12 Years A Slave returns home from after being freed from slavery
we learn that he was not able to sue the men who stole him from his "free" life in Saratoga New York and sent him to a
Louisiana plantation. Since he was officially freed before he was abducted why we might ask he was not able to sue the white
men who abducted him. The answer is simple because a black person even a free black person was not allowed to testify
against a white person in a courtroom. For many of us this has a familiar ring for those who would say that America has come a
long way since 1865, but most black people know that when a crime is being investigated the word of a white person always
takes precedence over the word of a black person. Today there is no law on the books that says a black person cannot testify
against a white person but we might be in a worse situation than we were in 1854 simply for the fact that no
black voice has any truth value when it contradicts a non black voice. The truth value I am talking about is something
more comprehensive than the narrow requirements on judging who did or did not win the debate. What 12 Years A Slave helps
us understand is that black enunciations cannot be recognized and incorporated into the global fabric of
Human enunciation. The Narrative Arc of a Slave is not an arc at all but a flat line or what Hortense Spillers calls historical
stillness. A flat line that moves (if moves is the right word) from disequilibrium to a moment of narrative called faux equilibrium to
disequilibrium restored and/or re-articulated. In 12 Years A Slave one might think of the moment when Brad Pitt's character
agrees to contact Solomon's white friends in the North so that they can come South with free Negro papers as the moment of
faux equilibrium. The formal structure of 12 Years A Slave's narrative arc, which is no arc at all but rather a wallowing within an
A temporal state of disequilibrium alerts us to the fact that this is a film about slavery shot through the lens of social
death. There is no pretense of a sentimental investment in the emancipatory promise in democracy and
constitutional redress. There is no pretense of sentimental investment in liberal Humanist notions of the
universal integrity of the Human or the capacity of white people to look into their hearts and change. This
kind of change, this transformative promise, this peculiarly humanist kind of narrative belongs to white men and
their junior partners in civil society meaning non-black immigrants, white and non-black people who are Queer,
and non-black women. These fully invested and not so fully vested citizens live through narrative arcs of
transformation and when need be their collective unconscious can call upon Blacks as props they can
harness their anti-black violence to turn blackbodies or black flesh into
the necessary implements to help bring about their psychic and social transformation. We might agree that an
analogy between the plantation of the 19th century and the web of institutional relations that constituted the world of debate
seems a bit dodgy if we were to base our comparison points of articulation in political economy. In other words it is not cotton
which is being picked or sugar cane that is being chopped in these hermetic conference rooms where people speak so fast that
you wonder if you should call paramedics before they die of hyperventilation. The round robin losers don't get taken out back
and given out a hundred lashes for their failures. Thepolitical economy of the slave estate looks a lot different from
the political economy of debate, but the structural violence that is fortified and extended, the political and
the libidinal economy of the plantation can be apprehended in the libidinal economy of debate. In
debate, as on the plantation fully vested citizens and not so fully vested citizens live through narrative arcs
and transformations. I was struck by the long enduring moments of silence in 12 Years A Slave, for me those silences
labor in two ways. They force the audience into a reflection on the Slave's historical stillness. To quote Hortense Spillers or to
quote Orlando Patterson on natal alienation. And they could note a paradigm of existence that if one is a slave one has
no contemporaries no interlocutors in the world. The silences are coupled with a series of unsuccessful
attempts on a part of the Slave's to find an auditor for his or her speech and be successful in the acts of
writing. As Solomon Northup makes his way South in the hold of a slave vessel one of the slaves tells him the way for him to
stay alive is to say as little as possible about himself and to let no one know that he can read and write. The simple act of
communication, of being heard by the Other turns into an endeavor that cannot be reconciled with his
status as a speaking implement. The berries that he makes ink with are too thin and watery to secure his
words on the page. Every declaration he makes in which he claims his status as a free black and a
bonafide member of civil society is met not with reasoned rejoinders and counter claims backed by the
argumentation and evidence that proves him wrong. But are met instead with the most horrendous acts of
violence, violence aimed not at producing a disciplined subject in the Foucauldian sense of the word or even a more
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productive laborer. Rather it is violence aimed at maintaining the annihilation of his subjectivity, violence in
service to maintaining the line between the living and the dead. Solomon and the women and the men who traveled
south with him learned very quickly that Black speech is always coerced speech. The only way to speak is to mirror back to non-
black that which they are willing to hear. The only way to speak he learns is to mirror back to his masters that which they most
admire and cherish in themselves and that any problem which he raises must be tested and rehearsed inside his head before it
is broached to his masters that his dilemmas must be transposed into white dilemmas if they are to gain any traction whatsoever
and not become just cause to open his back with a whip. An analogy between 12 Years A Slave and the world of debate may
seem facile and ahistorical to some. For this reason we might want to think of the resonance between the plantation and debate
not as an analogy but as a homology- the existence of shared ancestry between a pair of structures or genes in different
species. Homologous structures are any structure that have similarity and come from the same lineage. It can be seen in the
forelimbs of mammals; analogous structures are very similar but come from different ancestors. This can be seen as the North
American flying squirrel as one definition puts it verses the Australian sugar glider. They both have similar features but come
from two different locations. The Australian sugar glider is more related to the kangaroo than to the flying squirrel. So I am
suggesting that there is an homology or a set of homolomgies here that makes for a common ancestry and we'll come to this in
a moment between the debate and plantation life. Two homologies between the libidinal economy of debate and the libidinal
economy of the plantation are Negrophilia and Negrophobia both of which are subtended by gratuitous violence.
Gratuitous violence is well theorized by Orlando Patterson along with two other constitutive elements of social death: natal
disalienation and general dishonor. But the writing of Franz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks or Hortense Spillers in
Black, White, And In Color or Jared Sexton in Amalgamation Schemes and above all the writing of David Mariott in On Black
Men and Haunted Life help us understand how Negrophilia and Negrophobia are also essential to the maintenance of social
death.

complex.
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have briefly outlined, and the practical-theoretical need for situating an abolitionist praxis within a longer tradition of freedom struggle , I

of
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that this

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1NC: Vs Gibson-Graham
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To trace the
interests that uses prisons as a solution to social, political, and economic problems.14 In
fact, as many abolitionist scholars have
forgivable. It
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both
effective?
Their capitalism root cause arguments reentrench an anti-black framework that

eclipses the realities of the carceral system and ignores forms of violence that cannot
be attributed solely to economic forces
With that being said, my reluctance to jam Black rage into a white framework is not an assertion of the political
viability of a pure politics of refusal. White anarchists, ultra-leftists, post-Marxists, and insurrectionists
who adhere to and fetishize the position of being for nothing and against everything are equally
eager to appropriate events like the 2011 London riots for their (non)agenda. They insist on an analysis
focused on the crisis of capitalism, which downplays anti-Blackness and ignores forms of gratuitous
violence that cannot be attributed solely to economic forces. Like liberals, post-left and anti-social
interpretive frameworks generate political narratives structured by white assumptions, which delimits which
questions are posed which categories are the most analytically useful. Tiqqun explore the ways in which we
are enmeshed in power through our identities, but tend to focus on forms of power that operate by an
investment in life (sometimes call biopolitics) rather than, as Achille Mbembe writes, the power and the
capacity to decide who may live and who must die (sometimes called necropolitics).25 This framework is
decidedly white, for it asserts that power is not enacted by direct relations of force or violence, and
that the capitalism reproduces itself by inducing us to produces ourselves, to express our identities
through consumer choices, to base our politics on the affirmation of our marginalized identities. This
configuration of power as purely generative and dispersed completely eclipses the realities of policing,
the militarization of the carceral system, the terrorization of people of color, the institutional violence
of the Welfare State and the Penal State, and of Black and Native social death. While prisons certainly
produce race, a generative configuration of power that minimizes direct relations of force can only
be theorized from a white subject position. Among ultra-left tendencies, communization theory notably
looks beyond the wage relation in its attempt to grasp the dynamics of late-capitalism. Writing about Thorie
Communiste (TC), Maya Andrea Gonzalez notes that TC focus on the reproduction of the capital-labor
relation, rather than on the production of value. This change of focus allows them to bring within their purview
the set of relations that actually construct capitalist social life beyond the walls of the factory or office.26
However, while this reframing may shed light on relations that constitute social life outside the workplace, it
does not shed light on social death, for relations defined by social death are not reducible to the capital-labor
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relation. Rather than oppose class to race, Frank Wilderson draws our attention to the difference
between being exploited under capitalism (the worker) and being marked as disposable or superfluous
to capitalism (the slave, the prisoner). He writes, The absence of Black subjectivity from the crux of radical
discourse is symptomatic of [an] inability to cope with the possibility that the generative subject of capitalism,
the Black body of the 15th and 16th centuries, and the generative subject that resolves late capitals over-
accumulation crisis, the Black (incarcerated) body of the 20th and 21st centuries, do not reify the basic
categories that structure conflict within civil society: the categories of work and exploitation.27 Historian
Orlando Patterson similarly insists on understanding slavery in terms of social death rather than labor
or exploitation.28 Forced labor is undoubtedly a part of the slaves experience, but it is not what
defines the slave relation. Economic exploitation does not explain the phenomena of racialized
incarceration; an analysis of capitalism that fails to address anti-Blackness, or only addresses it as a
byproduct of capitalism, is deficient.
The affirmatives deferral of abolition within their anti-capitalist framework is the

(re)production of white supremacy. Capitalisms genesis is the theft of indigenous land
and the inauguration of the slave trade. Without a centering of abolition of the prison
industrial complex, the affirmatives conceptualization of freedom will become
dependent on the prison regime.
Stein et al 14 - Mariella Castaldi, Ashley Masters, Jess Mease, Chinwe Okona, Zachary Ontiveros,
Mohamed Shehk, David Stein, LETTER FROM THE EDITORS, in The Abolitionist Issue 23: Capitalism, Anti-
Capitalism, and the Prison Industrial Complex, Fall 2014
2014s second issue of The Abolitionist tackles the theme of Capitalism, Anti-Capitalism, and the prison industrial complex (PIC). To many of our readers, this topic will come as no surprise. Two
what might prison industrial complex abolition look like

interconnected questions might help to frame the pieces offered in this issue: First,
through an anti-capitalist lens? Second, what does capitalism look like when our struggles to abolish the
PIC provide the lens through which we view it? The term prison industrial complex helps shift the way
that we think and talk about prisons and policing, to shift the way that we explain why imprisonment
and policing exist in the first place. Whereas the all-too-prevalent explanation says we need prisons as a solution to crime and other social problems, the term
prison industrial complex suggests that in order both to explain and to fight the racist system of
imprisonment, we needed to ask, who benefits from policing and prisons? Who makes money? Who gets elected and reelected?
Who gets a career? Why is it that the US has spent millions of dollars on new prison beds even as the rate of crime has
fallen? How is it that, as Ruthie Gilmore puts it punishment has become as industrialized as making cars, clothing, or
missiles, or growing cotton? Why prisons, rather than some other industry? Why, as Craig Gilmores interview with James Kilgore in this issue suggests, do people who do not
benefit directly from the PIC believe it to be necessary? What makes people believe that prisons solve problems? Asking these questions reminds us that in order to fight the PIC,
we need also to fight the social, political, and economic systems that make the PIC possible in the first
place. What we gain from analyzing that system is the ability to imagine how the abolitionist struggle
intertwines and intersects with other struggles. Taken as a whole, the pieces in this issue insist that we understand how housing
justice is an abolitionist struggle (in Bruce Reillys piece), how social inequality is giving rise to new forms of
imprisonment (in Micah Wests piece), how globalization fuels and is fueled by the PIC (in Rachel Herzings interview with Linda Evans and Eve
Goldberg), and how the USs exportation of the War on Drugs has also involved the exportation of the US
prison model (in Julie de Dardels piece). Placing the PIC at the center of the way that we think about capitalism
troubles the lie at the heart of capitalist ideologythe notion capitalism has given rise to freedom and
democracy around the world . In response, the abolitionist asks, freedom for whom? Which world? For the world in which the abolitionist
sets to work and seeks to transform, the world in which the abolitionist finds community is also the
world in which capitalism has sought to find freedom and security in unfreedom. The abolitionist
knows that capitalism saw its dawn in the captivity industry that kidnapping and shackled millions of
Africans, commodifying their bodies and labor as a source of wealth; in the warfare industry that
deployed murder, displacement, and sexual violence to transform Native lands into colonial properties
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and plantations. Plantation slavery instituted on Native lands has its afterlife in the modern prison
system, as Brionne DeDeckers article on Louisiana incarceration demonstrates. The world, then, in which the abolitionists struggle begins is a world where as James Baldwin once wrote in
solidarity with a then-imprisoned Angela Davis, people are taught to measure their safety in chains and corpses. Chains, corpses, and, we might add, cages: this, to
the abolitionist, is what capitalism looks like. As this issue goes to press, an Israeli military offensive on the Palestinian people Gaza brings the death toll to over
2,100 in the last 47 days. Over 500 of the dead have been children. If, as Noam Chomsky has suggested, Gaza is the worlds largest open-air prison, the $9.9 million per day that the US government
in the context of racial capitalism, the prison industrial complex, colonial

sends to Israel is a sharp reminder that
occupation, and American empire are interwoven. We recognize those same forces at work presently in Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of the police
execution of Black teenager Michael Brown. Here, local police, Missouri Highway Patrol, and the National Guard have set the technologies of capitalist warmaking/warmongeringassault rifles, tear gas,
flashbangsagainst the largely Black community that has risen up in response. The expressions of solidarity sent by Palestinan residents in Gaza to the Ferguson uprising echo across a new and yet
familiar landscape a message of solidarity sent by the poet June Jordan in 1982: I was born a Black woman and now I am become a Palestinian Against the relentless laughter of evil there is less and less
living room and where are my loved ones? It is time to make our way home. Things look different when one resides in this world, where the story capitalism tells is not freedom but violence, not safety but
The abolitionist knows that to struggle against capitalism is to struggle to make living room, to
shackles.
make room, that is, for another kind of life to flourish.
The affirmatives liberalism works to negate alternative futures and become the states
first line of defense. Our position begins with a refusal of liberalism
As that is happening, a white woman hits me in the head, knocking my hat off onto the
movement.
it stands, for radicals, specifically non-white anti-authoritarians, these actions hold the same element of danger as attending a Trump rally. For
a
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This must end, we

You should vote negative to refuse the economy focused approach of the affirmative in
favor of a revolutionary position of abolition.
complex.
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of
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that this

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1NC: Vs Coop Federalism
and genocide.
contextualizing critical, radical, and perhaps abolitionist pedagogies. In
subtle distinction from the criminological, social
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condition of teaching in the context of a prison regime that is so relentless in its innovation and intrusiveness? We
might depart from
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To trace the
forgivable. It
participate robustly in civil society, outside and apart from the social dominance and institutional violence of the prison regime. In both
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effective?
The expansion of prison regime at home and abroad begins with the bipartisan desire
to disappear the Black Other. Oposition to violence cannot succeed unless we first
grapple with the US prison in all its formations as a machine for the murder of
blackness.
Sexton and Lee 06 [Jared, Prof African American Studies @ UC-Irvine, and Elizabeth, Prof Geography @
U British Columbia, Figuring the Prison: Prerequisites of Torture at Abu Ghraib, Antipode, p. 1005-
For those who would describe Abu Ghraib as a space of exception, a deviation from the norm, a place of unregulated chaos existing in stark opposition to standard military operations, we can only reply
that it was the very theater of operations, the shooting war and scene of combat unfolding around Abu Ghraib, that enabled and permitted the horrors eventually revealed inside (Gregory 2004). It was, in
other words, the incorporation of the prisonrefurbished by US forces from the rubble to which it had been reduced by an Iraqi crowd during the
storming of Baghdad in March 2003 into the arena of ongoing military intelligence that defined its protocols (Hersh 2004). In this respect, Abu Ghraib seems
not so much an exception as it is a facet of the rule, a foreseeable consequence of imperial design and
rampant militarismall of which requires states of confinement in order to execute the necessary dirty
work. Analysis that does not situate the prison in this broader context misrecognizes the prison per se. This
is why any call for reforms at Abu Ghraibfor the humane treatment of prisoners, the end of abuse, the cessation of torturethat does not connect such demands indelibly to the end of
military occupation and the withdrawal of troops, which is to say the positive restoration of Iraqi sovereignty, does not simply fail to address the roots of the problem. It also contributes,
directly or indirectly, to the elaboration of a better prison and, by fiat, a better and more intractable
occupation, capitulating, as it were, to the current stage of the US imperium. We are by now well aware that torture is
endemic to the contemporary prisonindustrial complex, that this recent and rapid build up of the American Gulag has stretched
across more than half a dozen administrations from both sides of the aisle, that it represents one of the few truly successful bipartisan
projects of the last half century and that it involves, by definition, the collaboration or coalescence of
all three branches of the federal government and a related coordination of activities at the state and
local levels. In fact, as Paul Wright finds, mass incarceration is the most thoroughly implemented social experiment in American history (quoted in Silverstein 2003:1).8 [Foonote 8: As Franklin
(2004) notes: The prison has become a central institution in American society, integral to our politics,
economy, and culture. Between 1976 and 2000, the United States built on average a new prison each week and the number of imprisoned Americans increased tenfold.] It thus
seems profoundly mistaken to discuss recent events at Abu Ghraib as an extension or projection of mass imprisonment in the US and, at the same time, an effect of the peculiarities of the current
administration, the agenda of hard-line elements within the Republican Party, the short-term interests of the US corporate class or particular sectors of the domestic political economy. For Susan Sontag,
to take only the most well-known example, the photographs from Abu Ghraib are representative of the fundamental corruptions of any foreign occupation together with the Bush administrations
distinctive policies (Sontag 2004). Yet, the breadth and longevity of both the great prison buildup and the myriad of US foreign occupations renders problematic the notion of distinctive policies for the
present administration. On the matter of US foreign policy objectives, we must ask: distinctive at what level, strategic or tactical? What, after all, is the strategic difference between Clintonesque mul-
tilateralism, wherein the US pursues consensus issues among the elite through a manhandling of the UN, NATO, the IMF and World Bank (Ali 2000; Chomsky 1999), and a recrudescent unilateralism,
wherein the US openly flouts international institutions and/or simply drags them into its wake (Feffer 2003)? For radical critique, one would think these are differences of degreetactical distinctionsnot
differences of kind. Rather than join the clamor that has arisen on the subject of Abu Ghraib, weighing in on precisely what it tells us about the folly of Op- eration Iraqi Freedom or the ferocity of the
neoconservative program or the miserable character of contemporary US society, we may do better to consider why so many observers, observers who quite frankly know better, have seen fit to speak of
it in such evocative, often melodramatic and bewildered, language? In the scramble to provide explanation for the litany of violencepresuming that such images of violence shock and confuse and
disorient viewing audiences, rather than corroborating our existing knowledge and outrage and dissentour critical commentators have, each in their own ways, attempted to reduce an elusive and
disturbing political, economic, social, and cultural complex to a fixed aspect or moment or source in US society, to fashion an identifiable and stable object of criticism and opposition. Though the tropes
vary somewhat, it is the Janus head that has surfaced, if inexactly, as the leitmotif of this drive (Carby 2004), a restorative figure upholding the possibility that the ideal, to say nothing of the infrastructure,
of American democracy is, in fact, the other face of the gruesome visage revealed behind the prison wall, the promise on the periphery of the current and continuous mortification: the better angels of the
indomitable democratic experiment, the old Spirit of 76: infinitely redeemable and fundamentally decent (Whitney 2004). We submit, in contrast, that this overarching metaphorical initiative is as inapt as
those that serve as its supports. Without the buttressing of its figurative keystone, the initiative may give way altogether. Social critics across a range of publication venues have asserted, time and again,
that there is a linkage between the atrocities at Abu Ghraib and the legacies of racism and other forms of oppression in the United States, particularly the history and present of anti-blacknesswhether
that link is one marked by scattered recollection or one that discloses a direct, but hidden, line (Carby 2004). But for all this imaginative trafficking, none has felt obliged to explicate the linkages, to justify
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the association, or to carry it to its logical conclusion. The latter would require, at the very least, speculation on the ramifications for the domestic front of opposition to the Iraq war, well beyond the
In asking whether the Left is, at

rollback of the Pa- triot Acts and the enhancements of Homeland Security, which is to say, a return to the US of the Clinton administration.
bottom, willing to bring its critique of US imperialism back home, to say that occupation is corrupt
abroad as well as at home, we find that the mobilization of hazy and indistinct metaphors of black ex-
perience is neither incidental nor optional. Rather, the imprecision of terms is mandatory to the discourse and such comparative comments are passing by
definition. As we will see, to dwell at any length within the analogy, to meditate on the production of its conceptual space, only diminishes the rhetorical purchase of the endeavor. Why, then, forge the
analogy in the first place? Why recall it, repeat it, cite it? In order to establish what point? Simply that the US is plagued by problems more long-standing and deep-rooted than is admitted by the tendency
to represent Abu Ghraib as an aberration or anomaly? Even so, why make an argument en route that has to do with the enduring history of anti- black racism? What conceptualization of anti-blackness
its placement in time and spaceis enabled by and embedded within this gesture? Despite their insertion into chains of equivalence in the critical literature on Abu Ghraib, the frequent references to the
historical experience of blacks in the USanalogies made to the estate of chattel slavery and the subsequent institutions of lynching and mass imprisonment function as supplemental to all other
gestures of comparison: for instance, to the brutalities of European colonialism in India (Ghosh 2005), to the barbarities of Nazism on the European continent (Brown 2004), to the desolation of Stalins
As
untold gulags (Blumenthal 2004), to the sexual exploitation, violence, and general nastiness of the multibillion dollar pornography industry and its popular culture (Brison 2004).
productions of slaverys afterlife, the institution of lynching in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries and the emergence of mass imprisonment in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries should be understood as altogether interleaved elements in the evolution of the invariant
social control and spatial containment, the permanent social incarceration, of blacks (Wacquant 2002). Yet, whereas the
other noted historic instances inscribe political dispositions that brook viable, if not always unambiguous oppositiondecolonization, the end of military occupation, the fall of the regime, the dismantling or
rollback of imperial encroachments, transformations in the political economy of sex work, etcfor the conjured figures of black suffering in the US, there is, it seems, no political correlate. This impossible
correlation begs a number of urgent questions, questions shaped and incited by a political milieu that includes both the violence at Abu Ghraib and its opposition, but that are aimed at a certain
transfiguration. How, at the outset, might we begin to (re)formulate or (re)phrase the question of black freedom struggle today? How, in other words, are we to speak of or with or in relation to the forces of
black radicalism after Emancipation, post-civil rights, during an era in which a new nigger or replacement Negro appears at each turn (eg exploited and embattled i mmigrants from Latin America and
Asia, profiling and targeted Muslims, Arabs, etc), an era in which black suffering circulates everywhere as a criterion of political appraisal but resonates nowhere (sometimes not even among blacks) as a
cause worthy of its own name, let alone a collective effort warranting a certain pride of place? If we cannot square the circle of oppressions as we are wont to do, if we cannot simply assume or assert an
affinity of suffering as the common ground of a united front or a global Left, then how is opposition to US imperialism (its military adventures, its economic machinations, its political black- mail) to proceed
in such a way that it does not authorize the alienation or forfeiture, the endless deferral or deactivation, of the most belated of black demands? Is there language that can synchronize and coordinate
(solidarity with) an Iraqi (or Afghani or . . .) demand for independence and self-determination, and (solidarity with) a black demandin and beyond the United States, throughout the African Diasporafor
the reparation of everything?9 [Footnote 9: This point is not meant to diminish in any way the concrete platforms that have been developed already by the international reparations for slavery movement
(Bittker 2003; Robinson 2001). Rather, it is to recognize that such platforms, though rich and far reaching in their potential impact, actually represent a contraction or discounting of the incalculable debt
incurred by the US, the West, and the world at the expense of African- descent peoples across the last five centuries. In fact, even if the economic legacies of transatlantic slavery and colonialism in Africa
and the Americas were redressed through, say, a global redistribution of capitalits impact would induce not crisis, which the capitalist system can accommodate, but catastrophe.] If not, then why not?
Even if we can agree that Abu Ghraib is more than a symptom of the Bush regime, still we must interrogate the analogical impulse that has disseminated on the heels of Sontags Regarding the torture of
others (2004). As the author rightly opines, [t]o acknowledge that Americans torture their prisoners [of war] would contradict everything this administration has invited the public to believe about the
virtue of American intentions and Americas right, flowing from that virtue, to undertake unilateral action on the world stage (Sontag 2004). What, then, exactly, is contradicted by the acknowledgment that
Americans torture their prisoners within the fortress gates of the US? Official virtue is similarly impugned, of course, but what right is thereby cancelled? Does it cancel the states right to pursue the
domestic equivalent of invasion of a sovereign entity, a sort of unilateralism within the homeland? Are we to assume that over three decades of mass imprisonment, or a near century of lynching before it,
or the centuries-long slave regime from which the latter comes into view, are pursued according to the dictates of some US Grand Strategy? In point of fact, the situation is much worse. The profound
continuity of black captivity across the entire history of the United States indicates not its utility but rather its excess in relation to the shifting winds of political expedience (including otherwise paramount
economic rationalities), its status as what we might call pre- political, a condition of gratuitous (and not only instrumental) violence that founds the very order of the political and that affords the frame of
intelligibility for political conflicts proper. Is this not why the question of black emancipation and the prospect of black freedom has always raised, and catastrophically delivered on, the specter of civil war;
why it has required the most exceptional deployments of repressive state power, on all sides; why it has presented the most fundamental questions about the constitution (and Constitution) of the nation-
state?10 The rituals of torture exposed at Abu Ghraibstaged events both reckless and deliberate, a whole theatrics of humiliation, terror, sexual degradationprovide, not contradiction or hypocrisy, but
the necessary counterpart to the American principles of democracy, dignity, and freedom; what Zizek calls the obscene underside of U.S. popular culture . . . the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and
obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values (Zizek 2004).11 In this sense, what the notorious images of frivolous brutality circulating
throughout the global media environment evoke, however obliquely, is the ambient combat, and the attendant culture of authoritarianism, that operates without direct announcement and acknowledgment
within the United States as an affirmation of its birthright in and as a slave society.12 This ancient internal warfare is foundational and constitutive; the primary division of humanity it enables launches the
syntax of western modernity, the state(s) of democratic citizenship, the promise and compromise of civil societynot the division between the exploiters and the exploited or the rich and the poor, but
the repression, torture, and

rather the free and the enslaved, subject and object, person and property (Barrett 2006). The obscene underside of the popular culture,
sexual coercion that constitute the underbelly of a particular version of democracy, which has
achieved dominance in the world (Davis 2004:45), and the myriad peculiar institutions of social incarceration
it has engendered, is the most intimate possession of black existence in the USfrom the political and
libidinal economies of chattel slavery (still determinate in current affairs despite wishful thinking from all quarters) to the official
endorsements of institutionalized lynching (practices commandeered in recent generations by the proper authorities) and the codification of
Jim Crow segregation (whose revival cancels apace the detours thrown up by the modern Civil Rights Movement) to the formation of the urban
ghetto (which retains its powers of quarantine even in the aftermath of the long hot summers and the short flight of a fragile black lumpen bourgeoisie) to the rise of the
modern day prison (whose ghastly presence supplies the hallmark of the so-called post-civil rights era) (Nast 2000).13 The latter, it bears repeating, now
warehouses well over 2 million people; it carries out a range of invisible punishments over another
nearly 5 million maintained in its orbit as probationers and parolees; and it produces a ruinous
cascade of collateral consequences for the millions more considered family, friend, and community
to those who are most immediately disappeared and monitored (Mauer and Chesney- Lind 2002). We are indicating something of the
generative force of the prison, but it must be stated as well that the prison (and its repercussions) is more appropriately understood as a component of an even broader offensive on the
apparatuses of the welfare state, a malevolent social transformation for which black communities remain the
epicenter poor black women above all insofar as they inhabit the mesh of hyper- segregation, mass
imprisonment, and the discipline and punishment of workfare austerity. That is to say, the
peacetime assault finds its raison detre and its most compelling rationalization in the persistence
of the domestic black population, and the frontline of this racist carceral regime obtains in the ever-
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increasing powers of the police exercised particularly over the lives of black women and men
(irrespective of class status or educational background), a development for which the term racial
profiling marks only the tip of the iceberg (Sexton forthcoming). In the US, there is among both state officials and the general public a long historical
preoccupation with weapons of mass destruction in regard to blacks. Black people have been deemed, since well before the inception of the United States,
perennial threats to national security not for having such weapons (which might actually lend collective bar- gaining powerwitness Iran or North Korea at present),
but for being such weapons and thus always in need of containment, surveillance, sanction, deportation, elimination; a point
that underscores the accuracy of Lewis Gordons formulation of racism as a desire for black people
to disappear (Gordon 1997:63). What concerns us in this respect is the problematic rendering by many commentators of the torture at Abu Ghraib as, for instance, eerily or hauntingly
reminiscent of black lynchings, while those same commentators display considerably less vigilance and indignation about the similar, and entirely contemporary, treatment of a prototypically black
prison population here in the United States. Nearly all will acknowledge, perfunctorily, the violations of human rights in Lockdown America (Parenti 2000) carefully documented by international
monitoring groups, yet few have moved beyond concerns for reform of current practices of incarceration, loosening their most repressive aspects, or rescinding the most egregious of drug laws. More to
the point, the analogy between the foreign military prison and the domestic prison tends to obfuscate as much as it seeks to illuminate, since it is unable to remark the critical difference between what is
happening in the respective carceral formations and why. Differences not at the empirical levelmany practices were exported wholesale or transposed with little variation (Peirce 2004)but at the
structural level, the level at which Wilderson (2004) elaborates what he terms the political ontology of race.14 Now, there are compelling reasons for this general failure of discern- ment, but this fact
makes it no more defensible. While departments of the same repressive state apparatus are called to question in each case, even the most preliminary examination makes clear that divergent aspects of
its functioning are at stake at either end of the comparison; divergence between the hard site at Abu Ghraib and, say, Louisianas Angola Prison, or, more broadly, between the War on Terror and the
domestic political opposition to the US invasion of Iraq, or the vaster post-Cold

War on Drugs. This is why, at one level,
War US militarism, cannot hope to mount viable criticism, much less effective political intervention, if it
cannot subject to radical critique the local police forces and the ancillary juridical institutions with
which they interact daily. So much goes for the welfare of POWs as well. The disinclination of left intellectuals to datewhether activist, academic, or bothto engage the
question of prison abolition on the domestic front finds its counterpart in the hedg- ing of their responsible commentary on the military occupation (in Afghanistan, in Iraq) and the accumulation of
There is a significant difference, after all, between calling for the immediate
unlawful enemy combatants.15
enforcement of Geneva Conventions in the global network of US military prisons (unlikely in any event) and
calling for the dismantling of the network itself, the closure and demolition or conversion of its
physical plant, and the release of the prisoners held captive within its walls (no more likely, of course, but no more fanciful either).
For those who pause in lieu of subsequent reconstructive efforts, those animated by questions like, What is to be done with former prisoners and the myriad social problems faced by them and their
communities? or What will happen to Iraq now that it has been devastated by the war, how will it be rebuilt, and who will oversee its renewal? we couldbut will not hereentertain any number of policy
packages and spending conversion schemes, none of which seem incredibly difficult to imagine (though most register as alien to the current political landscape) and all of which would certainly be better
, there is something disingenuous about the

than present proposals for maintaining the relevant custodial relationship (Ali 2003; Davis 2003).16 Yet
unwillingness to advocate the abolition of prisonat home and abroadunless and until a clear
alternative is on hand. Disingenuous because it bespeaks a refusal to engage the lived experience of
the imprisoned, to enter serious dialogue across prison walls, to become conversant with the archive
of research and testimony about their political location, about existence in a state and status of civic
death. This disposition, which, needless to say, concedes to criminalization, has a general salience, given that prisoners in the US are officially
disregarded and popularly despised as a class. However, the particular virulence that characterizes the institutionalized fear and
hatred of prisoners in the US, both men and increasingly women, is thoroughly coded by race, and racial blackness
unquestionably functions here as its chief abbreviation. In racial constructs, the hyper-black-as-
prisoner is slave and so she stands distinctly debased from all other racial formations in society (James
2005a:xiii, emphasis added). Thus we offer that the societal derogation of the imprisoned draws its principal affective power
and its strictest ideological cast from the deep wells of anti-blackness, and that the prisonization of
the US is more accurately discussed as a reverberation or derivation of the social death implanted at
the heart of black existence, the quintessence of racial slavery and the principle legacy of its afterlife in
altered structural modalities (Hartman 1997; Patterson 1982). The reticence of the Left to engage arguments, and
efforts for prison abolition within the US and to center therein the ongoing struggle for black freedom,
serves to hamstring its critical resistance to US imperialism abroad, leaving it open to capitulation on
the emancipation of those with which it seeks to forge solidarity. It does so by approaching sovereignty as a matter of degree. Still, it is not
hard to imagine scenariosindeed, they already existin which the Left licenses itself to pursue radical platforms against imperialism, which is to say abolitionist campaigns overseas, while allowing the
historical condition of blacks, irreducible to the shifting objectives of empire (or Empire), to serve as little more than convenient metaphor: source of insight and outrage, but only insofar as the trouble is
quarantined to the past (as lessons learned) or rendered on scales too small or too big to demand action (as either nagging residue or eternal national shame). On this note, we should admit that there is
something unconvincing, unpersuasive, and perhaps even fraudulent about the analogical links drawn between, on the one hand, the scandal at Abu Ghraib and, on the other, the fetid history of lynching
or the contemporary horrors of mass imprisonment or both. The pretense is due not so much to the moral non-equivalence of the respective institutions (Winn 2004) as to their strict political in-
commensurability. Thinking productively about this incommensurability, rendering it legible, requires, above all else, the working through of a persistent screen memoryfor them and for usthat
dispatches racial slavery as an allegory for regarding the torture of others: As an African American, these actions are all too familiar to me . . . When Blacks arrived from Africa during the 1600s, they were
stripped of their clothes, pride, dignity and religion. Africans that were enslaved in America went through a tortuous process known as seasoning, which is a term referring to the process of breaking
down the African physically, emotionally, and psychologically, hence making him/her submissive. Once the slaves arrived in America, members of the dominant culture raped women repeatedly, men
were publicly humiliated and children were sold and separated. It is probably safe to assume that at Abu Ghraib the similarities vastly outweigh the differences. (Slater 2004)
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The AFFs reform focus on discrete problems with the school misses the point
School has always been messed up for black people their colorblind approach to
reform will continue to fail black students
Perry 16 (Andre is a contributor at The Root. The Root. Black Folks Dont Need Education Reform; We
Need a System We Can Call Our Own August 3, 2016 http://www.theroot.com/black-folks-don-t-need-
education-reform-we-need-a-syst-1790856272)
The scant mention of Democrats official platform on K-12 education on the main stage at the Democratic National Convention last week was clearly a
political effort to distance the party from the fray. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has backed off many hallmarks of the accountability
era that started with the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001 under the first George W. Bush administration and ended when that law was replaced
with the Every Student Succeeds Act last year. Many approaches, like teacher evaluation, simply did not work and caused irreparable harm to teachers
and children. Others, like charter expansion and school closures, did not live up to the promise Clinton hoped for. In 2014, Bill Clinton forecast his wifes
evolution when he said that charter schools have not held up their original bargain. Hillary Clinton the following year doubled down on her husbands
remarks, stating, Most charter schools don't take the hardest-to-teach kids. And if they do, they don't keep them. Leading up to the DNC, reform-
friendly language was scrubbed from the official platform. And Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in her remarks
at the DNC (pdf) that Hillary Clinton will reset education policy to focus on skills like creativity and critical thinking, not more testing. Education reform is
clearly a part of the Obama legacy that Clinton doesnt outwardly want to adopt. But rebuking education reform is an insufficient
strategy to address districts and states that continuously failed to serve black and brown children
before the NCLB. Black folk need an alternative, and reform must be redefined. Instead of reforming the reforms,
lets do something weve never done before: Lets create a system rooted in the people who need change the most.
Lets adopt a philosophy centered on black and brown people. In his classic text Pedagogy of the Oppressed, philosopher
and educator Paulo Freire said, If true commitment to the people, involving the transformation of the reality by which they are oppressed, requires a
theory of transforming action, this theory cannot fail to assign the people a fundamental role in the transformation process. Freire believed
that transformation requires an educational system rooted in the people who need change. The choice
movement, for instance, will always fall short in urban areas because the system of thought wasnt
centered on black or brown worldviews. Adam Smith, forefather of the political economy, might appreciate the choice- and standards-
based curriculum movements that emphasize competition, productivity and rugged individualism. Filtered by the works of Milton Friedman, the
educational-choice movement in particular has been applied so loosely that basic ethics and notions of fairness have been trumped by stereotypical
corporate values that fly in the face of what black, brown and girl students need. As it was inevitable for school leaders to call themselves CEOs, it was
also inescapable that students and teachers would be viewed instrumentally in terms of their productivity. Suspension, expulsion and mass firings
became practical and acceptable means of showing growth. First poverty didnt matter. Then, all of a sudden, it did, and schools needed
wraparound services. The race of the teacher didnt matter. Now reform organizations are looking for black
and brown teachers and leaders en masse. (For the descendants of slaves, human capital problems take on a whole different meaning.)
Expulsion and suspension were a necessary evil in order to develop a positive school culture. Now we need restorative-justice programs. All of the
aforementioned mistakes were predicted, aired and fought and could have been avoided. But the fidelity to
ideology evidences the stubbornness of white privilege that comes out of a Eurocentric model . The
inefficiencies of white privilege cost us so much more than dollars. With every reform from the choice frame, we add to the bureaucracy of white
institutions built to help black communities. Consequently, each institution and approach attempts to reform the prior without
questioning the bedrock on which they were all built upon: white supremacy and patriarchy. After every iteration, the only
remaining factors are the base ideology and system of oppression. Audre Lorde said, The master's tools will never dismantle the
master's house. Lets stop patching the previous error. If we can build a reform approach and invest billions around a
white male, we should be able to do so around Afrocentric people and philosophies. Black and brown folk
dont need reform. We need an alternative that we define.
States rights is code for the generalizable resentment of black people and defense of
slavery
Greenberg 07 [David, Slate.com, Dog-Whistling Dixie, http://www.slate.com/news-and-
politics/2017/07/obamacare-repeal-is-the-first-step-in-scaling-back-entitlements.html]
Both accounts, obviously, are overdrawn. But there are a few more nuanced histories out there, including Chain Reaction by Tom and Mary Edsall
(which Krugman cites in his latest column) and In Search of Another Country by Emory University historian Joe Crespino (who has weighed in on the
Reagan-in-1980 controversy here). These credit the way that race
has worked as an unspoken subtext in unlikely places.
The key to the argument is that Reagan's success hinged on forging messages to Americansnot just
Southern whites, incidentally, but also Catholic blue-collar workers and neoconservative
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intellectualsthat eschewed explicit racism while still tapping into sublimated resentments of blacks or
anger at racially fraught policies like busing, welfare, and crime. In its simplest form, this multitiered message relied on code
words. No one who used the phrase "states' rights" in living memory of the massive resistance
movement against forced desegregation could be unaware of the message of solidarity it sent to
Southern whites about civil rights. (The phrase, of course, had been bound up with racism at least since
John Calhoun championed it in his defense of slavery in the 1830s.) But because the term also connoted a general
opposition to the growth of the federal government's role in economic life, nonracist whites could comfort themselves that politicians like Nixon and
Reagan were using it innocentlyand thus shrug off any guilt they might feel for being complicit in racist campaigning. It was a dog whistle to
segregationists. In the same vein, Reagan's use of phrases linked to insidious racial stereotypeshis talk of Cadillac-driving welfare queens, or
"young bucks" buying T-bone steaks with food stampspandered to bigots while making sure not to alienate voters whom starker language would have
scared away. More important, even where code words weren't at work, Reagan's very ideology contained a strong dose of racial conservatism. On one
hostility to assisting minorities with positive measuresaffirmative
issue after another, Reagan's image and appeal was shot through with a
action, legal protections for criminal defendants, welfare programs (which mainly helped whites but were perceived as
mainly helping blacks). As a standard-bearer of the conservative movement, the Edsalls have written, Reagan in 1980 "revived the sharply polarized
racial images of the two parties with racial conservatism contributing decisively to the GOP advantage." As Crespino notes, the triumph of the civil
rights movement and its assumptions about racial equality forced conservative Southerners to find other issues with which to galvanize voters. On these
fronts, too, racial politics nonetheless shaped the debate. Southern candidates created private religious schools, for example, that could escape court-
ordered integration, thus recasting the fight as one of religious freedom. In my own research, I've found that today's right-wing attacks on the "liberal
media" have roots in George Wallace's relentless war in the early 1960s against the national news agencies whose reporters, he and other Southern
whites believed, distorted the terms of their struggle to maintain Jim Crow. The upshot was that by 1980, race and ideology had become so commingled
that one's stand on racial issues served as a proxy for one's partisan preference. Previously, economic issues had been the chief dividing line between
the parties. By 1980, though, according to the Edsalls, the changes that followed the civil rights movement had crystallized, and racial politics figured just
as strongly. Almost 69 percent of the public, for example, thought the Democrats were likely to aid minorities, compared with just about 11 percent who
thought the same of the Republicans. Conversely, roughly 66 percent thought the GOP "unlikely" to aid minorities, while about 12 percent said the same
of the Democrats. Even talking about domestic government spending carried a tacit racial message, since
public opposition to spending was highest and most intense when it came to programs devoted to the
needy and to blacks. By contrast, support for government spending on Social Security, education, health care, and the environment remained
robust even during the heyday of Reaganism. Building on the efforts of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon before
him, as well as of a generation of Southern Republican leaders, Reagan succeeded in altering the
terms of political debate when it came to race. Stripping away the crude bigotry that had cost the white
South the rest of nation's sympathy in the 1950s and 1960s, he and other conservative political leaders
fashioned an ideology in which racial politics were implicit, and yet still powerful. Ever since, their
followers have been able to indignantly claim that any allegations of racism are smears and slursand
discredit the entire discussion by making it about personal prejudice rather than public policy.

liberalism.
movement.
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For a
it stands, for radicals, specifically non-white anti-authoritarians, these actions hold the same element of danger as attending a Trump rally.
about unity right now, there is this desire by those who seek liberation and revolution to align themselves with liberals. This
must end, we
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complex.
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of
the radical challenging of common sense discussed above, another critical analytical tool for building an abolitionist pedagogy entails
prison regime. In relation to
that this
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***Links***
They are prep schools for prisons
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LinkAgamben
The 1ACs method of refusal assumes an individualized neoliberal subjectivity. The

refusal of potentiality does not free them from neoliberal discourses of citizenship and
productivity, rather their articulation of agency as individual empowerment lends moral
authority to neoliberalism and precludes interdependent agency and collective action.
Rowe 9 [Aimee Carrillo Rowe Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Iowa Subject to Power
Feminism Without Victims Women's Studies in Communication Volume 32, Number 1. Spring 2009]
Power operates, according to critical theorist Giorgio Agamben, through the process of sovereignty wherein
the state's capacity to wield power, to create rules, is ironically only made possible through its
exclusion from the site of power wherein the rule applies,^^ This process operates as the sovereign exception
simultaneously empowers the state, or the subject of power, to create the rule and be excluded from its reach. In relation to the subject of
feminism, who likewise may be inaugurated through this process of sovereign exceptionalism, we must
attend to the consequences of power and empowerment, inclusion and exclusion, from those power dynamics, if we are to avoid reproducing the logics
and practices of ruling that feminism seeks to dismantle. More recently, Aiwha Ong argues that this process of exceptionalism
becomes a potentially divisive force within neoliberal discourses of citizenship,^' This is to suggest that the
subject is never comprehended or evaluated on her own terms , but rather her value is adjudicated by
nation-state and transnational discourses and policies, legal practices, and market forces. Aimee Carrillo
Rowe 25 These insights call us to question the risks at stake in individualized articulations of the subject,
founded upon the subject's sovereign status, for the processes of ruling and adjudicating upon which
they rely and through which they gain power. Thus, to consider the relationship between sovereignty and power is one task that
remains undertheorized within our efforts to theorize power within any articulation of feminism. If power feminism is to seek to rearticulate and redeploy
power, it must attend to power's multiple and often overlooked sources of authority. The image on Ong's book cover captures this quality of power: a
well-dressed East Asian woman with a shopping bag in her hand walks past an East Asian street vending woman, balancing baskets of food, hoisted at
the end of a long pole, upon her shoulders. Neoliberalism adjudicates the value of each of these "third world women," the image suggests, quite
differently. Neoliberal citizens are mobile individuals who possess human capital or expertise are highly valued and can exercise citizenship; nation-state
If our feminism is sutured
citizens, who are judged not to have such tradable competence or potential, in turn, become devalued.
through notions of individual empowerment that seeks a mode of power "not dependent" on others
and yet which is ironically quite extensively dependent upon themit is underwritten and hence lends
moral authority to neoliberalism as a mode of inclusion and exclusion that is founded in
exceptionalism.
The 1AC is rooted in a universalizing description of bare life that occludes the
specifically racial and gendered histories and instances of sovereign violence.
Thobani 12 [Sunera, Associate Professor in the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia, Canada, borderlands
e-journal, volume 11, number 1, Empire, Bare Life and the Constitution of Whiteness: Sovereignty in the age of terror, p. 6-7,
http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol11no1_2012/thobani_empire.pdf]
Yet Agambens analysis remains deeply problematic , not least in his universalizing of the status of
bare life in the claim that the state of exception has become the norm. More often than not, bare life
has historically been captured by the logic of sovereign power that is explicitly racial , as has been
the constitution of bios (political life) in its incarnation as the rights-bearing citizen, who, historically, has
been the white Euro-American subject. Thus Agambens claim cannot explain why it is that not all
bodiesbut very particular kinds of bodiesare captured by sovereign power in the form of bare
life.4 In the War on Terror, it is Muslim bodies (i.e. those who look like Muslims), that is, Black and Brown bodies, that are the target of sovereign violence, regardless of
their actual juridical status. In universalizing the status of bare life, Agambens analytic frame obscures the actuality
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that it is primarily Muslims who are today trapped in what he calls the zone of indistinction. In other words,
even as Agambens formulation reveals the relation between bare life and sovereign power in the
abstract, it conceals the actuality that the bare life that is the innermost secret of Western
sovereignty has been racialized since the violence of its originary constitution, even as it is in the
contemporary historical juncture. Moreover, along with the racialization of this bare life, the constitution of
the Westas the province of sovereign powerlikewise remains an articulation of racial-as-white
colonial/imperial power. Once race enters the analytic frame, it becomes evident that the state of
exception has been no such thing in the colony, the inextricable Otherside of the West and governed by
particular forms of deadly and genocidal violence. Indeed, in the colony that was co-constitutive of the West, the state of
exception was normalized, rendered banal in the ordinary workings of power. Achille Mbembe notes, like Foucault, that
to kill or to allow to live constitute the limits of sovereigntyto exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation
of power (2003, pp. 11-12), but then also asks who is the subject of this right to kill? This is a question posed neither
by Foucault nor Agamben, yet it remains critical to understanding the raciality of the global project
that is Western sovereignty. Critical race and post-colonial scholars have long argued that the native,
colonized as savage, was not only stripped of every right in the structure of poweralien to their societies and
imposed by the violence of Euro-American powersbut was also constituted as the very antithesis of the civilized-as-
political human life (bios) that was the Western man, and subsequently, the Western woman. In her study of the global idea of race,
Denise Ferreira da Silva has argued that the knowledge arsenal, which now governs the global (juridic, economic, and
moral) configuration, institutes racial subjection as it presupposes and postulates that the elimination
of its others is necessary for the realization of the subjects exclusive ethical attribute, namely, self-determination
(2007, p. xiii). Rejecting the sociological conception of race that centres on the exclusion of people of colour from universality, da Silva instead defines raciality as a strategy of
power that creates homo modernus, i.e., the modern subject-as-sovereign. She notes this power is constituted through the related constructs of historicity and globality
the constitution of
configured as the nation and the racialand thus populates the global space with a variety of modern subjects (2007, p. 12). In other words,
man as sovereign subject and his disenfranchised others as less than human reveals the centrality
of race to the modern form of sovereignty. The very category of the West is an articulation of the
sovereign right to kill, a right entrenched in the racial logic of its sovereignty with its rights bearing
Euro-American citizen-subject. The constitution of native life as racially distinct and less-than-
human is thus a Western tradition foundational to its forms of sovereignty.
You have an ethical obligation to reject Agambens critique of sovereignty --- its
universalist description of the world reproduces colonial violence.
The opening of the barriers at Bornholmer Strasse on 9 November 1989 was not simply a moment that inaugurated the reunification of Germany or the end of the Cold War.
Marked by the crowds of East Berliners as they poured onto Bosebrucke Bridge into West Germany, this was also an event in the Zizekian sense that came to symbolize, in
political and intellectual circles, a reunification of the 'West'. Of course, this 'West' was imaginary, highly ideological, and in reality politically contested through bloodshed.
Former Eastern European countries were (and still are) seen as outside the pale of 'western' civilization even as they adopted capitalist reforms (see Pocock 1997); migrants
from the former third world increasingly questioned the coherence of the West; Turkey's liminal status exposed the religious and ethnic fault lines of Europe; and, more
recently, even the idea of a unified West seemed threatened by France's decisive political break from the US in the preamble to the preemptive invasion of Iraq. Yet since the
1990s, continuing after 9/11 and the unilateral invasion oflraq in 2003, the idea of one world and past former divisions seems
reproduced in a major intellectual impetus in Europe and the US: to produce paradigms of what I call
global theory, based on the assumption that the contemporary moment calls for a resurgence of some
form of universal theorizing. And while the particular form of this theorizing might vary from the search
for a new humanism, to a critique of modern sovereignty , the assumptions and scope of these
theories are universalist . Such a shift has been characterized as a movement away from the quagmire of micropolitics of radical theory of the 1960s to an
embrace of the idea of emancipatory knowledge, the development, as Negri puts it, of a "new post-deconstructive ontology," and a bold step beyond the negation of
postmodernism (Negri 1999: 12; see also Passavant 2004: 4). This emphasis on a new ontology, the object of which is to energize us with new global possibilities
for resistance, can be seen among others in the work of Hardt and Negri (Empire and Multitude), Giorgio Agamben (Homo Sacer, State of
Exception, The Coming Community), and Alain Badiou (Ethics), and the new work of Judith Butler (Precarious Life). But if these new ontologies go beyond the
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circumscribed limits of postmodernism to offer us revolutionary or liberatory manifestoes and theories appropriate to the current moment, they are also theories that
confront us with a postcolonial unease precisely because they are, like the tradition of colonial knowledge
production, universalizing, albeit in different ways. Whereas the decolonization movements of the mid-twentieth century and the
new social movements of the 1960s led to a Lyotardian postmodern suspicion of grand narratives, the contemporary
intellectual moment seems to relish grand narratives. In a section entitled 'Back to the Eighteenth Century' in Multitude, Hardt and Negri
write: What was indeed utopian and completely illusory in the eighteenth century was to repropose the ancient form of democracy designed for the city-state as a model for
the modern nation-state ... The challenge then was to reinvent the concept of democracy and create new institutions adequate to modern society and the national space. It is
useful to go back to the eighteenth century, finally, to appreciate what a radical innovation they accomplished. If they did it, then we can too! (Hardt and Negri 2004: 307) But
if the contemporary intellectual moment is an exciting one, calling for a new theoretical project- dare one say a new Enlightenment- those
of us who are wary
of eighteenth-century Europe's racial projects and colonial missions have reason to be extremely
wary of these current projects in which a West-centered humanism parades as universalism. At stake
in critiquing universalist theories today is the fact that the contemporary moment of hyper-imperialism
and intense conflict between the global North and global South - as evidenced by US military
occupations, the battles over scarce resources, the patenting of indigenous knowleges, and the
continual building of walls (at the Israel-Palestine border, the US-Mexico border) that separate the West and its allies from the rest - requires an
analysis sensitive to particular striations. I suggest, therefore, that what I have called global theories can operate as
colonizing forces which it is our ethical task to resist , to decolonize. Implicit in this formulation is the idea that colonial
difference continues to be central in knowledge construction, particularly in theory. Colonial
difference is operative not only in globalization theories which contest the very idea of imperialism, but also in (universalist) theories that
address the imperial moment, as well as in what have been touted as radically new global movements. I will begin by briefly analysing the West-centred
basis of the idea of inevitability in Hardt and Negri's concept of empire, then move on to critiquing two universalizing concepts: Agamben's bare life and Judith Butler's
vulnerability. I focus on these four major theorists because they have undoubtedly been the most influential in the humanities and because their works offer a range of
theorizing from questions of globalization to those of sovereignty, and a feminist-based humanism. Turning from theory to practice, I will point out the problems of
Eurocentrism in even so ostensibly radical and global an organization as the World Social Forum. My purpose is not to offer a new third worldist or global South theorization
for the contemporary moment, but rather to demonstrate the need for vigilance against the global theoretical projects being generated today.
More evidence --- the rhetorical force of their impact claim is rooted in a shared
presupposition that violence is acceptable as long as it directed at subordinated
others.
Morgensen 11 [Scott Lauria, Associate Professor in Gender Studies and the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies at Queens University, Settler Colonial
Studies, 1:1, The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now, p. 72-73]
In conclusion, I hope my analysis illuminates a key implication of Agambens work: that if today there is no longer any one clear
figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all virtually homines sacri.45 Agambens statement acknowledges here a longstanding premise
of the state of exception, that anyone incorporated into Western law may be assigned to this state: as the defiant son is eliminated by the father in exception to their bond, so
his statement clearly foregrounds a more recent
the law excises people to constitute a People that returns to conformance with its rule. Yet
temporality in which proliferating permutations of the state of exception seem to blur its target, and
suggest using Butlers paraphrase that today we are all potentially exposed to this condition.46 I submit that how
Agambens statement reads to you depends largely on whom you think he means by we. Some of us
will always appear to be part of the People Agamben perceives within the body of Western law , as if our
consanguinity is not in question until confronted by what we do with it. Some of us, however, only appear within the body of Western
law once recognition of consanguinity arrives as a violence to destroy collective and resistant difference. Thus,
today, we are all exposed to bare life not because we appear similarly to Western law, but only to the
extent that we are all caught distinctly in the hierarchies that structure its persistently colonial
formation. While I expect this point is not lost on my readers, it bears repeating. Ongoing reaction to the U.S. Patriot Act or the war
on terror by many white Europeans and white settlers suggests that their potential exposure to bare
life comes as an unwelcome surprise . Produced by the securitisation of liberal modernity, white liberal subjects might think
that the Act or the war abrogate freedoms promised by a law that should protect them the very law
that they invite racialised and colonised peoples to affirm, as if extending its rule leads to liberation
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rather than subjection. Yet if we situate the Patriot Act or the war on terror in context of settler
colonialism, as does Indigenous feminist theorist Andrea Smith, we can ask what shifts if we understand the Bush regime
not as the erosion of U.S. democracy but as its fulfillment? If we understand American democracy as
premised on the genocide of indigenous peoples?47 Such a perspective informs alliances by Palestinians and Indigenous Americans
who critique the war on terror for having linked white supremacy, Orientalism, and racial nationalism to reinforce the United States and Israel as settler colonial states. In such
a light, Agambens assertion might suggest that we are all exposed to bare life to the extent that the colonial exception and its universalisation within Western law now mark
all peoples for elimination just as Indigenous peoples always were and still are marked. Yet, conversely, if Agamben names an exception that settlers assigned to others now
being potentially assigned to them, then for all of us to be exposed to bare life is to potentially position us all as settlers. I write provocatively here to suggest that a normative
relationality between Indigenous and settler structures all logics of inclusion and exclusion in settler law and, therefore, in its universalisation as Western law. Scholars must
We must theorise
interrogate how this power-laden distinction imbues not only settler societies, but also their conditioning of liberal modernity along global scales.
settler colonialism as historical grounds for the globalisation of biopower, and as an activity
producing biopower in the present that requires denaturalising critique .
Their essentialist understanding of the sovereign occludes the fact that numerous
cultural and historical factors have gone into education policy. --- that means the aff
cant solve broader violence and the critique accesses the root cause of the aff.
Halit Tagma 09, Professor of Political Science, Arizona State , Homo Sacer vs. Homo Soccer Mom: Reading Agamben and Foucault in the War on Terror,
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Oct.-Dec. 2009), pp. 407-435
Sovereign decisions are always already informed by historical and cultural understandings as to
who counts as a member of the "good species." The "good species," "the inside," and the body politic
have been constructed by colonial discourse . As Roxanne Doty has pointed out, colonial discourse has had a vital role in the construction of
Western nations. She further points out that race,
religion, and other marks of difference have played an important role in
national classification.94 The treatment of faraway people as inferior and exotic has played an important role in nation building in its classic sense. Therefore,
who counts as a citizen, a "legitimate" member of a "legitimate" nation, is the product and effect of
centuries of interaction of the West with its others. Understood in this sense, sovereign decisions (whether made at the top
or bottom level) are informed and shaped by a cultural and colonial history . This is neglected in Agamben's
grand analysis of Western politics. Therefore, sovereign power needs the classification, hierarchization, and othering provided by a regime of truth in
order to conduct its violent power. Only certain types of people could be rendered as bare life and thrown into a
zone of indistinction. Understood this way, it is easier to comprehend the "smooth" production of homines sacri out of Middle Eastern subjects. In the early
stages of the war in Afghanistan, as Michael Ratner and Ellen Ray point out, tens of thousands of people were collected by the Northern Alliance.95 Among the collected were
ordinary foreign aid workers, refugees, and probable fighters of the Taliban regime. They were sold from $50 to $5,000 per head to Coalition Forces.96 Even though there
was no real investigation based on tangible and concrete evidence, some these captives were flown to Guantnamo. As Fox points out, if the prisoners were wearing a Casio
brand watch, this meant an higher prize in the eyes of the interrogators, as it signaled that the prisoner was a probable AI Qaeda bombmaker.97 The small difference between
wearing a Casio watch in some parts of the world, as opposed to others, is at the ground level what makes it possible for a body to be become a homo sacer. They can then
be flown off to an unknown place to face an unknown future that get read and interpreted by petty sovereigns. Such differences inform the decisions that render bodies as
homo sacer, which are thrown into a zone of indistinction. In
the modern age, no doubt, Agamben would argue that even the body
of a soccer mom - an obedient national flag-waving subject - has entered into political and strategic
calculations . However, the soccer mom is not exposed to the violence of homo sacer. Regimes of truth
and disciplines produce hierarchically ordered subject positions, and this is an aspect of biopower. The
theoretical priority that Agamben gives to sovereign power is reversed when it is shown that biopower makes it possible for the petty agents of the state to conduct sovereign
violence. Sovereign power is informed and shaped by biopower.
Agambens purported stance against imperialism is the reason his theory must be
subject to critique --- the universalizing concept of homo sacer levels difference
between distinct manifestations of oppression and repeats the universalizing gesture
of coloniality.
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Unlike Hardt and Negri's universalist rhetoric of empire, which accepts the premises of globalization theory, Agamben and Butler turn to the universal not as a philosophical
ally of globalization, but rather as a means of theorizing in what they see as a clearly imperial moment. But precisely because they are offered as
universalist analyses that critique imperialism, the status of the universal in these works demands
attention . I begin with Agamben because his concept of bare life as well as the related state of exception have been so widely used by philosophers, sociologists,
political theorists, and legal and cultural studies scholars that Agamben has become arguably one of the most influential of contemporary theorists. Slavoj Zizek (2002: 100),
for instance, sees Agamben as demonstrating the fact that in today's "'post-politics", the very democratic public space is a mask concealing the fact that, ultimately, we are all
Homo sacer.' Human rights theorists seek to explain terms of incarceration through the idea of people being reduced to bare life, an aspect that Judith Butler uses to
The attractiveness of Agamben's
understand the Bush administration's use of indefinite detention at Guantanamo (see Jenkins 2004; Butler 2004: 67).
conceptualization of bare life lies in its potential to explain the everyday workings of power in
contemporary liberal democracies, as well as in conditions of complete domination such as Guantanamo, and
to demonstrate the links between the two. And yet the foundations of bare life rest upon a
problematic Orientalism that has been unquestioningly accepted by the numerous scholars using
Agamben. Let us examine Agamben's theorization of bare life, which he develops most extensively in Homo Sacer, an attempt to understand the nature of sovereignty
in the West. Agamben derives his concept of bare life from the ancient Greek separation of life into zoe and bios. Zoe expresses the 'simple fact of living common to all living
beings (animals, men, or gods)' and bios, "the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group' (Agamben 1998: 1). In the classical world, zoe or sheer living was
excluded from the polis and relegated to the sphere of oikos or home (2). In contrast to Foucault, who distinguishes between biopolitical and sovereign power, Agamben
argues that what has always constituted sovereignty in the West is the biopolitical production of bare life, of subjects who can be abandoned by the state, whose exclusion
defines sovereign power. Agamben derives the concept of bare life from a figure from archaic Roman law: homo sacer or sacred man, who can be killed but not sacrificed, a
figure produced from the sovereign power to decide what constitutes bare life, life between zoe and bios. What constitutes modernity is that the exception, bare life or the life
of homo sacer, becomes the rule and starts to dwell in the political (9). And this bare life, as is seen in the idea of habeus corpus, becomes the basis for both control and the
idea of rights. Modern democracy therefore does not simply exclude bare life or the body of the homo sacer, but 'shatters it and disseminates it into every individual body'
(124). Bare life thus becomes the hidden foundation for the political order. The most extreme example of this new biopolitical sovereignty is the Jew under Nazism who, as
bare life, can be killed but not sacrificed (114). In camp, 'the most absolute biopolitical space', power and bare life confront each other without mediation and biopolitics
becomes politics (171). Agamben argues that the camp is the nomos or the hidden model of the modern, dictating not only visible cases such as refugees but extending
through society as a whole, making us all virtually homines sacri (175). Elaborating further on the idea of bare life in State of Exception, Agamben suggests how Bush's policy
of indefinite detention produces the idea of bare life in its maximum state of indeterminacy, which reaches its end point in Guantanamo (Agamben 2005: 3-4).
Agamben's articulation of the idea of bare life is powerful because it takes us from the tactics of power to their workings
in specific situations and moves us, as he says, from the Foucauldian prison of penal law to the camp of absolute
exception, from punishment to indefinite detention. And Agamben's work is particularly attractive in its use of the ideas of bare life and sovereign exception to analyse
contemporary manifestations of exceptions such as refugees or foreigners in Europe. However, what is most interesting in Agamben's
theorizations is the sheer absence of colonialism to considerations of western sovereignty. In the

spirit of Agamben's critique of Foucault, then, we can say that we need to move not only from prison to
camp but also from prison and camp to colony. Such a move would not only illuminate the role of the
exception of colonial difference to the construction of modern biopolitical power, but also help
understand the construction of the western biopolitical subject. As postcolonial scholars have been
pointing out for some time now, the very construction of the subject in the West cannot be separated
from the construction of the Other in the colonies. Indeed, as Gauri Viswanathan persuasively argued in Masks of Conquest, the very
instruments of culture used to create obedient and exemplary British subjects in public schools were first tried out in the colonies. Numerous studies of gender and domesticity
have also established the intimate connections between metropolitan and colonial identities (e.g. Levine 2004; Stoler 2002). Can we, therefore, think of bare life as formulated
through the writ of habeus corpus in late seventeenth-century Europe without thinking of how the body in the West was itself being constructed through complex systems of
identification and disidentification from the bodies of the natives in North America? More importantly, can we think about the sovereign right to determine bare life between zoe
and bios without thinking about the systems of racial/human classification propounded by scientists such as Linnaeus, Buffon, and Blumenbach and which helped consolidate
colonialism? Indeed, one only has to remember the constant construction of natives as children in need of rescue to realize the centrality of colonial exclusion to the
construction of the western polis. My
point is obviously not to fault Agamben for simply not having colonization as
his subject matter, but rather for constructing, like Foucault, a West apart from the rest. Furthermore, if camp
is an extreme manifestation of the production of bare life, a place where bare life confronts power
without mediation, how does that explain whose bare life comes to be marked for a place such as the
camp? Why was it particularly the Jew who was marked as bare life in Nazi camps and why are Middle Easterners being marked as bare life today? We might all
be 'virutally' homines sacri, but only some of us are marked to be in the permanent state of
exception, a localization without order such as the camp (Agamben 1998: 175). The racial fracture at the core of
modernity and colonialism, in other words, needs to be addressed if theory put at the service of
addressing contemporary totalitarianism does not itself become imperial and universalizing.
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Its not a link of omission --- Agambens theory continues and naturalizes coloniality.
Only the alt solves.
Studies, 1:1, The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now, p. 68-72]
Scholars must examine the past and present biopolitics of settler colonialism to challenge presentist
horizons in theories of biopower and colonialism. I argued that liberal governance under Western law is
presaged and instituted by the biopolitics of settler colonialism. Here, Indigenous peoples are recognised with a provisional
humanity for amalgamation by settler nations, where their elimination nevertheless follows whether they defy or conform to a promised consanguinity with settlers who
replace. Sherene Razack and Sunera Thobani have modelled the acknowledgment of settler colonialism as a condition of the colonial biopolitics scholars increasingly
diagnose in contemporary states and global regimes. Yet my argument extends theirs by requesting even broader enunciation of settler colonialism as an activity directly
manifesting as the biopolitics of the present. My account suggests that the growth of liberal modernity by universalising Western law and its exception was facilitated by settler
states that circulate and sustain them today. Here I echo Anna Tsings account of the conditions of theories and practices of globalisation the global situation when I
argue that they also arise in relation to the intimate and systemic procedures of settler colonialism.37 In particular, scholars
must challenge
ahistoricity in accounts of the coloniality of biopower, as these temporalise colonialisms in various
pasts only to link them to supposedly unprecedented power relations in the present. Certainly distinctions within
present power relations must be specified. But to posit their temporality as advanced beyond colonialism is to naturalise
how settler colonialism acts continuously within them. The persistence and naturalisation of settler
colonialism defines the present as colonial, while occluding settler colonialisms action in and as the
power we wish to critique. Even to mark this would transform most work on coloniality and biopower .
Yet while I did intend my words to call for such analysis, my argument more deeply marks the specific biopolitics of settler colonialism as generalised tactics of late modern
power relations, which proliferate by naturalising their settler colonial conditions. Agambens work is ripe for such analysis given that,
by the appearance of State of Exception, the superpower status of the U nited S tates becomes his central case. Yet given that his
prior scholarship concertedly traced a European horizon, citing the U nited S tates as exemplary of Western sovereignty
occludes its formation outside Europe through settler colonial processes that remain opaque to his
critique. For instance, when Agamben traces the history of the camp to Spanish Cuba in 1896 and to
the twentieth century British conquest of the Boers, he omits knowledge in Native studies that
nineteenth-century U.S. expansion used internment camps to relocate Indigenous peoples and to
model their militarised containment on reservations.38 Some scholars date this process to the 1837 Treaty of New Echota passed by
Congress in disregard of Cherokee protest which through military force contained Cherokee people for removal on the Trail of Tears.39 Another noted example is the 1862
Dakota War, in which Dakota peoples denounced the breaking of treaties by Congress and the State of Minnesota by fighting back against land theft. The war concluded with
the largest mass hanging in U.S. history, of 38 Dakota men at the Lower Sioux Agency; the three-year internment of 1700 Dakota people at Fort Snelling on Pike Island,
Minnesota, where over 300 died of starvation and disease; and the forced relocation of survivors hundreds of miles to militarised reservations.40 Pike Island sits at the
confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, a central site of the traditional spiritual homeland of the Dakota people. Today it remains a Minnesota state park, where
the now-forested internment site is overlooked by the massive stone fort, its gun turrets still pointing down at passing bicyclists and day hikers, while historical re-enactors of
U.S. soldiers employed by the fort educate visiting children by teaching them how to march in formation while pretending to hold bayonets.41 Dakota activist, historian and
critical theorist Waziyatawin has helped lead annual Dakota Commemorative Marches the 150 miles from Lower Sioux Agency to Pike Island during the cold autumn season
when these events transpired. Dakota activists continue to mobilise to Take Down the Fort and return the lands and internment site to the Dakota people.42 Given that the
1862 events followed Minnesota Governor Ramsey declaring that the Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state, the
I do not
genocidal biopolitics that defined Dakota people for one and a half centuries would seem relevant to a history of the camp within Western modernity.43
mark Agambens neglect of histories such as this as an erasure correctable by citation. Rather, I am
identifying here a naturalisation and continuation of settler colonialism within Agambens theoretical
apparatus and the horizons of critical theory. Certainly, Agambens account of the camp elides the encampment of Indigenous peoples as
distinctive nations resisting incorporation by a settler nation. Yet, at once, Agamben obliquely invokes, without discussing, two more cases of settler colonialism: Spanish
removal of Cuban revolutionaries seeking self-rule on lands erased of Indigenous national difference; and British containment of Boer settler colonists so as to pursue their
colonialism was already fully present, yet
own white settler conquest of African peoples and lands. We see here that white supremacist settler
fully occluded in the history of the camp provided by Agamben, whose citational trail leads to
twentieth century Europe and National Socialism.44 But what if we took Agamben seriously, so that whether marked or unmarked, his
citations prove the case: that the camp does arise within white supremacist settler colonisation, only later to be transported to the Nazi regime? Does our understanding of the
camp shift if its definition and containment of racialised populations by the modern biopolitical state was a lesson learned in settler colonial situations and subsequently
applied to Europe? Does the camps spatialisation of the exception come to exemplify Western law only on its return-arrival to Europe; or, might it have borne that capacity on
Indigenous American and African lands? Does its European arrival then constitute a reckoning with what the West could become by following lessons already learned under
settler colonialism? And once the camp finally returns again to Cuba this time, under the United States as supreme arbiter of global law and its exceptions is settler
colonialism irrelevant to its form? Does settler colonialism represent only a historical footnote to U.S. rule at Guantanamo Bay, as representative of an unprecedented scope
of power in the contemporary world? Or does the ongoing life of settler colonialism in fact condition and produce all that is new and transformative about that power? Scholars
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can trace how the U.S. establishment of a zone of indistinction for enemy combatants on settled Indigenous lands learns from the
conquest of
Indigenous peoples and its naturalisation, which remain the states foundational and sustained activity.
Regardless of the answers to my questions, the evidence that they have been unimaginable in theory of biopower even if a theorist
cites settler situations indicates that settler colonialism remains naturalised within theory and requires a new
genealogy to be transformed. Scholars must not interpret modern state biopolitics or its
extrapolations in global governance as recent rather than deeply historical phenomena. Nor should we
let the preeminent role of any settler state in those processes appear to be the action of the West,
without specifying how settler colonialism acts as the Wests leading edge by establishing grounds
for the globalisation and universalisation of its governance. The biopolitics of settler colonialism sustain in the persistence of settler
states, and we must interpret their activities as precisely enacting settler colonialism. These notably include the proliferation of Western modernity and liberal governance
using methods first learned and still defended by settlement. National resistance to incorporation in the body of Western law continues to result in being placed in the camp.
The power of Western law demands incorporation and justifies excision by containing the differences it encounters in a globalizing world: a process highlighted already by
Indigenous peoples who confront the West and its law as settler colonial.
Relations of coloniality are the condition of possibility for biopolitical violence.

Studies, 1:1, The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now, p. 55]
Yet significanttensions appear in the work of Foucault and Agamben and, hence, also in Agambens revision of Foucault in
that neither scholar directly theorises colonialism as a context for biopower. Scholars of colonialism
respond by arguing that colonialism is intrinsic to processes of biopower in the past and present.
Reading Foucaults account of the modern biopolitical state in relation to colonial situations, Ann Laura
Stoler definitively demonstrated that its racial, sexual and national power arise at colonial sites or
relationally among colonies and metropoles, not as projections from a European source.8 Following Stoler,
modern biopower is the product and process of a colonial world . Achille Mbembe extended such reinterpretations of Foucault in
Razack
conversation with Agamben by reading the colony as exception, which defines Western law amid the globalisation of European capital and empire.9 Sherene
and Sunera Thobani engage all such theories to explain that in contemporary modes of biopower, the colonial returns
or never left; and, notably, both centre settler colonialism as a condition of the power they examine.10
Mark Rifkin signally engages Agambens theses with settler colonialism by arguing that the geopolitics of conquest place Indigenous peoples in a state of exception that
these scholars respond to
simultaneously troubles the territorial and national integrity of settlers as representatives of Western law.11 Together,
colonialisms elision in theories of biopower by demonstrating that it conditions biopower and critical
theory an intervention deepened by Rifkins and my work centreing settler colonialism for study.
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LinkAnti-Bully Discourse
The 1AC Shalet evidence advocates for anti-bullying legislation
Anti-bullying legislation will be implemented alongside comphensive sex ed three

impacts
1. facilitates heteronormativity by believing anti-gay bullying is a result of individual
pathologies
2. this evidence is a solvency take out there is no evidence that anti-bullying laws at
as a deterrent
3. put black students in juvie at 16x higher rate.
Quinn and Meiners, 13 - Therese Quinn is Associate Professor of Art History and director of the Museum
and Exhibition Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Erica R. Meiners is Professor of Gender
and Womens Studies and Education at Northeastern Illinois University (From Anti-Bullying Laws and Gay
Marriages to Queer Worlds and Just Futures, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Inaugural Issue, Fall
2013, Project Muse)
As is clear from the snapshots of research and media coverage we present, violence is a problem and queer
youth are targeted, and yet the question is framed narrowly: If not anti-bullying laws, then what? We suggest
that the states criminalizing responses mask the complex roots of queer violence and distract
audiences from understanding the importance of structural factors that facilitate and naturalize
violence targeted at queers. These anti-bullying laws overwhelmingly work to transfer structural
factors that perpetuate and reward heteronormativity into individual pathologies and also suggest
that the way to address homophobia is to punish individual perpetrators. The majority of responses to
harm in school do not make connections between forms of structural violence including the lack of LGBT
teachers and curriculaand forms of interpersonal violence. In a related area, a number of scholar activists
have come out in opposition to hate crimes legislation arguing that not only is there no evidence that the
existence of hate crimes legislation functions as a deterrent to reduce biased acts of violence, but that hate
crimes legislation supports a culture of punishment that distracts us from understanding how LGBTQ and other
folks have found themselves punished through hate crimes legislation.33 The Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a
national organization that works to ensure that all people are free to self-determine gender identity and
expression, in a statement opposing hate crimes legislation, states: The evidence . . . shows that hate crime
laws and other get tough on crime measures do not deter or prevent violence. Increased
incarceration does not deter [End Page 156] others from committing violent acts motivated by hate,
does not rehabilitate those who have committed past acts of hate, and does not make anyone safer. As
we see trans people profiled by police, disproportionately arrested and detained, caught in systems of poverty
and detention, and facing extreme violence in prisons, jails and detention centers, we believe that this system
itself is a main perpetrator of violence against our communities.34 In a culture of pervasive homo- and
transphobia, hate crimes laws, like anti-bullying laws, are seductive with their promise to punish
perpetrators and distract us from an examination of the complex roots of harm. Activist and journalist
Liliana Segura argues that politicians who voted in favor of the Matthew Shepard Act, the 2009 legislation that
amended the 1969 Hate Crimes Act to include sexual orientation and gender identity, many of whom also
voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, used their vote as an opportunity to appear tough on crime while also
appearing to support gay rights.35 Further, as social justice lawyer Andrea Ritchie has identified, anti-
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bullying laws are mini hate crimes laws likely to both reflect and reinforce dominant sets of power
arrangements.36 In fact, recent research highlights that queer youth, the targets of hetero-norming
violence in schools, are also more severely punished in other institutional settings.37 Angela Irvines
research with the National Council on Crime and Delinquency demonstrates that queer youth are
disproportionately represented in juvenile justice systems: At least 15 percent of the population in juvenile
detention is LGBT. Dice the numbers according to gender and the statistics get worse: 27 percent of girls
booked into detention sites across the country disclosed lesbian or bisexual sexual orientations or otherwise
failed to conform to expectations of how girls should behave. Like kids of color, LGBT youth are punished more
often than their straight peers.38 Not only are LGBT youth overrepresented in justice systems, Irvines
multistate research shows that LGBT youth are targeted for harsher sanctions at every level of the system:
[LGB] and gender non-conforming youth in juvenile detention were twice as likely to have a history of home
removal by a social worker, placement in a group or foster home, or homelessness when compared with their
straight peers. Theyre also twice as likely to face detention in the juvenile justice system for running away,
prostitution, sex with someone of the same gender, and minor offenses like loitering and truancy. Lesbian, gay,
and bisexual (but not gender non-conforming) youth are also more likely than their straight peers to face
detention for a violent offense. The harshest disparities show up in punishments for running away: 28 percent
of gay and bisexual boys are detained for running away compared with 12 percent of straight boys, and 38
[End Page 157] percent of lesbian and bisexual girls are detained for running away compared with 17 percent
of straight girls.39 Not only is there no evidence that anti-gay bullying laws, like other forms of hate
crimes legislation, will act as a deterrent toward bias-related harm, this criminalizing response
circulates in a landscape where LGBT youth are already disproportionately punished by state entities
tasked with ensuring our collective safety and security. Strengthening a Punitive and Racialized Regime
Another gay win frequently identified is the increase in both the focus on bullying in schools and the resulting
attempts by schools to institute anti-bullying regulations. The rationale for anti-bullying laws, often presented as
necessary to protect children, is seemingly hard to contest. Yet, as previously noted, instead of excavating the
heteronormativity, trans- and homophobia in schools and communities, state responses to bullying define the
problem narrowly and posit punishment and criminalization as the response. Anti-bullying laws suggest that
if we removed the few bad kids that are causing problems, schools would be safer for queers .
However, these initiatives are not capable of identifying and addressing social inequality. For example,
a 2009 Gallup survey showed that 46 percent of those polled are not supportive of adoptive rights for gays and
lesbians, and 2012 polls showed that 46 percent of Americans oppose marriage for gay people.40 Attitudes
like these indicate the prevalence of social anxieties about queer people. In particular, nonnormative forms of
gender identity and expression continue to receive punishment.41 Without acknowledgement of the structural
and institutional contextforms of state violencethe individuated anti-bullying laws and other punitive
sanctions operating in schools will target those who are already suspect within national logics of race, class,
gender, and other marginalizing categories. For example, school suspension rates for African Americans,
and in particular for African American boys, are significantly higher than for their White
counterparts.42 As summarized in a 2010 article in an Educational Researcher article that surveyed all
available national research on disciplinary sanctions, Males of all racial and ethnic groups are more likely than
females to receive disciplinary sanctions. In 2004, only 1% of Asian Pacific Islander females were suspended,
compared with 11% of Asian Pacific Islander males. Expulsion data from that same year showed that White
females were half as likely to be expelled as White males (p < .001), and similarly, Black females were half as
likely to be [End Page 158] expelled as Black males (p < .05). Black males are especially at risk for
receiving discipline sanctions, with one study showing that Black males were 16 times as likely as
White females to be suspended.43 These gendered and racialized practices of removing students from their
educational settingsthe most dramatic educational sanction availablestart in preschools, as indicated in a
2005 survey of 40 states prekindergarten programs.44,45 It is important to note that available data on school
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suspensions and expulsions shows that these practices do not improve youth academic or behavioral
performance, and suspensions are not reserved for acts of violence or actions that might be perceived as
dangerous. In their review of the research on the reasons for suspensions, Losen and Skiba46 found wide
variations among the reasons students were suspended nationwide and identified that suspensions were not
the result of violent and serious behavior.47 In one state-wide study, only 5%ofall out-of-school suspensions
were issued for disciplinary incidents that are typically considered serious or dangerous, such as possession of
weapons or drugs. The remaining 95% of suspensions fell into two categories: disruptive behavior and
other.48 Excessively punitive school disciplinary measures that disproportionately target the most
marginalized in school contexts made national headlines in 2011, highlighting the educational cost to young
people when they are pushed out of school.49 Within this landscape, it is not a stretch to predict that anti-
bullying laws will be unevenly implemented and that certain students will continue to be disproportionately
targeted and punished. Although all laws are intended to prevent future harm, the measures that are most
powerful generally have sanction and punishment components. For example, in 2011 California made bullying
illegal with the passage of passed Seths Law, yet the final version of the bill was stripped of all language
mandating counseling or restorative justice practices. Rather than being proactive, the law is retroactively
punitive, involving spot checks of schools to see if they are in compliance.50 New Jerseys 2011 anti-
bullying legislation tightened relationships between schools and local law enforcement, forcing
schools and officials to report incidences more quickly, to create school-based anti-bullying
specialists, and to increase penalties for bullying. It also provides for a Crimestoppers telephone line,
to make reporting easier, but [which] also ups the ante by involving law enforcement rather than
resolving issues in the principals office.51 Because schools are sites of surveillance that are neither
race nor gender neutral, these laws entrench extant relationships to law enforcement.52
Criminalization in and outside of schools is a process of racialization , through which youth of color
are normalized as those who are bad and in trouble.53 These laws falsely assume [End Page 159]
that law enforcement is free of violence or bullying, yet police and other security forces are often key
perpetrators of sexual and other forms of violence.54 Finally, this turn to criminalization as a response to
homophobia and punishing gender normativity augments a carceral system that is deeply flawed,
fundamentally shaped by racism, and actively reproductive of heteronormativity and gender
conformity. Thus, it is a solution that fails to effectively address the immediate problem of anti-queer
school-based violence, which we argue is exacerbated by new forms of privatized schooling.
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LinkBiopolitical Discourse
The 1AC biopolitical analysis is Eurocentric and disavows the racialized positionalities
that grant coherence to their analysis black studies transforms the human into a
heuristic model that challenges biopoltiics better than Eurocentric philosophy
Weheliye 2016 [Alexander, professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University where he
teaches black literature and culture, critical theory, social technologies, and popular culture. He is the author of
multiple books, Critical Ethnic Studies: Racializing Biopolitics and Bare Life,(p478-480)(Haq 7/3/2017)
Bare life and biopolitics discourse in particular is plagued by a strong anti-identity politics strain in the
Anglo-American academy in its positioning of bare life and biopolitics as uncontaminated by and prior
to reductive or essentialist political identities such as race and gender. Supposing that analyses of race and
racism are inherently essentialist whereas those concerning bare life and biopolitics are not because
they do not suitably resemble real-world identities ----allows bare life and biopolitics to appear
unelected by identarian locality and thus as proper objects of knowledge. is occurs because the ideas of white
European theorists are not regarded as affectable by a critical consciousness that would to open them up toward historical reality, toward society,
toward human needs and interests, to point up those concrete instances drawn from everyday reality that lie outside or just be-yond the interpretive
area.3 Traveling
theories, particularly those supposedly transparent and universal soldiers in Mans philosophical army, should be ex-
posed to and reconstructed not only according to the factors Edward Said mentions but also in concordance with a critical
consciousness that probes the conceptual constraints of these theories, especially as it pertains to the
analytics of race, and exhumes their historico-geographical aectability.4 Since bare life and biopolitics discourse largely
occludes race as a critical category of analysis (and not race as such), as do many other current articulations of critical theory,
it cannot provide the methodological instruments for diagnosing the tight bonds between humanity
and racializing assemblages in the modern era. the volatile rapport between race and the human is defined above all by two
constellations: first, there exists no portion of the modern human that is not subject to racialization, which determines the hierarchical ordering of the
Homo sapiens species into humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans; second, as a result humanity has held a very different status for the traditions
of the racially oppressed. Man will be abolished like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea only if we disarticulate the modern human (Man) from
different modalities of the human come to
its twin: racializing assemblages.5 My principal question, phrased plainly, is this: What
light if we do not take the liberal humanist figure of Man as the master subject but focus on how
humanity has been imagined and lived by those subjects excluded from this domain? Some scholars
associated with black and ethnic studies have begun to undertake the project of thinking humanity
from perspectives beyond the liberal humanist subject, Man. 6 there humanity emerges as an object of knowledge, which
orders the means of conceptualizing how the human materializes in the worlds of those subjects habitually not thought to define or belong to this field.
the greatest contribution to critical thinking by black studies and critical ethnic studies more generally
is the transformation of the human into a heuristic model and not an ontological fait accompli, which
seems particularly important in our current historical moment. Through the human as a secular entity of scientific and
humanistic inquiry has functioned as a central topos of modernity since the Renaissance, questions of humanity have gained importance in the academy
and beyond in the wake of recent technological developments, especially the advent of biotechnology and the proliferation of informational media. These
discussions, which in critical discourses in the humanities and social sciences have relied heavily on the concepts of the cyborg and the posthuman,
largely do not take into account race as a constitutive category in thinking about the parameters of humanity. Reading thinkers such as Jacques Derrida,
Michel Foucault, or Louis Althusser today, one cannot help but notice the manifestolike character of their writings, historicizing the Western conception of
Man (Foucault) providing a more scientific, nonhumanist version of Marxism (Althusser), or attempting to think at the limits of humanism while being
aware that this just reinscribes the centrality of Man (Derrida). Going back further, the axial project of linguistic, anthropological, and literary structuralism
that emerged in the aftermath of World War II was to displace a holistic notion of the human through various structural features that constitute, frame,
and interpellate Man. We can also locate these tendencies in the German philosophical traditions that inspired a number of poststructuralist projects, or,
for that matter, in the works of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Ferdinand de Saussure. These thinkers, however, are hardly regarded as posthumanist
philosophers; instead they are classified as antihumanist.
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The 1ACs idea of power and ontology as a universal structure of Bare Life does not
account for the structural violence of antiblackness that makes bare life not contingent
but structural ban from subjectivity that persists even in the after-life of slavery
Menzel 14 (Annie, University of Washington, Political Science (Political Theory), Graduate Student The
Political Life of Black Infant Mortality
https://dlib.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/bitstream/handle/1773/26159/Menzel_washington_0250E_13773
.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y/)
Chapter 1, Infant Mortality and Social Death, explores the antebellum roots of the racially bifurcated
biopolitics of infant mortality: the prehistory of the genealogy above. It draws on the work of Saidiya
Hartman, Jared Sexton, Frank Wilderson, and other scholars who argue that present-day US blacks
continue to live the afterlife of slavery, visible in the post-emancipation continuities of normalized
African American subjection to violencedirect and indirectdispossession, and exclusion from
human norms. I argue that the persistent black-white disparity in infant mortality represents an
important case of this quotidian violence. Following these scholars in employing Orlando 46 Pattersons
concept of social death to grasp the conditions of what Sexton calls the political ontology of anti-
blackness (2010b, 36-37), I track the new figuration of priceless white infancytrue babyhoodthat
emerged in the 19th century, and the ways that enslaved black infants were constitutively excluded from this
figuration. The ontological exclusion of black infants from real infancy persisted after emancipation, I
argue, both in the overt biopolitical exclusions of the race traits paradigm, and in the failure of later
biopolitical interventions to address the root causes of black infant mortality, from the Sheppard-Towner
paradigm to the present day.
The complex network of biopolitical regulation and management outlied by the 1AC is
not external to the prison, but rather is given life by antiblackness the school-as-
prison and the prison-as-school are elaborations of the discourses and technologies
produced under chattel slavery. This must be the starting point of our analysis
Dillon 13 [Stephen, assistant professor of Queer Studies, holds a B.A. from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in American Studies with a minor in
Critical Feminist and Sexuality Studies from the University of Minnesota | Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State,
Dillon | Vol. 1 pg 228 232] //shuler
the Middle Passage, The door [of no return] signifies the

In A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, Dionne Brand writes of
historical moment which colours all moments in the Diaspora. It accounts for the ways we observe and are observed as
people, whether its through the lens of social injustice or the laws of human accomplishment. The door exists as an absence. A thing in fact which
we do not know about, a place we do not know. Yet, it exists as the ground we walk... Where one stands in a society seems always
related to this historical experience. Where one can be observed is relative to that history. All human effort seems to
emanate from this door.32 For Brand, the Middle Passage and chattel-slavery compose the original
template for modern power. The door of no return is the site from which all disciplinary and biopolitical
regimes emanate . It (and not it alone) determines the ways people are regulated, visualized, mobilized,
positioned, and organized. Yet, the deathly touch of terror and the warm embrace of inclusion are not just stained from the original scene.
What began at the door is also transmitted, transformed, renewed, and repositioned in our present
day.33 This is what Saidiya Hartman calls the afterlife of slavery, where premature death, incarceration, limited
access to healthcare and education, and poverty are structured by the logics and technologies of
chattel-slavery.34 Under this analytic, the past does not give way to the present, slowly dissolving under the
bright shinning light of progress; slaverys afterlife is the pasts possession of the present. The past
holds the present captive structuring, surrounding, and inhabiting it. The fabrication of concrete and
compartmentalized conceptions of time and space dissolves under the crushing weight of the blood stained gate. But this possession does not just take
the form of the tactile, visible, and known. Part of the afterlife of slavery emanates from an absence that cannot be recovered or repaired. The door of no
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return is not a place, it is a gap that founds the nowit is history as the unknown. The present rests upon this rupture , upon the
unknowable, upon the forgotten, and upon the dead. In this chapter, I use the term possession as a modification of the concept of haunting. In Ghostly
Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery Gordon argues that haunting describes how that which seems to be not theresomething
that is absent or missingis often a seething presence...acting on and meddling with taken for granted realities.35 A ghost is one way something lost,
disappeared, or dead makes itself known. Engaging a haunting means to consider the apparitions lingering outside the frame of disciplinary knowledge,
to make contact with the reality of fictions and the fictions of reality, to reckon with endings that are not over and past events that loiter in the
present.36 If haunting names the lingering presence of the dead in the realm of the livingthe present absence of what is there and yet hidden, the
feeling that there is something in the room with you even when your eyes tell you otherwisethen possession is when the ghost does not haunt, but
rather, takes hold. Possession is when the ghost inhabits and controls. To be haunted is to see the ghost that has been waiting for your field of vision to
change. By contrast, a possessive spirit is not so passive and patient. Unlike a ghost, a spirit does not wait; it grabs hold of you first, perhaps without
your knowledge. What seizes you are not the murmurs of the oppressed or the whispered demands of those killed by state violence and terror
possession is the deathly grip of the dominant. Possession is a psychological state in which an individual's normal personality is replaced by another;
domination by something (as an evil spirit, a passion, or an idea); or something owned, occupied, or controlled.37 To be possessed is to be under the
control of something more powerful than the imagined free will of the liberal individual. We can witness possession in the relationship between race,
gender, and death as theorized by black feminists in the 1970s. For example, in her 1968 essay The Black Revolution in America, Grace Lee Boggs
argues that American capitalism was born out of the labor of black slaves and has since used white
workers to defend the system and...keep Blacks in their place at the bottom of the ladder, scavenging
the old jobs, old homes, old churches, and old schools discarded by whites...thereby contributing to
the overall capital of the country.38 She goes on to outline a regime of biopolitical management
animated by this history: They [black youth] also recognize that although a particular struggle may be precipitated by an individual incident,
their struggle is not against just one or another individual but against a whole power structure
comprising a complex network of politicians, university and school administrators, landlords, merchants, usurers, realtors, insurance
personal, contractors, union leaders, licensing and inspection bureaucrats, racketeers, lawyers, policementhe overwhelming majority of who are white
and absentee, and who
exploit the black ghetto the same way the Western powers exploit the colonies and
neo-colonies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.39 Within a theory of power as possession, slaverys
relationship to the present is more than the haunting of a ghost. Slavery, for Boggs, is not lurking behind contemporary
formations of power. Instead, the complex network of biopolitical regulation and management outlined by
Boggs is given life by an anti-blackness as old as liberal freedom. Contemporary biopolitics are possessed
by discourses and technologies produced under slavery that were carried into the future (our
present) by race, gender, sexuality, and anti-blackness. As Omiseeke Tinsley writes, The brown-skinned, fluid- bodied experiences now called
blackness and queerness surfaced in intercontinental, maritime contacts hundreds of years ago: in the seventeenth century, in the Atlantic Ocean.40
Extending Ruth Wilson Gilmores definition of racism as state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploration of group-differentiated vulnerability to
premature death, we can understand race and death as a possessive spirit that works as one, born out of the genocide of conquest and slavery.41
Being placed at the bottom of the ladder by an expansive network of racialized management and control is Boggss way of describing the uneven
distribution of value and disposability produced by slaverys ongoing role in the present. Although death is sometimes a natural biological phenomenon,
it is more often manufactured and distributed by regimes of power far removed from ones last breath or final heartbeat. Race is one such technology; it
is a mechanism for distributing life and death, and for black people, race and white supremacy are motivated by a past of subjection, subjugation,
Race possesses life in both the biological and biopolitical sense,
torture, terror, and disposability that has not ended.42
ending or extending biological life for individuals and populations. While race sometimes haunts, it more often
limits life chances by inhabiting and controlling individuals, institutions, and populations. In short, we
are possessed by race, and death and life are the outcome . The relationship between race and
possession is also evident in the writing of prisoners and activists in the 1970s who connected the
contemporary prison to chattel- slavery. Within this body of work, the contemporary prison is animated by logics, technologies, and
discourses constructed under nineteenth-century U.S. slavery. For countless prisoners and activists, race (and anti-blackness) were
instruments that transcended space and time so that the past could invade and contort the present in
its image. For instance, in his best-selling collection of prison writing Soledad Brother published in 1970, George Jackson described the ways that
the prisons connection to slavery reverses, compresses, and undoes the progress of time: My recall is nearly perfect, time has faded nothing. I recall
the very first kidnap. Ive lived through the passage, died on the passage, lain in the unmarked shallow graves of the millions who fertilized the Amerikan
soil with their corpses; cotton and corn growing out of my chest, unto the third and fourth generation, the tenth, the hundredth.43 Here, Jackson
describes the relationship between memory, time, and possession. His captive body is metaphorically infested with the cotton and corn grown under the
prison of the plantation. Time did not wash away the horrors of slavery, but rather, modified and intensified
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them. Jackson both lives the past and continues to live its afterlife. He feels possessed by the forms of death produced under slavery, and
throughout his writing connects this to his living death in prison. This possession is not temporally constrained; neither the law nor the state can
the U.S. must be destroyed and that anything less
exorcise black bodies of this death sentence. Instead, Jackson argued that
would be meaningless to the great majority of the slaves.44 Although an extensive review of Jacksons discussion of
slavery is beyond the scope of this project, his ideas and declaration that I am a slave to, and of, property were not unique among the black liberation
movement.45 In fact, Jacksons writing was emblematic of larger political, social, and economic changes occurring in the 1960s and 1970s, and
paradigmatic of the political thought of the black liberation movement. The work of Shakur and Davis are one of the lines of flights that depart from the
thought of Jackson and the black liberation movement. Indeed, Davis dedicates Reflections to Jacksons life (cut short by his violent death) and his
struggle against his own misogyny. In addition, Davis offers a literal embodiment of how the theories, histories, and epistemologies produced by the
black feminist and black liberation movements have entered the university.
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LinkCap First - Wang
Their capitalism root cause arguments reentrench an anti-black framework that

eclipses the realities of the carceral system and ignores forms of violence that cannot
be attributed solely to economic forces
With that being said, my reluctance to jam Black rage into a white framework is not an assertion of the political
viability of a pure politics of refusal. White anarchists, ultra-leftists, post-Marxists, and insurrectionists
who adhere to and fetishize the position of being for nothing and against everything are equally
eager to appropriate events like the 2011 London riots for their (non)agenda. They insist on an analysis
focused on the crisis of capitalism, which downplays anti-Blackness and ignores forms of gratuitous
violence that cannot be attributed solely to economic forces. Like liberals, post-left and anti-social
interpretive frameworks generate political narratives structured by white assumptions, which delimits which
questions are posed which categories are the most analytically useful. Tiqqun explore the ways in which we
are enmeshed in power through our identities, but tend to focus on forms of power that operate by an
investment in life (sometimes call biopolitics) rather than, as Achille Mbembe writes, the power and the
capacity to decide who may live and who must die (sometimes called necropolitics).25 This framework is
decidedly white, for it asserts that power is not enacted by direct relations of force or violence, and
that the capitalism reproduces itself by inducing us to produces ourselves, to express our identities
through consumer choices, to base our politics on the affirmation of our marginalized identities. This
configuration of power as purely generative and dispersed completely eclipses the realities of policing,
the militarization of the carceral system, the terrorization of people of color, the institutional violence
of the Welfare State and the Penal State, and of Black and Native social death. While prisons certainly
produce race, a generative configuration of power that minimizes direct relations of force can only
be theorized from a white subject position. Among ultra-left tendencies, communization theory notably
looks beyond the wage relation in its attempt to grasp the dynamics of late-capitalism. Writing about Thorie
Communiste (TC), Maya Andrea Gonzalez notes that TC focus on the reproduction of the capital-labor
relation, rather than on the production of value. This change of focus allows them to bring within their purview
the set of relations that actually construct capitalist social life beyond the walls of the factory or office.26
However, while this reframing may shed light on relations that constitute social life outside the workplace, it
does not shed light on social death, for relations defined by social death are not reducible to the capital-labor
relation. Rather than oppose class to race, Frank Wilderson draws our attention to the difference
between being exploited under capitalism (the worker) and being marked as disposable or superfluous
to capitalism (the slave, the prisoner). He writes, The absence of Black subjectivity from the crux of radical
discourse is symptomatic of [an] inability to cope with the possibility that the generative subject of capitalism,
the Black body of the 15th and 16th centuries, and the generative subject that resolves late capitals over-
accumulation crisis, the Black (incarcerated) body of the 20th and 21st centuries, do not reify the basic
categories that structure conflict within civil society: the categories of work and exploitation.27 Historian
Orlando Patterson similarly insists on understanding slavery in terms of social death rather than labor
or exploitation.28 Forced labor is undoubtedly a part of the slaves experience, but it is not what
defines the slave relation. Economic exploitation does not explain the phenomena of racialized
incarceration; an analysis of capitalism that fails to address anti-Blackness, or only addresses it as a
byproduct of capitalism, is deficient.
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LinkCap First Stein
The affirmatives deferral of abolition within their anti-capitalist framework is the
(re)production of white supremacy. Capitalisms genesis is the theft of indigenous land
and the inauguration of the slave trade. Without a centering of abolition of the prison
industrial complex, the affirmatives conceptualization of freedom will become
dependent on the prison regime.
Stein et al 14 - Mariella Castaldi, Ashley Masters, Jess Mease, Chinwe Okona, Zachary Ontiveros,
Mohamed Shehk, David Stein, LETTER FROM THE EDITORS, in The Abolitionist Issue 23: Capitalism, Anti-
Capitalism, and the Prison Industrial Complex, Fall 2014
2014s second issue of The Abolitionist tackles the theme of Capitalism, Anti-Capitalism, and the prison industrial complex (PIC). To many of our readers, this topic will come as no surprise. Two
what might prison industrial complex abolition look like

interconnected questions might help to frame the pieces offered in this issue: First,
through an anti-capitalist lens? Second, what does capitalism look like when our struggles to abolish the
PIC provide the lens through which we view it? The term prison industrial complex helps shift the way
that we think and talk about prisons and policing, to shift the way that we explain why imprisonment
and policing exist in the first place. Whereas the all-too-prevalent explanation says we need prisons as a solution to crime and other social problems, the term
prison industrial complex suggests that in order both to explain and to fight the racist system of
imprisonment, we needed to ask, who benefits from policing and prisons? Who makes money? Who gets elected and reelected?
Who gets a career? Why is it that the US has spent millions of dollars on new prison beds even as the rate of crime has
fallen? How is it that, as Ruthie Gilmore puts it punishment has become as industrialized as making cars, clothing, or
missiles, or growing cotton? Why prisons, rather than some other industry? Why, as Craig Gilmores interview with James Kilgore in this issue suggests, do people who do not
benefit directly from the PIC believe it to be necessary? What makes people believe that prisons solve problems? Asking these questions reminds us that in order to fight the PIC,
we need also to fight the social, political, and economic systems that make the PIC possible in the first
place. What we gain from analyzing that system is the ability to imagine how the abolitionist struggle
intertwines and intersects with other struggles. Taken as a whole, the pieces in this issue insist that we understand how housing
justice is an abolitionist struggle (in Bruce Reillys piece), how social inequality is giving rise to new forms of
imprisonment (in Micah Wests piece), how globalization fuels and is fueled by the PIC (in Rachel Herzings interview with Linda Evans and Eve
Goldberg), and how the USs exportation of the War on Drugs has also involved the exportation of the US
prison model (in Julie de Dardels piece). Placing the PIC at the center of the way that we think about capitalism
troubles the lie at the heart of capitalist ideologythe notion capitalism has given rise to freedom and
democracy around the world . In response, the abolitionist asks, freedom for whom? Which world? For the world in which the abolitionist
sets to work and seeks to transform, the world in which the abolitionist finds community is also the
world in which capitalism has sought to find freedom and security in unfreedom. The abolitionist
knows that capitalism saw its dawn in the captivity industry that kidnapping and shackled millions of
Africans, commodifying their bodies and labor as a source of wealth; in the warfare industry that
deployed murder, displacement, and sexual violence to transform Native lands into colonial properties
and plantations. Plantation slavery instituted on Native lands has its afterlife in the modern prison
system, as Brionne DeDeckers article on Louisiana incarceration demonstrates. The world, then, in which the abolitionists struggle begins is a world where as James Baldwin once wrote in
solidarity with a then-imprisoned Angela Davis, people are taught to measure their safety in chains and corpses. Chains, corpses, and, we might add, cages: this, to
the abolitionist, is what capitalism looks like. As this issue goes to press, an Israeli military offensive on the Palestinian people Gaza brings the death toll to over
2,100 in the last 47 days. Over 500 of the dead have been children. If, as Noam Chomsky has suggested, Gaza is the worlds largest open-air prison, the $9.9 million per day that the US government
in the context of racial capitalism, the prison industrial complex, colonial

sends to Israel is a sharp reminder that
occupation, and American empire are interwoven. We recognize those same forces at work presently in Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of the police
execution of Black teenager Michael Brown. Here, local police, Missouri Highway Patrol, and the National Guard have set the technologies of capitalist warmaking/warmongeringassault rifles, tear gas,
flashbangsagainst the largely Black community that has risen up in response. The expressions of solidarity sent by Palestinan residents in Gaza to the Ferguson uprising echo across a new and yet
familiar landscape a message of solidarity sent by the poet June Jordan in 1982: I was born a Black woman and now I am become a Palestinian Against the relentless laughter of evil there is less and less
living room and where are my loved ones? It is time to make our way home. Things look different when one resides in this world, where the story capitalism tells is not freedom but violence, not safety but
The abolitionist knows that to struggle against capitalism is to struggle to make living room, to
shackles.
make room, that is, for another kind of life to flourish.

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LinkCap First Dillon
Slaveryand its contemporary manifestation as the prison--are the condition of

possibility for neoliberalismcannot challenge neoliberalism without first accounting
for antiblackness in the afterlife of slavery
Dillon, 13 (Stephon, Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State //Daniels)
For Shakur, the regulations of a burgeoning neoliberal-carceral state possessed life in ways that rendered the
free world an extension of the prison. An assemblage of race, gender, capital, policing, and penal technologies
produced a symbiosis between the deindustrialized landscape of the late 20th century urban United States and
the gendered racisms of an emerging prison-industrial complex. Diffuse structural networks of racism and
sexism mimicked the steel bars of a cage. This is the complicity between freedom and captivity, the
entanglements between the living and the living dead, and the hemorrhaging of a buried past into the imagined
progress of the present. For Shakur, prison looked like and felt like nineteenth century chattel slavery: We sit
in the bull pen. We are all black. All restless. And we are all freezing.25 In the essay, affect continually
forces the past to open directly onto the present.26 The sensations and feelings of frozen skin speaks in a way
that words cannot. In prison, shivering black flesh weighted with chains looked like slavery to Shakur. As a
fugitive who now has political asylum in Cuba, she understands herself as a twenty-first century runaway slave,
a maroon woman.27 Although Shakurs essay does not name neoliberalism explicitly, we can read it as a
black feminist theorization of neoliberalism at the very moment of its emergence. Indeed, it is a narration of the
drastic racialized and gendered restructurings of social and economic life in the 1970s United States from the
perspective of someone detained for resisting those changes. Written by a captured member of the
underground black liberation movement, the text names the discourses and (state) violence neoliberalism
requires yet erases. Neoliberalism is most certainly an economic doctrine that prioritizes the mobility and
expansion of capital at all costs, but its mechanisms exceed the liberation of the market from the repression of
the state. As Shakur indicates, one of the conditions of possibility for the emergence of the neoliberal state is
the kinship shared between the free world and the prisonan affinity structured and produced by an anti
blackness inaugurated under chattel-slavery. More over, as Shakur argues throughout the essay, the
technologies of immobilization utilized by the neoliberal state specifically target black women, a process
connected to the emergence of the black feminist. By reading black feminist texts from the 1970s as implicit
theories of neoliberalism, we can come to understand the formation and implementation of neoliberalism in a
new light. Shakur not only connects an emergent neoliberalism to a rapidly expanding prison regime, she also
links the contemporary prison to chattel slaveryan institutional, affective, and discursive connection
apprehended by Angela Daviss phrase, From the prison of slavery to the slavery of prison.28 The
connections made by Shakur between the prison and neoliberalism, and between slavery and the prison,
have been thoroughly explored by many scholars.29 Indeed, during the past two decades, a growing body of
scholarship has affirmed and extended Shakurs analysis of blackness, slavery, and the prison by exploring
what Saidiya Hartman calls the afterlife of slavery.
Their analysis of capitalismwhich thinks slavery appendage to state and capital

rather than foundationalfigures antiblack violence as aberration and black freedom
as impossibleonly our alternative is adequate to the task of thinking the unthought of
both pro and anti-capitalist frameworks (H&N specific underlining)
Dillon, 13 (Stephen, Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State //Daniels)
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If chattel slavery's foundational relationship to the contemporary distribution of life and death is often
under theorized, overlooked, or erased within normative epistemologies (and within progressive, radical,
feminist, and queer formations), its connection to capitalism is an epistemological impossibility.
According to Walter Johnson, under the historical terms that frame western political economy,
understanding slavery as capitalism is unthinkable because there are no adequate epistemological
instruments available to make sense of such a connection.67 In both Smithian and Marxist economics,
slavery is an un-theorized foundation to the history of capitalism, "an un-thought (even when present)
past to the inevitable emergence of the present."68 Slavery is understood to have a temporal relation
to capitalism instead of a spatial one. That is, slavery is theorized as pre-capitalist, as opposed to
animating, colluding with, or being indistinguishable from capitalism.69 The problem of slaverys status as
the unthinkable history of capitalism is not isolated to the shortcomings of economic theoryit stems
from western liberal epistemologies. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues, the Haitian Revolution was
unthinkable in Europe and the United States because it challenged the ontological ordering of the
planet under racism and colonialism. According to Trouillot, in 1791 there was not one public debate on
record in England, France, or the United States on the right of slaves to achieve self-determination, let
alone the right to do so through armed resistance.70 Simply, slavery did not present an ethical
dilemma for the white world; its moral crises were unthought.71 In a similar way, the slave occupies
the position of the unthought within dominant epistemologies. While the structural position of the
worker has animated much of the left for the last two hundred years, the positionality and demands of
the slave elude hegemonic and resistant forms of thought. For example, Boggs writes that black
people remain invisible in the white radical imagination because white Marxists regard black
militants as unfinished products who will arrive at the understanding that racism arises from
capitalism and that the working class in the irreconcilable foe of capitalism. By 69 Because slavery
did not use wage-labor, many Marxists have argued that it was wasteful and inflexible and thus does
not meet a strict definition of capitalism. Marx himself did not consider slavery capitalist because, for
him, wage-labor exchanging against capital was the essence of capitalism. Under this theory, the
forms of domination and subjugation used on the plantation are understood as pre-capitalist and
extraeconomic. In the teleology of some forms of Marxism, industrial capitalism would supersede the
precapitalist mercantilism of the plantation. Plantations were understood as an aberration from the
rational, efficient, commercial calculations of capitalism. Yet, as Robin Blackburn points out the rational
calculations used to measure tight-packing on slave ships, reproduction, health and life spans, insurance,
finance and profit, and so on demonstrates the absolute modernity of the slave trade. For Blackburn, the slave
trade anticipates and inaugurates many of the practices central to modern capitalism. As a first
approximation, then, think of this form of class struggle as a kind of maroonage. Like the slaves who
collectively escaped the chains of slavery to construct self-governing communities and quilombos,
biopolitical labor-power subtracting from its relation to capital must discover and construct new social
relationships, new forms of life that allow it to actualize its productive powers. But unlike the maroons,
this exodus does not necessarily mean going elsewhere. We can pursue lines of flight while staying right
here, by transforming the relations of production and mode of social organization under which we
live.72 For Hardt and Negri, the forms of class struggle required under the biopolitics of contemporary
capitalism are like the tactics mobilized by slaves, even though in the end, the essence of maroonage
(escape) is not required; the multitude can change the conditions of power by staying right where they
are. By constructing equivalence across time and positionality, Hardt and Negri erase the specificity of
chattel slaverythe literal steel chains used to torture and immobilize slaves are compared to the
metaphorical chains used by capital to manage the labor of the multitude. In this way, Hardt and Negri
reproduce the fungibility of the slave (the slave will be whatever it is most useful for the slave to be). This is
what Frank Wilderson calls the ruse of analogy where grammars of suffering that are irreconcilable
are made equivalent. Simply, the alienation and exploitation of the multitude (or the worker) is not
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comparable to the slaves expulsion from humanity.73 Thus, the very attempt to empathetically identify
with the slave results in the slave's obliteration. As Hartman writes, "Only if I can see myself in that position
can I understand the crisis of that position."74 In order to empathize with the slave, Hardt and Negri insert the
multitude into the position of the slave, thus eradicating the slave. The slave becomes a worker, and is thus no
longer a slave.75 For Johnson and Trouillot, slaverys connection to capitalism and freedom is
unthinkable due to the epistemological boundaries of liberal Western thought. However, as evidenced
by Hardt and Negri, even if the slave is not forgotten, even when she enters the realm of the thinkable,
even when the slave is present, she is often erased. One can stare directly at the slave and not see her.
When the slave is made equivalent with what she is not, she is disappeared. As such, the slave and
slaverys structural relation to the national order and capital is unthinkable and frequently unthought.76
Subsequently, race and white supremacy are constructed as appendages to the state and capital, as
opposed to foundations.
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LinkCap First Wilderson
Their analysis of capitalism cannot account for the irrational underside of wage labor:
the accumulation of black flesh that precedes the utility of labor means their analysis
will always be anti-black and incapable of challenging the structure of capitalism rather
than just its contingent symptoms
Wilderson 5 (Frank Wilderson III, January 2005 [Gramscis Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society
http://bmorereadinggroup.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/frank_gramsci.pdf - ERW)
Capitalism was kick-started by the rape of the African continent. This phenomenon is central to neither Gramsci nor Marx.
The theoretical importance of emphasizing this in the early 21st century is two-fold: First, the socio-political order of the New
World (Spillers 1987: 67) was kick-started by approaching a particular body (a Black body) with direct relations
of force, not by approaching a White body with variable capital. Thus, one could say that slaverythe
accumulation of Black bodies regardless of their utility as laborers (Hartman; Johnson) through an idiom of despotic
power (Patterson)is closer to capital's primal desire than is waged oppressionthe exploitation of unraced bodies
(Marx, Lenin, Gramsci) that labor through an idiom of rational/symbolic (the wage) power: A relation of terror as opposed to a relation of hegemony.3
Secondly, today, late capital is imposing a renaissance of this original desire, direct relations of force (the
prison industrial complex), the despotism of the unwaged relation: and this Renaissance of slavery has, once again,
as its structuring image in libidinal economy, and its primary target in political economy, the Black
body. The value of reintroducing the unthought category of the slave, by way of noting the absence of the Black subject, lies in the Black subjects
potential for extending the demand placed on state/capital formations because its re- introduction into the discourse expands the intensity of the
antagonism. In other words, the slave makes a demand, which is in excess of the demand made by the worker. The worker demands that productivity be
fair and democratic (Gramsci's new hegemony, Lenin's dictatorship of the proletariat), the slave, on the other hand, demands that production stop; stop
without recourse to its ultimate democratization. Work is not an organic principle for the slave. The
absence of Black subjectivity from
the crux of marxist discourse is symptomatic of the discourse's inability to cope with the possibility
that the generative subject of capitalism, the Black body of the 15th and 16th centuries, and the generative subject that resolves late-capital's over-
accumulation crisis, the Black (incarcerated) body of the 20th and 21st centuries, do not reify the basic categories
which structure marxist conflict: the categories of work, production, exploitation, historical self-awareness and, above all, hegemony. If,
by way of the Black subject, we consider the underlying grammar of the question What does it mean to be free? that grammar being the question What
does it mean to suffer? then we come up against a grammar of suffering not only in excess of any semiotics of exploitation, but a grammar of suffering
beyond signification itself, a suffering that cannot be spoken because the gratuitous 3 Its important to bear in mind that for Hartman, Johnson,
Patterson, and Spillers the
libidinal economy of slavery is more fundamental to its institutionality than is the
political economy: in other words, the constituent element of slavery involves desire and the
accumulation of Black bodies and the fact that they existed as things becoming being for the captor
(Spillers 1987: 67). The fact the Black slaves labored is a historical variable, seemingly constant, but not a constituent element. terror of White
supremacy is as much contingent upon the irrationality of White fantasies and shared pleasures as it is upon a logicthe logic of capital. It extends
beyond texualization. When talking about this terror, Cornel West uses the term black invisibility and namelessness to designate, at the level of
ontology, what we are calling a scandal at the level of discourse. He writes: [America's] unrelenting assault on black humanity produced the fundamental
condition of black culture -- that of black invisibility and namelessness. On the crucial existential level relating to black invisibility and namelessness, the
first difficult challenge and demanding discipline is to ward off madness and discredit suicide as a desirable option. A central preoccupation of black
culture is that of confronting candidly the ontological wounds, psychic scars, and existential bruises of black people while fending off insanity and self-
annihilation. This is why the "ur-text" of black culture is neither a word nor a book, not and architectural monument or a legal brief. Instead, it is a guttural
cry and a wrenching moan -- a cry not so much for help as for home, a moan less out of complaint than for recognition. (80-81) Thus, the
Black
subject position in America is an antagonism, a demand that can not be satisfied through a transfer of
ownership/organization of existing rubrics; whereas the Gramscian subject, the worker, represents a demand that can
indeed be satisfied by way of a successful War of Position, which brings about the end of exploitation. The worker calls
into question the legitimacy of productive practices, the slave calls into question the legitimacy of
productivity itself. From the positionality of the worker the question, What does it mean to be free? is raised. But the question hides the process
by which the discourse assumes a hidden grammar which has already posed and answered the question, What does it mean to suffer? And that
Thus, exploitation (wage slavery) is the
grammar is organized around the categories of exploitation (unfair labor relations or wage slavery).
only category of oppression which concerns Gramsci: society, Western society, thrives on the exploitation of the
Gramscian subject. Full stop. Again, this is inadequate, because it would call White supremacy "racism" and
articulate it as a derivative phenomenon of the capitalist matrix, rather than incorporating White
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supremacy as a matrix constituent to the base, if not the base itself. What I am saying is that the insatiability of the slave
demand upon existing structures means that it cannot find its articulation within the modality of hegemony (influence, leadership, consent)the Black
body can not give its consent because generalized trust, the precondition for the solicitation of consent, equals racialized whiteness (Lindon Barrett).
Furthermore, as Orland Patterson points out, slavery is natal alienation by way of social death, which is to say that a slave has no symbolic currency or
material labor power to exchange: a slave does not enter into a transaction of value (however asymmetrical) but is subsumed by direct relations of force,
which is to say that a slave is an articulation of a despotic irrationality whereas the worker is an articulation of a symbolic rationality. White supremacys
despotic irrationality is as foundational to American institutionality as capitalisms symbolic rationality because, as Cornel West writes, it... ...dictates the
limits of the operation of American democracy -- with black folk the indispensable sacrificial lamb vital to its sustenance. Hence black subordination
constitutes the necessary condition for the flourishing of American democracy, the tragic prerequisite for America itself. This is, in part, what Richard
Wright meant when he noted, "The Negro is America's metaphor." (72) And it is well known that a metaphor comes into being through a violence which
marxism can only come to
kills, rather than merely exploits, the object, that the concept might live. West's interventions help us see how
grips with America's structuring rationality -- what it calls capitalism, or political economy; but cannot come to
grips with America's structuring irrationality: the libidinal economy of White supremacy, and its hyper-
discursive violence which kills the Black subject that the concept, civil society, may live. In other words,
from the incoherence of Black death, America generates the coherence of White life. This is important
when thinking the Gramscian paradigm (and its progenitors in the world of U.S. social movements today) which is so dependent on
the empirical status of hegemony and civil society: struggles over hegemony are seldom, if ever, asignifyingat some point they
require coherence, they require categories for the recordwhich means they contain the seeds of anti-
Blackness. Let us illustrate this by way of a hypothetical scenario. In the early part of the 20th century, civil society in Chicago grew up, if you will,
around emerging industries such as meat packing. In his notes on Americanism and Fordism (280-314), Gramsci explores the scientific management
of Taylorism, the prohibition on alcohol, and Fordist interventions into the working class family, which formed the ideological, value-laden grid of civil
society in places like turn of the century Chicago: It is worth drawing attention to the way in which industrialists (Ford in particular) have been concerned
with the sexual affairs of their employees and with their family arrangements in general. One should not be misled, any more than in the case of
prohibition, by the puritanical appearance assumed by this concern. The truth is that the new type of man demanded by the rationalization of
production and work cannot be developed until the sexual instinct has been suitably regulated and until it too has been rationalized. (Prison Notebooks
296- 297) The discourse of this suitable regulation and rationalization underwrote the common sense which hailed the proletariat through the
influence, leadership, and spontaneous consent of an ensemble of questions (hegemony) and simultaneously crowded out the project of transforming
proletarian shards and We Write January 2005 2(1) 8 fragments of good sense into a revolutionary project. Gramsci called it a psycho-physical
adaptation to the new industrial structure [pre-Crash], aimed for through high wages (286). And it meant that the working class struggle was pre-
hegemony existing, he suggested, still in defense of craft rights against industrial liberty (Ibid). In this scenario a war of position has yet to commence
because even unions, the vanguard of the working class, were simply the corporate expression of the rights of qualified crafts and therefore the
industrialists attempts to curb them [had] a certain progressive aspect (Ibid.). Gramscis preceding diagnosis is indicative of his well known pessimism
of the intellect but it also contains the glimmer of his optimism of the will. For the unflinching nature of his analysis illustrates the moves that the worker
must make (against Americanism and Fordism) in order to bring about the flowering of the superstructure (a War of Position) so that the fundamental
question of hegemony [can be] posed (Ibid.). But we must ask ourselves, for whom does his analysis provide an optimism of the will? Most American
political theorists and social moment activists have not pried open even the crevice of a doubt about the Gramscian Dreams applicability to all U.S.
positions, which Gramsci himself acknowledges when he writes: The absence of the European historical phase, marked even in the economic field by
the French Revolution, has left American popular masses in a backward state. To this should be added the absence of national homogeneity, the
mixture of race-cultures, the negro question [Emphasis mine]. (286-87) For the sake our scenariothe impact of a successful War of Position on our
hypothetical meat packing plantlet us not refer to the question as the negro question. Instead, let us call it the cow question. Let us suppose that
the superstructure has finally flowered, and that throughout the various fronts where the power to pose the question held by the private initiatives and
associations elaborated by the industrialists, hegemony has now been called into question and a war of position has been transposed into a war of
maneuver. The scandal which the Black subject position threatens Gramscian discourse with is manifest in the subject's ontological disarticulation of
Gramscian categories: work, progress, production, exploitation, hegemony, and historical self- awareness. Gramscis notes on Americanism and
Fordism demonstrate his acumen in expressing how the drama of value is played out away from the slaughter house (civil society: i.e. the family), while
being imbricated and foundational to the class exploitation which workers experience within the slaughter house. But still we must ask, what about the
cows? The cows are not being exploited, they are being accumulated and, if need be, killed. The desiring machine of capital and
White supremacy manifest in society two dreams, imbricated but, I would argue, distinct: the dream of worker
exploitation and the dream of Black accumulation and death. Nowhere in Gramsci can one find sufficient
reassurance that, once the dream of worker exploitation has been smashedonce the superstructure, civil society,
has flowered and the question of hegemony has been posedthe dream of Black accumulation and death will be thrown
into crisis as well. I submit that death of the Black body is (a) foundational to the life of American civil society (just as foundational as it is to the
drama of valuewage slavery) and (b) foundational to the fantasy space of desires which underwrite the industrialists hegemony and which underwrite
the workers potential for, and realization of, what Gramsci calls good sense. Thus, a whole set of new and difficult, perhaps un-Gramscian, questions
emerge at the site of our meat packing plant in the throes of its War of Maneuver. First, how would the cows fare under a dictatorship of the proletariat?
Would cows experience freedom at the mere knowledge that theyre no longer being slaughtered in an economy of exchange predicated on
exploitation? In other words, would it feel more like freedom to be slaughtered by a workers collective where there was no exploitation, where the
working day was not a minute longer than time it took reproduce workers needs and pleasures, as opposed to being slaughtered in the exploitative
context of that dreary old nine to five? Secondly, in the river of common sense does the flotsam of good sense have a message in a bottle that reads
Workers of the World Become Vegetarians!? Finally, is it enough to just stop eating meat? In other words, can the Gramscian worker simply give the
cows their freedom, grant them emancipation, and have it be meaningful to the cows? The cows need some answers before they raise a hoof for the
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flowering of the superstructure. The cows bring us face to face with the limitations of a Gramscian formulation of the question, what does it mean to be
exploitation (rather
free? by revealing the limitations of the ways in which it formulates the question, what does it mean to suffer? Because
than accumulation and death) is at the heart of the Gramscian question, what does it mean to sufferand thus crowds out
analysis of civil societys foundation of despotic terror and White pleasure by way of the accumulation
of Black bodiesthe Gramscian question also functions as a crowding out scenario of the Black
subject herself/himself, and is indexical of a latent anti-Blackness which Black folks experience in the
most sincere of social movements. So, when Buttigieg tells us that: The struggle against the
domination of the few over the many, if it is be successful, must be rooted in a careful formulation of a counterhegemonic conception of
the social order, in the dissemination of such a conception, and in the formation of counterhegemonic institutionswhich can only take place
in civil society and actually require an expansion of civil society [Emphasis mine]... (31) ...a chill runs down our
spine. For this required expansion requires the intensification and proliferation of civil societys
constituent element: Black accumulation and death.
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LinkChild Protection
Child protection discourse produces an innocence/guilt binarism that criminalizes
queer students and queer students and students of color, and obscures and extends
the carceral logic of surveillance and punishment in school
These theorized examples of how representations and tropes of the child are deployed across contemporary carceral landscapes remind us that decarceration and movements against the prison-industrial
Abolition work also requires that

complex involve labor beyond closing prisons and opening the doors of other supposedly democratic institutions that have locked out too many.
we intimately reassess the foundational building blocks of how civic society is understoodfamily and
childto demonstrate how these supposedly neutral or private categories are used to require and
extend the carceral apparatus. With the perpetual faade of authenticity that places children outside history, the child redefines the category
of innocence and simultaneously protects this concept from critical engagement. Innocence is a
racialized, gendered, sexualized, and flexible construct, but the symbolic child is able to mask these genealogies
and distract audiences from seeing the histories of power and other political and economic forces that
literally stage manage and permit us to read the body. The symbolic child also shores up the
intertwined logics of punishment and protection. Child protection centers interpersonal violence while
obscuring state violence and the ties that suture these together. Adults feelings about the child and
the childs familial tiesas evidenced in the last example, anti-bullying legislation are used to
support more punishment and policing, responses that perpetuate the conditions that actively create
more structural and interpersonal harm. Protection and innocence and consent are central to
discussions about children and are the foundation of other structures, namely our justice system. The
bright lines within our system used to ascertain and identify are innocence and consent. If these categories are lost for children, can this also affect wider justice frameworks? Despite these critiques, the
As 14 year olds are transferred to adult court, seven- and

categories of adult, childhood, and juvenile are used daily to shape peoples life pathways.
eight year olds are moved into juvenile detention, men and women over the age of 18 are consigned to
long prison terms, and those female, queer, and non-gender-conforming are targeted for containment
and sexual surveillance, it desperately matters who is viewed (or not) as innocent or disposable. My work in
movements is a crisp reminder that there are no pure places for organizing, research, and movement building. Yet, the analysis in this article clearly highlights that the construct of the
child is being remade and deployed right now. It is not possible to wait until the dust settles before
engaging. If anti-prison campaigners cannot reframe the terms of the debatethat is, deconstruct the centrality of white
supremacy, capitalism, or heteropatriarchy or reshape the relentless focus on interpersonal violence
over state violencethere should at least be a recognition of how these constructs are embedded and
masked. Though campaigners and scholars have critically deconstructed deficient tropes such as
family values, child protection has received less scrutiny. To leave no one behind, we must shift the organizing
focus away from individuals and begin to scrutinize what categories such as the child mask. Such
politics enable anti-prison organizers to move outside pro-prison expansion and policing narratives
that overwhelmingly revolve around the child and innocence. Parallel work is to meticulously and rigorously understand meanings in
particular contexts. As queer theorist Eve Sedgewick (1990, 27) did in relation to the categorization of the homosexual, we must ask who benefits from a classification, who does not, and why: Repeatedly
to ask how certain categorizations work, what enactments they are performing and what relations they are creating, rather than what they essentially mean, has been my principal strategy. Deconstructing
the uses of the symbolic child in contemporary incarceration offers insights into the most central questions in justice work todayspecifically, those surrounding tensions between reform work and
structural, systematic changes. This has material impacts on the lives of many, including children. These practices require a more rigorous
analysis that links this exactness to actions. For example, if children selectively can access rehabilitation, does that require adults to be constructed as static and therefore only targeted and eligible for
practices of child-
incapacitation? Does rehabilitation require a normativitysexual, developmental, or economic? If we cannot distinguish the construction of the child from histories and
saving that create bureaucratic and intimate surveillance systems, what are the local, narrow moves possible for those who work in
schools, detention centers, and courts? The time and space to ask these questions are not always available before actions are taken, but they eventually become
available later. Abolition work requires that this scrupulous labor be a central part of our movement work.
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The prison industrial complex leads to the criminalization of colored youth under the
guise of safety and manifests itself in strategic political wars that disproportionally
incarcerate these youth.
Meiners 13 (Erica Meiners is a professor of education and women's and gender studies at Northeastern Illinois University Why Prison?, edited
by David Scott, Cambridge University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/socal/detail.action?docID=1303675
Published 2013, DOA: 7/26/17). EL
Perhaps the
most highly visible manifestation of the school-to-prison nexus is the criminalisation youth
misconduct in schools. Most urban public schools have on-site police detachments that conduct
drug tests and searches at schools, and the naturalisation of this police presence creates a seamless and interlocking relationship
between the school and the juvenile justice systems. In Chicago public schools in 2010 there were 5,574 school-based arrests of juveniles under 18
years old on school property. Unsurprisingly, black youth accounted for 74 per cent of school-based juvenile arrests
in 2010; Latino youth represented 22.5 per cent of arrests (Kaba and Edwards, 2012). The New York Police Department
released data in 2012 acknowledging that in the last three months of 2011, five students were arrested in New York schools every day and these
students were, again, disproportionately black and Latino. Again, the majority of these students were arrested for
disorderly conduct (New York Civil Liberties Union, 2012). Asserting and affirmatively challenging police conduct
in schools is particularly salient when research demonstrates that one of the most popular reasons
students are referred to juvenile courts is, again, subjective: disorderly conduct (Florida, 20072008) and dis-
rupting schools (South Carolina, 20072008) (Hewitt et al., 2010: 112). It is challenging to secure students rights, in particular the right to due process
within schools and to privacy in a context where courts are relatively reluctant to seriously infringe upon the power of schools. For example, the 1985
decision in New Jersey v. T.L.O.stated that while the Fourth Amendment does apply to students, because schools have special needs, school
administrators need only reasonable suspicion, rather than probable cause, to search students (Hewitt et al., 2010: 115). Bodies that count as children
are also highly policed, and schools are public spaces that are under continuous surveillance. Often this criminalisation occurs under the
guise of safety or protection. For example, almost every state has adopted drug-free zones around
schools, but as a 2006 Justice Policy Institute Report identified, these zones overwhelmingly blanket
neighbourhoods in urban areas where predominantly people of color reside, including 76 percent of Newark, and
over half of Camden and Jersey City (Greene et al., 2006: 26). These zones ostensibly created in the name of safety result in the
targeting of communities of color by police, yet they fail to keep drugs away from schools. Along these same
lines, the mobility and public space restrictions attached to sex offender registries, the most potent and current component of our expanding prison-
industrial complex, centre around public places where children congregate: schools and parks. But with the Bureau of Justice Statistics acknowledging
that over 70 per cent of all reported sexual assaults against children are committed in a residence, usually the victims, this emphasis on policing public
spaces is misplaced (Bureau of Justice, 2000).
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LinkCurriculum Change
The AFFs focus on curriculum change disavows the explicit and hidden curriculum
that constitutes a racist texture of teaching constituted in an apparatus of punishment,
surveillance, and pathologization. This ensures the continuation of the school to
prison pipeline that consigns students of color to their death
Recent decades have seen the development of a hyperdisciplinary orientation in education, in which the process of punishment
insinuates itself ever more intimately into the texture of teaching, especially for students of color. In the
context of moral panics over youth, the broader penalization of society, and the ramification of security technologies, schools are
increasingly remade as occasions of enforcement rather than inquiry (Giroux 2009; Lipman 2004). The concern
with security has led to tighter links between schools and law enforcement and an aggressive surveillance culture that
criminalizes students without seeking to incorporate or rehabilitate them according to older disciplinary models
(Devine 1996). The emergence of the school to prison pipeline, as it has often been called, or the jailhouse track (Browne 2003) reconfigures Bowles
the pathologization of students of color by the disciplinary
and Gintis correspondence theory in a sinister direction, as
and security apparatuses of schools increasingly appears to set them on a path toward the criminal
justice system proper. Research shows that preferred disciplinary policies such as zero-tolerance act insidiously
to obstruct the educational opportunities of students (Browne, Losen and Wald 2001) even in the context of declining rates of
youth violence, and that disciplinary referrals and suspensions in schools continue to be disproportionately
applied to students of color (Skiba et al. 2011). Apart from the immediate injustice represented by this
intensification of the drive to punish, evidence suggests that it may be an important factor in producing
differing achievement levels between white students and students of color (Gregory, Skiba, and Noguera 2010).
However, critical accounts of hyperdisciplinarity also point to effects beyond and below the so-called achievement gap. Thus, Duncan (2000) argues
that the forms of pedagogy confronted by students of color work simultaneously to degrade their
economic competitiveness and to construct them as undesirable employees in an increasingly service-
oriented economy. In this way, the school to prison pipeline can be understood as an expression of the tacit
intentionality (Gillborn 2005) that structures schooling as an act of whiteness. In the racialized educational landscapes of
neoliberalism, then, the preparation of students through explicit and hidden curricula becomes paradoxically
a kind of pernicious deskilling that leaves them vulnerable to surveillance, detention and incarceration.
The process of classroom management by the teacher allows the bodies of students to
become machines under temporal control in the form of school time which becomes
indistinguishable from the prison
In the context of the school, the broad processes of preparation and demoralization that we have described above are expressed in the daily rituals and
It is in the small everyday classroom experiences and interactions that we
procedures of teaching and learning.
find the material grounds for the type of consent the neoliberal political project requires. The school of
today does not only reproduce subjects or workers; it also imposes domination and a particular way of
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being in the world upon everyone. Those that do not easily submit to the dictates of power are
punished, obscured, and injured (De Lissovoy 2010). Learning and teaching processes are reorganized by
the accountability regime as exercises in domination. Processes of punishment in the school have rightfully been focused
upon by critical scholars aiming to illuminate the carceral turn in neoliberal education (Saltman and Gabbard 2003), and we discuss these trends in the
next section of our paper. However, we argue that the
schools resemblance to prison does not develop only from the
turn to punishment. Instead, under the accountability regime, the drive to injure, exclude, and
marginalize students arises from everyday classroom experiences that appear natural and even as
best practices. Just as prisons are ideologically constructed as the natural places where bad subjects
are fully stripped of the autonomy to control their time, in the same way, it is in the proper
disciplining through pedagogy of student subjects that prison time is reproduced in the classroom. In
the first place, with the rise of the standardized testing regime an explicit language of productivity and
investment has crept into the school. Ubiquitous discourses of staying on task and maximizing
learning time as well as calls for the efficient use of the classroom are examples of the language of
school time, as it is manifested in the best practices of classroom management (Gettinger and Seibert 2002;
McLeod, Fisher, and Hoover 2003). Ultimately, the teaching and learning process , including the arrangement of the
classroom and student movement within the classroom space, are designed to provide a maximum
efficiency that implies the complete domination of what takes place within the classroom . The process
of learning itself becomes less important than the students ability to demonstrate proficiency as measured by an exam. While this overall shift in
schooling to a paradigm of efficiency has been much commented on (e.g. Au 2011; Peters 2001), the reorganization of education within neoliberalism
extends as well to the moment-to-moment experience of pedagogy itself. For instance, in a series of video clips titled Tight Transitions (2012) produced
by Uncommon Schools, a network of urban charter schools in the Northeastern United States, which is intended to portray best teaching practices, the
reconfiguration of the meaning of education in terms of a dominative efficiency can be witnessed. In one clip, a teacher is seen instructing her students
to move from their desks to the carpet area. The teacher first asks the students to raise their hands, wiggle their fingers, and then to clasp their hands
over their desks. She then counts to five with her fingers and at each number the students perform an action. At one, still sitting down, the students push
their chairs back. At two, they stand up. At three, four, and five, the students push their chairs in and stand quietly behind their desks. As they
perform the transition in a regimented manner that resembles a military practice, the teacher waves her hand and
the students immediately walk towards the carpet. The students are not yet seated on the carpet when the teacher begins her lesson. Uncommon
Schools takes pride in the percentage of their students scoring at proficient or advanced levels on state administered assessments (Uncommon Schools
n.d.). In this framework, it is imperative that teachers maximize learning time by developing tight transitions and beginning instruction immediately. The
transition portrayed in the video appears successful and efficient, and yet the question arises: Given this control and regimentation of time, what are
the students learning through the hidden curriculum? Similarly, in another clip (Uncommon Schools, 2010) featuring the Teach Like a Champion
approach, a teacher instructs his students to stand with hands behind their backs as they wait to be called on to answer content questions and to recall
information. The voice-over states that the students in this classroom are not intimidated by this cold call teaching method and that they actually like to
this pedagogy reconstructs teaching as a process
be called on using this technique because they like to be challenged. In fact,
of classroom management that obsessively promotes efficiency and surveillance. This type of
teaching, closely aligned with the standardized testing regime, exemplifies a condition described by Freire (2005):
A situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of
violence. The means used are not important; to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to
change them into objects (p. 85). We would add that there has been a shift in the present from the primarily
epistemological estrangement that Freire focused on to an even more thoroughgoing biopolitical control that
seeks to govern each movement and discursive interaction in the classroom. The teacher, for the sake
of efficiency and academic achievement as measured by a test, has to run his or her classroom as if
commanding a troop or instructing inmates to step out of their cells and move to the yard . The
teacher, as the representative of power, dictates and controls time, body movements, and interactions.
This pervasive control repeats, in a pedagogical register, the apparatuses of security and surveillance that students
increasingly confront in school entrances and hallways, and which carefully monitorespecially in students of
colorminute deviations from the norm, even down to bodily comportment and facial expressions (Pinnow, 2013). To live within these
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procedures and apparatuses of control is to do school time. Intensive pedagogical control is at once
continuous with the properly disciplinary apparatus that polices student bodies and behavior, as well as an
increasingly elaborate structure of curricular control at the district and state levels. In a recent in-depth ethnographic account, Alex Means (2013) shows
how teachers in one Chicago school must contend with a proliferation of mandated curricular programs, which often work at cross purposes. Teachers
compliance with these programs is monitored by department review of lesson plans, walk- throughs by administrators or program representatives, and
even online review by the district of grade books that must be loaded by teachers into an electronic system. Importantly, the pervasiveness of the control
of teachers work in this instance is linked to the schools probationary status based on its standardized test performance. In
this way, for
teachers and whole schools, as for students, assessment becomes increasingly indistinguishable from
punishment, and both are expressed in the appropriation of the time itself of teaching and learning. It
should be noted that this is something more than a struggle for space within a standards-based educational model; even creative teachers who are
skilled in tying critical lessons to the standards are hemmed in and frustrated by scripted drive-by curricular programs that give them no leeway
(Stillman, 2009). It might seem paradoxical at first that as a national emphasis on accountability ostensibly focuses attention on raising academic
performance, very often it is behavioral control that comes to be emphasized in innovative educational initiatives. In fact, however, under the
accountability regime, control and management become watchwords for a reorganization of the
student as a whole, in which a moralized notion of responsibility undergirds both the interpersonal and
the intellectual. Interestingly, the technical language of auditing that is associated with accountability frameworks at the district or state level
increasingly shows up in student-level guidelines for behavior. Thus, a host of educational entrepreneurs have developed packages that aim for this top-
to-bottom organization of learning as (self-)control. For instance, one such initiative, based in Arkansas, touts a behavioral instruction element within its
broader packaged school improvement and reform plan in which the same self- management component and process occurs at three levels: student,
staff and school, and system and district (Project ACHIEVE 2012). Even regular grading systems within public districts, such as the
Austin
Unified School District in Texas, already in kindergarten integrate numerical scores for behavioral
evaluation criteria within the same rubric as grades for academic performance. However varied the types of
engagement or interaction in the space of school, the accountability model promises an ultimate continuity in its (standardized, quantitative) rationality of
assessment. In this way, students are accustomed to a relationship to authority constructed in terms of a pervasive experience of monitoring, evaluation,
and self-surveillance.
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LinkHate Crimes - El-Amins Story
El-Amins story and the problem with hate crime laws (theyre racist)
Robinson 17 [Giselle, Organizer, https://www.generosity.com/fundraising/supporting-bayna-lehkiem-el-amin
Supporting Bayna-Lehkiem El-Amin! Accessed 6-20-17]
On May 5, 2015, Jonathan Snipes, a 33-year-old gay white man, assaulted Bayna-Lehkiem El-Amin, a 42-
year-old gay Black man, at a Dallas BBQ in Chelsea. Snipes, who originally claimed El-Amin had insulted him
with homophobic slurs, went up to El-Amins table and attacked El-Amin with his purse. Snipes later testified
that did not know if El-Amin said any homophobic slurs. El-Amin fought back in an act of self-defense, and
when the situation escalated and Snipes threatened with a knife, El-Amin hurled a chair at Snipes and left the
restaurant to seek medical attention. A city wide hunt for El-Amin ensued and shortly after the incident El-Amin
turned himself into authorities, still scared they would not believe him.
El-Amin was convicted on multiple assault charges on May 25th, 2016, and is facing 5 to 15 years in prison.
LGBTQ organizations, city politicians, local and national news, as well as the prosecutor's office, all used racist
hate crime language for a situation that was not a hate crime but actually self defense.
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LinkHumanist Opposition/Civil Society
The 1AC political framework is predicated on the dispossession of Blackness that
renders Black into a phobogenic object structurally adjusted through their humanist
opposition to humanism
Aarons 16 (K. Aarons 2016,. https://itsgoingdown.org/no-selves-abolish-afropessimism-anti-politics-end-
world/. The following article bene ted from the suggestions and critiques of afropessimists from the USA and
Germany during an international discussion in Bremen, Germany, in Spring 2014, and through regular
discussions with S, L, A, H and others in the Berlin Radical Theory group over several years.)
From a practical or historical point of view, the Afropessimist story reaches back to Assata Shakur, to the Black Liberation Army, even all the way back to the great Nat
Turner, the Dismal Swamp, the Seminole Wars, and so on. But as an explicit body of theoretical work, it begins really with Histo- rian Orlando Patterson (despite his
own liberal proclivities). Patterson argued in the early 1980s that, contrary to Marxist assumptions, what historically de nes the slaves position in society is ultimately
not the phenomena of forced labor. Al- though frequent, forced labor occurs only contingently or incidentally, and not everywhere slaves are found. The slave relation,
Patterson argued, is rather de ned by a threefold condition: a) general dishonourment (or social death), b) natal alienation (i.e. the systematic rupture of familial and
genealogical continuities), c) gratuitous or limitless violence. This threefold combination gives rise to a being experientially and socially devoid of relationality: the slave
4
relation is a type of social relation whose product is a relationless object. In the late 1990s Saidiya Hartman, following on the work of cultural theorist Hortense
Spillers, added to Pattersons criteria an ontological dimension: the slave, she argues, is one who finds themselves positioned in
their very existence, their being-as-such, as a non-Humana captured, owned, and traded object for
another. The ontological abjection of slave existence is not primarily de ned by alienation and
exploitation (a suffering due to the perceived loss of ones humanity) but by accumulation and
fungibility: the condition of being owned and traded, of having ones being reduced to a being-for-the-
captor.5 Far from disappearing with the 13th amendment, or even in the post-Civil Rights period,
Afropessimists argue that the formal traits of the slave relation were reproduced and kept alive through
the perpetuation of a form of social and civil death6 that continues to materially and symbolically
locate the Black body outside Humanity. At a symbolic level, these theorists argue that the racial
abjection of the slave were transferred to an epidermalized racial construction of Blackness, which
had the e ect of inscribing the social death and relationless objecthood at the level of appearance
itself: the slave relation now marks itself within the being-as-such of Blackness.7 Black folk today
continue to be constitutively denied symbolic membership within White civil society (both culturally
and politically), in such a way that no analogical bridge to White culture exists through which Blacks
could conceivably wage a war of position or sue for the sort of junior partner status otherwise
accorded to White women, non-Black people of color, or dutiful immigrants. The symbolic death or
exclusion of Blackness from Humanism means that it is not Whiteness or White supremacy but
Humanity as an ontologically anti-Black structure as such which stands in antagonism with Black
bodies, since its self-understanding of its own subjecthood as value is coherent only so long as it is
measured against the killable and warehousable objecthood of Black flesh. At a corporeal level, the subjection of the
Black body to direct relations of force has been institutionally carried forward through institutional paradigms of convict-leasing, police impunity and mass
incarceration. Throughout, Black bodies continue to be marked by a constitutive rather than contingent experience of direct material violence. Prior to any transgres-
sion, the Black body is subsumed by relations of direct force that do not possess the same sort of
logical or instrumental coherence characterizing the exploitation of wage laborers by capital, for
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example. The physical violence marking Black bodies is continuous with the slave relation, in that it
remains basically despotic and gratuitous, awaiting no legitimate cause or justi cation, open to
limitless expression, and enjoying institutional impunity. Modernity is therefore fundamentally organized around a double
8
register . On the one hand, those included within civil society are subjected to a contingent, ideological exploitation by variable capital (a regime of hegemony or
exploitation).Yet this hegemonic exploitation nonetheless tends to preserve for the non-Black worker an existential commons which places symbolic limits on their
degradation. For example, even where they may be criminalized, as in the bloody legislation against vagabondage described by Marx in the first volume of Capital,
still a transgression is always logically necessary for this criminalization to take place, and hence the violence never seeps into the being of the criminal per se, i.e. it
never becomes ontological. In this way, a symbolic space of belonging is safeguarded within White civil society through the social reinforcement of a racialized pathos
of distance, whose axiomatic was distilled by Fanon into a simple phrase: simple enough one has only not to be a n_____ [epithet] This horizon below which non-
Whites cannot sink without scandal is marked o by despotic direct force relations, which function as the existential border separating those who live in a de jure
perpetual vulnerability to terroristic violence, and those for whom such violence could only be experienced under a de facto state of exception or subsequent to a
transgression. These two distinct modalities of power do not simply emerge at the same time; rather, one conditions the other. What Martinot and Sexton describe as
the ignorability of Black death and the impunity of police murder of Black bodies provides the
constitutive background for the symbolic rationality of White democracy, and the symbolic currency of
social capital within it. The incoherence of Black death, is the condition for the coherence of White
common sense and hegemonic discourse. For this reason, the entire liberal discourse of ethics
inasmuch as it takes place within the White discourses framed by the ignorability of police and
carceral terror renders it totally irrelevant to Black existence.9 What Wilderson calls the crisis of the existential commons
therefore describes the constitutive gulf across which any attempt to analogize and tether White visions of emancipation to Black life are bound to stumble.The
product of asymmetrical regimes of force, it renders the project of what we could call an affirmative identity politics untenable for Black flesh. It is on the
basis of this orienting problematic of social death that Afropessimists attempt to demonstrate the one-
sided, regional, and limited character of Marxist, anarchist, feminist, and post-colonial visions of
emancipation. Each of these traditions remains external to the paradigm of Blackness because of the
way in which their grammar of suffering frames the subject of revolutionary practicethe working
class, the subaltern, non-Black womenon the basis of mediating objects that allow it to analogize
itself with White civil society, and which in each case are absent and unavailable to those positioned
by social death. Such mediating objects can include land, labor-power, and cultural artifacts (such as
language and customs).10 As Wilderson writes,social death is a condition, void, not of land, but of a
capacity to secure relational status through transindividual objectsbe those objects elaborated by
land, labor, or love.11 Since the ability to analogize or humanize oneself is the condition of a
struggle in which the social coordinates of identity can serve as an orienting axis for strugglei.e. it is
the condition of any positive identity politics, wherein one seeks to valorize and augment the social
standing and/or symbolic cach of ones group either by recognition from the State, or by constituting
a community bound together by common values, cultural and familial ties, etc.those who struggle
against oppression therefore need to consider the difference between those groups accorded a
suffcient quanta of social capital to become junior partners of White civil society and Black subjects
who remain shut out of this economy of symbolic recognition. In shortand this point really cannot be overemphasized if
Afropessimism is anything, it is the wreck of a formative identity politics, both Black and non-Black:
whereas Black existence is stripped of the symbolic capacity to lasting- ly transform dominant
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structures of signification (at least, through hegemonic means), since its gestures dont register in the symbolic except on condition of being
structurally whitened, White life cannot e ect such shifts in the name of Black existence without reinforcing the latters nullity at the same time, by speaking in a
voice that precisely draws its signifying power from Black nihilation. Black and non-Black identity politicians who nonetheless continue to pursue a symbolic valorization
of Black life (e.g. in certain currents of the Black Lives Matter movement) do so only provided they structurally adjust or whiten the
grammar of Black suffering to suit a Human grammar. In this way, rather than seeking a way out of the
desert, they in fact only deepen it.
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LinkCapitalocentrism
Their white leftism is a disavowal of the antiblackness that grants coherence to the
affinities and communal relations that grant the conflict against capitalocentrism
coherence
For over a decade, anti-racist discourse in North American and Northern European radical left and anarchist
movements has been dominated by what has come to be called privilege theory.2 Privilege theorys
emphasis on liberal forms of consciousness-raising activism, often bound up in the largely-symbolic
disavowal of accrued social bene ts, presents a vision of anti-racist struggle that inadvertently centers
the agency of benevolent white people, while tending to treat questions of racism as issuing above all
from psychological sources. Too-often subscribing to idealist theories of power, these approaches prioritize practices aimed at increasing
cultural hegemony or positive symbolic representation of marginal groups, rather than seeing race
as reproduced through di erential regimes of ballistic and carceral material violence like police and
prisons and strategizing on this basis.Where they do acknowledge the central role of material violence
and the consequent inevitability of anti-State revolt, they are often lead into embarrassing e orts to
shelter homoe- neously-understood communities of color from State violence, erasing the ongoing
histories of Black autonomous revolt and replacing it with a vision of struggle that looks more like a
voluntary disavowal of privilege by White leftists and people-of-color-allies. Finally, in addition to its being burdened by
unstrategic, liberal nonviolent leftist tendencies, privilege theory also grossly underestimates the depth and scale of
racism in this country. At the same time, an otherwise understandable dissatisfaction with privilege theory seems to have pushed some folks back either
into a simplistic class first Marxism (which I wont waste time critiquing here), or else into seeking a reference point for struggle exclusively in their own immediate
experience. The latter idea, more common in certain insurrectional anarchist approaches to social conflict,
emphasizes the positive intensive social bonds forged through street confrontation, and the
consequent need for everyday forms of attack on police and prison apparatuses. We overcome the
whatness of our constructed identities, the socio-institutional categories designed to reinforce our
separation, by becoming a how together in the streets, when our bodies interact by means of a shared
gesture of conflictuality (e.g. acting together while rioting, building barricades, looting, fighting the
police, defending neighborhoods, etc.).Yet what doesnt always accompany this is an attentiveness to
the different orders and registers of dissatisfaction which animate these conflicts (never mind the
sometimes uncritically white way in which individuality and freedom is framed in these discourses).3
What is forgotten is the fact that being willing to throw down alongside others in the streets doesnt
mean that the characteristic or paradigmatic form of suffering that pushed one to do so is analogous
to that of others next to you. And this matters so much more if one seeks to locate the means of antiracist struggle nowhere else than within these
clashes themselves and the bonds forged through them. In short, what we have seen in the past few years is a regrettable oscillation between a vicarious acting on
behalf of others reasons (i.e. a gesture of self-parenthesis) and an acting out of ones own immediate reasons and assuming or hoping they are compatible or
compossible with everyone elses (i.e. uncritical self-assumption). What has so far gone largely unnoticed is the way in which
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Afropessimist anti-politics renders both of these positions untenable. And while many who struggle to-
day and are currently unfamiliar with this body of thought might find a lot to sympathize with in the
final analysis, it is important to note that the path Afropessimists take to reach these conclusions is in
many respects diametrically opposed to core assumptions of the anarchist, queer, de-colonial and
communist traditions.
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LinkEconomy
Neoliberalism exacerbates the problems of the prison
Bordt 14 (Maria J., University of Tennessee, Self-Sustaining Capitalism: The Prison Industrial Complex,
Alienation, and Simulated Reality, Accessed 7/25/17) //AC
ANALYSIS Who is in the prison system? If we are to relate the PIC back to Marx, I think this is the first
question that we need to ask ourselves. If we look at both the people working and the people serving
their sentences, we will find an entire building full of people exploited by the bourgeoisie . Since the
prison system has now become marketized, everything becomes about saving money. The labor of
correctional officers (COs) is exploited in the same way that the 13th Amendment to the Constitution makes
exploitation of criminals entirely legal. How can this be so? From the outside, it may seem to the layperson that
one who spends their time guarding dangerous others ought to be compensated for putting themselves in
harms way. Private prisons have overtly stated that they are able to operate facilities more efficiently
than the government [] by reducing the costs of labor associated with operational costs. Labor costs
are controlled by reducing one or more of the following personnel cost factors: (1) number of staff, (2)
wages, or (3)fringe benefits (Austin & Coventry, 2001; pp. 15-16). Since paying workers makes up the bulk
of the cost to operate a prison facility, private prisons hire exclusively nonunion laborers, which they pay
considerably less than their unionized counterparts . Additionally, reducing the number of staff members
places COs at greater risk should a riot break out. Thus, if the essential Marxist question is how is the
work that people do related to their inability to thrive?, then I think it is prudent to examine how the
privatization of the prison industry allows for both the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat (namely
the inmates) to be used to the advantage of the bourgeoisie. Specifically, the proletariat are lured into
the private corrections industry with the promise of stable employment (we will always have crime!)
and the lumpenproletariat are, by virtue of their unwillingness to contribute to society properly are
there because we tend to take the prison system as an institution for granted . The driving force behind
all of this is the ideology promoted in Western society that the PIC is whats best for everyone involved. I think
the important thing to consider here is that neither of these classes of people tend to realize what is happening
to them. As Dahms (2012) writes: To tell another person that the world is governed by alienation is an utterly
meaningless statement, unless the person is able [] to undergo the labor of seeing for herself or himself
(p.45). Certainly, these people have little time to concern themselves with this labor. Prison workers are often
too concerned with making a living in times of austerity and globalization to wonder about the implications of
what they do. Prisoners often internalize the message that they deserve to be in prison, so it will do
them no good to imagine another alternative for themselves, in which they are treated like human
beings rather than items that need to be stored away in a warehouse of bodies . Compounding this is
the proclivity of the ruling class to hire uneducated men and women to be the overseers inside the prison walls
and then cut any program that allows for an inmate to gain any sort of critical consciousness of their situation.
No one will question any of this, because it will all get swept under the rug in the name of austerity.
Neoliberalism means that the old adage youve got to spend money to make money is now a
falsehood; now, you deprive humanity to make money and no one bats an eye. Alienation The
concept of alienation also plays into the PIC beautifully. It can be viewed from the point of view of
either the inmate or the correctional officer. Ill first examine how this affects the inmate. When prison labor
is used, it is often at a fraction of the cost of legitimate Western options. Many well-known companies use it
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(Proctor & Gamble, Motorola, Victorias Secret, the U.S. military and more) and enjoy the benefit of only
paying these workers a few cents an hour (Flounders, 2013; Hallett, 2006; Sykes, 1958).
The prison industrial complex and the capitalist system are intertwined by the
branches of marketization of criminals in which the workers is worth more in a cell
than she is as free labor. A takedown of capitalism begins with the deconstruction of
the PIC.
INTRODUCTION What is the prison-industrial complex? The problem of the prison-industrial complex is
one that concerns many facets of sociological inquiry. It is a thread that connects political economy
to criminology and epitomizes the problem of private property, as Marx describe d. The United States
is currently the incarceration capital of the world , and from 1990 to 2009, the number of men and women
in private prisons increased by 1600% (American Civil Liberties Union, 2011). This is a worrying trend
which, given the implications of the recent financial crisis in America, shows no signs of slowing
down. Reagan-era economics, and subsequently the mantra of smaller government, created the breeding
ground for the first of the private prisons in the mid-1980s (Selman & Leighton, 2010). It is surprising that such
a business proposition was not created sooner; after all, there will always be crime no matter how society
chooses to define it. Neoliberal policies, combined with a war on drugs that has been raging since the
Nixon administration, also created the problem of prison overcrowding, putting government-managed
penal institutions in a compromised position. When privately funded prisons came along, they made
an offer the state couldnt refuse; why not rent our buildings for your incarceration needs? What
seemed like a great idea, at least in the capitalist imagination, turned out to be quite the opposite. In
2008 and 2009, a privately owned prison in Pacos, TX was destroyed by inmates rioting over poor
treatment; specifically, their rage was centered around the austerity measures put in place by the
management company, GEO Group, that operates the facility as a proxy of the State of Texas (Selman &
Leighton, 2010). Reports of inmates not receiving medical treatment and spending inordinate amounts of time,
without explanation, in solitary confinement were common reasons for their dissent. This is abhorrent, not only
because of what is deemed acceptable in the treatment of incarcerated people, but also because of the human
lives that were put at risk as a result. Thus, the prison-industrial complex (PIC), as it is now known, is
problematic for a variety of reasons. In this paper, I will utilize Marxist theory to illuminate how issues
of alienation are present in both the lives of inmates, as well as the proletariat that are in charge of
guarding them. I will then argue that the prison industrial complex is meant to simulate the way a
worker should behave on the outside; yet, it is just that, a simulation, and nothing more. The beauty
of this system is that the simulation does nothing to prepare the formerly incarcerated for life beyond
the prison walls, thus increasing the chance that they will find themselves trapped within the
simulation once more, and more importantly, creating a profit for one of the many prison
management firms in the United States. Hallett (2006) puts it very succinctly: The incentive structure
associated with for-profit imprisonment dramatically readjusts the crime control formula from attentiveness to
crime-reduction strategies to acceptance and dependence upon high-crime and harsh punishment (p.18).
Thus, by marketizing crime, we have created a dangerous climate in which the worker is actually
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worth more in a cell than they are as a free citizenso the object of the game is to keep them coming
back to prison. Literature Review The literature on this topic is vast, spanning several decades and featuring
the voices of a variety of scholars. Western (2006) discusses how prison growth is often attributed to the
decreased crime rate which began in the early 1990s, but in reality, the only thing this trend has
contributed to is furthering income inequality in the United States . Hallett (2006) and Alexander (2010)
take a similar approach to the prison boom, both paying close attention to the ways in which private prisons
disenfranchise African-American men in particular. Gottschalk (2006) explores the variety of movements that
paved the way for mass incarceration in the United States. Her work surveys the political institutions that
created a reliance on mass incarceration as the dominant mode of punishment, as well as the lack of
opposition to this practice. Previously, Foucault (1975) described the modern prison system as a
creation of the bourgeoisie in which they colonized the legal institution (p.231). He goes on to
discuss how the emergence of the middle class has created a climate in which prison is seen as the
most equitable solution to punishment . For example, while the rich can afford to pay a fine with ease,
this may not be the case for a working class individual. Consequently, this also allows for prison time
to be viewed in capitalistic terms (i.e. when someone is incarcerated, we say they are paying their
debt). Currie (1998) illuminates various myths about prison in America. These include the idea that the U.S. is
soft on crime, prisons are an effective deterrent to criminals, and that spending money on crime control (that
is, in the form of prisons) is a worthwhile investment. He also offers alternatives to prison in the form of both
prevention and widespread social change. Echoing this refrain, Clear (2007) theorizes that mass
incarceration actually makes communities more susceptible to crime, because it has a destabilizing
effect on the family. He also mentions how imprisonment disenfranchises individuals by decreasing
their human capital (p.76). Much like Foucault, Clear seems to recognize the impact of treating human beings
in capitalistic terms. Ryan & Ward (1989) offer a comparison of American and British penal systems, with an
extensive discussion of how privatization has affected prisoners in the United States. Of particular interest to
my project is the fact that private management is likely to cause exploitation of prisoners under poor working
conditions, (p.35) among other concerns. In short, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the PIC
does not benefit the public at large, but rather, will only benefit the few that have invested in its
creation.
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LinkEcon
Prison is big business - Automation is not the key internal link to econ the prison
industrial complex is the prison industrial complex sustains neoliberal economic
growth even as it strips workers of jobs by shifting those jobs to prison slave labor
this evidence is specific to the aff prisoners are already doing the high skilled labor
the AFF shifts to we have already shifted in the site of the prison also at: Right
Wing Populism (Survivor Coop Fism AFF)
Series v. 0004, pp. 13-5]

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the results.
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LinkEd Reform
The AFFs reform focus on discrete problems with the school misses the point
School has always been messed up for black people their colorblind approach to
reform will continue to fail black students
Perry 16 (Andre is a contributor at The Root. The Root. Black Folks Dont Need Education Reform; We
Need a System We Can Call Our Own August 3, 2016 http://www.theroot.com/black-folks-don-t-need-
education-reform-we-need-a-syst-1790856272)
The scant mention of Democrats official platform on K-12 education on the main stage at the Democratic National Convention last week was clearly a
political effort to distance the party from the fray. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has backed off many hallmarks of the accountability
era that started with the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001 under the first George W. Bush administration and ended when that law was replaced
with the Every Student Succeeds Act last year. Many approaches, like teacher evaluation, simply did not work and caused irreparable harm to teachers
and children. Others, like charter expansion and school closures, did not live up to the promise Clinton hoped for. In 2014, Bill Clinton forecast his wifes
evolution when he said that charter schools have not held up their original bargain. Hillary Clinton the following year doubled down on her husbands
remarks, stating, Most charter schools don't take the hardest-to-teach kids. And if they do, they don't keep them. Leading up to the DNC, reform-
friendly language was scrubbed from the official platform. And Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in her remarks
at the DNC (pdf) that Hillary Clinton will reset education policy to focus on skills like creativity and critical thinking, not more testing. Education reform is
clearly a part of the Obama legacy that Clinton doesnt outwardly want to adopt. But rebuking education reform is an insufficient
strategy to address districts and states that continuously failed to serve black and brown children
before the NCLB. Black folk need an alternative, and reform must be redefined. Instead of reforming the reforms,
lets do something weve never done before: Lets create a system rooted in the people who need change the most.
Lets adopt a philosophy centered on black and brown people. In his classic text Pedagogy of the Oppressed, philosopher
and educator Paulo Freire said, If true commitment to the people, involving the transformation of the reality by which they are oppressed, requires a
theory of transforming action, this theory cannot fail to assign the people a fundamental role in the transformation process. Freire believed
that transformation requires an educational system rooted in the people who need change. The choice
movement, for instance, will always fall short in urban areas because the system of thought wasnt
centered on black or brown worldviews. Adam Smith, forefather of the political economy, might appreciate the choice- and standards-
based curriculum movements that emphasize competition, productivity and rugged individualism. Filtered by the works of Milton Friedman, the
educational-choice movement in particular has been applied so loosely that basic ethics and notions of fairness have been trumped by stereotypical
corporate values that fly in the face of what black, brown and girl students need. As it was inevitable for school leaders to call themselves CEOs, it was
also inescapable that students and teachers would be viewed instrumentally in terms of their productivity. Suspension, expulsion and mass firings
became practical and acceptable means of showing growth. First poverty didnt matter. Then, all of a sudden, it did, and schools needed
wraparound services. The race of the teacher didnt matter. Now reform organizations are looking for black
and brown teachers and leaders en masse. (For the descendants of slaves, human capital problems take on a whole different meaning.)
Expulsion and suspension were a necessary evil in order to develop a positive school culture. Now we need restorative-justice programs. All of the
aforementioned mistakes were predicted, aired and fought and could have been avoided. But the fidelity to
ideology evidences the stubbornness of white privilege that comes out of a Eurocentric model . The
inefficiencies of white privilege cost us so much more than dollars. With every reform from the choice frame, we add to the bureaucracy of white
institutions built to help black communities. Consequently, each institution and approach attempts to reform the prior without
questioning the bedrock on which they were all built upon: white supremacy and patriarchy. After every iteration, the only
remaining factors are the base ideology and system of oppression. Audre Lorde said, The master's tools will never dismantle the
master's house. Lets stop patching the previous error. If we can build a reform approach and invest billions around a
white male, we should be able to do so around Afrocentric people and philosophies. Black and brown folk
dont need reform. We need an alternative that we define.
Education reform fails black students, making them guilty for the consequences of an
antiblack system bent on their destruction
Nelson 15 (Steve is Head of the Calhoun School in Manhattan. Huffington Post. Education Reform Is Making All Public
Schools Worse January 13, 2015. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-nelson/education-reform-public-
schools_b_6457414.html)
Education is really not worse (or better) now than in previous generations. Diane Ravitch and others have made that case with abundant evidence. But
the political hand-wringing over low achievement in poor urban schools has unleashed a torrent
of really bad policy and practice that is washing over schools everywhere. It is a bit like trying to put out a fire in the closet by turning the hoses on
the whole damn house. Which would be bad enough, but the policies are pouring gasoline, not water, on the fire. Just in two days this month, I heard
reports from several family members on the hot flames of reform licking at schools far removed from the neighborhoods targeted by reformers. My
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daughter is a wonderful teacher, trained in the Steiner (Waldorf) philosophy. For more than a dozen years she worked in several progressive Waldorf
schools, engaging children in play-based activities, rich in the arts and lively, creative experiences and all the other things a good progressive education
provides. Then, in fall of 2014, she began work at a semi-rural public school in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. There, she encountered the slightly
diluted, but still pointless, expectations of educational reform. Testing, standards, rubrics, accountability. She teaches pre-school, so the impact is less
severe. The superintendent and principal clearly hired her because of her more progressive sensibilities. But she and they must work around the
requirements of federal and state policy in order to do the work they love. My sister-in-law, a music teacher for many years in Madison, WI, reports being
at the end of her rope. What has been, and should be, a joyful experience has been made increasingly tedious by regulation, standardization,
assessment rubrics and other nonsense that adds nothing. Theexpectations and requirements emanating from No Child Left
Behind, Race to the Top and the Common Core are making life more difficult for teachers all around America
for absolutely no reason. Their schools are not failing, their students are doing no worse (or better) than theyve ever done before,
their communities arent concerned about the schools and yet, the tentacles of mindless reform are strangling the life out
of their schools. The MetLife Survey of teacher satisfaction reports that teacher morale is plummeting. In 2008 62 percent of
teachers reported being satisfied with their work. In 2012 that percentage shrank to 39 percent. This tragic fact is due to the policies and practices of
so-called traditional educational reform and to the decreasing resources available to teachers. The mixed success of traditional
schools in decades past was due, at least in part, to the autonomy of schools and their faculty to do many things that were essentially progressive;
things like field trips, fun projects, musical theater, science experiments, debate classes and other experiential, sensory rich activities.
Now, with the stringent, all-consuming expectations imposed by NCLB, RTTP and Common Core,
good teachers simply dont have the time or freedom to do those progressive things they might have done in
the past. These are only the educational reasons that reform really means deform. The political ramifications are equally or more damaging.
Funding for public education has declined. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: States new budgets are providing less per-pupil
funding for kindergarten through 12th grade than they did six years ago often far less. The reduced levels reflect not only the lingering effects of the
2007-09 recession but also continued austerity in many states; indeed, despite some improvements in overall state revenues, schools in around a third
of states are entering the new school year with less state funding than they had last year. At a time when states and the nation are trying to produce
workers with the skills to master new technologies and adapt to the complexities of a global economy, this decline in state educational investment is
cause for concern. The phrase trying to produce workers ... diminishes my enthusiasm for the Centers point of view, but the facts are alarming
nonetheless. The reasons for the decline are complex, including the lingering effects of the recession they cite. But this trend will continue despite the
clear economic recovery. In part this is because the tide of economic recovery has floated all the luxury liners not so much the middle class
rowboats. Most schools are still funded by a stagnant or shrinking property tax base. Finally, although a relatively small factor, according to the U.S.
Census Bureau, the percentage of households in America with children under age 18 has been in steady decline. These economic factors are
exacerbated by constant political rhetoric, which is parroted by educational reformers and conservative commentators.
Here are constant themes echoed on various political and education forums: Money doesnt fix education. We spend more than (choose
your nation) and get worse results. Class size doesnt matter. (Which is true to a certain extent in the grim industrial model of this era) Teachers are
overpaid and dont even work all year. Teachers unions are only interested in the status quo and ripping off the rest of us. The reasons schools
are bad is because parents are irresponsible. Its their problem. Im not paying to raise their (usually black)
kids.There are many similar bits of bitter propaganda one can discover in an hour or two on Huffington Post or in other education discussion settings.
The fascination with economy of scale and the use of technology also contributes to the erosion of funding. If one believes that technology can make
education leaner and meaner, they certainly have a point. Schools have indeed gotten leaner and meaner. And most of all, the rise of charter
schools, the mirage of school choice, and the hundreds of millions spent by hedge funds and foundations to fund a very small
percentage of Americas schools, create
the illusion that we dont need a strong base of funding for the public
system. The education reform cartel has largely succeeded in convincing the public of the bullet points above, leading to civic resistance to proper
funding of local schools. The strategy of reformers seems to be to starve public schools so that increasing
numbers of families will flee to the charters and voucher-funded private schools. Whether or not it is their intent, it is the
clear result. For these reasons it is not hyperbole to claim that educational reform has made nearly all public schools worse.
Education Reform is used to delay structural change and sustains anti-black violence
Quick 16 (Kimberly is a policy associate at The Century Foundation working on education policy in the foundations
Washington, D.C. office. The Century Foundation. Why Black Lives Matter in Education, Too. June 21,
2016. https://tcf.org/content/commentary/black-lives-matter-education/)
Last month, the New Schools Venture Fund Summit in San Franciscoan invitation-only conference of education reformers
opened with words from a Black Lives Matter Teach For America executive, an advocate for undocumented young
people, and a professor on social movements. Their opening plenary session reflected the growing commitment ofmany
mainstream education reform organizations to explore how issues of race and identity impact educations
landscape. But not everyone is happy about it. Not too long after the conference, Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow and vice president at the
Thomas B. Fordham Institute, wrote a piece criticizing the leftward lurch of the education reform movement. He quoted several right-leaning education
reformers who feel like conservative dissenting views are being ostracized by the increasing dominance of social justice warriors. Many of the
decried the increase of identity politics in
unnamed sources, as well as Rick Hess of American Enterprise Institute,
education policy. Specifically, they seemed to have the biggest issues with Black Lives Matter (BLM) and its unapologetic rhetoric. One
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cannot ignore structural racism, anti-blackness, and institutionalized violence in schools and call
themselves an education reformer. To assert that the vast disparities in educational and social outcomes
between minority children and their white counterparts are not rooted in past and present racially
discriminatory policies and pervasive biases is to intentionally misdiagnose the problem. In fact, lets take it a step
further and ask: Should we be comfortable with people teaching and creating policy for black children if they are uncomfortable proclaiming that Black
Lives Matter? Suresome of BLMs principles are divisive. Black Lives Matters bold mode of advocacy makes demands rather than proposals, and
identifies more challenges than victories. But we should remember that this nation was divided on issues of race and class long before BLM emerged as
a social force. Moreover, neither the conservative ed-reformers that criticized BLM, nor the activists that spoke on its behalf at the summit mentioned
specific policies that theyd like to disagree with or promote. Rather than engaging in a discussion on debateable policy platforms and interventions,
conservative reformers like Jeanne Allen of CER are perturbed by social justice activists beating [their] chests over race and income. Division is
not why we fear BLM; its far-reaching calls for change implicate long-standing institutions and individuals alike.
Black Lives Matter is a radical concept for three major reasons. Flipping the Script First, it decentralizes white people from
conversations about policies and institutions that were previously created for maintaining the power and privilege of
whiteness. Our public school system began to take shape during a time when, in most Southern states, it was illegal
to teach black slaves to read and write. As the system developed and expanded, schools were thought to be vehicles to
civilize, Christianize, and control black and brown children so they would not contribute to social upheaval. In this process, Congress
made it illegal to teach Native Americans in their native tongues, and stripped young native children from their homes to kill the Indian to save the man.
And although African-American leaders pushed for public education in the South during Reconstruction, the withdrawal of federal troops in 1877
jumpstarted generations of terror, legal segregation, sharecropping, and substandard educational opportunities. By 1932, a survey of 150 school districts
showed the beginnings of racialized academic tracking, and by the time the Educational Testing Service is formed in 1948, the originator of the SAT,
known eugenicist Carl Brigham had already performed research proving that immigrants and minorities were feeble minded. Most
current education reform circleswhile often innovative in outlookhave systematically failed to contend for the
ways in which racially discriminatory policy is baked into our system of public education. While we have made progress,
this disregard for black lives and black narratives limits the effectiveness of proposed reforms. How can one truly measure success through test scores
without first deeply evaluating how those tests might contain racially biased measures? How can reformers push challenging curriculums but not first ask
whether the books given to the children affirm or diminish their heritage? Do we trust charter schools to implement no-excuses disciplinary policies
before wrestling with the historical tendency of public education to encourage white assimilation over black freedom? In both blatant and subtle ways,
our education, housing, criminal justice, and political systems center the needs, feelings, and experiences of white Americans. Racial segregation and
marginalization are often foundational, and breaking that foundation necessarily causes fear, instability, and discomfort to those for whom it lifted up. Of
course, white peopleand particularly low-income white peopleface real and legitimate problems and inequities in America as well. But unlike black
and brown people, these challenges do not occur because they are white. Black Lives Matter doesnt seek to remove cross-racial concerns from public
policy discourse and creation, but to ensure that the concerns of African-Americans are consistently included in meaningful and effective ways. Wanting
It Now Unfortunately, and in contrast to much political rhetoric, we have never been a Were all in this together nation. We were for forced busing
before we were against it: white families remained quietly satisfied with the practice as long as it was used to maintain segregated schools rather than as
a tool for integration. Majority-minority schools are much more likely to be overwhelmingly low-income, lack qualified or experienced teachers, have an
insufficient number of therapists or counselors on staff, and fail to offer higher level or advanced placement coursework. The landscape of black
economic deprivation and isolation is also bleak: people of color are more likely to experience discriminatory housing policies, live near environmental
hazards like coal-fired power plants and landfills, and suffer from unsafe and contaminated living spaces than are low-income whites. And the low rate of
intergenerational social and economic mobility in the black community means that even if a black family climbs into the middle class, there is no
guarantee that their children will remain there. This is old news. Research now confirms what minorities have long known to be true through their own
lived experiences. Tired of waiting, Black Lives Matter demands sweeping and immediate change. If BLM activists seem perpetually dissatisfied, its
because they are. And they should be. The issues facing black Americans are urgent, and small advancements, while good, are woefully
insufficient. Moreover, marginal, slow improvements are too often used as excuses to cancel or postpone
structural change. Many education reformers, resigned to passive incrementalism, are too quick to
celebrate minor changes when vast racial and socioeconomic gaps persist when it comes to student achievement and
opportunities. Pushing Back to Push Forward Finally, this push for immediate change necessitates more
confrontational, more visible tactics. Its worth remembering the marginalization that frequently accompanies minority voices. From delays in
civil rights legislation, to the voter ID laws currently springing up in many states, the concerns and opinions of brown and black people
have been drowned out by powerful leaders who do not look like them unless and until they raise their voices or disrupt
the status quo. A significant catalyst for reform during the height of the Civil Rights Movement was the media imagery of black people facing
violence in the forms of angry mobs, police dogs, and fire hoses head on, defying local laws and regulations that restricted their ability to protest and
assemble. Black Lives Matter is in many ways a movement of black bodies in defiance. It makes sense that this challenges us
particularly as people invested in education. Part of the purpose of school is to mold not just smart, but well-adjusted and civic
minded kids, and at first glance, Black Lives Matter activists appear unconcerned with civility. But in many ways, BLM uplifts a vision of
blackness that educators should want for their students: powerful, confident, inquisitive, social-justice
minded, determined, and ultimately, heard. In an environment where black boys are three times more likely than white boysand
black girls are six times more likely than white girlsto be suspended or expelled from school, and where the vast majority of those punishments are
delved out for defiance or other subjective, non-violent behaviors, its time to seriously reflect on the ways that society
might conflate bad behavior and black expression. Educators, regardless of ideology, should advocate for spaces in which all
student voices will be empowered, and should be particularly conscious of how black voices might need to be a little louder than the rest to be equally
regarded. The Conservative Voice: Pushout or Walkout? The conservative voice in education reform remains important, and has contributed to
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challenging the status quo in several important ways. But Black Lives Matter is simply the notion that the humanity of black people deserves to be
respected and regarded with the same vigor and consistency as that of white people in all policy and processes. Its curious,
then, thatsome conservativeshave identified this basic notionthe still unfulfilled promise of all men are created equalas a
force that alienates them from the education reformconversation. Its fully possible to be conservative and advocate for say,
market-based reforms, while acknowledging structural racism and disparity and desiring to do something about it. In his essay on conservative pushout
in the education reform movement, Pondiscio writes that conservative theories of action are based on strong evidence of two claims: that markets have
taken more people out of poverty than any force and history, and that full membership in civil society gives individuals and their groups power, builds
social capital, and enables communities to thrive and express themselves fully. He is correct that these ideas merit a full hearing. But they are not
incompatible with equity-minded social movementsso long as conservatives are willing to acknowledge the ways in which minorities have struggled to
gain access to both the marketplace and civil society. Anti-racism need not be connected to a particular partisan ideology, but for whatever reasons,
some conservatives still seem to shy away from the concept.
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LinkEd-Reform - Wilderson
Link - Debate cant be reformed- Cant change educational models or spaces. ----Their
simple in vocational gesture towards a social world for blacks ignores the churning
vertices of pervasive anti-blackness only once we come to abject humanity for its
violent consumption of blackness can black social life steal itself away from the human
and its socio-pathogenic logic of representation living death-making registers as
perceptual labor in order to force and secure the grammar of progress
Wilderson 14
(Frank B. Wilderson III, UC Irvine Round Robin Discussion, 2014)
I want you to know that it is not my intention to single out the world of college debate as a peculiarly anti-black constellation or
institution of arrangements.Those who know my work know that I think the world is one big plantation. But the web of
institutional relations which we call college debate requires special attention for the simple fact that it represents itself to
itself as a bastion of consent. An institutional world which is as far removed from the daily floggings and sexual violations
and the injunction against Black intellectual interventions as it can be. The past architects and present day guardians of
college debate would have us belief that the world of debate and the world in general can be reformed and
indeed transformed if thoughtful, well meaning, and liberal minded people engaged in reasoned, rational and above
all, civil dialogue. The film 12 Years a Slave is not as naive as that when Solomon Northup the protagonist in 12 Years A Slave
returns home from after being freed from slavery we learn that he was not able to sue the men who stole him from his "free" life
in Saratoga New York and sent him to a Louisiana plantation. Since he was officially freed before he was abducted why we
might ask he was not able to sue the white men who abducted him. The answer is simple because a black person even a free
black person was not allowed to testify against a white person in a courtroom. For many of us this has a familiar ring for those
who would say that America has come a long way since 1865, but most black people know that when a crime is being
investigated the word of a white person always takes precedence over the word of a black person. Today there is no law on the
books that says a black person cannot testify against a white person but we might be in a worse situation than we were in
1854 simply for the fact that no black voice has any truth value when it contradicts a non black voice. The truth value I am
talking about is something more comprehensive than the narrow requirements on judging who did or did not win the
debate. What 12 Years A Slave helps us understand is that black enunciations cannot be recognized and incorporated into
the global fabric of Human enunciation. The Narrative Arc of a Slave is not an arc at all but a flat line or what Hortense
Spillers calls historical stillness. A flat line that moves (if moves is the right word) from disequilibrium to a moment of narrative
called faux equilibrium to disequilibrium restored and/or re-articulated. In 12 Years A Slave one might think of the moment when
Brad Pitt's character agrees to contact Solomon's white friends in the North so that they can come South with free Negro papers
as the moment of faux equilibrium. The formal structure of 12 Years A Slave's narrative arc, which is no arc at all but rather a
wallowing within an A temporal state of disequilibrium alerts us to the fact that this is a film about slavery shot through the lens of
social death. There is no pretense of a sentimental investment in the emancipatory promise in democracy and
constitutional redress. There is no pretense of sentimental investment in liberal Humanist notions of the universal integrity
of the Human or the capacity of white people to look into their hearts and change. This kind of change, this
transformative promise, this peculiarly humanist kind of narrative belongs to white men and their junior partners in civil society
meaning non-black immigrants, white and non-black people who are Queer, and non-black women. These fully invested and not
so fully vested citizens live through narrative arcs of transformation and when need be their collective unconscious can
call upon Blacks as props they can harness their anti-black violence to turn blackbodies or black flesh into
the necessary implements to help bring about their psychic and social transformation. We might agree that an analogy
between the plantation of the 19th century and the web of institutional relations that constituted the world of debate seems a bit
dodgy if we were to base our comparison points of articulation in political economy. In other words it is not cotton which is being
picked or sugar cane that is being chopped in these hermetic conference rooms where people speak so fast that you wonder if
you should call paramedics before they die of hyperventilation. The round robin losers don't get taken out back and given out a
hundred lashes for their failures. Thepolitical economy of the slave estate looks a lot different from the political economy of
debate, but the structural violence that is fortified and extended, the political and the libidinal economy of the plantation can
be apprehended in the libidinal economy of debate. In debate, as on the plantation fully vested citizens and not so fully
vested citizens live through narrative arcs and transformations. I was struck by the long enduring moments of silence in 12
Years A Slave, for me those silences labor in two ways. They force the audience into a reflection on the Slave's historical
stillness. To quote Hortense Spillers or to quote Orlando Patterson on natal alienation. And they could note a paradigm of
existence that if one is a slave one has no contemporaries no interlocutors in the world. The silences are coupled with a series
of unsuccessful attempts on a part of the Slave's to find an auditor for his or her speech and be successful in the acts of
writing. As Solomon Northup makes his way South in the hold of a slave vessel one of the slaves tells him the way for him to
stay alive is to say as little as possible about himself and to let no one know that he can read and write. The simple act of
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communication, of being heard by the Other turns into an endeavor that cannot be reconciled with his status as a
speaking implement. The berries that he makes ink with are too thin and watery to secure his words on the page. Every
declaration he makes in which he claims his status as a free black and a bonafide member of civil society is
met not with reasoned rejoinders and counter claims backed by the argumentation and evidence that proves him
wrong. But are met instead with the most horrendous acts of violence, violence aimed not at producing a disciplined subject in
the Foucauldian sense of the word or even a more productive laborer. Rather it is violence aimed at maintaining the
annihilation of his subjectivity, violence in service to maintaining the line between the living and the dead. Solomon and the
women and the men who traveled south with him learned very quickly that Black speech is always coerced speech. The only
way to speak is to mirror back to non-black that which they are willing to hear. The only way to speak he learns is to mirror back
to his masters that which they most admire and cherish in themselves and that any problem which he raises must be tested and
rehearsed inside his head before it is broached to his masters that his dilemmas must be transposed into white dilemmas if they
are to gain any traction whatsoever and not become just cause to open his back with a whip. An analogy between 12 Years A
Slave and the world of debate may seem facile and ahistorical to some. For this reason we might want to think of the resonance
between the plantation and debate not as an analogy but as a homology- the existence of shared ancestry between a pair of
structures or genes in different species. Homologous structures are any structure that have similarity and come from the same
lineage. It can be seen in the forelimbs of mammals; analogous structures are very similar but come from different ancestors.
This can be seen as the North American flying squirrel as one definition puts it verses the Australian sugar glider. They both
have similar features but come from two different locations. The Australian sugar glider is more related to the kangaroo than to
the flying squirrel. So I am suggesting that there is an homology or a set of homolomgies here that makes for a common
ancestry and we'll come to this in a moment between the debate and plantation life. Two homologies between the libidinal
economy of debate and the libidinal economy of the plantation are Negrophilia and Negrophobia both of which are subtended by
gratuitous violence. Gratuitous violence is well theorized by Orlando Patterson along with two other constitutive elements of
social death: natal disalienation and general dishonor. But the writing of Franz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks or Hortense
Spillers in Black, White, And In Color or Jared Sexton in Amalgamation Schemes and above all the writing of David Mariott in On
Black Men and Haunted Life help us understand how Negrophilia and Negrophobia are also essential to the maintenance of
social death.
Link Education reform is a cover for furthering institutional power that perpetuates
ant-blackness.
Pommells 12
(Michaela works with political education development, racial identity development and facilitating capacity building workshops
for achieving gender and racial justice. She has presented at numerous interdisciplinary conferences and community lectures
focusing on intersectional feminism and restorative justice practices. Huffington Post. Education Reform is Impossible Without
Addressing Racism October 4, 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michaela-pommells/education-reform-and-
racism_b_1940056.html2
Im tired of talking about education reform. Tired of yapping with other reformers who are trying to figure it all out.
Im done. Im throwing in the towel. But this doesnt mean I will let my lips turn blue from silence; Im taking my rant to the picket
lines. Its time to lead the conversation about education reform, with race: the structural organizing
factor that determines educational access and opportunity in education institutions. Lets face it, race inequity may not
be a deliberate goal of education policy and practice (or maybe it is) but neither is it accidental. The result is a whole lot of
seemingly well-meaning people trying to evoke change in an education system that never intended to
educate people of color in the first place. Educational institutions are places that actively reproduce ways of thinking,
feeling, believing, and acting that work to the advantage of white students. If we want to reform education, it
requires that we acknowledge and dismantle the power structures that are embedded in the system. It
involves understanding that the conversation about education reform takes place in the shadow of slavery and Jim Crow. The
outright denial of the institutional racism that afflicts our schools and classrooms is reinforced through bad policies and
educational malpractice. This lends little value in criticizing the circumstances in public schools when most schools fail to even
recognize the presence or impact of racism. Yet, its a problem because the actual process of dismantling racial
inequality in education requires an outright revolution. Power structures and institutions cannot change
without getting everybody involved. The conversation has to begin with the assertion that many
teachers and teacher educators reflect internalized deficit assumptions about students of color.
Teachers are gatekeepers to learning and they can empower their students to challenge our nations ideology
about black and brown inferiority.Teachers can be led either to continue to project racism in their classrooms, or to build
their capacity to challenge institutional racism that is affirmed, appropriated, or resisted within their school site. Engaging
educators in the process of building an anti-racist movement for public education creates solidarity that is not separated by race
but explored and appreciated in order to better understand the way power works. Today, education policies have
barely responded to the disparities in the system that systematically disadvantage students of color.
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Democrats policies have aligned with the corporate education agenda. The GOP and the Tea Party have
made strong endorsements for school choice and have essentially suggested eliminating the Department of
Education. We cant rely on our government for this one. Achieving an anti-racist education system will
require an uprising from the ground up that demands anti-racist policies and carries out systematic anti-racist
education among teachers and students. Until then, we will only pretend to care about education reform.
Sidelining Black analysis destroys effective coalitions and produces alliances with an
anti-black civil society. Vote Neg on presumption.
Sexton 10 (Jared, UC-Irvine, https://eee.uci.edu/12w/22500/homepage/sexton_POC.blindness.ST.pdf)
If the oppression of nonblack people of color in, and perhaps beyond, the United States seems conditional to the historic
instance and functions at a more restricted empirical scope, antiblackness seems invariant and limitless (which does not mean
that the former is somehow negligible and short-lived or that the latter is exhaustive and unchanging). If pursued with some
consistency, the sort of comparative analysis outlined above would likely impact the formulation of political strategy and modify
the demeanor of our political culture. In fact, it might denature the comparative instinct altogether in favor of a relational analysis
more adequate to the task. Yet all of this is obviated by the silencing mechanism par excellence in Left political
and intellectual circles today: Dont play Oppression Olympics! The Oppression Olympics dogma levels a charge
amounting to little more than a leftist version of playing the race card. To fuss with details of comparative (or relational)
analysis is to play into the hands of divide-and-conquer tactics and to promote a callous immorality. However, as in its
conservative complement, one notes in this catchphrase the unwarranted translation of an inquiring position of comparison into
an insidious posture of competition, the translation of ethical critique into unethical attack. This point allows us to understand
better the intimate relationship between the censure of black inquiry and the recurrent analogizing to black suffering mentioned
above: they bear a common refusal to admit to significant differences of structural position born of
discrepant histories between blacks and their political allies, actual or potential. We might, finally, name this
refusal people-of-color-blindness, a form of colorblindness inherent to the concept of people of color to the precise
extent that it misunderstands the specificity of antiblackness and presumes or insists upon the
monolithic character of victimization under white supremacy thinking (the afterlife of) slavery as a form of
exploitation or colonization or a species of racial oppression among others. The upshot of this predicament is that obscuring
the structural position of the category of blackness will inevitably undermine multiracial coalition
building as a politics of radical opposition and, to that extent, force the question of black liberation
back to the center of discussion. Every analysis that attempts to understand the complexities of racial rule and the
machinations of the racial state without accounting for black existence within its frameworkwhich does not
mean simply listing it among a chain of equivalents or returning to it as an afterthoughtis doomed to miss
what is essential about the situation. Black existence does not represent the total reality of the racial
formationit is not the beginning and the end of the storybut it does relate to the totality; it indicates
the (repressed) truth of the political and economic system. That is to say, the whole range of positions within the
racial formation is most fully understood from this vantage point, not unlike the way in which the range of gender and sexual
variance under patriarchal and heteronormative regimes is most fully understood through lenses that are feminist and queer
What is lost for the study of black existence in the proposal for a decentered, "postblack" paradigm is a proper analysis of the
true scale and nature of black suffering and of the strugglespolitical, aesthetic, intellectual, and so onthat have sought to
transform and undo it. What is lost for the study of nonblack nonwhite existence is a proper analysis of the true scale and nature
of its material and symbolic power relative to the category of blackness.76 This is why every attempt to defend the
rights and liberties of latest victims of state repression will fail to make substantial gains insofar as it
forfeits or sidelines the fate of blacks, the prototypical targets of the panoply of police practices and the juridical
infrastructure built up around them. Without blacks on board, the only viable political option and the only
effective defense against the intensifying cross fire will involve greater alliance with an antiblack civil
society and further capitulation to the magnification of state power. At the apex of the midcentury social
movements, Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton wrote in their 1968 classic, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, that black
freedom entails "the necessarily total revamping of the society." 77 For Hartman, thinking of the entanglements of the African
diaspora in this context, the necessarily total revamping of the society is more appropriately envisioned as the creation of an
entirely new world: I knew that no matter how far from home I traveled, I would never be able to leave my past behind. I would
never be able to imagine being the kind of person who had not been made and marked by slavery. I was black and a history of
terror had produced that identity. Terror was "captivity without the possibility of flight, ' inescapable violence, precarious life.
There was no going back to a time or place before slavery, and going beyond it no doubt would entail nothing less momentous
than yet another revolution.78
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LinkEqual Education Access
The move towards providing equal access to education replicates the failures of 19th
century white abolitionism by securing faith in the modernist institution of education to
resolve anti-blackness. The affirmative is a active deterrent of meaningful abolitionist
praxis.
Despite the shift of the weight of the abolitionist movement away from colonizationwhether
promoting it or arguing against itand toward planning and enacting immediatist approaches, the
movement still retained many modernist assumptions, necessarily linked with subtle forms of
coloniality. In part of the movements defense against the colonization approach, they had sought to undermine the latters defamation of black peoples moral
character and intellectual capabilities, whether directly or implied in environmentalist arguments. The complexity of the relations between different sides in the movement
required the more radical, immediatist advocates to make multiple compromises. In what Ibram Rogers calls the first great debate over the function of black higher
education, he distinguishes four main camps in the debate who argued over the slave-holding societys racial quandary: what to do with free blacks (Rogers 2012, 10-11).
On the side of colonization education, some black educators were accommodating separatists, believing that African Americans should impart their superior civilization to
backward Africans, and they joined forces with the white paternal conservatives, particularly the ACS who were among the minority of whites who believed at the time that
African Americans should be educated (10). Opposed
to them in this ideological dispute were two camps who joined
forces to advocate for giving freed blacks a classical college education in the US: black thinkers who
were egalitarian elitists, believing that both races were capable of receiving the same education for
the same purposetraining a talented few to lead and provide a model for the many, and white
abolitionists who were paternal liberals, who believed they were innately endowed with a civil or
Christian mission to lift African Americans from their degradation by means of a liberal method
education for domestic civil equality (11). Despite their racial and ideological differences, a commonality
across these four camps was a shared faith in the modernist institution of educationand, conversely,
a neglect to consider narratives of alternative regimes of study. Perhaps because the black egalitarian elitists were seeking to
collaborate with the paternal liberals and to connect with a wider white audience who subscribed to the modernist valuing of educationand probably also because they
believed in these ideals to varying extentsthey deployed them in the rhetoric they used to counter the colonization discourse and to inspire black people to organize
themselves with pride and self-determination. These
assumptions were seen most especially in the call to
selfimprovement through work and education, such as in the Freedom Journal in 1827: the key to the
races advance was rigorous education and hard work, embracing the virtues of industry, temperance,
and order, thereby convincing the world by uniform propriety of conduct that we are worthy of
esteem and patronage (Goodman 1998, 26). Likewise, the militant abolitionist, David Walker, argued that,
black people should aim to become educated, in order to counter white peoples (such as Thomas
Jeffersons) assumptions of black peoples inherent intellectual inferiority, and nothing so frightened
whites as the bare name of educating the colored people (Walker 1829-30; in Goodman 1998, 31). With the
integration of the immediatist wing of the movement, the white leaders also promoted education as a
means both for combating white prejudice and developing movement leaders, such as with their plan
for establishing manual labor colleges, with a first one located in New Haven, which would train a new
generation of black leaders (33). Their hopes were realized to some extent, as some of the key black abolitionists were educated in Northern schools,
usually segregated, such as the African Free Schools in New York City, from which several notable black abolitionists graduated, including Henry Highland Garnet, James
McCune Smith, and Charles L. Reason (Kharem and Hayes 2005, 74). Although the intellectual development of black abolitionist leaders was certainly important for the
realization of some of the abolitionist movements goals, it
is my contention that retaining an uncritical view on these
modernist assumptions prevents us from seeing the ways in which the abolitionist project was limited
in carrying out its mission by subscriptions to these assumptions and the practices and institutions
that they legitimated. On the one hand, I argue that the ability of black abolitionist leaders to develop their capacities in education institutions was because of
their practices of autonomous study within those places, not because of but despite of the presence of modernist/colonial practices in those institutions. For example, to the
extent that the African Free Schools employed black teachers who promoted the learning of African and African-American knowledge they attracted more black students,
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while conversely their enrollment declined when they hired white teachers who promoted modernist/colonialist curricula, such as James Andrews, who began to favor the
idea of Blacks returning to Africa as colonizers (Kharem and Hayes 2005, 74). On the other hand, the major successes realized through the abolition movement required the
more radical abolitionists to compromise as they entered partnerships, not only with the paternal liberals, but also with the Northern white elite, the Northern states, and the
Republican Party, culminating with the Union victory in the Civil War and the formal outlawing of slavery and involuntary servitude with the 13th Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution in 1865. Yet, the intended effects of this formal abolition were only partially realized in the South in the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, as black people
still lacked effective political, economic, and civic freedoms to a great extent, and even less so after the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the Jim Crow era (Olson
2004, 9-16; Du Bois 1992). Considering
the manifold ways in which these forms of racial domination continue
today in the new Jim Crow and white democracy (Alexander 2010; Olson 2004), this should call for more
serious investigation into the conditions that limited the abolitionist movement from realizing its full
potential and made it more of a means of recuperating the movement into the project of
modernity/coloniality and, thereby, delaying meaningful abolition of white supremacist institutions.
One of the key mechanisms of this recuperation was the institution of education. Although there were inklings of black
self-determinated study in the early abolitionist movement, such as in the African Free Schoolslater developed in more self-determining ways with the Black Nationalist and
Black Power movements of the 20th century (Kharem and Hayes 2004) most instances of black study within education institutions subordinated black, African peoples
knowledge to white, Western, Christian epistemology and recuperated their passions for learning into the modernist/colonialist projects of liberal, capitalist democracy.
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LinkFeminist Carcerality
Despite the affirmatives well meaning intensions, the 1AC must be placed within the
larger, historical lineage of feminisms active role in the growth of the carceral state.
VAWA, Without our alternative, the affirmatives pro-feminist politics place the state as
the abitrator of sexual violence AND eschews a structural critique of the operation of
gendered violence. The impact is the incarceration of black people.
Gottschalk, 13 Marie, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania (THE POLITICS OF
THE CARCERAL STATE: YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW, Why Prison?, David Scott, Cambridge
University Press, 2013)
Politicians of all stripes, including Barry Goldwater, Governor George Wallace of Alabama and
Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, promulgated the politically potent but highly
misleading image of white women, preyed on by strangers, as the most likely victims of violent
crime. But leading politicians had considerable help from womens groups in feminising the crime issue and taking it in a more punitive direction. Womens
groups and feminists in the USA have a long and conflicted history on questions related to crime,
punishment and law and order (Gottschalk, 2006: 11621). Periodically, they have played central roles
in defining violence as a major threat to society and uncritically pushing for more policing powers .
The US victims rights movement coalesced at about the same time that womens groups were
mobilising against rape and domestic violence. This had important consequences for the growth of the
carceral state. The contemporary womens movement in the USA was among the first to draw widespread attention to the issue of violence against women in the
1970s. By some measures, the US anti-rape and domestic violence movements were remarkably successful. Nearly every state enacted legislation designed to make it easier
to convict and punish people accused of sexual assault or domestic violence. These reforms had significant effects on public attitudes. On the positive side, more services
became available for victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. Public officials and members of law enforcement were sensitised to these issues in ways they had not
been before. On
the negative side, these movements, with their emphasis on law enforcement solutions,
bolstered a more punitive climate. Feminists allied themselves with law-and-order groups to secure
rape reform and domestic violence legislation. If they had not, the simmering backlash against the womens movement in the 1970s likely
would have derailed their efforts in many state legislatures. The cost of these alliances was high. In Washington State, for example, the womens lobby marketed a rape
reform bill to the legislature as a law-and-order bill. The measure was eventually enacted in July 1975, in part by riding on the coat-tails of a new, mandatory death penalty
statute (Loh, 1981). In California, the rape shield statute was named the Robbins Rape Evidence Law in honour of its co-sponsor, conservative state senator Alan Robbins
(McDermott, 1975; Henderson, 1985). Mainstream national womens organisations, notably the National Organistion for Women, are credited with putting rape and, later,
domestic violence on the national agenda. But the original rape crisis centres and shelters for battered women in the USA had strong local and radical origins (ONeill, 1969;
Ferree, 1987: 183; Dobash and Dobash, 1992: 23; Matthews, 1994: xiixiv). Over the years, many of these centres and shelters were dramatically transformed (Gornick et al.,
1985: 260; Smith and Freinkel, 1988: 812). Apolitical professionals replaced many of the highly politicised volunteers and staff members who had established these facilities.
Shelters and centres cast aside their initial concerns about being too closely associated with the
government, and developed formal and informal ties with police, prosecutors, hospitals and social
service agencies (Matthews, 1994). They became more dependent on government money and more
supportive of law enforcement solutions, like stiffer penalties, mandatory arrests and no-drop policies.
Shelters in the USA faced greater pressure to secure government funding because the US welfare state is comparatively less developed. British shelters could fund
Many US shelters and centres
themselves, primarily by charging rent to their residents, many of whom received financial support from the government.
had modest goals that turned out to be quite compatible with the growing conservative law-and-order
movement. They sought to press public officials to manage violence and eschewed any broader
critique of the governments role in the war against crime. In the process, rape and domestic violence
were increasingly redefined as individual, psychological traumas. This seemingly apolitical view of
violence against women complemented the conservative view that attributed the increase in crime to
the pathologies of individual criminals and not to deeper social, economic and political problems in the
USA. It also was compatible with the proliferation of dehumanised images of black criminals preying on
innocent white victims, best exemplified by the infamous Willie Horton commercials of the 1988
presidential campaign (Matthews, 1994: 1549; Madriz, 1997). 1 As the victims rights movement took shape, anti-rape
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activists mimicked some of its key tactics in order to secure legislation and funding. For example, they
used storytelling tactics that dramatised accounts of a rape victims experience (Schmitt and Martin, 1999). By
framing the rape issue around horror stories and victimhood, they fed into the victims movements
compelling image of a society held hostage by a growing number of depraved, marauding criminals. The
main vehicle for greater state involvement in the cause of violence against women was the US Department of Justice, which funnelled money, expertise and philosophy into
the emerging movement. The patchwork, incoherent, means-tested US welfare state had neither the will nor the way to help women who were victims of violence. Instead, the
US Department of Justice became the champion of abused women. It was a leading critic of the governments response to domestic violence, including the failure of law
enforcement to protect women from further abuse. Law enforcement solutions filled a vacuum created by an underdeveloped and much maligned welfare state. By contrast,
Britains Home Office and police maintained their distance from womens groups fighting rape and domestic violence (Rock, 1990: 44). By the time the womens movement in
Britain sought to politicise the issue of violence against women in the early-to-mid 1970s, the needs of crime victims had been an ongoing, though not leading, concern in elite
British politics for nearly two decades. The anti-rape and domestic violence movements in Britain emerged at a time when the politics of victims was already on a relatively
settled course that emphasised social welfare solutions and that did not pit victims against offenders. The presence of a more developed welfare state in Britain predisposed
British feminists and public officials to view social policy as the most promising arena to address violence against women. State officials in Britain were responsive to calls
from womens groups for more housing, social services and welfare benefits to help them escape violence by achieving economic independence. They were far less receptive
than US officials to criticisms of policing and other law enforcement practices in dealing with domestic violence and rape. By not legitimising feminists criticisms of law
enforcements unresponsiveness to violence against women, the British government reduced the likelihood that feminists would become accomplices in the brewing get-
tough movement in Britain. In essence, it neutralised the salience of violence against women as a law-and-order rallying point. 2 The US womens movement embraced the
cause of violence against women at a moment when the politics of victimhood was still very embryonic, fluid and volatile in the USA (Gottschalk, 2006: 12430). Attention to
the needs and rights of rape victims and abused women helped to ignite and politicise a broader interest in victims that stressed victims rights and that denigrated offenders.
In the USA, the victims movement and the womens movement increasingly converged, which helped to embolden penal conservatives. In Britain they remained largely at
arms length from one another. Womens groups in the USA worked closely with state officials and government agencies at a time when the voice of penal conservatives was
growing louder in local and national politics. As a consequence, they were not well positioned to resist the rising tide of penal conservatism. Indeed, they ended up supporting
policies that emboldened it. The most notorious example is the federal Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) of
1994. The VAWA was a considerable achievement in many ways. It heightened public awareness of violence against women, promoted greater cooperation between
agencies with vastly different perspectives on the issue and provided states with new resources to tackle this problem. But the VAWA also strongly emphasised law
enforcement remedies. The
VAWA was part of the landmark $30 billion Violent Crime Control and Law
Enforcement Act signed into law by President Clinton, which allocated nearly $10 billion for new prison
construction, expanded the federal death penalty and created a federal three-strikes law. In the name
of protecting women and children, it contained several measures that challenged established privacy
protections, including a mandate that all states establish a registry for sex offenders or risk losing
federal money. The crime bill also permitted prosecutors in federal cases to introduce a defendants previous history of sexual offences into court proceedings.
The consolidation of the VAWA into the crime bill solidified the understanding of domestic violence
and other violence against women as primarily criminal matters. The VAWA became yet another way
for congressional leaders to show they were tough on crime. Although womens groups had some concerns about the VAWA as it
wound its way through Congress and became attached to the crime bill, they nonetheless spearheaded the effort to pass it. The VAWAs supporters ended up aligning
At the time, few feminists and womens
themselves with conservative political forces that had been prosecuting the war on crime so zealously.
groups considered that, by relying so heavily on the criminal justice system to combat violence
against women, they might be fostering a punitive political environment conducive to a prison boom.
The enormous expansion of the carceral state in the decades since may finally bring about a day of reckoning for feminists and womens groups. With more than 2 million
people behind bars, the overwhelmingly majority of them men, millions of women are the mothers, daughters, wives, partners and sisters of men entombed in the carceral
state. Moreover, since 1995, women have been the fastest growing segment of the US prison population. The chorus of doubts about relying on penal solutions to address
violence against women has been growing louder in the USA. Across a broad range of feminists, crime experts, academics and social workers, concerns have been mounting
The belief is growing that these legal
about mandatory arrest, presumptive arrest and no-drop policies, and about tougher sentencing.
remedies do not necessarily reduce violence against women and have contributed to greater state
control of women, especially poor women. 3 In recent years, womens groups in the USA have emerged as some of the fiercest critics of the
widening net of registration, community notification, residency and civil commitment laws that ensnare sexual offenders.
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LinkFigure of the Good Student
We have a link to their affirmation of the good student. The production of obedient,
governable subject necessitates the production of the delinquent child sent to
detention or juvenile hall. The abolition of white supremacist, settler colonial
capitalism requires resistance to the production of educated subjects that sustain
and solidify the prison regime.
Meyerhoff, 15 - Ph.D., Political Science, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, July 24, 2015
Abolitionjournal 15, 7-24-2015, "Prisons and universities are two sides of the same coin: Eli Meyerhoff on
Abolition," Abolition, http://abolitionjournal.org/eli-meyerhoff-abolitionist-study-against-and-beyond-higher-
education/)//HEX
Popular narratives portray society as made up of good and bad people. Figures of the citizen, the
worker, and the graduate are contrasted with the deviant, the criminal, and the dropout. For the safety
of good people, we are supposed to put bad people in separate places. When they are younger, those
stigmatized as bad kidsas delinquents, failures, dropoutsare sent to lower tracked courses,
detention, or juvenile hall. If they continue down this criminalized life path, they are sent to jails and
prisons. By contrast, those deemed good through the categorizing and sorting of education are admitted to
the place where good people rise: up through the school grades and into higher education. Prisons
and universities complement each other as two sides of the same coin . They are institutions for
producing obedient, governable subjects shaped in an accounting mode with incarceration for
debts to society and education for credits. Abolitionist movements should seek to abolish this whole
coin. From a decolonial, abolitionist perspective, this coin is the intersecting regimes of white
supremacist, settler colonial, hetero-patriarchal capitalism. Abolitionists have organized against
institutions associated with the bad side of the dichotomy of good/bad personsincluding prisons,
corporal punishment in schools, the schools-to-prisons pipeline, the death penalty, and the policeas
well as against the redemptive intermediaries of the military and work. Yet, abolitionists also need to
resist institutions, such as higher education, that are associated with the good side of the coin. When
considering an abolitionist critique of universities, academics experience anxieties: losing status and
competitiveness, giving up comforts, appearing hypocritical, or getting in trouble with employers (or
potential employers for the majority of the precarious academic workforce). Rather than dismissing these fears, we need
better collective practices for talking, writing, and organizing around these issues within and
against the education system, with communities who are excluded and marginalized from that system,
and for abolitionist, decolonial movements. Trying on our own, as heroic individuals, we get crushed, co-opted, or pushed out. The with and for
imperative requires recognizing that people are engaged in teaching and studying outside of
universities, including in prisons, all of the time. Ive learned this through organizing with prisoners and their families in North Carolina (see Inside-Outside
Alliance). Their studying together creates new ways of thinking and relating that are more useful for abolitionist resistance than any academic knowledge. Yet, institutions of
education de-legitimize their mode of studying. Thus, a central question for abolitionist movements is: how to connect with, amplify, and expand peoples
everyday, autonomous studying? Grounding abolitionism in everyday studying demands continual reflection on how to
understand and connect our movements. What if the resources of academiasuch as money, spaces,
and laborcould be used for supporting collective discussion of abolitionist questions in ways that
include people normally marginalized from academia? Such discussions could re-define how we
understand resources for movement-embedded study, while transforming ourselves and our
movements along the way. Abolition is an experiment with, and wager for, these possibilities .
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LinkGood Intensions
White people are guilty until proven innocent attempts to stabilize crisis endemic
to civil society are ultimately attempts to reinstantiate antiblackness through
recovery and reform
Wilderson 08 [Frank B. Wilderson III, former member of the Umkhonto we Sizwe, Incognegro: A Memoir of
Exile and Apartheid South End Press, pg. 407-411//heyo]
The claim of balance and fair play forecloses upon, not only the modest argument that the practices of the Cabrillo Student Senate are racist and illegitimate, but it also forecloses upon the more extended,
comprehensive, and antagonistic argument that Cabrillo itself is racist ad illegitimate. And what do we mean by Cabrillo? The White people who constitute its fantasies of pleasure and its discourse of
legitimacy. The generous We.So, lets bust We wide open and start at the end: White people are guilty until proven innocent. Fuck the compositional moves of substantiation and supporting evidence: I
was at a conference in West Oakland last week where a thousand Black folks substantiated it a thousand different ways. Youre free to go to West Oakland, find them, talk to them, get all the proof you
need. You can drive three hours to the mountains, so you sure as hell can cut the time in half to drive to the inner city. Knock on any door. Anyone who knows 20 to 30 black folks, intimatelyand if you
dont know 12 then youre not living in America, youre living in White Americaknows the statement to be true. White people are guilty until proven
innocent. Whites are guilty of being friends with each other, of standing up for their rights, of pledging allegiance to the flag, of reproducing concepts
Whites are guilty of wanting stability
like fairness, meritocracy, balance, standards, norms, harmony between the races. Most of all,
and reform.White people, like Mr. Harold and those in the English Division, are guilty of asking themselves the
question, How can we maintain the maximum amount of order (liberals at Cabrillo use euphemisms like peace,
harmony, stability), with the minimum amount of change, while presenting ourselves if but only to ourselves
as having the best of all possible intentions. Good people. Good intentions. White people are
the only species human or otherwise, capable of transforming the dross of good intentions into the gold of
,
grand intentions, and naming it change.These passive revolutions, fire and brimstone
conflicts over which institutional reform is better than the other one, provide a smoke screen
a diversionary play of interlocutionsthat keep real and necessary antagonisms at bay. White
people are thus able to go home each night, perhaps a little wounded, but feeling better for having
made Cabrillo a better placefor everyoneBefore such hubris at high places makes us all a little too giddy, let me offer a cautionary note: its scientifically
impossible to manufacture shinola out of shit. But White liberals keep on trying and end up spending a lifetime not knowing shit from shinola. Because
White people love their jobs, they love their institutions, they love their country, most of all they
love each other. And every Black or Brown body that doesnt love the things you love is a threat
to your love for each other. A threat to your fantasy space , your terrain of shared pleasures. Passive
revolutions have a way of incorporating Black and Brown bodies to either term of the debate.
What choice does one have? The third (possible, but always unspoken) term of the debate, White people are guilty of structuring
debates which reproduce the institution and the institution reproduces America and America is
always and everywhere a bad thingthis term is never on the tale, because the level of abstraction is too high for White liberals. Theyve
got too much at stake: their friends, their family, their way of life. Lets keep it all at eye level,
where Whites can keep on eye on everything. So the Black body is incorporated. Because to
be unincorporated is to say that what White liberals find valuable I have no use for. This , of course,
is anti-institutional and shows a lack of breeding, not to mention a lack of gratitude for all the
noblesse oblige which has been extended to the person of color to begin with. We will
incorporate colored folks into our fold, whenever possible and at our own pace, provided theyre
team players, speak highly of us, pretend to care what were thinking, are highly qualified, blah,
blah, blahbut, and this is key, we wont entertain the rancor which shits on our fantasy space. Weve
killed too many Indians, worked too many Chinese and Chicano fingers to the bone, set in
motion the incarcerated genocide of too many Black folks, and weve spent too much time at
the beach, or in our gardens, or hiking in the woods, or patting each other on the literary back,
or teaching Shakespeare and the Greeks, or drinking together to honor our dead at retirement
parties (Hell, Jerry White, lets throw a party for Joe White and Jane White who gave Cabrillo the best White years of their silly White lives, that we might all continue to do the same W hite thing. Sounds
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good to me, Jack White. Say, youre a genius! Did you think of this party idea all on your own? No, Jerry White, weve been doing it for years, makes us feel important. Without these parties we might
actually be confronted by our political impotence, our collective spinelessness, our insatiable appetite for gossip and administrative minutia, our fear of a Black Nation, out lack of will. Whew! Jack White,
too much time White-

we sound pathetic. Wed better throw that party pronto! White you are, Jerry. Jack White, you old fart, you, youre still a genius, heh, heh, heh.)
bonding in an effort to forget how hard we killed and to forget how many bones we walk across
each day just to get from our bedrooms to Cabrillotoo, too much for one of you coloreds to come
in here and be so ungrateful as to tell us the very terms of our precious debates are specious.But
specious they are, as evidenced by recent uproar in the Adjunct vs. Minority Hire debates, or whether or not English 100 students should be normed. The very terms of the debate suture discussions
around White entitlement, when White entitlement is an odious idea. White are entitled to betray other Whites, nothing else Beyond that youre not entitled to anything. So how could you possibly be
entitled to decide who should pass and who should fail? How could you possibly be entitled to determining where the sign-up sheet for Diversity Day buses will or will not be placed, and how funds should
be allocated? Okayso some of you want to hire a minority as long as s/hes well mannered and wont stab us in the back after s/hes in our sacred house; and some of you want to hire an adjunct (Jill
or Jeffery White) because, What the helltheyve been around as long as Jack, Joe, Jerry, and Jane White, and shucks fair is fair, especially if youre entitled. And entitlement is a synonym for Whiteness.
But theres only one job, because for years youve complained about the gate, while breathing collective (meaning White) sighs of relief that it was there to protect you from the hordes. (Somewhere down
the street in Watsonville an immigrant is deciding whether to give his daughter or his wife up for the boss to fuck that he might have a job picking your fruit. Somewhere up the road in Oakland a teen is
going to San Quentin for writing graffiti on a wall. And youre in here trying to be fair to each other, while promoting diversitywhatever that means. By the time youve arrived at a compromise over
norming or faculty hiresyour efforts to enlighten whoever doesnt die in the fields or fall from the earth into prisonthe sista has been raped and the brotha busted. But then youve had a difficult day as
well.) So, do what you always do. Hire the most qualified candidate. Here are some questions and guidelines to speed the search committee on its way and make everyone feel entitled.
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LinkHegemony/U.S. Exceptionalism
The affirmatives Pro-America political orientation renews the temporal distinction

between domestic peace and foreign conflict that is fundamental to U.S. nationalism.
Affirmations of hegemonic control create a racialized relationship of spectatorship that
disavows the interrelation between war within the international sphere and police
violence. The impact is the disappearance of the mass violence of border militarization
and an anti-black prison regime.
126)
There are several problems with this nationalist frame. Not
only does organization for war blur sharp temporal distinctions
between war and peace, it also blurs what are often thought of as spatially discrete spaces of domestic
peace and foreign conflict. Further, the myth of exception shrouds the everyday, unexceptional
organization and deployment of state violence on the domestic front through policing the presence
and actions of people. In practice these lines are blurry, but they must be constantly renewed
discursively (e.g. media, think tanks) and materially (e.g. border fortification)because these
categories are so fundamental to national identity and to the states claims to singularly decide who
may use force. This chapter focuses on American exceptionalism and specifically on analyzing the geopolitical imaginations of this national ideology. How do
exceptionalist understandings of domestic and foreign space work to reproduce US nationalism and
war-making abroad and to obscure state violence practiced domestically? By the term geopolitical imaginations, I mean
The reproduction of such discourses
understandings of places and their interrelations that inform the discursive production of meaning.
through representations and everyday practices of identity making, statecraft and governance thereby
have material effects in the world, informing and undergirding the often violent reproduction of
national spaces and international relations (Bialasiewicz et al., 2007). I build on Judith Butlers (2009) Frames of War, in which she theorizes
antiviolence, from a critical geographic perspective. Butlers essays were written as the US waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. US practices of torture revealed by the Abu
Ghraib photos and the practice of indefinite detention in Guantnamo provoked a crisis in national identity centering on the nations claims to democracy, freedom, and the
rule of law. The temporizing frame of wartime emergency serves to legitimate such violent practices, while
simultaneously obscuring how these practices were developed historically and how frequently they
have been deployed (Puar 2007). Geopolitical imaginations constitute some of the most durable frames of
war. A critical understanding of how these imaginative geographies work to sustain global power and hierarchies, including the fraught racializing line of whose lives are
grievable, is imperative for cultivating a nonmoralized sense of responsibility within shared conditions of precarious life (Butler 2009: 177). While a good deal of critical
attention has analyzed how racialized geopolitical imaginations inform and sustain popular support for war-making, there has been much less attention to how racialized
imaginations of the domestic sphere also shape understandings of defense, security and organization for violence. The infapolitical line dividing who will count as human (who
is grievable in Butlers terms) from those whose lives are not grievable is a geopolitical struggle engaged not simply through external or Orientalist logics of foreignness, but
also through the cultivation of internal enemies. For example, the
abstract depictions of US war-making on the nightly news are
not separate from racialized depictions of crime. Each set of depictions creates a racialized
relationship of spectatorship that fosters viewers material complicity in state violence, while
dematerializing its effects and erasing the interrelation between police violence and war-making
(Feldman, 2004). Criticism
of American exceptionalism that focuses on US war-making and empire building
abroad, but ignores the systemic practices of state violence domestically, reproduces exceptionalist
lens undergirding US state violence wherever it is practiced. What disappears in plain sight is the mass
violence of border militarization responsible for the deaths of thousands of migrants and a US prison
system whose population of 2.3 million people rivals that of the nations fourth largest city, Houston,
Texas. In the US, governing through crime builds on and ratifies anti-Black racism, while also serving to police and thereby constitute gender and sexual difference
(Subdury, 2005; Incite!, 2006). Yet, the centrality of confronting anti-Black racism is not frequently understood as
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fundamental to also ending Native colonization and genocide and war (Smith, 2006; Smith, 2010). This makes
challenging the systematic, domestic practices of state violence, a site where its exercise is most
hegemonic, fundamental to undermining the legal categorizations that create race and structure
grievability. This chapter proceeds in four parts. First, it briefly traces Judith Butlers discussion of making antiviolent political interventions. Next, develops an analysis
of the dominant geographic imagination shaping American exceptionalism. It then provides an example of the interrelation between postCold War domestic and foreign
politics, which work to perpetuate and obscure practices of US state violence. It shows how the naturalization of antiBlack racism and legitimacy afforded to state punishment
have created a normalized system of state violence in the form of mass imprisonment. Fi- nally, the chapter concludes by returning to Judith Butlers politics of antiviolence
with a consideration of the politics of abolition.

126)
sovereignty. Yet,
As
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170
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LinkIdentity
The appeal to social identity categories in the 1AC (like gender, worker or democrat)
are a form of structural adjustment of black to human in civil society that disavows the
antiblack homicidal project at the heart of civil society
Wilderson 10 [CITE??]
Until one can demonstrate how the corporeal integrity of the Black has indeed been repaired, "a
political genealogy of gender ontologies" which "blow[s] apart the sex-gender-desire nexus .. . [and thus] permits
resignification of identity as contingency" is a political project the Slave can only laugh at, or weep at.
But whether laughing or weeping(for the Slave's counterhegemonic responses are of no essential value and have no structural
impact), the Slave is always sidelined by such "resignification of [Human] identity." Resignification of an identity
which never signified an identity void of semiotic playis nothing to look forward to. Here, an unforgivable obscenity is performed twice
over: first, through the typical White feminist gesture that assumes all women (and men) have bodies, ergo all bodies
second, by way of the more recent, but no less common, assertions that the analysis of
contest gender's drama of value; and,
"relations" between White and Black has a handy analog in the analysis of gendered relations. Indeed, for such intellectual
protocols to transpose themselves from obscenities to protocols truly meaningful to the Slave (in other words, for their explanatory power to be essential
and not merely important), the operative verbs, attached to what Butler calls "the . . . forces that police," would have to be not maskand redact but 31
5 murder. "Identity" may very well be "the investiture of name, and the marking of reference"44and here
is where the postcolonial subject and the White subject of empire can duke it out (if, in the process, they would
leave us alone!)but Blackness marks, references, names, and identifies a corpse. And a corpse is not relational because death
is beyond representation, and relation always occurs within representation. What is the "it" beyond
representation that Whiteness murders Inother words, what "evidence" do we have that the violence
that positions the Slave,is structurally different from the violence inflicted on the worker, the woman,
the spectator, and the postcolonial? Again, as I demonstrated in part 1, the murdered "it" is capacity par
excellence, spatial and temporal capacity. Marxism, film theory, and the political common sense of socially engaged White cinema
think Human capacity as Butler and Seshadri-Crooks do, as universal phenomena. But Blacks experience Human capacity as a homicidal phenomenon.
Fanon, Judy, Mbembe, Hartman, Marriott, Patterson, and Spillers have each, in his or her own way, shown us that the Black lost the coherence of space
and time in the hold of the Middle Passage. The philosophy of Judith Butler, the film theory of Kaja Silverman, Mary Ann Doane, and Kalpana Seshadri-
Crooks, the Marxism of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, the social optimism or pessimism of popular film reviews, and the auteurial intention of the
director Marc Forster all leave the Slave unthought. They take as given that the Black has access to dramas of value. But each disparate
entity in any drama of value must possess not only spatiality (for even a patch of grass exists in space), but the
power to labor on space,the cartographic capacity to make placeif only at the scale of the body. Each disparate entity in any
drama of value must possess not only temporality (for even a patch of grass begins-exists-and-is-no-more) but the power to labor over
time: the historiographic capacity to narrate "events"if only the "event" of sexuality. The terrain of the body and the event of sexuality
were murdered when the African became a "genealogical isolate."45 Thus, the explanatory power of the theorists, filmmaker, and film reviewers cited
above, at its very best, is capable of thinking Blackness as identity or as identification, conceding, however, as the more rigorous among them do, that
"black and white do not say much about identity, though they do establish group and personal identifications of the subjects involved."46 But even this
concession gets us nowhere. At best, it is a red herring investing our attention in a semiotic impossibility: that of
the Slave as signifier. At worst, it puts the cart before the horse, which is to say that no Marxist theory
of social change and proletarian recomposition, and no feminist theory of bodily resignification, has
been able (or cared) to demonstrate how, when, and where Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. Yet, they
remain, if only by omission, steadfast in their conviction that slavery was abolished. At moments, however, the
sensory excess of cinema lets ordinary White film say what extraordinary White folks will not.
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LinkImmigration
The affirmative replicates status quo immigration activism that sustains the prison
industrial complex. Emphasis on innocence and programs such as the DREAM Act and
UAFA actively supports the military and the nuclear family. The impact is genocide.
Nair 14 (Yasmin, writer and activist, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial
Complex How to Make Prisons Disappear: Queer Immigrants, the Shackles of Love, and the Invisibility of the
Prison Industrial Complex AK Press)
Before I knew it, I was handcuffed and taken away like a criminal. I was put in a van with two men in yellow
jumpsuits and chains and searched like a criminal, in a way that I have only seen on television and in the
movies. Shirley Tan Shirley Tan was describing her experience of being woken up early one morning in her
Pacifica, California, home by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents for violating a court order for
her deportation.1 She was speaking to a special congressional hearing United States Senate Committee on
the Judiciary about the need for the Uniting American Families Act (UAFA), legislation meant to secure the
right of lesbians and gays to sponsor their partners for immigration.2 By any standards, Tans testimony was a
unique moment in the history of the Senate. Facing a row of Senators, including Committee chairman Patrick
Leahy, and surrounded by portraits of former presidents, Tan, a lesbian and an undocumented immigrant,
appeared in a court-like setting with her twin sons and very butch-looking partner, Jay Mercado.3 Tans
account of what she felt was clearly a violation and disruption of her life was strategically meant to drive home
the point that she, an exceptional and all-American immigrant, had done everything necessary to deserve
citizenship and nothing to deserve the treatment meted out to herexcept for the slight wrinkle of her legal
status. According to her, the ankle bracelet that the state made her wear worsened her experience. So
ashamed was she of the bracelet, she told the Senators, that she went out of her way to hide it from her
children. As Tan delivered her testimony, a different case was unfolding in Chicago. Rigo Padilla was fitted with
an ankle bracelet and served an order of deportation in early 2009, but, unlike Tans story, his received
comparatively little sympathy until the late fall of 2009 when he was finally able to corral public support for his
case. Padilla was brought to the United States in 1994, at the age of six, by his undocumented Mexican
parents. In January 2009, he was stopped on a traffic violation and was also charged with driving under the
influence of alcohol. He had no drivers license and his only form of identification was from the Mexican
consulate; he was taken to Chicagos Cook County Jail. Once there, he met with a public defender who asked
him about his immigration status (a question that had no bearing on the DUI case and that the defender had no
right to ask). After finding out that Padilla was undocumented, the defender left. Minutes later, Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents entered the room and took him to a federal prison. All of this happened
despite the fact that Chicago claims to be a sanctuary city where city employees are legally barred from
enforcing federal laws. Padilla was informed that his best chance was to seek voluntary departure. It took him
weeks to find an attorney to represent him. He even wrote an open letter to Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, asking
for clemency until the Dream Act might come into effect (the Act would grant relief to the undocumented
children of immigrants).4 But the fact that he had been apprehended under a DUI appeared to have turned
people off the case. A friend of Padilla told me that Durbins office made a categorical statement to this
effect: We only work with the good immigrants, the ones who dont break laws. Served with an order
to leave the country in December, Padilla and his friends set about drumming up public support for him. Finally,
at the last minute and after a long and sustained media campaign, with the help of thousands of individuals
and many activist groups, including Gender JUST (of which I am a member), Padilla gained a one-year
deferment of his deportation. If deported, he would have had to return to a country he had not visited since his
departure and be separated from his parents and siblings. If he had resisted deportation, he would have been
arrested and detained, possibly indefinitely, or flown out of the country. In contrast, Tan brought her citizen
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partner (Mercado is originally from the Philippines but a naturalized citizen) and her two sons, native-
born US citizens, to the hearing. They were even featured in a People magazine two-page spread,
which included photos of the family in their comfortable Pacifica home (Mercado works in the information
technology industry, and the family is well off). Padilla, worried about his undocumented parents, did not and
does not discuss them. In an interview, he politely declined to tell me anything about them, concerned that the
slightest detail might provide ICE with clues as to their whereabouts. While the coverage about Tan
emphasized the possible pain of separation from her family, little was said about the pain that Padillas family
might feel at seeing him taken away from them. Tan, despite her undocumented status, garnered enough
attention that Senator Diane Feinstein sponsored a private bill in her name. Illinois US State Representative
Jan Schakowsky also introduced a private bill for Padilla, but this came much later, in the fall of 2009.5 How do
we account for two such diametrically opposed accounts and experiences of undocumented immigrants? How
is it that Padilla, who is not queer, was treated with disdain, at least initially (and he still elicits the ire of many),
while Tan, an out lesbian with a significantly butch and consequently gender-non-conforming partner was able
to fly to Washington, D.C. and address a bevy of senators? If we are to follow the established logic of the
heteronormative state, it is Tan who should have been vilified as a lesbian and undocumented immigrant. Why
did she instead get the kind of special treatment accorded to her? The exceptional treatment accorded to
Shirley Tan is symptomatic of the ways in which the issue of LGBT immigration separates some gay
and lesbian identities (and to a much lesser extent trans people), the kind that are recognizable as
synonymous with class and privilege, from immigrant identities. In addition, this separation renders
prison invisible. Tans shock at being lumped with inmates in yellow jumpsuits reflects the ways in
which the realities of prison have been dematerialized for gay and lesbian immigrants like her. That
dematerialization is furthered by the discourse around LGBT immigration, which only emphasizes what
the UAFA already did up front, and the bonds of love, and erases the reality that gays and lesbians
are also workers.6 At the time of this writing, immigration activists of all stripes are calling for much-needed
reform to the current immigration system. But increasingly these calls for reform are being made within
affective calls to reward the bonds of immigrant families instead of emphasizing the truth that most Americans
seem unwilling to confront: that the crisis in immigration will not go away as long as we enable the severe
exploitation of immigrants that enables Americas neoliberaland severely worseningeconomy. The
excessive priority given to Shirley Tan and her family signals a neoliberal state that strategically
deploys sexual identities and the affective discourses around them as tools with which to build up new
categories of exclusion while erasing the realities of the exploitation of labor that enables the status
quo. Padillas experiences are more typical of what happens to undocumented immigrants caught by ICE. Not
only are ankle bracelets par for the course, but most undocumented immigrants are raided in their workplaces
or homes and hunted down brutally and disappeared. Until 2007, undocumented parents and children were
incarcerated at the infamous Texas Hutto Center, where children were threatened with separation from their
families as a disciplinary measure. Tan, in contrast, was able to return to her suburban home and family.
Padillas arrest was predetermined by a history of the states surveillance and instant deportation of
undocumented people; his DUI arrest formally made him a bad immigrant, but his personal history as a
young Mexican had already marked him as such.7 Many undocumented people, for instance, become such by
simply living here on expired visas, and, for that reason, what many describe as a broken system is in fact an
advantage for those who need to remain under the radar. At the same time, the lack of access to benefits like
healthcare and the real dangers of being exposed while traveling or working make the life of an undocumented
person fraught with peril on a daily basis. The undocumented alien is always a prospect for arrest, by
sheer dint of the multiple webs of laws and surveillance mechanisms that exist primarily to make the
presence of the undocumented visible. But all this can be significantly alleviated by circumstances of
class and access, making the experiences of undocumented immigrants vastly different depending on
factors like education and job history. In effect, the two ankle bracelets stood in for different things. By
Tans account, the bracelet was a horrifying aberration, a wrinkle in her self-described almost perfect
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existence. In Padillas case, the bracelet was an inevitability, not something that he expected but something
that no one would question. Tan first came to the United States from the Philippines in the mid-1980s on a
vacation designed as a graduation present from her father, who accompanied her. Once here, she met and fell
in love with Jay Mercado and returned when her six-month tourist visa expired. Upon returning to the
Philippines, she found out that the man who had murdered her sister and mother ten years ago had been
released; her fear of him compelled her to go to Jay, to a place where [she] knew [she] would be safe. In
1995, she hired an attorney to apply for asylum and legalize her stay in the US Then, she claims, When my
application was denied, my attorney appealed the decision. I did not know it, but my appeal had also been
denied. All the while Jay and I went about building our lives together. Tan emphasized the harmony of their
lives and how they fit into every (stereotypical) image of the all-American family: Our family has
always been like every American family and I am so proud of Jay and the twins. The American-ness of
the family was further highlighted by its religiosity: The boys attended Catholic school through sixth grade
and are now in Cabrillo Elementary School. I am a Eucharistic minister at Good Shepherd Church, where
Jay and I both sing in the Sunday Mass choir. According to Tan, they were such exemplary parents that, even
as lesbians, they never felt stigmatized, saying that, We have never felt discriminated against in our
community and our friends, mostly heterosexual couples, call us the model family. And even said we
are their role models. We try to mirror the best family values and attribute the fact that our children are so well
adjusted to the love, security, and consistency that we as parents have been able to provide. Coming to the
point of her presentation, she described her arrest in these terms: Our lives, I can say without any doubt, were
almost perfect until the morning of January 28, 2009. That morning at 6:30am, Immigration and Customs
Enforcement officials showed up at my door. The agents showed me a piece of paper, which was a 2002
deportation letter, which I informed them I had never seen. Tan went on to describe how ICE agents took
her away like a criminal. She continued with her account of her concern for her family: All the while,
my family was first and foremost the center of everything on my mind. How would Jay work and take care of
the kids if I was not there? Who would continue to take care of Jays ailing motherthe mother I have come to
loveif I was not there? Who would continue to take care of my family if I was not there? In an instant, my
familymy American familywas being ripped away from me. As Tan told her story, she received constant
support and affirmation from Senator Leahy. At one point, when Tans son showed visible signs of anguish, the
senator stopped the proceedings to ask if the child needed to go into another room, saying, I have a grandson
the same age, and Young man, I want you to know your mother is a very brave woman. Tan went on plead
to the UAFA with these words, We have a home together. Jay has a great job. We have a pension, mortgage,
friends, and a community. We have everything together and it would be impossible to [re-]establish elsewhere.
We have followed the law, respected the judicial system, and simply want to keep our family together.
Tans emphasis on the American-ness of her family was obviously strategic, even if she was also
sincere in her emotions. A plea for clemency to an inherently conservative immigration process that values
an adherence to American values cannot deconstruct the very foundation upon which that process rests. But
its also inarguable that the lengths she went to paint herself as not a criminal also threw into relief the figure of
the illegal alien, a figure that is the flashpoint of so much contentious debate. Or, as Rachel Tiven, executive
director of IE put it to People magazine with no subtlety, They are exactly the kinds of immigrants you
want in this country [emphasis mine]. Tans version of her story also made it appear that her status as an
undocumented person did not define her existence but that, instead, her brush with ICE was simply a minor
blip in an otherwise almost perfect life, in which she moved about in complete freedom, blissfully unaware of
her status. In fact, despite her assertion of having respected the judicial system, its unlikely that the lawyer
she hired did not tell her that her application had been rejected. Given her access to legal expertise and her
partners career in Information Technology, a field filled with highly educated foreign nationals and immigrants,
she had to be aware of the rudiments required for an extended stay in the United States. Its also unlikely that
she would not have inquired into getting a green card, or wondered what documentation she was to use from
there onespecially since without such, she would not have been able to travel outside the country, or even
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within it under some circumstances. It is not unusual for people to ignore the letters of deportation and simply
not show up for their departure. My point here is not to expose Tan as a liar. The current immigration system
is set up to exploit and terrorize the undocumented who are here in such large numbers because the
US economy is sustained on and encourages the development of a pool of exploitable and cheap
labor. The system is set up so that people like Tan and others are compelled to lie and obfuscate their
origins in order to survive. In this context, defining some immigrants as more or less honest than
others does nothing to address the fact that it is the state, with its willingness to dehumanize and
exploit those it deems expendable, that commits atrocities beyond mere lies. Im pointing to the fact that
even under senatorial scrutiny, the verifiable truth of her account was less important than the construction of a
supposedly authentic narrative about her honesty and uprightness as a citizenunmarred except for the fact
that she was not a citizen. That authenticity involved purging the possibility of prison or any evidence of
wrongdoing, of not having respected the judicial system. It also involved explicating her lesbianism
within contained terms (by clarifying that most of their friends were heterosexual couples) and
demonstrating her adherence to the kind of gender roles that could legitimize her family. Where
ordinarily her partners butch self-presentation might have proved a liability, in this case they were able to use it
as an advantage. Mercado emerged as the manly figure who protected Tan, supported her financially, and
provided food and shelter for the family. At the same time, like the stereotypical male, Mercado was declared
unable to perform basic household chores while also workingthis, despite the fact that she was clearly
socialized as female.8 Tans version of what happened to her hides the brutal reality of undocumented life,
transmogrifying it into an ethereal suburban paradise shattered only by the unexpected visit from ICE. But for
millions of day laborers and factory workers, and countless trans/queer sex workers, life is a constant climate
of fear and surveillance, with exploitative jobs for which employers can underpay, threatening to turn them over
to ICE if they complain about wages or mistreatment. Tans testimony is quite typical of the discourse around
LGBT immigration, which has, in recent years, been distilled down to just one issue: that of lovelorn US
citizens or permanent residents needing to be with their foreign partners. In addressing the need for the Uniting
American Families Act, proponents describe the situation of bi-national couples in excessively melodramatic
terms, going so far as to describe US citizens and permanent residents who might leave the country to be with
their partners as exiles, as if a romantic partnership were akin to the trials of Pablo Neruda. The shackles of
love replace the reality of the very real shackles that await many thousands of undocumented aliens, queer
and otherwise, who are swept up and disappeared from their neighborhoods and then detained in often
inhumane conditions before being deported. But, as Tiven emphasizes, gays and lesbians like Tan are not to
be confused with the criminals in yellow jumpsuits. But what then of the relationship of queers to the state?
The history of queer immigration to the United States has been a fraught one. The current emphasis on
UAFA provides the illusion that the entrance of queers/LGBTs into the United States has been
determined entirely by their status as queers/LGBTs, but in fact queer immigration has always been
interlinked with the history of immigrant labor and has always been affected by the gendering of that
labor. Until 1990, gays and lesbians were barred from entry as immigrants.9 That might seem shockingly
recent until we remember that Bowers v. Hardwick was only repealed in 2003. Over the years, especially
beginning in the mid-1990s, the gay rights movement has become a perfect replica of the neoliberal
state. Marriage, Dont Ask Dont Tell, and hate crimes legislation have taken over the agenda. None of
these are anything but rank conservative issues, and the last in particular simply adds to the number of those
detained by the legal system. Despite the obvious conservatism of these issues and the fact that far greater
issueslike poverty and the lack of healthcareaffect millions of gays and straights, the average American
assumes that gay rights are automatically left/progressive issues. Through the gay marriage movement, gays
and lesbians are now mostly conceived of in terms of their relationships and, within that context, it is only
natural that UAFA should be seen as the immigration issue for gays and lesbians. Given the history of illegality
of the queer body in the United States, and how clearly that has been a construct and until how recently, we
might imagine that queers of all people would be suspicious of any attempt to collude with the state. Yet, as the
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push for UAFA shows, many gays and lesbians have bought wholesale into the idea that the state can
and should affirm their identities, and they have sought to engage the process of normalization as
much as possible.10 The dilemma now facing advocates for queer immigrants is, How do we make
queer visible? And what does that visibility look like? In cases of appeals for asylum on the grounds for
sexual orientation, for instance, lawyers are compelled to prove the sheer brutality and repression of home
cultures. This strategy comes with its costs. It is certainly true that queer life in some countries is subject to
violent repression, but the one-sided portrayal of other cultures as sexually repressive helps to efface the
reality of queer life in the United States, where both normative and non-normative homosexuality are
continually policed and brutalized. In addition, asylum seekers are often held up to cultural stereotypes, with
asylum officers refusing admission on the grounds that applicants dont look or act gay/lesbian enough. In
this context, where queer immigrants must fit into fictional narratives that seek a pre-determined
authenticity, family and love become the only modes by which queers can assert themselves as queer.
They are to be either connected to families or hounded by them. In addition, the fact that immigration reform
efforts are still bound by the idea of family reunification, despite every indication that addressing labor issues
would be more worthwhile. Queer immigrants in particular are harmed by an emphasis on family reunification
because their families of origin may, in many cases, prove dangerous to them; many queers, including non-
immigrants, leave their birth homes in their teens for these very reasons. Gender and reproduction have
been interlinked with labor in US immigration law, which has, historically, been concerned with the
literal and metaphorical reproduction of the state. This emphasis on reproduction is linked to the
principle of family reunification, which dictates that immigration law should be designed to enable
families to stay together. However, this is applied only when convenient. When Mexicans and other
Latin Americans reproduce, they are accused of having anchor babies, a term that implies that
families use their native-born children to gain permanent residence in this country. Immigration has
also been intensely racialized and that racialization has been about surveilling and controlling the
reproduction of non-white foreigners. For instance, the 1857 Page Act effectively banned Chinese women
from immigrating, on the grounds of prostitution, but the ban was meant to prevent Chinese men from forming
families here. The anti-immigrant fervor of recent years has brought about a backlash against chain migration
and calls for revoking natural birth citizenship from the children of illegal aliens. The paranoia about anchor
babies adds to this backlash. All of this is, of course, clearly a class-inflected paranoianobody has anything
to say about well-paid professionals who have babies in the US. UAFA, which is being endorsed as a part
of family reunification, replicates the problematic construction of the gendered family by insisting
that same-sex partners of US citizens and permanent residents demonstrate their financial
dependence. By law, the sponsoring partner must be able to demonstrate that he or she can support the other
and provide 125 percent of the income required for a single-family unit. In addition, they are legally bound to
agree to support their partners for a period of ten years; the notion of interdependence mapped out by UAFA
is, in fact, dependence. UAFA reproduces the ultimate class fantasy of the immigrant, as made visibly evident
through Tan: a suburban home, a place in the church, two suburban soccer-playing kids, and a dominant
partner to take on the financial burdens of the household. In fact, family reunification, far from being solely
about bringing families together, disguises the realities of gendered labor that are a part of
immigration and that can and do exist, even in lesbian relationships, and it avoids the stigma faced by
millions of families who are deemed unworthy of rights. Families like Padillas are constructed as labor
units by immigration but ignored as families when convenient. The neoliberal reality of a world devastated by
economic free trade acts like NAFTA is that entire families are compelled to move across borders to seek
better lives because their own economies have been laid to waste and cannot sustain them. In the process,
some families are held up as more ideal than others. Those that can adhere to the heteronormative ideal of
a sole breadwinner assuming responsibility for the entire family have their filial emotions validated.
Those that must remain invisible because they dont present themselves as ideal (for example,
undocumented adolescents whose labor cannot yet be exploited, at least legally) are considered less
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than human, and their filial relationships and emotions are erased. In the strategic deployment of family
reunification, Tan was hailed as the ideal citizen-to-be, but there was little public concern about Padillas
parents losing their son to deportation. One familys tragic loss is seen as anothers punishment for being
illegal in the first place.12 Traveling back home to Chicago in the Spring of 2009, Juan (out of concern for his
parents, he does not want his full name used), an out queer student, dozed off on the Greyhound bus and slept
through it stopping. He woke up to find ICE agents making their way toward him, the only Latino on the bus.
They demanded to see his papers. Juan, brought here as a child by his parents, does not have an American
passport and records indicated his undocumented status. He was apprehended and placed in detention for
weeks while his parents, working-class Chicagoans, scraped together the $8,000 required to get him out of jail.
At the time of this writing, Juan is awaiting an indefinitely postponed series of trials. When I asked him how his
queerness might have affected his experience, he described what happened when he was allowed to make a
phone call. Overcome with emotion, he began to cry on the phone. Im not afraid to be emotional, explained
Juan, attributing this to his queerness. When he turned around after the call, he saw ICE agents laughing at
him and mimicking him. Prerna Lal is a Fijian immigrant who came here with her parents and two sisters when
her father came to the United States for graduate studies. Their original plan was for everyone in the family to
gain citizenship through her grandmother, but through a complicated series of setbacks and delays, Lal ended
up being the only person in her family to remain undocumented, a situation that she has written about publicly
quite often (shes a co-founder of the DREAM activist network). Her life has also been marked by significant
amounts of physical and emotional abuse, and she was put to work in the family business while still a student
at San Francisco State University. Lal came out as queer in high school, and her father sent her to a counselor
because he refused to believe that she was normal. During a counseling session, Lal revealed that her father
beat her, and her revelation resulted in child protective services showing up at her high school and home,
prepared to take her away and arrest her father. At the time, her father, in between his school years and in the
process of getting his green card, was undocumented. Lal, afraid that the family breadwinner would be
deported, eventually retracted her story of abuse. Both Juan and Lals stories reveal that queer immigrants
come from backgrounds infinitely more complex and different than the almost perfect suburban ideal held up
by Tan. As Lal put it to me in a telephone interview, her familys travails and her own undocumented status
were in large part due to their lack of cultural capital. Although her father was here as a student, their class
status as working-class Fijian immigrants precluded their access to the kinds of legal and cultural expertise
required to maneuver through the complicated and labyrinthine processes required for citizenship. Within her
family, her status as a lesbian put her in physical and emotional danger on two fronts: an abusive parent who
clearly saw her as abnormal, and child protective services that could recognize the physical danger to her but
could do nothing about her invisible status as the undocumented child of an undocumented man. The stories of
Juan and Lal reveal the contradictions in which immigrants find themselves. When I asked Juan what he
considered suitable solutions for people like him, he was quick to say that UAFA would help queer immigrants.
But when I asked him how that was supposed to help uncoupled queers, he confessed that he hadnt
considered that marriage/coupledom was not the ideal solution. Lal publicly supports UAFA and gay
marriage, even joining the board of Immigration Equality in 2010, which is bewildering given the extent
to which the legislation and the marriage movement reinforce exactly the kinds of gendered and
sexualized dependencies and family formations that made her vulnerable in the first place. The fact
that people like Lal and Juan echo support for measures that contradict the realities of their existence
only proves the power of the discursive frameworks within which such immigrants must operate. To
consider a case where queerness intersected with immigration and where neither framework provided
any safety, we could look at the life and horrific death of Victoria Arellano. Arellano was a 23-year-old,
transgender Mexican immigrant who died of complications from AIDS while in the custody of the
Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a San Pedro, California, facility. Arellano had
been in this country since the age of six and had been caught entering the United States for the second time in
May 2007. While in detention, she was denied medication and medical attention despite her diagnosis of HIV.
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After a particularly brutal relapse resulting from not having access to proper medications (her fellow inmates
took turns tending to her and walking her to the bathroom), Arellano was only prescribed amoxicillin, a
standard drug prescribed for common bacterial infections. She was eventually taken to a San Pedro hospital
but was returned to the prison the next day. When her condition worsened, she was taken out again and
placed in the intensive care unit of Little Company of Mary Hospital in San Pedro. There, she was handcuffed
to her bed while immigration agents watched the door. She died there on July 20, 2007. Arellanos story is a
common one, and hers happens to be one of the few that garnered some media attention. While the
mainstream gay community focuses on UAFA, it ignores cases like Arellanos. But what happened to her
is far more typical for transgender and queer immigrants than what happened to Shirley Tan. Her gender
identity and her undocumented status caused her death by willful negligence within a system designed to
brutalize a non-conforming body, one that could not be interpolated into normative discourses about perfect
assimilationist families.13 How do we remedy matters so that the issues facing people like Padilla, Juan, and
Arellano are brought to the forefront? The strategy engaged by so-called progressive and left immigration-
rights activists so far has been to render immigrants stories in palatable terms by discussing the pathos and
vulnerability of their lives. This strategy has failed miserably except in individual cases. Victories like Padillas
constitute short-term wins for individuals, but they do nothing to cease the systemic problems with the system.
Padillas success and the intense campaign around it galvanized an already vibrant undocumented-
youth movement, and various groups of students have been engaging in acts of civil disobedience
across the country in order to gain support for the DREAM Act (Development, Relief, and Education for
Alien Minors). This federal legislation is designed to provide a path to citizenship for anyone brought here as
an undocumented minor under the age of 16. But while the DREAM Activists, as they call themselves,
provide poignant reasons why the legislation should pass, their rhetoric echoes the same problematic
kinds of exclusion as used by Shirley Tan and the supporters of UAFA.14 Over and over, these youth
describe themselves as exceptional immigrants, pointing to their academic achievements and exemplary
citizenship. One of the chief ironies of the DREAM Act is that it requires such students to rhetorically turn
against their own parents. One of the requirements of the DREAM Act is that qualified students either
attend college or join the military for two years. Given that so many of the youth who would benefit
from the DREAM Act are of color and from families for which college might be a hardship, its likely
that a great number of them will be compelled to join the army and become fodder for one of the
endless and meaningless wars being waged by the United States. In this way, they will join the ranks of
the millions of youth of color who have been coerced into war. In order to create real change, we have
to center the violence at the heart of these experiences, to speak and write of them as experiences with
the brutal power of the state, not as narratives about good versus bad immigrants. If we are to undo the
prison industrial complex and interrogate its relationship to racialized immigration, gender, and
sexuality, we need to first make manifest the violence that marks immigration from the start: the
violence at the border, the sexualized brutality, the psychic and epistemological violence at the heart
of the family that compels children and women in particular to remain silent, the violence of gender
normativity, and the crushing force that dehumanizes and kills immigrant detainees. We need to
recover the discourse on violence instead of relying on the notion of love in order to rematerialize the
specter of the prison. Paradoxically, this is what it will take to make it vanish forever. The current
discourse on queer immigration presents an idealized and bourgeois version of transgender and queer
immigrants, a discourse that makes the reality of the prison industrial complex completely invisible. If
we are to seek an end to the nightmare of the PIC and the disaster that is immigration reform in this country,
we need to reintegrate an analysis of the violence of the PIC back into the discourse on immigration and
queers. We need to abolish the walls of prison and the discourse of normative attachment, a discourse
that only succeeds in making prison disappear under the fog of love.
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LinkLGBT Inclusion
Legal reforms for the protection and inclusion of LGBT people dissociates regimes of
gender and sexual confinement from the institutions in which they are practiced the
idea that we could make a safe space for queers while maintaining the structure of the
prison erases the fact that the prison paradigm itself is gender violence (Legal reform
fails)
Spade 11 [Dean, lawyer and Associate Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law, and founder of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-
profit law collective in New York City that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income
and/or people of color, Queering Prison Abolition Now, Against Equality, http://againstequality.org/files/queering_prison_abolition_now.pdf]
An important part of understanding the limits ofthe contemporary gay and lesbian rights politics framework is understanding how it has
made the mistake of uncritically adopting and centering a legal equality strategy. There are many problems with that strategy
and many factors that contribute to its inability to produce meaningful transformative change to the
conditions that most significantly harm queer and trans people. One of those problems is that it, at best, addresses sites of explicit legal
exclusion, but does not touch the broader administrative frameworks that structure the most significant violence being
faced by queer and trans people. Equality law reforms, such as the Employment Non-Discrimination Act or the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd,
Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act or the quest for same-sex marriage recognition, that have been the main targets of lesbian and gay rights politics and sucked up
most of the resources of that work in recent decades, do not address the violent imposition of racialized gender norms that
structure all the forms of confinement where poor people and people of color are concentrated under various administrative regimes
foster care group homes, juvenile punishment facilities, psychiatric hospitals, immigration prisons, adult
criminal punishment facilities, and homeless shelters. Gender segregation, gendered dress codes,
gendered behavioral codes, and hierarchical systems of gender violence organize these spaces, under
and through the work of various structures and agents of law enforcement, and all of that violence remains unremarked
and untouched by the kinds of law reform agendas produced in calls for equality. Queering Prison Abolition, Now? | 121 When we put those
violent disciplinary spaces at the center of our inquiries about the relationships between law and people who violate norms of gender and sexuality,
we get a very different image of how resistance to homophobia and transphobia might concern law and order, and we better understand the direct, constant,
relentless gendered violence that imprisonment produces and relies on. Thinking about imprisonment
as gender violence helps us get out of the false idea that we can have a government that promotes
gender equality while we still have imprisonment, and helps clear up the fantasy that we could have
some kind of prison system that is safe for queer or trans people or women.
Narratives of LGBT harm in the school is used as a pretext by the state to extend
punishing and policing practices in the name of LGBT inclusion this carceral
paternalism individuates structural cisheteronormativity and results in the further
criminalization of queers of color and queers engaged in sex work or other illegal
modes of survivalbullying legislation proves
Meiners 16 (Erica R, Meiners. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/48228) For the Children? University of Minnesota Press in Minneapolis, MN in 2016.
Erica R. Meiners is a Bernard J. Brommel Distinguished Research Professor at Northeastern Illinois University. She is the author of Right to Be Hostile:
Schools, Prisons, and the Making of Public Enemies (2007) and of articles in Meridians, Social Justice, Womens Studies Quarterly, In ese Times, and
Radical Teacher. She teaches womens and gender studies, justice studies, and educational studies and is a member of the labor union University
Professionals of Illinois. AB)
Harm experienced by LGBTQ youth is also used to expand punishment and to extend policing practices further
into schools. In 2008, a fifteen- year-old boy named Lawrence Larry King was shot in the head and killed in his middle school computer lab by a classmate, Brandon McInerney, aged fourteen (Cathcart 2008). Brandon was
horrified that Larry flirted with him in public. Kings murder was followed, in 2010, by a concentrated and well-publicized wave of suicides by gay youth, including Tyler Clementi, Seth Walsh, Asher Brown, and Billy Lucas. These
suicides, like Larrys murder, were preceded by intense sexuality- and gender-policing by peers and teachers and
triggered a series of antibullying initiatives. The high profile media attention that centered select (often white and
male) examples of antigay bullying spurred state legislatures to act. States that already had school antibullying programs, including character
education or legislation, broadened these policies. For example, in 2011, New Jersey implemented what has been described as the strongest anti-bullying legislation in the country after Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementis suicide (Education
Law Center 2013). Called the Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights, the New Jersey law requires teachers to report bullying
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to administrators, requires school superintendents to report bullying to the state board of education,
and allows the suspension or expulsion of students accused of bullying (Friedman 2010). In 2012, a law criminalizing cyberbullying passed in
North Carolina. In an effort to protect school employees, this law makes it a crime for any student to post real images or make any
statement on-lineeven if it is truethat provokes harassment. Other prohibited acts by students are signing teachers up to receive junk mail, posting
pictures of teachers online, and making fake websites. In North Carolina, those who are sixteen are treated as adults under state law ;
therefore, if convicted, a student could face thirty days in jail or a $1,000 ne (Miller 2013). As of 2015, all states have antibullying laws (Child Trends 2015). Meanwhile, despite the increased media
focus on particular kinds of youth violence and focused support for antibullying legislation, non-
gender-conforming and nonheterosexual young people continue to harm and be harmed in
classrooms, on playgrounds, and online. Stories splash across media outlets every day. A New York fourteen-year-old, Jamey Rodemeyer, contributed a video statement to the online It
Gets Better archive in May 2011 and, after experiencing physical, verbal, and online harassment about his perceived sexuality, hanged himself in September 2011 (Praetorius 2011). On June 5, 2012, Kardin Ulysse, a
New York City middle school student, was blinded in one eye after being assaulted by a group of boys
shouting antigay taunts in the cafeteria of Roy Mann Junior High School (Cannold 2012). Also in 2012, in New Jersey, Pine Lake Elementary
School student C.O. routinely returned from school bruised, crying, and depressed from being verbally and physically harassed about his perceived sexual orientation. His parents asked the school to intervene in a culture of pervasive
homophobia that included classmates yelling homophobic slurs at C.O. from his own front lawn, and being called gay, fag, and girl every day at school. C.O.s parents were told that he should attempt to make new friends. When C.O. was
While most of the attacks

assaulted on a school bus with a metal seat belt and the school and the district still refused to intervene, the family moved and C.O. transferred to a different school (Armstrong 2012).
that become high profile or receive media or other attention target cisgender boys, others, including
trans youth in particular, are certainly not exempt from violence. These acts of interpersonal and structural
heteronormativity or transphobia, of course, are neither new nor surprising. Heteronormativitythe
structures and systems that legitimize and privilege heterosexuality and heterosexual relationships
as fundamental and natural within society (C. Cohen 2005, 24)is pervasive in most institutions,
including schools. Fear of the queer, or all the meanings and associations attached to non-
heteronormativity, leads schools to suppress teachers and creates cultures that facilitate harm toward
non-gender-conforming and non- heteronormative youth. Instead of excavating heteronormativity in
schools, legislative responses to bullying define the problem narrowly and posit punishment and
criminalization as the response. These laws are predicated on the concept that if we removed or
changed the few bad kids, schools would be safer for queers. While this practice could purchase a temporary reprieve, a few bad kids in schools are not the root
problem. These initiatives are not capable of excavating heteronormativity. Beyond individuating what is in fact a structural and institutional
problem, anti- bullying laws and their accompanying punitive sanctions operate in already highly
attenuated spaces for surveillance and punishment that are neither race- nor gender-neutral. School
suspension rates for African Americans, in particular for African American males, are significantly
higher than for their white counterparts (Once for Civil Rights 2012; Losen and Skiba 2010; Skiba et al. 2002). Excessively punitive disciplinary measures that disproportionately target the
most marginalized students in school contexts (including queer youth) made national headlines in 2011, highlighting the educational cost to young people when they are pushed out of school (Losen and Skiba 2010; Phillips 2011; Schwarz 2011;
Given this preexisting landscape, when disruptive behavior and other are the
Himmelstein and Bruckner 2011).
dominant reasons for suspensions, it is not a stretch to predict that antibullying laws will be unevenly
implemented and that particular students will be disproportionately targeted and punished. While the majority of the
laws passed nationally are also intended to act preventively, the sanction and punishment measures are generally most powerful. In 2011, California made bullying illegal with the passage of Seths Law, yet all language requiring counseling or
restorative justice practices was pulled from the final version of the bill. Rather than being proactive, the bill is retroactively punitive, involving spot checks of schools to see if they are in compliance (Gould 2011). In 2011, New Jersey enacted its
Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights tightening the relationship between schools and local law enforcement. e law forces schools and officials to report incidents more quickly and to hire school- based antibullying specialists, and increases penalties for
bullying; it also provides for a Crimestoppers telephone line, which makes reporting easier, but . . . also ups the ante by involving law enforcement rather than resolving issues in the principals once (Hu 2011). In 2014, Car- son, California,
proposed charging anyone who cyberbullies or physically bullies anyone of school age, up to age twenty five, with a misdemeanor and/or fining them (C. Muhammad 2014). ese laws deepen already existing relationships to law enforcement and
also falsely assume that law enforcement is free of violence or bullying. Police and other security forces are often key perpetrators of sexual and other forms of violence (Richie 2012). The suicides of white male queer youth engender the most
public response, perhaps because of the images of the grief of white heterosexual parents. For example, in the deaths of Seth Walsh and Jamey Rodemeyer (and, earlier, the death of Matthew Shepard), the maternal and paternal losses are
mobilized to support antibullying or hate crimes legislation. After his 2009 murder by peers in Chicago, sixteen-year-old Derrion Albert was repeatedly identified in the national media as physically slight, an excellent student, and a
Grandmommas boy (C. Cohen 2012, 126). Mean- while, Alberts family was rarely visible in mainstream coverage; instead the media focused on violent, unruly black male youths. For dead white gay youths, the families loss is often highly
visible. LGBTQ young people face persistent violence in schools, and numerous reports highlight the interpersonal violence that non-gender- conforming and non-heteronormative students experience at the hands of peers, teachers, and other
staff members (Kosciw et al. 2010; Pascoe 2007; McCready 2010). Yet interpersonal violence is precipitated and shaped by state violence. A 2009 national study of LGBT students of color, Shared Differences: e Experiences of Lesbian, Gay,
Bisexual, and Transgender Students of Color in Our Nations Schools, identified the curricular and systemic erasure and marginalization of LGBTQ youth of color: Few LGBT students of color had access to LGBT-inclusive curricular resources in
school. Less than a h?? of students had been taught about LGBT-related people, history, or events in their classes, or had such information available in their textbooks (14% each). Furthermore, only 38% reported that they could access LGBT-
related resources in their school library. Less than a half of all LGBT students of color (18%) reported that their school had a comprehensive policy to address in-school harassment and assault, which provided specific protections based on
that the
sexual orientation and gender identity/expression. (Diaz and Kosciw 2009, 13) Violence is a problem, and yet the question gets framed very narrowly: If not antibullying laws, then what? This chapters analysis outlines
states responses to violence mask the problem. These laws transfer structural factors that perpetuate
and reward heteronormativity into individual pathologies and also suggest that the route to ending
homophobia is to punish perpetrators. The symbolic figure of the dead queer white male child and, as importantly, the kinship networks that the child is attached to are used to pass these
laws. Queer youth, who are often criminalized for their sexual practices, restricted by ordinances and
statutes that deny transgender and non-gender-conforming youth gender-harming bathroom access,
and can be placed on the sex offender registry for consensual sexual acts, appear to incite less
concern from the state while alive or when unharmed. Harm and violence experienced by the child, in conjunction with desires of communities for systemic change,
advance agendas that do little to make communities actually safer, particularly for those who are nonheterosexual and/or non-gender-conforming. An increase in criminalization means
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that those most vulnerableincluding queers and those involved in survival economies such as the
sex and drug tradeswill be caught up in the criminal justice system. More people in the system
means more people subjected to racist, gendered, and heteronormative judicial proceedings.
Conviction means detention and confinement in institutions predicated on gender normativity,
compulsory heteronormativity, and racial oppression.
The inclusionary remedies the aff offers will inevitably criminalize youth of color only
furthering the school to prison pipeline
-Encounters with prevention work: Building relationships between anti-prison and HIV prevention communities
Meiners 13 (Erica Meiners is a professor of education and women's and gender studies at Northeastern Illinois University Why Prison?, edited
by David Scott, Cambridge University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/socal/detail.action?docID=1303675
Published 2013, DOA: 7/26/17). EL
Sexuality and gender are central to the movement of youth, in particular youth of color, toward penal incarceration. Sexual and gender
violence towards girls increases the likelihood that girls will drop out/be pushed out of school, and
researchers have linked interpersonal sexual violence as a powerful indicator of future incarceration
for young girls (Simkins et al., 2004; Winn, 2010). Sexually righteous young women, including pregnant and parenting teens, are offered no
protection for their sexual lives in school and are punished if they exceed the states impoverished expectations (Fine and McClelland, 2006). Not
surprisingly, research identifies that gay, bisexual and lesbian youth are more likely to be punished by
courts and schools, even though they are less likely than straight peers to engage in serious crimes,
and consensual same-sex acts more often trigger punishments than equivalent opposite sex
5
behaviors (Himmelstein and Bruckner, 2011: 50). Scholarship and organising on the school-to-prison nexus must
account for the myriad ways in which schools actively discriminate and concurrently push out lesbian,
gay, bisexual, transgendered and gender-non-conforming youth and how sexual violence targeted at
girls and women participates in augmenting the school-to-prison nexus. As a short sidebar, these
intersections are key when thinking through strategies to respond to injustices in schools and
communities. For example, as anti-bullying legislation and policies have recently gained measures of success, specifically those that
recognise the decades-long failure to provide even a measure of safety for LGBTQ and gender- non-conforming youth in schools, all too often
these policies heavily sanction perpetrators. The turn to a criminalisation of perpetrators of this anti-
gay violence in schools results in more school sanctions, more punishment, potentially more push-
out in an educational context where school disciplinary actions disproportionately harm youth of
color. Our remedies have collateral damages . Intervention in the movement of youth of color from schools to prisons requires
that organisations and scholars engage in inter- and intra-movement analysis.
Your incorporation of LGBTQ is a subject making of the perfect queer which becomes
a technology of prison expansion and global anti blackness.
Anna M. Agathangelou (2013) Neoliberal Geopolitical Order and Value, International Feminist Journal of
Politics, 15:4, 453-476, DOI: 10.1080/14616742.2013.841560
Stephen Dillon provides a theoretical framework to start this analysis, asking: If slaverys
anti-black technologies inhabit and structure the prison, how do they live in the operations
of the market? (Dillon 2012: 114). His article suggests that the emerging international
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discourse on gay rights and its displacement in Africa and blacks is a bar on the prison
of blackness as well as a technology of slavery. Dillon considers how the necropolitics of
slavery inhabit and drive the biopolitics of neoliberalism (2012: 115) even in the
governance of historically marginalized subjects (i.e., gays and lesbians, immigrants,
aboriginal peoples). I contend that the (disciplined) queer is a newer technology in world
politics, where a promotion of a specific notion of the queer (i.e., among those subjects
who possess a capacity and a will to become self-enterprising subjects, indeed their own brand),
along with the protection of that queer, is being used to further a narrative of the
superiority of US law as an international white dog (Dayan 2011), white supremacy,
neoliberal democracy and imperialism by rupturing black life. In this view, slavery is the
condition of economies of blackness (i.e., it is blackness) as openness to gratuitous terror.
The terror that both makes blacks and is enacted upon blackness in the afterlife of the
historical institution of slavery is a rupturing of the flesh, the evacuation of the black
psyche, the practice of empathic identification and an acknowledgment that blackness is
only made visible through a discourse and narrative afforded a positioning within civil
society (such as queerness) (Pak 2012: xiv). Paks analytical intervention enables us to
recognize the ways that transatlantic slavery constituted blackness as outside sexual civil
society relations and outside of sovereign sexual protection is in the now (The Smiths
1984) therefore this is what also makes possible the segregation of sex from race and the
practice of sex as terror. While the slave has no-value as a being, a body and sexually, it is also
a usable and utilized assignation (Barrett 1999: 207). The institution of slavery instantiates
itself in the subordination, torture and terror of blackness in the worlding of (i.e., global
and local) politics global (and local) politics (see Dillon 2012: 121) in the now rather than
in some vague and atemporal historical imaginary.
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LinkLiberalism Bobby London

liberalism.
movement.
For a
it stands, for radicals, specifically non-white anti-authoritarians, these actions hold the same element of danger as attending a Trump rally.
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This must end, we
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LinkPolitics of Innocence
Appealing to safety and innocence is manipulated to justify violence and clouds any
clear alternatives
SAFE SPACE The discursive strategy of appealing to safety and innocence is also enacted on a micro-
level when white radicals manipulate safe space language to maintain their power in political spaces.
They do this by silencing the criticisms of POC under the pretense that it makes them feel unsafe.29
This use of safe space language conflates discomfort and actual imminent danger which is not to
say that white people are entitled to feel safe anyway. The phrase I dont feel safe is easy to
manipulate because it frames the situation in terms of the speakers personal feelings, making it
difficult to respond critically (even when the person is, say, being racist) because it will injure their
personal sense of security. Conversation often ends when people politicize their feelings of discomfort
by using safe space language. The most ludicrous example of this that comes to mind was when a woman
from Occupy Baltimore manipulated feminist language to defend the police after an occupier called the cops
on a homeless man. When the police arrived to the encampment they were verbally confronted by a group of
protesters. During the confrontation the woman made an effort to protect the police by inserting herself
between the police and the protesters, telling those who were angry about the cops that it was unjustified to
exclude the police. In the Baltimore City Paper she was quoted saying, they were violating, I thought, the
cops space. The invocation of personal security and safety presses on our affective and emotional
registers and can thus be manipulated to justify everything from racial profiling to war.30 When people
use safe space language to call out people in activist spaces, the one wielding the language is framed
as innocent, and may even amplify or politicize their presumed innocence. After the woman from Occupy
Baltimore came out as a survivor of violence and said she was traumatized by being yelled at while defending
the cops, I noticed that many people became unwilling to take a critical stance on her blatantly pro-cop,
classist, and homeless-phobic actions and comments, which included statements like, There are so many
homeless drunks down there suffering from a nasty disease of addiction what do I care if they are there
or not? I would rather see them in treatment that is for sure but where they pass out is irrelevant to me.
Let it be known that anyone who puts their body between the cops and my comrades to protect the States
monopoly on violence is a collaborator of the State. Surviving gendered violence does not mean you are
incapable of perpetuating other forms of violence. Likewise, people can also mobilize their experiences
with racism, transphobia, or classism to purify themselves. When people identify with their
victimization, we need to critically consider whether it is being used as a tactical maneuver to
construct themselves as innocent and exert power without being questioned. That does not mean
delegitimizing the claims made by survivors but rather, rejecting the framework of innocence,
examining each situation closely, and being conscientious of the multiple power struggles at play in
different conflicts. On the flip side of this is a radical queer critique that has recently been leveled
against the safe space model. In a statement from the Copenhagen Queer Festival titled No safer spaces
this year, festival organizers wrote regarding their decision to remove the safer-space guidelines of the
festival, offering in its place an appeal to individual reflection and responsibility. (In other words, The safe
space is impossible, therefore, fend for yourself.) I see this rejection of collective forms of organizing,
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and unwillingness to think beyond the individual as the foundational political unit, as part of a
historical shift from queer liberation to queer performativity that coincides with the advent of
neoliberalism and the Care of the Self-style politics of choice).31 By reacting against the failure of
safe space with a suspicion of articulated/explicit politics and collectivism, we flatten the issues and miss an
opportunity to ask critical questions about the distribution of power, vulnerability, and violence, questions about
how and why certain people co-opt language and infrastructure that is meant to respond to internally
oppressive dynamics to perpetuate racial domination. As a Fanonian, I agree that removing all elements of risk
and danger reinforces a politics of reformism that just reproduces the existing social order. Militancy is
undermined by the politics of safety. It becomes impossible to do anything that involves risk when people
habitually block such actions on the grounds that it makes them feel unsafe. People of color who use privilege
theory to argue that white people have the privilege to engage in risky actions while POC cannot because they
are the most vulnerable (most likely to be targeted by the police, not have the resources to get out of jail, etc)
make a correct assessment of power differentials between white and non-white political actors, but ultimately
erase POC from the history of militant struggle by falsely associating militancy with whiteness and privilege.
When an analysis of privilege is turned into a political program that asserts that the most vulnerable
should not take risks, the only politically correct politics becomes a politics of reformism and retreat, a
politics that necessarily capitulates to the status quo while erasing the legacy of Black Power groups
like the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army. For Fanon, it is precisely the element of risk that
makes militant action more urgent liberation can only be won by risking ones life. Militancy is not just
tactically necessary its dual objective is to transform people and fundamentally alter their being by
emboldening them, removing their passivity and cleansing them of the core of despair crystallized in their
bodies.32 Another troublesome manifestation of the politics of safety is an emphasis on personal comfort that
supports police behavior in consensus-based groups or spaces. For instance, when people at Occupy
Baltimore confronted sexual assaulters, I witnessed a general assembly become so bogged down by
consensus procedure that the only decision made about the assaulters in the space was to stage a 10 minute
presentation about safer spaces at the next GA. No one in the group wanted to ban the assaulters from
Occupy (as Stokely Carmichael said, The liberal is afraid to alienate anyone, and therefore he is
incapable of presenting any clear alternative.)33 Prioritizing personal comfort is unproductive,
reformist, and can bring the energy and momentum of bodies in motion to a standstill. The politics of
innocence and the politics of safety and comfort are related in that both strategies reinforce passivity.
Comfort and innocence produce each other when people base their demand for comfort on the
innocence of their location or subject-position. The ethicality of our locations and identities (as people
within the US living under global capitalism) is an utter joke when you consider that we live on stolen lands in a
country built on slavery and genocide. Even though I am a queer woman of color, my existence as a person
living in the US is built on violence. As a non-incarcerated person, my freedom is only understood through the
captivity of people like my brother, who was sentenced to life behind bars at the age of 17. When considering
safety, we fail to ask critical questions about the co-constitutive relationship between safety and violence. We
need to consider the extent to which racial violence is the unspoken and necessary underside of
security, particularly white security. Safety requires the removal and containment of people deemed to
be threats. White civil society has a psychic investment in the erasure and abjection of bodies that
they project hostile feelings onto, which allows them peace of mind amidst the state of perpetual
violence. The precarious founding of the US required the disappearance of Native American people, which
was justified by associating the Native body with filth. Andrea Smith wrote, This absence is effected through
the metaphorical transformation of native bodies into pollution of which the colonial body must constantly purify
itself.34 The violent foundation of US freedom and white safety often goes unnoticed because our lives are
mediated in such a way that the violence is invisible or is considered legitimate and fails to register as violence
(such as the violence carried out by police and prisons). The connections between our lives and the
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generalized atmosphere of violence is submerged in a complex web of institutions, structures, and economic
relations that legalize, normalize, legitimize, and above all are constituted by this repetition of violence.
Politics of innocence feed into the notion that only white bodies are capable of
personhood and consent, regulating the ability for people to respond to sexual
violence
SEXUAL VIOLENCE When we use innocence to select the proper subjects of empathetic identification
on which to base our politics, we simultaneously regulate the ability for people to respond to other
forms of violence, such as rape and sexual assault. When a woman is raped, her sexual past is inevitably
used against her, and chastity is used to gauge the validity of a womans claim. Promiscuous women, sex
workers, women of color, women experiencing homelessness, and addicts are not seen as legitimate
victims of rape their moral character is always called into question (they are always-already asking for
it). In southern California during the 1980s and 1990s, police officers would close all reports of rape and
violence made by sex workers, gang members, and addicts by placing them in a file stamped NHI: No
Human Involved.35 This police practice draws attention to the way that rapeability is also simultaneously
unrapeability in that the rape of someone who is not considered human does not register as rape. Only those
considered human can be raped. Rape is often conventionally defined36 as sexual intercourse
without consent, and consent requires the participation of subjects in possession of full
personhood. Those considered not-human cannot give consent. Which is to say, there is no
recognized subject-position from which one can state their desires. This is not to say that bodies
constructed as rapeable cannot express consent or refusal to engage in sexual activity but that their
demands will be unintelligible because they are made from a position outside of proper white
femininity. Women of color are seen as sexually uninhibited by nature and thus are unable to access
the sexual purity at the core of white femininity. As Smith writes in Conquest: Sexual Violence and
American Indian Genocide, Native American women are more likely to be raped than any other group of
women, yet the media and courts consistently tend to only pay attention to rapes that involve the rape
of a white woman by a person of color.37 Undocumented immigrant women are vulnerable to sexual
violence not only by because they cannot leave or report abusive partners because of the risk of
deportation, but also because police and border patrol officers routinely manipulate their position of power over
undocumented women by raping and assaulting them, using the threat of deportation to get them to submit
and remain silent. A Mexican sociologist once told me that women crossing the border often take
contraceptives because the rape of women crossing the border is so normalized. Black women are also
systematically ignored by the media and criminal justice system. According to Kimberle Crenshaw, Black
women are less likely to report their rapes, less likely to have their cases come to trial, less likely to have their
trials result in convictions, and, most disturbingly, less likely to seek counseling and other support services.38
One reason why Black women may be less likely to report their rapes is because seeking assistance from the
police often backfires: poor women of color who call the police during domestic disputes are often sexually
assaulted by police, criminalized themselves, or have their children taken away. Given that the infrastructure
that exists to support survivors (counseling, shelters, etc) often caters to white women and neglects to
reach out to poor communities of color, its no surprise that women of color are less likely to utilize
survivor resources. But we should be careful when noting the widespread neglect of the most
vulnerable populations by police, the legal system, and social institutions to assume that the
primary problem is neglect implies that these apparatuses are neutral, that their role is to protect us,
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and that they are merely doing a bad job. On the contrary, their purpose is to maintain the social order,
protect white people, and defend private property. If these intuitions are violent themselves, then
expanding their jurisdiction will not help us, especially while racism and patriarchy endures. Ultimately,
our appeals to innocence demarcate who is killable and rapeable, even if we are trying to strategically use
such appeals to protest violence committed against one of our comrades. When we challenge sexual
violence with appeals to innocence, we set a trap for ourselves by feeding into the assumption that
white ciswomens bodies are the only ones that cannot be violated because only white femininity is
sanctified.39 As Kimberle Crenshaw writes, The early emphasis in rape law on the property-like aspect of
womens chastity resulted in less solicitude for rape victims whose chastity had been in some way
devalued.40 Once she gives away her chastity she no longer owns it and so no one can steal it. However,
the association of women of color with sexual deviance bars them from possessing this valued chastity.41
Politics of innocence reproduced the compliant citizen that results in a refusal to to

hear guilty voices. Innocent, passive victims are a way for the liberal white
conscience to purify and ennoble itself.
AGAINST INNOCENCE The insistence on innocence results in a refusal to hear those labeled guilty or
defined by the State as criminals. When we rely on appeals to innocence, we foreclose a form of
resistance that is outside the limits of law, and instead ally ourselves with the State. This ignores that
the enemies in the War on Drugs and the War on Terror are racially defined, that gender and class
delimit who is worthy of legal recognition. When the Occupy movement was in full swing in the US, I often
read countless articles and encountered participants who were eager to police the politics and tactics of those
who did not fit into a non-violent model of resistance. The tendency was to construct a politics from the
position of the disenfranchised white middle-class and to remove, deny, and differentiate the Occupy
movement from the delinquent or radical elements by condemning property destruction,
confrontations with cops, and in cases like Baltimore anti-capitalist and anarchist analyses. When
Amy Goodman asked Maria Lewis from Occupy Oakland about the violent protestors after the over 400
arrests made following an attempt to occupy the vacant Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center in Oakland, I was
pleased that Maria affirmed rather than excised peoples anger: AMY GOODMAN: Maria Lewis, what about
some of the reports that said that the protesters were violent? MARIA LEWIS: Absolutely. There was a lot of
anger this weekend, and I think that the anger that the protesters showed in the streets this weekend and the
fighting back that did take place was reflective of a larger anger in Oakland that is boiling over at the betrayal of
the system. I think that people, day by day, are realizing, as the economy gets worse and worse, as
unemployment gets worse and worse, as homelessness gets worse and worse, that the economic system, that
capitalism in Oakland, is failing us. And people are really angry about that, and theyre beginning to fight back.
And I think that thats a really inspiring thing. While the comment still frames the issue in terms of capitalist
crisis, the response skillfully rearticulates the terms of the discussion by a) affirming the actions immediately, b)
refusing to purify the movement by integrating rather than excluding the violent elements, c) legitimizing the
anger and desires of the protestors, d) shifting the attention to the structural nature of the problem rather than
getting hung up on making moral judgments about individual actors. In other words, by rejecting a politics
of innocence that reproduces the good, compliant citizen. Stokely Carmichael put it well when he
said, The way the oppressor tries to stop the oppressed from using violence as a means to attain
liberation is to raise ethical or moral questions about violence. I want to state emphatically here that
violence in any society is neither moral nor is it ethical. It is neither right, nor is it wrong. It is just
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simply a question of who has the power to legalize violence.42 The practice of isolating morally
agreeable cases in order to highlight racist violence requires passively suffered Black death and
panders to a framework that strengthens and conceals current paradigms of racism. While it may be
factually true to state that Trayvon Martin was unarmed, we should not state this with a righteous
sense of satisfaction. What if Trayvon Martin were armed? Maybe then he could have defended himself by
fighting back. But if the situation had resulted in the death of George Zimmerman rather than of Trayvon
Martin, I doubt the public would have been as outraged and galvanized into action to the same extent. It is
ridiculous to say that there will be justice for Trayvon when he is already dead no amount of prison time for
Zimmerman can compensate. When we build politics around standards of legitimate victimhood that
requires passive sacrifice, we will build a politics that requires a dead Black boy to make its point. Its
not surprising that the nation or even the Black leadership have failed to rally behind CeCe McDonald,
a Black trans woman who was recently convicted of second degree manslaughter after a group of racist,
transphobic white people attacked her and her friends, cutting CeCes cheek with a glass bottle and provoking
an altercation that led to the death of a white man who had a swastika tattoo. Trans women of color who are
involved in confrontations that result in the death of their attackers are criminalized for their survival. When
Akira Jackson, a Black trans woman, stabbed and killed her boyfriend after he beat her with a baseball bat,
she was given a four-year sentence for manslaughter. Cases that involve an innocent (passive),
victimized Black person also provide an opportunity for the liberal white conscience to purify and
morally ennoble itself by taking a position against racism. We need to challenge the status of certain
raced and gendered subjects as instruments of emotional relief for white civil society, or as bodies that
can be displaced for the sake of providing analogies to amplify white suffering (slavery being the
favored analogy). Although we must emphasize that Troy Davis did not kill police officer Mark MacPhail,
maybe we also should question why killing a cop is considered morally deplorable when the cops, in the last
few months alone, have murdered 29 Black people. Talking about these murders will not undo them. Having
the right line cannot alter reality if we do not put our bodies where our mouths are. As Spivak says, it cant
become our goal to keep watching our language.43 Rejecting the politics of innocence is not about
assuming a certain theoretical posture or adopting a certain perspective it is a lived position.
The 1AC politic is predicated on proving the innocence of a victim reifies the
innocence/guilty paradigm that reconstitutes blackness as criminal. The impact is the
vilification of those who cannot be rendered innocent.
Saidiya V. Hartman: I think that gets at one of the fundamental ethical questions/problems/crises for the West:
the status of difference and the status of the other. Its as though in order to come to any recognition of
common humanity, the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced: Only if I
can see myself in that position can I understand the crisis of that position. That is the logic of the moral and
political discourses we see every day the need for the innocent black subject to be victimized by a racist
state in order to see the racism of the racist state. You have to be exemplary in your goodness, as opposed to
... Frank Wilderson: [laughter] A nigga on the warpath! While I was reading the local newspaper I came across
a story that caught my attention. The article was about a 17 year-old boy from Baltimore named Isaiah
Simmons who died in a juvenile facility in 2007 when five to seven counselors suffocated him while restraining
him for hours. After he stopped responding they dumped his body in the snow and did not call for medical
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assistance for over 40 minutes. In late March 2012, the case was thrown out completely and none of the
counselors involved in his murder were charged with anything. The article I found online about the case was
titled Charges Dropped Against 5 In Juvenile Offenders Death. By emphasizing that it was a juvenile
offender who died, the article is quick to flag Isaiah as a criminal, as if to signal to readers that his death is not
worthy of sympathy or being taken up by civil rights activists. Every comment left on the article was crude and
contemptuous the general sentiment was that his death was no big loss to society. The news about the
case being thrown out barely registered at all. There was no public outcry, no call to action, no discussion of
the many issues bound up with the case youth incarceration, racism, the privatization of prisons and jails
(he died at a private facility), medical neglect, state violence, and so forth though to be fair, there was a
critical response when the case initially broke. For weeks after reading the article I kept contemplating the
question: What is the difference between Trayvon Martin and Isaiah Simmons? Which cases galvanize
activists into action, and which are ignored completely? In the wake of the Jena 6, Troy Davis, Oscar Grant,
Trayvon Martin, and other high profile cases,1 I have taken note of the patterns that structure political
appeals, particularly the way innocence becomes a necessary precondition for the launching of anti-
racist political campaigns. These campaigns often center on prosecuting and harshly punishing the
individuals responsible for overt and locatable acts of racist violence, thus positioning the State and
the criminal justice system as an ally and protector of the oppressed. If the innocence of a Black
victim is not established, he or she will not become a suitable spokesperson for the cause. If you are
Black, have a drug felony, and are attempting to file a complaint with the ACLU regarding habitual police
harassment you are probably not going to be legally represented by them or any other civil rights
organization anytime soon.2 An empathetic structure of feeling based on appeals to innocence has come
to ground contemporary anti-racist politics. Within this framework, empathy can only be established
when a person meets the standards of authentic victimhood and moral purity, which requires Black
people, in the words of Frank Wilderson, to be shaken free of niggerization. Social, political, cultural, and
legal recognition only happens when a person is thoroughly whitewashed, neutralized, and made
unthreatening. The spokesperson model of doing activism (isolating specific exemplary cases) also
tends to emphasize the individual, rather than the collective nature of the injury. Framing oppression in
terms of individual actors is a liberal tactic that dismantles collective responses to oppression and
diverts attention from the larger picture. Using innocence as the foundation to address anti-Black
violence is an appeal to the white imaginary, though these arguments are certainly made by people of color
as well. Relying on this framework re-entrenches a logic that criminalizes race and constructs subjects
as docile. A liberal politics of recognition can only reproduce a guilt-innocence schematization that
fails to grapple with the fact that there is an a priori association of Blackness with guilt (criminality).
Perhaps association is too generous there is a flat-out conflation of the terms. As Frank Wilderson noted in
Gramscis Black Marx, the cops answer to the Black subjects question why did you shoot me? follows
a tautology: I shot you because you are Black; you are Black because I shot you.3 In the words of Fanon, the
cause is the consequence.4 Not only are Black men assumed guilty until proven innocent, Blackness itself is
considered synonymous with guilt. Authentic victimhood, passivity, moral purity, and the adoption of a
whitewashed position are necessary for recognition in the eyes of the State. Wilderson, quoting N.W.A, notes
that a nigga on the warpath cannot be a proper subject of empathy.5 The desire for recognition compels us to
be allies with, rather than enemies of the State, to sacrifice ourselves in order to meet the standards of
victimhood, to throw our bodies into traffic to prove that the car will hit us rather than calling for the execution of
all motorists. This is also the logic of rape revenge narratives only after a woman is thoroughly degraded
can we begin to tolerate her rage (but outside of films and books, violent women are not tolerated even when
they have the moral grounds to fight back, as exemplified by the high rates of women who are imprisoned or
sentenced to death for murdering or assaulting abusive partners). We may fall back on such appeals for
strategic reasons to win a case or to get the public on our side but there is a problem when our strategies
reinforce a framework in which revolutionary and insurgent politics are unimaginable. I also want to argue
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that a politics founded on appeals to innocence is anachronistic because it does not address the
transformation and re-organization of racist strategies in the post-civil rights era. A politics of
innocence is only capable of acknowledging examples of direct, individualized acts of racist violence
while obscuring the racism of a putatively colorblind liberalism that operates on a structural level.
Posing the issue in terms of personal prejudice feeds the fallacy of racism as an individual intention, feeling or
personal prejudice, though there is certain a psychological and affective dimension of racism that exceeds the
individual in that it is shaped by social norms and media representations. The liberal colorblind paradigm of
racism submerges race beneath the commonsense logic of crime and punishment. This effectively
conceals racism, because it is not considered racist to be against crime. Cases like the execution of Troy
Davis, where the courts come under scrutiny for racial bias, also legitimize state violence by treating such
cases as exceptional. The political response to the murder of Troy Davis does not challenge the assumption
that communities need to clean up their streets by rounding up criminals, for it relies on the claim that Davis is
not one of those feared criminals, but an innocent Black man. Innocence, however, is just code for
nonthreatening to white civil society. Troy Davis is differentiated from other Black men the bad ones and
the legal system is diagnosed as being infected with racism, masking the fact that the legal system is the
constituent mechanism through which racial violence is carried out (wishful last-minute appeals to the right to a
fair trial reveal this as if trials were ever intended to be fair!). The State is imagined to be deviating from its
intended role as protector of the people, rather than being the primary perpetrator. H. Rap Brown provides a
sobering reminder that, Justice means just-us-white-folks. There is no redress of grievance for Blacks in this
country.6 While there are countless examples of overt racism, Black social (and physical) death is
primarily achieved via a coded discourse of criminality and a mediated forms of state violence
carried out by a impersonal carceral apparatus (the matrix of police, prisons, the legal system,
prosecutors, parole boards, prison guards, probation officers, etc). In other words incidents where a
biased individual fucks with or murders a person of color can be identified as racism to conscientious
persons, but the racism underlying the systematic imprisonment of Black Americans under the pretense of the
War on Drugs is more difficult to locate and generally remains invisible because it is spatially confined. When it
is visible, it fails to arouse public sympathy, even among the Black leadership. As Loc Wacquant,
scholar of the carceral state, asks, What is the chance that white Americans will identify with Black convicts
when even the Black leadership has turned its back on them?7 The abandonment of Black convicts by
civil rights organizations is reflected in the history of these organizations. From 1975-86, the NAACP
and the Urban League identified imprisonment as a central issue, and the disproportionate incarceration of
Black Americans was understood as a problem that was structural and political. Spokespersons from the civil
rights organizations related imprisonment to the general confinement of Black Americans. Imprisoned Black
men were, as Wacquant notes, portrayed inclusively as brothers, uncles, neighbors, friends.8 Between 1986-
90 there was a dramatic shift in the rhetoric and official policy of the NAACP and the Urban League that is
exemplary of the turn to a politics of innocence. By the early 1990s, the NAACP had dissolved its prison
program and stopped publishing articles about rehabilitation and post-imprisonment issues. Meanwhile these
organizations began to embrace the rhetoric of individual responsibility and a tough-on-crime stance
that encouraged Blacks to collaborate with police to get drugs out of their neighborhoods, even going
as far as endorsing harsher sentences for minors and recidivists. Black convicts, initially a part of the we
articulated by civil rights groups, became them. Wacquant writes, This reticence [to advocate for Black
convicts] is further reinforced by the fact, noted long ago by W.E.B. DuBois, that the tenuous position
of the black bourgeoisie in the socioracial hierarchy rests critically on its ability to distance itself from
its unruly lower-class brethren: to offset the symbolic disability of blackness, middle-class African
Americans must forcefully communicate to whites that they have absolutely no sympathy and no
known connections with any black man who has committed a crime.9 When the Black leadership and
middle-class Blacks differentiate themselves from poorer Blacks, they feed into a notion of Black
exceptionalism that is used to dismantle anti-racist struggles. This class of exceptional Blacks (Barack
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Obama, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell) supports the collective delusion of a post-race society. The shift in
the rhetoric and policy of civil rights organizations is perhaps rooted in a fear of affirming the
conflation of Blackness and criminality by advocating for prisoners. However, not only have these
organizations abandoned Black prisoners they shore up and extend the Penal State by
individualizing, depoliticizing, and decontextualizing the issue of crime and punishment and vilifying
those most likely to be subjected to racialized state violence. The dis-identification with poor, urban Black
Americans is not limited to Black men, but also Black women who are vilified via the figure of the Welfare
Queen: a lazy, sexually irresponsible burden on society (particularly hard-working white Americans). The
Welfare State and the Penal State complement one another, as Clintons 1998 statements denouncing
prisoners and ex-prisoners who receive welfare or social security reveal: he condemns former prisoners
receiving welfare assistance for deviously committing fraud and abuse against working families who play
by the rules.10 Furthermore, this complementarity is gendered. Black women are the shock absorbers of the
social crisis created by the Penal State: the incarceration of Black men profoundly increases the burden put on
Black women, who are force to perform more waged and unwaged (caring) labor, raise children alone, and are
punished by the State when their husbands or family members are convicted of crimes (for example, a family
cannot receive housing assistance if someone in the household has been convicted of a drug felony). The re-
configuration of the Welfare State under the Clinton Administration (which imposed stricter regulations on
welfare recipients) further intensified the backlash against poor Black women. On this view, the Welfare State
is the apparatus used to regulate poor Black women who are not subjected to regulation, directed
chiefly at Black men, by the Penal State though it is important to note that the feminization of
poverty and the punitive turn in non-violent crime policy led to an 400% increase in the female prison
population between 1980 and the late 1990s.11 Racialized patterns of incarceration and the assault on
the urban poor are not seen as a form of racist state violence because, in the eyes of the public,
convicts (along with their families and associates) deserve such treatment. The politics of innocence
directly fosters this culture of vilification, even when it is used by civil rights organizations.
Innocence discourse results in the criminalization of black youth who are not
understood as innocent children
Freedom is the regeneration of black manhood, de facto heterosexualized and gendered. These framings, however, are reflected across the political
spectrum of contemporary interventions
into the school-to-prison pipeline. Examples include fatherhood curricula
that do not address patriarchy, single-sex schools and boys after-school programs that require
compulsory heteronormativity, and failed attempts by the state to coerce marriage to solve the
problem of poor single mothers, often framed as responsible for the rise in imprisonment rates for
black youth, particularly males. Making the case that the black and brown male body is being harmed is not a shallow or reactionary
evidentiary move. To be harmed, a body must be sensate, capable of experiencing pain, and count as fully human. Establishing this point has been part
of the abolitionist strategy. Bernstein (2011) argues that although nineteenth-century abolitionists successfully illustrated that African American enslaved
bodies were capable of feeling pain (and were thus human), the libel of insensateness and its attendant meaning did not
fade with the abolition of slavery. Instead, it has stealthily moved into childrens culture, where
innocence provides a cover under which otherwise discredited racial ideology survives and continues,
covertly, to influence culture (ibid. 51). This is evident in contemporary analysis of the school-to-prison pipeline. Charting racial
disproportionality at every level of the juvenile justice systemsurveillance, arrest, removal from
home, conviction, and sentencingclearly shows that youth of color do not have the same access to
innocence and are not understood as sensate in the same way that white youth are. Yet, the circulation of the black and brown
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male child in campaigns against the school-to-prison pipeline reproduce heterosexualized and gendered constructions of freedom, and these campaigns
invoke and naturalize the ideas of children and innocence as neutral and a priori categories. Another fundamentally under-theorized component of
expanding reform work centering on youth, including advocacy surrounding the school-to-prison pipeline, is how the racialization of
innocence is masked and reproduced throughout these campaigns. As the previous section shows, adult, child, and juvenile are
flexible artifacts, and a core legal strategy is to assert that juveniles and youth are categorically less culpable (Soung 2011: 439). Criminal
justice reformers have used innocence and an array of proxy terms and concepts for decades in an attempt to wrest
some sort of reform from our nations addiction to punishment and incarceration. For example, the most visible
prison reform campaigns during the last 20 years have focused on the treatment of mentally ill prisoners to free the falsely accused and imprisoned. A
strategy of relative innocence also refies binaries. Work to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline does
not aim to reify innocence, and the youth centered in these campaigns are often refused categorization
as childrenand innocencein the judgment of the state. Yet, the push-back strategy employed
suggests that these harmed bodies, particularly male youth of color, should count as children and
should be viewed as innocent. This strategy to claim childhood for youth harmed by the pipeline
challenges how the category of childhood shields the racialized production of innocence.
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LinkFederalism
States rights is code for the generalizable resentment of black people and defense of
slavery
Greenberg 07 [David, Slate.com, Dog-Whistling Dixie, http://www.slate.com/news-and-
politics/2017/07/obamacare-repeal-is-the-first-step-in-scaling-back-entitlements.html]
Both accounts, obviously, are overdrawn. But there are a few more nuanced histories out there, including Chain Reaction by Tom and Mary Edsall
(which Krugman cites in his latest column) and In Search of Another Country by Emory University historian Joe Crespino (who has weighed in on the
Reagan-in-1980 controversy here). These credit the way that race has worked as an unspoken subtext in unlikely places.
The key to the argument is that Reagan's success hinged on forging messages to Americansnot just
Southern whites, incidentally, but also Catholic blue-collar workers and neoconservative
intellectualsthat eschewed explicit racism while still tapping into sublimated resentments of blacks or
anger at racially fraught policies like busing, welfare, and crime. In its simplest form, this multitiered message relied on code
words. No one who used the phrase "states' rights" in living memory of the massive resistance
movement against forced desegregation could be unaware of the message of solidarity it sent to
Southern whites about civil rights. (The phrase, of course, had been bound up with racism at least since
John Calhoun championed it in his defense of slavery in the 1830s.) But because the term also connoted a general
opposition to the growth of the federal government's role in economic life, nonracist whites could comfort themselves that politicians like Nixon and
Reagan were using it innocentlyand thus shrug off any guilt they might feel for being complicit in racist campaigning. It was a dog whistle to
segregationists. In the same vein, Reagan's use of phrases linked to insidious racial stereotypeshis talk of Cadillac-driving welfare queens, or
"young bucks" buying T-bone steaks with food stampspandered to bigots while making sure not to alienate voters whom starker language would have
scared away. More important, even where code words weren't at work, Reagan's very ideology contained a strong dose of racial conservatism. On one
hostility to assisting minorities with positive measuresaffirmative
issue after another, Reagan's image and appeal was shot through with a
action, legal protections for criminal defendants, welfare programs (which mainly helped whites but were perceived as
mainly helping blacks). As a standard-bearer of the conservative movement, the Edsalls have written, Reagan in 1980 "revived the sharply polarized
racial images of the two parties with racial conservatism contributing decisively to the GOP advantage." As Crespino notes, the triumph of the civil
rights movement and its assumptions about racial equality forced conservative Southerners to find other issues with which to galvanize voters. On these
fronts, too, racial politics nonetheless shaped the debate. Southern candidates created private religious schools, for example, that could escape court-
ordered integration, thus recasting the fight as one of religious freedom. In my own research, I've found that today's right-wing attacks on the "liberal
media" have roots in George Wallace's relentless war in the early 1960s against the national news agencies whose reporters, he and other Southern
whites believed, distorted the terms of their struggle to maintain Jim Crow. The upshot was that by 1980, race and ideology had become so commingled
that one's stand on racial issues served as a proxy for one's partisan preference. Previously, economic issues had been the chief dividing line between
the parties. By 1980, though, according to the Edsalls, the changes that followed the civil rights movement had crystallized, and racial politics figured just
as strongly. Almost 69 percent of the public, for example, thought the Democrats were likely to aid minorities, compared with just about 11 percent who
thought the same of the Republicans. Conversely, roughly 66 percent thought the GOP "unlikely" to aid minorities, while about 12 percent said the same
of the Democrats. Even talking about domestic government spending carried a tacit racial message, since
public opposition to spending was highest and most intense when it came to programs devoted to the
needy and to blacks. By contrast, support for government spending on Social Security, education, health care, and the environment remained
robust even during the heyday of Reaganism. Building on the efforts of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon before
him, as well as of a generation of Southern Republican leaders, Reagan succeeded in altering the
terms of political debate when it came to race. Stripping away the crude bigotry that had cost the white
South the rest of nation's sympathy in the 1950s and 1960s, he and other conservative political leaders
fashioned an ideology in which racial politics were implicit, and yet still powerful. Ever since, their
followers have been able to indignantly claim that any allegations of racism are smears and slursand
discredit the entire discussion by making it about personal prejudice rather than public policy.
Federalism is bad because American Federalism was built on the backs of

enslaved people and the exploitation of slave labor.
Ericson 11 (Ericson, David 11. http://soar.wichita.edu/bitstream/handle/10057/118/ericson.pdf?sequence=1.,
David F. Ericson received his B.A. from Wayne State University, M.A. from the University of Michigan,
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and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He has also taught at Wichita State University and University
at Albany (SUNY) and held research fellowships at the University of Chicago and Princeton University.
AB)
The fugitive-slave law of 1850 created this stronger, more friendly federal legal apparatus for Southern
slaveholders and, by the way, completed the process of severing fugitive-slave cases from criminal-
extradition cases. The new law provided for court-appointed United States commissioners to grant
certificates of removal in fugitive-slave cases, authorized United States marshals to appoint deputies and organize posses to
secure the return of fugitive slaves in the face of local resistence, and obligated the federal government to pay the costs for the protection and
transportation of fugitive slaves in cases where such resistence was anticipated.95 Of course, the new apparatus was only as strong as the will of
federal officials to use it. The law had been enacted as one of the pro-Southern parts of the Compromise of 1850. Throughout the rest of the decade,
both Whig and Democratic administrations were determined to enforce the law to make that compromise a reality. Despite several celebrated slave
rescues, the law was enforced. Slaveholders were successful in pressing their claims to alleged fugitive slaves in the vast majority of the cases that fell
under the law. In his study of the enforcement of the law, Stanley Campbell found 332 fugitive slave recovery cases during the 1850-1860 period. In
these 332 cases, 141 alleged fugitive slaves (42.5%) were reclaimed without any federal court proceedings; meaning that they were essentially
kidnaped by slaveholders or their agents. The remaining 191 cases involved federal court proceedings. In these 191 cases, 157 alleged fugitive slaves
were remanded to their claimants (82.8%), 11 were released (5.8%), 22 were rescued (11.5%), and 1 escaped (0.5%). In 68 of the 157 cases (43.4%)
where alleged fugitive slaves were remanded to their claimants, the federal government paid protection and transportation costs.96 In possibly the most
expensive of these 68 cases--the Arthur Burns case in Boston (1854)--Campbell calculated federal expenditures of $14,166 to return Burns to slavery in
Virginia.97 Treasury Department ledgers recorded protection and transportation costs in 23 other cases, ranging from $25 to $745.98 If we add the costs
of these 23 cases to the cost of the Burns case, we obtain a sum of $18,759 in documented federal expenditures. This figure, however, represents only
the tip of the proverbial iceberg. It does not include any costs for the 44 other fugitive-slave cases in Campbells population that involved federal
protection and transportation costs and it includes court costs only for the Burns case, not for the 190 other fugitive-slave cases in Campbells population
that involved federal court proceedings.99 Total federal expenditures for slave recoveries during the whole 1789-1861 period would also include any
federal expenses in fugitive-slave cases that fell outside Campbells population.100 In addition, the federal government assisted slaveholders in
attempting to recover their lost slaves in other ways or, alternatively, in securing compensation for slave losses. For example, the federal government
paid $5,465 in prize money to several Navy personnel for the destruction of a fort occupied by runaway slaves in what was then Spanish Florida.101 In a
later case, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun authorized an $1,000 payment to an army captain for the recovery of slaves seized by a Creek raiding
party along the Georgia-Florida border.102 Indian agent William DuVal was paid $1,285 in extra expenses to arbitrate slave disputes between
Seminoles and white settlers in territorial Florida.103 The federal government also assisted slaveholders in attempting to secure compensation for their
slaves in cases where they were liberated by foreign powers, such as by Great Britain during the Revolutionary War and War of 1812. This
type of
support of slavery carried significant costs to the federal government in negotiating, litigating, and processing
these cases. The cost to the federal government of the two commissions that were established to settle War of 1812 claims for slave losses was
$56,887.104 The federal government itself ultimately paid $35,880 to settle one Revolutionary War claim.105 Total federal expenditures for slave
recoveries during the 1789-1861 period must have dwarfed the spending on fugitive-slave cases. The sum for the five items documented above is
$100,517. The significance of federal spending in this policy area, though, transcended the amount of money spent. However modest the expenditures
may have been, they suggest important parallels between pre-Civil War and post-Civil War state-building activities in the United States. In
order to
implement fugitive-slave law, the federal government created a separate law- enforcement apparatus
and used it to enforce the constitutional rights of individual slaveholders. After the Civil War, the
federal government greatly expanded its efforts on both fronts, both in creating its own law-
enforcement apparatuses and in enforcing the constitutional rights of individual citizens. At least initially, the
constitutional rights it enforced were those of the very people who had been the targets of its pre-Civil War efforts.106 Obviously, the pre-Civil War
federal expenditures in this policy area were not seen as precedents for the post-Civil War expenditures. Yet, both cases represented federal efforts to
bypass resistant state and local governments and directly affect the lives of individual citizens (and noncitizens). In
both cases, those
efforts were only partially successful. Federal spending on slave recoveries shows the most
unmediated influence of the continued existence of slavery on federal spending patterns during the
pre-Civil War period. It also shows how Southern slaveholding elites were not adverse to a powerful
federal government. When it directly served their interests, they were as eager to support an extension of federal authority as other Americans
were.107 Federal spending on interdicting illegal slave trading, subsidizing African colonization, and recovering fugitive slaves did not exhaust the extent
of federal spending on slavery-related items during the pre-Civil War period. Though the amounts are hopelessly disaggregated,the federal
government spent a sizable amount of money on slave labor. Those expenditures took two forms: payments to
federal contractors who used slave labor and payments to slaveholders for the use of their slaves as federal
employees. The estimated costs of slave labor to one federal subcontractor was $40,000 for work on a military fortification near Mobile,
Alabama.108 The construction of new dry docks at Norfolk, Virginia, cost the Navy an estimated $119,246 in slave labor.109 Federal expenditures in
territories could spike because of local conflicts over slavery, as clearly occurred in bleeding Kansas. The Treasury Department reported that an 1856
congressional investigation of the violence in Kansas cost $2,400.110 Subsequently, President Franklin Pierce asked Congress for $8,118 to help defray
the extraordinary expenses the Kansas territorial militia incurred in 1856 and the Buchanan administration recommended that it appropriate $7,003 to
cover the extraordinary expenses Robert J. Walker, the former territorial governor of Kansas, incurred in 1857.111 An 1858 special election in Kansas,
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which led to the ultimate defeat of the Lecompton constitution, cost the federal government $10,000.112 Territorial governors and residents fearful of
slave insurrections and the loss of their slaves to Native Americans also frequently petitioned the Department of War to station more troops in their
territories.113 The federal government incurred treaty obligations because of slavery. The United States paid at least $18,149 on claims for slave losses
during its 1812-1813 and 1817-1818 military incursions into Spanish Florida under the terms of the Adams-Onis treaty by which it acquired the
territory.114 The federal government also provided extra sections of land to Chickasaw slaveholders in the treaty by which the Chickasaws ceded their
lands in Georgia and Alabama to the United States in exchange for lands in Arkansas territory.115 Finally, there were truly miscellaneous federal
expenditures on slavery. For example, Secretary of State Calhoun, in a strictly confidential letter to the United States ambassador to France,
authorized him to spend $500 to plant stories in the French press favorable to the South and its peculiar institutions at the time of the annexation of
Texas.116 In a related case, President John Tyler admitted paying Duff Green, a Virginia newspaper editor and Calhoun confidante, $1,000 out of a
contingency fund for his role in promoting the annexation of Texas.117 The total amount spent in this miscellaneous category is impossible to estimate.
Yet, it is clear that the federal government was involved in many intricate ways in the continued existence of slavery during this whole period and that it
spent a considerable amount of money as a result. The $205,416 I have documented above is the mere tip of another iceberg. Specifically with
reference to slave labor, the continued existence of slavery expanded the capacities of the federal government in a very concrete way.
As federal
officials defended the use of slave labor from its critics, it became a simple cost-saving measure that allowed
them to complete more projects more cheaply.118 The continued existence of slavery also influenced foreign
and territorial policy and induced the federal government to extend its authority over both policy areas in ways
it might otherwise not have.119 The pre-Civil War budgetary data is incomplete but it is sufficient to support two major conclusions about the
relation of slavery to American political development. First, the spending patterns of the federal government would have been
significantly different if slavery had not continued to exist in the United States during this period. In some policy
areas, the continued existence of the institution did not inhibit federal spending but encouraged it. Second, the continuing existence of
slavery prompted the early American state to undertake a number of state-building activities that it
might not otherwise have undertaken. Prodded by the sting of slavery or, alternatively, of slaveholders,
the early American state engaged in immigration control and overseas colonization, subsidized private
organizations, and enforced its own laws, all in ways analogous to later American states.120 Any causal
connections between the pre-Civil War and post-Civil War policies in these areas were, at best, tenuous. Nonetheless, the parallels between the two
sets of policies call into question the assumption that slavery had an overall negative impact on the development of the early American state. To the
contrary, the federal government made a number of policy commitments because of the continuing presence of slavery on American soil. Over time,
those commitments became increasingly expensive ones and spurred such institutional developments as the creation of a separate African Squadron in
the Navy, a federal agency in Liberia, and expanded roles for United States commissioners and marshals in the Attorneys General office. They
also
produced several shifts of authority, from the state to the federal level as well as within the federal
government itself. The most durable of those shifts lasted until the Civil War shattered both the early
American state and the institution of racial slavery. Africans became a source of official complaint.72 The ACS received a
much-delayed $37,800 federal payment for one group of recaptured Africans in 1851 and another $200 the following year for two smuggled African
children who it had shipped to Liberia.73 Finally, in 1858, President James Buchanan decided to formalize this financial arrangement between the
federal government and the ACS by recommending to Congress that the society receive $50 per person for the
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LinkLegal Reform Farley
White supremacy is engrained within the law reformist language assumes a political
subject that structurally disbars blackness. Their political framework is an antiblack
form of education that cultivates submission to the law of white-over-black and
reinstantiates the master/slave relation at the heart of civil society
Farley 05 [Anthony Paul, Associate Professor, Boston College Law School | Perfecting Slavery, Boston
College Law | Research Paper No. 53 pg. 2 6] //shuler
The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in
education, in wealth, and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage, and holds fast to the principles
of constitutional liberty.1 [P]eople will be able to liberate themselves only after the legal superstructure itself has begun to wither away. And when we
begin to overcome and to do without these [juridical] concepts in reality, rather than merely in declarations, that will be the surest sign that the narrow
horizon of bourgeois law is finally opening up before us.2 I. Slavery is with us still. We are haunted by slavery. We are
animated by slavery. White-over-black is slavery and segregation and neosegregation and every situation in which the distribution of material
or spiritual goods follows the colorline. The movement from slavery to segregation to neosegregation to whatever form of white-over-black it is that may
come with post-modernity or after is not toward freedom. The movement from slavery to segregation to neosegregation is
the movement of slavery perfecting itself. White-over-black is neosegregation. White-over-black is
segregation. White-over-black is slavery. All of it is white-over-black, only white-over-black, and that continually. The story of
progress up from slavery is a lie, the longest lie. The story of progress up from slavery is told juridically in the form of
the rule of law. Slavery is the rule of law. And slavery is death. The slave perfects itself as a slave when it bows down
before its master of its own free will. That is the moment in which the slave accomplishes the impossible reconciliation of its freedom with its unfreedom
The slave bows down before its master when it
by willing itself unfree.3 When exactly does this perfection of slavery take place?
prays for legal relief, when it prays for equal rights, and while it cultivates the field of law hoping for an
answer. The slaves free choice, the slaves leap of faith, can only be taken under conditions of legal
equality. Only after emancipation and legal equality, only after rights, can the slave perfect itself as a
slave. Bourgeois legality is the condition wherein equals are said to enter the commons of reason4 or the kingdom of ends5 or the New England town
meeting of the soul to discuss universalizable principles, to discuss equality and freedom. Much is made of these meetings, these struggles for law,
these festivals of the universal. Commons, kingdom, town meeting, there are many mansions in the house of law, but the law does not forget its father,
as Maria Grahn-Farley observes: The
law of slavery has not been forgotten by the law of segregation; the law of
segregation has not been forgotten by the law of neosegregation. The law guarding the gates of slavery, segregation,
and neosegregation has not forgotten its origin; it remembers its father and its grandfather before that. It knows what master it serves; it knows what
color to count.6 To wake from slavery is to see that everything must go , every law room,7 every great house, every
plantation, all of it, everything. Requestsfor equality and freedom will always fail. Why? Because the fact of need itself means
that the request will fail. The request for equality and freedom, for rights, will fail whether the request is granted
or denied. The request is produced through an injury.8 The initial injury is the marking of bodies for lessless
respect, less land, less freedom, less education, less. The mark must be made on the flesh because that is where we start
from. Childhood is where we begin and, under conditions of hierarchy, that childhood is already marked. The mark organizes, orients,
and differentiates our otherwise common flesh. The mark is race, the mark is gender, the mark is class, the mark is. The
mark is all there is to the reality of those essencesrace, gender, class, and so onthat are said to precede existence. The mark is
a system.9 Property and law follow the mark. And so it goes. There is a pleasure in hierarchy. We begin with an education in our
hierarchies. We begin with childhood and childhood begins with education. To be exact, education begins our childhood. We are called by race, by
gender, by class, and so on. Our
education cultivates our desire in the direction of our hierarchies. If we are
successful, we acquire an orientation that enables us to locate ourselves and our bodies vis--vis all
the other bodies that inhabit our institutional spaces. We follow the call and move in the generally expected way. White-
overblack is an orientation, a pleasure, a desire that enables us to find our place, and therefore our way, in our institutional spaces. This is why no one
The request for rightsfor equality
ever need ask for equality and freedom. This is why the fact of need means that the request will fail.
will always fail because there are always ambiguities. To be marked for less, to be marked as less than
zero, to be marked as a negative attractor, is to be in the situation of the slave. The slave is not called.
The slave is not free. The slave is called to follow the calling that is not a calling. The slave is trained to be an object; the
slave is trained, in other words, to not be. The slave is death. Death is the end of ambiguity. To be in the situation of the slave is to
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have all the ambiguities organized against you. But there are always ambiguities, one is always free. How, then, are the ambiguities organized? How is
freedom ended? The slave must choose the end of ambiguity, the end of freedom, objecthood. The slave must freely choose death. This the slave can
only do under conditions of freedom that present it with a choice. The perfect slave gives up the ghost and commends its everlasting spirit to its master.
The slaves final and perfect prayer is a legal prayer for equal rights. The texts of law, like the manifest content of a dream, perhaps of wolves, may tell a
certain story or an uncertain story. The certainty or uncertainty of the story is of absolutely no consequence. The story, the law, the wolves table
manners, do not matter. The story, the law, the
story of law, the dream of wolves,10 however, represents a disguised or latent
wish that does matter. The wish is a matter of life or death. We are strangers to ourselves. The dream of equality, of rights, is the
disguised wish for hierarchy. The prayer for equal rights is the disguised desire for slavery. Slavery is death. The prayer for equal rights,
then, is the disguise of the deathwish. The prayer for equal rights is the slaves perfect moment. The slaves perfect prayer, the prayer of the perfect
slave, is always answered. The slave, however, knows not what it does when it prays for rights, for the slave is estranged from itself. Of its own inner
strivings it knows not. The slave strives to be property, but since property cannot own property the slave cannot own its inner strivings. The slave strives
to produce the final commodity law. In other words, the slave produces itself as a slave through law. The slave produces itself as a slave (as a
commodity) through its own prayer for equal rights. And that prayer is all there is to law. The slave bows down before the law and prays for equal rights.
The slave bows down before the law and then there is law. There is no law before the slave bows
down . The slaves fidelity becomes the law, and the law is perfected through the slaves struggle for
the universal, through the slaves struggle for equality of right. The slave prays for equality of right. Rights cannot
be equal. Its perfect prayer is answered; the laws ambiguities open, like the gates of heaven, just above its head. And all of the white-over-black
accumulated within the endless ambiguities of law rains down. Whiteover- black is slavery and slavery is death. Death is the end of forever. The end of
forever is perfection and perfection, for us, seems divine, beyond the veil, beyond death; hence, the end of forever. There is a pleasure in this death. It is
the pleasure of hierarchy. If there is hierarchy, white-over-black, for example, there is an experience of pleasure
in it. Bodies are marked white-over-black. This is a pleasure and a desire. Property is marked white-over-black. This
too is a pleasure and a desire. Law, following the system of marks and the system of property, is white-over-black, and a pleasure and a desire. There
are always ambiguities. The ambiguities are vessels of our desires. Our pleasures and desires follow
the colorline. In a colorlined order, all institutions are ordered by the colorline. A white-over-black orientation is required to navigate the institutions
that order life. In other words, a white-over-black orientation is required to follow the colorline, and one must follow the colorline or lose ones way. The
ambiguities, then, are always white-over-black. White-over-black is the North Star. Every correct legal answer is white-over-black.
There is a pleasure and a desire in moving to the correct answer. The pleasure and desire of moving to the correct answer is experienced as the
sublime pleasure of the legal method, as the sovereignty of death. The commodity reaches its apogee in the black.11 There is no black, save for white-
over-black. White-over-black is slavery. Slavery is death. Death is the end of it all. Death is the complete end. Death, then, is perfection, the end of all
things. The slave perfects itself as a slave when it prays for slavery. The slave, being perfect in that moment of prayer, is one with that before which it
bows down in prayer. The slave prays to itself for itself to be transformed into itself and so its perfect prayer is always already granted. The slave prays
If the slave were not hated, lessened, then it would never experience itself
for equal rights. Rights cannot be equal.
as lessthan. Without the experience of being less-than, the idea of equal-to could not arise. To be a
slave is to become what one becomes through the experience of less-than. The less-than experience may be
expressed as white-over-black. White-over-black is an identity and an orientation. White-over-black is a form of training. Our institutions, under the
colorline, are forms of white-over-black.
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LinkLGBT Rights
Queer liberation movements that were once built to fight racist, anti-poor, and anti-
queer violence conducted by law enforcement are now being co-opted into the prison
industrial complex to uphold state violence.
Bassichi et al 11 (Morgan Bassichi, writer for the radical history review and the revolution starts at home ,
Alexander Lee, founder and former director of the transgender, gender variant, and intersex justice politics,
Dean Spade, Lawyer, writer and associate professor of law at Seattle University School of Law Captive
Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex AK Press)
As we write this, queer and trans people across the United States and in many parts of the world have just
celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. On that fateful night back in June 1969, sexual
and gender outsiders rose up against ongoing brutal police violence in an inspiring act of defiance. These early
freedom fighters knew all too well that the NYPDNew Yorks finestwere the frontline threat to queer and
trans survival. Stonewall was the culmination of years of domination, resentment, and upheaval in many
marginalized communities coming to a new consciousness of the depth of violence committed by the
government against poor people, people of color, women, and queer people both within US borders and
around the world. The Stonewall Rebellion, the mass demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, and the
campaign to free imprisoned Black-liberation activist Assata Shakur were all powerful examples of a
groundswell of energy demanding an end to the business as usual of US terror during this time. Could these
groundbreaking and often unsung activists have imagined that only forty years later the official gay rights
agenda would be largely pro-police, pro-prisons, and pro-warexactly the forces they worked so hard to
resist? Just a few decades later, the most visible and well-funded arms of the LGBT movement look
much more like a corporate strategizing session than a grassroots social justice movement. There are
countless examples of this dramatic shift in priorities. What emerged as a fight against racist, anti-
poor, and anti-queer police violence now works hand in hand with local and federal law enforcement
agenciesdistrict attorneys are asked to speak at trans rallies, cops march in Gay Pride parades. The
agendas of prosecutorsthose who lock up our family, friends, and loversand many queer and trans
organizations are becoming increasingly similar, with sentence- and police-enhancing legislation at
the top of the priority list. I. How Did We Get Here? The streams of conservative as well as more
progressive and radical queer and trans politics developed over time and in the context of a rapidly changing
political, economic, and social landscape. Although we cant offer a full history of how these different streams
developed and how the more conservative one gained national dominance, we think it is important to trace
the historical context in which these shifts occurred. To chart a different course for our movements, we
need to understand the road weve traveled. In particular, we believe that there are two major features of the
second half of the twentieth century that shaped the context in which the queer and trans movement
developed: (1) the active resistance and challenge by radical movement to state violence, and subsequent
systematic backlash,7 and (2) the massive turmoil and transformation of the global economy.8 Activists and
scholars use a range of terms to describe this era in which power, wealth, and oppression were
transformed to respond to these two significant crisesincluding neoliberalism, the New World
Order, empire, globalization, free market democracy, or late capitalism. Each term describes a
different aspect or take on. Resisting the Traps, Ending Trans Imprisonment Even in the context of
growing imprisonment rates and deteriorating safety nets, the past decade has brought with it an upsurge
in organizing and activism to challenge the imprisonment and policing of transgender and gender-non-
conforming communities.32 Through high-profile lawsuits, human rights and media documentation,
conferences and trainings, grassroots organizing, and coalitional efforts, more individuals and organizations
are aware of the dynamics of trans imprisonment than ever. This work has both fallen prey to the tricky
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traps of the New World Order that we described above and also generated courageous new ways of
doing the work of transformation and resistance that are in line with the radical values that we also
trace. What was once either completely erased or significantly marginalized on the agendas of both the
LGBT and anti-prison/prisoner rights movements is now gaining more and more visibility and activity.
We think of this as a tremendous opportunity to choose which legacies and practices we want for this
work moving forward. This is not about playing the blame game and pointing fingers at which work is
radical and which is oppressive, but rather about building on all of our collective successes, losses,
and contradictions to do work that will transform society (and all of us) as we know it. Below are a few
helpful lessons that have been guided by the values above and generated at the powerful intersections of
prison abolition and gender justice:33 1. We refuse to create deserving vs. undeserving victims.34 Although
we understand that transgender and gender-non-conforming people in prisons, jails, and detention centers
experience egregious and often specific forms of violenceincluding sexual assault, rape, medical neglect and
discrimination, and humiliation based on transphobic normswe recognize that all people impacted by the
prison industrial complex are facing severe violence. Instead of saying that transgender people are the most
oppressed in prisons, we can talk about the different forms of violence that people impacted by the prison
industrial complex face, and how those./ PC
We dont want gay cops, politicians and CEOs the politics of assimilation is a device
used to withdraw from the struggle for liberation
If history proves anything, it is that capitalism has a treacherous recuperative tendency to pacify
radical social movements. It works rather simply, actually. A group gains privilege and power within a
movement, and shortly thereafter sell their comrades out. Within a couple years of stonewall, affluent-
gay-white-males had thoroughly marginalized everyone that had made their movement possible and
abandoned their revolution with them. It was once that to be queer was to be in direct conflict with the
forces of control and domination. Now, we are faced with a condition of utter stagnation and sterility. As
always, Capital recuperated brick-throwing street queens into suited politicians and activists. There are
logcabin-Republicans and stonewall refers to gay Democrats. There are gay energy drinks and a queer
television station that wages war on the minds, bodies and esteem of impressionable youth. The LGBT
political establishment has become a force of assimilation, gentrification, capital and state-power. Gay
identity has become both a marketable commodity and a device of withdrawal from struggle against
domination. Now they dont critique marriage, military or the state. Rather we have campaigns for queer
assimilation into each. Their politics is advocacy for such grievous institutions, rather than the
annihilation of them all. Gays can kill poor people around the world as well as straight people! Gays
can hold the reigns of the state and capital as well straight people! We are just like you.
Assimilationists want nothing less than to construct the homosexual as normal - white, monogamous,
wealthy, 2.5 children, SUVs with a white picket fence. This construction, of course, reproduces the
stability of heterosexuality, whiteness, patriarchy, the gender binary, and capitalism itself. If we
genuinely want to make ruins of this totality, we need to make a break. We dont need inclusion into
marriage, the military and the state. We need to end them. No more gay politicians, CEOs and cops. We
need to swiftly and immediately articulate a wide gulf between the politics of assimilation and the
struggle for liberation.
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LinkEmpire
Slavery is the precondition for the intelligibility of empire and its discontents (war) and
sovereignty. Blacks must be disbarred from the conceptual apparatus of the political
in order for debates about sovereignty legality, military oversees operations, the
White House to occur.
Sexton 06 [Race Nation and Empire p. 251-2]
We can note further that the institution of transatlantic racial slavery whos political and economic
relations constitute, present tense, the social fabric of Western modernity in general, of the Americas in
particular, and of the United States most acutely cannot be explained (away) by the acquisition of fixed
capital, the minimization of variable capital, or the maximization of profits, much less by the dictates of gunboat
diplomacy, the expansion of strategic overseas military installations, or the idiosyncrasies of the White
House. It may seem so at times, but only insofar as contemporary observers, or our historical
counterparts, fundamentally misrecognize the nature of racial slavery: as a brutal regime of labor
exploitation; as the atrocious adjunct to land conquest and the extermination, containment, and/or forced
assimilation of indigenous peoples; or as an endeavor functional to, rather than in excess of and at times at
odds with, the advent and maturation of Eurocentric capitalism. Of course, all of these procedures have been
important to the history of racial slavery (and vice versa), but none is essential to its origins, its
development 252 Radical History Review and, above all, its pernicious afterlife.1 Rather, enslavement the
inaugural enterprise for the age of Europe, the precondition for the American century and its coveted sequel
is enabled by and dependent on the most basic of operations: symbolic and material immobilization, the
absolute divestment of sovereignty at the site of the black body: its freedom of movement, its
conditions of labor, its physical and emotional sustenance, its social and sexual reproduction, its
political and cultural representation. Beyond its economic utility, this rendering of the black as the object
of dispossession par excellence object of accumulation, prototypical commodity, captive flesh
structures indelibly the historical proliferation of modern conceptions of sovereignty that now dominate
political and legal discourse globally and provide the crucial frames of intelligibility for both imperialism
and anti-imperialism, empire and its discontents. With blacks barred by definition from the very notion of
the sovereign (whatever their nominal legal status, wherever their tentative place of residence), those not
marked by the material and symbolic stigma of slavery have the exclusive and positive capacity to
debate about sovereignty: to trivialize its importance and rationalize its violation or to struggle in its defense,
to name and lament its loss, and wage war for its recovery.
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LinkMilitary
The military and prison industrial complex impact gender and sexual minorities
through the criminalization of those who are deemed as unfamiliar
Manning 14 (Chelsea, United States Army intelligence analyst, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and
the Prison Industrial Complex On the Intersection of the Military and the Prison Industrial Complex, AK Press)
My homeor, at least my place of residence for the time beingis the United States Disciplinary Barracks,
Americas crown jewel military prison. Being both a military institution and a prison, it lies in a unique, though
not necessarily uncommon, intersection of two of the worlds largest institutional ecosystems. These systems
are commonly referred to by academics and advocates as industrial complexes, and are namely the military-
industrial complex and prison-industrial complex. I am also a transwoman1 with an adjudged sentence of thirty-
five years.2 My status as a trans woman places me in the unique position in which the extraordinary
administration, regulation, surveillance, and policing of gender norms, expectations, vices, and virtues
clash with my most fundamental understanding of my identity and how I intend to express myself as a
female. For instance, although I am now being allowed to wear female undergarments, use cosmetics, and
take hormones, I am not allowed to grow my hair beyond the two inches authorized by the military. Here l am
going to discuss my specific situation, but l also intend to offer some broad definitions of the military- and
prison-industrial complexes and discuss the effects these systems have on our societyboth separately and
combinedand, consider some ideas and methods that can be used to regulate the expansion of, or at least
minimize the scale and effect of the military- and prison-industrial complexes. Without issue, I believe we can
agree on a broad definition of industry as the labor or production for the purpose or creation of something of
value. I believe we can also define a complex as the whole or sum of complicated or interrelated parts. From
here, I shall begin to generalize, and define an industrial complex as the sum of complicated and interrelated
parts for the production of something assumed to be of value. There can be more specific forms of these
industrial complexes depending on their circumstances and contexts. For instance, the military-industrial
complex can be described as an informal alliance of the military, defense contractors, and related
government departments and agencies, including the intelligence services and surveillance apparatus.
At the federal level in the United States, this consists of several legal and organizational frameworks and
processes that can determine how individuals and groups in societies get labeled as enemies or terrorists.3
This is also how certain behaviors and actions can become associated with terrorism (legally defined as
dangerous actions intended to intimidate or coerce a population and influence or affect a government),4 and
determined as threats to national security.5 In contrast and collaboration, the prison-industrial complex is
also a formal and informal alliance, here consisting of correctional and law enforcement departments
and systems. In the United States, these include the local, state, and federal police and investigative services;
the state and federal criminal and civil courts; and the county jail, state and federal prison systems. These
processes determine how individuals and groups in society are labeled as criminal, how certain behaviors and
actions in society become associated with criminals and are classified as crimes liable to punishment by the
law. As you can see, the purpose and intent of the military- and prison-industrial complexes are very
similar, and do not exist independent of each other. While both systems are created and often appear
to be functioning separately, there are more and more instances where they operate in unison. This is
especially the case in our post-9/11 world, in which these frameworks and structures overlap and
operate together in many places. Such overlaps between them can now determine how individuals and
groups that society labels as criminal can now be labeled as enemies or terrorists and become
classified as threats to national security. Such intersections are now familiar and common. For example, we
could look at task forces and fusion centers for joint operations between local law enforcement and federal law
enforcement,6 intelligence and surveillance agencies; solitary confinement and communication management
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units;7 the military commissions system;8 immigration detention centers; indefinite detentions without trial;9
enhanced interrogation (torture) techniques; targeting lists and disposition matrices; and assassinations by
unmanned aerial systems (drones). The interests that promote and sustain both the military- and prison-
industrial complexes are also very similar. For the military-industrial complex, you have lobbyists for the
defense industry; politicians in Congress; the judges of federal courts; and the heads of government
departments and agencies. For the prison-industrial complex, you have the lobbyists for prison construction
and law enforcement equipment; local, state, and federal politicians; law enforcement officers and agents;
state and federal prosecutors; prison wardens and prison staff and officers. For both ecosystems, these
interests operate with structural biases and prejudices. A non-exhaustive list of these can include skin
complexion, eye color, and hair color (race); who your parents are, and the geographic location where
you were born (immigration status); what your spiritual and political beliefs are (religion, political
identity); what gender you were assigned as, or identify as (gender, gender identity); who you are
physically and emotionally attracted to (sexual orientation); what job you have, and how much your
family makes (class); and your assumed intellectual and physical capacity (mental and physical
ability). These systems are arranged in such a manner that the most vulnerable populations in society
are the ones that are most negatively affected. For instance, both systems impact youth, particularly
those that are low income and/or are of color. Many youth, even those who are first time offenders, become
caught in a cycle of release and re-offense. Vulnerable youth also get caught up in the military-industrial
complex: there is the enlistment of sailors, soldiers, airmen, and marines, and their placement into harms way.
Both systems impact women and other gender and sexual minoritiesthe imposition of strict gender
norms of femininity on women, and the praise of masculinity and the macho at the expense of
femininity, which is deemed a sign of weakness. Both systems impact immigrants through the
criminalization of those who are read as unfamiliar. The military-industrial complex also targets people
read as foreigners by labeling them as potential terrorists and threats to national security. Both systems
impact people living in poverty through the criminalization of low-income people. There is also a lack of
concern for foreign poverty by the military establishment, and the placement of the poorest U.S. citizens into
the most dangerous military positions (infantry, field artillery, etc.). These systems help perpetuate the
society many have become immune to seeing. Related, they have established a lack of public funding for
(often popular) social programs, and extract funds that should be used for health care, education, housing, and
transportation, and funnel them toward the construction and maintenance of police stations, jails, prisons, and
parole offices at home, and ships and military bases overseas. It is at the intersection of these two systems
that places trans women such as myself into the exhausting and dehumanizing position of being
determined as a potential criminal, threat to national security, andironicallybe deemed immutably
male. For example, when I was a homeless teenager in 2006, I was trying to survive in the Midwest and on the
streets of Chicago. Without structure and support, I was left to fend for myself against both systems. The
prison-industrial complex had the power to imprison me and label me as an offender for life, for crimes
as small and victimless as loitering in public areas, trespassing in private parking areas, and being suspected
of solicitation for prostitution. The reality, from my perspective, was clearthat I had nowhere not to loiter or
trespass, and that my perceived sexual orientation, living as an effeminate gay male at the time, allowed law
enforcement officials to assume that I was a prostitute. Later, in 2007, while attempting to start a career and
obtain a degree from college, the military-industrial complex tempted me with large bonuses and
financial assistance. By enlisting for a four-year term as an intelligence analyst, I would also receive
training with certification and tuition assistance, and receive more paywithout paying for taxesfor
deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan. Yet, despite my certain sexual orientation and uncertain gender
identity, I placed myself into a structure of strict sexual and gender norms and expectations,
compounded by the Dont Ask, Dont Tell law still in effect.10 In the 20092010 timeframe, when I
eventually did deploy to Iraq, I saw firsthand how the military places people like me and my fellow soldiers into
some of the most burdensome positions in the intelligence community, with most of us making less than a
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fourth or a fifth of the pay earned by civilian counterparts while enduring long work days with no time off. From
the start of 2010 to our current moment (2015), l have continued to have my gender enforced and regulated (to
varying degrees) as being forever and immutably male underneath the somewhat mild and cosmetic
relaxations of the male standards imposed on military prisoners. And, this has primarily been the result of two
years of public pressure and litigation11 to compel the military and the Secretary of Defense to provide for
accommodations as recommended by medical and mental health professionals and the World Professional
Association for Transgender Health standards of care.12 Thus far successes have been slow and, ultimately,
unnecessary. How do we begin to roll back the widespread effects of these two (continually expanding)
industrial complexes? One thing we can do is identify what the institutions are and the interested
parties involved behind them (Who? What?). We can identify the scope and range of the institutions
driving the industrial complexes (Where?). We can identify what the general objectives of the parties
identified are, and what specific objectives each component to them has to meet the general objective
(Why?). Through educating each other and ourselves we can fill in the gaps in our understanding of
the world around us. We can inventory all the things that we know from our experience, and find out what we
dont know or understand. But, this is only the first step. From here, we can use our improved and continually
improving understanding of how the institution works to identify the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of them.
These are going to be dependent upon the context in which the specific institution operates. For instance, a
private corporation is going to have different vulnerabilities than a public department or agency does. These
are for us to figure out in our local circumstances. We must also communicate with each other, sharing
knowledge, experience, ideas, and criticisms with each other. Through this kind of communication,
which institutions naturally and reflexively attempt to stifle, we can help to regulate the expansion of
and to minimize the scale and effect of the military and prison industrial complexes in our lives.
Ultimately, it may be that the quality (and sometimes quantity) of the lives of our more vulnerable siblings in
society (and potentially even ourselves at times) is dependent upon such insights and observation. Going back
to my homeless situation in 2006, I certainly needed to make these not-at-all intuitive leaps toward
understating the military and prison industrial complex in order to survive. Thus, as it stands today in 2015, we
can be successful.
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LinkSeparation of the Prison
The affirmative positions the prison as separate and removed from the world instead of
positioning the prison as the constitutive element that undergirds civil society. The
impact is the cleansing of blackness.
WHITE SPACE [C]rime porn often presents a view of prisons and urban ghettoes as alternate
universes where the social order is drastically different, and the links between social structures and
the production of these environments is conveniently ignored. In particular, although they are public
institutions, prisons are removed from everyday US experience.12 The spatial politics of safety organizes
the urban landscape. Bodies that arouse feelings of fear, disgust, rage, guilt, or even discomfort must be made
disposable and targeted for removal in order to secure a sense of safety for whites. In other words, the space
that white people occupy must be cleansed. The visibility of poor Black bodies (as well as certain non-
Black POC, trans people, homeless people, differently-abled people, and so forth) induces anxiety, so
these bodies must be contained, controlled, and removed. Prisons and urban ghettoes prevent Black
and brown bodies from contaminating white space. Historically, appeals to the safety of women have
sanctioned the expansion of the police and prison regimes while conjuring the racist image of the Black male
rapist. With the rise of the Womens Liberation Movement in the 1970s came an increase in public awareness
about sexual violence. Self-defense manuals and classes, as well as Take Back the Night marches and rallies,
rapidly spread across the country. The 1970s and 1980s saw a surge in public campaigns targeted at women
in urban areas warning of the dangers of appearing in public spaces alone. The New York City rape squad
declared that [s]ingle women should avoid being alone in any part of the city, at any time.13 In The Rational
Womans Guide to Self-Defense (1975), women were told, a little paranoia is really good for every woman.14
At the same time that the State was asserting itself as the protector of (white) women, the US saw the
massive expansion of prisons and the criminalization of Blackness. It could be argued that the State
and the media opportunistically seized on the energy of the feminist movement and appropriated
feminist rhetoric to establish the racialized Penal State while simultaneously controlling the movement
of women (by promoting the idea that public space was inherently threatening to women). People of this
perspective might hold that the media frenzy about the safety of women was a backlash to the gains made by
the feminist movement that sought to discipline women and promote the idea that, as Georgina Hickey wrote,
individual women were ultimately responsible for what happened to them in public space.15 However, in In
an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement Against Sexual Violence, Kristin
Bumiller argues that the feminist movement was actually a partner in the unforeseen growth of a criminalized
society: by insisting on aggressive sex crime prosecution and activism, feminists assisted in the creation of a
tough-on-crime model of policing and punishment.16 Regardless of what perspective we agree with, the
alignment of racialized incarceration and the proliferation of campaigns warning women about the dangers of
the lurking rapist was not a coincidence. If the safety of women was a genuine concern, the campaigns would
not have been focused on anonymous rapes in public spaces, since statistically it is more common for a
woman to be raped by someone she knows. Instead, womens safety provided a convenient pretext for
the escalation of the Penal State, which was needed to regulate and dispose of certain surplus
populations (mostly poor Blacks) before they became a threat to the US social order. For Wacquant,
this new regime of racialized social control became necessary after the crisis of the urban ghetto
(provoked by the massive loss of jobs and resources attending deindustrialization) and the looming
threat of Black radical movements.17 The torrent of uprisings that took place in Black ghettoes between
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1963-1968, particularly following the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968, were followed by a wave of prison
upheavals (including Attica, Solidad, San Quentin, and facilities across Michigan, Tennessee, Oklahoma,
Illinois, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania). Of course, these upheavals were easier to contain and shield from
public view because they were cloaked and muffled by the walls of the penitentiary. The engineering and
management of urban space also demarcates the limits of our political imagination by determining which
narratives and experiences are even thinkable. The media construction of urban ghettoes and prisons as
alternate universes marks them as zones of unintelligibility, faraway places that are removed from
the everyday white experience. Native American reservations are another example of a void zone
that white people can only access through the fantasy of media representations. What happens in these
zones of abjection and vulnerability does not typically register in the white imaginary. In the instance that an
injustice does register, it will have to be translated into more comprehensible terms. When I think of the
public responses to Oscar Grant and Trayvon Martin, it seems significant that these murders took
place in spaces that the white imaginary has access to, which allows white people to narrativize the
incidents in terms that are familiar to them. Trayvon was gunned down while visiting family in a gated
neighborhood; Oscar was murdered by a police officer in an Oakland commuter rail station. These spaces are
not alternate universes or void-zones that lie outside white experience and comprehension. To what extent is
the attention these cases have received attributable to the encroachment of violence on spaces that white
people occupy? What about cases of racialized violence that occur outside white comfort zones? When
describing the spatialization of settler colonies, Frantz Fanon writes about a zone of non-being, an
extraordinary sterile and arid region, where Black is not a man.18 In the regions where Black is not man,
there is no story to be told. Or rather, there are no subjects seen as worthy of having a story of their
own. TRANSLATION When an instance of racist violence takes place on white turf, as in the cases of
Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant, there is still the problem of translation. I contend that the politics of
innocence renders such violence comprehensible only if one is capable of seeing themselves in that
position. This framework often requires that a white narrative (posed as the neutral, universal
perspective) be grafted onto the incidents that conflict with this narrative. I was baffled when a call for a
protest march for Trayvon Martin made on the Occupy Baltimore website said, The case of Trayvon Martin
is symbolic of the war on youth in general and the devaluing of young people everywhere. I doubt George
Zimmerman was thinking, I gotta shoot that boy because hes young! No mention of race or anti-Blackness
could be found in the statement; race had been translated to youth, a condition that white people can
imaginatively access. At the march, speakers declared that the case of Trayvon Martin is not a race issue
its a 99% issue! As Saidiya Hartman has asserted in a conversation with Frank Wilderson, the other must
be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced.19 In late 2011, riots exploded across
London and the UK after Mark Duggan, a Black man, was murdered by the police. Many leftist and liberals
were unable to grapple with the unruly expression of rage among largely poor and unemployed people of color,
and refused to support the passionate outburst they saw as disorderly and delinquent. Even leftists fell into
the trap of framing the State and property owners (including small business owners) as victims while
criticizing rioters for being politically incoherent and opportunistic. Slavoj iek, for instance, responded
by dismissing the riots as a meaningless outburst in an article cynically titled Shoplifters of the World Unite.
Well-meaning leftists who felt obligated to affirm the riots often did so by imposing a narrative of political
consciousness and coherence onto the amorphous eruption, sometimes recasting the participants as the
proletariat (an unemployed person is just a worker without a job, I was once told) or dissatisfied consumers
whose acts of theft and looting shed light on capitalist ideology.20 These leftists were quick to purge and re-
articulate the anti-social and delinquent elements of the riots rather than integrate them into their analysis,
insisting on figuring the rioter-subject as a sovereign deliberate consciousness, to borrow a phrase from
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.21 Following the 1992 LA riots,22 leftist commentators often opted to define the
event as a rebellion rather than a riot as a way to highlight the political nature of peoples actions. This attempt
to reframe the public discourse is borne of good intentions (the desire to combat the conservative
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medias portrayal of the riots as pure criminality), but it also reflects the an impulse to contain,
consolidate, appropriate, and accommodate events that do not fit political models grounded in white,
Euro-American traditions. When the mainstream media portrays social disruptions as apolitical,
criminal, and devoid of meaning, leftists often respond by describing them as politically reasoned.
Here, the confluence of political and anti-social tendencies in a riot/rebellion are neither recognized nor
embraced. Certainly some who participated in the London riots were armed with sharp analyses of structural
violence and explicitly political messages the rioters were obviously not politically or demographically
homogenous. However, sympathetic radicals tend to privilege the voices of those who are educated and
politically astute, rather than listening to those who know viscerally that they are fucked and act without first
seeking moral approval. Some leftists and radicals were reluctant to affirm the purely disruptive perspectives,
like those expressed by a woman from Hackney, London who said, Were not all gathering together for a
cause, were running down Foot Locker.23 Or the excitement of two girls stopped by the BBC while drinking
looted wine. When asked what they were doing, they spoke of the giddy madness of it all, the good fun they
were having, and said that they were showing the police and the rich that we can do what we want.24
Translating riots into morally palatable terms is another manifestation of the appeal to innocence rioters,
looters, criminals, thieves, and disruptors are not proper victims and hence, not legitimate political actors.
Morally ennobled victimization has become the necessary precondition for determining which
grievances we are willing to acknowledge and authorize.
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LinkSexual Citizenship
The 1ACs politics of sexual justice becomes a form of criminal justice sexual
citizenship is predicated on a correction of the necessary killing that redistributes
policing and death onto the queer and trans people of color, now erased from view as
those worthy of protection, consigned to genocide and negligence in precarious
militarized
Haritaworn, Kuntsman, and Posocco 14 [Jin, Assistant Professor of Gender, Race and Environment
at York University in Toronto; Adi, Simon Research Fellow at the University of Manchester; and Silvia,
Lecturer, Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London, Introduction, in Queer
Necropolitics, pp. 16-9]
The prison (and also the psychiatric institution, which has not received critical attention to the same extent, including in this book) are further key sites for the vitalization of
queer subjectivities. Sarah Lambles Chapter 7 shows how, with regard to the emergence of hate crime as the new single issue in LGBT organizing, the prison is
now a key terrain for queer vitality. This is ironic, as sexually and gender non-conforming subjects,
even those with race and class privileges, were long among the prototypical deviants and, with the belated and
incomplete decriminalization and depathologization of same-sex and transgender practices and identities, have only just escaped the prison themselves. Several
conversions concur at this punitive moment: as sexual justice turns into criminal justice, the
homonormative subject nevertheless remains close to the old site of its death, which paradoxically
becomes the site of its rebirth as a respectable subject. This goes along with another spatial
reconfiguration, by the degenerate inner city into the revitalizing downtown neighbourhood, whose
first gentrifiers often include queer and trans people with race and class privileges. As the old trope of
the ghetto as dangerous (hate) crime scene converges with the new trope of the recovering inner
city, where the properly alive like to live, eat and party, a certain queer subject comes to life in the shadows of the regenerating buildings. In homo-neoliberal
accounts such as urban expert Richard Floridas (2002), gays are interpellated as creative classers whose pioneering
ventures into hitherto ungentrifiable territory must be encouraged in urban policy (see Tongson (2007) for a critique). This
globalized settler colonial fantasy has also returned to Western Europe, where the struggle of queer lovers and hateful Others is regularly
scripted through anti- Muslim racism. There, the arrival of queers, which marks an areas recovery and
discovery as a queer space, goes hand in hand with the displacement and policing of the degenerate
bodies once confined to it (Decolonize Queer 2011; Hanhardt 2008; Haritaworn 2013; Manalansan 2005; Razack 2002). This brings home
the need to think the necropolitical alongside the geopolitical, and the prison alongside the border and
the inner city, and discourses on queer space, safety and security alongside racist, neoliberal and
neo/colonial urban, immigration, military and development policies. Elijah Edelman, in Chapter 8, examines this with
regard to prostitution free zones, a spatial profiling instrument that is part of revanchist gentrification
policies in Washington, DC. There, anybody looking like a prostitute (which regularly interpellates trans feminine
people of colour) can be searched, banished and criminalized with no further grounds. Edelman shows how this
has in some contexts led to the formulation of a queer and trans politics that begins with the
experiences of sexually and gender non-conforming people who are poor, of colour, homeless,
criminalized, pathologized, or otherwise precarious, and attends to the intersecting regimes of killing,
both spectacular and banal, institutional and interpersonal, which target some much more than others
for premature death. However, any such inclusionary moves must themselves account for the ways in
which black trans feminine bodies in particular have become the raw material for an expanding
LGB(now-including-the)T non-profit sector. In fact, the new tendency in queer, trans and LGBT
organizing to include those deemed precarious often reinscribes their killability while securing a newly
professionalizing class of experts in the realm of life. As Snorton and Haritaworn (2013) suggest, it is in the moment of
their death that those most in need of survival become valuable, as experts, allies and funders become
literate and numerate in hate crime paradigms whose main function is to secure further funding. Most
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starkly, this is illustrated by the globalization of Transgender Day of Remembrance, whose travels again call for a bio-, necro- as well as geopolitical lens (see Bhanji 2013).
Thus, TDOR events from Toronto to London to Berlin enable mainly white trans people from the global north to commune by reading out the names and looking at the photos
of dead people, mainly poor, trans feminine, black and/or from the global south, who would have unlikely had much access to trans communities while alive (see Lamble
2008). This illustrates how queer and trans vitality, besides symbiotically enhancing the death-making capacities
of the market and the state, is often cannibalistic on the lives and deaths of the very people it claims to
represent. Transnational investigations such as Lambles are important, as they force us to understand queer necropolitics through various racial formations. If in
Western Europe, the drama of queer lovers and hateful others both brings home and renders palpable globalized
demonologies of Islam that allow white Europeans to come together and cohere against highly
disparate contexts of colonialism, slavery, genocide and migration, in the US white gay activists have
treated black people as their significant Other (Bacchetta and Haritaworn 2011). In this context, Morgan Bassichis and Dean Spade argue in
Chapter 9 that anti-blackness is foundational to sexual citizenship claims. Non-black queers become junior
partners to a violently anti-black state, whose prime lens for blackness is criminality. Rather than a
mere by-product of neoliberalism, Bassichis and Spade demand that we understand queer racism as a
minoritarian modulation of the structures of anti-blackness, settler colonialism and permanent war that
are at the basis of the American project itself. Yet if queer necropolitics is not reducible to
neoliberalism, it is neoliberalisms capacity to diversify racism and politically correct necessary
killing (Foucault 1981) by rewriting it into minoritarian languages such as LGBT rights and protection that
serves to usher into consent those who have traditionally been critical of the racist state. Nowhere is
this more apparent than in the area of policing. As race and class-privileged queers across the West
mobilize police to protect them from homophobic and transphobic others, for whom the prison is
already carved out as natural habitat, the forces that render sexually and gender non-conforming
people vulnerable to violence ironically disappear from view. In contrast to the visibility and publicity
politics of mainstream hate crime activism, which tend to imag/ine the innocent victim as white, gender
conforming, consumptive and respectable, those who are most vulnerable to violence and premature
death are left completely unrecognizable in the institutionalized and professionalized anti-violence
discourse (Alliance for a Safe & Diverse DC 2008; R. Gossett 2011; Lavers 2011; Young Womens Empowerment Project 2009). Thus, the kinship with
death that all queer and trans people seem to nostalgically inherit (Nunokawa 2007) is very literal for sexually and gender non-
conforming people whose race and class locations are marked as targets and topoi of cruelty, for
whom more police in the neighbourhood will regularly mean more abuse.10 As activists have long shown, low-
income gender non-conforming people of colour are especially easy targets for a criminal justice
system whose routine deployment of gender and racial violence in the street continues and intensifies
in the gender-binaried space of the prison (Mogul, Ritchie and Whitlock 2011; Sears, Clay, Fields and Martinez 2011; Stanley and Smith 2011;
Sylvia Rivera Law Project et al. 2009).
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LinkSchools=School2Prison Pipeline
Public education targets non-white and poor youth This strengthens linkages
between schools and prisons
Meiners 11 (Erica R. Meiners, professor of education and women's and gender studies at Northeastern
Illinois University, Ending the School-to-Prison Pipeline/Building Abolition Futures pg. 549-551)//KR
the U.S. has the dubious distinction of locking up more people than any other nation. With
As many other papers in this special issue have outlined,
5% of the worlds population and 25% of the total prison population, the number of people incapacitated in the U.S.
has increased since the 1970s, not because of an increase in violence or crime, but because of policies including three
strikes and you are out legislation, mandatory minimum sentencing, and the war on drugs (Alexander 2010; Davis 2003; Gilmore 2007; Mauer 1999;
Pew Center on the States, 2008). Who is harmed by this expansion of our prison nation is not arbitrary: the over two million people
locked up and warehoused in prisons and jails across the U.S. are poor, mentally ill, under- or uneducated, non-
gender conforming, non-citizens, and/or non-white. Activists, organizers, academics and those directly impacted have
popularized the term prison industrial complex (PIC) refers to the creation of prisons and detention centers as a
perceived growth economy in an era of deindustrialization, and as a set of symbiotic relationships among
correctional communities, transnational corporations, media conglomerates, guards unions and legislative and court
agendas (Davis 2003. p. 107). These economic and social changes shape prison expansion, and subsequently
naturalize prisons as inevitable. I also use the term carceral state to highlight the multiple and intersecting state
agencies and institutions that have punishing functions and effectively regulate poor communities: child and family
services, welfare/workfare agencies, public education, immigration, health and human services, and more (Roberts
1997; Wacquant 2009). While the term PIC typically refers to connections between jails, the economy and the political sphere, research demonstrates that education must be included in this definition. With the increased use of
surveillance and incarceration toolsfor example metal detectors, surveillance cameras, school uniforms, armed security guards, and on-site school police detachmentsurban schools look and feel a lot like detention centers. In addition, the growth of an
incarceration nation clearly impacts education, funneling the limited pool of tax dollars from social service programs to the carceral state. Between 1984 and 2000, across all states and the District of Columbia, state spending on prisons was six times the
The term school-to-

increase of spending on higher education (Justice Policy Institute 2002). As budgets for corrections expand and funding for higher education contracts, the states visions about the future of select youth are clear.
prison pipeline aims to highlight a complex network of relations that naturalize the movement of youth of color
from our schools and communities into under- or unemployment and permanent detention. This is not a novel
phenomenon. Public education in the United States has historically aggressively framed particular populations as
superfluous to our democracy yet imperative for low wage work, or jobs available after full white employment. With
First Nations residential schools, apartheid segregation, and chronically inequitable access to state resources, public
education has, and continues, to funnel targeted non-white and poor youth towards non-living wage work,
participation in the street or the permanent war economy and prison. While these educational outcomes are not
new, the expansion of our prison nation in the U.S. over the last three decades has strengthened policy, practice and
ideological linkages between schools and prisons. White supremacy has always been central to our nations public
education system and to our carceral state. As is the case with many pressing justice issueshealthcare, housing, food resisting on the carceral state requires that organizers and scholars practice the
both/and: social service and social change. Services are desperately needed for young people who are locked up, and yet equally important are structural and paradigmatic shifts that alter the contexts that produce such high levels of incarceration in the U.S. I frame
this tension between the need to provide services and the need to make structural reforms as a reform/abolition tension. Or, short-term reforms are needed to address the real conditions and real needs of actual people caught up in the system, but this is not enough.
Many, as Angela Davis writes, are raising the question of abolition (Are prisons obsolete? 2003). Critical Resistance, a national anti-prison organization, defines prison abolition as the creation of genuinely safe, healthy communities that respond to harm without relying
Prison abolition doesnt mean that there will be no violence. Rather, it acknowledges that
on prisons and punishment (Critical Resistance, n.d.).
prisons are not a just, efficient or moral solution to the problems that shape violence in our communities. As we have
reduced or eliminated social assistance programs, and criminalized the options that poor people possess to cope with
untenable situations, the majority of those in prisons and jails are poor people. In Illinois in 2002, 90% of women caught up in the system were locked up for non-
violent crimes, largely related to poverty and addiction (Clark and Kane-Willis 2006, p. 4). As California (CA) State Senator Gloria Romero stated (CA is the state with the worlds two largest prisons for women) California cant build [more prisons as] its way out of this
While abolition is not a utopian dream but a necessity, simultaneously reform work is required
problem (Romero, as cited by Braz 2006, p. 87).
because there are real bodies in need of immediate resources. For example, in schools students are under or over
diagnosed with a behavior disorder, there are grotesque disproportionalities in who gets suspended and expelled,
and police presence in select urban schools has been naturalized. As longtime feminist anti-prison activist and scholar
Karlene Faith writes, this requires those invested in change to negotiate reform and structural change work: Every reform raises
the question of whether, in Gramscis terms, it is a revolutionary reform, one that has liberatory potential to challenge the status quo, or a reform reform, which may ease the problem temporarily or superficially, but reinforces the status quo by validating the system
though the process of improving it. (Faith 2002, p. 165) Faith reminds us of the necessity of doing the both/and where everyday local work may involve engaging reforms, but it is also useful to place, understand and connect these reforms to a larger movement. Or, if
we are keeping our eyes on the prize, what is the prize? Liberation and justice for all, including the young people in juvenile detention centers, or cleaner prisons that have better due process? Better school suspension and expulsion policies that just remove the right
Building for abolition is neither clean nor easy. It is by definition

bad kids from schools, or communities and school systems that do not prioritize identifying and punishing bad kids?
transformative and multifaceted work as scholar and anti-violence worker Beth Richie identifies: The work for prison
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abolition is at once a policy issue, a community accountability issue, a family issue, and an issue that must be
understood to be deeply personal. It is about health, neighborhood, the environment, U.S. position in global markets,
youth empowerment, spirituality, the upcoming election, interpersonal relationships, identity politics, and many
more things. (Richie 2008, p. 24). As Richie outlines, and as this article documents, to build stronger communities we
must transform our conceptions of what makes us secure, and what makes our lives and communities just. This has
specific implications for educators .
Gendered and racialized practices that start as early as pre-school lead to higher rates
of incarceration of minorities
Over the last decade, there has been a growth in analysis and scholarship surrounding the school-to-
prison pipeline (Duncan 2000; Browne 2003; Meiners 2007; Simmons 2009; Winn 2010). Yet, as previously notedand this merits re-
emphasizingthe targeted under or un-education of particular populations is nothing new, and the
U.S. has always tracked poor, non-white, non-able bodied, non-citizens and/or queers toward under or
un-education, non-living wage work, participation in a permanent war economy and/or permanent
detention. The School to Prison Pipeline: Structuring Legal Reform (Hewitt et al. 2010) identifies some
of the key components: special education, school discipline, criminalization of students, monstrous
resource disparities and unequal access to educational opportunities in alternative schools. And these
are interlocking: students with select soft disability categories are targeted for suspension and
expulsions, and these same students are often pushed into alternative schools (because they have Queer encompasses not just gay,
lesbian, bisexual and transgendered, but all non-heteronormative and non-gender conforming identifications. been suspended or expelled), or have been caught up in schools that are hyper policed. Research has consistently documented how
school suspension and expulsion and classification as special education are moderate to strong predictors of under education and future incarceration (Advancement Project 2010; Duncan 2000; Losen and Orfield 2002; Skiba et al. 2002).
School suspension rates for African American male students are consistently significantly higher than
their white and female counterparts, and scholarship documents the overrepresentation of youth of
color in our nations juvenile justice systems and in school-based disciplinary actions, as early as pre-
school (Ayers et al. 2001; Gilliam 2005; Gregory et al. 2010; Polakow 2000; Skiba and Knesting 2002);
U.S. Department of Education). These gendered and racialized practices of removing students from
an educational setting, the most dramatic educational sanction available, starts in pre-schools, as a
2005 survey of 40 states pre-kindergarten programs indicates (Gilliam 2005, p. 3). In addition to radical disproportionality in school suspension and expulsions,
school-to-prison pipeline work highlights how students of color are overrepresented in soft disability categories (Harry and Klingner 2006; Losen and Orfield 2002; McNally 2003; Smith & Erevelles 2004), warranting two formal investigations
(1982 & 2002) by the National Academy of Sciences. In Why Are There So Many Minority Students in Special Education? (2005), Harry and Klingner document how soft categoriesthat is, categories reliant on assessment practices that are
much more subjectiveare differentially interpreted across states, and researchers have found that these categories are clearly not applied uniformly within schools and districts. The use of each of these categories also shifts across time, a
further indication of a sign of the instability and ambiguity of the categories themselves (Harry and Klingner 2006, p. 4). Not unlike the subjectivity of school-based disciplinary actions, where disrespect or acting out move children into the
. Classification as special education

category of a disciplinary problem, a number of subjective factors are responsible for placing largely male youth of color in these soft disability categories
masks segregation, and pathologizing students of color as disabled allows their continued
segregation under a seemingly natural and justifiable label (Reid and Knight 2006, p. 19). An entire
special issue of Educational Researcher (2006) examined racial (and gendered) disproportionality in
special education and aimed to invite readers to think about how these flexible practices of
classification educationally disqualify certain communities. Building from critical work on how
disability places students on tracks toward under-education, related work examines schools as
punishing sites within larger economic and political structures (Anyon 1980; Saltman and Gabbard 2003; Robbins 2008). Scholarship also analyzes the
linkages between capitalism, and more currently, neoliberal policies and education, creating punishing educational futures (Anyon 2005; Apple 2010; Kumashiro 2008; Lipman 2004). Numerous smaller ethnographic studies document the
gendered and racialized production of disposable youth (Ferguson 2000; Lo p ez 2003; Winn 2010) and this research is inextricably linked to work that outlines the foundational inequities of public education in the U.S. by many including James
Anderson (1988), Jeannie Oakes (1985) and William Watkins (2001). Of course, my summary is woefully ahistoric. Significant scholarshipfrom Carter G. Woodson to bell hookscontinues to identify the complex roles of white supremacy in
Investigations in overlapping fields

education, highlighting the old story of tracking and unequal access to educational opportunity for African American, First Nations, and Latino students.
also identifies that incarceration and education are directly linked. Decreases in education correlate
with higher rates of incarceration, most dramatically for African American males (Petit and Western
2004). Research suggests that just one more year of high school would significantly reduce
incarceration (and crime) rates, and raising the male high school graduation rate by one percent would
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result in the nation saving, by one economists analysis, $1.4 billion (Lochner and Moretti 2004).
Numerous studies demonstrate that education, in particular higher education while locked up, reduces
recidivism (Fine et al. 2001; Steurer et al. 2001; Taylor 1992; U.S. Department of Education 1995), yet
Pell Grants were removed in 1994 for people incarcerated. The Illinois Consortium on Drug Policies has calculated that, in 2002, if post-secondary programs were
offered to incarcerated men and women, then Illinois could have saved between $11.8 and $47.3 million from the reduced recidivism rates (Kane- Willis et al. 2006, p. 4). Networks and organization have emerged to focus research and
resources around the school-to-prison pipeline, to convene high-profile meetings and to translate research into more accessible materials for mainstream audiences: Advancement Project (http://www.advancementproject.org
http://www.stopschoolstojails.org/); American Civil Liberties Union (http://www.aclu.org/racial-justice/schoolprison-pipeline); Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice (http://
www.charleshamiltonhouston.org/Projects/Project.aspx?id=100005); Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles (http://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/); Dignity in Schools (http://www.dignityinschools.org/); and Southern Poverty Law Center
(http://www.splcenter.org/what-we-do/children-at-risk). Advocacy organizations that work on juvenile and educational justice issues in many states have developed initiatives, for example the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisianas Schools First!
Project (http://jjpl.org/new/?page_id=19) centering the school-to- prison pipeline as an organizational focus. Grassroots and youth-centered community groups across the U.S. have placed interrupting the schoolhouse-to-jailhouse track on their
advocacy agenda. Youth-led projects including Chicagos Blocks Together, teacher-facilitated journals such as Rethinking Schools and smaller conferences such as Educational for Liberation have all provided leadership, analysis and movement
building around challenging discriminatory educational policies at the local and state level that track youth to prisons. Notably, the schools not jails movement was initially a staunchly youth- led movement, with a fierce critique of the status
quo of schoolingincluding non-relevant curriculum and a sharp analysis of the unequal forms of schooling available to urban youthyet some of this analysis gets lost in more mainstream scholarship on the relationships between education
and incarceration that simply posits schooling as the antidote to carceral expansion, without linking the two structures (Acey 2000).
Children in schools are treated like adult prisoners- this ensures their place in prisons
Research and organizing within the framework of the school-to-prison pipeline struggles with the tensions involved in
working with and challenging a portion of a system and a structure that is flawed; this becomes particularly troubling
as this labor and focus is reliant on prioritizing a category, youth, that is also constructed and flexible. Scholarship
and advocacy in this field often starts with a shared understanding that youth are different than adults. This a priori
case for a kind of exceptionalism creates problems for both wider justice movements, and for work with youth as
well. These categorieschildhood, youth, juvenile, adultare anything but natural or static. Debates about where to draw the chronological (and
culpable) line repeatedly surface in mainstream media; less visible yet equally important is the evidence used to rationalize any boundary by the media, child savers, psychological experts and other parties across the political spectrum. For example, emerging
adulthood, the new development category that elongates adolescence, surfaced in 2010 in mainstream media at the same time the Supreme Court debated the constitutionality of sentencing juveniles to life without parole (LWOP) for non-murder crimes (the death
penalty for juveniles was abolished in the U.S. in 2005). Science and experience were used to scaffold both constructions. Emerging adulthood, psychologists identify, is demarcated by delay of common adult experiences employment, leaving the parental home,
marriage, childbirthand other seemingly naturalized life-stage markers. In writing the Courts 6-3 decision to render LWOP unconstitutional for those who commit crimes under age 18, the New York Times cites Justice Stephenss decision: Knowledge accumulates,
he wrote. We learn, sometimes, from our mistakes (as cited in Liptak 2010). Neurological research was also circulated in material that supported efforts to render the death penalty unconstitutional for juveniles by the American Bar Association (2004). Psychology,
experience and neurology legitimate delay, and are organized as evidence that juveniles need protection and should not receive the death penalty, or that 26-year-olds (emerging adults) should be able to continue to access their parents health insurance and
remain dependent on state or parental management and intervention. In particular, for youth, experience becomes a double bind. Remaining innocent (the defining category of childhood) requires the negation of experience (sexual, life and other), and therefore
knowledge becomes tricky for children. As McDermott et al. (2006) aptly point out in their research on the construction and circulation of learning disability within educational spaces, the child can be the unit of concern, but not the unit of analysis (2006, p. 12).
When the child becomes the unit of analysis the contextual factors that shape and produce this artifact, the child, and her condition as disabled, are erased. Exceptionality and youth are also circulated in other arenas. Innocence and safety (for select children only)
are repeatedly deployed to expand policing and surveillance. How many times at a meeting having to do with education or criminal justice is the good of the children, or childrens futures, raised? While protection of innocence (of course only available to the few) is
. Yet, these political and economic futures are always

used to expand the carceral state, anxieties surrounding the laboring futures for our children are also often a key plank of prison expansion
predicated on a particular racialized, heteronormative, gendered logic. Clearly, those interested in prison construction
are imagining futures where their sons are on the right side of the prison bars, and not futures where their
daughters work in an all male prison. Childhood is at the heart of prison expansion as false promises of safety and
employment, particularly for our most innocent ( children) are repeatedly used to expand a prison nation .
Interestingly, where I have observed and felt this tension around youth, criminality and exceptionalism most directly
in the last year has been in relation to work in immigration justice organizingspecifically surrounding the
Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act (DREAM Act). Living in a community and working at a
university with a large number of undocumented people, and as a legal resident alien myself, has educated me about
the U.S. border, and I have participated in legalization movements since I arrived in the U.S. on a tourist visa. First introduced in
2001, the DREAM Act was created to offer undocumented youth potential pathways for legalization in the absence of any comprehensive. For a more extensive discussion on the local economics of prison expansion, see Gilmore (2007). Gilmore documents how a small
California town, Corcoran, lobbied for a prison, and providing local economic futures for young people was offered as the rationale for a prison (p. 171172). Immigration reform proposal. As this article goes to press, the 2010 DREAM Act (there have been many
. While I support the

iterations over the last 10 years) permits undocumented youth who finish two years of community service or two years in the military and are of good moral character access to potential pathways for legalization
advocates for the DREAM Act, I also persistently raise questions. The DREAM Act trades on tropes of innocence and
merit, directly linked to student identity. These strategies reinforce the idea that there are real criminals and
undeserving or guilty immigrants who should legitimately be denied access to pathways for legalization. The DREAM
Act (the 2010 version is also a de facto racial and economic draft) also separates a population that typically accrues
the most sympathystudentsand provides this limited group access to pathways for legalization thus possibly
making it difficult to pass a wider legalization initiative for other undocumented groups that are less attractive
including day laborers, domestic workers and those over 30. Justice movements struggle with exceptionality, or what
is the difference that makes a difference? Motherhood continues to be circulated in efforts to push for changes in
sentencing and conditions for women who are locked up. Narratives and images of transwomen in mens prisons who
are denied access to hormones or the right to serve their sentence in womens institutions are circulated to instigate
change. These are critical and vital issues. Exceptionality, as noted, is particularly prevalent in work related to the
school-to-prison pipeline. We love children, want to center children and youth as different from adults and our entire body of developmental literature reinforces developmental differences. Yet, there are costs to the deploying
and framing of populations as different, special. This use of difference can also limit other ways of knowing/knowledge and organizing. If juveniles are protected because of immature brain development, does this make the rest of us culpable and can only
access punishment? The challenge for those of us with extra time who are paid to think is to ask what the circulation of these identities makes visible and what is obscured. Yet, as I write this I am daily reminded of the unequal ways in which state and
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Disproportionality does not capture the reality of who is actively targeted for state
interpersonal violence is deployed in our own lives and communities.
and interpersonal violence: women, queers and those gender non-conforming, poor people, brown redblack
people, people with disabilities and/or others on the margins. Nancy Fraser addresses this challenge directly in her work, writing about when our tactics result in recognition but not
redistribution (of resources, state systems, and more) (Fraser 1997). For Fraser, justice strategies all too often agitate for recognition (a liberal multicultural model), thus inviting additive responses that are not capable of transforming systems of power, oppression and
Asking juveniles or children to be viewed as different than adults does not

privilege. In addition, recognition can often only be on a single axis (race, gender or sexuality).
transform the larger contexts that punish particular communities. This is also the reform/abolition questionin a
different outfit. Abolition visions can get translated into reformist strategies because for example, simply asking
select good gays to be recognized as equals by the state does not redistribute access to all the important resources
attached, for example, to marriage organizing can be about compromise, and the tactics deployed attempt to trigger
public feelings (outrage, sympathy, pity) that can limit and constrain work. Public and private affect (and corresponding campaigns) are often produced through the
specialness of particular populations. Organizing and research on the school-to- prison nexus, with a center on youth, is particularly challenged by the very framings that make this work and these interventions possible.
Girls account for 1 in 4 of juvenile arrests, yet the juvenile system fails to consider
their issues. Claiming to seek the best interest of the child not only focuses
exclusively on boys violence, but also drastically increases incarceration rates among
girls
Chesney-Lind 99 [Meda, Challenging Girls' Invisibility in Juvenile Court. The Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 564, 1999, pp. 185202. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1048784.
ABSTRACT: Despite the fact that girls account for one of four arrests of juveniles, discussions of
delinquency and juvenile justice generally ignore young women and their problems. A review of the nature of
female delinquency as well as the juvenile justice system's long-documented bias against girls suggests that
careful consideration of girls' issues would shed considerable light on the shortcomings of the juvenile
justice system as a whole. Specifically, the unique problems of girls, like sexual abuse, were long ignored by a system
that purported to seek "the best interests of the child." Instead, girls' survival strategies, like running away from home, were
criminalized. Contemporary congressional efforts to reform juvenile justice, focused almost exclusively on boys' violence, are
likely to produce changes that will result in the compounding of girls' problems due to contact with a system that ignores their unique situations. E VERY
year, girls account for one of four arrests of young people in America (U.S. Department of Justice 1997, 219). Despite this, young women
are almost always
forgotten when ju-venile justice issues are discussed. There are many ways in which girls' invisibility can be measured. For
example, in the most significant congressional overhaul of the juve-nile justice system in the last three
decades, no one is talking about girls. A quick review of the initiatives being considered by Congress finds an
almost exclusive focus on "violent" juvenile offenders (meaning boys) and the need to "get tough" on
youth violence (Schiraldi and Soler 1998). A closer reading though, suggests a less public congressional agenda-- one that would again permit the
juvenile justice system to discriminate against girls and jail them for running away from home-no matter how abusive. It turns out that the invisibility of girls in the juvenile
justice system has also often facilitated practices that could in no way be jus-tified as in the best interest of girls. This article will briefly address some of the critical issues
no
confronted by those attempting to understand both female delinquency and crea-tive, girl-centered responses to the problems of young women. It will also suggest that
discussion of the future of juvenile justice is complete without consideration of girls and their unique
problems. GIRLS' TROUBLES AND GIRLS' CRIME: ARE GIRLS GETTING MEANER? Shortly after a study by the Ameri-can Association for University Women
(1992) documented the dra-matic and widespread drop in the self-esteem of girls during early ado-lescence, a curious thing happened in the media. There was a
dramatic surge of journalistic interest in girls, often girls of color, engaged in non-traditional, masculine
behavior-notably, joining gangs, carrying guns, and fighting with other girls. This fascination with a
presumably new, violent female offender is itself not really new, however. In the 1970s, a notion
emerged that the women's movement had caused a surge in women's serious crimes, but this
discussion focused largely on an imagined increase in crimes of adult women, usually white women
(Chesney-Lind 1997). The current discussion has settled on girls' commission of violent crimes, often in youth gangs. Indeed, there has been a veritable siege of these news
stories with essentially the same theme-today girls are more violent, they are in gangs, and their behavior does not fit the traditional stereotype of girls' delinquency. On 2
August 1993, for example, in a feature spread on teen violence, Newsweek had a box entitled "Girls Will Be Girls" that noted that "some girls now carry guns. Others hide
razor blades in their mouths" (Leslie et al. 1993, 44). Explaining this trend, the article notes, "The plague of teen violence is an equal-opportunity scourge. Crime by girls is on
the rise, or so various jurisdictions report" (Leslie et al. 1993, 44). A review of girls' arrests for vio-lent crime for the last decade
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(1987-96) initially seems to provide support for the notion that girls have become more violent. Arrests
of girls for all Crime Index' violent offenses were up 118.1 percent (U.S. Department of Justice 1997,
219), and arrests of girls for "other assaults" were up 142.6 percent. But a closer look at these and other data on girls' violent
behavior presents a more complex picture. First, and most important, boys' arrests for these offenses have been climbing sharply as well; as a result, girls' share of serious
crimes of vio-lence has changed only slightly dur-ing the time period. In 1987,
arrests of girls accounted for 11 percent of all arrests of
youths for serious crimes of violence; in 1996, the comparable fig-ure was 15 percent (U.S. Department
of Justice 1997, 219). Second, serious crimes of violence still constitute only a small proportion of all
girls' delinquency, and that figure has remained essentially unchanged. Only 2.0 percent of girls'
arrests in 1987 were for serious crimes of vio-lence. By 1996, this figure had climbed to 2.9 percent
(13,995 arrests out of a total of 481,164 arrests) (compared to 5.6 percent of boys' arrests). But what
about those increases, particularly in "other assaults"? Relabeling as violent offenses behav-iors that were once categorized as status
offenses (noncriminal offenses like running away from home and "person in need of supervision") can-not be ruled out in explanations of arrest rate shifts, nor can changes in
police practices with reference to domestic violence. A review of the more than 2000 cases of girls referred to Maryland's juvenile justice system for "person-to-person"
offenses revealed that virtually all of these offenses (97.9 percent) involved "assault." A further examination of these records revealed that about half were "family centered"
and involved such activities as "a girl hitting her mother and her mother subsequently pressing charges" (Mayer 1994). Other mechanisms for relabeling status offenses as
criminal offenses include police officers' advising par-ents to block the doorways when their children threaten to run away and then charging the youths with assault when they
shove their way past their parents (Shelden 1995). Such relabeling, which is also called bootstrapping, has been particularly pronounced in the official delin-quency of African
American girls (Robinson 1990; Bartollas 1993), and this practice also facilitates the incarceration of girls in detention facilities and training schools-something that would not
be possible if the girls were arrested for non-criminal status offenses. When exploring the dramatic increases in the arrests of girls for "other assaults" (which increased by
142.6 percent in the last decade), it is also likely that enforcement prac-tices have dramatically narrowed the gender gap. Minor
or "other" assaults can range from schoolyard tussles to relatively serious but not life-threatening assaults (Steffens-meier and Steffensmeier 1980). Steffensmeier and
Steffensmeier first noted an increasing tendency to arrest girls for these offenses in the 1970s and commented that "evidence suggests that female arrests for 'other assaults'
are relatively non-serious in nature and tend to consist of being bystanders or companions to males involved in skirmishes, fights, and so on" (70). Currie adds to this the fact
that these "simple assaults without injury" are often "attempted" or "threatened" or "not completed" (Currie 1998, 40). At a time when official concern about youth violence is
almost unparalleled and school principals are increasingly likely to call police onto their campuses, it should come as no surprise that youthful arrests in this area are up.
Detailed comparisons drawn from supplemental homicide reports based on unpublished data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation also hint at the central, rather than
peripheral, way in which gender colored and differentiated girls' and boys' violence. Loper and Cornell's study (1996) of these FBI data on the characteristics of girls' and boys'
homicides between 1984 and 1993 found that girls accounted for "pro-portionately fewer homicides in 1993 (6%) than in 1984 (14%)" (324). Their work shows that girls'
choice of weap-ons differed from that of boys; in com-parison to boys' homicides, girls who killed were more likely to use a knife than a gun and to murder someone as a result
of conflict (rather than in the commission of a crime). Girls were also more likely than boys to murder family members (32 percent) and very young victims (24 percent of their
victims were under the age of 3, compared to 1 percent of the boys' victims) (328). When involved in a peer homicide, girls were more likely than boys to have killed "as a
result of an interpersonal conflict"; in addi-tion, girls were more likely to kill alone, while boys were more likely to kill with an accomplice (328). Loper and Cornell concluded
that "the stereotype of girls becoming gun-toting robbers was not supported. The dramatic increase in gun-related homicides ... applies to boys but not girls" (332). Finally, a
note about self-report data. These have always shown that girls committed more assaults than official statistics reflected (Chesney- Lind and Shelden 1997). A summary of
recent studies of self-reported aggression also reflects that while about a third of girls reported having been in a physical fight in the last year, this was true of over half of the
boys (Girls Incorporated 1996, 13). Girls are far more likely than boys to fight with a parent or sibling (34 per-cent compared to 9 percent), whereas boys are more likely to
fight with friends or strangers. Finally, boys are twice to three times more likely to report carrying a weapon in the past month (13). Trends in self-report data of youthful
involvement in violent offenses also fail to show the dra-matic changes found in official statis-tics. Specifically, a matched sample of "high-risk" youths (aged 13-17) surveyed
in the 1977 National Youth Study and the more recent 1989 Den-ver Youth Survey revealed signifi-cant decreases in girls' involvement in felony assaults, minor assaults, and
hard drugs, and no change in a wide range of other delinquent behaviors, including felony theft, minor theft, and index delinquency (Huizinga 1997). Finally, girls' behavior,
including violence, needs to be put in its patri-archal context. In her analysis of self-reported violence by girls in Can-ada, Artz (1998) did precisely that, and the results were
striking. First, she noted that violent girls reported significantly greater rates of victimi-zation and abuse than their nonvio-lent counterparts, and that girls who were violent
reported great fear of sexual assault, especially from their boyfriends. Specifically, 1 in 5 violent girls felt they were physically abused at home compared to 1 in 10 violent
males and only 6.3 percent of nonvio-lent girls. Patterns for sexual abuse were even starker; roughly 1 in 4 vio-lent girls had been sexually abused compared to 1 in 10
nonviolent girls (47). Follow-up interviews with a small group of violent girls found that the girls had learned at home that "might makes right" and engaged in "horizontal
violence" directed at other powerless girls (often with boys as the audience). Certainly, these findings provide little ammunition for those who would contend that the "new,"
vio-lent girl is a product of any form of emancipation. While the media has focused attention on girls' violent, nontradi-tional delinquency, most delin-quency by girls is not of
that sort at all. Examining the types of offenses for which girls are actually arrested, it is clear that most are arrested for the less serious criminal acts and status offenses
(noncriminal offenses for which only youths can be taken into custody, like running away from home). In 1995, well over half of girls' arrests were for either larceny theft (25.8
percent), much of which, par-ticularly for girls, is shoplifting (Shelden and Horvath 1986), or status offenses (23.4 percent). Boys' arrests were far more dispersed. Running
away from home and prostitution remain the only two arrest categories where more girls than boys are arrested. Despite the intention of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention (JJDP) Act of 1974, which, among other things, encouraged jurisdictions to divert and deinstitutionalize youths charged with status offenses, arrests for these have
been climbing in recent years. Between 1987 and 1996, for example, girls' runaway arrests increased by 20.7 percent, and arrests of girls for curfew viola-tions increased by
155.2 percent (U.S. Department of Justice 1997, 219). Status offenses have always played a significant role among the offenses that bring girls into the juvenile justice
system. They accounted for about a quarter of all girls' arrests in 1996, but less than 10 percent of boys' arrests-figures that remained relatively stable during the last decade.
In 1996, over half (57.5 percent) of those arrested for one status offense-running away from home-were girls (U.S. Depart-ment of Justice 1997, 219). Why are girls more
likely to be arrested than boys for running away from home? There are no simple answers to this question. Studies of actual delinquency (not simply arrests) show that girls
and boys run away from home in about equal numbers. As an example, Canter (1982) found in a National Youth Survey that there was no evidence of greater female
involvement, com-pared to that of males, in any cate-gory of delinquent behavior. Indeed, in this sample, males were significantly more likely than females to report status
offenses. There is some evidence to suggest that parents and police may be responding differently to the same behavior. Parents may be calling the police when their
daughters do not come home, and police may be more likely to arrest a female than a male runaway youth. Another reason for different responses to running away from home
speaks to differences in the reasons that boys and girls have for running away. Girls are, for example, much more likely than boys to be the victims of child sexual abuse, with
some experts estimating that roughly 70 percent of the victims of child sexual abuse are girls (Finkelhor and Baron 1986). Not surprisingly, the evidence is also suggesting a
link between this problem and girls' delinquency, particularly run-ning away from home. Studies of girls on the streets or in court populations show high rates of both sexual
and physical abuse. A study of a runaway shelter in Toronto found, for example, that 73 percent of the female runaways and 38 percent of the males had been sexually
abused. This same study found that sexually abused female runaways were more likely than their nonabused counterparts to engage in delinquent or criminal activities such
as substance abuse, petty theft, and prostitution. No such pattern was found among the male runaways (McCormack, Janus, and Burgess 1986). Detailed studies of youths
enter-ing the juvenile justice system in Florida have compared the "constel-lations of problems" presented by girls and boys entering detention (Dembo, Williams, and
Schmeidler 1993, 1995). In these studies, it was found that female youths were more likely than male youths to have abuse histories and contact with the juvenile justice
system for status offenses, while male youths had higher rates of involvement with various delinquent offenses. Further research on a larger cohort of youths (N = 2104)
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admitted to an assess-ment center in Tampa concluded that "girls' problem behavior com-monly relates to an abusive and trau-matizing home life, whereas boys' law violating
behavior reflects their involvement in a delinquent life style" (Dembo, Williams, and Schmeidler 1995, 21). Girls on the run from these sorts of homes clearly need help. For
many years, however, their accounts of abuse were ignored, and they were inappropriately institutionalized in detention centers and training schools as delinquents if they
refused to stay at home. THE FAMILY COURT AND THE FEMALE DELINQUENT While girls have long been invisi-ble to those who crafted theories of delinquency, concerns
about girls' immoral conduct were at the center, rather than at the periphery, of the movement that established the juve-nile court (Platt 1969; Odem 1995; Kunzel 1993). As a
result, in the ear-liest years of the court, girls were fre-quently institutionalized for such offenses as "sexual immorality" or "waywardness," and well into the 1970s,
contemporary status offenses such as running away from home often functioned as "buffer charges" for the court's concern about the sex-ual behavior of girls (see Chesney-
Lind and Shelden 1997 for a discus-sion of these issues). Correctional reformers, concerned about abuse of the status offense category by juvenile courts (though not
necessarily concerned about girls), were instrumental in urging the U.S. Congress to pass the JJDP Act of 1974. This legislation required that states receiving federal delin-
quency prevention moneys begin to divert and deinstitutionalize their status offenders. Despite erratic enforcement of this provision and considerable resistance from juve-nile
court judges, girls were the clear beneficiaries of the reform. Incar-ceration of young women in training schools and detention centers across the country have fallen
dramatically in the decades since its passage, in distinct contrast to patterns found early in the century. National statistics on girls' incar-ceration reflect both the official
enthusiasm for the incarceration of girls during the early part of this cen-tury and the impact of the JJDP Act of 1974. Girls' share of the population of juvenile correctional
facilities increased from 1880 (when girls were 19 percent of the population) to 1923 (when girls were 28 percent). By 1950, the proportion of girls had climbed to 34 percent of
the total, and in 1960 they were still 27 percent of those in correctional facilities. By 1980, this pattern appeared to have reversed, and girls were again 19 percent of those in
correctional facili-ties (Cahalan 1986, 130). In 1993, girls composed 10 percent of those held in public detention centers and training schools (Hsieh 1998). Despite its success
in reducing the number of status offenders, and hence girls, in facilities, the reform effort faced broad resistance from the outset. In 1980, the National Council of Juvenile and
Family Court Judges was able to narrow the definition of a status offender in the amended act so that any child who had violated a "valid court order" would no longer be
covered under the deinstitution-alization provisions (Pub. L. 96-509). This change effectively gutted the 1974 JJDP Act by permitting judges to reclassify a status offender who
violated a court order as a delin-quent. This meant that a young woman who ran away from a court-ordered placement (a halfway house or foster home, for example) could be
relabeled a delinquent and locked up. Judges have long used techniques like charging youths with "violation of a valid court order" or issuing con-tempt citations as ways to
"boot-strap" status offenders into catego-ries that permit their detention. They thereby circumvent the deinsti-tutionalization component of the JJDP Act (Costello and
Worthington 1981, 42). These judicial maneuvers clearly disadvantage girls. For example, a Florida study (Bishop and Frazier 1992) reviewed 162,012
cases referred to juvenile justice intake units during 1985-87. The research-ers found only a weak pattern of dis-crimination against female status offenders compared to the
They found that female
treatment of male status offenders. However, when they examined the impact of contempt citations, the pattern changed markedly.
offenders referred for con-tempt were more likely than females referred for other criminal-type
offenses to be petitioned to court, and substantially more likely to be peti-tioned to court than males
referred for contempt. Moreover, the girls were far more likely than boys to be sentenced to detention.
Specifically, the typical female offender in their study had a probability of incarceration of 4.3 percent,
which increased to 29.9 percent if she was held in con-tempt. Such a pattern was not observed among
the males in the study. The researchers concluded that "the traditional double standard is still
operative. Clearly, neither the cultural changes associated with the feminist movement nor the legal
changes illustrated in the JJDP Act's mandate to deinstitutionalize status offenders have brought
about equal-ity under the law for young men and women" (1186). During the early part of this dec-ade,
things seemed to be turning around for girls. Hearings held in 1992 in conjunction with the reauthorization of the JJDP Act addressed for the
first time the "pro-vision of services to girls within the juvenile justice system" (U.S. House 1992). At this hearing, the double standard of juvenile justice was discussed, as was
the paucity of serv-ices for girls. The chair of the hear-ing, Representative Matthew Marti-nez, noted the high number of girls arrested for status offenses, the high percentage
of girls in detention as a result of violation of court orders, and the failure of the system to address girls' needs. He ended with the ques-tion, "I wonder why, why are there no
other alternatives than youth jail for her?" (U.S. House 1992, 2). As a result of this landmark hear-ing, the 1992 reauthorization of the act included specific provisions requiring
plans from each state receiving federal funds to include "an analysis of gender-specific services for the prevention and treatment of juvenile delinquency, including the types of
such services available and the need for such services for females and a plan for providing needed gender-specific services for the pre-vention and treatment of juvenile
delinquency" (Pub. L. 102-586). Additional moneys were set aside as part of the JJDP Act's challenge grant program for states wishing to develop policies to prohibit gender
bias in placement and treatment and to develop programs that ensure girls equal access to services. As a result, 23 states embarked on such programs-by far the most
popular of the 10 possible challenge grant activity areas (Girls Incorporated 1996, 26). Finally, the legislation moved to make the bootstrapping of status offenders more
difficult (U.S. House 1992, 4983). Sadly, these changes, while extremely hopeful, were short-lived. Currently, Congress is undertaking a major overhaul of the JJDP Act, and
virtually all of the initiatives being considered are ominous for girls. The bills introduced to date intend to refocus national attention on the "violent and repeat juvenile offender"
(read "boys") while also granting states "flexibility"i n imple-menting the four core mandates of the JJDP Act. Key among these man-dates, of course, is the deinstitution-
alization of status offenders, though conservative lawmakers are also tak-ing aim at efforts to separate youths from adults in correctional facilities, efforts to reduce minority
overrepre-sentation in juvenile detention and training schools, and efforts to remove juveniles from adult jails (National Criminal Justice Associa-tion 1997, 2-3). Most ominous
for girls are efforts to loosen restrictions on the deten-tion of status offenders. An example is Senate Bill 10, the Violent and Repeat Juvenile Offender Act of 1997: it allows for
the incarceration of runaways if a hearing determines that "the behavior of the juvenile con-stitutes a clear and present danger to the juvenile's physical or emotional well
being" or when "secure deten-tion is necessary for guarding the safety of the juvenile" or, finally, when "the detention is necessary to obtain a suitable placement" (Coali-tion
for Juvenile Justice 1997). Both House and Senate bills currently under consideration weaken the 1992 initiatives in the area of the detention of youths for violation of a valid
court order. Even more worri-some, all the bills make it easier to hold youths in adult jails. The latter provision is most disturbing, since girls were not infrequently held in such
situations in the past (such as de facto detention centers in rural America). Sadly, abuse is not uncom-mon in such settings. In Ohio, for example, a 15-year-old girl was sexu-
ally assaulted by a deputy jailer after having been placed in an adult jail for a minor infraction (Ziedenberg and Schiraldi 1997, 2). Due to the isola-tion and abuse in these
settings, girls are also at great risk for suicide (Chesney-Lind 1988).2 These initiatives should not sur-prise any student of the court's his-tory, since they represent a return to
the court's backstopping the sexual double standard (and parental authority) at the expense of girls' freedom. Indeed, a careful review of the data
on
incarceration patterns (during deinstitutionalization) sig-naled the resilience of the court's bias against
girls as well as the special meaning of this for girls of color. Spe-cifically, recent research suggests
that the impact of deinstitutionaliza-tion has produced a racialized, two-track system of juvenile
justice, one in which white girls are placed in mental hospitals and private facili-ties, while girls of
color are detained and institutionalized. DEINSTITUTIONALIZATION UNDER SIEGE While the JJDP Act
stressed the need to deinstitutionalize status offenders, we have seen that the numbers of girls and
boys arrested for these noncriminal offenses con-tinued to increase. What has emerged from this
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pressure is a com-plex and not necessarily equitable system. Notably, over the last two decades, there has been
a distinct rise in the number of youths confined in private facilities, an/d this trend has special meaning for girls. In 1991, girls were 11 percent of those in public institutions but
over a quarter (29 percent) of those held in private institutions (Moone 1993a, 1993b). Another way to look at this is to say that, of girls held in facilities of any sort, over half
(62 percent) are held in private facilities. The vast majority of girls (85 percent) h/./aseld in private facilities are being held for "nondelinquent" offenses including status
offenses, dependency, and neglect, and due to "voluntary"a dmis-sions; for boys, only slightly over half (58 percent) are held for these rea-sons, with the rest being held for
criminal offenses (,mews, 596). Ethnic differences are also appar-ent in the populations of these insti-tutions; whites constituted about 40 percent of those held in public insti-
tutions in 1989 but 60 percent of those held in private facilities (Kris-berg et al. 1991, 57-59). A more recent census (1995) of private facili-ties showed that well over half (53
percent) were white and, more important, that most youths in these facilities were "detained" or "commit-ted" rather than admitted voluntar-ily (Moone 1997, 2). Finally, the
numbers indicate that, after a dramatic decline in the early 1970s, the number of girls held in public training schools and deten-tion centers has not declined much, and
meanwhile the number of girls in private facilities has soared. As an example, on one day in 1979, there were 6067 girls in public facilities (mainly detention centers and train-
ing schools); in 1991 the figure was 6328. Meanwhile, the number of girls held in private facilities increased 27 percent, from 8176 in 1979 to 10,389 in 1991 (Krisberg et al.
1991, 43; Moone 1993a, 1993b). Between 1991 and 1995, the number of girls held in private facilities increased by 7.62 percent (Moone 1997, 1). Some research indicates a
reason for this pattern. Deinstitutionaliza-tion may have actually signaled the development of a two-track juvenile justice system--one track for girls of color and another for
white girls. In a study of investigation reports from one area office in Los Angeles, Jody Miller (1994) examined the impact of race and ethnicity on the processing of girls'
cases during 1992-93. Reviewing the characteristics of the girls in Miller's group reveals the role played by color in the current juvenile justice system; Latinas com-posed the
largest proportion of the population (43 percent), followed by white girls (34 percent), and African American girls (23 percent) (Miller 1994, 11). Predictably, girls of color were
more likely to be from low-income homes, but this was espe-cially true of African American girls (53 percent were from families par-ticipating in Aid to Families with Dependent
Children, compared to 23 percent of white girls and 21 percent of Hispanic girls). Most important, Miller found that white girls were significantly more likely to be recom-
mended for a treatment-oriented placement, as opposed to a "deten-tion oriented" one, than either Afri-can American or Latina girls. In fact, 75
percent of the
white girls were recommended for a treatment-oriented facility, compared to 34 per-cent of the Latinas
and only 20 per-cent of the African American girls (Miller 1994, 18). Examining a portion of the proba-tion officers' reports in detail, Miller
found key differences in the ways that girls' behaviors were described, reflecting what she called "racialized gender expectations." In particular, African
American girls' behavior was often framed as products of"inappro-priate 'lifestyle' choices," while
white girls' behavior was described as resulting from low self-esteem, being easily influenced, and
the result of "abandonment" (Miller 1994, 20). Latina girls, Miller found, received "dichotomized" treatment, with some receiving the more
paternalistic care that white girls received, while oth-ers received the more punitive treat-ment (particularly if they had com-mitted "masculine" offenses like car theft).
Robinson's in-depth study of girls in the social welfare (CHINS) and juvenile justice system (DYS) in Massachusetts documents the ra-cialized pattern of juvenile justice quite
clearly (1990). Her social wel-fare sample (N = 15) was 74 percent white/non-Hispanic and her juvenile justice system sample (N = 15) was 53 percent black or Hispanic. Her
interviews, though, document the remarkable similarities of the girls' backgrounds and problems. As an example, 80 percent of the girls committed to DYS reported being
sexually abused, compared to 73 per-cent of the girls "receiving services as a child in need of supervision" (Robinson 1990, 311). The difference between these girls was in
the offenses for which they were charged; all the girls receiving serv-ices were charged with traditional status offenses (chiefly running away from home and truancy), while
the girls committed to DYS were charged with criminal offenses. Here, though, her interviews reveal clear evidence of bootstrapping. Con-sider, for example, the 16-year-old
girl, Beverly, who was committed to DYS for "unauthorized use of a motor vehicle." In this instance, Beverly, who is black, had presumably stolen her mother's car for three
hours to go shopping with a friend. Previous to this conviction, according to Robin-son's interview, she had been com-mitted to CHINS for "running away from home
repeatedly." Beverly told Robinson that her mother had been "advised by the DYS social worker to press charges for unauthorized use of a motor vehicle so that Beverly could
be sent to secure detention whenever she was caught on the run" (202). Other evidence of this pattern is reported by Bartollas (1993) in his study of youths confined in
juvenile "institutional" placements in a mid-western state. His research sampled female adolescents in both public and private facilities. The state sample (representing the
girls in public facilities) was 61 percent black, while the private sample was 100 percent white. Little difference, however, was found in the offense patterns of the two groups
of girls. Seventy per-cent of the girls in the state sample were "placed in a training school as a result of a status offense" (473). This state, like most states, does not per-mit
youths to be institutionalized for these offenses; however, Bartollas noted that "they can be placed on pro-bation, which makes it possible for the juvenile judge to adjudicate
them to a training school" (473). In the pri-vate sample, only 50 percent were confined for status offenses; the remainder were there for "minor stealing and shoplifting-related
offenses" (473). Bartollas also noted that both of these samples of girls had far less extensive juvenile histo-ries than did their boy counterparts. Programming for girls National
data indicate that, between 1989 and 1993, detentions involving girls increased by 23 per-cent, compared to an 18 percent increase in boys' detentions (Poe- Yamagata and
Butts 1995, 12). Shorter et al. (1996), examining the situation of girls in San Francisco's juvenile justice system, concluded that girls would languish in deten-tion centers
waiting for placement, while the boys were released or put in placement. As a result, 60 percent of the girls were detained for more than seven days, compared to only 6 per-
cent of the boys (12). Despite figures like these, a recent study by the U.S. General Account-ing Office of services to status offend-ers that had, as a major goal, the
exploration of the "availability of facilities and services for female and male status offenders" reported that "most of the juvenile justice officials and service providers
interviewed told us that status offenders did not need gender-specific treatment or services, except for gynecological ser-vices and prenatal care for females" (U.S. General
Accounting Office 1995, 5.3). These comments reflect a system that has failed to develop pro-grams shaped by girls' unique situa-tions and failed to address the special
problems girls have in a gendered society. Clearly, after decades of "deinsti-tutionalization efforts," girls con-tinue to be "all but invisible in pro-grams for youth and in the
literature available to those who work with youth" (Davidson 1983, viii; Bergs-mann 1989). As an example, the 1993 study by the San Francisco Chapter of the National
Organization for Women found that only 8.7 percent of the programs funded by the major organization in San Francisco that funded children and youth programs "specifically
addressed the needs of girls" (Siegal 1995). Not surprisingly, then, a 1995 study of youth participa-tion in San Francisco after-school or summer sports programs found that
juvenile justice system typically prefer
only 26 percent of the participants were girls (Siegal 1995). In addition, people who work in the
working with boys and rou-tinely stress the difficulty of working with girls. Belnap and her colleagues
in Ohio reported, in their study of youth workers, that "most of the pro-fessionals, unless they worked
exclu-sively with girls, had a difficult time not talking solely about the male delinquents" (Belnap,
Dunn, and Holsinger 1997, 28). Likewise, Alder (1997) has noted that "willful" girls produce problems
for a system ini-tially devised to handle boys: girls in these systems get constructed [construct girls]
as "hysterical," "manipulative," "ver-bally aggressive," and "untrusting," while boys are "h'onest,"
"open," and "less complex." Clearly, the juvenile justice system has its work cut out for it if it hopes to deal fairly with girls, to say nothing of creating
programs and services tailored to girls' prob-lems and needs. What are the specific needs of young women in general and, in par-ticular, those who come into contact with the
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juvenile justice system, either as victims or offenders? David-son (1983) argues that "the most des-perate need of many young women is to find the economic means of sur-
vival" (ix). Other research has stressed homeless girls' urgent needs for housing, jobs, and medical serv-ices (Iwamoto, Kameoka, and Bras-seur 1990). The Minnesota
Women's Fund noted that the most frequent risk fac-tors for girls and boys differ and that for girls the list includes emotional stress, physical and sexual abuse, negative body
image, disordered eat-ing, suicide, and pregnancy. For boys the list included alcohol use, polydrug use, accidental injury, and delinquency (Advisory Task Force 1994). While,
clearly, not all girls at risk will end up in the juvenile justice system, this gendered examination of youth problems sets a standard for the examination of delinquency pre-
vention and intervention programs. Among other needs that girls' pro-grams should address are the follow-ing: dealing with the physical and sexual violence in their lives (from
parents, boyfriends, pimps, and oth-ers), confronting the risk of AIDS, dealing with pregnancy and mother-hood, drug and alcohol dependency, facing family problems,
vocational and career counseling, managing stress, and developing a sense of effi-cacy and empowerment. Many of these needs are universal and should be part of
programs for all youths (Schwartz and Orlando 1991). Most of these, however, are particularly important for young women. Alder (1986, 1995) points out that serving girls
effectively will require different and innovative strategies since "young
men tend to be more noticeable and noticed than young
women" (1995, 3). When girls go out, they tend to move in smaller groups, there are greater
proscriptions against girls "hanging out," and they may be justly fearful of being on the streets at
night. Finally, girls have many more domestic expectations than their boy counterparts, and these may
keep them confined to their homes. Alder notes that this may be a particular issue for immigrant girls.
Programs must also be scrutinized to ensure that they are culturally specific as well as gender
specific. As increasing numbers of girls of color are drawn into the juvenile justice system (and bootstrapped into cor-rectional settings), while their white counterparts
are deinstitutionalized, there is a need for programs to be rooted in specific cultures. Since it is clear that girls of color have different experiences of their gender, as well as
different experiences with the dominant institutions in the society (Amaro and Aguiar 1994; Amaro 1995; Orenstein 1994; LaFromboise and Howard-Pitney 1995), programs to
divert and deinstitutionalize must be shaped by the unique develop-mental issues confronting minority girls. In addition, such programs must incorporate the specific cul-tural
resources available in ethnic communities. The content of gender-specific pro-grams formed within the juvenile justice system requires special vigi-lance, since the family
court has a long history of sexism, particularly in the area of policing girls' sexuality. In fact, the one area where the Gen-eral Accounting Office found evi-dence of gender
difference was the focus on girls' sexuality. In addition to a fairly routine focus on girls' abil-ity to become pregnant or be preg-nant, the researchers reported that institutions
that served girls exclu-sively included testing for sexually transmitted diseases while "at simi-lar male-only facilities operated by the same organizations, such testing was not
done unless requested by the males" (U.S. General Accounting Office 1995, 5.2.3). As Kimberly Kempf-Leonard (1998) has recently cautioned,
the juvenile
justice sys-tem's long history of paternalism and sexism makes it a problematic site for gender-
specific services. Cer-tainly, the existence of such services should not be used as justification for
incarcerating girls, and girl-specific programming should never be an excuse to return to the good old
days of girls' institutions where working-class girls were trained in the wom-anly arts. Some might
even extend Kempf- Leonard's argument to a more gen-eral call for an end to the juvenile jus-tice
system, given evidence that the system has had a notable lack of suc-cess in controlling its own
excesses when it comes to policing the non-criminal activities of girls. Certainly, many of the worst excesses of "state
maternalism" (Odem 1995) would be avoided if girls were tried in adult courts. As is often the case, however, the crafting of solutions to complex prob-lems may produce
unanticipated consequences. A quick look at the recent trends in the adult criminal justice system reveals, for example, a disturbing tendency to subject women offenders to a
form of justice that might be called vengeful equity. Here, in the name of equal treat-ment, women are tried, sentenced, and incarcerated as if they were men (Chesney-Lind
1997). The most tan-gible consequence of this pattern of equality has been the soaring number of women in U.S. prisons. In 1980, there were just over 12,000 women in U.S.
state and federal pris-ons. By 1997, there were 79,624. In about a decade and a half, the number of women being held in the nation's prisons had increased six-fold (Cahalan
1986; U.S. Depart-ment of Justice 1998). In essence, if the juvenile justice system represents the worst excesses of a system that policed and rein-forced gender difference,
the contem-porary adult system epitomizes a system that embraces, often with a troubling zest, a form of equality that penalizes women by failing to recog-nize real
differences (both biological and social) between men and women. This, coupled with the fact that the adult system, and most particularly the adult correctional system, is
being overwhelmed by admissions of women inmates, argues for seeking solutions to the problems of girls in a system that, at least currently, is able to entertain the notion of
inno-vation and reform. The major challenge to those seek-ing to address the needs of girls within the juvenile justice system remains the invisibility of these young women.
The short-lived con-gressional focus on girls has, unfor-tunately, been followed by a major retreat from such initiatives .
Not only that, but Congress is
apparently encouraging the recriminalization of status offenses, which suggests that without powerful,
local advocacy, the nation could again see large numbers of young girls incarcerated "for their own
protection." A girl-centered response to this backlash, as well as continued pressure on the juvenile
justice system to do more to help girls, is essential. Much more, not less, work needs to be done to
support the fundamental needs of girls on the margin.
Policies enacted in the 90s to cushion the so-called youth superpredator movement
that never happened still exist. The damage created is irreversible unless we abolish
the current system.
Schept Wall and Brisam 2014 [Building, Staffing, and Insulating: An Architecture of Criminological
Complicity in the School-to-Prison Pipeline Author(s): Judah Schept, Tyler Wall and Avi Brisman Source:
Social Justice, Vol. 41, No. 4 (138), Special Issue: Youth under Control: Punishment and Reform in the
Neoliberal State (2014), pp. 96-115 Published by: Social Justice/Global Options Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/24871277 Accessed: 24-07-2017 18:38 UTC]
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feature of the prison-industrial complex (the "PIC"). These include the
implementa tion of "zero tolerance" measures for disciplinary
infractions on school grounds, the growing presence of police in schools, and the concomitant criminalization and the
growing presence of police in schools, and the concomitant criminalization and juridification of school discipline (see
e.g., Ayers, Dohm, and Ayers 2001; Giroux 2004,2012; Monahan and Torres 2010). Such measures and policies arose,
in part, as a response to the infamous and racialized prediction by criminologists James Q. Wilson and John J. Dilulio,
Jr., about the rise of the "youth superpredator," which they [criminologists James Q. Wilson and John J. Dilulio, Jr.,]
envisioned would hit the streets of the United States in the mid-1990s (see Barrett 2013; Chura 2011). The "youth superpredator"
never arrived, but the policies substantiating and perpetuating the pipeline remain. Moreover, the direct complicity
of two of the most notorious late-twentieth-century right-wing scholars belies the larger epistemic, ideological, and
practical ways in which the disciplines of criminology and criminal justice structure the pipeline. 1 Indeed, criminology has offered
alibis and bodies for the capitalist state to securitize schools and criminalize youth. It is the purpose of this article, then, to begin to sketch these structural com plicities. Specifically, we
examine the role of the university criminology/criminal justice department in creating, staffing, and legitimating the pipeline. This article offers a preliminary and provisional conceptual
scaffold for understanding the complicity of the criminology/criminal justice discipline and its academic departments. In addition, this article argues that when criminology does call critical
attention to the pipeline, its gaze remains decidedly reformist. We contend that scholars must commit to the abolitionist project of dismantling the pipeline and "redistributing" the state
resources that sustain it (Fraser 1997,2000; Meiners 2011). Future articles will flesh out the ideas offered here and we hope our colleagues will take up the project of holding the discipline(s)
accountable. We believe we are uniquely positioned to offer this reflexive analysis of the discipline's (or disciplines') complicity in the carceral continuum. As associate professors in the
School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University (EKU) previously, the Department of Criminal Justice and Police Studieswe are housed in a school and larger college (the College
of Justice and Safety) that exist in a somewhat bizarre tension. All three authors and many of our colleagues identify as committed leftists, who are critical of the conservative and
liberal/reformist initiatives in criminal justice and for years have been involved to varying degrees in a wide range of social movements and political causes. Meanwhile, our livelihoods as
teachers depend upon educating students seeking positions in the very systems, with their related practices and knowledge bases, that we actively struggle to upend. We first review some
of the literature demarcating the school-based trends that perpetuate the pipeline. These works demonstrate the various factors that have propelled so many youth out of schools and into
jail and prison cells, yet we contend that the role of higher education in the pipeline remains underdeveloped. Finally, the article sketches the critical role of the criminology/criminal justice
discipline and its academic departments in staffing, sustaining, and continuing to legitimate the continuum.The
pipeline concept implies a flow between two
seemingly distinct institutions: the "school" and "prison," as well as the various appendages of the criminal justice
system, to mix metaphors. Sometimes, however, the faade of their distinctiveness crumbles and the "coordinated
institutions" (Simmons 2009) become completely imbricated. Simmons (2009; this volume) examines one such sitea
"prison school" in New Orleanswhere the sheriff has created a school for non-delinquent, but educationally "at
risk," youth at the parish prison. Although framed as a preemption of the pipeline, the initiative collapses it.
Comprised almost exclusively of African-American youth, it is run by the sheriff and housed in a prison. This school
clearly signifies a racialized interlocking of the school and the carceral apparatus. Numerous other institutions more
closely resemble jails or prisons than the schools they are supposed to be. Every day in one high school in post-Katrina New Orleans, there were
31 to 40 security guards, two to four New Orleans Police Department Officers, and only 21 to 30 educators present at a given time, with class size rarely surpassing 40 to 50 students (Tuzzolo
and Hewitt 2007). The authors go on to note: go on to note: When students enter John Mac, after standing in long lines to enter the building, they pass through metal detectors staffed by
seven security guards and one officer from the New Orleans Police Department. Students are scanned with a hand-held metal detector while the contents of their book sacks are searched.
Cell phones, oversized jewelry and belts with certain buckles are confiscated. Students who set off the metal detectors three times with no item found are sometimes sent away at the door.
On various days, students who are not in their classrooms by 9:00 a.m. are locked out of their classrooms while the 31-40 security guards on staff perform a "sweep." Students rounded up in
the sweep are brought to the auditorium and suspended. According to the principal, 52 students were suspended in one day for tardiness. (Tuzzolo and Hewitt 2007,66) These coercive,
increasingly normalized "security measures" exemplify the pipeline and are often bolstered by criminology as an academic discipline and by the workings of criminology and criminal justice
departments. In this sense, the university and criminology are complicit in building, staffing, and insulating the pipeline. We know that academics in a criminology/criminal justice-oriented
department such as ours help to create the pipeline, provide crucial infrastructure (bodies), and insulate it through justifying knowledge. We now briefly explore the architectural and
intellectual conjunctures between the criminology/criminal justice department and the state. Building the Pipeline Deeply structured forces
catalyze the criminalization and collection of school-aged youth and usher them toward incarceration.
Substantial opposition to this process also exists. Where do the officers in schools, prosecutors, juvenile probation officers, truancy court
workers, and other personnel that comprise the shrinking continuum between school and prison originate? How are these functionaries prepared for jobs and careers staffing the pipeline?
How does a university degree in criminology or criminal justice legitimate the pipeline? What discourses justify and support the pipeline's existence within the critical academic literature and
related journalistic and policy writings? Until now, we believe, academic criminology and criminal justice have escaped scrutiny for their roles. The complicity of university criminology and
criminal justice departments can be subtle or explicit. Job fairs that feature only representatives of criminal justice agencies and the high numbers of students who express interest in such
careers are a clear indicator. Meiners (2011) contends that she has yet to meet, the person who is for the school-to-prison pipeline, or is advocating for an increase in school suspensions, or
is conducting research to document why education should not be offered in prisons, or is collecting data to demonstrate that black female youth really are inherently more violent or
dangerous than white female youth, or is writing about why we should or dangerous than white female youth, or is writing about why we should provide school security guards tasers.
Though few people express approval for the "pipeline" as such, manyincluding our studentsargue for increased law enforcement presence in schools and greater use of police power to
discipline students. This is probably true in other departments of criminology or criminal justice across the United States. But an investigation into complicity should not stop at the level of
responses and dispositions. Attitudes critical of the pipeline from faculty and students must contend with a deeply structured, historical, and intimate relationship between our segment of
the academy and the armed apparatus of the state. Critically inclined students are no match for a discipline with institutional homes that are so heavily committed toand depend on
ensuring the pipeline's existence. University criminology and criminal justice departments have their own historical and political-economic context. Historically, many of the better-known
departments were products of Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) funding. Following
grotesque exercises of police power during
antiwar (Vietnam), civil rights, and black power movements in the 1960s and 1970s, the federal government moved to
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professionalize police forces. This plan also established "Centers of Excellence" that were geared toward providing
higher education to police. Professionalized higher education, however, has failed to alleviate the racist and classist
nature of police power. LEAA and the history of these departments remain relevant for understanding the genesis of
and logic behind professionalized training for practitioners in higher education. Even the research, writing, teaching, and activism of scholars
in programs such as EKU's School of Justice Studies, which boasts Marxist, feminist, critical race, and postmodern and post-structural viewpoints, cannot erase the school's historical
contingency on the original and ongoing material support from the security-carceral-state. Despite the radical content that they may encounter in their courses, in reality most students
believe in the necessity of the state to the extent that they enroll in our institution to pursue a degree that improves their chances of working for the state.4 Our own home in a College of
Justice and Safety reflects this history. The
college was the brainchild of a director of the Kentucky State Police in the 1960s and was
officially founded as the Department of Law Enforcement in 1965, a decade before massive federal funding flooded
universities with startup funds to create or expand criminal justice (McClanahan and Smith n.d., 5). Indeed, when Eastern
Kentucky University's newly minted Department of Law Enforcement secured $36,844 from the US Department of Justice's Office of Law Enforcement Assistance, it became the first program
in higher education in the country to receive such funding. Though LEAA and federal support for university-based law enforcement education departments was not the beginning of higher
education's intimacy with police, it did signal a critical point in the complicity of higher education in the school-to-prison pipeline. The neoliberalization of the university further structures
this orientation within departments that otherwise might reject it (Mills 2012). First, shrinking state investment in education led to a
growing reliance on alternative revenue sources for public institutions of higher education. In large
criminology or criminal justice departments, this can mean soliciting and/or receiving larger numbers of already
minted law enforcement officers whose tuition they pay. Second, neoliberalism features a weakened welfare
state (due, in part, to the privatization of public services) and an emboldened security state (Giroux
2004, 2012; Hallsworth and Lea 2011; see also Brisman 2013). Despite the once popular notion that "the state is dwindling" due to the "natural
processes" of globalization and privatization, the liberal democratic state with its security fetish has brought about its own transformation. Broadly, the rise of the carceral state has steadily
shifted state budgetary priorities, including the transfer of tax dollars from schools to prisons. A well-known Justice Policy Institute study (2002), for example, found that between 1985 and
2000, spending on corrections across the United States grew at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Beyond revealing the social and fiscal priorities of state legislators, such a
focus on carceral growth can be interpreted as signifying a labor market investment as well. In tandem with the rise of the federally funded and practitioner-oriented academic department
of criminology and criminal justice is the well-documented emergence of a criminal justice industrial complex that includes mass incarceration, growing and increasingly authoritarian police
forces, and surveillance creep into everyday life. The connection is not incidental. Indeed, as Foucault (1980, 48) noted, criminological discourse is necessary to justify judges judging. That is,
neoliberal state-manufactured crises and their "socio-spatial fix" in the prison and other formations of the criminal justice industrial complex (Gilmore 2007) require a legitimating discourse,
which the disciplines of criminology and criminal justice supply. Although "criminology" is a permeable category (Garland and Sparks 2000; see generally South, Brisman, and Beirne 2013), as
are all academic disciplines, much of what constitutes the study or field(s) of "criminology" "criminal justice" is decidedly administrative. This does not reflect some grand conspiracy, since
broader changes in governance and political economy structure changes in all institutions, including the university and the prison. In the context of the neoliberal withdrawal of the welfare
state, governance and policy operate in and through institutional assemblages of the carceral state and police power and, crucially, through logics that securitize areas of sociality previously
unattached to criminal justice. Thus, policy approaches to welfare and education filter through discourses and logics that subject their institutional formations and their everyday activities to
carceral influences (Gilmore 2007; Hirschfield 2008; Schept 2013; Simon 2007; Wacquant 2001,2009). Neoliberal reliance on police and penal power to manage urban and rural crises has
effects beyond the individuals and groups targeted directly for imprisonment and the places and spaces identified specifically for locating prisons. Of course, governing through prison is
partly to blame for the pipeline in that communities targeted for incarceration tend to be those selected for greater police presence in targeted for incarceration tend to be those selected
for greater police presence in schools and, as a result, more school-based arrests of youth. Yet, there is another dimension to building and sustaining the pipelinea population of young
people entering the labor market and dependent upon the criminal justice industrial complex for employment. Working- and middle-class university-age youth have grown up in an era in
which their parents have lost jobs and local factories, mines, and plants have been closed. Such youth are increasingly bombarded with images and indicia of bleak job prospects. That is, of
course, except for the bright future of one industry: criminal justice.5 Staffing the Pipeline Although the DOCJT (Department of Criminal Justice Training) is not an EKU program, it has
become, in the minds of many Kentuckians, inextricably joined. Many of the DOCJT graduates boast they attended EKU. This familiarity with the University breaks the ice for many trainees,
encouraging them to begin a part-time college career. (At www.justice, eku .edu/sites!justice .eleu .edw'files/'files/JShistory.pdf) A job fair at our college revealed the deeply structured logic
of what jobs are appropriate for and available to graduates from the School of Justice Studies. In September 2013, a fair held downstairs from our offices included the following agencies:
American Medical Response; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; Cincinnati Fire Department; Cleveland (TN) Police Department; Drug Enforcement Agency; Evansville
Police Department; Federal Bureau of Prisons; Florence (KY) Police Department; Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice; Lexington Community Corrections; Lexington Division of Police;
Lexington Fire Department; Louisville Metro Police Department; Memphis Police Department; Metro Nashville Police Department; and the United States Marine Corps. Despite the potential
draw of nonprofit, community organizing, advocacy, and legal defense organizations to a job fair for a School of Justice Studies and a College of Justice and Safety, the above list confirms the
career orientations of our students. That is, the agencies attending and others like it illuminate the employment opportunities structured into the workforce narrative of our students and
demonstrate which jobs are available. Based on informal conversations and in-class polling, around 75 percent of our undergraduate students attend the School of Justice Studies to secure
employment in "law enforcement" or "corrections." Even a conservative estimate of 50 percent would mean that every year 150 graduates are seeking work in these areas. One of the
authors (Schept) is the new coordinator for the School of Justice Studies' internship program. The internship provides credit hours for a semester's worth of work. Historically, this has meant
interning with a criminal j ustice agencya county sheriff's office, the Kentucky State Police, or federal law enforcement agencies, such as the US Marshals Service and the Drug Enforcement
Agency. Schept, the coauthors of this article, and a select group of other School of Justice Studies faculty members are dedicated to broadening the range of internship possibilities and
moving the school in the direction of social justice. The reality, however, is that the School of Justice Studies has cultivated institutional relationships with various agencies of criminal justice
and our students wish to take advantage of these connections.6 The
neoliberal university that creates the higher educational context within
which the criminal justice department reproduces its history as a training ground for state agents has an important partner in the
public school district. As the state withdraws from paying for teachers and counselors, guns and guards emerge as a
glaring area of growth. Bryant (2013) notes that "at a time when most states are cutting education budgets, and depressed property taxes are reducing local revenues
for schools, lawmakers are having no problem finding cash to spend on guns and guards in schools." According to The Center for Public Integrity, in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, a state
legislative delegation in Florida approved a proposal to increase property taxes to pay for more school police, "at an annual cost of up to $ 130,000 per officer." A bill in Mississippi "set up a
$7.5 million school-security fund." Alabama legislators proposed "a lottery to pay for a $20 million plan to put police officers in every school." And Indiana lawmakers weighed a measure to
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"set aside $10 million to offer grants to schools to hire local police to post in schools." The White River Valley School Board in rural southern Indiana recently voted to hire an SRO for the
White River Valley High School from grants provided by the Indiana Department of Homeland Security. The school superintendent has said: "It's all about providing our kids and our staff a
safe and secure learning environment." The SRO will be armed and have an assortment of duties, as explained by a local journalist (Squires 201 The officer will be expected to provide
educational programs; provide a wide variety of professional and technical police work in investigation including the enforcement of local ordinances, state and federal statutes; provide
security with visibility and presence in school buildings; assist in the prevention of crime or delinquency on corporation campuses; act as an advisor to the administrators for the crisis
response teams and coordinate with the Greene County Sheriff's Department. The officer will be expected to be armed while on campus. This trend is not limited to states. Indeed, President
Barack Obama'has promised 1,000 new SROs as part of a White House plan to reduce gun violence, ignoring the painful irony of placing 1,000 more armed police officers in schools as part of
a violence reduction project. The logic enacted here presupposes that state violence is a feasible route to pacifying, or making "civil" citizens. "Good guys with guns," as Wayne LaPierre,
executive vice-president of the NRA, has called them, are often the ones who enact violence on communities of color and other poor populations. A central enforcing agent of the pipeline is
the SROa member of law enforcement working directly in the geographies of education. SROs may perform a range of duties, but the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968
describes the position as a "career law enforcement officer, with sworn authority, describes the position as a "career law enforcement officer, with sworn authority, deployed in community-
oriented policing, and assigned by the employing police department or agency to work in collaboration with school and community-based organizations" (Girouard 2001). A Justice Policy
Institute report (2011) revealed a 38 percent increase in the number of SROs between 1997 and 2007 as more youth became increasingly subjected to juridification of school-based
disciplinary problems. As the law enforcement presence in schools heightened, arrests of youth climbed, with more of them being processed in and moving through various courts (adult and
juvenile) and juvenile detention systems. SROs perform duties other than arresting students on school grounds. According to a National Institute of Justice report, SROs reported that their
workweek was evenly split between law enforcement duties and advising, mentoring, and teaching (Finn and McDevitt 2005). However, would (or should) a student concerned about drugs,
peer pressure, parental issues, family income, sex, or violence seek out a police officer for support? Furthermore, what does it signify to students that the school, and presumably the state,
believes that police officers are the most appropriate actors to deal with situations that are not, on their face, issues of police power? Finally, how is a young person supposed to know what
he/she can or cannot say to someone who may be, at once, a mentor and a cop? There is substantial room for coercion, secrecy, shame, and deployment of state punishment in an area
where students should have freedom to work through issues without the threat of sanction. The concept of "pacification" is a potentially useful way to think about SROs. Often associated
with US counterinsurgency efforts in Vietnam, recent calls have beenThe history of our discipline reveals an intimate, interdependent relationship with the state and today, in quotidian
ways, criminal justice students are prepared for careers in the law enforcement apparatuses that maintain and enforce the pipeline. Moreover, the discipline is complicit in the production of
knowledge and the epistemological legitimacy we give to the school-to-prison pipeline. In this realm, there is the greatest space for resistance. We cannot reverse
the discipline's historical legacy or easily change the course of the larger institutional
context of a department or school; more room to maneuver exists to intervene in the
knowledge production practices and orientation that legitimate the practice and our
role in it. Our college houses the Kentucky Center for School Safety (the "center"), which conducts research into and training on, among other things, SROs. The presence of this
center in our college clarifies the relationship we are attempting to examine, for it is a gateway between school jurisdictions and the federal funds that support those jurisdictions in the area
of school safety. As budgets shrink, the availability of millions of dollars in funding for schools becomes increasingly attractive. The center's location at a respected college staffed by
researchers legitimates its existence and gives its products credibility. A university setting establishes the center as a location of specialized scholarship, which can translate research into
policy analysis and implementation. Thus, scholars researching the ongoing existence of phenomena such as the pipeline should seriously examine statements and positions such as the one
on SROs found on the center's webpage: Maintaining safe schools requires the involvement of many agencies outside of the educational community, particularly law enforcement, social
service, juvenile justice agencies and the court system. Partnerships across these agencies improve school safety and serve the needs of youth at risk. For example, law enforcement agencies
assist schools in development of safety and emergency plans, provide classroom instructions with programs such as DARE and crime prevention, investigate crimes in schools, and often
assign officers to schools through an Adopt a School or School Resource Officer program. (At www.kycss.org/law.php) .
The academic literature generally
concludes that SROs in schools do not enhance student safety, and yet the center promotes expanding their use. Its
SRO webpage even features a quotation from the US Department of Justice (DOJ): "Communities throughout the
nation recognize that trained, sworn law enforcement officers assigned to schools make a difference." Research on
the pipeline shows that SROs do "make a difference," but not in the ways the quoted statement misleadingly implies.
Beyond defining, advocating for, and noting the numbers of SROs in the state (approximately 230 in more than half of Kentucky's counties), the webpage displays a student-made poster for
a "reading week" that features a sheriff's car and caution tape, proudly noting that "SRO's [sic] are so much a part of the school that somethings [sic] they are used in academic campaigns ...
such as this READ poster" (at www.kycss.org/schoolresource.php). Such narratives operate on multiple planes. Concretely, they promote the belief that the police, courts, and juvenile justice
systems are essential to keeping schools safe. Indeed, safety requires their active involvement. Two programs they endorseSROs and the infamous Drug Abuse Resistance Education
(D.A.R.E.) programhave been roundly dismissed by empirical studies as ineffective (see Hagan 2011). Thus, the center's expertise subjugates empirical and "evidence based" knowledge to
an ideological agenda of securitization. Ultimately, it argues that cops, courts, and corrections are indispensable to safety, but never defines what makes a school "safe." Disregarding data
proving otherwise, criminology and the state advance armed actors as solutions to problems that are deeply structured by the neoliberal withdrawal of the welfare state and the resultant
problems of classroom size, poverty, under-resourced schools, and disaffected students. Youth
point out that police in schools may protect the school,
but not students (McClellan 2011). Who, then, is being served and protected by SROs and other technologies of the pipeline? What interests are being "secured" by the
assemblage of schools, police, and prisons? The center's endorsement of the DOJ position on SROs is instructive as a meta-narrative of criminology. The discourse and the center as a place
and space of ideological perpetuation make them indispensable to the project of school safety. The
work of juridifying, policing, and carceralizing the
school and of subjecting students to increasing numbers of hearings, arrests, and detentions requires constant
justification, or at least the appearance of it. In the absence of "evidence" or expertise that a district can use to justify
the activity, how could parents accept such gross encroachment into educational space? In this way, criminologydue to centers like
this, DOJ grants, and departments in need of studentsbecomes essential to the operation. Some compelling work within criminology (and substantial work outside it) does critique the
carceral state and the pipeline. Yet in its literature and anecdotally from our professional lives, the discipline's critical variant often remains decidedly reformist and thus does notand
cannotoffer the more radical critique of the state and capital needed for material disruption. Rarely are the political and cultural assumptions constituting the foundations of the discipline
thoroughly scrutinized. Under the pretense of being radical, those in the critical subfields of criminology and criminal justice, along with reformist criminal justice system administrators,
often speak the language of progressivism, modernization, reform, and a fetish for the "rule of law" as a solution to modern ills. In everyday practice, professors of criminal justice say, "we
need to reach those students who are going to be officers and teach them how to be better (e.g., professional, empathie, civilized) officers. We are making a difference, even if it is in
220
minimal ways." Police professionals and administrators proclaim similar things: "I want my officers to have high academic qualifications, the best training, and work with the community in
Session II
helpful, smart, and empathie ways." This approach has some utility, but generally its pervasive, insidious ideological framing precludes serious consideration of questions regarding state
power and violence, political economy, and the genealogy of racism and classism that underpins the liberal project of the penal state. Meiners (2011 ) has examined the role of youth in the
prison-industrial complex. In her view, children have been and remain the lifeblood of prison expansion due to racialized constructs of innocence and safety. By extension, we submit that the
department of criminology and criminal justice is a central location where the "false promises of safety and employment, particularly for our most 'innocent' what makes a school "safe."
Disregarding data proving otherwise, criminology and the state advance armed actors as solutions to problems that are deeply structured by the neoliberal withdrawal of the welfare state
and the resultant problems of classroom size, poverty, under-resourced schools, and disaffected students. Youth point out that police in schools may protect the school, but not students
(McClellan 2011). Who, then, is being served and protected by SROs and other technologies of the pipeline? What interests are being "secured" by the assemblage of schools, police, and
prisons? The center's endorsement of the DOJ position on SROs is instructive as a meta-narrative of criminology. The discourse and the center as a place and space of ideological
perpetuation make them indispensable to the project of school safety. The work of juridifying, policing, and carceralizing the school and of subjecting students to increasing numbers of
hearings, arrests, and detentions requires constant justification, or at least the appearance of it. In the absence of "evidence" or expertise that a district can use to justify the activity, how
could parents accept such gross encroachment into educational space? In this way, criminologydue to centers like this, DOJ grants, and departments in need of studentsbecomes
essential to the operation. Some compelling work within criminology (and substantial work outside it) does critique the carceral state and the pipeline. Yet in its literature and anecdotally
from our professional lives, the discipline's critical variant often remains decidedly reformist and thus does notand cannotoffer the more radical critique of the state and capital needed
for material disruption. Rarely are the political and cultural assumptions constituting the foundations of the discipline thoroughly scrutinized. Under the pretense of being radical, those in
the critical subfields of criminology and criminal justice, along with reformist criminal justice system administrators, often speak the language of progressivism, modernization, reform, and a
fetish for the "rule of law" as a solution to modern ills. In everyday practice, professors of criminal justice say, "we need to reach those students who are going to be officers and teach them
how to be better (e.g., professional, empathie, civilized) officers. We are making a difference, even if it is in minimal ways." Police professionals and administrators proclaim similar things: "I
want my officers to have high academic qualifications, the best training, and work with the community in helpful, smart, and empathie ways." This approach has some utility, but generally its
pervasive, insidious ideological framing precludes serious consideration of questions regarding state power and violence, political economy, and the genealogy of racism and classism that
underpins the liberal project of the penal state. Meiners (2011 ) has examined the role of youth in the prison-industrial complex. In her view, children have been and remain the lifeblood of
prison expansion due to racialized constructs of innocence and safety. By extension, we submit that the department of criminology and criminal justice is a central location where the "false
promises of safety and employment, particularly for our most 'innocent' (children) are repeatedly used to expand a prison nation" (ibid., 555). Meiners also argues that approaches to the
pipeline problem often rest on recognition rather than redistribution. Departments, individual scholars, and even students angling for careers in law enforcement recognize the problem and,
within proscribed and decidedly liberal frameworks, see "solutions" in working as "good" cops or social service workers to "improve" or help. In the name of reform and benevolence,
concerned and even leftist criminologists reinscribe the "common sense" of criminal justice, now further instantiated through liberal logics and discourses that purport to offer alternate
approaches to punitive business as usual. This highlights the fluidity with which the neoliberal state structures the political-economic reality of labor markets and higher education, while
configuring the terrain of discourse on which criminal justice academics operate. In our rueful, guilt-ridden teaching of studentswishing to fashion "better" SROs, police, probation, or
corrections officersthe state's logic of security flows in and through us. We seek imagined social security for certain youth, job security for our students, school security for teachers and
students, public security for imagined communities, and even state and homeland security (since secure "hometowns" make secure "homelands" in the Department of Homeland Security's
neocolonial logic). This
fetishistic logic of security must be refused, as it primarily enhances accumulation and state power,
against alternative forms of human solidarity.7 Against this pervasive logic, we reject such reformist changes and
demand that criminology take seriously an abolitionist and anti-security project of redistribution (see Neocleous and
Rigakos 2011). Such an approach requires that scholarship move beyond recognition of the problem. Instead,
scholarship must respond to and generate alternatives to the school-to-prison pipeline that result in transformative
changes within and outside the school that challenge "systems of power, oppression and privilege" (Meiners 2011,556). This calls
for two complementary actions: (1) and privilege" (Meiners 2011,556). This calls for two complementary actions: (1) the removal (rather than reformation) of the material support that the
state provides the removal (rather than reformation) of the material support that the state provides to the pipeline; and (2) its subsequent redistribution in communities targeted by policing
and incarceration. Thus, removing material support for the school-to prison pipelinethe SROs, the justifying discourses, and the financial investment in other forms of securitizationmust
be accompanied by a process of "currency exchange," whereby the money previously assigned to the pipeline is reallocated to assist and empower communities, rather than police and
imprison them. Conclusion Millions of young people experience the school-to-prison pipeline. Compelling scholarship, journalism, and activism have illuminated its racialized and class
nature, traced its origins, and demand that it be dismantled. Our contribution to this vibrant collection of work seeks to better formulate the complicity of academic criminology and criminal
justice in its construction, operations, and justification. Understanding the problem of the pipeline and working toward its abolition require110 JUDAH SCHEPT, TYLER WALL & AVI BrISMAN
an appreciation of the extent to which the discipline provides it with material funding, physical bodies, and intellectual legitimacy. We specifically address the reformist and apologist
tendencies within criminology and criminal justice. These well-intentioned efforts simply produce slightly more compassionate or informed SROs and enable ongoing juridification, policing,
and incarceration of a racialized and classed youth. We urge colleagues in our field to commit to abolition of the pipeline and of the structural conditions that make it possible.
School is a prison
Monahan & Torres 10 [Monahan, T. & Torres, R.. Schools Under Surveillance: Cultures of Control in
Public Education. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010. Project MUSE.,
https://muse.jhu.edu/.Schools Under Surveillance Torin Monahan, Rodolfo Torres Published by Rutgers
University Press Monahan, T. & Torres, R.. Schools Under Surveillance: Cultures of Control in Public
Education. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010. Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/. For
additional information about this book Access provided by The University Of Texas at Austin, General Libraries
(25 Jul 2017 19:38 GMT) https://muse.jhu.edu/book/6135 Chapter 4 Safety or Social Control? The Security
Fortification of Schools in a Capitalist Society Ronnie Casella
// narrative????//Imagine you are a young person entering a school. This may be the series of events that unfolds:
even before entering, you may be recorded by surveillance cameras that have the ability to zoom in and archive the
footage that is taken; you may be required to scan an ID card that retrieves information about you and is able to track
your whereabouts through a radio-frequency identifi cation (RFID) system; you may pass through an upright metal
detector; or have your body scanned, perhaps your face, iris, or palm, by a device that checks your biometric reading
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Session II
against a database of collected readings. Now that you have entered school, you may continue to be on surveillance
cameras during the day and have your movements monitored through the RFID chip in your ID card. And even after
you leave for the day, you may still be tracked and on surveillance cameras on the bus that takes you home . It has become
quite clear that the use of security equipment in schools is becoming more prevalent in the United States and other
countries (Smith 2003).1 In the United States, this

shift is partly a[s a] response to incidents of horrific school shootings as well as
threats of terrorism, especially when schools were identifi ed as potential terrorist sites following the 2001 attacks on
New York City and Washington, DC. This made schools eligible for homeland security grants to
purchase security equipment and to coordinate with police departments. 2 The trend to outfi t schools
with security equipment is also a way of controlling youths and, increasingly, teachers and parents (Devine 1996;
McCormick 2004). It is an example of how technology and telecommunications development in the 1990s aided the
success of businesses involved 73 74 Ro n n i e Ca s e l l a in surveillance, detection, identifi cation, and database
technologies. Judicial rulings also paved the way for security fortifi cation by establishing the legal use of random
surveillance in public places such as schools (Stefkovich 2002; Sher 1996). Add into the mix governments throughout
the world, especially in the United States and England, that pump extraordinary amounts of money into security
equipment development at research labs such as School Security Technology and Resource Center at Sandia National
Laboratories in the United States, and we see that security fortifi cation is also the result of governments that have
bankrolled the creation of the equipment (Casella 2006; Parenti 2003; Green 1999). Federal-agency fi nancial support that goes
directly to schools, including the Matching Grant Program for School Security (which provides matching grants to schools that purchase security equipment), has
made it possible for school administrators and school board members even in poor districts to purchase equipment (see H.R. 2685). Corporations that offer perks,
incentives, and pro bono installation work have had the same effect. While there is much promoting of school fortifi cation, this chapter examines one aspect of this
fortifi cation process: the selling of security equipment to schools.3 The fortifi cation of schools is primarily a business response to safety. Safety has become a
commodity that is sold by security professionals whose purpose, after all, is to make money and to create profi t for the security companies for which they work.
While we may hear that security equipment is used in order to create a safe environment or, on the other hand, for social control, these claims miss a signifi cant
aspect of school fortifi cation: that the installation of security equipment in schools is foremost a corporate transaction led not by people who can guarantee us
safety, and not by tyrants imposing social control, but rather by business people who convince us that products they have for sale will give us peace of mind. The
popularity of security devices marks a new era in school safety. To some extent school administrators have given up on violence prevention and confl ict resolution
programs. By the fi rst decade of the twenty-fi rst century it was clear that newer efforts involving school safety would focus on using security equipment. Certainly,
school shootings and terrorism spurred this movement, but the school security market has been developing since the 1970s, especially in urban school districts where
youths of color have long been policed and monitored. However, the public school system, especially when we take into account rural and suburban schools, is a
relatively new market. It is also a lucrative one. Imagine the opportunity to outfi t all public (and perhaps private) schools in the country with security equipment that
can cost several hundred thousands of dollars for initial setup and more with ongoing upgrades and service. Include in this mix day-care centers and colleges and
universities, and for international companies, schools in countries around the globe. Safety or Social Control? 75 The fortifi cation of schools is in large part the result
of the expanding international market for security equipment in public places and, more specifi - cally, the targeting of the public school sector by security businesses.
School administrators enter into deals with vendors and take away a product designed to provide safety but geared to making customers want to buy more and
better technologies as newer devices come out. This keeps the security industry flush and contributes to a kind of consumer security: people are expected to invest in
their own safety and companies are expected to provide for this social need. What we are talking about here does not involve safety, and it is not really about social
control; it is about private enterprise, the opening up of the public school market to businesses, and the success that security vendors have had in penetrating this
market. Security Technology and the Widening-Effect The two popular discoursessecurity as safety and security as controldo not really offer adequate
explanations for why we see a surge in the use of security devices in schools. To some extent, security professionals use these discourses to sell equipment; they wish
customers to know that the equipment will make them safer and that it can be used to control people and their behaviors. But their use of these discourses is always
tempered, especially as they attempt to tap into the sector of white, middle-class schools. Because their motivation is profi t, security professionals attempt to
increase the numbers of individuals using the equipment. But in order to do this, greater numbers of people have to agree to have the equipment used on them. If
security equipment were advertised and sold to schools only for its potential to control individuals, many critical people would be wary. So security professionals shy
away from discussions of how the equipment can be used to control populations or how it can be used on people or against people. They also, ironically, shy away
from the idea that security makes us safer. Security dealers can not sell safety, they can only sell equipment. They may be able to guarantee that a surveillance
camera can zoom in on a persons face from a mile away, but they cannot guarantee that this will make a place any safer. Also, security people want people who
already feel safe to buy the equipment. As one vendor for Extreme CCTV explained, You dont buy the equipment just to feel safe, you buy it because you know this
is the way of the future. What security professionals offer is cutting-edge technology that we are expected to assume will make us safer. In order to appeal to mostly
middleand upper-class individualsthis relatively new market of school offi cials and professionalsthey also offer a lifestyle image that is meant to demonstrate the
professionalism of the individual or institution using the equipment. 76 Ro n n i e Ca s e l l a Security professionals convince consumers that security equipment is a
sign of being up-to-date, professional, and even high status. In advertisements for school security equipment we do not learn much about the safety of equipment or
about its capabilities to control people; instead, we learn what it means to be part of a successful, middle-class life, which naturally includes the use of security
technologies. Fargo is a security company that markets to schools, and its advertisement for its school ID system is typical. There is no indication that the cards will
make students safer; and certainly no mention that the cards can be used to control individuals. We see, instead, a cherub-faced boy, with props (soccer ball, lunch,
books) indicating that he is the ideal student. He seems only too happy to have an image of his face affi xed to a student ID. The clever layout design also conveys the
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Session II
naturalness of having an ID card, for the boy seems to mesh easily with the card to the point where the boy and the card are one. The advertisement makes ID-ing
seem appealing not just for people who use it but also for people who have it used on them; we see, for example, that ID-ing is not just for villains, but even for our
best-looking middle-class white youths. This is how security businesses expand their market, ultimately broadening the use of the equipment to include suburban,
white, and upper-class schools, and, ultimately, even the adults in those schoolsnot by forcing it on them, but by making it so appealing that people welcome the
equipment. In another advertisement for the Fargo school ID system, we are given an image of an entirely different person: an adult superintendent who is African
American. The advertisement conveys to potential buyers that the ID card system is not just for kids, but for everybody in the school system, including the
superintendent. But although an entirely different person is portrayed, there are similarities between the two advertisements. The model playing the part of the
superintendent is cherub-faced (like the boy) and the ideal professional with his props: leather brief case, dark suit, crisp white shirt, and tie; he also wears a
wedding band, letting us know he is a family man. The purposeful use of an African American model may be Fargos attempt to market to urban school districts. But
whether urban or suburban, using a black model or a white one, Fargo attempts in both these ads to increase sales by appealing to middle-class professionals with
models that look good and present to us images of success, of wholesomeness, and of upward mobility. The two advertisements also demonstrate how the security
industry urges youths and adults alike to buy into the security fortifi cation of schools. The superintendent advertisement makes not-so-subtle reference to this as
well in the question prominently placed at the top of the page: How far do you need your photo ID system to go? It also makes reference to this in its sales
statement at the bottom of the page, stating: Safety or Social Control? 77 No matter how far you need your ID system to go, your budget goes farther with FARGO.
From simple photo ID badges to complete, one-card solutions, FARGO photo ID systems help your schools run more securely and cost-effectively. Our reliable, easy-
to-use card printers integrate with virtually any photo ID software to produce the industrys most durable cards in seconds. And, with our add-on encoding and
lamination modules, you can rest easy knowing your FARGO photo ID system is ready to go farther when you are. (Fargo 2003, 15) We can expect that teachers,
superintendentsall adultswill gladly go farther. One vendor for TempBadge told me, In the old days we would get a schoolusually a universityto start with
student ID-ing, then up it a notch to workers and teachers. Now, we just go in for the whole unit [sell a package that involves both youth and adult ID-ing]. But in
addition to expanding the use of the equipment, when the advertisement asks, How far do you need your photo ID system to go? it is also referring to the extent of
the technology. The add-on encoding and lamination modules mentioned in the Fargo advertisement, for example, will make it possible to hook up card scanners to
databases that will record information about individuals and can be used to track their whereabouts. The use of security equipment is expanding to include suburban
and rural as well as urban districts and, perhaps most signifi cantly, adults and youths alike. Consider, for example, public schools in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where
school offi cials have implemented security systems that use hand scanners to identify parents and guardians of children (Kennedy 2001). In Philadelphia, similar
technology is used on teachers, where several hundred fi nger scanners (rather than palm scanners) were installed in 2003. In schools in Plumsted Township, New
Jersey, a similar system, called T-PASS (Teacher Parent Authorization Security System), is used by teachers and by parents to gain access to schools, and in the case of
parents, to leave with their children (Uchida et al. 2004). It is logical that parents would accept the requirement that they have special ID cards and submit to fi nger
scanning to enter their childrens schools. Most adults already carry some form of ID and are used to it being requested, and as school offi cials in Philadelphia stated,
fi nger scanners are only (presumably) an updated form of the punch-in/punch-out machines that many people already use. But these assumptions neglect to
recognize how the equipment has advanced: fi nger scanners are much more high-tech than punch-in/punch-out machines, and new ID cards are quite different from
everyday identifi cation cards. New cards use technology developed by scientists who worked on President Ronald Reagans Star Wars program, 78 Ro n n i e Ca s e
l l a using global positioning systems so that authorities can track the bearers of the ID cards, get continuous information, and even know how fast individuals are
traveling (Monmonier 2002). The
Spring Independent School District in Texas, for example, equipped 28,000 ID cards with
built-in tracking devices based on radio frequency identifi cation. RFID uses a computer chip that contains a micro-antenna that transmits
information to the school district main offi ce and local police department. When students board and exit school buses they must scan their cards, and in school and
police centers an icon appears on a map showing the position of the cardholder (Richtel 2004). The technology is not newa version of it has been used by
companies to track livestock and inventory, and it is similar to the systems used to keep tabs on truckers (Parenti 2003). But the Spring Independent School District is
one of the fi rst to use it on children. It was fi rst introduced in an elementary school and promoted as a way of keeping track of little children who could get lost or
kidnapped. Other schools are also using the technology. In 2004 a school in Phoenix started using ID cards with a biometric scanning device to keep track of students
getting on and off buses. In 2003 a school in Buffalo, New York, started keeping track of attendance with microchip-equipped ID cards. When students entered the
school, they passed a scanner that registered their attendance in a main database (Richtel 2004). School surveillance cameras have also been used to document
adults, and what we see with IDs (the naturalness with which adults agree to be on the receiving end of them) we also see, for example, with cameras in school
classrooms and on school buses. Beginning in 2001, all classrooms in the Biloxi, Mississippi, school system were equipped with surveillance cameras, which school offi
cials claimed would help deter violence and vandalism and raise test scores, becoming a kind of built pedagogy of the school, integral to maintenance as well as
teaching and learning (Dillon 2003; Monahan 2005). The cameras were installed to watch over students, but they also record teachers. School bus surveillance
cameras, installed in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Texas, California, and other states, operate in a similar fashion. Once used mostly to deter vandalism and usually
mounted in school bus depots, with the advent of wireless networks in the 1980s surveillance cameras were moved inside buses in order to oversee students, and
more recent systems also include cameras focused on bus drivers. In an advertisement for Honeywells Digital Chaperone surveillance system, reference is made to
the fact that bus surveillance cameras are meant to oversee not just the students but also the drivers (Securing the Bus Ride 2003). In the advertisement, we see a
close-up of a pretty blonde girl, about seven years old, presumably waving good-bye to a parent through the window of a school bus. The advertisement tells us: Get
the coverage you require Safety or Social Control? 79 to monitor the security of your passengers, drivers, and buses with the new Digital Chaperone DDR system by
Honeywell Video Systems. Again, we see reoccurring messages: the cherub-faced white childanother image of successful middle-class living and wholesomeness
and the use of the equipment on adults (bus drivers) so that we are urged once again to understand that the equipment is for everybody. As one vendor for
Honeywell told me, We all know the bus driver has to keep his eyes on the road, and he cant be doing that if hes watching out for kids in the back who may be up
to no good or destroying property. But he also added: And there is also nothing wrong with having an extra set of eyes on the bus driver. This also protects him from
litigation, for we will have archival footage in the event that there is an investigation into some episode or tragedy. But it also lets parents and everybody else
involved know that the bus driver is doing his job, that he is on the job, and we can even call this information up on our own computers and tune in to the cameras. . .
. Because the images are digital, more can be stored with less space, so we can add more cameras, even to the outside of the school bus if we wanted, lets say, bus
stop imageswe could have detailed digitalized archives of who is picking up kids, who is at bus stops, whatever you want. This is what the Chaperone offers to our
customers. The name chaperone itself is meant to comfort people who feel that it is only logicala matter of being a good parentthat we would chaperone our
children with such devices. But the name of the Honeywell system betrays the sophistication of the device; what we are expected to purchase is more than your
everyday friendly chaperone. The Digital Chaperone DDR system uses GPS for wireless networking and real-time monitoring, can include up to four cameras per bus,
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Session II
and can be hooked up to an alarm system that can turn on the cameras for recording when the buses are not in service. Security professionals work hard to increase
their market, and they know that in order to do this in a capitalist, democratic society, they must make the products appealing to consumers. Security equipment has
become ubiquitous in the United States in the same way other technologies have: through peoples sheer will to buy the products and make them a part of their lives.
Fortifi cation occurs not only because humans want to be safer and so authorities can spyalthough these are part of it; it occurs because customers such as school
offi cials and parents have been convinced that security equipment is an invaluable part of creating a successful school. Using security equipment and having it used
on you is a sign of being forward-thinking and modern. The more high-tech the equipment, the more prestige one is liable to getit 80 Ro n n i e Ca s e l l a
represents being cutting-edge, and makes individuals such as school offi cials and institutions such as schools more competitive and appealing in a world where
technology (including security technology) is a sign of advancement. That techno-security equipment in schools is increasingly used on adults is something that could
be thought about as a widening effect. Most of the technology used in school security equipment was fi rst developed for military purposesthis is true of lasers,
micro- and nanotechnology, digitalization, computers, the Internet, and so on (Fay 1993; Petersen 2000). In the 1980s, as the technology revolution helped popularize
the devices, they were adopted by other organizations besides the military, including federal agencies (social services) and urban police departments, and fi nally by
homeowners, by city council members gentrifying downtown districts, by library administrators, and naturally by school offi cials (Nunn 2001; Scarbrough and Corbett
1992; Staples 1997). As the equipment gets used in more public contexts and across more institutions, increasing numbers of people end up using it and having it
used on them. Even within institutions, the use of the devices is likely to expand: the ID card system originally developed for students will often be expanded to
include teachers; several security cameras installed to oversee a particularly dark outside portion of a school (the far corner of a parking lot, for example) will
eventually be upgraded to include more cameras in more areas of the school. By the early twenty-fi rst century, security equipment had become integrated with
other building management systems and had therefore become a common and integral component of buildings. Surveillance cameras, for example, can be
coordinated with automatic locks, and facility management systems in schools that control lights, the thermostat, and other utilities can also control detection
devices. Increasingly, security is becoming integral to architecture and the daily business of running a facility or living ones life; it is becoming a life accessory and a
professional tool for people looking to get ahead. Security devices in schools will one day be totally integrated with offi ce, social service, and police databases,
lighting, bookkeeping, ID-ing, scheduling, and will be part of parking lots, hallways, classrooms, and the engineering of the buildings. Those who fear that schools will
become like military states have a valid case, but they sometimes forget how stylish security devices can be, and with greater technological advancements comes the
potential for equipment to be even more appealing and less intrusive. With more advanced lasers, for example, we can take readings without people even knowing it.
We can jack up the fl ow of metal detectors. A nice-looking ID card will act as a tracking and bookkeeping device and make taking attendance easier. There are no
backroom interrogations here, just people going about their day. Schools will exude security, but they will do so in a clean and quaint way. Companies are quite
capable of making surveillance Safety or Social Control? 81 cameras for schools the size of a pencil eraser so that nobody would see them. Why do we still see
cameras? Partly to deter violence, but also because they look good. Additionally, covert cameras may seem too totalitarian; better to have people see the cameras
and like what they see. When the Fargo advertisement asks How far do you need your photo ID system to go? we should take its wording seriously. The issue is not
how far do we let others go; rather, how far do we go? You want that nice house in the suburbs or that fancy apartment in the trendy neighborhoodit has a built-in
surveillance system which you end up paying for with your mortgage or rent or co-op fees. You want that cell phone? It comes with a GPS system that can be used to
locate its bearer so worried parents can keep tabs on their kidsa technology initially developed so soldiers could home in on a cell phonecarrying enemy,
sometimes for a missile strike. You want to attend a nice public school? You will fi nd it well secured, with security equipment networked into the management
system of the entire schoolyour tax dollars at work. Of course, there are times when security is put in place against our will or without us knowing about it, but the
idea that some authoritarian organization above us is setting up the equipment to keep down little people is a single-dimensional way of looking at security fortifi
cation. In some ways, security businesses must love the Big Brother story. What better way to divert attention. While the critics are clamoring about government
oppression and a surveillance society gone awry, businesspeople are trotting out their wares for thousands of willing customers. The Security Commodity Safety has
become a commodity. Items such as metal detectors and surveillance cameras are sold not so much for their protective qualities, and not just for their abilities to
control populations, but for the fact that they appeal to people and give them the boost of self-confi dence that we associate with ownership of advanced equipment.
Middle- and upper-class people invest in security, and in doing so they follow in the footsteps of other free market agents in capitalist societies who use their buying
power to acquire the newest accessories necessary to attain and give the impression of attaining a higher level of social and economic well-being. As with all
commodities, security equipment is presumed to meet a basic need, but in order to be appealing security equipment must be invested with meanings that offer more
than simple utility (Barthes 1972; Spitzer 1987). It is not enough that a surveillance camera record images in the dark or zoom in to record a car license number from a
mile away. It also has to look good, give us a sense of power, and be a symbol of upward mobility. This is how security equipment becomes prevalent in our schools:
through the concerted efforts of businesspeople to give security technology an aura that makes it appealing 82 Ro n n i e Ca s e l l a to those who already buy
technology for economic and social advancement. Along with this, government funding, the stoking of fears, and the affordability of the newer equipment also boost
business and promote the security equipmentyet none of this has anything to do with being safe. In security equipment advertisements, we see the secret to
getting a school fortifi ed: creating an image that associates security equipment with success and contentedness, equipment that is owned by good-looking,
wholesome, and successful professionals. Security professionals attempt to convince individuals that they must invest in their own security, and in time they make it
an expectation that any person of social and economic worth would welcome security equipmentnot only would they accept it, they would pay for it. For security
businesses consulting with school offi cials (as well as with real estate developers, architects, urban renewal authorities, and homeowners), fortifi cation is a way of
selling a commodity to individuals with certain lifestyle expectations, who use the equipment to feel good about their status in life. School offi cials buy the
equipment to get recognition from the community and to create an environment that is inevitably described by school offi cials and security professional alike as
advanced, cutting-edge, and high-tech, but rarely safer. Security professionals know that they do not have to convince buyers that the equipment will make
their buildings safer; they have to present images that convey to individuals that they and/or the fortifi ed buildings will have greater worth and appeal when the
equipment is utilized. If we were to ask people why security equipment has become so prevalent in the United States, we would be likely to hear the popular
discourses: by the proponents, because the equipment makes us safer, and by the critics, because the equipment is foisted on us by authorities to control and spy. As
mentioned earlier in this chapter, there is some truth in both of these assertions. But they miss a crucial point. What about the people who invest in the equipment
and welcome it in their kids schools, and even seek out circumstances (going to well-secured malls, living in gated communities) where they know they will be on the
receiving end of security? Most of these people are already safe. Whereas metal detectors were fi rst used in urban schools in the 1970s, by the early twenty-fi rst
century, suburban and middle- to upper-class schools were often the fi rst to use the most sophisticated and costly equipment, such as the T-PASS iris-scanning
system used in the schools of New Jerseys Plumsted Township; the schools are 95 percent white and the townships median household income ($61,357) is higher
than the median income in both New Jersey ($55,146) and in the United States ($41,994) (Uchida et al. 2004). Increasingly, security equipment is becoming another
accruement that upwardly mobile peoplefamily men, professionals, working womenuse Safety or Social Control? 83 to distinguish themselves. In their childrens
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Session II
schools, it is a sign of being advanced and modern. If businesspeople were just selling safety, they would not be able to sell to people who are already rather safe; and
if they were to focus on social control, they would not be able to broaden their market to include those people who are wary of such intentions. People have bought
into security and have justifi ed it not only on the basis of needs (we buy it because we need to protect ourselves), but also on the basis of free will and choice (we
buy it because we have the choice to do so). Individuals look for safety in the same way that they look for a new style, prestige, and lovethrough their buying
power. When people fret about a world overrun by security they envision a police state, robots that track our movements, cameras that watch everything we do, and
computers that contain all information about us. But if this has happenedand to some extent it haswhat has also happened is that individuals have accepted the
terms of security businesses even while fretting about a world overrun with their stuff. Security businesses have been successful tapping into urban, suburban, and
rural public school sectors. To do this, they have had to redefi ne the equipment that they sell; rather than getting clunky mechanisms of war, we are getting cutting-
edge technology and clearly articulated messages telling us that it is only natural that we would use such equipment. This is the engine for fortifi cation when the
private sector is involved; it is not imposed as much as sold. The equipments use expands across institutions (from the military to police departments to schools, for
example) and expands within institutions (from students to teachers to parents, and so on) as more people are persuaded that the equipment is essential to their
lives and to the workings of buildings and organizations. This is the business dream come true: imagine that equipment once used only by the military is now
becoming an essential element of even safe, middle-class schools. Sales representatives do not even have to demonstrate that a school is dangerous, or that the
equipment will make the school safer even if it were dangerous; all they have to do is make the equipment look good and market it as you would any other piece of
technologyby appealing to peoples sense of self-worth and their yearnings for power, prestige, and thrills. School fortifi cation occurs because it benefi ts business
and because school offi cials have been convinced that the purchasing of equipment will make the school a more desirable and effi cient place. Additionally, schools
have become more receptive to vendors in general, so to some extent technosecurity equipment is nothing more than another item in a long line of items that
businesspeople sell to schools. For the security industry, it is fortuitous that in the last two decades of the twentieth century public schools became 84 Ro n n i e Ca s
e l l a more receptive to private enterprise at the same time that security businesses began moving into the public school market. We see the inroads that private
companies have already made in schools not only in security, but in food, textbook, curricula, and other services, as well as in many voucher programs, in school
takeovers by businesses, and in the development of some charter schools (Molnar 1996 and 2005). Many writers have discussed the privatization of education, and
my point is not to recap this material but rather to point out that school security is also a part of this. The U.S. public school system is one of the last frontiers in the
free market march for privatization, something the security industry knows well. Schools are an example of how institutions are likely to fortify in technology-based
capitalist countries. Security will become integral to the boosting of a place in an open marketplace; it will be used to sell a schoolor neighborhood, or house, or
mall, or community, for that matter. Advanced security equipment brings schools into the twenty-fi rst century not only technologically but also ideologically. We
hear the same old free market story: for various reasons public offi cials cannot provide safety, or the safety they provide is inferior to what the private sector can
provide, so the private sector must step in and pick up the slack. And security businesspeople step in with gustosince the 1990s, hundreds of security businesses
focusing on schools have formed, and already-established businesses have created their own school security divisions. Salespeople who once sold only to prison offi
cials and facility managers of government buildings, warehouses, and offi ce buildings are now in touch with school facility managers. They work to convince each and
every person investing in security that we must solve our own problems, that professionals in the private sector (our own security consultants), and not our public
sectornot our police or fellow citizensare the ones who can protect us. This is really about private enterprise and the workings of capitalist societies that
inevitably turn social needs, such as safety, into commodities sold to people with the resources to afford them. Once we recognize this, we have a better grasp of
what is promoting the security fortifi cation of schools, and, therefore, what we should or should not do about it. It is almost beside the point to argue about the
benefi ts/ disadvantages of the equipment in relation to safety; no doubt the equipment can make us safer sometimes. It can also be ineffective, have unintended
consequences, or be oppressive. It is also beside the point to talk about social control when it is people with budgets behind themand often the will of taxpayers
who are paying the bill for the fortifi cation of schools to watch over their own children. Rather than argue about safety and social control, what we need to
determine is whether we want businesses to provide for all our needs. It should make us wary not that Big Brother is watching us, but that our safety comes with a
price tag.
Schools only tolerate students who follow the rules, those who dont get sent to juvie
Krueger, 10 (IMK)
(The Public of Science project at the Graduate center of the City of University of New York, New York, USA
Patricia Krueger (2010) It's not just a method! The epistemic and political work of young people's lifeworlds at
the schoolprison nexus, Race Ethnicity and Education, 13:3, 383-408, DOI: 10.1080/13613324.2010.500846
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2010.500846)
When students miss significant periods of classroom time (school suspensions have ranged anywhere
from five days to a year), and without any academic support and services during their suspension and
expulsion period, it becomes nearly impossible for students to recuperate their missed academic work.
Hence students long- term removal from school correlates with low academic achievement, grade
retention, school non-completion (dropping out), and also increases the likelihood of getting involved
with the police and the criminal justice system (The Civil Rights Project 2000; Ruglis 2009). In addition, policed and
securitized school grounds have produced strengthened use of school-based arrests to address minor
offenses such as student violations of school codes of conduct. Similar to school suspension rates, it
225
Session II
is students of color who carry the burden of this punitive and criminal justice-oriented discipline
method. For example, during 2007 and 2008 a Black student in Philadelphia was three and half times
more likely to be arrested and referred to the states Department of Juvenile Justice than a White
student (The Advancement Project 2010). Many scholars, educators and activists are arguing that there exists an
institutionalized collaboration between public schools and the juvenile justice system, and that with
the help of criminal-justice-oriented educational policies and practices, disruptive students are
systematically removed from the classroom and placed in suspension rooms, regional truancy offices,
and juvenile detention facilities. Since the early 1990s this phenomenon has gained nationwide attention and has been called the school-to- prison
pipeline (Brown 2003; Drum Major Institute for Public Policy 2005; Noguera 2003; Skiba and Knesting 2001). Nevertheless, decision makers in NYC, and advocates for zero-tolerance-driven school safety and
discipline practices continue to believe in the success these punitive approaches have for maintaining public schools safe and secure. It was in 2005 when NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that, We launched the
2
Impact School Initiative in order to put a stop to the culture of crime and disorder that was ruining the educational opportunities for our students, and the results have been promising. By increasing the number of school
safety personnel, Race Ethnicity and Education 385 386 P. Krueger strictly enforcing the Disciplinary Code and improving our management systems, we have been able to transform these schools into safer places of learning.
(New York City Office of the Mayor 2005) To this day there is no proof that strengthened school safety practices and security technologies have created safer learning environments in U.S. public schools. However, it is with
this top-down ideology that the disproportionate implementation of school safety practices further perpetuates ongoing social inequalities and institutionalized racism in the lives of under-served youth. And worse, they
student deficit model by placing the weight of academic underachievement and at risk
operate from a
behavior on students and their communities without taking into account the extent to which larger
social structures of schooling strengthen ongoing social disparities within urban school space and
place.
Zero-Tolerance Polices increase school safety measures, Penalizing School safety is

disproportionally racialized and gendered resulting in increased suspensions for
African American, Latino and LGBTQIA youth. Which can lead to getting involved with
the criminal justice system.
Krueger, 10 (IMK)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2010.500846)
turn to the news to help me open this article. At the moment of conceiving the lines that occupy these pages, multiple news channels remind us about the violent
shootings at a Colorado high school in Columbine exactly 11 years ago on April 20, 1999. To this day, the images of this shocking incident that took the lives of 12
students and one teacher remain vivid in the publics mind and are depicted by media as one of the most violent events to take place on the grounds of a U.S. public
school. While the eleventh anniversary of the Columbine fatalities triggers both disbelief at the great human loss and rage against a failed suburban school safety
system that should have been able to prevent the horrifying events of that day, many schools districts and city administrators in this country have since then been
placing school safety as a top-notch priority for public schools, particularly in urban areas. The events in Columbine as well as the more recent
attacks on the U.S. globalized corporate financial headquarters in New York City on September 11 in 2001 have contributed
to heightened safety and surveillance procedures in public schools across the nation and spurred the development of
surveillance technology into an exception- ally lucrative industry that reshaped public schools into techno-fortifications
(Casella 2006). In 2004 the U.S. federal government spent 60 million dollars on hiring police personnel to work in schools and 19.5 million dollars on school safety
equipment (New York Civil Liberties Union 2007). At that same time in New York City (NYC), the Department of Education (DOE) and City Council approved the
installation of security cameras in every public school, and consequently 155 of the 1300 city schools began with their installations (NYC Department of Education
2004). The New York-based Sentry Technology Corporation reported that 5 to 10% of its 30 million dollars in annual sales of closed-circuit television sets come from
schools. The cameras, which can be expensive, range from 1600 to 20,000 dollars, and can cost approximately 75,000 dollars per school to install (Mukherjee 2007). Of
the 1300 public schools in NYC, 155 began with their immediate installation. Nonetheless, the total number of current schools with surveillance cameras remains to be
reported (Winston 2007). In addition to surveillance cameras, public schools in urban areas
are also relying more on metal
detectors and the presence of police officers to securitize school grounds. Ever since the introduction of zero tolerance policies in
the 1980s to apply a punitive method to addressing minor offenses (i.e. urinating in public or sleeping in public space), many
urban school districts adopted this top-down approach by dele- gating school safety-related issues to be under mayoral
control. In 1998, NYC school safety was handed over to the mayor and the New York Police Department (NYPD), and NYC
public schools were rapidly equipped with heightened safety measures (policed school grounds, daily use of metal
detectors, and more surveillance cameras) to lower the rate of school-based violence. In 2006, NYC reported that 21% of middle schools
and high schools, a total of 82 schools, scanned students with permanent metal detectors on a daily basis (Winston 2007). Further, during the 20052006 school year
there were 4625 school safety agents (SSAs) and at least 200 armed police officers working on NYC public school grounds, which would make the citys safety division
226
Session II
the fifth largest police force if NYPDs safety division were its own police division (Mukherjee 2007). However, reports show that schools with metal detectors, police
officers and safety agents tend to have twice as many non-criminal incidents than schools without them (Mukherjee 2007; Sullivan 2007). This full securitization of NYC
public schools, the countrys largest public school district, has created a new school-based division of labor under which teachers are restricted to accessing student
minds via the classroom encounter, while security staff and police officers are in full charge of all safety-related decision-making and supervise and discipline student
bodies and behavior (Devine 1996). The securitization of public schools has had its collateral damage (Saltman 2000). Data
of schools that tend to
rely on student exclusion or student physical removal from the classroom as the primary discipline
strategy (Arcia 2006) have shown how penal-izing school safety and discipline measures are disproportionately racialized and
gendered. For example, only 17% of all students who attend public schools in the United States are Black; yet they account
for 32% of student suspensions (Wald and Losen 2003). According to a national study on the increased use of school suspensions and detentions between
1991 and 2005, researchers found that exclusionary school disciplinary practices were highest for Native American
(38%) and Black (35%) students (Wallace, et al. 2008). Latino students were expelled and suspended at
a frequency of 20%, and White youth received these forms of severe sanctions at the lowest rate of
15%. While the number of suspensions per Black and Latino students increased by 8% and 14%
respectively between 2002 and 2007, the number of suspensions per White student decreased by 3%
(The Advancement Project 2010). Additionally, Black and Latino males are more likely to be punished
for disruptive behaviors than White females (Ferguson 2000; Gregory, Skiba, and Noguera 2010; Skiba et al. 2002; The Advancement Project
2005; Wallace et al. 2008). More particularly, Black boys are 16 times as likely as White girls to be suspended,
detained or sent to the principals office (Gregory 1997). According to The Advancement Project (2010), during the 20062007 school year
there was no state in the United States in which Black students were not suspended more often than White students (21). Furthermore, young people who attend
schools with high numbers of students from low-income families and single-parent households are most likely to be subjected to punitive forms of school discipline
(Skiba et al. 2002). When
students miss significant periods of classroom time (school suspensions have
ranged anywhere from five days to a year), and without any academic support and services during
their suspension and expulsion period, it becomes nearly impossible for students to recuperate their
missed academic work. Hence students long- term removal from school correlates with low academic
achievement, grade retention, school non-completion (dropping out), and also increases the likelihood
of getting involved with the police and the criminal justice system (The Civil Rights Project 2000; Ruglis 2009). In addition,
policed and securitized school grounds have produced strengthened use of school-based arrests to
address minor offenses such as student violations of school codes of conduct. Similar to school
suspension rates, it is students of color who carry the burden of this punitive and criminal justice-
oriented discipline method. For example, during 2007 and 2008 a Black student in Philadelphia was
three and half times more likely to be arrested and referred to the states Department of Juvenile
Justice than a White student (The Advancement Project 2010). Many scholars, educators and activists are arguing that
there exists an institutionalized collaboration between public schools and the juvenile justice system,
and that with the help of criminal-justice-oriented educational policies and practices, disruptive
students are systematically removed from the classroom and placed in suspension rooms, regional
truancy offices, and juvenile detention facilities. Since the early 1990s this phenomenon has gained nationwide attention and has been called the school-
to- prison pipeline (Brown 2003; Drum Major Institute for Public Policy 2005; Noguera 2003; Skiba and Knesting 2001). Nevertheless, decision makers in NYC, and advocates for zero-tolerance-driven
school safety and discipline practices continue to believe in the success these punitive approaches have for maintaining public schools safe and secure. It was in 2005 when NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that, We
2
launched the Impact School Initiative in order to put a stop to the culture of crime and disorder that was ruining the educational opportunities for our students, and the results have been promising. By increasing the
number of school safety personnel, Race Ethnicity and Education 385 386 P. Krueger strictly enforcing the Disciplinary Code and improving our management systems, we have been able to transform these schools into safer
places of learning. (New York City Office of the Mayor 2005) To this day there is no proof that strengthened school safety practices and security technologies have created safer learning environments in U.S. public schools.
However, it is with this top-down ideology that the disproportionate implementation of school safety practices further perpetuates ongoing social inequalities and institutionalized racism in the lives of under-served youth.
student deficit model by placing the weight of academic underachievement and at risk
And worse, they operate from a
behavior on students and their communities without taking into account the extent to which larger
social structures of schooling strengthen ongoing social disparities within urban school space and
place.
This study took place in NYC; thus the findings and their analysis are based within a NYC context. I do not reflect on how the securitization of public school space parallels other manifestations of a U.S. globalized neoliberal
market-driven economy (i.e. commercialization of public space, formation of gated communities, etc.). In this article I argue that spaces of securitized school grounds are both a useful unit and a lens of analysis for gathering
insights to how young people experience the school prison nexus. This includes reflections on ideological designs of school space and the social values that users (i.e. students and teachers) find inside them. These often
seem to be invisible to the eye but they directly connect individuals to social inequalities in education across time and scale. For example, by drawing analytical connections between outsourced U.S. means of production on a
global scale, increased federal investment in Homeland Securitys special immigration units, and locally fortified school surveillance programs in NYC, geographer Cindi Katz encourages us to imagine a politics that maintains
the distinctness of a place while recognizing that it is connected analytically to other places along the contour lines that represent not elevation but particular relation to a process, e.g. globalizing capitalist relations of
production. (2001, 1229) Because space is profoundly connected to human relations in production, spaces of teaching and learning consequently are informed and shaped according to the larger socio-economic constellation
of globalized production processes. Additionally, I argue that the overt and covert meanings of physical space of school safety and thus their materialized social and political underpinnings are complex. However, some of the
most prominent discussions on space in education are rather limited and need expansion: that school safety is an ideological sphere to examine the social-reproduction function of schooling (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990;
Bowles and Gintis 1976; Willis 1981); an alienating unit that houses the hidden curriculum of knowledge production (Apple 1990, 2003); an analytical tool to dissect the theoretical groundings for critical pedagogy (Giroux
1983); an innovative and situated spatial- temporal setting to transport student learning beyond factual knowledge into larger social contexts (Lave and Wenger 1991); a political instrument to facilitate the internalization of
spatial design as structures of social control by dominant power relationsjik. (Foucault 1977); and a medium that either facilitates or hinders the development of individual identity formation (hooks 1990; Yon 2000).
Whether physical, social, historical, political, ideological, mental or emotional, the multi-faceted definitions and manifestations of space remain under-examined while outlining the systemic criminalization of poor and non-
White youth in public schools. I claim that space offers numerous methodological possibilities for studying young peoples perceptions and experiences with security processes, and as an epistemology, space is absolutely
227
Session II
invaluable to interrogate the physical manifestations of educational policies and practices that increasingly push poor and non-White students into the criminal justice system. My contention of the social character of space
is grounded within three interwoven manifestations of space production, or a so-called trialectics of spatiality as brought to us by critical geographers Henri Lefebvre (1991) and Edward Soja (1996). By paying attention to
how students perceive, conceive and experience their securitized public learning space, we can sharpen our understanding of how spatial re-arrangements can contribute to the educational dispossession of marginalized
youth. To document what young people are saying about metal detectors and police in schools, I applied Sojas emancipatory praxis of Thirdspace to question mainstreamed beliefs in strengthened safety measures being
3
able to create safer learningenvironments in urban schools. According to him, quality of Thirdspace is marked by: ... a knowable and unknowable, real and imagined lifeworld of experiences, emotions, events, and political
choices that is existentially shaped by the generative and problematic interplay between centers and peripheries, the abstract and concrete, the impassioned spaces of the conceptual and the lived, marked out materially
and metaphorically in spatial praxis, the transformation of (spatial) knowledge into (spatial) action in a field of unevenly developed (spatial) power. (1996, 31, emphasis in original) I adopted Sojas lifeworld to including youth
researchers race, class, and gender-specific journeys through the physical and materialized landscapes of school security and surveillance. More importantly, conceiving school spaces with heavy policing and surveillance by
way of focusing on the moving, the living, and the real, rather than the static and lifeless, was a constant reminder that this study embraced real people, real issues, and real problems, thus it embraced real, existing material
within a real given historical moment in our lives. Sojas theory of Thirdspace as lifeworld is useful to turn the focus of research agendas towards the dehumanizing and demonizing manifestations of structural inequalities
inside school space. With this analytical approach I hope to expand the meanings of how students bear witness to the systematized removal of marginalized youth from schools into the spaces of the criminal justice system.
The pages that follow are filled with background information for this study as well as an overview and some procedural descriptions of the research methods we used. I dedicate close attention to the cognitive maps of my
co-researchers as these guided many critical and in-depth conversations during our research meetings and students personal interviews. More significantly, youth researchers cognitive maps also contextualized the findings
from our city-wide youth survey. Hence cognitive maps were our most insightful research method for identifying how young people observe, think about and experience securitized school space. In addition, co-researchers
cognitive maps made vital contributions to Sojas conceptual framework of lifeworlds by adding a student-centered praxis to its manifestation. The following Race Ethnicity and Education 387
388 P. Krueger key themes represent young peoples experiences with criminalizing safety and security practices in urban schools: Schools on lockdown: creating spatial enclosures, SSA favoritism (school safety agents
preferential treatment of students), Metal detectors make me feel safe (students contradicting perceptions of metal detectors), and Internalizing formulas of discipline to maintain the status quo to show the intimately
perceived, conceived and lived knowledge that NYC youth possess about their securitized and policed schools. To include the words of geographer Doreen Massey in our researchs collective focus on school space and
security practices in NYC public schools, I hope this space- centered examination of punitive school discipline and safety measures helps us to think of spatiality in a highly active and politically enabling manner (1992, 66).
Thus I conclude this article by encouraging educators, researchers and activists to consider the social character of space as a vital site of inquiry and activism to strengthen our epistemological and methodological vision for
building pedagogies and community- wide activism that welcome spatialized knowledges into researching and dismantling the schoolprison nexus. About this study an easily overlooked, daily and thus seemingly mundane
phenomenon such as school safety and school space as my research sites stands in the service of considering how, why and where do little, banal, everyday things really matter in the contexts in which we live and work
(Horton and Kraftl 2006, 262; original emphasis). Similar to government, religion and family, schools as institutions hold a tremendous amount of power and influence over how we perceive and explain personal achieve-
ment and attain sustainable livelihoods. Even though that shaping is marked by a history of unequal access as experienced by people of color and women in the United States, by forced access (i.e. Native Americans), or by
stratified access (i.e. working- class education for children from working-class families), school grounds and processes of schooling occupy a significant social function in a persons lifetime. Our data situated the school ground
and securitized school space as everyday geographies as experienced by students in order to participate in a knowledge production of young people as engaged and active space stakeholders who are able to alter power
relations and representations of teenagers in academic, policy and media arenas (Weller 2006, 105). In other words, their everyday lifeworlds were constituted in self-definitions of their trajectories through school space.
Prior to the implementation of all research activities, I selected the research tools for this study in order to obtain research approval from both my universitys Institutional Research Board (IRB) and the DOE. After I placed a
recruitment call to various NYC youth organizations, 10 high school students five female and five male joined me during weekly meetings for this participatory-action-research-driven (PAR) mixed-method study from
November 2007 until February 2009. PAR as both a methodology and epistemology re-situates research participants as knowing subjects and most importantly, PAR takes lived experiences as the starting point for investi-
gation, places emphasis upon the research process, and reconsiders the value of research as a vehicle for social change (Cahill 2004, 3). In other words, in PAR theory, method, and question are revisited and matched
continuously with the lives, talents, and skills of co-researchers (Cammarota and Fine 2009). All youth researchers in this research collaborative identified their schools as learning sites that used school safety mechanisms and
security technology, namely police officers, safety guards, surveillance cameras and metal detectors. Youth researchers attended six different NYC public high schools in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. Moreover, half of
them attended some of the newly created small high schools and others came from the citys larger comprehensive high schools (some of which have received additional city funding to decrease their numbers of violent
incidents, meaning, they are operating with an intensified number of school safety agents). Collectively, the group of youth co-researchers identified as multilin- gual and globally schooled, working-class, South Asian, Black
American, Caribbean, African, Latino, Native American, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning (LGBTQ), immigrant youth, spoken-word artists, community activists and youth organizers. The following
table displays a few more self-identified details about youth researchers demographical information at the time of our data collection: Table 1. Name Allemand Askia Samuel DC Scwartz Dimples Ja KD MS Piper
Starshonna Vileta Members of Students Supporting Action Awareness (SSAs). Race Ethnicity and Education Age/ Gender 18 Female 18 Male 17 Male 17 Female 18 Male 16 Male 16 Male 18 Female 16 Female 15 Female
Grade Sophomore Senior Senior Senior Senior Junior Junior Senior Sophomore Freshman Ethnicity/Nationality Egyptian South Asian Black Latina South Asian African American Latino Caribbean African
American African & Native American Youth researchers were directly involved in all the necessary steps to revise and restructure my initially conceived methods into more youth-centered research activities. This included
reworking many of the questions for our city-wide youth survey (n = 114) and youth researchers personal interviews with me (n = 10). In addition, youth researchers created visual narratives of their experiences with school
safety by drawing a floor plan of their respective high school on which they identified specific safety and security practices. Our data collection concluded with youth researchers each recording a 15-minute video narrative
(n = 10). By creating a video representation of their daily movement on school grounds, all members of the research team were able to visually access and further evaluate the different security measures as previously
examined on students cognitive maps of their schools. Even though it was I who chose and introduced youth co-researchers to theories and methods for their studies of their schools physical space, our research collective
embodied numerous fundamental PAR principles. Thus, all youth researchers as both participants and co-researchers were directly nvolved in administering our data collection, conducting data analyses, and co-facilitating
4
multiple conversations during our weekly research meetings to identify the implications our research could yield for those who are in positions of power over the citys public school system. As a research collective we
In particular, my
exercised the potential and power of collective wisdom, that people know things from their lived lives that go unseen by other modes of inquiry (The Public Science Project, pers. comm.).
co-researchers drew on their lived experience with school safety and security practices, the
disproportionate suspension rates among their Black and Latino friends, and increasingly similar rates
among their lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer peers (Linville 2009b). My co-researchers
and I concluded that socio-cultural differences of race, class, gender, and sexuality produced a fast-
track journey between public school and the criminal justice system for some students, such as poor
males of color. The written, verbal and visual narratives that youth researchers created in this study answered the following central research question: What are some visible and invisible elements of the
school-to-prison pipeline that mark the learning environment in some of NYCs public high schools? While all our data types offer detailed responses to this question, it is especially the findings from youth researchers
cognitive maps that provided us with unique insights to the specific physical and thus visible manifestations of how practices of school safety and surveillance may be strengthening educational policies that systematically
dispossess youth in urban schools (Giroux 1999; Leonardo and Hunter 2007). Youth researchers each created a floor plan of their respective high school and on which they named all the different places within the physical
space of their schools, including specific locations and frequencies of safety practices and measures. At the end they drew an arrowed line to indicate their daily movement through the outlined school space. Students
decided to use different colors and shapes (circles, squares and rectangles) to differentiate between specific location and frequency of safety measures. Collectively, youth researchers created the following set of map keys to
document these two categories: Table 2. Map keys for analysis of surveillance maps. Mobile SSA (unarmed) = dark and shaded circle Permanent SSA (unarmed) = dark and shaded square NYPD officer (armed) = light circle
outlined with darker color Permanent SSAs = shaded square Metal detector = big and dark L-shape figure Surveillance camera = lightly shaded circle NYPD office/security office = specifically outlined places (appear as
box shapes) We cross-examined and compared all 10 maps to create a list of emerging themes. In the middle of this process we decided to call our spatialized analyses surveillance maps instead of cognitive maps or floor
plans. We learned that with this type of young peoples visual narrative of space we were able to shift away from a dominant discourse that has focused on how student disruptive behavior is representative of the neighbor-
hoods in which they reside to explain the need for intensified school safety and security practices in schools (Devine 1996). With our student-directed space maps we turned the gaze of school surveillance away from student
bodies and onto space in order to not further perpetuate a deficit-heavy and blaming-the-victim standpoint. For example, on their maps, youth co-researchers interrogated school space to distinguish between spaces and
places they used by obligation (according to individual class schedule) and the areas of choice (where they preferred to hang out with friends and teachers) during the school day. Furthermore, co-researchers applied their
inquisitive eyes and minds to displaying their detailed knowledge of space distribution and social functions of particular places (i.e. which hallways and staircases are connected to particular offices and classrooms, and how a
heavy presence of police officers and metal detectors can impact a change in personal attitudes towards wanting to enter the school building). In summary, our maps exhibit young peoples profound knowledge about the
different elements that compose the physical landscape of their schools. Finally, with our surveillance maps we examined the possibility of criminal-justice-oriented educational policies influencing the decisions students
make around what place and space they use in school. We created taxonomies to list and compare the particular security measures in the six schools that youth researchers attended. We learned quickly that there was not a
city-wide safety and security protocol. For example, only three schools operated with metal detectors. All detectors were located immediately within student entrance areas. In addition, youth researchers from four different
schools identified surveillance cameras on school grounds, including surveillance cameras that were installed in front of both the boys and girls locker rooms, as well as one camera in front of the girls bathroom only. Youth
researchers also reflected on the four schools where safety personnel worked with search tables within their main entrance areas; youth researchers named these pet down tables or frisking tables. One youth researcher
counted 13 different armed NYPD officers at the end of the day right in front of the school building. There was only one other school that operated with four armed police officers. All schools had mobile SSAs that patrolled
multiple areas, such as the extreme ends of hallways, corners, in front of security offices, in front of classrooms, staircases, cafeteria, suspension rooms, in front of locker rooms, elevators, emergency exits and roof-top
access. The locations of permanently installed SSAs included any of the aforementioned places. Within the field of geography, our research tool of creating surveillance maps is more widely known as place mapping, as
they visually represented individual and group experiences (Travlou et al. 2008). According to human geographers, Place mapping (re)constructs the dynamic relationship of young people with their physical context and
neither our discussions during our weekly research meetings nor any of the personal interviews would have been able to build this multi-layered interface of space that framed the encounters between the people and space.
We did not require our maps to be drawn to scale and were instead more interested in the ideas and the ways in which youth acknowledged and conceptualized school safety. Although place mapping is commonly depicted
as static representations of the real world (Travlou et al. 2008, 320), our surveillance mapping added under-represented and youth-centered visual- izations of space production and spatialized manifestations of school
safety procedures. In other words, by displaying their expertise in school space, young people expanded on the work of urban planners by adding the lived character of securitized space.
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Increased School Security creates spatial confinement, in order to control students
behavior and movement
Krueger, 10 (IMK)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2010.500846)
school security measures collide with the fundamental social characteristic of space in
One of our primary findings speaks to how
that they treat space as a container; empty and disconnected from historical contexts. Additionally, security
staff and surveillance cameras are primarily set up to control and contain flows of movement. By borrowing
language from scholar activists from the global prison abolition movement, I framed some of our data to explain that space for public education in NYC is increasingly placed on lockdown. According to Julia Sudbury (2005),
lockdown is a term commonly used by prison movement activists to refer to the repressive
confinement of human beings as punishment for deviating from normative behaviors (xii). NYC schools follow the
ideological lineage of lockdown in that the bodies of SSAs and surveillance cameras are commonly
placed at all points of entry and exit, including doors, windows, staircases and access to roof tops. Even
though youth researchers schools implemented differing levels of safety practices, their surveillance maps captured both themes of spatial confinement
and lockdown as spatial tactics to control student behavior and movement. I selected 2 of our 10 surveillance maps to show how Figure
1. Surveillance map of KD. students daily journeys through school space speak back to this idea of school lockdown. The first map was designed by KD, a 16-year-old African American male who attended a high school in
Manhattan. KDs surveillance map is divided into quadrants to represent the four different floors of his school that he used on a daily basis. The thick and arrowed line indicates his movement during the school day, while the
lightly shaded circles point to the bright areas inside the building. The bottom right quadrant is a representation of his schools first floor, including the main entrance, the security desk, a security office, a large area for all
student lockers, the computer lab and a large set of doors that leads to the schools main staircase. After identifying the specific locations of small dark and shaded circles and squares, his map taught us that permanent and
mobile SSAs were stationed at central locations throughout his school. Three SSAs worked at the main entrance; two by the security desk, one stood right in front of the emergency exit, while four overlooked the larger area
between the security office and the doors leading to the main staircase. Additional floors on his map, such as the depicted sixth floor in the top right quadrant further illustrate the placement of security personnel in front of
or next to stairway doors, throughout the central hallway, in corners from where they could oversee most of the floors area, and in front of the elevator. More insights to securitized school space come from Allemands
surveillance map, an 18-year-old Egyptian female who was a sophomore during the time of our study and attended a small high school in the Bronx. Her map depicts more intensified school security along multiple central
points that provide or prevent exit and access to the building. Unlike KDs map, her school ground operates with armed police officers and surveillance cameras. Her surveillance map provided us with vital information about
the simultaneous use of multiple security measures on the first floor. She used three floors during her school day and included them all on one page. The light and arrowed line that curves throughout her schools space
represents her daily movement. The main entrance is located in the bottom right corner. She explained to us that the main entrance is an emotionally charged place for her due to various reasons: five armed NYPD officers
worked nearby the metal detector next to the search table and inside the adjacent security office. In addition, six SSAs usually stood immediately next to the police officers. Allemand described her security-heavy school
entrance as this area makes me angry. We derived that her feelings were based on the dispositions and behavior of security personnel towards students, as her map also indicated that one police officer whom she knew by
first name is not nice, and one SSA had an attitude. There was only one SSA among security staff whom she identified as nice. Her map also made reference to the regular sounds of the metal detector as indicated by the
written toot-toot next to it. Allemand climbed stairs to the third floor where her classrooms were located. Both the auditorium and the hallway of the third floor were heavily equipped with surveillance cameras as
indicated by the lightly shaded circles. Six SSAs worked in the main corners of this particular hallway. In addition, her schools cafeteria occupied a large space in the basement. Two SSAs supervised its interior with the help of
five surveillance cameras that were installed in all four corners with an additional one in the center space. Students could leave school grounds from the cafeteria. Five armed NYPD officers supervised the area in front of the
designated exit door. We also noticed the 13 SSAs who surveilled the outside space surrounding her school building. These maps offer detailed insights to strictly controlled central entry and exit points in two different NYC
schools. Both first floors were equipped with SSAs Race Ethnicity and Education 393 394 P. Krueger Figure 2. Surveillance map of 18 year-old Allemand. predominantly worked within areas that lead to main hallways and
staircases. The lobby areas were especially equipped with fortified security technologies as they most often functioned as interfaces from where all security decisions were made to control student movement and activities in
all remaining spaces. One co-researcher provided me with a brief insight into this during his interview: Author: Do you think that your schools safety practices influence all the physical spaces of your school? MS: The lobby,
thats it. Author: How so? MS: Because its the main floor. Thats always the main thing they control. It seems that main entrance areas on the first floor of school buildings play a significant role in orchestrating and
overseeing the safety practices and procedures for the entire school building. Moreover, and as surveillance maps show, safety measures concentrate on securitizing the use of doors, elevators, and staircases. This could
possibly explain why co-researchers had such difficulty with identifying each others starting and ending points of their individual journeys; none of the arrowed lines were drawn across any of the shapes or lines that
represented central entrance or exit points. As a result, their movement seemed to take place within tightly controlled spatial enclosures on school grounds. While she talked to me about the overuse of student detention at
her school, during her interview, co-researcher Vileta expressed her frustration with her school actually locking classroom doors: Vileta: We get detention way too often. Way too often. For walking in the hallway ... I dont
think you should get detention for that. If you have a legit reason to be in the hallway? No, its okay. Uh, if you dont, thats another story. And then they keep earlier in the year, they kept locking the school down for, like,
school lockdown is used to create a complete state of spatial
the whole period. Like, nobody cant leave the classroom. It seems possible that
supervision, including all physical movement that the school day requires and facilitates, such as
students individual schedules.
schools with large populations of students of color are much more likely to
The Advancement Project reported the disturbing fact that
lock their doors during the school day (2010). These sets of preemptive security measures situate youth in
urban schools as inherently misbehaving and in need of intensified discipline and control. Hille Koskela (2000) calls
this state of tightened security the gaze without eyes to connect surveillance mechanisms to relations of power and domination. The design and location of these various security measures exercise a spatialized power that
surveilles young peoples bodies and their physical movement. In other words, securitized and locked school grounds seem to be enforcing a physical state of learning that strengthens the growing power gap between the
that police officers and
surveillor and surveilled. Similar to many other urban youth who find themselves stuck with punitive school safety practices, Vileta and MS deliver an inescapable message;
safety guards on school grounds of working-class youth and non-White students apply severely
punitive safety measures which have damaging impacts on their educational opportunities. When the
learning environment of students who are mostly punished for non-criminal behavior are increasingly
turned into prison-like spaces, then the combined effects of discriminatory treatment, systemic and
institutionalized racism are particularly devastating for low-income youth and students of color. In this current
economic production of prison nation (Herivel and Wright 2003) schools increasingly feed the U.S. prison system with socially undesired populations to warehouse them as low-wage and exploitable workers. In addition,
security measures frequently produce a surplus of encounters between students and safety personnel.
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Most often these result in students not being able to reach their expected destinations as outlined by their individual class schedules. Race Ethnicity and Education 395 396 P. Krueger Students have expressed their
frustrations with being prevented from arriving to class on time. One hundred and one of the 114 students from 19 different public high schools in NYC who took our survey answered our open-ended survey question What
student encounters with SSAs, who for the most part removed students
interaction have your had with school safety? Eleven percent of all answers generated the same theme, namely
specific student responses

from non-classroom spaces, hindered youth from exiting the school building, or did not allow students to participate in classroom learning. Some
included: When I have community service, school safety makes it hard for me to go to my service site
by asking me questions because they think Im lying about going to community service. One day I went into an empty
classroom and got kicked out after being told to present my i.d. I then went to the corner room where students are allowed to be when they have no class and the same security officer came into that room and kicked me
out and then I went to my A.P. [assistant principal] he allowed me to stay in a different room, and then the same security guard attempted to kick me out but was unsuccessful because I went and got my A.P. One time I
wanted to use the bathroom and the officer wanted to suspend me because I didnt go to class. I had just finished my AP double period class. The only interaction I ever had with school safety was when they took my I.D.
and gave me detention for walking to class seconds after the late bell had rang. One security ask why I go out of school early I explain to why they dont believe me so they request a note etc for go out of school. I think
that not right cause if I dont feel good at school nobody can effort me to stay even when Im sick. Hallway blockage and preventing students from accessing specific places that are part of their learning day can be
interpreted as additional spatialized security tactics. This over-production of enclosures as discussed by Sudbury (2005) pay attention to the spaces of confinement that warehouse those who are surplus or resistant to the
new world order (xii). Students who refuse to subordinate themselves to safety procedures that severely punish students for disciplinary issues take the risk of being systematically excluded from educational opportunities
school lockdowns and hallway enclosures parallel an
that are central to building sustainable futures for themselves. I therefore suggest that
ideological mode of space production that creates physical enclaves to disproportionately exclude
poor youth and students of color who increasingly experience massive exclusion from the formal
economy (Mullings 2005, 676) of globalized neoliberal market structures.5 To illustrate this point further, in December 2009 the unemployment rate among
Black males aged 1624 reached an unsettling 34.5%. The Washington Post reported that this number is three times the rate for the general U.S. population (Haynes 2009). In summary, school security and surveillance
designs as spatial tactics are important elements in examining their impacts on students as well as on the production of youth perceptions of them. The work of Low and Lawrence-Ziga (2003) expands on the concept of
spatial tactics coined by Michel De Certeau (1984) who offered a useful definition of the relationship between power and public space: ... power is about territory and boundaries in which the weapons of the strong are
classifications, delineation and division what he calls strategies while the weak use Race Ethnicity and Education 397 furtive movement, short cuts and routes so-called tactics to contest this spatial domination. (Low
and Lawrence-Ziga 2003, 32; original emphasis) Consequently, spatial tactics
such as students exiting the school building from a door reserved for teachers only could be interpreted as a form of political
dissent by young people as they challenge power relations within the boundaries of school space. Additionally, anthropologist Setha Low (2000) explains that ideological differences create spatial boundaries in public spaces,
including school space. Low clarifies that the spatial strategies are essentially tied to larger market forces, such as the privatization of public
schools. She explains this point by giving the following example, a public space that is valued ostensibly as a place for people to sit, read, and gather becomes a way to maintain real estate values, a financial strategy
for revitalizing a declining city center, and a means of attracting new investments and venture capital. (2000, 80) The takeover of public schools by private
contractors and entities such as police departments, educational management organizations (EMO) as
currently witnessed in New Orleans, mayoral control takeover of city school districts in New York and
Chicago, and the national charter school movement that is supported by the corporate accounts of its
sponsors and funders embody this type of for-profit spatial zoning within the field of education. In
addition, a spatially rearranged and commodified school space provides a convincing materiality to be
used to educate others about school safety and security functioning as surplus-producing
mechanisms that can only operate at the expense of those who are pushed into the social margins of
society to become the next cadre of cheap and exploitable labor. Understanding securitized spaces of schools as sites of tension and contradictions
invites the presence of the theoretical concept of multivocality (Rodman 1992). The multivocality of school safety grows from the discourse of
its inhabitants, and particularly in the rhetoric it promotes (642). School space not only facilitates and
hosts social encounters between students and safety personnel; but it also is a highly orchestrated
interface, or a contact zone as explained under the theoretical framework of Marie Louise Pratt (1992)
in which a persons social and cultural background influences the ways one perceives and
experiences school safety. Even though based on a different (but yet a very similar) study of disproportionate surveillance practices in
communities of color, the rationale of surveillance as offered by John Fiske (1998) is of enormous help to show how students may be experiencing security measures
in public schools as a socializing and self-disciplining system to maintain the status quo. Fiske wrote: Video surveillance is
reaching into every corner of our cities because it can claim real social benefits that range from traffic management, through reducing drug-dealing and street crime, to counter-terrorism. But its beneficence hides an icily oppressive side; it acts as an agent of the
surveillance is useful for the

totalitarian, for the law-abiding citizens who are most subject to it have no say in its operation and no ability to influence its impact upon their daily lives. (1998, 69) His analysis of
context of surveilled public school space to illustrate how mechanisms of school security participate
in the maintenance of the status quo. According to Fiske, surveillance technology has demonstrated to be effective
and productive to identify criminal activity. However, increased surveillance of public space has also resulted
in instilling fear and intimidation in people, especially in socially marginalized and economically
disenfranchised communities. This could assuage the exploitative and violent character of security
mechanisms. In the case of school safety, I noticed the frequency and ease with which youth researchers told me about specific safety procedures that are applied to a particular disciplinary issue. For
example, youth researchers filled me in on how highly situation-specific and calculated discipline practices are to remove resisting youth: Race Ethnicity and Education 401 402 P. Krueger Starshonna: Author: Starshonna: Author: Stashonna: I remember one time, I was
in the bathroom and like, one of them [SSA] walked in there because I guess thats where some people hide out. And she was like, um, show your passes. And I you have to show me your pass and if you didnt have a pass you have to go to the auditorium. Its this
whole process where they sit you there, they take your ID and they write your name down and if you do that three times or something, you get a detention. If you do that three times during one week, during a month, during a school year, during what? I think its a
week. Because then also if you do if you get caught within the next week you get another day of detention and then three three detentions or two detentions add up to a suspension. Its really weird. Its a lot of equaling up. Formulas like that, right? Yeah.
The constant imposition of discipline codes on students may lead to students internalizing unequal
and top-down power relations that move between the binaries of the surveilled and the surveilling gaze
of school safety. The work of Foucault is useful to acknowledge the presence of the Panopticon in our data (1977); an architectural design that
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was assessed by British philosopher Jeremy Bentham as facilitating the omnipresence of surveillance throughout the spaces of
penal institutions such as schools, hospitals and prisons. According to Foucault, the major effect of the Panopticon
is to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assumes the automatic
functioning of power (1977, 201). In translating Foucaults structure of discipline and punishment into current school security practices that
criminalize students at great frequency for non-criminal behavior, young people are sustaining
constant surveillance and methods for social control throughout their school day. Their bodies and minds
internalize the disciplinary gaze of the school safety officers. Similar to the surveilling architectural structures of the eighteenth
century, centralized school security and surveillance mechanisms can shape young people into docile
bodies to be easily administered. Finally, individually internalized codes of disciplines strengthen the
administrative apparatus of surveillance in that it makes it possible to see constantly and to
recognize immediately (Foucault 1997, 200) any disruptive behavior that falls outside the (spatialized) social
formation of the Panopticon.
School Security Agents show favoritism towards to students, and Immigrants,

LGBTQIA+, Black, Latinos, trouble-makers get the brunt of this favoritism
Krueger, 10 (IMK)x
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2010.500846)
A theme that embodied and exemplified the concept of multivocality in our data was the great frequency by which the topic of favoritism emerged during our own
research meetings as well as in our survey data. More specifically, youth researchers explained to me how commonly SSAs treated students unequally and unfairly. I
noticed how emotionally charged their stories were and thus I speculated that this was a topic of utmost importance to them. The following is an excerpt from a tran-
scribed conversation between co-researchers Dimples and MS that took place during one of our research meetings: Dimples: oh, oh,oh... [her voice reflects excitement]
6
I have a story! Security guard Miss X. She is black, whatever. I dont think she likes Spanish people ... I have my scarf on. She asked me why I have my scarf on, your
not black? I said, What? What dya mean, I am not Black? [shortly before Dimples had 398 P. Krueger MS: Dimples: explained to the group that she identifies as both
Black and Spanish, given the different backgrounds of her parents]. Oh, you Spanish people wear the ... the ... head wrap like you are morenas. [She asks her co-
researchers if they know what morenas means, and explains, Thats what Spanish people callBlack people, morenas]. So I am like, I am Black, I am Spanish and Black.
7
Whatever, I am in the gym, and a Black girl with her sidekick and all, mind you, we cant have sidekicks in the gym, she is with her sidekick right in front of Miss Xs
face, and I pull out my sidekick, and she is like, no, give it to me, give it to me. I am like, that girl was just sitting there talking, yall were just talking about the fight that
happened the other day in school. She is like, yeah that girl got ragged. But when I say something, or when I take my phone to have a look at the time, she always says
something, and she wants to take my phone away [emphasis in original]. When a minute ago a Black girl was sitting in front of me with her sidekick in her hand... Can I
say something? In my school I see a lot of favoritism that goes on. ...Like they be complaining if we come to school with sneakers. In my school we use uniform. I see a
lot of people wearing colorful-ass sneakers ... mad colorful sneakers like this [points at his sneakers]. And then they want to be complaining and stuff. Like ... same
things with the phones. No lie, I wont give up my phone unless they take everybody elses phone. It is usually the young security guards ... the young, hood ragged
security guards [laughter]. The 21-year-olds that came right out of high school, that just got their certificates for eight hours and go to school. That is security guards
right there. It wont be the old people. It is the young guards that try to get involved with the teenagers. You are not a teenager anymore! You are an adult! The age
group is very close. The encounters that Dimples and MS had with SSAs reveal how at least some safety guards at each of their respective schools are inconsistent with
implementing equal safety measures with all students. Further, Dimples story touches on a safety procedure that is very unpopular among students; NYCs school
systems ban of communication devices on school grounds traces back to a policy in the late 1980s to reduce the number of in-school thefts. To this day this policy
continues to cause much discontent among students and their parents, as cellular phones remain the primary means of emergency communication between them. If
students are caught with phones on school grounds, SSAs are mandated to confiscate and return
them to students at the end of the school day. However, students have also reported numerous
incidents of SSAs failing to return phones to their owners (Mukherjee 2007). In addition to alluding to the ease with which this
particular SSA seems to interact with students, and students of color particularly (Oh, you Spanish people...), Dimples story reveal insights to the internalized
assumptions the security guard may have of how race and ethnicity is performed by different student groups. Moreover, the female SSA perceived Dimples as a Latina,
or Spanish-speaking student (by labeling Dimples to be Spanish). According to the racialized and gendered differentiation the SSA seemed to have attached to Black
and Spanish students, only Black females would cover their head with a scarf. Thus Dimples use of the scarf seemed to have caught the SSAs eyes and may have
drawn further attention to the sidekick in Dimples hands. This could be one approach to explaining why this SSA might not have asked the nearby Black female to give
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Session II
up her phone. MS shares Dimples frustration with SSAs
inconsistent implementation of safety and security procedures,
and adds by voicing how some of the SSAs at his school do not apply the same supervision to all students to ensure
that everyone follows the mandated dress code. Both co-researchers reveal that security and discipline decisions may be personal,
situational, and based on individual discretion. However, Dimples offers her own perspectives to clarify why these inconsistencies exist among SSAs. According to her, it
is the small age difference between SSAs and students, as well as the short amount of training period she believes is required to become an SSA that contribute to
8
unregulated and inconsistent school safety decisions. However, the conversation with Dimples and MS also requests the acknowledgement of various underlying
questions that the aforementioned tensions between students and SSAs raise. First, regarding the tenuous relationships among racial and ethnic groups on school
grounds, do these show that securitized school space also shapes and possibly limits the possibility for solidarity among racial and ethnic groups? We are reminded that
both students and SSAs
are placed in the position of having to function (learn and work respectively) under the dominant
ideology of zero- tolerance policies. Given this perspective, SSAs and students could be situated as being both
products and victims of the same ideological, social and political school of thought. Yet, it is unsure if
their different social roles are marked with different implications. In other words, while under-served
youth are tracked to the prison system, has the schooling of the predominantly non-White workforce
of SSAs resulted in other effects? And secondly, the work of SSAs can be compared to the labor force inside
prisons, namely correctional guards, who mostly come from working-class backgrounds. Both job types do not require a college education and pay
a salary and health benefits just enough to get by. Nonetheless, they do not suffice to improve or change ones socioeconomic class standing (Mauer
1999). Hence, both job types contribute to unchanged working conditions for the working class, as both school safety agents and correctional officers are not
provided with additional and versatile skill sets to find employment in other places. To our surprise, our survey data did not corroborate youth researchers
views on SSA favoritism. We found responses that indicated young peoples belief in SSAs fair and just treatment of students. Eighty-seven out of 114 students
answered our survey question Who do you think does not get treated fairly by school safety officers? Given the idea of favoritism built into this question, only 16.67%
of student answers identified SSA favoritism. At times, students included an explanation to their answer to showcase which
students were targeted
by SSAs favoritism, including kids that are not very talkative, the kids who have low grades, the people
who dont know the officers, people who look like from a gang, and I think students who dont sit
down and gossip with the school safety officers are treated wrongly. Their answers indicated that students could
possibly avoid SSA favoritism if they knew how to build social and mostly personal connections with
security staff.
In addition, 12.28% of all answers showed that favoritism could be related to behavioral issues. For example, answers included kids
thats always in the hallways, those who are arrogant enough to reject safety rules and students who are suspended to point out that students were responsible for
creating situations in which they are treated unfavorably. There were also a few survey answers that confirmed existing literature on the demographic information of
students who are systematically treated unfairly by security (11.4% of all answers). They explained that students
such as Immigrants, LGBTQ,
Black, Latinos, trouble-makers like myself and many other males, and I think people who are in lower class or certain
minorities carry the brunt of SSA favoritism.
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LinkSchooling
The modern day school system has been built off of institutionalized racism that has
accumulated throughout history, creating racist melancholia.
Harris and Hodge 17, (Travis T. Harris, American studies, graduate student at college of William and Mary, Daniel Whit
Hodge, Humanities and social Sciences, North Park University. They Got Me Trapped: Structural Inequality and Racism in Space and
Place Within Urban School System Design.)
Supreme Courts ruling of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 aimed to effectively end racial segregation throughout schools in America. This date has traditionally gone down as the end to
Jim Crow and the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. Conventional notions of the Civil Rights Movement mark the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as the
downfall of segregation and the end of the movement. Many scholars have recognized that this view is insuf cient in accounting for the Black freedom struggle. Sugrue (2008) states: Rather, it
was one part of a larger multifaceted battle that at it broadest included ghts for prohibition against discrimination in the workplace, the opening of housing markets, the provision of quality
education, the economic development of impoverished communities, and the untrammeled access to the consumer marketplace. The keyword linking these battles was rights (p. xvi). The
It is essential to contextualize and recognize the

story throughout American history has been the devaluation of People of Color and their resistance.
larger system of institutional racism against People of Color in which the school-to-prison pipeline is
situated in. Institutional racism consists of degrading attitudes that disenfranchises Black and Brown
racialized bodies being carried out by institutions throughout society, including but not limited to the
government, legal system, businesses, and education system. The roots of institutional racism and the beginning of Black freedom
struggle are found in slavery. Johnson (2013) reveals that foundational to Americas notion of liberty and democracy is an inherent contradiction. He shares what Thomas Jeffersons wrote
to James Madison in 1814: We should have such an Empire for Liberty as [none] has ever surveyed since the creation... No Constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for
extensive empire and self-government (Johnson 2013, p. 24). At the heart of this empire was capitalism, which he, Cox (1948) and other scholars link directly to slavery. A cheap labor force
was needed in order to work the land. Jordan (1968) contends that Englishmen justi- ed obtaining this labor force and slavery by punishment for crime and captivity in war (p. 69). Slavery
was utterly brutal for Blacks, it was under these inhumane conditions that whites begin to recognize Blacks as inferior and the self- reinforcing cycle of debasement and racialized prejudice
commenced. The Fieldses (2012) identify Blacks and whites social situation during slavery as nature which is the sense of inevitability that gradually becomes attached to a predictable,
repetitive social routine (p. 128). They go on to explain that the language used to describe nature is ideology. They state: It is the interpretation in thought of the social relations through
which they constantly create and recreate their collective being, in all the varied forms their collective being may assume: family, clan, tribe, nation, class, party, business, enterprise, church,
army, club, and so on (p. 134). An important component to the Fieldses argument is that non-slaveholding whites
could never be devalued to the place of slaves even if they were in a lower socioeconomic class
because they were free and could own land. Therefore, through the process of systematizing slavery,
including the passage of laws, increase in capital, gathering more land and scientifically placing
Blacks at the lowest position in the human race, racism was formed. Noguera (2012) and Fuentes (2011) argue that the development
of schools in the North during the eighteenth and nineteenth century were not racially motivated, rather, focused on addressing the prevailing notions of social deviance. Noguera
states this about early school designs: Whether designed to house the indigent, the insane, the sick,
or the criminally inclined, the asylum served as the model for human service institutions Fuentes describes them
as one-room schoolhouses. Noguera further elaborates on the purpose behind the design by sharing Lawrence Cremins perspective of three dominant reasons impacting public education.
They are: serve as an agent of social control, Americanize numerous European immigrants (which is
the same group Fuentes recognized as criminals), and prepare future workers for industry jobs (Noguera,
p. 12). Hahn (2003) highlights the forms of resistance to slavery in the South and Blacks ability to self-educate. Frederick Douglass famous words by his former master on slaves not being
taught to read directly point to the desire to keep Blacks uneducated. This battle persisted post slavery but after the Civil War, institutional racism fully conceptualized. Although the post-Civil
War wave of crime was committed by whites not Blacks (Blackmon 2009), Muhammad (2010) contends that a
stigma of criminality was placed on
Blacks. It was precisely this stigmatization of Blackness that perpetuated violence and disparate
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education of Blacks. He states, At its worst, the stigma of criminality was an intellectual defense of
lynching, colonial-style criminal justice practices, and genocide (Muhammad, p. 11). Blackmon (2009) further illuminates how
Black behavior became criminalized in order to have cheap workers. The comparison to the present
mass incarceration system is strikingly similar to what Blackmon described happened during the re-
enslavement of many Blacks in the South. He examined county and state records which indicated Blacks were arrested for charges such as vagrancy. The
system functioned by arresting and convicting Blacks on these ubiquitous charges. The state would
then sell them to private companies placing Blacks in involuntary servitude with the business or
entrepreneur that purchased them. In order to keep Blacks longer, the company/individual would
manufacture additional random charges. The state pro ted off of every Black person leased out.
Investors pro ted from cheap labor with high returns. Straton (1900) and Vardaman (1904) directly link
their perceived notions of Black criminality to the education of Blacks during the antebellum period.
Vardaman points to Jefferson in arguing for segregation. He states In the solution of this problem we must recognize in the very outset what
Thomas Jefferson recognized a hundred years ago and what Abraham Lincoln indorsed fty years later, that the nigger cannot live in the same country with the white man on terms of social or
Washington (1900) answered Straton

political equality (Vardaman 1904). They both believed that educating Blacks would not address deviant behavior.
and argued that education will address Black criminality. He identifes a broader notion of education
that involves familial education, religious and moral instruction, and the education of whites as well.
He states: As all classes of whites in the South become more generally educated in the broader
sense, race prejudice will be tempered and they will assist in lifting up the black man (Washington 1900, p. 221).
Hoffschwelle (2008) provides details about Rosenwald Schools, which was developed through a partnership between Washington and Juluis Rosenwald. As made clear by Washington in his
response to Straton, they believed that the school would bring new hope and con dence to the people (p. 213). Hoffschwelles examination of the Rosenwald Schools provides a depiction of
The goal was

some of the earliest schools built in the South. She explains that they were motivated to build these schools because Blacks were being taught in decrepit buildings.
to teach Blacks basic literacy and numeracy skills with agricultural and trades programs for boys and
home economics training for girls (p. 214). She explains that Samuel Smith along with his mentor and popular designer, Fletcher Dresslar
designed the schools with the most modern frame structures. The two primary principles were proper lighting and ventilation.
Despite the schools being built with the latest technology, they were still a part of the larger system of
institutional racism. We focused on the effects of institutional racism on the design of the school,
therefore we did not portray the sense of pride it offered for Blacks to come together and have a space
of their own to edify each other. Further, many other schools for Blacks were not built this way. They were vandalized by whites (p. 221), some were overcrowded
with 80 students to a room when it was designed for 40, and the industrial room contained an insuf cient amount of equipment (p. 227). Additionally, they were not built in
white racialized spaces because as one white contractor who headed the board of trustees for an
Alabama School district stated, they would be better than the white schoolhouse (p. 221). While the developmental
design of schools in the North may not have been racially persuaded, Sugrue (2008) explicates that a Jim Crow school system existed in the North. His argument is that scholars have not ade-
quately accounted for the ght for racial equality in the North. He focuses on the protests in Hillburn, New York, which led to the dismantling of legal segregation in 1943. Sugrue also mentions
that boycotts occurred in Chicago, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, and Michigan (p. 169). Although slavery terminated in the North earlier than the South, Blacks were still oppressed. After
Jordan (1968) completed his research, he made this statement It came to me as a surprise that many of
the patterns of behavior, beliefs and
emotional tensions which are well known in the twentieth century were in existence more than two
hundred years ago (p. x). Jordans revelation connects all of the characteristics of institutional racism
and school design from the eighteenth century to the present school system. Vaught (2012) illustrates the
link between Jeffersons Empire for Liberty with the current school and prison system in her
discussion about institutional racist melancholia. Vaught explains that the racist melancholic institutional narrative of school equality relies on the
precarious balancing of freedom and oppression (160). She argues that prisons and schools have an institutional grief that results from
institutional racist melancholia. Vaught identi es institutional racist melancholia as institutions addressing the irreconcilability of dominant meaning making (160).
She asserts, There is no whiteness without the story of liberty and justice. There is no whiteness without
supremacy over Blackness (p. 161). Essentially schools and prisons are supposed to educate and transform
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people but they are subjugating Black and Brown racialized bodies to a white supremacy model of
education (Watkins 2001). Alexander (2010) contends that the most recent iteration of the self- reinforcing racial caste system is mass
incarceration. She defines mass incarceration as the larger web of laws, rules policies, and customs
that control those labeled criminals both in and out of the prison. Once released, former prisoners enter a
hidden underworld of legalized discrimination and permanent social condition. Because of this
debilitating socially controlling system, these Blacks and Latino/as become a part of a social caste in
which they are held back from social mobility. The positioning of the prison-like school design within
an institutional racism framework elucidates the direct connection between the formation of the
school-to-prison pipeline and mass incarceration. Fuentes (2011) articulates that paralleled to mass incarceration, Ronald Reagan years laid the
foundation for what she calls Lockdown High (p. 17). Fuentes de nes the Lockdown High approach as schools creating a prison-like atmosphere by
focusing on unreal but perceived school violence by using metal detectors, tracking systems, and
security guards. Ronald Reagan administrations War on Drugs led to congress passing the Drug-Free School and Communities Act in 1986, which ushered in the zero
tolerance to sentencing drug offenders. Bill Clinton then cemented what Reagan started with the Safe and Drug-Free School and Communities Act, adding violence prevention funding to
the agenda of the legislation and he signed the Gun-Free Schools Act (p. 19). The legislation that Reagan and Clinton passed enabling mass incarceration was intertwined with the legislation
for the school-to-prison pipeline. Akin to the crime wave after the North American Civil War by whites, and the eventual criminalization of Blacks, there have been school shootings that
created the hysteria of school violence which were committed by white males. Fuentes provides a list of school shootings and posits that it was the killings by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold on
April 20, 1999 at Columbine High School that cemented public fears and misconceptions about school violence beyond the reach of reason (p. 22). It was also this shooting that led President
Clinton to hold a conference on school violence and investing $60 million on police of cers in schools and $12 million on the School Emergency Response to Violence (SERV) program (p.
23). While Clinton invested money into school security and corrections ($19 billion), he decreased the amount for public assistance (Alexander 2010, p. 57). President George Bush took
Clintons legislation one step further with No Child Left Behind Act (Fuentes 2011, p. 24). This required that persistently dangerous schools were identi ed and reported violent acts to the
government. This provision funded metal detectors, security guards, and drug testing and prevention (Fuentes, p. 24).
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LinkSTIs
Even politically progressive organizations trying to create STI resources end up
being oppressive and colonialist through shaming entire communities for being black
or queer or choosing to use drugs/resorting to sex work. Not only is this harmful, but
it reinforces the criminalization of minorities and erases the crisis of STIs in the PIC.
Haritaworn et al 14 (Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, Silvia Posocco. Jin Haritaworn is an Assistant
Professor in Gender, Race and Environment at the Faculty of Environmental Studies York University. Adi
Kuntsman is lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Kuntsman published extensively on queer
migration, politics and digital cultures. Silvia Posocco is the Programme Director MA Psychosocial Studies, and
Department of Psychosocial Studies Research Ethics Officer. Queer Necropolitics. Routledge, Feb 3, 2014)
Why do so many non-profit structures even those which are politically progressive resemble vertical/top down hierarchies of corporate
power? How can we create more HIV/AIDS resources in anti-oppressive and decolonial ways? Yet, the politics of racial uplift and rescue are prevalent in
the social service and risk rhetorics that dominate AIDS activism in the United States. Such rhetorics promise to overcome AIDS for black communities
through an individualizing neoliberal logic of choice and responsibility (as in the injunction to use a condom). This
forecloses a systematic
analysis of forces structuring choice and responsibility, including blame and gay shame. Centers for Disease
Control interventions that target black queer and/or trans people often unfortunately reinforce uplift ideology
through measures such as role model stories, that retell how reformed neoliberal subjects and members of high risk populations the
highest being black, queer and/or trans people and youth have come to transcend their old problematic
behaviours, sex work and drug use especially. The primary purpose of the role model stories was to model risk-reducing behaviours,
suggest solutions to risky situations, and illustrate positive outcomes of taking steps toward protecting oneself (CDC Divisions of HIV/AIDS Prevention
2007). The politics of racial uplift saturate AIDS risk rhetorics in sex negative, objectifying and abjectifying ways. Both the MSM (men having sex with
men) discourse and the dominant regime of risk categorization always already mark black people (youth, non-trans men, trans women) as vulnerable,
at risk, a statistic. We arrive again, cir - cuitously, through another vector of anti-blackness in this case the disease frame to W.E.B. Du Boiss
question, which he argued perennially confronts black people: How does it feel to be a problem? As long as we have prisons we will never have
universal health/care. Prisons exacerbate public health crises by increasing Hepatitis C and HIV on the inside and on the outside. Following release
formerly incarcerated people face dispro - portionate rates of homelessness one of the key social drivers of HIV/AIDS and joblessness. What is
the meaning of healthcare within the context of a carceral system designed to foster death, despair,
destitution and depoliticization? How can we organize healing and care for those who are incarcerated in ways
that do not further the dehumanizing and decaying capacities (body and soul) of the carceral? Carceral
healthcare stands in stark contrast to the legacy of radical health activism ranging from the detox acupuncture clinic that
the Young Lords and Black Panthers established at Lincoln Memorial Hospital in the Bronx (Pates and Riley 2012: 373) to the clinics and sickle cell
campaigns of the Black Panthers (Nelson 2011). Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore often speaks of following Andre Gorz non-
reformist reform, i.e. aiming for socio-political changes which do not ultimately reinforce carceral violence and
prison expansion. AIDS activists fighting for harm reduction services and anti-prison activists lobbying for decarceration and re-entry
services that put more resources into education than incarceration are working to create a socio-political
landscape in which the prison is not the readymade and given answer to complex social problems.
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LinkSex Ed
Sex-Education correctives to Abstinence-only relies on racialized connotations of

sexual health and innocence that vilifies Black men and pathologizes black women as
high risk populations
Fields, 05 (Jessica Fields is a Professor of Sociology. She is also Graduate Studies Coordinator in Sexuality Studies and Research Faculty at the Center for
Research and Education on Gender and Sexuality, Social Problems, Vol. 52, Issue 4, pp. 549571, ISSN 0037-7791, electronic ISSN 1533-8533. http://www.
ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm. , published May 30, 2014, DOA: 7/26/17) EL
As I discussed earlier, educators adultifying responses to African American boys misbehavior deny the boys the
protective mantle that childhood offers their Euro-American peers. Similarly, mainstream discourse and
institutions consistently deny African American girls both the troubled privilege of idealized childhood
innocence and the transitional moment of adolescence (Ferguson 2001; Roberts 1997). In the late twentieth century, unwed Euro-
American mothers became increasingly common and even accepted; their pregnancies were missteps from which they
could recover with the assistance of trusted adults and proper care services. On the other hand, social
rhetoric cast unmarried African American mothers as manifestations of an inherently corrupt sexuality
(Solinger 2000; see also Kunzel 1994). As Dorothy Roberts (2000) has argued, many continue to consider African American mothers
inherently unfit and even affirmatively harmful to their children (p. 179). The Moynihan Report (Moynihan 1965) and other culture-of-
poverty models have served as the basis for decades of research and policy that implicitly assigned responsibility for perceived social decay in the African American and larger communities to
Anti-welfare politics have increasingly linked
African American girls and women (Kaplan 1997:326; Luker 1996; Patton 1996; Rose 2003).
illegitimacy and dependency to unwed African American motherhood, assigning African American
women responsibility for the apparent weakening of conventional family structures, gender roles, and class systems
(Levenstein 2000; Males 1999; Mink 1998; Roberts 1997). Notions of vulnerable youth and children having children helped U.S. liberals shift the tone of discussions of youth sexuality in
the 1990s: while 20-60-20 cast some young people as unsalvageable, children having children evoked care for those who struggle. According to Mae Thompson, a Euro-American school
board member, young womens and girls sexual activity was a problem not because of its corrupting influence on impressionable Southern County youth but instead because pregnancies and
parenting cut childhoods short and required girls to prematurely bear the responsibilities of parenthood (interview). As Elaine Adams said, To me there is really a crisis. When you [have], you
of pregnant young
know, young ladies who are beginning to become pregnant even in the sixth grade, we are in a crisis situation (interview). Adamss image
ladies, in contrast to that of opportunistic and corrupting welfare queens, suggested that Southerns children were modest,
pure, proper girls who found themselves pregnant, apparently through no action of their own. The pregnancies and promiscuity for which others might want to punish these girls were the
missteps of ill- informed and inexperienced children. These
villains are no more than babies; as Kristin Luker has noted, Babies who
[have] babies [are] themselves victims (1996:85). Adams and her allies called on others to act not on behalf of
young women engaged in illicit sexual activity but instead on behalf of guilelessand racelessgirls.
Ironically, as abstinence-plus advocates claimed innocence for Southern County youth, they implicitly, if
unwittingly, confirmed the guilt of African Americans. At-risk may be analytically specific in epidemiological and other social research; and
educators and advocates may speak of children having children entirely because of concern for young people. How- ever, the terms have come to function without specific content.
Relying on racialized ideological codes regarding sexuality and innocence, they are heavy with
connotations in lay discussions. At-risk, for example, assumes enormous power to identify, explain,
and predict futures for young people in disadvantaged urban schools and neighborhoods (Ferguson 2001:91;
see also Males 1999). Similarly, the coded language of children having children allows liberals to talk about African
Americans and poor women . . . without mentioning race[, gender,] or class (Luker 1996:86; see also Males 1999).
Abstinence-plus advocates confirmed, in particular, the guilt of adult African American women. Abstinence-plus advocates did not address race directly. Their comments were most often race
neutral. However, in Southern County, pregnancy, poverty, and failing public schools were racialized social issues. Among Metropolitan Region counties, Southern County had a troubled
reputation and was home to the largest percentage of African Americans, Afri- can American public school students, young people living below the poverty level, and teen pregnancies (see
Tables 1, 2, and 3). In such a context, race-neutral comments could not remain neutral for long. Ultimately, this
multiracial coalition built its argument on
key myths (Rose 2003) about black womens sexuality and corresponding myths about white
innocence (Collins 2000; Jewell 1998). In particular, those promoting abstinence-plus built upon rhetoric that casts
black mothers as bad for their children. Their arguments contributed to a larger discourse about
black young people in which the focus is all too often on individual maladap- tive behavior and black
mothering as the problem rather than on the social structure (Ferguson 2001:78). Rather than confronting the
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systemic racial inequities that characterized Southern County, abstinence-plus advocates elided such inequities in their
public statements and privately explained the missteps of African American girls as a function of the
presumably economically and emotionally impoverished homes they shared with their ill-equipped
mothers. As I discuss below, their rhetoric also implicitly vilified adult African American men, who appeared in
their tales as absent fathers, sexual predators, and little else .
The affirmatives investment in sexual education programs that emphasize agency,

desire, and pleasure for students disavows the structural entanglement between
sexual (un)freedom and the carceral regime. Queer and trans incarcerated people
experience a structural vulnerability to sexual violence that renders queer sex and
pregnancy itself illegal.
Fields and Toquinto, 17 Jessica Fields is an Associate Professor of Sociology at San Francisco State
University and Senior Researcher at the Center for Research on Gender and Sexuality and Signy M Toquinto,
University of California, San Francisco, SFGH-HIV/AIDS Department (Sexuality Education in the Context
of Mass Incarceration: Interruptions and Entanglements,
Despite the cultural authority that abstinence-only education has achieved in the last 30 years (Fine and
McClelland 2006 , p. 299), a feminist, queer, and anti-racist vision of sexuality education has found a voice in
many universities, academic journals, and advocacy organizations (Marsh and Fields 2014 ). As the
contributions to this volume attest, ongoing concerns about sexually transmitted infections (STIs),
unintended pregnancies, anti-gay violence, gendered sexual assault, and the possibility of liberation
have inspired innovative thinking about sexuality education. Over the last 30 years, sexuality education
research, curricula, and programming have emerged to interrupt constraining models of abstinence-
only education and to advocate gender, racial, and sexual justice in the lives of young people. These
same years of innovative thinking have been marked for many in the United States by widening
economic inequalities, starved social welfare systems, disparities in health care and outcomes, and a
punitive War on Drugs. One striking manifestation of the stark divide between the advantaged and disadvantaged is the mass incarceration of people of color
and poor people. Th e United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. According to Th e Sentencing Project, over 700 of every 100,000 people (about 0.7 %) in
this country are in prison or jail ( 2014 ). In 2012, approximately 1 of every 35 US adults (about 3 %) was court-involvedin jail, or prison, or on probation or parole. Over half
of the men and women in prisons and jails are Black or Latina (Bonczar 2003 ). One in three Black men and one in six Latino men can expect to go to prison in their lifetimes;
one of every seventeen white men can expect the same (Th e Sentencing Project 2013 ). While men are six times as likely as women to serve time in jail or prison, over the
last 30 years the rate of increase in incarceration rates for women has been more than one-and- a-half times that for men (Bonczar 2003 ; Th e Sentencing Project 2012 ).
Transgender people, particularly transgender people of color, face considerable social and economic
discrimination and are disproportionately arrested, convicted, and incarcerated (Tarzwell 2006 ). About one in
six transgender people have been incarcerated at some point in their lives, and nearly half of Black
transgender people have been incarcerated (Grant et al. 2011 ). Communities disenfranchisement in the face
of mass incarceration reflects a broader vulnerability to a host of social and sexual inequities,
including violence and coercion, HIV and other STIs, and unintended pregnancies. Imprisoned and
court-involved cisgender and transgender women and men typically live in areas of concentrated
poverty, lack formal education and work histories, and have neither aff ordable nor safe housing (Covington
and Bloom 2007 ; Freudenberg 2002 ; Haywood et al. 2000 ; Th e Sylvia Rivera Law Project 2007 ). Many are addicted to or using drugs, and many contend with serious
mental illness (Kantor 2003 ; McClelland et al. 2002 ). Violence and discrimination often continue during their incarceration at the hands of jail deputies and others (Beck et al.
2013 ; Human Rights Watch 1996 ). Th ese histories and experiences contribute to the likelihood of criminal behavior, court involvement, and poor sexual and reproductive
health. Th ey also render sexuality education and other eff orts to interrupt these entrenched conditions all the more important. Sexuality education has long aimed to prevent
And, as state-sponsored sexuality education
poor health outcomes and promote social and moral well-being (Luker 2006 ; Moran 2000 ).
has focused on those whose health, morality, or intimate relationship seem to require some
intervention, it has often affirmed oppressive ideas about the sexual lives of youth, women, people of
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color, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI) people (Fields 2008 ; Garca 2012 ).
As we noted at the opening of this chapter (and as other chapters in this volume suggest),
contemporary feminist, queer, and anti-racist researchers and advocates have resisted the pull of this
history, claiming instead that sexuality education which emphasizes agency, desire, and pleasure has
the potential to address and perhaps even reverse social inequities and injustices (Fine 1988 ; Fine and McClelland
2006 ). Surely, then, sexuality educators have an important role to play in addressing the profound injustices marking imprisoned peoples lives. Having been
pushed out of school and other social institutions offering care and education, people caught up in the
US carceral system do not have reliable access to any version of sexuality educationlet alone one
marked by a commitment to sexual and reproductive justice . They receive sexual and reproductive
health care and education while under state surveillance; only once they become involved with the
courts are they likely to receive sexual and reproductive health education and care. The question
becomes, what meaningful and effi - cacious teaching and learning are possible within the context of
racialized and gendered mass incarceration? Below we explore the possibilities for interrupting the inequalities and injustices that thread
through sexuality education available to those most aff ected by mass incarceration, focusing throughout on the tensions between education and punishment, intervention and
liberation. While
sexuality education gained through jails, prisons, and street outreach is an opportunity to
learn and to support agentic claims to ones own sexuality, this teaching and learning is always
encumbered with the demands of the carceral institution. Sites and Experiences of Incarceration and Vulnerability We approach
incarceration as a broad experience of court involvement that spans multiple settings and institutionsprisons, jails, parole, probation, and the streets. People in state and
federal prisons have been convicted of felonies and are serving sentences of more than one year. In contrast, jails are city and county facilities with prisoner stays typically
less than a year and as brief as 24 hours. Jailed people are either awaiting trial or sentencing (often without the resources to make bail) or serving shorter terms for
misdemeanor off enses. Someone on parole has been released from jail or prison before the completion of their original sentence. Th eir freedom is contingent upon meeting
the conditions of parole; these conditions often include reporting to a parole offi cer. Probation is a sentence in lieu of a prison or jail time: as long as someone adheres to the
terms of probation (e.g. abstaining from drug use or maintaining employment), they can avoid a jail or prison term. Many people chronically entangled with the criminal justice
system are released to probation or parole to live on the streetseither homeless or unstably housed. Frequent arrests mean that many court-involved people repeatedly
[go] in and out of the court system, [spend] nights in jail or in court pens at enormous expense, and [come] back out only to face the same situation, with no lasting change or
benefi t to these people or their surrounding community (Th e Urban Justice Center 2003 , p. 3). Just as the geography of mass incarceration extends across these sites and
environments, health risk and vulnerability travel across prison, jail, release, and street involvement (Cloud et al. 2014 ). While one in ten Americans contends with a
diagnosable substance use disorder, seven in ten people in jail and half those in prison contend with substance abuse (Fazel et al. 2006 ; Karberg and James 2005 ). Rates of
mental illness are two to four times higher in prisons than in the community at large (Prins 2014 ). Violence, injuries, and suicides are common occurrences inside jails and
HIV infection remains two to
prisons. And, while these sites, like the United States more broadly, have seen a decrease in HIV infections in recent years,
seven times as prevalent among incarcerated women and men in the United States as it is in the United
States in general (Spaulding et al. 2009 ). The entanglement of vulnerability, intimacy, and risk in incarcerated
womens lives leaves them particularly susceptible to poor health. Court-involved cisgender and
transgender women endure systemic and interpersonal violence and discriminationfor example,
physical, sexual, and emotional abuse at the hands of corrections offi cers and other incarcerated
persons (Arkles 2009 ). Many women face long-term (and even permanent) separations from their families when their children are placed into the foster care system
(Hines et al. 2004 ). Pregnant incarcerated women are subject to the continued practice of shackling during
childbirth and have experienced a long history of abusive sterilization practices (Daane 2003 ; Richie 1996 , 2002 ). Th
e rate of HIV and STI infection among women in jail or prison exceeds that of men (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2011 ; Maruschak 2005 , 2012 ). Women
whose partners share a history of incarceration are more likely to report histories of STIs and coerced sex (Kim et al. 2002 ). All womens lower earning power and lowered
economic status increases their vulnerability to HIV, limits their access to health care and education, and makes it diffi cult for them to leave relationships that compromise
their well-being (Wingood and DiClemente 2000 ). Women at risk for HIV infection have high prevalence rates of intimate partner violence (Cohen et al. 2000 ); this history of
abuse suggests that these women may have limited ability to negotiate sexual concerns with their partners (Gmez and Marn 1996 ; Melendez et al. 2003 ).
Heteronormative expectations compel the separation of women and men prisonersthe assumptions
being that women and men would become sexual partners if not separated and that separation from
the desired pool of heterosexual partners represents a signifi cant punishment. Ironically, sex
segregation allows for, and even facilitates, same-sex interactions and partnershipseven as sex
segregation also pathologizes these relationships as perverse responses to deprivation. And, the same
heteronormative expectations that compel sex segregation also render healthy and freely chosen LGBTQI genders and sexualities invisible to many sexuality and HIV
The
educators, care providers, and corrections offi cerseven those committed to advocating for prisoners rights (Richie 2005 ; Zierler and Krieger 1997 ).
condemnation and prohibition of sex between people in prisons and jails suggest queer sexuality, not
sexual violence, is the problem that [detention] administrators care about eliminating (Arkles 2009 , p. 536).
This implication has acute consequences for LGBTQI prisoners, who are frequently cast as the
perpetrators and thus face, on the one hand, disproportionate discipline and isolation and, on the
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other, little help when they themselves are the victims of sexual violence (Tarzwell 2006 , p. 179). Transgender
and gender-nonconforming people also face repudiation of their gender identities, denial of health care
to which they are entitled, verbal abuse, and physical and sexual violence within prisons and jails. Most
facilities make gender classifications based on genitalianot gender identityand some facilities
segregate transgender individuals into solitary confinement or protected status simply because they
are transgender (Just Detention International 2013 ). Transgender people, convicted sex off enders, former gang members, and others share and, not surprisingly,
meet harm in this ostensibly protected space. Sexual violence and vulnerability extend across the landscape and logic of
mass incarceration . If overcrowding, extended periods of solitary confi nement, and sexual victimization at the hands of other prisoners or prison staff
characterize jails and prisons (Cloud et al. 2014 ), the street can off er respite from imprisonment and surveillance. On the streets, court-involved people may be able to
reunite with family or community and fi nd opportunities for personal autonomy. However, the street is often a site of vulnerability, violence, and marginalization. In the fi rst
two weeks following release from jail or prison, court-involved people are particularly vulnerable to homelessness and death (Weiser et al. 2009 ). Those who remain on the
street often participate in sex work, robbery, or petty theft; some sell or use illicit drugs. Th ese strategies may allow for survival, but they may also make it diffi cult to achieve
economic and social stability, cope with mental illness and substance use, and secure sexual and reproductive health. And, given the increasing criminalization of poverty and
homelessness, life on the street frequently results in subsequent incarceration.
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LinkSTEM Race-Neutrality
The School to prison pipeline criminalizes boys of color preparing students for
incarcerated life - STEMs emphasis on race-neutrality and the context neutrality that
keeps boys of color locked in a system of criminalization regardless of STEM aptitude
reproduction of criminal identities (MacLeod, Truth, & Times, 2009), it is no surprise we see criminalizing processes in schools as well. Garland

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As boys of color are consistently both formally and informally sent out of classrooms and denied use of
242
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(by
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that
the transformation of a polarized participation structure into an oppositional one (p. 97). An assumption made in this research, however, is
positioned resistance
resistance despite academic ability. McFarland (2001) disagreed that race plays a role in student resistance. McFarland
These assumptions erase the differential lived experiences
that it only undermines teacher authority and the teachers will.
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LinkSTEM Military Industrial Complex
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students.
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LinkSTEM Turns Aff
The school to prison pipeline kills the students natural curiosity for STEM education
with the constant loom of punishment.
Crouch 13 (Lori, May 17th, 2013, STEM Education and the School-to-Prison Pipeline, Education Writers
Association, http://www.ewa.org/blog-educated-reporter/stem-education-and-school-prison-pipeline) //AC
At EWAs National Seminar at Stanford University on May 2, a panel that included an investigative reporter, an
academic and an advocate looked at the issue of the school-to-prison pipeline and how to stop it. As panelist
and UCLA professor Phillip Atiba Goff put it, If you want to get people arrested, send a cop to where they are.
But the issue might be even greater than the criminalization of discipline and misbehavior. What if the
pipeline also squelches a students natural curiosity and desire to experiment, even when the
experiment turns out badly? A Florida student, Kiera Wilmot, 16, was arrested and threatened with
felony charges and expulsion for mixing toilet-bowl cleaner and aluminum foil in an 8-ounce plastic
bottle. The news created a furor among scientists and the science-education community, as the
Orlando Sentinel describes . Scientists, from a geologist to the editor of Planetary.org to a chemist,
recounted their adolescent experiments that went bang and decried the zero-tolerance policies that led to the
arrest. Kiera told officials she was practicing a science experiment, although her science teacher said it
wasnt a sanctioned exercise, according to news reports. And her story also led to a discussion on
how low-income students of color often are discouraged from exploring STEM subjects. Biologist
DNLee, who writes the popular Urban Scientist blog on Scientific American, wrote a powerful column
on how STEM education is denied to too many students before they step through the door.
Christopher Emdin, a professor at Columbia University Teachers College penned an even more blistering
piece. Even aerospace engineer Homer Hickam, famous from the movie October Sky, got into the act. He
raised enough money to send Kiera and her twin sister, Kayla, to Space Camp in Huntsville, Ala. Hickam had
his own experiences with the law: As a teen, he was arrested and accused of starting a wildfire with his rocket-
making experiments. The state attorneys office decided not to press charges against Kiera, who will have to
do some community service to have her arrest record expunged. Meanwhile, the Polk County School District
hasnt determined how far it will go to discipline her, according to the Lakeland Ledger. She is attending an
alternative school instead of her high school for the remainder of this year.
Prison industrial complex the seven million people cannot access the aff.
Thompson 13 (Heather Ann, Chapter 13: Chapter Title: Criminalizing Kids: The Overlooked Reason for
Failing Schools, Public Education Under Siege, University of Pennsylvania Press, Chapter 13, Date
Accessed 7/26/17) //AC
The nations school dropout rate reached crisis levels in 2009, and test scores posted by its poorest
public schools were also grim. According to a report in The Hill on March 10, 2010, only 70 percent of
first-year students entering Americas high schools were graduating, with a full 1.2 million students
dropping out each school year. Four months earlier, Times Detroit blog noted that in 2009 the Detroit
public school system reported math scores that were the worst in forty years of participation in the National
Assessment of Edu- cational Progress test (December 8, 2009). So great was the problem of low performing
schools by 2010 that the U.S. Department of Education set up ten regional advisory committees to collect
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information on the educational needs across the country and President Barack Obama committed $3.5 bil-
lion to fund schools that were doing particularly poorly. Politicians and policy makers offer various explanations
for the dire state of public education in America. Some blame self-interested teachers unions for abysmal
graduation rates and test scores (see Kahlenbergs chapter in this book). Others argue that deepening poverty
rates coupled with increasing racial segregation have undermined school success (see the other chapters in
this section). All have missed the proverbial elephant in the classroom, which is the extent to which
the nations public school system has been criminalized over the last forty years. More specifically,
they have failed to reckon with the devastating effect this unprecedented criminalization of educational
spaces has had on the ability of teachers to teach and students to learn. If This content downloaded from
128.62.27.73 on Mon, 24 Jul 2017 20:39:36 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 132 Heather
Ann Thompson we are truly serious about fixing our nations schools, and if we ever hope to roll back
the resegregation and ever-deepening poverty of these same institutions, we must first recognize
the enormous price public school children have paid for Americas recent embrace of the worlds
most massive and punitive penal statea vast carceral apparatus that has wed our economy, society,
and political structures to the practice of punishment in unprecedented ways. We must challenge the
view that societys interests can best be met by criminalizing the neediest citizens and the spaces in which
they live, work, and learn. * * * Although most Americans are at least vaguely aware that this nation has beefed
up its law-and-order apparatus considerably over the last five decades, few grasp what a dramatic and
destructive political and policy shift has actually occurred. Before the early 1970s, the incarceration rate was
fairly unremarkable. Indeed, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, in the
thirty-five years prior to 1970 the prison population in this country only increased by 52,249. In the subsequent
thirty-five years, however, from 1970 to 2005, it increased by a staggering 1.26 million, a far larger percentage
of the total U.S. population. While the incarceration rate of the nation as a whole rose to historic and even
shocking levels after the 1960s, as Michelle Alexander notes in her path breaking study The New Jim Crow
(2010), the rate for African Americans in particular became catastrophic. Eventually one out of every nine black
men aged twenty to thirty-four would be in prison in America. The origins of this deeply racialized crisis are
complex, but the political backlash to the civil rights momentum of the 1960s was a central cause. As
the 1960s unfolded, white fears of black agitation both implicitly and explicitly contributed to a
complete overhaul of this countrys criminal laws as well as its state and federal policies governing
punishment. In short, the more contested urban spaces became in the 1960s, and the more they erupted in
protest and outrage, the more certain were white voters that crime had become the nations most pressing
problem, that blacks were responsible for this breakdown of law and order, and that the way to deal with both
blacks and crime was to beef up the carceral state. Notably, however, at the very time the foundation of the
carceral state was first being laid, namely when the Johnson administration passed the Law This content
downloaded from 128.62.27.73 on Mon, 24 Jul 2017 20:39:36 UTC All use subject to
http://about.jstor.org/terms Criminalizing Kids 133 Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965, which earmarked
historically new levels of funding for the nations criminal justice apparatus, the nation was not experiencing a
crime wave. Indeed, the same states that were clamoring most loudly to bolster the criminal justice
system in the mid-1960s were, according to data gathered by the federal as well as state governments,
experiencing the lowest crime rate since 1910. As the 1960s wore on, though, and not coincidentally
because the federal reporting standards changed and more money was available to areas that re-
ported high crime rates, the nations crime problem seemed even graver than it was. With whites
increasingly unnerved by the civil rights unrest continuing to engulf the country, all plans to give
greater resources to police departments, pass more stringent laws, and make punishment for
breaking those laws more punitive were enthusiastically embraced. Speaking to a reporter from the
New York Times in 1964, one taxi driver bluntly articulated the white view that blacks civil rights
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desires directly undermined public safety: we have a terrific crime problem here and if you segregate
[blacks], its easier to police them (Johnson Prestige on the Line in Indiana, April 19). As the twentieth
century came to a close, policies born of white fear of urban unrest had led to the wholesale criminalization of
urban spaces of color. Thanks to a revolution in drug legislation, to the enforcement of particularly
aggressive new law-and-order policies such as Stop and Frisk, and to a simultaneous overhaul of
sentencing guidelines, by 2010 the Justice De- partment reported that more than seven million
Americans were trapped in the criminal justice systemon parole, on probation, or in prisonand
the overwhelming majority of them came from poor inner-city neighborhoods . Indeed, it mattered little
whether one came from an urban enclave of a southern state like Texas, a western state like California, or a
northeastern state like Pennsylvania; law-and-order rhetoric dominated the political landscape and scarred the
social landscape of Americas inner cities. Indeed, by 2010, states across the country were spending as much
as a billion dollars a year on myriad new anti-crime measures, leaving few resources to repair the damage
caused to Americas inner cities by this same turn to criminalization.
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LinkSTEM Model Minority Module
The origins of STEM education and cyber-technology is military expansion today

shadow research campuses, run by corporations, are used to outsource university
STEM students to build nuclear weapons
Bui 16 (Long T, faculty member in the Department of Sociology and the Program in Science and Technology
Studies at Vassar College, A Better Life? Asian Americans and the Necropolitics of Higher Education, Critical
Ethnic Studies: A Reader, Duke University Press, p161-174)//MNW
If the task of critical ethnic studies scholars is to think about the genocidal contexts and conditions that undergird our precarious lives, it is imperative to
consider the public university as more than an educational system and as a productive site for the war machine. Indeed the
first computer
networks, which helped give birth to the Internet, were linked together at ucla, a project funded by the U.S.
Defense Department, giving he to the University of California as a powerhouse and node of technological innovators, whose products of creative
innovation feed directly into the warfare state.9 For six decades the University of California held primary responsibility for
managing the nations two major research centers under the Department of Energy: Livermore and the Los
Alamos National Laboratory. Based in remote, clan- destine locales, these laboratories employ an army of researchers conducting classi ed
research and manufacturing, among other things, military arsenals under the protective cloak and aegis of national security. uc faculty helped establish
these laboratories, embedding them in the universitys high-research culture.10 For
decades the university played an illustrious role
as the primary institution of education running those top-secret sites, developing the first nuclear weapons and
atomic bombs under the Manhattan Project. While uc formally ended its ties to the laboratories in 2006, it
succeeded in the con- tractual rebid to lead the autonomous corporate entity created in the wake of this split,
called Lawrence Livermore National Security, a shrewd move that enables the hiring of uc scientists in coveted
government jobs.11 These shadow research campuses broker institutional links between the corporate, military,
and governmental networks and the university. While the University of California is no longer in charge of the production or
stor- age of nuclear weapons, it is still a central player in overseeing the maintenance of U.S. nuclear technology. At the
same time as a student movement has emerged to bring visibility to the plight of undocumented students, Janet Napolitano, the former head of the
Department of Homeland Security in charge of monitoring terrorist activities and border patrol, assumed the presidency of the uc system in 2013an
unusual choice, according to the Los Angeles Times, that brings a national-level politician to a position usually held by an academic. For uc o cials
Napolitano was a wise choice because her background could enable her to uently administer the nuclear energy and weapons labs already run by the
university.12 Before Napolitano other uc presidents were entangled in U.S. imperial projects; for example, as superintendent of tribal education in the
Philippines, David Barrows was responsible for forcibly assimilating and reforming Americas largest colony at the turn of the twentieth century. e study
of necropower in higher education necessitates not just a demilitarizing plan of action but what Sarita See calls a decolonized eye open to seeing and
unwinding the imperial structures that bind us.13 The fight for life over the machinery of death continues to make waves. Inspired by the principles of
nonviolence, the Coalition to Demilitarize, composed of community leaders and students, since 2002 has been throwing light on the crisis situation
bubbling under the veneer of intellectual work and academic enterprise. e nuclear abolitionists nd it is their responsibility to do whatever they can to
prevent the uc Regents from facilitating nuclear militarism.14 is prompted a No More Nukes in Our Name! hunger strike at uc Berkeley in 2007 during
a meeting where the regents were discussing cutbacks in employee pensions and when the United States was planning to upgrade its nuclear weaponry
The current U.S. nuclear weapons program, called the Reliable
to possibly fight North Korea and terrorism around the world.15
Replacement Warhead, hinges on ucs for-pro t business partnership model with the Bechtel Corporation and
other industrial development companies to facilitate the proposed construction of hydrogen bomb and
plutonium bomb pits (not manufactured since 1949). It is no coincidence that the reinvigorated militarization of the
country and necropoliticalization of higher education occurred at a time when the number of foreign-born
scientists working in the United States had doubled and college students from militarizing countries like China,
Japan, India, and South Korea soared. (International students account for 40 percent of all doctoral degrees in science and engineering
granted in the country.)16 Almost 70 percent of Asian PhDs in the United States earn their degrees in the life
sciences, physical sciences, and engineering, an upward trend as the hard sciences receive heavier promotion
and funding to bolster the number of potential workers able to directly enhance Americas global standing as
the most powerful nation. In the so-called post-American Asian Century, when scienti c know-how gives industrializing Asian nations a
comparative advantage in their bidding for world power against the United States, skilled Asian workers are valuable players in leveraging a new world
order. In light of all this, it behooves scholars to move away from discussing the Asian model minority myth as a false stereotype or xating on the
bamboo ceiling faced by Asian professionals in their lucrative careers and begin initiating tough conversations about the lethal costs of their labor
productivity.
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The model minority myth is a tool to create neoliberal subjects who contribute to the
academic-military-industrial complex
Bui 16 (Long T, faculty member in the Department of Sociology and the Program in Science and Technology
Studies at Vassar College, A Better Life? Asian Americans and the Necropolitics of Higher Education, Critical
Ethnic Studies: A Reader, Duke University Press, p161-174)//MNW
The University of California is slowly moving away from its historic legacy as an all-white institution (though the faculty remains overwhelmingly white
and male); now Asian students are not simply model minorities but institutional model majorities, paragons of
academic excellence and the upstanding good life offered by higher learning. The fact remains that many Asian
American students are the children of war. When I asked students in my ethnic studies class about their family background, many of
them told of their parents overcoming war and con ict to come to the states. Yet while many claimed ancestry in the former war
zones of Taiwan, Cambodia, or the Philip- pines, they disassociated their violent Asian past from their
improved Ameri- can lives. One female student put it simply, My parents left the civil war in China so I could come here to have a better life,
and that means getting a good education. This premise of public education as o ering a better life has been challenged by critical race legal scholars
such as Cheryl Harris and Devon Car- bado, who suggest that the
desire to make college more accessible to all citizens
deploys the language of progress, neutrality, and merit to mask our public educational systems massive failure
to boost social mobility and diversity in general.28 In the aftermath of Proposition 209 there remains a new racial
preference for certain minority groups (e.g., Asian Americans) able to capitalize on the universitys demands
for a diverse pool of talent targeted not because of their race but because of their skills. In this manner Asian
Americans, as a desirable or worthy minority group, are rewarded with education.29 is new preference ironically favors upwardly mobile Asian global
elites, a phenomenon that ends up negatively impacting native-born Asian Americans who need the University of California as a less expensive alterna-
tive to private schools. According to the scholar-activist Don Nakanishi, the University of California has been the major vehicle for social mobility for the
Asian-American community, which values an a ordable, high-quality public education.30 The complex relationship between Asians and Asian
Americans, which for decades has gone unnoticed due to the lumping of all Asians into one group, has now reached a turning point.
While the
number of U.S.-born Asian students in the uc system has reached critical mass and plateaued a er decades of
explosive growth, the number of foreign students from Asia has skyrocketed, particularly in the 2000s, due to increased
allotment of spaces for them over in-state residents as a means of getting more outside sources of revenue. In 2009 the administrators at the San Diego
campus reduced its number of in-state freshmen by ve hundred and lled those spots with out- of-state and international students. As a result close to two
hundred freshmen from China enrolled in the school, a twelvefold increase from just barely sixteen individuals the year before, while the number of
Asian American Cali- fornia freshmen fell by almost 30 percent.31 Asian American students must now ght against rising tuition prices and systematic e
orts to push them out from the very place they helped build into prominence.32 That the university is a conduit for life-restricting
forces and projects can be seen in a range of issues, such as the institutions ongoing diminishment of
organized labor union rights, the erosion of indigenous tribal sovereignty and land rights, the restriction of
student dissent and free speech protest on campuses, and the administrations resistance to calls for
divestment of university capital funds in corporations operating in countries with a history of human rights
abuses.33 The battle over life-and-death matters can be discerned in the balancing act between state funding for prisons and schools.
Californias governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made this obvious when he publicly stated his interest in outsourcing
the care and housing of inmates in Californias overcrowded prisons to Mexico to pay for the states insolvent
college system. He hoped to restore the University of California to its former rightful place as the number-one public school system in the world lest
it slip into obsoles- cence and face its own demise.34 Such overtures to institutional martyrdom, sacri ce, and survival gesture to what Mbembe calls the
Recognizing the necropolitical logics inherent in
state of siege characteristic of our everyday realities in late capitalist society.
such neoliberal ratio- nales serves to explain necropolitics at a broader level, which disavows certain
undesirable populations to save the most productive and privileged groups in society. As state investment in
public schools decreases every year, the ballooning funding deficit in Californias prison system siphons
precious monies and resources away from poorer schools, which in term further reduce the chances of
marginalized youth and poor communities to get a basic education. (In 2010 state funding for education was 7.5 percent of
Californias total budget, with prisons receiving 11 percent, but ten years earlier universities received close to 10 percent and only 3 percent went to the
penitentiary system.)35 The
interrelationship between state prisons and public schools is a moral crisis not addressed
by many educational advocates, who focus only on the bureaucratic problems of schooling. at the steadily gaining numbers of Asian-identi
ed students who make up more than 40 percent of the total uc undergraduate population might also speak to the growing incarceration of black, brown
and indigenous youth (as well as Paci c Islanders and South- east Asians) who make up the supermajority of the states jails and prisons is a teachable
moment that needs to be deconstructed. Left uez describes as
alone, we become blind [unaware] to what Dylan Rodrig
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the genocidal logics buttressing the push toward a multicultural liberal society.36 Schwarzeneggers wish to terminate
Californias responsibilities to its prisoners for the sake of assisting the college-bound pits those already consigned to social death against those with
better life opportunities, enabling
certain educated subjects pre- judged as having the right to life, liberty, and
happiness to receive more state entitlements and protection than criminalized people of color deemed unde-
serving in their rightlessness as nonwhite racialized subjects.37 Racialization of Asians is concealed, even though
their overrepresentation at the University of California makes them powerful cultural liaisons (or potential disruptive spies) between the American
university and Asian nations at a crucial time, when cash-strapped public universities with dwindling state nancial support seek to magnify their
outreach and partnerships in the East (e.g., ucla-National University of Singapore). Coincident
with the greater demand for more math
and science education to bolster national security, there is increasing stress at the University of California on
stem fields (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), where students of Asian descent can be found in
disproportionate numbers.38 Asian minds and bodies, perceived as easily assimilated into neoliberal and
neocolonial ideas of educational competitiveness, embody the type of modular (post) racial subjects able to fill
the globalizing necropolitical economies of a multitiered U.S. college system skewed to match the competitive
talents of graduates from Asia. is is not to suggest a direct causal relationship between the corporatization, militarization, and globalization
of the university and the enlarging of the Asian presence in college, but there exists a connection between what the research
university represents as the best and brightest and what particular racial groups appear to fit its high
standards of excellence. The boundary between Asians reliance on the life force of education and their
inadvertent contribution to the military-academic industry is a testy relationship; as the activist Helen Zia notes, Asian
Americans are part of the problem [as] collaborators in our own oppressions.39 Asians are not simply another minority easily lumped together with
other nonwhite groups, since their de facto status as an institutional model majority essentially deminori- tizes them in a state apparatus that wants to
exploit them as racialized human capital but does not consider them racially marked in some way.40 Within the blurred lines of academic life and death,
one nds that higher education can be the pathway to our salvation or to our destruction.
STEM education uses the model minority myth and controlled immigration policies to
attract better workers
Pan 15 (Jennifer, a contributor to Jacobin, Dissent, the Margins, and other publications, Beyond the Model
Minority Myth. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/07/chua-changelab-nakagawa-model-minority/,
7/14/15)//MNW
Wus book is notable in that it foregrounds the specific ways in which Asian groups actively participated in the construction of the fateful mythology, a
that model minority status was, for the most part an
piece of history heretofore largely ignored. However, Wu is also careful to note
unintended consequence that sprung from many concurrent imperatives in American life. In other words, discussing
certain Asian groups material advantages today as a type of transhistorical privilege or complicity with power rather than the result of a specific set
of immigration and domestic policies that have aligned with shifting national attitudes mystifies the mechanisms of capitalism rather than elucidating
them. To better explain the position occupied by Asians in the current hierarchy of power, more useful questions to ask might include: Which political
structures have enabled certain Asian-American communities to flourish economically, and in which instances has this occurred at the expense of other
ethnic and racial groups? How does the model minority narrative operate as part of the legacies of colonization, slavery, and immigration that have
The contemporary
shaped the racial hierarchy in the US? And how are race and class boundaries in the US currently enforced and upheld?
iteration of the model-minority stereotype was sealed into place following the 1965 Immigration and
Naturalization Act, which abolished strict national-origin quotas and instead prioritized family unification,
education, and professional skills. Sociologist Jennifer Lee whose new book The Asian American Achievement Paradox examines this
phenomenon in detail argued recently in Contexts that the Asian immigrants who enter the US are highly selected,
meaning that they are more highly educated than their ethnic counterparts who did not immigrate. According to
Lee, this hyperselectivity also means that those who are admitted to the US have the capital to create ethnic
institutions such as after-school academies and SAT prep courses that then become available to working-
class co-ethnics, boosting rates of education for the entire group. Other scholars, such as Tamara Nopper, have focused their
attention on how domestic policies, rather than immigration provisions, have aided Asian-origin groups. In an article
for Everyday Sociology, Nopper argues that numerous domestic initiatives, such as the White House
Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, have provided financial support to Asian immigrant
communities that have not been as readily available to other communities of color. As a result of both the
immigrant selection process and domestic policies, Asian Americans currently hold the highest median income
and education levels of any race today, with climbing wealth levels projected by the Federal Reserve of St. Louis to overtake those of
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to interpret this data as evidence that race has caused Asian success, or that
whites within two decades. However,
Asians have somehow accessed the spoils of white supremacy, is to elide racism and class in a way that
misunderstands how the particular racialization of Asians in America augments capitalist restructuring that
demands increasing numbers of both knowledge workers and service workers while simultaneously attempting
to press the wage floor lower for all.
Stem focus creates hyper-selectivity which replicates the model minority myth
Lee 15 (Jennifer, sociology department at the University of California, Irvine, how hyper-selectivity drives
asian americans educational outcomes, https://contexts.org/articles/fifty-years-of-new-immigration/#lee,
6/13/15)//MNW
The passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965 was a watershed moment for Asian immigration.
By replacing national origins with a system that privileged family reunification and high-skilled applicants, the
change ushered in a new stream of Asian immigrants with a markedly different profile. A century ago, Asians in the U.S.
were poorly educated, low-skilled, low-wage laborers described as undesirable immigrants full of filth and disease. Confined to crowded ethnic
enclaves, they were denied the right to citizenship and even intermarriage with citizens. Today,
Asian Americans are the most highly
educated, least residentially segregated, and the group most likely to intermarry in the country. Driving the
transformation was the change in selectivity of Asian immigration. Contemporary Asian immigrants who arrived
after 1965 are, on average, highly selected, meaning that they are more highly educated than their ethnic
counterparts who did not immigrate. Not only did the 1965 Act alter the selectivity of Asian immigrants, but it also fueled the rise in the
Asian American population. In 1970, Asians comprised only 0.7% of the U.S. population, but today they account for
nearly 6%. Asians are the fastest growing group in the country, and demographers project that, by 2050,
Asians will make up close to 10% of the population. Nationwide percentages pale in comparison to the percentage of Asian
Americans in the countrys most competitive magnet high schools and elite universities. Among the students offered admissions to
New York Citys famed Stuyvesant High School in the fall of 2014, more than 70% were Asian, 20% White, and less
than 10% Other. Asian Americans typically comprise about one-fifth of the entering classes at Ivy League
universities and, at the University of Californias flagship campus, Berkeley, they make up more than 40%.
Vexed by Asian Americans exceptional educational outcomes, some pundits have pointed to Asian culture: because Asian Americans possess the
right cultural traits and value education, they outperform their non-Asian peers, including native-born Whites. However, it is worth remembering that
Asian culture was not always hailed as exceptional; less than a century ago, Asians were described as marginal members of the human race and
unassimilable. Moreover, reducing educational outcomes to cultural traits and values is nothing more than re-framing the culture of poverty thesis into
a culture of success antithesis. Missing from the cultural values argument are two key elements: hyper-selectivity
and starting points. If we examine the three largest East Asian immigrant groups in the United States
Chinese, Vietnamese, and Koreanswe find that each is highly selected from its country of origin. More than
half (56%) of Korean immigrants have a Bachelors Degree or higher, compared to only 36% of adults in
Korea. The degree of selectivity is even greater among Vietnamese immigrants; more than one quarter (26%) have at least a Bachelors Degree,
while the comparable figure among adults in Vietnam is 5%. Chinese immigrants are the most highly selected: 51% have graduated from
college, compared to only 4% of adults in China. U.S. Chinese immigrants are more than twelve times as likely
to have graduated from college than Chinese adults who did not emigrate. Furthermore, Chinese and Korean
immigrants are more highly educated than the general U.S. population, 28% of whom have graduated from
college. This dual positive immigrant selectivity is what Min Zhou and I refer to as hyper-selectivity. The hyper-
selectivity of Chinese and Korean immigrants in the U.S. means that their 1.5- and second-generation children begin their quest to get ahead from more
favorable starting points than the children of other immigrant groups, like Mexicans, as well as native-born groups, including Whites. Hyper-
selectivity benefits all members of an immigrant group, because these groups are more likely to generate
ethnic capital, which manifests into ethnic institutions like after-school academies and SAT prep courses that
support academic achievement. The courses range in price tags (some are freely available through ethnic churches), so they are often
accessible to the children of working-class Chinese and Korean immigrant parents. Hence, the hyper-selectivity of an immigrant group
can assuage a childs poor socioeconomic status (SES) and reduce class differences within an ethnic group. In
turn, this produces stronger educational outcomes than would have been predicted based on parental SES alone. While some
pundits argue that there is something intrinsic about Asian cultural traits or values that explain their exceptional educational outcomes, this argument is
as flawed and reductive as the culture of poverty argument sociologists debunked decades ago. Instead, the change in U.S. immigration
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law half a century ago, coupled with the resulting change in selectivity of Asian immigration explain Asian
Americans educational outcomes.
Need for good workers cultivates Asian-American immigrants and the model minority
myth
Hsu 15 (Madeline, Associate Professor, Centre for Asian America Studies, The University of Texas at Austin,
US Immigration Laws and the Making of Model Minorities and Illegal Aliens,
https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-
criminologies/blog/2015/04/us-immigration, 4/7/2015)//MNW
In How Race is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts , the historian Natalia Molina observes that
[i]mmigration laws are perhaps the most powerful and effective means of constructing and reordering the social order in the United States. Construed
broadly, immigration laws serve defensive agendas, in keeping out potential threats or drains on national
resources, as well as strategic agendas that enhance foreign relations and economic competitiveness. The former
sets of priorities are generally served by exclusionary measures that identify attributes and categories of persons to be barred from entry, whereas the
latter goals tend to select or screen for the admission of advantageous individuals and groups. Because they are
understood as serving national interests, immigration laws and policies are perhaps the main area of US government
authority in which systemic inequalities are tolerated and even encouragedalthough considerable conflicts have always
complicated what national priorities are most important, how they can be protected, and the uneven impact of immigration laws and administrative
practices on different populations. Studying
Asian American populations highlights the tremendous power of immigration
laws to shape certain sectors of American society. Asian Americans, categorized by race and national origins,
were the first to face enforced immigration restriction during early US nation-building. By excluding Asians as unfit for
citizenship, the United States worked out the ideological, legal, and institutional foundations and sets of strategies justifying and implementing a
broadening array of controls. These controls were to serve an increasingly well-defined set of priorities and national protections against probable
After World War II, Asians served
problems such as the diseased, illiterate, imbeciles, those likely to become public charges, and radicals.
as templates for the determination of attributes and recruiting mechanisms that made up desirable immigrants,
chiefly defined by family connections, capacities to contribute economically, and strengthen foreign relations as
refugee admissions. These are the main criteria for entry under the 1965 Immigration Act, which has
significantly remade Asian Americans into a model minority population. Given the choice of potential
immigrants from around the world, the United States has given preferential admission to those with higher-
than-average levels of education; white-collar, professional, and technical employment; and thus household
incomes. As a predominantly foreign-born population for most of its history, and currently standing at 70
percent foreign-born, the demography of Asian Americans reveal most strikingly US economic priorities in
deciding the qualifications for legal entry.
H1B visas and STEM craze increase Asian immigration

Wildes 12 (Michael, writer for The Washington Post, Asian arrival: How STEM demand led to a massive shift
in immigration, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-small-business/asian-arrival-how-stem-demand-
led-to-a-massive-shift-in-immigration/2012/06/21/gJQAaShLtV_story.html?utm_term=.a00be62b5e61,
6/22/12)//MNW
The Pew Research Centers recent study concluding that the number of Asian immigrants moving to the United
States now exceeds the number of Latinos hardly seems surprising to me or many of my fellow immigration attorneys. My law firm,
Wildes & Weinberg P.C., which has focused exclusively on United States immigration matters for more than 50 years, has seen a dramatic uptick in the
number of our clients who are of Asian origin in the last several years, many of them of Indian, Bangladeshi, and Chinese descent. And of those,
many, if not the majority, are
highly skilled workers who meet the qualifications for H-1B professional nonimmigrant
visas. The H-1B visa is the visa that affords its holder the ability to have dual intent; that is, the holder of the
H-1B can intend to reside in the U.S. permanently by applying for lawful permanent residence, despite the
otherwise temporary nature of the visa. Nevertheless, it has become increasingly difficult for employers to sponsor their employees for H-
1B visas. This is largely due to increasingly exhaustive review of such applications by the Department of Homeland Securitys U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services (USCIS). However, there are tools in the immigration lawyers toolbox that allow us to extend the time frame for certain foreign
students to find employer-sponsored employment so as to qualify and apply for the H-1B and many Asian immigrants are taking advantage of these
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tools. The STEM Designated Degree Program gives an added advantage to foreign students who come to this
country to pursue bachelors degrees or higher studies in science, technology, engineering or math (STEM) as
F-1 nonimmigrant students. Provided they are otherwise maintaining valid status as F-1 student visa holders, full-time foreign students
studying in the U.S. are eligible for one year of post-completion work-related training (Optional Practical Training, or OPT) to obtain work authorization
and gain experience-based training in their field of endeavor with an American employer. Students who pursue a course of study in one of the STEM-
related fields are eligible for an additional 17-month period of OPT with a U.S. employer. Therefore, F-1 students who are currently pursuing a
bachelors, masters, or doctorate degree included in the STEM Designated Degree Program List, and who are currently approved for a post-completion
OPT period based on a designated STEM degree are given the added benefit of significantly more time in the U.S. in authorized on-the-job training
work. This added time helps foreign STEM students secure longer-term job offers and gain a better foothold in a career in the United States. In May, the
Department of Homeland Security significantly expanded the program to include 90 additional STEM fields of study in disciplines spanning from
archeology to zoology. According to the latest Census figures, more than 20 percent of bachelors degree holders
who earned their degrees in science and engineering fields are foreign born, with more than half of those
students coming from Asia. Of these fields, native-born students only lead their foreign-born counterparts in psychology, social sciences, and
multidisciplinary sciences. Consequently, foreign-born Asian students are able to get jobs relevant to their science and
engineering degrees. Department of Commerce studies also show that Asians are twice as likely to hold jobs
in STEM-related fields than any other group, and that one in five workers in a STEM-related field is foreign-
born, of which 63 percent comes from Asia.
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LinkTech
Technology will be used to democratize the prison through surveillance and control
technologies into ever more intimate aspects of our lives expands the state of
exception to the domestic much like the intensification of the plantation into convict
labor into the prison
Shirley 15 [neal, licits and disseminates their news and analysis across North Carolina's prison system. He
co-authored the book Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South, prisons are for
burning, Abolition and Dystopia, The Alien Issue, Jun 2015, http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-alien-
issue/struggle/a-few-notes-on-abolition-and-dystopia]
A century and a half ago, a huge social struggle was waged over the question of slavery on this continent. Slave uprisings and mass escapes were increasingly common, and
conflicts internal to the ruling class over what kinds of colonial and industrial expansion should take place added to the tension. The
American Civil War was a
product of the state intervening in this struggle, and it resulted in new regimes of bondage and control. The loophole in the 13th
amendment, which abolished slavery except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, made
this abundantly clear, and the politics of Reconstruction even more so. While occupying the former Confederacy, the Union Army itself enforced labor
contracts by which Black people were often made to work for their former masters. Former slaves were evicted from
lands they had taken over, industrial projects increased in number and scope, and the wage labor and convict lease systems favored by northern capitalists
solved the labor problem created by the absence of slavery. Bondage was not destroyed by slavery's
abolition it was democratized. Today, we witness an unprecedented renewal of the discourse of abolition, now with the idealistic gaze firmly set
This rhetorical framework, by

upon the massive prison-industrial complex that has come to define our lives, in particular those of young men of color.
which radical reforms, activism, and technological development will replace prisons and even
policing, has emerged not just in the usual mish-mash of liberal and leftist scenes, but in the very heart
of the capitalist State . Fueled by the financial collapse of 2008 and subsequent budget crises,
everyone from Democratic hopefuls to right-wing judges can be heard sounding the call: We need to
shrink prisons, move away from mass incarceration, and develop alternatives to prison. All of a
sudden, the president and his opposition all sound an awful lot like Angela Davis. The vanguard of this
political development is also a technological one: emergent technologies in population analytics,
biometrics, genetic mapping, and computing systems suddenly make prison abolition a real possibility
for 21st century state and capitalism. Take the booming technology of ankle bracelets, for example. North Carolina has
tripled the use of electronic monitors since 2011. California has placed 7,500 people on GPS ankle bracelets as part of a realignment program aimed to reduce prison
populations. SuperCom, an Israeli-based Smart ID and electronic monitor producer, announced in early July 2014 that they were jumping full force into the US market,
predicting this will be a $6 billion-a-year global industry by 2018. The praise singers of electronic monitoring are also re-surfacing. In late June 2014, high-profile blogger Dylan
Matthews posted a story on Vox Media, headlined Prisons are terrible and theres finally a way to get rid of them. He enthusiastically argued that the most promising
alternative fits on an ankle. The
techno-utopian vision here is boundless. One pair of enthusiasts even drafted a
document, Beyond the Bars, that envisions a world where advanced risk modeling, geospatial
analytics, smartphone technology, and principles from the study of human behavior allow for a
smartwatch to control the movement of entire populations. Maybe this sounds like conspiracy theorist nonsense like a scene from
Hollywood's renewed obsession with dystopian settings but think about all the developments we've already accepted into daily life that could make this totalizing reality
possible: metal detectors at public schools, drug tests at public housing, breathalyzer machines in our cars, police body cameras, mass data collection via cell phones, GPS,
halfway houses, community policing substations and permanent police checkpoints at the entrances to certain neighborhoods, city planning courses at universities, DNA
mapping...The list is pretty endless, and it doesn't take a paranoid wingnut to start to understand how prisons might actually be abolished. Instead
of prison
being a discrete, physical place, a state of exception from normal life that houses only a small
minority of the population, prison would become a nameless normality, something a plurality if not
majority of people are interacting with, in some version, every day. Like slavery, imprisonment would
not be destroyed it would be democratized. None of this goes to say that we shouldn't destroy prisons. Prison and police are the absolute
enemy of all liberatory efforts in the 21st century, by desire and necessity. But we would do well not to fall into the same limitations as did slavery's critics in the antebellum
United States. However broad its proponents may declare their concerns to be, prison abolitionism, in its name, scope, and vision, is primarily limited to reforming one aspect
of domination and oppression in this society, not destroying that form of control. And it offers the state a crucial escape route through already existent strategies and
We would do better to reject every reform and technological solution
technologies of profit, punishment, and control.
offered by the economy, confront rather than accept the gradualism of activist policy makers, and
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participate uncompromisingly in active revolt wherever it occurs. Developing our own communities of
care and solidarity as we rebel against the world around us, offers the only real alternative to prison.
As a discourse, abolition has immediate appeal, but the fruit it will most likely bear can already be seen in the reflection of a body camera or heard in the quiet beeping of an
ankle bracelet.
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LinkTemporality/Progress
The affirmatives belief in progress is a product of the states use of futurity as a

means to erase the violence that continues, ensuring that the future under the
affirmative is an extrapolation of the present continuing their impacts.
Dillon 13 (Stephan, University of Minnesota, Its here, its that time: Race, queer futurity, and the temporality
of violence in Born in Flames, Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, Vol. 23, No. 1, 3851,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2013.786277, Accessed 7/24/17) //AC
The accumulation of time and the end of the future
In one of the first lines of the film, a state newscaster covering the celebration of the revolutions
tenth anniversary says that the news program will look at the progress of the last ten years, and will
look forward to the future. 4 Progress is central to the discourses produced by the revolutionary state and is the liberal conception of time
that the Womens Army attempts to undo. Progress is named as a time that is cyclical and forcefully forgetful
(Sderbck 2012, 303). Indeed, progress, patience, and reform are the temporalities used by the state to
justify and erase the violence that continues under the names of justice, equality, and democracy.
The state describes the future as a space of safety and security in order to maintain the violence of
the present, and to temper the rage of those who refuse to wait for the futures warm embrace to
arrive . According to the state media, the Womens Army is not interested in the progress of all of us because their actions and demands contradict
the teleology of state development and reform. 5 The state declares change will come, to be patient, to trust in the progress of time. Critically, this
narrative is not just produced by the state, but also by the white feminist editors of the Socialist Youth Review. When asked about the actions of the
Womens Army, and more specifically about the continuation of sexual violence in the revolution, they respond: Well, I think statistics will show you that
the percentage of rape and prostitution at this point is lower than it was in pre-revolutionary society and that obviously its an advancement, its a step
forward. Its impossible to talk about the complete, you know, abolition [of sexual violence], because this is not the nature of this government, they dont
abolish its a question of a gradual move toward something, and I think everything is leading up to the point where those things will no longer exist. 6
white feminism aligns itself with the state through its adherence to liberal Western notions
40 S. Dillon Here,
of time and history. This is a notion of history where the passage of time washes away the violence of
then and now so that the future is free from the horrors of the past . In this way, the past is
constructed as a space of radical alterity, an aberration to the progress of the future . Sexual violence will be
left behind by the progress of the revolution. Time will temper terror. Yet, the
very ability of the editors to believe in the
progress of time is tied to the immunity of whiteness from structural forms of racial violence,
regulation, and social death. For instance, when Adelaide Norris, the black lesbian leader of the
Womens Army, goes to the editors of the Socialist Youth Review to ask for their support, their con-
versation highlights the divergent temporalities of black feminism and white feminism. When Norris
tells the editors, Youre oppressed too and its pathetic that you cant even see it! they respond,
There are problems, we know. But things are so much better than they were before . Things are not
going to happen overnight . Its important that the party remains strong so progress can be made. 7 Norriss response sutures gender and
race to a different theorization of time: You know the way my mom brought us up; there were eight of us and she took care of the domestic work all by
herself. And abortions; she couldnt even think of abortions. And daycare hmph we took care of ourselves, no one took care of us. And there are
For the
plenty of women who are living now in the same manner: Black women, Latin women, young women living in that same lifestyle. 8
editors, the future of the revolution will be free from state and non-state forms of racialized and
gendered violence because the reforms sutured to times progression will undo the horrors of the
present. But for Norris, gendered racism built into the banality of everyday life undoes the imagined
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progress of time, so that times passage is merely the modification and intensification of older modes
of subjection and subjugation. For those bearing the brunt of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy,
the past, present, and future are not distinct temporal spaces. In other words, Born in Flames documents the amplifica-
tion, modification, and protraction of the past in the present, where the past is not an isolated aberration of what is here,
b ut, rather, is an anticipation of the present and future. The past is an image of the future because the
future will be a repetition of the past. In this way, the film critiques normative notions of time and a liberal conception of history. In
Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History, Ian Baucom argues for a conception of history that undoes liberal
notions of progress, change, and time.
The future cannot be liberated from the constraints of society; there is no such thing
as progress, it is merely just repetition and intensification of the past an ontological
suture. The temporal has become a prison structured by white supremacy and
antiblackness.
Dillon 13 (Stephan, University of Minnesota, Its here, its that time: Race, queer futurity, and the temporality
of violence in Born in Flames, Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, Vol. 23, No. 1, 3851,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2013.786277, Accessed 7/24/17) //AC
According to Spillers, the
anti-blackness inaugurated under chattel slavery is a death sentence enacted
across generations, one that changes name and shape across time and space even as its continuity
endures. Yet, for Spillers, time not only accumulates, it also captures. Her conception of temporality means that time is
a form of captivity: one that makes her a marked woman (65). She is marked by a history of violence,
trauma, and terror that alters normative conceptions of temporality. In other words, anti-blackness and racial terror are
epistemological and bodily forces, but they are also temporal intensities that structure subjectivity and life chances. Baucom and Spillerss theorizations
of time as accumulation and capture have profound implications for how we understand the future. Traditionally, the future is a space
and time we do not know, a place of possibility and hope. The emptiness of the future is imagined as
a space of seamless progress: a myth of Marxist teleology; a capitalist dream; a fantasy of nationalism
and colonialism. When we imagine the future as the outcome of the passage of time, the past falls
away and the present disappears so that the future becomes relief from the devastating weight of
everything that has come before. For example, Jos Esteban Muoz argues that the way out of the
crushing weight of today is to hold on to the future because now is not enough . According to Muoz, the future
is the domain of queerness, a warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality that allows us to think then and there when here and now is not
He worries that abandoning the
enough (2009, 1). For Muoz, the call for no future is only available to those who have a future to deny.
future to a heteronormative white world will only lead to the deaths of more queer people of color. Yet,
if time does not pass but accumulates, then the future is not the triumph of a tendency inscribed in the
present. It is not the dissolution of the past or the undoing of the present. If time does not pass but accumulates, then the
future is not liberated from the constraints of yesterday, but, rather, is the place where the wreckage of
then and now lives on. When we think of time against the temporal regimes of the state, 42 S. Dillon heternormativity, the nation, and capital,
time drags, reverses, compresses, and accumulates. Engaging queerness as a force that distorts and undermines normative logics of sequence is to
know that the conditions of possibility for the atrocities of the past have not faded, but, rather, have intensified (Freeman 2010, 27). It
is to deploy
what Jasbir Puar calls an antecedent temporality where one can see, feel, and engage the ghosts
that are not yet here, but will be tomorrow and the next day and the next (Puar 2007, xx). Muoz writes that the past
tells us something about the present: It tells us that something is missing, or something is not yet here (2009, 86). Baucom and Spillers
extend this assertion by arguing that past forms of racial terror are a lesson about the present, but also
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a vision of what is to come. If time does not pass but accumulates, then the past is where the future is
anticipated, recollected, and demonstrated (Baucom 2005, 213). If there is no progress, but instead
repetition, modification, intensification, reversals, and suspensions, then we know what the future will
be. The future will be what was before . () Franz Fanons concept of historicity is instructive here. For Fanon, the past is
ontologically sutured to race so that when I discovered my blackness I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, slave-
ships, and above all else, above all: Sho good eatin (Fanon 1967, 112). For Fanon, white supremacy functions as a type of
temporal prison where black liberation is delayed and destroyed by the capacity of past traumas,
rooted in colonization and slavery, to affect, shape, and possess the present . Fanon looks to the past
of European colonization and sees a mirror of the future, an endless past/present of colonial
domination (Scott 2010, 76). In other words, white supremacy is not just a spatial technology that inhabits infrastructure and institutionality; it is
also a temporal regime that refuses to abide by the progress of the law, language, or the passage of time. As Kara Keeling writes: The past constricts
the present so that the present is simply the reappearance of the past (2007, 26). And as Isabel makes clear, state Women & Performance: a journal of
feminist theory 43 violence limits the possibilities of the present and future by binding both in a closed circuit of reverberation and magnification. When
time accumulates, it possesses, detains, and immobilizes: this is time as a form of capture. In short, Isabel knows what is coming because it has already
happened in the past that is the future that has already arrived. There
is not relief from knowing the past is gone because
the past is a warning of what is coming. Its going to happen again.
The seriation of activities inscribes a plethora of temporal segments which allows for
the investment of more power to justify detailed control and regular intervention,
assuring discipline.
Foucault 75 (Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison, Translated by Alan Sheridan, Pantheon
Books, Published in 1975, pg. 158, Date Accessed 7/24/17) //AC
Finalize these temporal segments, decide on how long each [person] will last and conclude it with an
examination , which will have the triple function of showing whether the subject has reached the level
required, of guaranteeing that each subject undergoes the same apprenticeship and of differentiating the abilities of each individual. When the
sergeants, corporals, etc. 'entrusted with the task of instructing the others, are of the opinion that a
particular soldier is ready to pass into the first class, they will present him first to the officers of their
company, who will carefully examine him; if they do not find him sufficiently practiced, they will refuse
to admit him; if, on the other hand, the man presented seems to them to be ready, the said officers will
themselves propose him to the commanding officer of the regiment, who will see him if he thinks it necessary, and will
have him examined by the senior officers. The slightest mistakes will be enough to have him rejected, and no one will be
able to pass from the second class to the first until he has undergone this first examination' (Instruction par !'exercise de l'infonterie, 14 mai 1754). 4
Draw up series of series; lay down for each individual, according to his level, his seniority, his rank,
the exercises that are suited to him; common exercises have a differing role and each Docile bodies
difference involves specific exercises. At the end of each series, others begin, branch off and
subdivide in turn. Thus each individual is caught up in a temporal series which specifically defines
his level or his rank. It is a disciplinary polyphony of exercises: 'Soldiers of the second class will be exercised every morning by sergeants,
corporals, anspessades, lance-corporals. . . The lance-corporals will be exercised every Sunday by the head of the section . . . ; the corporals and
anspessades will be exercised every Tuesday afternoon by the sergeants and their company and these in turn on the after- noons of every second,
twelfth and twenty-second day of each month by senior officers' (Instruction . . . ). It is this disciplinary time that was gradually
imposed on pedagogical practice - specializing the time of training and detaching it from the adult
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Session II
time , from the time of mastery; arranging different stages, separated from one another by graded examinations;
drawing up programmes, each of which must take place during a particular stage and which involves
exercises of increasing difficulty; qualifying individuals according to the way in which they progress
through these series. For the 'initiatory' time of traditional training (an overall time, supervised by the master alone, authorized by a single
examination), disciplinary time had substituted its multiple and progressive series. A whole analytical pedagogy was being formed, meticulous in its
detail (it broke down the subject being taught into its simplest elements, it hierarchized each stage of development into small steps) and also very
precocious in its history (it largely anticipated the genetic analyses of the ideologues, whose technical model it appears to have been). At the beginning
of the eighteenth century, Demia suggested a division of the process of learning to read into seven levels: the first for those who are beginning to learn
the letters, the second for those who are learning to spell, the third for those who are learning to join syllables together to make words, the fourth for
those who are reading Latin in sentences or from punctuation to punctuation, the fifth for those who are beginning to read French, the sixth for the best
readers, the seventh for those who can read manuscripts. But, where there are a great many pupils, further subdivisions
would have to be introduced; the first class would comprise four streams: one for those who are
learning the 'simple letters'; a second for those who are learning the 'mixed' letters; a 159 Discipline third for
those who are learning the abbreviated letters (a, e . . . ) ; a fourth for those who are learning the double letters (ff, ss, tt, st). The second class
would be divided into three streams: for those who 'count each letter aloud before spelling the syllable,
D.O., DO'; for those 'who spell the most difficult syllables, such as bant, brand, spinx', etc. (Demia, 19-2.0). Each stage in the
combinatory of elements must be inscribed within a great temporal series , which is both a natural
progress of the mind and a code for educative procedures. The 'seriation' of successive activities
makes possible a whole investment of duration by power: the possibility of a detailed control and a
regular intervention (of differentiation, correction, punishment, elimination) in each moment of time;
the possibility of characterizing, and therefore of using individuals according to the level in the series
that they are moving through; the possibility of accumulating time and activity, of rediscovering them,
totalized and usable in a final result, which is the ultimate capacity of an individual . Temporal
dispersal is brought together to produce a profit, thus mastering a duration that would otherwise
elude one's grasp . Power is articulated directly onto time; it assures its control and guarantees its
use. The disciplinary methods reveal a linear time whose moments are integrated, one upon another,
and which is orientated towards a terminal, stable point; in short, an 'evolutive' time. But it must be recalled that,
at the same moment, the administrative and economic techniques of control reveal a social time of a serial, orientated, cumulative type: the discovery of
an evolution in terms of 'progress', The disciplinary techniques reveal individual series: the discovery of an evolution in terms of 'genesis'. These two
great 'discoveries' of the eighteenth century - the progress of societies and the geneses of individuals-were perhaps
correlative with the new techniques of power, and more specifically, with a new way of administering
time and making it useful, by segmentation, seriation, synthesis and totalization . A macro- and a
micro-physics of power made possible , not the invention of history (it had long had no need of that), but the integration
of a temporal, unitary, continuous, cumulative dimension in the exercise of controls and the practice
of dominations. 'Evolutive' historicity, as it was then constituted-and so profoundly that it is still self-evident for many today -is bound up with a
mode 100 Docile bodies of functioning of power. No doubt it is as if the 'history-remembering' of the chronicles, genealogies, exploits, reigns and deeds
had long been linked to a modality of power. With the new techniques of subjection, the 'dynamics' of continuous evolutions tends to replace the
'dynasties' of solemn events.
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The affirmatives idea of progess pushes the modern didactic perspective which
broadens the gap between real life and school and allows for the world to be
characterized as stable and orderly, which makes intervention possible.
Vergara 15 (Marcela Gaete, Universidad de Chile, Santiago de Chile, Didactics, temporality and teacher
education, Revista Brasileira de Educacao, Date Accessed 7/25/17) //AC
If we inquire into the episteme of modern didactics, i.e., in the "set of relationships capable of uniting, in a given
epoch, the discursive practices of sciences" (Foucault, 1982, p. 323) in this case, didactics - it is possible to
find the same logic of construction, which is naturalized by those of that time. This didactic logic, according
to a number of authors (Behares, 2004; Bordoli, 2005; Camilloni et al., 1996), would be characterized
by: Providing objectivity to knowledge by de-historicizing it and removing it from the context in which
it was created. This implies transforming it into packaged knowledge, closed to itself, fragmented,
able to be sequenced and transmitted at a given time. Providing objectivity to school knowledge, so that it
can pass neutrally from one subject to another, without being re-signified by the experiences, biography,
emotions, and interests of those who learn and teach. Acting as if the information is processed in the
same way in the human cognitive system, thereby developing the same mediation strategies and
sequences - for example using progress maps - for the same group of students, without considering
individual or cultural differences. Acting so that all the individuals (in a class, school level, country)
achieve the same results/outcomes, resulting in the well-known expected learnings and various
learning objectives measured by standardized tests and whose results are used to establish school
rankings. Transmitting certain cultural referents that are specific to the legitimized culture. In Latin America,
this has implied not considering teaching ancestral knowledge or making it invisible. These characteristics
work as theoretical and practical assumptions that are instrumentalized through the notion of process,
which serves as a vehicle and catalyst for the modern didactic perspective. Thus, in name of the need for
educational process, the practices of knowledge are implemented that obey a naturalization of political and
epistemological ideals of modernity. However, they are seen as innovations and even as critical reviews. In the
name of the teaching and learning process, a lineal, causal, and stable perspective of human learning is being
validated. This process is understood as "a temporal continuum governed by the cause/effect
relationship" (Behares, 2004, p.16), and as such, it involves the same progression in increasing levels
of complexity for all subjects. []It assumes the existence of a linear psychological development in which
there is a sequence in just one direction through the temporal concatenation of causes and effects going
from the most simple to the most complex. Although formulations may vary behaviorist, psychogenetic,
cognitive, sociointeractionist, etc., it can be said that Didactics governed by the proposition of 'mediation' []
begins with the acceptance of that postulated by the process. (idem, p.17) []It assumes the existence of a
linear psychological development in which there is a sequence in just one direction through the temporal
concatenation of causes and effects going from the most simple to the most complex. Although formulations
may vary behaviorist, psychogenetic, cognitive, sociointeractionist, etc., it can be said that Didactics
governed by the proposition of 'mediation' [] begins with the acceptance of that postulated by the process.
(idem, p.17) This perspective about process contradicts human diversity and the incapacity to design
and implement a single learning process that allows all individuals to effectively learn the same thing
and at the same time, as if they were artificial intelligences. In this vein, Chevallard (1991) points out the
impossibility of isomorphism between planning time or legal didactic time and the learning time of students.
This seems to be an obvious issue, but it is made invisible within the logic of linear processes, which
also implies the belief that one can manage, measure, and intervene in the reality of the classroom as if
masterminds were able to foresee the future and accommodate it to the curricular programming
needs. This type of belief implies that the process no longer refers to real life which is uncertain,
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uncontrollable, complex, and changing by nature, and is transferred to a parallel world characterized
by stability, order, simplicity, and sequence, where it is possible to intervene . Such a conception
belongs to the "modern rationality and does not tolerate uncertainty, because it is a conception that seeks
clarity and distinction, linearity [and] time control" (Mndez, 2010, p.142). Accordingly, traditional didactics
- through school and, more specifically, learning-teaching mechanisms - fulfills the function of
forming a hegemonic vision of knowledge and values, thus trying to establish a certain type of
timeless and unhistorical subjectivities . In this framework, the scope, consequences, and relationships of
didactics praxis which are intimately related to the political context in which they take place - are overlooked.
In this regard, the logic that underlies how subjects act in the world is not an empty form of understanding. On
the contrary, it is built from historical and cultural contents that shape temporalities, which are not
considered from the ideology of the school and modern didactics. Temporalities are social constructs
that shape us. They are loaded with worldviews and anthropologies that guide our actions and our
relationships . This is to say that our subjectivities and worlds are built on temporalities. (Mndez,
2010, p.141) We cannot escape the time, culture, or history that shape us. Consequently, temporalities
imposed by schools are not neutral but penetrate and help shape our subjectivity. At this point, puzzling
questions arise, since the only way for schools to configure other subjectivities is by thinking from other
symbolic territories. But how can we do that? How can didactic actions be implemented outside the logic
of linear and progressive process if teachers have configured their subjectivity from the same modern
episteme? Is it possible for us to accept uncertainty, the flux of classrooms, the temporality of human
subjects, beyond school time and programming if, as teacher educators, we have also been educated
by the same logics ? Therefore, to overcome a modern didactic education, it becomes important to
broaden our understanding about temporality, to analyze the way this logic is made concrete and the
way individuals in teacher education adapt to and or resist this rationality . In this vein, it is essential to
locate the discussion by considering the concrete individuals live in the world of schools, specifically trying to
act in that space using a didactic approach that escapes the hegemonic episteme. Accordingly, this reflection
is made while working with a young preservice teacher (graduated with accreditation in Spanish Literature,
who will be referred to as RR) during his third and last semester of a post Bachelor's teacher education
program. This preservice teacher is one of six case studies in an ongoing study that aims to interpret the logic
of thinking that mobilizes, articulates and shapes secondary education preservice teachers during their
practicum.
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LinkRadical Pedagogy
contextualizing critical, radical, and perhaps abolitionist pedagogies. In
subtle distinction from the criminological, social
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condition of teaching in the context of a prison regime that is so relentless in its innovation and intrusiveness? We
might depart from
265
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To trace the
interests that uses prisons as a solution to social, political, and economic problems.14 In
fact, as many abolitionist scholars have
forgivable. It
266
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In both
participate robustly in civil society, outside and apart from the social dominance and institutional violence of the prison regime.
effective?
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LinkModel Minority - Rodriguez
The state produces the figure of the Model Minority as the condition of possibility for
the white supremacist carceral regime which destroys black and brown life. The
school is a key site for this production of carcerality (long version)
Re-narrations]
Perhaps the pivotal enunciatively moment for the rise of the contemporary U.S. policing and imprisonment regimes was the cultural watershed of Barry
This mobilization, while failing in its bid to win Goldwater the executive
Goldwaters 1964 presidential campaign.
office, was wildly successful in generating a re-coded racial discourse of policing and criminality that
targeted the Black and Brown urban poor and working classes for political neutralization, if not
strategic social liquidation. Articulated at the historical pinnacle of the reformist civil rights movement
and in the face of accelerating and substantively radical Black, Native American, Puerto Rican,
Chicano, Asian, and domestic Third Worldist liberation struggles, Goldwaters rhetoric resonated with
the anxieties of a white civil society whose hegemony appeared to be in a state of epochal crisis. Law
and order was thus simultaneously a cultural production and political agenda, offering a white national community the promise of militarized rescue as
well as a sweeping structure of collective sentimentality. Goldwaters 1964 acceptance of the Republican presidential nomination contrived an
intersection of racial and criminal discourse, pitched to a white electorate ostensibly reeling from the civic disruptions of Black and Brown urban
rebellions. Rendering
a vision of white civil society bound by a rearticulated reactionary nationalist
solidarity, Goldwater in fact reawakened the dream of a militarized white supremacist state amidst a
crumbling American apartheid. His political fantasy, which amounted to a vision of post-civil rights White Reconstruction, was the
harbinger of a quickly cementing common sense: Now, my fellow Americans, the tide has been running against freedom. Our people have followed false
prophets. We must, and we shall, return to proven waysnot because they are old, but because they are true.... And this party, with its every action,
every word, every breath, and every heartbeat, has but a single resolve, and that is freedom... freedombalanced so that liberty lacking order will not become
the license of the mob and of the jungle.9 [emphasis added] Echoing the racial juxtapositions of Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness, Goldwater elaborated a
white populist conception of liberty and security defined through the militarized containment and repression of the lurking urban-mob-jungle threat. His
declaration of veritable domestic warfare in this nomination speech prefaced Richard Nixons watershed electoral victory in 1968 and established a
crucial discursive political schema for a reconfigured police prison hegemony. Foreshadowing what would soon become Nixons political mantra,
Goldwater elaborates, Security from domestic violence, no less than from foreign aggression, is the most elementary and fundamental purpose of any
History shows us
government, and a government that cannot fulfill that purpose is one that cannot long command the loyalty of its citizens.
demonstrates that nothingnothing prepares the way for tyranny more than the failure of public
officials to keep the streets from bullies and marauders.10 The exponential growth of the police
industry in the United States closely followed the dictates of the Goldwater-Nixon law and order bloc,
carried on the strength of a putative political mandate to reorganize, remilitarize, and refocus on the
restoration of a white national hegemony in crisis.11 An allegory of bodily confrontation between
innocent white vulnerabilitya construct that crystallized notions of white communal and bodily
security across geographies and classesand Black-Brown criminal physicality instantiated a binding
historical telos for the post-1960s White Reconstruction, a post-civil rights revival that required the
simultaneous and decisive disruption of U.S. based anti-racist and anti-imperialist liberation
movements and their counterpart urban insurrections. Law and orders discursive structure was, in an
important sense, a political articulation of white liberation, articulated through white civil societys
awakening to the possibility of its own discursive material disarticulation: the militant reformism of the
Civil Rights Movement had not only broken the legal structures of segregation and Jim Crow, but had
additionally foreshadowed a lapse and spasm within the white supremacist state and body politic. The
emergence of this definitive era of domestic and international liberation movements throughout the 1960s and 1970s encompassed political and juridical
assertions that directly antagonized the broadly conceived premises of the nations historical formation, while substantively challenging and destabilizing
the post-emancipation juridical and social structures of American white supremacy, including formalized segregation, wanton racist police violence,
lynching, and illegal land occupation. Such notions as Black liberation and Indian sovereignty, in particular, represented unanswerable demands on
the presumptive white body politic, precisely because both were phrased as domestic claims on the United States of America, putatively blaspheming the
Additionally, the racialized class displacements of rapid de-
sanctity of historically white localities.
industrialization in urban and rural centers of production offered fodder for white civil societys closing
of ranksthat is, white supremacist capitals production of Black and Brown underground workers
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(including undocumented people and those in extralegal occupations) and non-workers represented, to the Goldwater-
Nixon bloc, the very picture of a riot waiting to happen. Articulated through and against the progressive and radical counter-communities that threatened
the transformation of the American social formation and abolition of white supremacist socio-cultural structures, the White Reconstruction reasserted an
essential stewardship of the state through the versatile mechanism of racial criminalization. The emergent technology of crime production was spurred
by Nixons rise to national power and the subsequent, massive federal and local investment in militarized police forces. 12 In this context, Goldwaters
ominous forecast of tyrannys onset shot through a civic consciousness that was absorbing the possibility of white freedoms rollback, and while white
selfdefense formed the template for an aggressively militarizing state, the law-and-order message remained intensely grandiose and global. Goldwater
was, in an important sense, foreshadowing U.S. white civil societys globalization, envisioning a reconstruction that reached across the domestic sphere
I can see
and constituted a hegemonic white Atlantic: I believe that we must look beyond the defense of freedom today to its extension tomorrow ... .
and I suggest that all thoughtful men must contemplate the flowering of an Atlantic civilization, the
whole world of Europe unified and free, trading openly across its borders, communicating openly
across the world. This is a goal far, far more meaningful than a moon shot. ... I can also seeand all free men must
thrill tothe events of this Atlantic civilization joined by its great ocean highway to the United States. What a destiny, what a destiny can be ours to stand
as a great central pillar linking Europe, the Americans and the venerable and vital peoples and cultures of the Pacific. I can see a day when all the
Americas, North and South, will be linked in a mighty system, a system in which the errors and misunderstandings of the past will be submerged one by
one in a rising tide of prosperity and interdependence ... . But we pledgewe pledge that human sympathywhat our neighbors to the South call that
attitude of simpaticono less than enlightened self-interest will be our guide.13 Couched
in the rhetoric of civic security and
personal safety, this discourse offered white civil society political rescue and a new structure of
collective sentimentality, mobilized through a intersectional rearticulation of classical American
conceptions of both race and crime. The convocation of the Nixon administration in 1968 involved a wildly successful
extrapolation and institutionalization of the seminal Goldwaterist rhetoric. A newly authenticated and electorally validated White Reconstruction facilitated
the transformation of the policing, criminal justice, and imprisonment apparatuses by integrating the transparently racist codings of law and order into
their collectiveand always overlappingmodus operandi. In subsequent years, this process has even fabricated a novel schooling= penal nexus,
wherein a veritable war on young people of color has emerged, according to Giroux, as an attempt to contain, warehouse, control, and even eliminate
all those groups and social formations that the market finds expendable.14 (I will discuss this nexus in more detail below.) Law and orders production of
a racially pathologized criminality has, in this way, provided the juridical torque necessary for new military and carceral organizations, technologies, and
territories. Militarized policing, criminal justice, and mass-scale imprisonment have emerged since 1964 as socially productive technologies, forging an
indelible linkage between the site and scene of the prison, the structured impunity of newly expanded and empowered police forces, and the
corresponding world of a consolidated and coherentthough always endangerednormative white civil society. It
is within this context that
Asian Americans qua model minorities have become pivotal social and cultural figures-fabrications,
positioned at the intersection of multiple racial antagonisms and situated within a specific projection of
white political desire. The cultural production and statecraft of the Asian-American model minority,
reproduced and institutionally inscribed by the administrative culture of dominant schooling
institutions (and accentuated in higher education), is wedged in a peculiar symbiosis with this militarization and
penal pedagogical shift in the war on poor urban Black and Brown youth. The Asian-American model
minority, as a cultural fabrication situated within a particular historical conjuncture, is something
even more than (as Prashad correctly asserts) a weapon in the war against black America: it is both the
condition of possibility and embodied site of reproduction of this domestic war, a seminal move in the
production of a national(ist) multiculturalism that fortifies and extrapolates historical white
supremacist social formationsincluding and especially the burgeoning U.S. prison regime. As such, the
Asian-Americanist contestation of the model minority myth as inaccurate, deceptive, (anti-Asian) racist, and=or an erasure of the material
subordination of poor and disenfranchised Asian populations tends to elide critical confrontation with the militarized and hegemonic discursive and
social structure through which the myth itself has been articulated. The rendition of the Asian immigrant model minority both facilitates and constitutes
the expansion of state capacities in the trajectory of mass-based Black/Brown punishment, providing the schema for an ascendantthough insistently
multicultural White-Asian alliance that manifests conspicuously in such instances as the 1980s and 1990s neoconservative movement to end affirm-
ative action policies (in which Asian Americans were continuously solicited and foregrounded as allies of a white supremacist pro-meritocracy
community leaders. The latter example provides an opportune moment of inquiry, if only because current Asian Americanist formations (including Asian
American Studies) have largely undertheorizedif not altogether ignoredthe implications of such a political coalescence. Emblematic of this
reactionary Korean AmericanLAPD coalition was a 2002 event entitled The March Against Crime, which occurred in the shadow of a massive and
nationally publicized investigation of LAPDs Ramparts Division, a scandal that revealed widespread corruption, brutality, and false testimony by LAPD
officers resulting in up to 3000 wrongful convictions, an overwhelming number of which were Black, Chicana=o, Mexicana=o, and Latina=o.30 In the
midst of these public revelations of the Ramparts Division as the instantiation of a low-intensity, localized urban state terrorist campaign against
Black=Brown communities in Los Angeles, the Korean Youth & Community Center (KYCC) and the Los Angeles Police Department (Wilshire Division)
widely circulated a flyer and email which announced, in resonance with Goldwaters rhetorical precedent: 10 YEARS AFTER THE L.A. RIOTS Our City
comes together to CLEAN our Streets. The flyer=email additionally urged its readers to speak out AGAINST CRIME and GRAFFITI; and show our
STRENGTH as a Com- munity. Contextualized by the heightened antagonism provoked by the Ramparts scandal, as well as the LAPDs infamous
record of militarizedand often spectacularviolence against racially- profiled people and communities, this presumptive invoking of our Community
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extrapolates the limits of the Goldwaterist racial paradigm. In fact, this Korean-American call for a police-powered street cleansing bespeaks the
political logic of a
The figure of the model minority is the condition of possibility for the anti-black and
brown militarization of the school
Re-narrations]
The conjoined rhetoric of the Moynihan-Lewis intellectual bloc was famously couched as an alleged social science of embedded Black=Negro (for
Moynihan) and Mexican=Puerto Rican (for Lewis) cultural pathology, and suggested the essentialized site of family structure as the source of a self-
perpetuating defeatism. Moynihans introduction pronounced, Thefundamental problem... is that of family structure. The
evidencenot final, but powerfully persuasiveis that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is
crumbling. The future U.S. Senators notorious ruminations on the Black familys Tangle of Pathology (see Chapter IV of The Negro Family)
helped shape a white civic consciousness that sought explanation for the persistent antagonismand lurking crisisthat poor urban Black communities
embodied within the white racial imaginary of American civil society. In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure
which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing
burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well. 15 Lewis similarly offered, The culture of poverty... is not only an
adaptation to a set of objective conditions of the larger society. Once it comes into existence it tends to perpetuate itself from generation to generation
because of its effect on the children.
By the time slum children are age six or seven they have usually absorbed the
basic values and attitudes of their subculture and are not psychologically geared to take full advantage
of changing conditions or increased opportunities which may occur in their lifetime. 16 Lewis extended
ruminations on matrifocality as a central element of various cultures of poverty echoed Moynihans contentions while supplementing them with a more
definitive set of conclusions. It appeared, for Lewis, that poor urban Puerto Ricans were an extrusive presence in white civil society, a population
that in his terms approximated a culturalism conception of racial pathology and incipient sub
humanity: [O]n the whole it seems to me that [the culture of poverty] is a relatively thin culture. There is a great deal of pathos, suffering, and
emptiness among those who live in the culture of poverty. It does not provide much support or long-range satisfaction and its encouragement of mistrust
tends to magnify helplessness and isolation. Indeed, the poverty of culture is one of the crucial aspects of the culture of poverty.17 [emphasis added] Crucial to
the production of the academic and popular consensus around the culture of poverty was that it was embroidered onto the racial formation of the post
1960s White Reconstruction. Specifically, Moynihan and Lewis (and their ideological contemporaries in
academia, policy think tanks, and government) helped suture a white liberal common sense that
apprehended the persistence of Black=Brown poverty, disfranchisement, and structured vulnerability to premature death18 as
the inevitable (though tragic) production of self-defeating cultural values and a retarding matriarchal family structure. Lewis schematization
of a poverty of culture pervasive among the Black=Brown poor19 in this sense hinted at something
more ominous: to the extent that culture is commonly understood as the primary and constituent labor of human beings across varying scales
of community and social intercourse, Lewis implied that there were people in the United States that were simply ill-equipped to either contribute or
survive the rigors of the postwarand embryonic Cold Warnational telos. Enriching and broadening the scope of this
reconstituted racial common sense was the conspicuous proposition of an Asian immigrant model
minority, an image that obtained wide circulation with the paradigmatic U.S. News and World Report
article of 1966. At a time when Americans are awash in worry over the plight of racial minoritiesOne such minority, the nations 300,000
Chinese-Americans, is winning wealth and respect by dint of its own hard work. In any Chinatown from San Francisco to New York, you discover
youngsters at grips with their studies.... Still being taught in Chinatown is the old idea that people should depend on their own effortsnot a welfare
Visit Chinatown U.S.A. and you find an important racial minority
checkin order to reach Americas promised land.
pulling itself up from hardship and discrimination to become a model of self-respect and achievement
in todays America.20 Numerous Asian American Studies scholars and activists have examined the genesis of the contemporary model minority
racial imaginary as the (perhaps required) discursive complement to the sustained post-civil rights era subordination of Black and Brown populations.
a categorical problem
Vijay Prashad has gone so far as to attest that to the extent that Blacks constitute, in DuBois famous formulation,
for the racial formation of the United States, Asians (for Prashad, South Asians in particular) embody a
solution. Prashad writes, Many folks feel, it seems, that to make positive statements about what they consider to be a race is just fine.... These
are not only statements of admiration. Apart from being condescending, such gestures remind me that I am to be the perpetual solution to what is seen
as the crisis of black America. I am to be a weapon in the war against black America. 21 Robert S. Chang, staking a claim for a narrative space that
model minorityism has obscured the oppression of
moves beyond a black-white racial paradigm, additionally argues that
Asian Americans. This history of discrimination and violence, as well as the contemporary problems of Asian Americans, are obscured by the
portrayal of Asian Americans as a model minority. Asian Americans are portrayed as hardworking, intelligent, and successful. This description
represents a sharp break from past stereotypes of Asians as sneaky, obsequious, or inscrutable. 22 Further positing the dual harm sustained by the
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model minority rendition, Chang continues, In
addition to hurting Asian Americans, the model minority myth works a
dual harm by hurting other racial minorities and poor whites who are blamed for not being successful
like Asian Americans. African-Americans and Latinos and poor whites are told, look at those
Asiansanyone can make it in this country if they really try. This blame is justified by the
meritocratic thesis supposedly proven by the example of Asian Americans. This blame is then used to
campaign against government social services for these undeserving minorities and poor whites and
against affirmative action. To the extent that Asian Americans accept the model minority myth, we are
complicitous in the oppression of other racial minorities and poor whites.23 Notably, critics like Chang fail to
elaborate how the production of model minority discourse has informed and constituted an overlapping police-corrections agenda that funnels pre-
legitimated state violence (from preemptive police detention to street assassinations qua justifiable homicide) through the sieve of contemporary racial
profiling practices: that is, model minorities will (with relative exception) tend not to be the categorical racial targets of the militarized law and order
states most acute exercises of bodily violence and juridical punishment. To contest and revise Changs summation, far more is at stake than differential
access to government social services and (a now non-existent) affirmative action. While
there is truth to Prashads and
Changs assertions that the model minority imaginary amounts to a cynical, white supremacist
objectification of Asians as a political and cultural weapon against other racial minorities, (though I am
less inclined than Chang to contend that it is either similarly or significantly utilized against poor whites) what remains undertheorized in Asian
American critique is the historical linkage between model minorityism and the militarized cultural production of the law and order state. Such a theoretical
examination requires a particular focus on the political and cultural technology of criminalizationdefined here as the social and political apparatuses
through which (racial) categories of deviance and criminality are invented, refined, and formalized into the states mobilizations of policing and
jurisprudence. By way of example: the contemporary technology of criminalization has reached across the emergence of the Asian American model
minority figure in the genesis of a veritable war on young people of color, waged on the street and in the increasingly militarized sites of urban public
schools. Structurally and discursively linked to what scholar-activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the rise of domestic militarization,24 the
school is
becoming a site of strategic penal management and social neutralization, and projects the racist law
and order imperative into an age-based preemptive strike: One way or another, if youre young, poor,
and of color, cops will find a way into your classroom. Cultural theorist and critical pedagogue Henry
Giroux, in an elaboration of Gilmores schematic, has suggested that the rise to prominence of school
based zero tolerance laws ought to be read as a material and juridical metaphor for hollowing out
the state and expanding the forces of domestic militarization,26 further arguing that the popular cultural and ideological
effect of these laws is to mobilize racialized codes and race-based moral panics that portray black and brown urban youth as a new and frighteningly
violent threat.27 Here,
the technology of criminalization becomes the point of transfer for an institutional
transformation: schools simultaneously become sites of carceral militarization (against poor, racially
pathologized youth) and disciplinary youth interpellation. According to Giroux, While schools share some proximity to prisons
in that they are both about disciplining the body... little has been written about how zero tolerance policies in schools resonate powerfully with prison
practices that signify a shift away from treating the body as a social investment (i.e., rehabilitation) to viewing it as a threat to security, demanding
control, surveillance, and punishment.... [S]uch practices have exceeded the boundaries of the prison-industrial complex, providing models and
perpetuating a shift in the very nature of educational leadership and pedagogy. 28 The
cultural production and statecraft of the
Asian-American model minority, reproduced and institutionally inscribed by the administrative culture
of dominant schooling institutions (and accentuated in higher education), is wedged in a peculiar
symbiosis with this militarization and penal pedagogical shift in the war on poor urban Black and
Brown youth. The Asian-American model minority, as a cultural fabrication situated within a particular
historical conjuncture, is something even more than (as Prashad correctly asserts) a weapon in the war against
black America: it is both the condition of possibility and embodied site of reproduction of this
domestic war, a seminal move in the production of a national(ist) multiculturalism that fortifies and
extrapolates historical white supremacist social formationsincluding and especially the burgeoning
U.S. prison regime. As such, the Asian-Americanist contestation of the model minority myth as
inaccurate, deceptive, (anti-Asian) racist, and/or an erasure of the material subordination of poor and
disenfranchised Asian populations tends to elide critical confrontation with the militarized and
hegemonic discursive and social structure through which the myth itself has been articulated. Thus,
against both the patronizing liberal racist valorizations and Asian Americanist contestations of the
Asian model minoritys alleged scholastic, economic, and cultural achievement sits a durable (though
dynamic) contextual backdrop of state and state-sanctioned racial violence. The preliminary genealogy of post-
1970s technologies of criminalization that I am briefly outlining here suggests that the lever through which Asian-American decriminalization obtains its
social truthvis-a`-vis a self-fulfilling white social imaginary that claims to witness, and subsequently proclaims the creeping ascendance of studious,
law-abiding Asian minorities is the same cultural=political fulcrum that historically militarizes white civil society against its more ominous Black=Brown
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racial antagonists and cultural pathogens. The rendition of the Asian immigrant model minority both facilitates and constitutes the expansion of state
capacities in the trajectory of mass-based Black=Brown punishment, providing the schema for an ascendantthough insistently multicultural white-
Asian alliance that manifests conspicuously in such instances as the 1980s and 1990s
neoconservative movement to end affirmative action policies (in which Asian Americans were
continuously solicited and foregrounded as allies of a white supremacist pro-meritocracy
community leaders. The latter example provides an opportune moment of inquiry, if only because current
Asian Americanist formations (including Asian American Studies) have largely undertheorizedif not
altogether ignoredthe implications of such a political coalescence. Emblematic of this reactionary Korean American
LAPD coalition was a 2002 event entitled The March Against Crime, which occurred in the shadow of a massive and nationally publicized investigation
of LAPDs Ramparts Division, a scandal that revealed widespread corruption, brutality, and false testimony by LAPD officers resulting in up to 3000
wrongful convictions, an overwhelming number of which were Black, Chicana=o, Mexicana=o, and Latina=o.30 In the midst of these public revelations of
the Ramparts Division as the instantiation of a low-intensity, localized urban state terrorist campaign against Black=Brown communities in Los Angeles,
the Korean Youth & Community Center (KYCC) and the Los Angeles Police Department (Wilshire Division) widely circulated a flyer and email which
announced, in resonance with Goldwaters rhetorical precedent: 10 YEARS AFTER THE L.A. RIOTS Our City comes together to CLEAN our Streets.
The flyer=email additionally urged its readers to speak out AGAINST CRIME and GRAFFITI; and show our STRENGTH as a Community.
Contextualized by the heightened antagonism provoked by the Ramparts scandal, as well as the LAPDs infamous record of militarizedand often
spectacularviolence against racially profiled people and communities, this presumptive invoking of our Community extrapolates the limits of the Gold
fact, this Korean-American call for a police-powered street cleansing bespeaks
wateriest racial paradigm. In
the political logic of a multicultural civil alliance cut on the teeth of the states mobilization against its
non-Korean=Asian, racially pathologized Others. Chang, writing in the immediate aftermath of the 1992
Los Angeles insurrection, inscribes the context for this emergent white-Asian alliance in his
mystification of a Korean American positionality between racist whites and angry Blacks: This
resentment, fueled by poor economic conditions, can flare into anger and violence. Asian Americans, the model minority, serve as convenient
scapegoats, as Korean Americans in Los Angeles discovered during the 1992 riots. Many Korean Americans now view themselves as human shields
in a complicated racial hierarchy, caught between the racism of the white majority and the anger of the black minority. 31
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LinkModel Minority Local Experience Good
Appealing to local experience as a way to characterize the affirmatives scenarios is

reductionist and paves the way for imperial domination
Yeh 1998 (Michelle, Professor of Chinese at UC Davis International Theory and the Transnational Critic: China in the Age of
Multiculturalism in Modern Chinese Literary and Culture Studies in the Age of Theory ed. Rey Chow)=^.^=
The logic behind the critics claim that Zhao and Xu are out of touch with Chinese reality because they are not
based in China is awed. Granted, it is common sense that just as a native speaker has an advantage
over foreigners trying to learn the language, living in the country one studies is an obvious advantage
in terms of familiarity with home perspectives and access to information. But familiarity with a culture
on an experiential basis and abundant data alone do not account for the quality of scholarship, which
also depends on the theoretical framework and methodology that one employs. How valid and
comprehensive the theoretical framework is and how rigorous the method of investigation is are more
important than experience and data per se. While local experience may help, it cannot take the place of
scholarly training and does not equal scholarship. The fundamental problem with this line of argument
is that it exalts local experience as a value in itself. Experience is treated, to borrow Joan W. Scotts
words, as in contestable evidence and as an originary point of explanationas a foundation upon
which analysis is based. Further, the evidence of experience...reif[ies] agency as an inherent
attribute of individuals, thus decontextualizing it.24 Unfortunately, evidence of experience is a fairly
common argument among scholars of Chinese ethnicity when they criticize their non-Chinese
colleagues for their lack of Chinese experience. For instance, a recent essay in Dushu, the most
inuential journal among intellectuals in mainland China, claims: Sinologists can speak Chinese, love
to taste Chinese cuisine, and often like to hang in their oces or homes a few scrolls of Chinese
calligraphy given by their Chinese friends. But hardly any of them can truly appreciate the spiritual
rhythm [shenyun] and the aura and structure [fenggu] of Chinese calligraphy, because calligraphy
requires an understanding of the spirit of the culture which ows in blood veins; it is not just an
intellectual issue.25 Statements such as this are not only condescending and grossly generalizing,
but, more seriously, they present a circular argument about why non-Chinese sinologists can never
really understand China. In the example cited above, the circularity of the argument hides behind a highly
impressionistic languageshenyun and fenggutypical of traditional Chinese poetry and art criticism. It is
futile to refute this kind of argument because it cannot be substantiated objectively in the rst place. The
emphasis on the uniqueness of Chinese experiencebut which cultures experience is not unique?
is inseparable from a defensiveness against any criticism of China coming from those not living in
China. To give another example, Lung Yingtaiisan inuential cultural critic who was born and raised in Taiwan.
She received her Ph.D. in English from an American institution and has been living in Germany for many
years, although she has published extensively in Chinese for more than a decade. After publishing an article
entitled A Bottle Filled with China China China in the Hong Kongbased Mingbao Monthly in 1992, she was
inundated with criticism from readers in mainland China, as she recounts in an interview: One typical example
[of the criticism she received] was, Lung Yingtai, since you have not gone through the suering that we have,
you really have no right to criticize us. She proceeds to recall an episode that suggests a cultural attitude:I
had many chances to meet with Chinese intellectuals [in Germany] after the June massacre in . In my
contacts with them, two impressions stood out: . . . I discovered that they were so obsessed with China that
they had hardly any interest in the rest of theworld. Iwould take them around, show them Goethes birthplace or
the first parliament of modern Germany or Kafkas home, but they would only talk about China. Secondly, they
were very defensive about China. That puzzled me a bit, because at home, these were considered the most
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liberal, outspoken critics of the culture. Now that they were here outside China, all of a sudden they were
metamorphosed into apologists for China. 26
Their claim that the aff is a net-benefit to the permutation necessitates the rejection of
the permutation because it proves that they reduce the object of their research to a
commodity
Bove 2000 (Paul, Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh "Afterword: The Possibilities
of Abandonment," in in Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field ed. Rey Chow (Duke
University Press)=^.^=
Chineseness affords an extraordinary opportunity to reform knowledge practice and do so in relation

to a problematic so important as to have consequences far beyond its seeming disciplinary limits.
Americanists, for example, old and new, might well take seriously Chows injunction that critics must
abandon existing fields and their boundaries. This is no soft call for interdisciplinaritythat bane of
serious scholarship that both keeps the disciplines in place (just use two!) and justifies not
amateurism but superficiality. Nor is it a call merely to alter the forms of existing fields such as area
studies, although no one familiar with the history of this model and its Cold War origins would lament
its passing. Rather, it is a call to adopt abandonment as a critical practice, a call to give up the already
known as a sacred value effectively working like Stones scruple, to rub raw the daring trespasser or
anarchist. Can there be a more frightening cry to the human scientist than to abandon the field? Does this not
imply cowardice, a giving up and running away? Nor does it mean something trivial like leaving the field and
training in another. It means, rather, taking seriously abandoning the organization of knowledge into fields as
such and making an effort to hollow out any given field for the knowledge it provides. Chows deepest
historical claim, one testified to by Ang in her remarkable essay in this collection, has to do with the
error humanists make in believing that knowledge made possible by, organized and preserved in,
reproduced through, and circulated by field models actually has value as anything other than a
powerful device for impoverishing the store of images, thoughts, intellectual practices, and so on by
means of which we live the experience we otherwise think we record or mirror.
The perm linksits an example of Western envy and commodification of the

subjectivity of the other.
Haldar 2007 (Piyel, Senior Lecturer of Law at the Birkbeck University of London Law, Orientalism, and Postcolonialism: The
Jurisdiction of the Lotus-Eaters Routledge-Cavendish)=^.^=
The matter and mechanics of envy have been the subject of jurisprudential debate since John Rawlss attempt
to exclude the syndrome from his concept of justice under a veil of ignorance. Justice, even social justice
(equal rights and equal opportunity), can only arise if society is in a position where, by hypothesis, no one is
moved by rancor and spite.4 Other than in Rawlss hypothetical original position, the suspicion raised by all
claims to equality is that such claims are based on an individuals envy of what another has (rights, goods etc),
and what might be denied to him. Envy, as Aristotle points out, is pain at the good fortune of others.5 In the
context of early encounters in the East, it might be thought that envy would be a useful way of
describing Western attitudes towards dierences in Oriental resources and manners. Envy at least
provides a standard which measures self worth against the other. However, the argument pursued in this
chapter will be based on something less than a comparative approach to the dierences between East and
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West. Instead, envy will be treated as a by-product of the specic relationship between desire and
pleasure (or rather, the impossibility of desire fullment) and as betraying something about what the
legal subject really wants. That is, he no longer wishes to simply be what he is meant to be; he no longer
wishes to be simply the end-product, the passive subject of civilization; he no longer wishes to behave
according to the proscribed set of pleasures. Rather, we have to take into account that the legal subject
often wants to be carnal, liberated, or to be another in order to have access to what he believes the
other has. Such a romantic desire to possess the earth, to be in touch with our outlawed emotions, has to be
factored into the institution of subjectivity. In slightly more synoptic terms, the argument made will be that the
codes of pleasure that colonize the legal subject (of which the Western traveller is a specic example)
erects an obstacle that prevents him from achieving what he desires (namely the excess enjoyment he
fantasizes as belonging to the Oriental subject he so despises). This obstacle of pleasures produces in
the legal subject a much more heightened state of desire that expresses itself as envy. Such envy is for the
very excess that constitutes the Oriental subject as an object of denigration. The fantasy of Oriental
excess renders a Western subject envious of all the things, energies and power, that he suspects the
Eastern non-subject might enjoy. Envy, in other words, emerges for that which exceeds civilized norms. But
all that which exceeds civilized norms, it will be argued, awakens in the Western subject a suppressed memory
of pre-civilized man. Envy for the Oriental subjects enjoyment, is for a fantasized mode of existence that
pre-existed the early modern civilized state of being. Such a state of being, such a fantasm, now comes to
be represented through early Orientalism, in the gures of the despot and his subjects, as well as in the fancy
that the East was the birthplace of all civilization. The Western subject desires to be the other that is
created in fantasy because the other, particularly the Oriental other, comes to represent something
that he himself once was (or might have been). The East thus stirs up such ancient primeval memories
from the depths of the West; it reminds and realizes the vitality and potential lost from sophisticated
society and institutionalized life. Such a hankering after the non-sophisticated domain of pre-historical life,
so well expressed in these early modern travel narratives, constitutes a strand of modern Western thought that
links Rousseau, the Libertarians, the Romantics, psychoanalysts etc; in short, it distinguishes all those
discontented with civilization. But this discontent cannot be thought of as an aberration in the make up of
legal subjectivity. The desire to be (or the envy for) someone dierent (caveman, superhero, bird, pop-star,
white, black, or to have dierent parents, or a dierent nationality) seems to be too common, too normal, an
occurrence for it not to be a signicant factor in the preparation of subjectivity. Thus, in the context of this
project, the trope and targets of Orientalist envy will be treated as vital yet paradoxical in forming
Western subjectivity. They will also be treated as a juridical feature of the colonialist impulse to understand,
chart and possess the transition from the raw to the cooked, from feral child to cultivated man.
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***Impacts***
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ImpactAbleism
The Prison Industrial complex and carceral state are technologies of social control
necessitated by the underpinning racism, settler colonialism, ableism, and classism as
foundational to modernity.
Dias, Giselle; Ruzsa, Joan; Ware, Syrus. It Cant Be Fixed Because Its Not Broken: Racism and Disability in the Prison
Industrial Complex. (Ch. 9) Disability Incarcerated:Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada. Edited
by Liat Ben- Moshe, Chris Chapman, and Allison C. Carey, 2014. Published by Palgrave Macmillan
Because of the ways that prisons

Prisons are dangerous places, especially if you are racialized and disabled.
are constructed, imagined, and maintained, rampant ableism and racism affect the daily lives
of many prisoners. In this chapter, we explore how disability and experiences of racialization are
constructed throughout the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) within the Canadian context (Turtle
Island). Further, we contend that colonization, racism, and ableism are inherent to the functioning
of the penal system. The PIC is based on a set of interests created and maintained to
support capitalism, patriarchy, imperialism, colonialism, racism, ableism, and white
supremacy. It acts as a form of social control for the rich and powerful. AS such, it benefits the
politicians, governments, big businesses, developers, law enforcement, and the nonprofit
industrial complex. Angela Davis (2003) explains, To deliver up bodies destined for
profitable punishment, the political economy of prisons relies on racialized assumptions of
criminalitysuch as images of Black welfare mothers reproducing criminal childrenand on racist practices in
arrest, conviction, and sentencing patterns Colored bodies constitute the main human raw material in this vast experiment
to disappear the major social problems of our time. Once the aura of magic is stripped away from the
imprisonment solution, what is revealed is racism, class bias, and the parasitic seduction
of capitalist profit. The prison industrial system materially and morally impoverishes its
inhabitants and devours the social wealth needed to address the very problems that have
led to spiraling numbers of prisoners. (55) Disabled people, racialized people and disabled People of Color
with disabilities. The PIC (prison industrial complex) criminalizes the experience of disability
and creates new experiences of disability both within prison and after people get out. With the
introduction of new crime legislation, Canada is moving toward mass incarceration, which will only exacerbate
colonialism, racism, and disabilities within the PIC. In our view, these
systems are not broken, they
function as extensions of racist and genocidal policies and practices that seek to
criminalize and imprison Indigenous and racialized people, and people with disabilities.
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The Prison Industrial complex works as a cannon of settler colonialism and ableism-
which functions both in education and incarceration- to maintain, assimilate, subjugate
and further the genocide of Indigenous Peoples.
Dias, Giselle; Ruzsa, Joan; Ware, Syrus. Disability Incarcerated:Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and
Canada. (Ch. 9) It Cant Be Fixed Because Its Not Broken: Racism and Disability in the Prison Industrial Complex.
Edited by Liat Ben- Moshe, Chris Chapman, and Allison C. Carey, 2014. Published by Palgrave Macmillan
In the last half century alone, Indigenous people have been sent to residential schools,
where they were punished for participation in their cultural practices and where ongoing (and
often violent) attempts were made to force them to assimilate into European Christian culture. In the
1960s, Indigenous children were stolen from their homes and placed in non- Indigenous homes, where they were often
beaten, verbally abused, and sexually assaulted (Aboriginal Healing Foundation 2009). Johns story lends
insight into the reality of these atrocities: I am writing this story on behalf of an individual who has been in
prison for over 20 years serving a life sentence. As a young Micmac he was often in trouble with the
nuns that ran the [residential] school he was sent to. Eventually, because of his inability to conform
to the nuns demand of silence and subservience they sent him to the psychiatric asylum
(prison) at the age of 9. It was at this facility [that he] was raised to adulthood and when he was 21 years
old the asylum released him from their custody... with a lack of social skills and [the] deep loneliness of a
person raised in a psychiatric prison he soon began to use drugs. It was not long after this that in a horrible turn of
events someone was found murdered [and he was arrested]. (Collins 2012) The brutality of the attempted
genocide of Indigenous people has had, and continues to have, a disabling affect. This
experience of disability is exacerbated by the PIC. In Johns story, resistance to being held in the
carceral space of the residential school resulted in him being labeled with a psychiatric disability, which led to time in the
carceral space of the asylum, where he experienced social isolation and loneliness. Peter and Johns analysis of the
story explains the experience of isolation that led to the use of drugs, which contributed to a horrible turn of events in
which a murder happens. Although it is unclear from Johns story if he is responsible for the murder, the story reads as if
this is the case. Johns story illustrates both a link between colonization and incarceration as
well as disability and incarceration. It also shows how acts of resistance to attempted
assimilation and colonization force people into the PIC, in its various forms. When Indigenous
people attempt to resist ongoing colonization through settling land claims or demands for self- determination (e.g. ,
Mohawk resistance in Kanehsatake/Oka, Tyendinaga, and Caledonia, etc.), they are arrested and put in
prison. Indigenous people make up 3 percent of the general population, but 23 percent of the federal prison population
(Gebhard 2012; Trevethan and Rastin 2004). While these statistics are used by the state to support the fallacy that
Indigenous people are more criminal, in reality they reflect the impact of the historical and ongoing colonization and
oppression of Indigenous peoples.
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Prisons excessive expropriation of bodies exacerbates poor mental health conditions,
treating peoples mental well being with cruel and unusual punishment is not unique, but
an essential function of the prisons daily ordering.
In 2010, a report was released by the Correctional Investigator's Office (an Ombudsman for the federal
prison system) to talk about the growing needs of prison populations. Howard Sapers, a Correctional
Investigator states, Canadian penitentiaries are becoming the largest psychiatric facilities
in the country. The Correctional Service of Canada assumes a legal duty of care to provide required mental
health services, including clinical treatment and intervention. In failing to meet this legal obligation, too many mentally
disordered offenders [sic] are simply being warehoused in federal penitentiaries. This is not effective or safe corrections.
(Office of the Correctional Investigator 2010) Sapers' quote suggests that (1) prisons are being used in lieu of
providing supportive services for psychiatric survivors/consumers in the community and that (2) once
inside prison, folks labeled with psychiatric disabilities are not receiving health services available to them
in the community. Thus, psychiatric survivors/consumers have a higher likelihood of incarceration and, as a result, are
less likely to access supportive services. There is anecdotal evidence of a trend in Canadian prisons of using
long-term segregation to isolate people with mental health issues from the rest of the population.
Isolating people with mental health issues is cruel and excessively punitive. One documented example of this
is the case of Ashley Smith,16 a young woman who asphyxiated herself in her segregation cell
while several guards looked on. The Smith case is one example that demonstrates that people with mental health
issues need access to community resources, not incarceration. Unfortunately, cruel and unusual punishment is
commonplace in the PIC, part of the essence of its daily functioning. This has dramatic effects on all
prisoners. For prisoners who have psychiatric disabilities or are psychiatric survivors, the prison environment
exacerbates existing mental health issues.17 In addition, a study released by the Correctional Service of Canada18
in 2010 reported that rates of HIV in prison are 15 times higher than in the community and rates of Hepatitis
C (HCV) are up to 39 percent higher, with an infection rate of 31 percent (Zakaria et al. 2010). These are
staggering rates of infection and are due in large part to the CSC's "zero-tolerance policy" on drug use and refusal to introduce
a needle exchange program (see Chu 2010). Without proper distribution of harm reduction materials in prison, these numbers
will continue to grow. When looking at intersections of disability and prisons, HIV/AIDS
and HCV infection rates are essential to the discussion. Overcrowded prisons without proper
harm reduction programs will ensure the further transmission of HIV/AIDS and HCV, leading to greater
disability in prison and in the community.
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Prisons produce disabling affect (powerlessness) in order to function.
Dias, Giselle; Ruzsa, Joan; Ware, Syrus. Disability Incarcerated:Imprisonment and Disability in the United
States and Canada. (Ch. 9) It Cant Be Fixed Because Its Not Broken: Racism and Disability in the Prison
Industrial Complex. Edited by Liat Ben- Moshe, Chris Chapman, and Allison C. Carey, 2014. Published by
Palgrave Macmillan
These guidelines suggest that the physical and mental health of prisoners are a high
priority for the Correctional Service of Canada and that health services are easily accessible and on par
with community standards. Yet, research suggests that the reality of access to care is different than what is
outlined in these guidelines, particularly for people living with disabilities (Ford and Wobeser 2012; McLay and
Silversides 2011; Sapers 2009). In addition, our stories from prisoners in federal prisons in Canada suggest that
prisoners are not accessing health care at community standards and that, in fact, the prison environment both
exacerbates existing disabilities and creates new ones. Many prisoners who are suffering
from serious health issues put in repeated requests over the course of weeks or months
before actually getting to see a doctor. We examine access to health care in relation to mental health diagnoses,
HIV/AIDS seroconversion,21 and mobility in prisons. In terms of psychiatric disabilities, the World Health Organization
(2007) states that, "prisons
are bad for mental health" because of overcrowding; violence;
solitary confinement; lack of privacy; separation from family and friends; lack of
meaningful activity; and uncertain futures in terms of housing, work, and
relationship. Prisons affect the ways our brains and bodies work, creating
experiences that don't fit within social notions of mental "health." 22 Additionally, there is a lack
of appropriate health care especially care for emotional health in prison, which leads to increased rates of depression and
suicide (WHO 2007). When people are in prison, they are fully under the control of the state.
This is true in a logistical sense: in that they have lost their physical freedom and are in a government-run
facility. It is also true in the sense that their personal agency is taken away. They are told when to
wake up, when to eat, when and for how long they can use the phone, when and in what conditions they can see their families,
when they can go outside, what they can read, etc. This lack of autonomy extends to almost every aspect
of life in prison, and it is done by design in order to erode people's sense of self-efficacy, so
that they become compliant (Foucault 1977); this directly affects their mental health.
Powerlessness is a result of this experience. The North American Nursing Diagnosis Association recognizes that,
Th e c r e a t io n o f t h e e x p e r i e n c e o f p o w e r le s s n e s s i s e s s e n t i a l t o t h e f u n c t io n in g o f
t h e p r is o n environment, and it is highly relevant to the experience of people with disabilities trying to access
health care services in prison. Despite the claims of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and C o m m i s s i o n e r ' s
Directive (Correctional Service of Canada 2011) listed earlier, p r i s o n e r s experience
difficulty accessing needed health care services, receiving adequate and appropriate
ongoing treatment in a timely fashion, and being allowed to meaningfully participate in their own
plan of care. The impact of this lack of access on mental health is illustrated in a study by Smith et al. (2008).
In a series of experiments to determine the effect of powerlessness on cognitive functioning , these
researchers found that Assigning someone a certain position can alter their mental skills in a
way that confirms their standing. The powerful retain power because of the improved
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mental processes that it brings about, while impairments in the same processes keep people
without power on the bottom rung. These effects make hierarchies incredibly stable, and lead
the powerless into what Smith calls "a destiny of dispossession." (Yong 2008)
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The carceral state and policing produce disabling experiences through the war on drugs.
the disabling experience of drug use as disability with the lens of

For the purposes of this chapter, we consider
understanding that drug use is not in itself the "problem" but that the War on Drug Users , lack
of harm reduction programming, and lack of access to social support for drug users creates disabling experiences for
many users. 27 However, we are also aware that people with undiagnosed psychiatric disabilities often use
drugs to try and find relief from the ways that society does not allow for differing mental states, such as
anxiety and experiences that are labelled as mania, depression, etc. Evidence shows that 30 percent of people living with
psychiatric disabilities also use substances, and 53 percent of people who use drugs have also been labelled
with "mental health issues" (Mood Disorder Society of Canada 2009). From our collective experience working in
prisons and with harm reduction both on the inside and outside in communities, the authors would estimate these statistics to be
higher. What we see from research is that there is a correlation between drug use and psychiatric disabilities that needs to be
explored when looking at disabilities and prisons. We look to forms of structural violence that
both create and reinforce disability and affect drug users' social determinants of health. Intersectional
experiences of marginalization affect both tendency to use drugs and access to supports once using drugs. Drug use by women
is often heightened by experiences such as sexual harassment; emotional, physical, and sexual abuse; poverty; racism; and
mental illness (see Martin and Macy 2011; Millay et al. 2009; Stevens-Watkins et al. 2012).
Anti Black Chattel slavery produces disabling phenomena, which possesses the
logics of the Prison industrial complex.
Erevelles, Nirmala Crippin Jim Crow: Disability, Dis- Location, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline (Ch. 5)
Disability Incarcerated:Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada. Edited by Liat Ben-
Moshe, Chris Chapman, and Allison C. Carey, 2014. Published by Palgrave Macmillan
In her thought-provoking book, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander (2010) describes how the relentless
focus on the War on Drugs by the US criminal justice system disproportionately targets underprivileged,
poorly educated African Americans who are basically warehoused in prison and who are then released
to face lifelong job discrimination, elimination from juries and voter rolls, and even disqualification from
food stamps, public housing and student loans. The nearly one million African Americans behind bars
(NAACP 2014), with even more experiencing legalized discrimination and permanent social
exclusion as a result of a criminal record, has produced what Alexander calls a new racial under-caste, relegated
to the margins of mainstream society. Alexander argues that this new racial under-caste now occupies a political and
social space not unlike Jim Crow the legalized racial caste system that emerged in the Southern US states, post
Reconstruction. This "New Jim Crow" (56), she argues, has "functioned relatively automatically, and the
prevailing system of racial meanings, identities, and ideologies [are naturalized and] . . . explained in
race neutral terms" (56-57). As a result, Alexander argues that much like their grandparents before them,
many poor African American communities continue to be legally subject to an explicit system of control and
social and political exclusion, even among incredulous assertions that the United States is now a postracial society.
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Although Alexander claims that this group is defined largely by race, I argue that this group is defined at the
crucial intersection of race, class, and disability. Interestingly, Alexander almost intuitively gestures toward
such an analysis. In marking the historical continuities between Jim Crow laws and mass incarceration, she writes
that, "the degraded status of Africans was justified on the grounds that Negroes, like the Indians, were an
uncivilized lesser race, perhaps even more lacking in intelligence and laudable human qualities than the red-skinned
natives" (25). Here, Alexander seems unaware that disability as deviant pathology is utilized to assign
African slaves a degraded self- worth. This unawareness results in her nonrecognition of the constitutive
relationship of race and disability where racialized bodies became disabled and disabled bodies became
racialized within the specific historical conditions of a burgeoning capitalism (Erevelles 2011). In her essay
"Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: Notes on an American Grammar," Hortense Spillers (1987) locates the "origins"
of African American subjectivity in the (trans)Atlantic slave trade that starts with the unimaginable
violence during the Middle Passage, continues through the dehumanization of slavery, and finally
concludes by exposing dominant conceptualizations of the contemporary "Black Family" as a tangle of
pathology. However, just like Alexander's book, Spillers' essay, detailing the historical practices that
enabled the black body to be pathologized, is as much about disability as it is about race, even though the
word "disability" is not mentioned once in her essay. I find this startling because the "scene[s] of actual
mutilation, dismemberment, and exile" (67) that Spillers' describes in her essay produce disabled
bodiesblack disabled bodies without gender, without genitalia, without subjectivity who in an
ironic turn are transformed into commodities that are exchanged in the market for profit. I call it
ironic because it is in this "becoming" disabled that the black body is at the height of its profitability for the slave
masters and it is the historical, social, and economic context of this "becoming" that I foreground. But profitability in
colonialist/protocapitalist contexts has its even darker side. If profits could not be realized from the enslaved
body, then of what value is the body? In the introduction, Chapman, Ben-Moshe, and Carey draw on Sharon
Snyder and David Mitchell's work to argue that "both English and German sources during the eugenics era portrayed .
. . the death of disabled people as a benefit to the nation" just as enslaved black bodies were deemed a benefit
to the nation so long as they represented a valuable labor force. Thus, in a curious complication,
although on the one hand "becoming disabled" as described in Spillers' text rendered black bodies
as profitable to slave masters, this profitability was only temporary because it "overlooks the
mortality that always accompanies slave systems, particularly for human chattel who become
disabled as a result of inhumane labor and living conditions or for those killed after being born with a
disability on slave plantations" (Snyder and Mitchell 2006, 122). To the ship crew of mostly European men
undertaking the Middle Passage, those bodies, "black as Ethiops, and so ugly, both in features and in body, as
almost to appear (to those who saw them) the images of a lower hemisphere" (De Azurara as qtd. in
Spillers 1987, 70) were nothing more than cargo to be transported to the New World by sea and to be traded for
unimaginable profit because of their obvious "physical" impairments. Here, the conceptualization of black
subjectivity as impaired subjectivity is neither accidental nor metaphorical. Rather it is precisely at
that moment when one class of human beings was transformed into cargo that black bodies become
disabled and disabled bodies become black. Further, it is also important to note that blackness itself does not
stand in for skin color. Black and disabled are not just linguistic tropes used to delineate difference,
but are, instead, materialist constructs produced for the appropriation of profit in an historical context
where black disabled bodies were subjected to the most brutal violence. Spillers describes the
brutal violation of black flesh with "eyes beaten out, arms, backs, skulls branded, a left jaw, a right ankle,
punctured; teeth missing, as the calculated work of iron, whips, chains, knives, the canine patrol, the bullet" (67).
Although Spillers (1987) describes these markings on the flesh as "the concentration of ethnicity" in a
culture "whose state apparatus, including judges, attorneys, `owners,' `soul drivers,' overseers,' and
'men of God,' apparently colludes with a protocol of 'search and destroy' (67), I argue that these
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same markings on the flesh, quite simply, also produce impairment. Here, impairment is not just
biological/natural, it is also produced in a historical, social, and economic context where the very
embodiment of blackness and disability "bears in person the marks of a cultural text whose inside has
been turned outside" (p. 67). Here, the historical conditions of a nascent colonialist transnational
expansion of capitalism are responsible for the violent reconfiguration of the flesh such that it becomes
almost impossible to even imagine the sovereign subject, now mutually constituted via race, disability, and
gender as a dehumanized commodity.
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The prison and police state produce compulsory able-bodiness, which violently
assimilates, isolates, and produces us/them pathologies of disabled bodies.
Erevelles, Nirmala Crippin Jim Crow: Disability, Dis- Location, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline (Ch. 5)
Disability Incarcerated:Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada. Edited by Liat Ben-
Moshe, Chris Chapman, and Allison C. Carey, 2014. Published by Palgrave Macmillan
McRuer (2006) has argued that the recognition of compulsory able-bodiedness as an organizing practice in
social life enables us to "question the order of things, considering how and why it is constructed and
naturalized; how it is embedded in complex economic, social, and cultural relations; and how it might be
changed" (2). Compulsory able-bodiedness is brought to bear on the body via the normate (Garland-Thomson
1996, 8), the cultural Self whose boundaries are marked by its opposing twinthe disabled other the very
embodiment of corporeal difference. The material effects of these ableist practices result in the removal or
erasure of disability or both, even in social practices that purport to be inclusive. In fact, conditions for the
inclusion of disabled people in mainstream society require their assimilation (via special education,
rehabilitation, and assistive technology), their removal (via segregation, institutionalization,
incarceration) or their complete annihilation (euthanasia, abortion of disabled fetuses) (Campbell 2009;
Siebers 2008; Snyder and Mitchell 2006). Disability, therefore, becomes "the boundary condition that
resides just on the other side of hope . . . the condition one must escape rather than improve" (Ferguson
1987, 63). Shifting the locus of analysis from the individual to the social, compulsory able-bodiedness
becomes the ideological and material means to separate mainstream society from its dangerous outcastes.
Here, pathological discourses of disability are used to justify the oppressive binary cultural constructions of
normal/pathological, autonomous/dependent, competent citizen/ward of the state, and the social divisions of
labor (Erevelles 2011). In the context of Jim Crow, Alexander (2010) points out that the continued need to
"prevent the 'amalgamation' with a group of people considered intrinsically inferior and vile" (27)
perpetuated the current stereotypes of black men as "aggressive, unruly predators" required to be
forcibly separated from the general population. Thus, while the US South was patrolled by Jim Crow laws,
the more liberal US North East was safe guarded-via the ghetto "a third vehicle [the first being slavery and the
second Jim Crow] to extract black labor, while keeping black bodies at a safe distance, to the material and
symbolic benefit of white society" (Wacquant 2009, 202). Wacquant (2009) likens the ghetto to an
"ethnoracial prison" and the prison to a "judicial ghetto" (205). He theorizes both these spaces as "socio-
spatial device[s] that enable a dominant status group . . . to simultaneously ostracize and exploit a
subordinate group endowed with negative symbolic capital" (204). Although the ghetto serves as an
"urban condom" (Richard Sennett qtd. in Wacquant 2009, 205) protecting urban residents from the
polluting intercourse of its outcasts, the prison cleanses the urban space from the pollution of natural and
dangerous depravity. Moreover, the concurrent loss of jobs in the inner city and the gradual retrenchment of
social welfare in response to the neoliberal policies of less government intervention and their corresponding
association with social stigma have created a breakdown of the social order in the inner city. Here, the ghetto
and the prison combine into a single carceral continuum that has entrapped "a redundant population of younger
black men (and increasingly women) . . . in a self-fulfilling cycle of social and legal marginality" (207). Here
the trajectory from the ghetto to the prison is one of circularity (akin to a hamster's wheel) and as a result
functions "as an ancillary institution for caste preservation and labor control" (Wacquant 2009, 207) in
US society.
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ImpactAlienation
The hypocrisy of the prison system attempts to tell prisoners that it will be better once
they are corrected; however, many are denied access to welfare, food stamps, and
support once out of prison which leads to them being reimplemented into the prison
system.
Inmates own very little while incarcerated; most everything on or near their person is property of the
institution which holds them captive . Thus, while they toil away to make cheap items for the rest of us to
buy, they are alienated from the product, the means of production, their own human existence and
interactions with other humans in one fell swoop. Certainly, it is obvious that they will not be able to own
any of the things they create, as they cannot own much of anything. They are alienated from the means of
production, as they have no say in how the product is made, nor would anyone allow them to voice
such concerns in the first place. Prison is already a very individualized experience (Irwin, 2004; Sykes,
1958; Gordon, 2000.). A common thread in the narratives of inmates is the idea of doing your own time. This
means that you ought not meddle in the affairs of others behind the barbed wire fence, as it might screw up
your ability to keep minor privileges or accrued good behavior time. Work is something to take your own mind
off the endless string of days on the calendar, not as an instance to do something positive as a group.
Generally, the whole enterprise of locking people up will alienate the inmate from other humans, because that
is what it is designed to do; deprivation of liberties is our bread and butter as a nation. We apply it broadly and
with no consideration for its ramifications (Currie, 1998; Raphael & Stoll, 2013). However, when austerity
comes into the mix, it is typically a recipe for disaster. By marketizing the prison system, we ensure that the
bottom line is always considered first, despite the fact that this can be a breeding ground for riots. In their 1954
book, McGraw and McGraw cite several reasons for most prison riots which, not surprisingly, include:
inadequate financial support, overcrowding, poorly compensated prison employees, letting prisoners
do nothing, and political disenfranchisement of inmates and prisons generally (p.217). As for the
correctional officer, she too is alienated by her work. She is the watchdog of the state, yet employed
by some impersonal entity that manages the operation and calculates the bottom line for the
shareholders . She not only produces for someone else, but her voice has no place in the process. If
something is troubling to the CO (inmates complaining about inedible food, for example) about the process of
watching the incarcerated, their suggestions will certainly fall on deaf ears if it is not in line with austerity
measures. Being a CO, by virtue of the job description, is a very solitary, isolating line of work. You are to sit,
typically alone, in a room and watch people who are openly antagonistic with you. You learn to view your
fellow incarcerated human beings as a large, teeming mass of bodies that deserve no consideration,
no special treatment, and no empathy. You do this because you have to in order to get yourself out of
bed every day. They are dangerous others and not to be trusted. In her ethnographic account of inmates and
COs on Rikers Island, Wynn (2001) describes the challenges that guards face as a result of their job; these
troubles include a high rate of divorce, assault at the hands of inmates, exposure to a variety of infectious
diseases, and an increased likelihood of committing suicide. At Rikers in particular, 5 correctional officers
killed themselves within the first six months of 2000. Guards described the job as hour upon hour of
tedium punctuated by moments of terror (p.100). Most people tend to either feel indifferent about COs or
openly hate them. Often, they dont realize the extent to which they are abused by their employers, as well as
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those they are in charge of watching all day, and how what they do actually creates traumatic, sometimes
violent, situations that they must bear witness to every day. Therefore, the CO is only a few clicks away from
the prisoner in terms of how the circumstances in their lives result in an inability to thrive and in both cases,
capitalism is to blame. As Wynn adds, many Rikers COs come from the same city neighborhoods as the
inmates. As such, they are more aware of the hazards of growing up poor (p.103). A simulated reality One
interesting angle of this exploitation that deserves far more scrutiny is the idea that prison itself is an artificial
reality for both inmate and correctional officer. Prison is the type of simulation to which Baudrillard (1994)
refers in his book Simulacra and Simulation. It is a self-referential idea of how the worker should
behave in a real life; every day should be highly regimented, with the worker participating in some
type of meaningful task that contributes positively to capitalist society . Weber would call this the
idealtypus or the ideal type. Prison is supposed to produce the ideal type of worker, to include the ideal
type of surveillance in the form of the correctional officer. However, the thing to remember about the
ideal type is that it doesnt actually exist. Mitford (1973) describes how treatment of prisoners is
typically for the benefit of administrators, rather than for the inmates themselves . Their individual
identity is typically compromised in order to make them more obedient upon release, with little consideration for
how this will actually help them in the long run. In truth, it typically does not. Currie (1998) notes that prison
actually makes criminals worse, and thus, more likely to return to the prison system. Foucault had long
criticized the true nature of punishment as concerning itself with the political economy of bodies, their utility
and their docility, their distribution and their submission (p.172). He viewed prison as a complete and
austere institution that has always sought to render individuals docile and useful, by means of
precise work upon their bodies (p.214). This preoccupation with the bodily aspect of punishment is no
accident; prison is meant to be hard on the body (Wakefield and Uggen, 2010), because work is meant to be
hard on the body. Thus, prison seeks to recreate the illusion of working a typical, industrial or service
sector job on the outside. Sykes makes this perfectly clear: At least [the inmate] is to be employed at
honest labor; and if his earnings make up only a portion of his expenses, this is better than nothing at
all. [The state] is motivated by a curious blend of economic self-interest, faith in the efficacy of work as a
means of spiritual salvation, and a basic, hostile feeling that no man should escape the burden of supporting
himself by the sweat of his brow (p. 16). Another interesting connection here is the idea that inmates, the
majority of which are drug offenders (Gottschalk, 2006), had previously subverted the rules inherent to the
political economy; namely, working for a legitimate enterprise and paying taxes on ones earnings to the
government. Therefore, prison also becomes a simulation of the proper way to engage in the pursuit of
the American Dream, despite the fact that being successful in a capitalist system is largely
impossible without breaking the law (Rosenfeld & Messner, 1997). As Hallett notes, one way of coping
with [societal deficiencies] is through the utilization of illegal avenues of economic production, such as the drug
trade (p.63). As for correctional officers, the prison setting also creates a simulation of control and order. As
Sykes (1958) points out, the authority of the guard is merely an illusion, as they are completely outnumbered
by prisoners; this is particularly true in privately-run facilities. Whats more, prison guards are acutely aware
that their menial status as the (rather euphemistic) correctional officer really does nothing to
correct; rather, the control exerted by the prison system, much like on the outside, is based on
informal social controls as opposed to formal ones. There is no greater advertisement for the irrelevance
of the prison guard than the recidivist. Perhaps if we could prove that criminals are deterred by the notion of
coming back to prison, that might make all the expenditures, the lives ruined, and the laws passed worth it. It
might destroy the illusion that the prison guard does much more than behave as the organic camera lens
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through which the entire prison is captured. with dire consequences It is a well-established fact in
criminology literature that prison sentences are an invitation for men and women to come back for
more time in a cell upon their release. This seems incongruous when considering the fact that prison is a
highly regimented environment meant to simulate real life, as described above. But the sad fact is that the
formerly incarcerated are ill-prepared for what awaits them on the outside. Travis (2002) writes about
the challenges that face ex-cons upon their release. A felony conviction will exclude them from
receiving federal housing assistance, food stamps, and other forms of welfare assistance. If they were
convicted of a drug charge, they no longer qualify for financial aid to attend college. Many employers
are wary of hiring the formerly incarcerated, as evidenced by the ubiquitous question on job
applications regarding prior convictions. Compounding this problem is the ease by which background
checks can be conducted in the digital age. Even if an inmate wanted to vote for a politician that might
change these sanctions (though highly unlikely), in many states felons are banned from the voting
both for life. Thus, in sharp contrast to the simulated environment from which they came, basic life
necessities, such as a job, shelter, and food, are no longer guaranteed. There is a common ideology among
the general public that recidivism occurs because convicts like it better in jail. Given what we know about
what Travis calls collateral sanctions, it seems unlikely that they have much of a choice in the matter.
Correctional officers, as mentioned above, are at a higher risk of death by suicide by virtue of their job (Stack &
Tsoudis, 1997). Additionally, they are more likely to commit workplace homicide as well (Castillo & Jenkins,
1994). High levels of job stress, poor training, and a high turnover rate are blamed for these extremely
problematic side effects of their job. It seems that the simulation of being in control, coupled with the abuses
and constant vigilance that the state requires of them have clearly taken their toll on the guards. It is as though
they are in a dance that they didnt especially want to be invited to, and the inmates are their partners.
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ImpactDisability Incarceration
Incarceration causes and exacerbates poor mental health within prisoners- specifically
those who are minorities
Ben-Moshe 17 [Liat, Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at the University of Toledo | Why
Prisons Are Not " The New Asylums ", Punishment and Society, March 19, 2017, R.F]
poor mental health (and other

Instead I examine literature on conditions of confinement from a disability and mad studies lens to suggest that
disabling conditions) are intrinsic to the prison and that should warrant an indictment of the system of
incarceration and institutionalization and not of deinstitutionalization. Rates of suicide can be examined as an example. As Stewart and I
discuss elsewhere (2016), suicide remains the leading cause of jail inmates deaths and the picture is not much different in state
prisons. According to Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS 2012), between 2001 and 2010, suicide was among the
five leading causes of death in prison in all but two years. Why is the suicide rate so high in carceral spaces? Much of the research
on suicide rates in prison had focused on the individuals incarcerated and their characteristics as explanatory variables, particularly indicators of mental
health. As Huey and McNulty (2005) rightfully state, this focus is related to the medicalization of suicide more broadly, in which the causes for suicide
(even in a repressive setting such as a prison or other total institutions) are seen as reflective of personal pathology. As Liebling (1999) adds, this narrow
focus on the individual had led to limited and ineffective analysis and prevention policy for suicide in prisons. Huey and McNulty (2005) show that it is
prison conditions that should be examined if we want to have a holistic understanding of the high rates of suicide behind bars. The
nature of
incarceration itself, therefore, distresses those incarcerated and worsens their mental and physical well-being.
Conditions of confinement may cause further mental deterioration in those entering the system with diagnoses
of "mental" or intellectual disabilities (American Association of Mental Retardation, 2005). To make matters worse, those
incarcerated who are identified as mentally ill or exhibit "disruptive behaviors" are often sanctioned to
"administrative segregation" in separate units (often referred to as the SHU- security housing units- or facility
wide as supermax). These are isolation units resembing a closet, in which one lives for 23 hours a day. People who are mentally ill,
queer / gay, gender non-conforming and others are often placed in solitary as a form of 'protective custody,
often 'for their own good'. These segregated forms of incarceration are likely to cause or exacerbate mental
and physical ill-health of those incarcerated, regardless of their mental state prior to incarceration. Haney (2003)
lists rage, loss of control, hallucinations, and self-mutilations as some of the adverse effects prisoners secluded in supermax and solitary confinement
have experienced. Shalev (2008) details the detrimental health effects of solitary confinement, including trauma, nightmares, headaches, hallucinations
Legal scholar DeMarco (2011) goes a step further to argue that since
and overall emotional and physical breakdown.
confinement in supermax facilities almost guarantees the creation of a mental disability, such confinement violates the
Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (which was approved by the UN in 2006). In a tragic cyclical way, as Reiter and Blair (2015a) point
out, the very presence of seriously mentally ill people in jail or prison has become a primary justification for the use of solitary confinement, which, in
turn, creates or exacerbates mental distress.
There is also a racial and gender bias in the interpretation and diagnosis of
mental health differences in prisons. Prisoners of color who experience an emotional breakdown are more
likely than their White counterparts to be sent to segregation, to be thought of as malingering/stubborn/violent and to be denied
treatment. This is part of the discourse of racial criminal pathologization, which interlinks anti-black racism with pathologization. Although the film "the
people in women's correctional facilities (including transgender
new asylums" was shot only in men's correctional facilities,
inmates) also experience bias in diagnosis and treatment of mental health difference while incarcerated.
Women and gender variant folks who are incarcerated report high levels of trauma, both before and during
their incarceration (Kupers, 1999; 2008). This previous experience with trauma is hardly taken into account both in
sentencing and during their incarceration. This trauma is then triggered and re-triggered by the further violence within prison, such as the
common practice of bodily cavity search, leading feminist abolitionists (see Davis, 2003) to refer to incarceration itself as State sponsored violence
against women.
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The affs defense of the logic of the prison industrial complex leads to ongoing ableism
in the U.S- only by abolishing prisons will we be able to properly solve for the
discrimination towards those who are disabled
Ben-Moshe 11 [Liat, Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at the University of Toledo | Disabling
Incarceration: Connecting Disability to Divergent Confinements in the USA, Critical Sociology 39, December
20, 2011, R.F]
Another set of studies that examine the connection between medicalization, criminalization and imprisonment is the gathering of statistics around the
Statistics on criminally
prevalence of disability, especially labels of mental illness and mental retardation, among the imprisoned population.
mentally ill or people with mental illness diagnoses in jails and prisons are generally hard to come by,
especially historically. This is one of the reasons why claims of increasing rates of mental illness in prisons
post-deinstitutionalization is hard to support, as there is no comparative data pre-deinstitutionalization that can
be used as a baseline for such comparisons. Although several attempts have been made to estimate the number of
prisoners who have a psychiatric diagnosis, it is impossible to quantify their number with any degree of precision, even if taking the label of mental
American Psychiatric Association reports in 2000 that up to 5% [of prisoners] are
illness as a viable construct. The
actively psychotic and that as many as one in five prisoners were seriously mentally ill (APA, 2000: xix). Other
attempts to estimate their prevalence appear to have used a substantially more expansive definition of mental illness. The Bureau of Justice
Statistics (1999) reports that 16 percent of state prison inmates either identified as having a mental condition or
having stayed overnight in a mental hospital. The statistics for women prisoners are particularly stark. The
same study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics based on a survey of prisoners, found that 29 percent of white
females, 20 percent of black females and 22 percent of Hispanic females in State prison were identified as
mentally ill. Nearly four in ten white female inmates aged twenty-four or younger were mentally ill (BJS, 1999). Even
when taking the construct of mental retardation as a pure label, which is dependent on socio-historical power/knowledge paradigms, there is no precise
measurement for the number of prisoners who are labeled as mentally retarded. A policy brief states that while those with intellectual disabilities
comprise 2 to 3 percent of the general population, they
represent 4 to 10 percent of the prison population, with an even
greater number of those in juvenile facilities and in jails (Petersilia, 2000). One study that looked at the number of people with
disabilities in state and federal prisons found that less than 1 percent of inmates had physical disabilities while 4.2 percent had mental retardation
(Veneziano and Veneziano, 1996). It is also important to note that the construct of mental retardation cannot be entirely separated from that of mental
illness, as there are many, especially those who end up in prisons and jails, that are labeled as both, and the types of discrimination they are facing is
compounded by unfounded beliefs and lack of services in relation to both disabilities. Analyzing imprisonment from a disability studies lens will
necessitate a closer look at the social and economic conditions of disablement and incarceration rather than looking at disability as a cause for criminal
The majority of prisoners are poor, and are
acts. Prisoners are not randomly selected and do not represent all statuses of society.
people of color. Poverty is known to cause a variety of impairments and disabling conditions. In addition it is
crucial to emphasize that the prison environment itself is disabling from hard labor in toxic conditions and
materials to closed wards with poor air quality, circulation of drugs and unsanitary needles, and lack of medical
equipment and medication (Russell and Stewart, 2001). It is also crucial to take an expansive view of what constitutes disability in such
environments. For instance, the high prevalence of HIV/AIDS among prisoners and the various impairments that come with aging in a disabling
environment such as a prison, as a result of prolonged sentencing policies, should be analyzed critically by sociologists and disability studies scholars.
Disability in this framework is not a natural biological entity, but related to economic and social conditions that lead to an increased chance of both
disablement and imprisonment. Regardless of the percentages, it has become clear that while in prisons or jails, those
with disability or psychiatric diagnoses are often discriminated against. Far too frequently, when there is no
serious effort to provide mental health treatment, the only semblance of treatment offered is psychotropic medication, and often in
such circumstances it is ill prescribed and controlled (see American Association on Mental Retardation, 2005). Because of lack of access, prisoners
with physical disabilities cannot leave their cells, including going to the bathroom or showering . The lack of basic
human needs in the penal system is brought to full light in the heart wrenching stories of prisoners with disabilities. Like in the case of Newman
v. Alabama, finding systemic constitutional violations of prisoners rights in the Alabama prison system,
including the death of a quadriplegic inmate, who spent many months in the hospital confined to a bed, leading
to bedsores, which developed maggots from lack of care until the stench pervaded the entire ward (see ADAPT,
2005). What such horrific stories show is not the uniqueness of the disability experience behind bars, but both systemic disablement within society at
large and the inherent cruelty and inhumanity of the penal system as a whole. Similarly, conditions of confinement may cause further mental
deterioration in prisoners entering the system with diagnoses of mental illness or intellectual disabilities. Most court cases show that the right to
(re)habilitation is often not fulfilled in jails, prisons and institutions, and that this further distresses those incarcerated and worsens their mental and
physical health overall. Those incarcerated (in institutions or prisons) with labels of intellectual disabilities may in fact lose crucial life skills that they had
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before they were imprisoned such as loss of the ability to communicate, perform daily self-care, remain physically safe, and to maintain even
Prisoners who are identified as mentally ill or
rudimentary emotional stability (American Association on Mental Retardation, 2005).
exhibit disruptive behaviors are often sanctioned to administrative segregation in separate units, which are
often isolation units. These segregated forms of incarceration, such as supermax or SHU (security housing units), are
likely to cause or exacerbate mental and physical ill-health of those incarcerated. Haney (2003) lists rage, loss of control,
paranoia, hallucinations, and selfmutilations as some of the adverse effects prisoners secluded in supermax and solitary confinement had experienced.
The reason why these figures are so crucial is because there is much at stake in counting the percentage of disabled prisoners, in terms of research,
policy and activism. In terms of policy and legislation, it is clear that if one can prove sufficiently that there is a large percentage of prisoners with a
specific disability, then it would require a specific solution such as requesting more hospital units to be built in specific prisons or prescribing more
medications on a particular unit. For activists, using statistics that demonstrate the high prevalence of disabled prisoners could lead in several directions.
If one is an activist in NAMI (National Alliance of Mental Illness), for instance, then these statistics are used to show that deinstitutionalization failed and
that prisons and jails had become a dumping ground for those labeled as mentally ill with the lack of other alternatives. Such campaigns, which have
been ongoing since the early 1990s, call in essence for the (re)hospitalization of those with psychiatric diagnosis (see Torrey, 1996 for example).
However, if one is an activist in broader or more radical social justice initiatives, they might use these statistics to showcase the cruelty of the criminal
justice system and call for the just treatment of all prisoners (such as abolishing the use of isolation units or forced medication overall). The downturn of
such arguments, much like those in the calls to abolish the death penalty for those who are labeled as intellectually disabled, is that they can turn into
arguments that reproduce ableist rhetoric and may seem to call for the release of some prisoners (i.e. those most disabled) but not others.
Deinstitutionalization has led to prisons becoming the new asylums- which specifically
targets minorities inside the prison system
Ben-Moshe 14 [Liat, Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at the University of Toledo | Prisons as the
New Asylums, Asylum, Winter 2014, R.F]
Although several attempts have been made to estimate the number of prisoners who have a psychiatric diagnosis, it is impossible to estimate the
numbers with any precision, even if mental illness is presumed a viable construct. In 2000 theAmerican Psychiatric Association
reported that as many as 20% of all prisoners were seriously mentally ill, while up to 5% were actively
psychotic (APA,2000). Other estimates appear to use a substantially more expansive denition of mental illness. Bureau of Justice
Statistics show that in 2005 more than half of all prison and jail inmates were reported as having a
mental health problem. The reported prevalence of mental health problems amongst the imprisoned also seems to vary by race
and gender. White inmates are reported with higher rates than African-Americans or Hispanics (Erickson &
Erickson,2008). However, African-Americans, especially men, appear to be labeled seriously mentally ill more
often than their white counterparts. It is also reported that, in general, women inmates have higher rates of mental health
problems than men (Human Rights Watch, 2006). Prisoners are not randomly selected and do not represent all strata of society. Most
prisoners are poor and people of color. Poverty is known to cause a variety of impairments and disabling
conditions. In addition, the prison environment itself is disabling: from hard labor in harsh conditions with toxic
materials, to closed wards with poor air quality, the circulation of drugs and unsanitary needles, and a lack of
medical equipment and medication (Russell & Stewart, 2001). In addition, conditions of connement may cause further
mental deterioration in prisoners entering the system already with a diagnosis of mental or intellectual
disability. The nature of incarceration further distresses those incarcerated, and worsens their overall mental and physical health. Prisoners
identied as mentally ill or who exhibit disruptive behaviors are often sanctioned to administrative
segregation in separate (often isolation) units. Those segregated forms of incarceration, such as supermax
or SHU (security housing units), are likely to cause or exacerbate the mental and physical ill-health of those
incarcerated, regardless of their prior mental state. As I suggested elsewhere (Ben-Moshe, 2013), these statistics are not used
merely for heuristic purposes: there is much at stake in counting the percentage of disabled and so-called mentally ill prisoners. For activists, using
statistics that demonstrate the high prevalence of disabled prisoners can take several directions. For instance, an activist in NAMI (National Alliance of
Mental Illness) might use the statistics
to show that deinstitutionalization failed and that, with a lack of other
alternatives, prisons and jails have become a dumping ground for those labeled mentally ill. In essence, a campaign
might call for the (re)hospitalization of those with psychiatric diagnosis (e.g., see Torrey, 1996). Also, critiques from activists and scholars about
inappropriately placing disabled people in nursing homes or prisons (as argued, respectively, by some ADAP and NAMI activists) rearm the sentiment
that it is somehow appropriate to place some people in nursing homes and prisons. In other words, they seem to suggest that some people really do
need to be segregated in places of connement, while the young and the disabled do not. A similar approach is taken by those who nd the living
conditions of disabled prisoners and the institutionalized so deplorable that they call for more hospital beds in prisons, the reform of psychiatric hospitals
and institutions for those labeled intellectually disable, and the creation of more accessible prisons. Others call not for reform, but for abolishing those
institutions altogether. Perhaps most relevant to the prison abolitionist and anti-institutional stance is the analysis of imprisonment
and
institutional segregation as a core structure which shapes social relations throughout society, not just for those
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immediately aected (Davis, 2003). It is not just about closing down prisons or such institutions. This kind of analysis oers a revolutionary
framework which transforms the way we understand the forces that shape our histories and everyday lives. It questions notions such as crime and
innocence (what gets dened as crime, and who gets dened as criminal); disability (not just a medical diagnosis but also an identity) and
rehabilitation (a benign process or a force of assimilation and normalization); ideas of punishment (justice vs. revenge or retribution); notions of
community (as in living in the community or community re-entry); institution (Who denes what is called an institution?); notions of freedom and
equality (Can we feel free and safe without locking others away?); and concepts of danger and protection (Who do we protect by segregating people
behind bars in psychiatric hospitals and prisons? Is it really for their own good?) (Ben-Moshe, 2013).
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ImpactEpistemic Innocence
To continue to silence black and colonized voices on this topic is to sustain the
narrative of an official history which is rooted in a White and anti-black
epistemology. Our criticism is a break with the sanctioned ignorance that produces
domination.
Medina 11 [Jose, Prof. Philosophy @ Vanderbilt, Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance:
Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerilla Pluralism, Foucault Studies no. 12, p. 29-32]
there is no such thing as epistemic innocence, for
The second crucial idea that derives from the Foucaultian approach is that
we always operate from a space of knowability and unknowability simultaneously, from a
knowledge/ignorance frame-work. And this problematizes the notion of culpable ignorance. On the one hand, as Code remarks, there is
no such thing as an innocent position from which we could level charges of culpability.65 Therefore, as Code insists, in dealing with the epistemic
aspects of particular forms of oppression, we should be very careful not to indulge in the nave charge of epistemic culpability they should have known
better for very often subjects could not have known otherwise and, therefore, the charge of culpability is vacuous. On the other hand, however,
interstices within dis-cursive practices as well as alternative practices are often available; and they present opportunities for epistemic resistance, for
challenging knowledge/ignorance structures. Genealogical investigations can be used to point out how these subjugated knowledges could have been
used, how people could have known otherwise by drawing on them, how they could have become able to undo epistemic exclusions and
stigmatizations. Hence the insurrectionary power of subjugated knowledges, which genealogical investigations try to mobilize. As Sullivan puts it,
echoing Foucault: The creation of ignorance/knowledge through relations of force often is unbalanced and
unequal, as is the case in colonized lands. But as a dynamic, relational process, it involves the active participation of all sides and
includes the possibility of resistance to and transformation of the forms of ignorance/knowledge produced.66 A Foucaultian guerrilla pluralism
enables us to see how different possibilities of resistance appear for differently constituted and
situated subjects as they develop different forms of agency with respect to power/knowledge, or rather,
power/know-ledge-ignorance. Let me briefly sketch, by way of a conclusion, how this insurrectionary genealogical
pluralism can be put to use against ideologies of racial oppression and the forms of white ignorance
that they produce. In my application of the Foucaultian approach to white ignorance, we can appreciate the two points high-lighted by Codes
Foucaultian standpoint theory in the context of the epistemology of race: the co-constitutive relations between racial knowledge and racial ignorance,
and the unavailability of innocent racialized standpoints. What a Foucaultian racial epistemology of power/knowledge-ignorance underscores is the
constant epistemic struggles that take place in racialized social fields, calling attention to possibilities of resistance and contestation. In what follows I will
compare and contrast Foucaults guerrilla pluralism applied to racial knowledge/ignorance with one of the most influential accounts in race theory:
namely, Charles Millss racial epistemology of ignorance. In his now classic The Racial Contract Charles Mills (1997)67 put white ignorance in the
agenda of critical race theory. Following a long tradition in African-American philosophy, Mills argued there that
privileged white subjects have become unable to understand the world that they themselves have
created; and he called attention to the cognitive dysfunctions and pathologies inscribed in the white
world, not merely as side-effects, but as constitutive features of the white epistemic economy, which
revolves around epistemic exclusions and a carefully cultivated racial blindness. As Mills suggests, white ignorance is a form of self-
ignorance, but this racial self-ignorance also produces blindness with respect to racial others and their experiences. As Code aptly puts it, the white
epistemic gaze produces an ongoing ignorance of its own positionality vis--vis people variously Othered.68 In his
recent work Mills has developed a critical epistemology of ignorance whichI want to suggestoverlaps with Foucaultian insurrectionary genealogies in
interesting ways. In White Ignorance (2007) Mills
emphasizes the role that official histories and hegemonic forms of collective
memory play in sustaining white ignorance, and also the crucial role that counter-memory needs to play to resist and subvert the
epistemic oppression that condemns the lives of marginalized people to silence or oblivion. As Mills puts it, a crucial element in white ignorance is the
management of memory, which involves socially orchestrated, exclusionary processes of both remembering and for-getting: if we need to understand
collective memory, we also need to understand collective amnesia.69 Mills emphasizes that there is an intimate relationship be-tween white identity,
white memory, and white amnesia, especially about nonwhite victims.70 But fortunately we have both official and counter-memory, with con-flicting
judgments about what is important in the past and what is unimportant, what happened and does matter, what happened and does not matter, and what
did not happen at all.71 Mills argues that the postbellum
national white reconciliation was made possible and was
subsequently maintained thanks to the repudiation of an
alternative black memory.72 There have been all kinds of mechanisms in white epistemic practices that have
contributed to maintain this repudiation in place: blocking black subjectivities from giving testimony,
keeping black testimonywhen givenout of circulation,73 exercising an epistemic assumption
against its credibility, etc. In multiple venues of epistemic interaction in the white world, from the streets
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of white suburbs to the lecture halls of the academy, black voices have been traditionally minimized
and heavily constrained in their ability to speak about their own experiences,74 when they have been
allowed to speak at all (think, for example, of how witnesses of lynching were terrorized into silence until not too long ago). Black counter-
testimony against white mythology has always existed but would originally have been handicapped by the lack of material and cultural capital investment
available for its production.75 The
black counter-memories that Mills describes as getting systematically
disqualified and whited out certainly count as subjugated knowledges in a Foucaultian sense. And Foucaultian
White
genealogical investigations that tap into those sub-jugated knowledges could produce the kind of subversion and insurrection that Mills calls for:
ignorance has been able to flourish all of these years because a white epistemology of ignorance has
safeguarded it against the dangers of an illuminating blackness or redness, protecting those who for
racial reasons have needed not to know. Only by starting to break these rules and meta-rules can we
begin the long process that will lead to the eventual overcoming of this white darkness and the
achievement of an enlightenment that is genuinely multiracial.76
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ImpactEmpire Capacity to Expand
Your defense of reform legitimizes empires expanding capacity to commit violence.

Rodrguez 07 [Dylan Rodrguez, Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Riverside.
AMERICAN GLOBALITY AND THE US PRISON REGIME: STATE VIOLENCE AND WHITE SUPREMACY
FROM ABU GHRAIB TO STOCKTON TO BAGONG DIWA. Kritika Kultura 9 (2007): 022-048.]
There is all the more reason for imprisoned muslims (including and beyond members and affiliates of the Abu
Sayyaf) to embody the leading edge of insurgency against proliferating state terror and institutionalized
dehumanization. the immediate aftermath of march 15, 2005 entwines the fourth thread connecting bagong
diwa to the global expansion of the American prison regime: it is wholly possible that the legacy of this
rebellion and state-conducted massacre will facilitate an era of Philippine prison
reform and prison expansion, both of which will undoubtedly be informed, assisted,
and politically supported by the uS government and military, as well as its expansive
prison establishment. there is historical precedent for this possibility: it was in the immediate
aftermath of the Folsom Manifesto, Attica rebellion, and a number of other early 1970s insurrections
by politicized imprisoned people in the US that the foundation was poured for the
industrialization and astronomical multiplication of the prison apparatus as a primary
method of political repression and social (dis)organization. reformist calls for
institutional change resonated through the mid-to-late 1970s, as a fragile alliance of
imprisoned activists, prisoners rights supporters, attorneys, liberal policymakers, criminologists, judges,
elected officials, and prison administrators enacted a broad agenda that would ostensibly
improve prison living conditions (for example, alleviating the overcrowding and undernourishment of
inmates), stamp out the most heinous forms of institutional corruption, and professionalize
(and multiply) prison staff. this generally well-intentioned reformist agenda, however, was
quickly absorbed into the political impetus and economic drive for more and better
prisons. In concert with the racist and anti-poor mobilization of the reactionary War
on drugs of the 1980s, the united States increased its total incarcerated population
almost tenfold in about one a generation: by 1990, more than a million people were held in American jails and prisons
and shortly thereafter the uS became the worlds per capita leader in human warehousing (see Wacquant). the rapid growth of womens prisons through
the 1990s, and the more recent transformation of uS immigrant detention facilities (through the militarization of the uS-mexico border and domestic
the Philippines is poised for a dramatic
War on terror) have further extended the scope of this apparatus. As such ,
prison and jail expansion, buttressed by a state and popular mandate to reform the
institutional methods and enhance the bureaucratic scale of its capacities to mass-
incarcerate. the Arroyo administration, in concert with the PnP and AFP, will likely justify a
commitment to Philippine law and order by pointing to things like the bagong diwa insurrection
and a constellation of other mobilizations and movements as alleged threats to national and
local security, particularly in the long-cast shadow of American globality and its
resident articulation as War on terror neoliberalism. The final and most important strand linking the Bagong Diwa
massacre to the globality of the uS prison regime is the political onus it bears upon people who are commi ed to struggle for human liberation and
freedom in the face of such overwhelming state violence. A profound and potentially revitalizing political possibility remains embedded in this moment of
mourning and commemoration. this possibility opens with the recognition that the bagong diwa tragedy of march 15, 2005 is an allegory of the everyday
for the increasing numbers of ordinary people who must suffer and die at the hands of the PnP, the Philippine jail and prison apparatus, and the uS
prison regime writ large. there is, in other words , a kinship of captivity that is shared by ever- increasing
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numbers of people in localities across the world that are somehow touched by the
virus of American globality, and its unholy matrimony of mass-based human
immobilization and acute bodily punishment. A mounting movement for the
fundamental transformation of the American prison, policing, and criminal justice
systems has taken flight since the late 1990s and has begun to blossom in the
resurgence of the late 19th century uS abolitionist movement, whose most
revolutionary dreams the decisive overthrow of slavery, white supremacy, uS
apartheid, and normalized state terrorremain to be fulfilled. As this movement grows in
relevance and political scope, it has become increasingly clear that Filipina/o activists, teachers, writers,
professional intellectuals, and ordinary people are situated to assume an epoch-shaping
responsibility in rendering themselves accountable to a living history. the nightmare of the
American prison regime is bleeding into our very pores, as its violence is literally becoming the way of the worldeven and especially in our so-called
homelands. bagong diwa has abruptly called us forth as protagonists in this state of emergency. As the soil hardens on the mass graves of the 22
prisoners killed at bagong diwa, the question remains as to whether and how we will muster a response.
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ImpactGlobal War
The impact is global war and state-organized human capture.
Rodriguez 2008 (Dylan Rodriguez is Professor and Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC
Riverside, Excerpt Warfare and the Terms of Engagement from Abolition Now! 12/17/2008
http://www.revolutionbythebook.akpress.org/warfare-and-the-terms-of-engagement/
We are collectively witnessing, surviving, and working in a time of unprecedented state-organized human
capture and state-produced physical/social/psychic alienation, from the 2.5 million imprisoned by the
domestic and global US prison industrial complex to the profound forms of informal apartheid and
proto-apartheid that are being instantiated in cities, suburbs, and rural areas all over the country. This
condition presents a profound crisisand political possibilityfor people struggling against the white
supremacist state, which continues to institutionalize the social liquidation and physical evisceration of Black,
brown, and aboriginal peoples nearby and far away. If we are to approach racism, neoliberalism,
militarism/militarization, and US state hegemony and domination in a legitimately global way, it is
nothing short of unconscionable to expend significant political energy protesting American wars
elsewhere (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) when there are overlapping, and no less profoundly oppressive,
declarations of and mobilizations for war in our very own, most intimate and nearby geographies of
home.
This time of crisis and emergency necessitates a critical examination of the political and institutional
logics that structure so much of the US progressive left, and particularly the establishment left that is
tethered (for better and worse) to the non-profit industrial complex (NPIC). I have defined the NPIC elsewhere
as the set of symbiotic relationships that link political and financial technologies of state and owning class
social control with surveillance over public political discourse, including and especially emergent progressive
and leftist social movements. This definition is most focused on the industrialized incorporation, accelerated
since the 1970s, of pro-state liberal and progressive campaigns and movements into a spectrum of
government-proctored non-profit organizations.
It is in the context of the formation of the NPIC as a political power structure that I wish to address, with a
less-than-subtle sense of alarm, a peculiar and disturbing politics of assumption that often structures,
disciplines, and actively shapes the work of even the most progressive movements and organizations
within the US establishment left (of which I too am a part, for better and worse): that is, the lefts
willingness to fundamentally tolerateand accompanying unwillingness to abolishthe
institutionalized dehumanization of the contemporary policing and imprisonment apparatus in its most
localized, unremarkable, and hence normal manifestations within the domestic homeland of the
Homeland Security state.
Behind the din of progressive and liberal reformist struggles over public policy, civil liberties, and law, and
beneath the infrequent mobilizations of activity to defend against the next onslaught of racist, classist, ageist,
and misogynist criminalization, there is an unspoken politics of assumption that takes for granted the
mystified permanence of domestic warfare as a constant production of targeted and massive suffering,
guided by the logic of Black, brown, and indigenous subjection to the expediencies and essential
violence of the American (global) nation-building project. To put it differently: despite the unprecedented
forms of imprisonment, social and political repression, and violent policing that compose the mosaic of our
historical time, the establishment left (within and perhaps beyond the US) does not care to envision, much
less politically prioritize, the abolition of US domestic warfare and its structuring white supremacist
social logic as its most urgent task of the present and future. Our non-profit left, in particular, seems
content to engage in desperate (and usually well-intentioned) attempts to manage the casualties of
domestic warfare, foregoing the urgency of an abolitionist praxis that openly, critically, and radically
addresses the moral, cultural, and political premises of these wars.
Not long from now, generations will emerge from the organic accumulation of rage, suffering, social alienation,
and (we hope) politically principled rebellion against this living apocalypse and pose to us some rudimentary
questions of radical accountability: How were we able to accommodate, and even culturally and politically
normalize the strategic, explicit, and openly racist technologies of state violence that effectively socially
neutralized and frequently liquidated entire nearby populations of our people, given that ours are the very same
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populations that have historically struggled to survive and overthrow such classical structures of dominance
as colonialism, frontier conquest, racial slavery, and other genocides? In a somewhat more intimate sense,
how could we live with ourselves in this domestic state of emergency, and why did we seem to generally
forfeit the creative possibilities of radically challenging, dislodging, and transforming the ideological
and institutional premises of this condition of domestic warfare in favor of short-term, winnable
policy reforms? (For example, why did we choose to formulate and tolerate a progressive political
language that reinforced dominant racist notions of criminality in the process of trying to discredit
the legal basis of Three Strikes laws?) What were the fundamental concerns of our progressive
organizations and movements during this time, and were they willing to comprehend and galvanize an
effective, or even viable opposition to the white supremacist states terms of engagement (that is,
warfare)? This radical accountability reflects a variation on anticolonial liberation theorist Frantz Fanons
memorable statement to his own peers, comrades, and nemeses:
Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity. In the underdeveloped
countries preceding generations have simultaneously resisted the insidious agenda of colonialism and paved
the way for the emergence of the current struggles. Now that we are in the heat of combat, we must shed the
habit of decrying the efforts of our forefathers or feigning incomprehension at their silence or passiveness. Lest
we fall victim to a certain political nostalgia that is often induced by such illuminating Fanonist exhortations, we
ought to clarify the premises of the social mission that our generation of US based progressive organizing
has undertaken. In the vicinity of the constantly retrenching social welfare apparatuses of the US state, much
of the most urgent and immediate work of community-based organizing has revolved around service provision.
Importantly, this pragmatic focus also builds a certain progressive ethic of voluntarism that constructs the
model activist as a variation on older liberal notions of the good citizen. Following Fanon, the question is
whether and how this mission ought to be fulfilled or betrayed. I believe that to respond to this political problem
requires an analysis and conceptualization of the state that is far more complex and laborious than we
usually allow in our ordinary rush of obligations to build campaigns, organize communities, and write grant
proposals. In fact, I think one pragmatic step toward an abolitionist politics involves the development of
grassroots pedagogies (such as reading groups, in-home workshops, inter-organization and inter-
movement critical dialogues) that will compel us to teach ourselves about the different ways that the
state works in the context of domestic warfare, so that we no longer treat it simplistically. We require,
in other words, a scholarly activist framework to understand that the state can and must be radically
confronted on multiple fronts by an abolitionist politics.
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ImpactRacialized Criminalization
Prison require the criminalization of children of color and the disappearing of whole
populations
Gordan and Davis 09 [Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara Race and
Class. ( globalism and the prison industrial complex: an interview with Angela Davis) http://rac.sagepub.com//
Daniels
More than 70 per cent of the imprisoned population are people of colour.
immense network of US prisons and jails.
Approximately five million people - including those on probation and parole - are directly under the surveillance of the
criminal justice system. Three decades ago, the imprisoned population was approximately one-eighth its
current size. While women still constitute a relatively small percentage of people behind bars, today the number of incarcerated
women in the state of California, where we live, alone is almost twice the entire state and federal womens
population of 1970. In fact, the fastest growing group of prisoners are Black women. According to Elliott Currie, [t]he prison
has become a looming presence in our society to an extent unparalleled in our history - or that of any other industrial democracy. Short of major wars,
mass incarceration has been the most thoroughly implemented government social Programme of our times I
Penal infrastructures must be created to accommodate this rapidly swelling population of caged people. Goods and people must be provided to keep
imprisoned populations alive. Sometimes these populations must be kept busy and at other times - particularly in repressive super-maximum prisons
and in Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) detention centres - they must be deprived of virtually all meaningful activity.
Vast numbers of
handcuffed and shackled people are moved across state borders as they are transferred from one state or
federal prison to another. All this work, which used to be the primary province of government, is now also
performed by private corporations, whose links to government in the field of what is euphemistically called
corrections reveal dangerous resonances with the military industrial complex. The dividends that accrue from investment
in the punishment industry, like those that accrue from investment in weapons production, only amount to social destruction. Taking into account
the structural similarities and profitability of business-government linkages in the realm of military production
and public punishment, the expanding penal system can now be characterised as a prison industrial
complexare only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending
with them are relegated to cages. Prisons thus perform a feat of magic. Or rather the people who continually vote in new prison bonds or
tacitly assent to a proliferating network of prisons and jails, have been tricked into believing in the magic of imprisonment. But, as youve suggested
elsewhere, prisons do not disappear problems, they
disappear human beings and the practice of disappearing vast
numbers of people from poor, immigrant and racially marginalised communities literally has become big
business. As prisons take up more and more space on the social landscape, other government programmes that have previously sought to respond
to social needs are being squeezed out of existence. In fact, the dismantling of the welfare state and the growth of the prison industrial complex have
taken place simultaneously and are intimately related to one another. In the process of implementing this prisonisation of the US social landscape,
private capital has become enmeshed in the punishment industry in a variety of ways and, precisely because of their profit potential, prisons are
becoming increasingly central to the US economy. If the
notion of punishment as a source of potentially stupendous profits is
disturbing by itself, then the strategic dependence on racist structures and ideologies to render mass
punishment palatable and profitable is even more disturbing. This political economy of prisons relies on
racialised assumptions of criminality - such as images of Black welfare mothers reproducing criminal
children - and on well-documented racist practices in arrest, conviction and sentencing patterns to
deliver up bodies destined for profitable punishment. Coloured bodies are the main raw material in this
vast experiment to disappear the major social problems of our time. Once the aura of magic is stripped away from the
imprisonment solution, however, what is revealed is racism, class bias and the parasitic seduction of capitalist profit within a system that materially and
morally impoverishes its inhabitants, while it devours the social wealth needed to address the very problems that have led to spiralling numbers of
prisoners.
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ImpactSexual Violence
The prison is rape it is a site where consent is structurally barred that creates the
routinization of sexual violation and traumaand deplorable care produces conditions
for the rapid spread of medication-resistant strains of HIV, turning case
Fink, OGrady and Fortier, 09 (Marty Fink, Ashley Fortier and Liam Michuad OGrady, Liam OGrady works in Family Continuity for female
inmates and ex-inmates, Marty Fink is an Assistant Professor in ProCom with a focus on queer and trans studies at The University of Ryerson, You Improvise to
Survive: HIV Prevention, survival strategies & queer cultures of self-defense, Journal of Prisoners on Prisons (University of Ottawa Press) 2009, DOA: 7/25/17,
http://www.againstequality.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/improvisetosurvive.pdf) EL
Here in prison or at least this prison there is no such thing as safe sex. It is against the rules. Matt Jones
As we received submissions, anecdotes, feedback, and suggestions from our contacts inside, we came to realize the extent to which these histories still
represent some of the key narratives structuring their daily lives and interactions on the inside. Today we
see these histories as diffuse, naturalized, and embedded in our negotiations of queer and trans desire,
risk, pleasure and survival. These negotiations are directly structured by expressions of antiqueer
violence in carceral settings: (a) Sexual expression and intimacy between prisoners is in almost all cases explicitly criminal, resulting in punishment,
extralegal beatings, administrative retaliation, solitary confinement / isolation, and increased sentencing. In the process, consensual queer sex between
prisoners faces the same sanctions as instances of sexual assault, rape, and sexual violence. (b)
Tangible and consistent condom access in prisons federal and provincial, north and south of the US- Canada border does not
exist, revealing the profound discrepancies between institutional policy, and peoples lived realities. Over
the course of the past two years, incarcerated project participants have recalled a spectrum of experiences with respect to alleged condom availability, ranging from condoms
being rationed at a rate of one per month, to the nursing station having run out for a nine consecutive month stretch, to an array of structurally coordinated disincentives in
condoms can only be accessed by asking administrative personnel, which
accessing condoms or lube. In many cases,
in the majority of contexts where queer sex is criminal, means that condom access hinges upon
directly incriminating yourself, or potentially outing yourself as gay or queer. Where in the US the landscape is
characterized by almost total lack of access nationwide, in Canada this landscape is characterized by the myth of consistent and unobstructed condom access. (c) Prisoner-
led organizing, including the emergence of prisoner-run HIV prevention and peer-health education programs in the late 1980s and early 1990s, has been criminalized inside
prisons over the course of the past twenty years, across the US and Canada, most explicitly under the purview of alleged anti-gang reform. This shift demobilized an
emerging prisoner AIDS prevention movement, ensuring the continued rise in infection rates among communities on the inside. (d) Queer
or explicit safer
sex information, literature, and resources, is routinely censored, seized, or returned under the purview
of anti-pornography policies. Just as the US-Canada border obstructed the passage of such materials in the 1980s when AIDS was decimating our
communities on the outside, prison mailrooms and administrations continue this role of censorship and gatekeeping as diffuse borders mapped onto existing national ones. As
a result, prevention and health knowledge on the inside is now often five, ten, or even fifteen years behind
what is on the outside, further inhibiting queer survival. (e) There exists a lack of consistent access to
HIV medication and anti-retroviral drugs among HIV positive communities who become incarcerated,
as well as among prisoners who contract HIV while incarcerated. These intentional and structural gaps
in access create new and more virulent strains of HIV that are medication-resistant in the bodies of
queer, trans, and other HIV positive prisoners. This last instance of the bodily management and regulation of
prisoners comprises an instance of structural antiqueer violence which not only mobilizes historical
legacies of entire communities being permitted to die, but which actively nurtures the conditions for a
second cohort to the epidemic that may prove itself even more resilient than the first. In our desire to revisit each of these intertwining narratives, not only
do we situate ourselves historically, but we come to understand that the realities we face today reflect the lived effects of legacies of thirty years of
AIDS decimation and carceral expansion. That these knowledges emerge through our correspondence and resource development reveals the
extent to which, in becoming naturalized, these histories exist in peoples very bodies, emerging in the most minute
and daily negotiations of violence, risk, and sexual safety.
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The prison regime is the biggest perpetrator of sexual violence
Vitulli 2008 (Elias, Visiting Lecturer of Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College, Queering the Carceral Intersecting Queer/Trans Studies and
Critical Prison Studies, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 2013 Volume 19, Number 1: http://glq.dukejournals.org/content/19/1/111.abstract.
AB)
a queer antiprison politic that takes into

In Queering Antiprison Work: African American Lesbians in the Juvenile Jus- tice System, Beth Richie calls for
account race, sexuality, and gender. She argues that this is necessary in order to attend to the heteronormative
imperatives of the US prison system, imperatives that are intersectionally structured by gender,
sexuality, and race.1 Published in 1995, this article has long been one of the rare queer scholarly engagements with the prison. Despite the fact that queer and especially trans and
gender- nonconforming people are disproportionately incarcerated and otherwise affected by the US prison system, queer studies has rarely examined the prison, and critical prison studies has rarely
engaged with queerness. However, in the past few years, a new cohort of scholars has taken up Richies call and begun to explore the multiple and complex ways that queerness pervades the US prison
system and the effects of criminalization and incarceration on queer, gender- and sexual- nonconforming, and LGBT people. The books in this review are an important core of this new scholarship: Regina
Kunzels Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality; the anthology Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, edited by Eric A. Stanley
and Nat Smith; and Dean Spades Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law. These books are joined by the also recently published Queer (In)Justice: The
Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States, by Joey Mogul, Andrea Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock, and by a handful of journal articles.2 These books come at an important moment in which the eld of
the US prison system as a key social and state institution in the United States and a central site of
critical prison studies is beginning to form. This field has theorized
US statecraft, social and racial formation, and political control. Critical prison studies scholars have shown that the prison system is
particularly enmeshed in white supremacy, helping produce and ground it.3 A few have also developed theoretical frameworks to
understand the prison system as simultaneously racialized, gendered, and sexualized. As Dylan Rodrguez argues, the prison system is constituted by the convergence of the discursive and material
axes of white supremacy, heteronormative patriarchy, and capital.4 However, the field tends to privilege race and white supremacy as the center of the US prison system and decenter other social
categories, such as gender and sexuality, and systems of oppression, such as heteropatriarchy. Furthermore, the fields discussions of gender and of men and women tend to assume that all incarcerated
people fall neatly into the categories of male and female and that all men are in mens prisons and all women are in womens prisons. In other words, the eld has not focused much attention on the
incarceration and criminalization of queer, gender-nonconforming, and trans people. As the scholarship in this review shows, the US prison system is also built on and produces systems of gender
normativity and heteropatriarchy. These oppressive systems are deeply enmeshed with the prison systems racism, in the way it warehouses certain people of color and produces prisoners as both racially
other and queer. Critical prison studies must, therefore, centrally engage with questions of gender and sexuality and do so intersectionally with its analyses of race and white supremacy. As a site of
deviance and perversion and as a system that deeply affects queer and trans lives, the prison system should be of interest to queer studies. Nevertheless, queer studies scholarship has yet to closely
examine the US prison system. Queer people are often caught in cycles of violence, poverty, and incarceration that are deeply connected to how they have been represented in pop culture, medicine, and
social scientific literature. As Eric A. Stanley explains in the introduction to Captive Genders, The historical illegality of gender trespassing and of queerness have taught many trans/queer folks that their
lives will be intimately bound with the legal system (8). While gay and lesbian history, queer studies, and trans studies frequently engage with questions of criminalization and show that experiences of
criminalization particularly police harassment and raids have been incredibly important in identity and community formation throughout the twentieth century, few scholars examine or connect this
racialization produces people and communities of color

criminalization to the prison system. In addition, queer of color scholarship has shown that
as inherently gender and sexually deviant and nonnormative. In other words, queerness, deviance, and racialized criminality are deeply inter-
twined. For example, in Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics? Cathy J. Cohen argues that white supremacy, patriarchy, and class exploitation produce many
Racialized criminality is one important way that certain people of color are
people of color as nonheteronormative.5
produced as queer and deviant. Joy James argues that in the United States, criminality, deviancy, and immorality
are embodied in the black because both sexual and social pathology are branded by skin color (as
well as by gender and sexual orientation).6 Here James ties together the racist productions of
blackness as criminal and as sexually and socially pathological. More specifically, incorrigibility and
criminality often hinge on the spectacle of the threat of black masculinity and the pathologization of
black femininity. In other words, it is not just punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens but also
criminals and prisoners who are queered. In Criminal Intimacy, Regina Kunzel examines the history of same-sex sex and sexuality in US prisons and how sex in
prisons was constructed, organized, and made sense of in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Looking at representations of prisons in memoirs, social scientific literature, ction, lms, and activist work,
she marks the presence of sex in prisons since the prisons modern formation in the nineteenth century and traces the continuous but changing anxieties about prison sex through the late twentieth
century. She shows that sex in prisons has long been talked about, but that the meaning of that sex, its place in prison societies, and its implications for US society beyond prison walls has changed over
time. Kunzel makes two central claims that help us understand the importance of queer engagements with the prison. First, she argues that sex in prisons has had a profound and central effect on the
organization, definition, and structure of prisons since their inception. Throughout the book, Kunzel documents that sex was not only a concern of prison administrators and reformers from the creation of
the penitentiary system through the (near) present but that sexuality was constitutive of the modern prison, informing and determining its design, organization, architecture, modes of confining and
scrutinizing prisoners, and relations between prisoners. Second, she argues that the materiality of prison sex along with the discursive interpretations of it have played an important role in creating and
defining modern sexuality. Echoing critical prison studies scholars, Kunzel argues that prisons and relations within them are not marginal or exceptional to US life and social structures. She shows that
constructions of sexuality in prisons, particularly regarding same-sex sexuality and desire, were deeply influenced by and also helped construct modern sexuality. Kunzels work reveals how the
construction of modern sexuality and the modern prison system have been deeply intertwined for nearly two centuries. For example, in her second chapter, Every Prison Has Its Perverts, Kunzel
examines the exchange among sexologists, penologists, and other writers examining prisons. Sexologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries helped produce a hegemonic understanding
of homosexuality as a distinct and essential trait. Kunzel argues that the prison as a single-sex space, in which same-sex sexuality was relatively common, challenged this essentialist and binary
framework of distinct sexual types, blurring boundaries, confounding categories, and producing queerness as a primary feature of the prison. To explain this, sexologists created two categories of
homosexuality: constitutional and circumstantial. Sexologists construction of sexuality deeply influenced penologists interpretations of prison sex, and penologists in influenced prison administrators, who
used this knowledge to alter prison space in various ways, such as segregating constitutional homosexuals, who were deemed a contaminating influence on the rest of the prison population. Prisons
have long been linked to deviant sex, sexuality, and gender, and prisons are often viewed as sites of rampant sexual perversion. Kunzel historicizes this perception, showing that this has long been a
central part of popular, scholarly, and reformist imaginaries of the prison. Like the other scholars in this review, Kunzel argues that this is not incidental but in fact matters to hegemonic constructions of
sexuality, gender, and the US prison system. She shows that pre- occupations with sex often took a central place in studies of prisons and argues that they represented some of the first efforts in the
United States to understand and codify deviant sexual types and practices. Yet this work also exposed the impossibilities and instabilities inherent in that taxonomical project from the outset (49). In
other words, prison sexual practices trouble understandings of both true homosexuality and heterosexuality and reveal the fissures in conceptions of modern sexuality, which rest on notions of
immutable and stable heterosexual and homosexual identities, thereby exposing its constructed nature. Throughout the book, Kunzel shows that interpretations and practices of prison sexuality were
deeply racialized and gendered. In fact, Kunzels work shows that the racialization of the prison and prisoners is deeply sexualized. In perhaps her most captivating chapter, Rape, Race, and the Violent
Prison, Kunzel traces the history of the emergence of the now ubiquitous association between male prisons and sexual violence, focusing on the centrality of race in this new narrative, which imagined a
black sexual aggressor and white victim. Kunzel argues that this narrative was not just important in changing public perceptions of prisons but also contributed to national postcivil rights debates about
black citizenship and politicization at a time when black men were incarcerated at increasingly disproportionate rates, in other words, on the eve of the rise of (racialized) mass incarceration. She argues
that this narrative also offered new ways to understand sex in prisons. While sexual violence existed in prisons throughout their history, prior to the 1970s it received little attention or was interpreted as the
result of sexual deprivation. In the 1970s and 1980s, sexual violence was reinterpreted as an expression of dominance and control, particularly employed by black prisoners to dominate white prisoners
and prison officials. Reading this shifting interpretation of sexual violence in prisons in the context of an increased focus on violence in prisons, the shifting racial makeup of prisons, and the postcivil
rights era backlash, Kunzel argues that these depictions of black sexual violence reinforced and reinterpreted black criminality, aggression, violence, and pathology. Kunzels interpretation of narratives of
prison rape adds depth to critical prison studies scholarship on the rise of mass incarceration, revealing an important way that it was also sexualized. While LGBT and queer activism is not the focus of her
project, Kunzels final chapter examines how the gay liberation movement of the 1970s actively engaged with radical prison activism. In some regards, Dean Spade and the editors and contributors to
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Captive Genders pick up where Kunzel leaves off. Both of these books engage with questions of LGBT, queer, and trans activisms and are deeply invested in prison abolitionist politics and analyses. In
fact, both books are activist projects that critique mainstream LGBT politics and work to envision a more radical queer/trans liberation movement that treats prison abolition as one of its central tenets.
These books also shift the focus to the broader prison industrial complex, or the vast carceral webs that run throughout US society and surveil and cage queer, trans, and gender- and sexual-
nonconforming people. These carceral networks are deeply invested in and help construct gender and sexual
normativity. Written by scholars, activists, currently and formerly incarcerated people, and people who traverse some or all of those categories, Captive Genders offers a critical trans and
queer analysis of the prison system. In his introduction to the anthology, Stanley argues that gender normativity and antitrans and antiqueer violence
are central logics of the US prison system that marginalize and oppress trans and gender-
nonconforming people. Echoing Kunzels analysis, Stanley explains that the prison industrial complex helps produce gender
normativity and heteronormativity. Captive Genders errs on the side of breadth over depth. Its twenty-five chapters provide glimpses into the prison industrial complex
that show how wide-ranging it is and in doing so allows the reader to grasp the immensity of this system. As Captive Genders shows, the prison industrial complex is not
only prisons and jails but also immigration detention facilities, juvenile facilities, police, laws, courts,
low-income housing systems, sex offender registries, and deportation policies. Those looking for a coherent narrative of what
the prison industrial complex is and how it affects trans and queer people will not nd such a narrative in this anthology. The value of Captive Genders is the way that it provides brief glimpses into aspects
of the prison industrial complex and does so through numerous perspectives and voices. Captive Genders starts and ends with calls for a queer/trans politics of prison abolition (237). As S. Lamble
explains in Transforming Carceral Log- ics: 10 Reasons to Dismantle the Prison Industrial Complex through Queer/Trans Analysis and Action, this politics works to question, disrupt, and transform the
normalcy of the prison, not only by helping identify the role of imprisonment in perpetuating gender, racial, and sexual violence, but also [by providing] tools for developing alternative community
responses that better address problems of harm (237). The anthologys rst section, Out of Time: From Gay Liberation to Prison Abolition, challenges readers to reimagine a queer/trans liberation
movement that centers queer and trans people of color and low-income people, the people most affected by the prison industrial complex. The authors in this section show us that we do not just have to
imagine such a movement, we can remember it as well as nd it in the present day. For example, in Street Power and the Claiming of Public Space: San Franciscos Vanguard and Pre-Stonewall Queer
Radicalism, Jennifer Worley discusses the emergence of the organization Vanguard in the 1960s, which shows what queer activism might look like if it were rmly grounded in the interests, experiences,
and agency of the most marginalized groups within our community (53). Formed and organized by gay and trans youth, most of whom were sex workers living and working on the streets, Vanguard
created a radical queer activist model that linked economic exploitation, homophobia, criminalization, police violence, and incarceration. While the anthologys rst section looks more to the past, the nal
section, Bustin Out: Organizing Resistance and Building Alternatives, looks to the present to nd radical queer/trans politics and practices of prison abolition. The chapters engage with current queer
antiprison organizing, centering the activism and knowledge of queer and trans people of color. The two middle sections examine the workings and materiality of the prison industrial complex, showing
how gender and sexual normativity, the criminalization and punishment of gender and sexual deviance, and white supremacy and neoliberalism are central to its logics, structures, and practices. The
second section, Prison beyond the Prison: Criminalization of the Everyday, examines several pieces of the wide network of the prison industrial complex, including the juvenile system; low-income
housing; penal management of HIV/AIDS; sex offender registries; immigration laws, incarcerations, and deportation; and the everyday violences that trans people of color experience. Together, these
chapters demonstrate the breadth of the carceral webs of the prison industrial complex, while focusing on technologies of surveillance, and challenge their normalization in US society. The third section,
Walled Lives: Consolidating Difference, Disappearing Possibilities, examines the inner workings and logics of prisons and jails. For example, in Out of Compliance: Masculine-Identified People in
Mens prisons are viewed as

Womens Prisons, Lori Girshick explains that prisons are highly gendered spaces that mirror a hyper expression of traditional gender roles (191).
spaces of concentrated masculinity, which naturalizes the violence of guards and administrators
against their captives as well as the violence among prisoners, particularly against those who are
viewed as weak, feminine, or queer. On the other hand, people housed in female prisons are expected
to be passive, dependent, and emotional. Masculinity and gender-nonconformity in people in female
prisons are often viewed as part of their delinquency. Prisons also enforce gender conformity. For
example, Girshicks masculine-identified informants describe how the womens prison in which they are housed provides clothing that is feminine in its cut and also requires
its prisoners to wear panties (and considers boxers to be contraband). One of her informants, Cookie, calls this
forced feminization (196). All the contributors to Captive Genders discuss the violence of the US prison system and how that violence is simultaneously racialized, gendered,
sexualized, and classed. The contributors speak to what blake nemec calls the cultural normalcy of violence in all locations of the prison industrial complex (220). Stephen Dillon explains that
institutionalized white supremacist and heterosexist violence . . . [is] not exceptional nor spectacular, but rather routine, mundane, and everyday [in the US prison system]. . . . This violence is foundational
and constitutive of regimes of punishment in the United States (178). In Being an Incarcerated Transperson: Shouldnt People Care? Clifton Goring/Candi Raine Sweet describes the multiple layers of
violence that trans and queer people experience within penal institutionsor the ways that they are put through hellfrom physical and sexual assault by staff and other prisoners to administrative
neglect and complacency with that violence to experiences of isolation and constant fears of death (186). Goring/Sweet explains that trans, queer, and gender-nonconforming people face a particular kind
of violence because of their queerness and gender nonconformity that other (straight and gender-conforming) incarcerated people do not have to face. Dean Spades Normal Life has a similar political and
scholarly project as Captive Genders but examines US society more broadly than just the prison industrial complex. Spade works to elaborate a critical trans politics, which demands more than legal
recognition and inclusion, seeking instead to transform current logics of state, civil society, security, and social equality (19). He argues that this politics must center trans and queer people who are most
vulnerable, namely, those who are people of color and low-income, which will lead activists to center political projects such as prison abolition, along with wealth redistribution and organizing against
immigration enforcement. Despite this broader focus, I include Spades book here because Normal Life is an excellent example of queer/ trans scholarship that includes an analysis of the prison industrial
complex as central to analyses of heteronormativity and gender normativity as well as queer and trans lives and communities. In this way, his book is instructive to queer and trans studies in
demonstrating the importance of taking seriously the prison industrial complex. Normal Life brings together the various strands of the scholarship that Spade has written over the past decade or so,
connecting his critiques of US law with his critiques of mainstream LGBT activism with his work analyzing and imagining a more radical and critical trans politics while grounding this work in an analysis of
power. Drawing from Michel Foucault, critical race studies, women of color feminism, and critical prison studies, Spade argues that current legal interventions espoused by mainstream LGBT activism,
such as antidiscrimination and hate crime laws, do not fundamentally challenge racist, heterosexist, and transphobic legal, social, and economic structures and, in fact, misunderstand how power works
and what role law has in the functions of power (29). While mainstream LGBT activism focuses on individual or intentional discrimination, Spade advocates instead for a biopolitical theory of power that
focuses on norms that govern population management. He argues that this would require activists to switch focus from formal legal equality and recognition to the administrative realm as the site that has
the greatest effect on the distribution of life chances and insecurity. He argues that these systems that administer life chances through purportedly neutral criteria actually produce racist, transphobic,
reform work that centers inclusion and recognition because it does

heterosexist, xenophobic, and ableist outcomes (30). Criticizing
not improve peoples daily lives, he argues that we must refocus our activism on the impact of systems and structures instead of their intent. In particular, Spade examines
three areas of law and policy that greatly affect trans and gender-nonconforming people: gender classification on IDs, sex segregation of key institutions (such as jails and prisons), and access to gender-
affirming health care. He argues that these systems have a particularly large impact on trans populations because of their frequent investment and management of gender classification systems, which are
often banal and innocuous daily parts of administrative systems with which trans people struggle. This gender categorization is an important way that the law and US state exert control over trans
populations and has a particularly devastating and controlling influence over trans people of color and low-income people who tend not to have the needed resources to navigate these systems. Spade
also contextualizes his critique of mainstream LGBT politics and his call for a radical approach to critical trans politics in neoliberalism, which he ties to mass incarceration. He argues that mainstream
LGBT organizations rely on a neoliberal framing of discrimination and violence that undermines strategies of resistance to economic and state violence experienced by queer and trans people who face
intersecting forms of oppression. Spade draws on the literature on homonormativity in his critiques of mainstream LGBT activism, although he does not name it. In doing so, he deepens the critique of
homonormativity to include how homonormativity feeds the prison industrial complex through hate crimes legislation and other strategies that negate the existence of structural and intersecting inequalities
and reinforce the idea that violence and discrimination are individual, aberrant acts that can be remedied by a supposedly neutral criminal legal system. Spade and a few others have made these
connections elsewhere, but this critique of the prison industrial complex has not made it into most discussions of homonormativity.7 Spade and the contributors and editors of Captive Genders show that
The criminal punishment system is the
trans and gender-nonconforming people and communities are devastated by the US prison system. As Spade argues,
most significant perpetrator of violence against trans people (90). Trans and gender- nonconforming
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people are particularly affected by police pro ling, harassment, and violence as well as mass
incarceration. Trans populations are disproportionately poor, unemployed, and homeless because of
discrimination, family rejection, and barriers to accessing school, medical treatment, and social
services. To survive, many trans and gender-nonconforming people turn to illegal economies,
particularly sex work, that produce and reinforce high levels of criminalization. Within prisons and
jails, trans and gender-nonconforming people face extreme levels of harassment, physical and sexual
assault, medical neglect, and other violences. The US prison system also tends to refuse to recognize
trans peoples gender identities, which in almost all cases causes trans people to be housed in penal
institutions based on their birth-assigned sex. Trans and gender-nonconforming populations,
particularly trans women of color, are main targets of the prison industrial complex. In her interview with Jayden Donahue
in Captive Genders, Miss Major explains, [Trans girls] already, from the moment we decide to be a transgendered person, are living outside the law. The moment this dick-swinging motherfucker wants to
put a dress on and head on down the street to go to the store or something like that, they have broke the law . . . We can be beaten, attacked, and killed, and its OK . . . You are already a convict for just
how you express yourself and you might start to live a lifestyle of a person that is living outside the law. Because you cant get a legitimate job, you cant get a chance in school, you cant get a chance to
function and survive as apart of mainstream society. So, immediately, once youve done this, youre Here, Miss Majora long-time activist and current Executive Director of the TGI Justice Project, which
works on issues faced by trans people in the criminal legal system while centering the work and experiences of low-income trans women of color who are or have been incarceratedarticulates that many
queer and trans people become involved in the prison industrial complex by simply living their lives.8 As Mogul, Richie, and Whitlock explain in Queer (In)Justice, queer people are constantly criminalized
in US society and within the criminal legal system. While this criminalization sticks to all queers, it is ampliflied by racism, sexism, classism, and other systems of oppression. LGBT, queer, and gender
When one factors in the ways that

nonconforming people experience violence within all levels of the criminal legal system. As Dillon explains,
heteronormativity structures the visibility of certain bodies (and particular tactics of survival) to the
police and technologies of discipline and containment, LGBTIQ poor people and people of color
become one of the populations hardest hit by white supremacy and neoliberalisms funneling of
millions of human beings into the US prison regime (173). Prisons are queer spaces, both because
queer, trans, and gender- and sexual-nonconforming people are criminalized and disproportionately
incarcerated and also because prisons themselves are sites of deviance and nonnormativity, as Kunzel, Spade,
and the contributors to Captive Genders show us. These scholars have taken up Richies call for a queer antiprison politic and scholarship, but more needs to be done. Queer and trans studies as fields
need to turn their critical lenses onto the US prison system, centering it to reflect its profound impact on queer and trans lives and communities. Kunzel reminds us that at one point, antiprison activism was
an important part of the gay and lesbian movement. She quotes a gay liberation activist, speaking at a 1975 rally supporting the San Quentin Six, pledging the gay liberation movements support for the
struggle of all prisoners because we understand that the system that has created and maintained prisons as a method of social control is the same system that oppresses us on the outside who have the
least vested interest in this social system (19394). This activist went on to explain that imprisonment is an intensified version of what we all have gone through. . . . All of our lives are profoundly affected
by the pressure of a legal code and a justice system and social attitudes that push us hard in the direction of conformity, in sexual things especially.
The prison regime is predicated on the non-consent of those captured under its
purview not only invidiual acts of body cavity searching, but the medical
interventions which prisoners have no right to refuse speak to a structural system of
denial of consent that makes the entire system a form of sexual violation and trauma
akin to the ban from the capacity to consent that structures slavery this exceptional
site of the non-capacity to consent constitutes the condition of possibility for consent
in civil society all interventions into sexual violation are bankrupt unless we begin
here
Arkles 15 (Gabriel, professor from Northeastern University who acquired his law degree from New York
University. Northeastern University Law Journal, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 71-130 (2015),
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2627297 //AB)
Searches that law
enforcement officers and staff of carceral institutions conduct constitute sexual violence.
Nonetheless, relatively few searches are unlawful. The
physical acts of searches and lack of consent mirror other forms of
sexual violence. They involve viewing, touching, or penetrating a persons body, including the genitals, anus,
breasts, thighs, mouth, and buttocks. While some searches may be consensual for Fourth amendment
purposes in that the person does not vocally object or physically resist,56 not fighting back against a
potentially dangerous aggressor is very different from giving full, free, knowing consent. Angela Y.
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Davis explains that the role of guards and prisoners can distract from the fundamental fact that guards
do to prisoners just what many of us would easily recognize as sexual violence in another context: [I]f
uniforms are replaced with civilian clothesthe guards and the prisonersthen the act of strip searching
would look exactly like the sexual violence that is experienced by the prisoner who is ordered to remove her
clothing, stoop, and spread her buttocks.57 While not all people subject to these searches understand them as
sexual violence, many do. For example, David Gilbert describes developments in New York prisons: there is a
new form of humiliation of pat frisks that are nothing short of sexual molestationwhich also serve as a
provocation since a reaction can set off a beating and box (isolation) time.58 Others think of the experience as
very similar to sexual violence, if not identical to it. One woman describes her experience of a search as follows: I honestly felt the only way
to prevent the search becoming more intrusive or sexual was to remain as quiet and docile as
possible. I later wondered why I was so passive. All I could answer was that it was an experience similar to sexual
assault. I felt the same helplessness, the same abuse by a male in authority, the same sense of degradation
and lack of escape.59 The impact of searches on individual survivors also corresponds to the impact of other
forms of sexual violence. While the impact of sexual violence varies from person to person and incident to
incident, many people experience trauma. One woman who was strip searched experienced paranoia, suicidal
feelings, and depression afterward, and would not undress anywhere but in a closet.60 Physical injuries with
long-term consequences also result, as in the case of the Black teenager whose testicles were ruptured by
police during a stop and frisk.61 The fear and sense of powerlessness that can accompany any sexual
violence may be especially severe when the government supports and perpetrates the act, because of the
relative power of the government as compared to an individual.62 Like other forms of sexual violence,
searches cause not only individual but also group-based harm, reinforcing social hierarchies.63 The racialized
and gendered dynamics of incarceration aggravate such harm.64 Cameo Watkins connects her
experience of being strip searched during initial prison processing to the legacy of slavery: It was the
worst thing that I have ever experienced. I remember thinking at the time that this had to have been
close to what my ancestors had been through. At that moment I remember thinking I am no longer a
person, that I had crossed the boundary, crossed the line from human to not only animal but owned. I
felt...it was worse than...it was the worst experience Ive ever had.65 Like other forms of sexual violence, searches are
66
also a form of exerting control. Laura Whitehorn describes pat searches in prisons: The point is not to locate contraband; its to reduce you to a
completely powerless person. If I had pushed a guards hands away they would have sent me to the hole for assault. In fact, that did happen once. It
67
reduces you to an object, not worthy of being defended. Commentators including feminist author Naomi Wolf and anti-violence organization Philly
68
Survivor Support Collective have criticized the political uses of forced stripping and sexual humiliation. [H]ow can women of color
rely on the Medical Industrial Complex for care and respect? In fact, cant women of color instead expect re-victimization when coming into contact with
69
the MIC? Cant we expect our autonomy and self-determination to be inhibited, and our safety to be threatened? --Ana Clarissa Rojas Durazo Certain
nonconsensual medical interventions, including certain refusals to provide necessary medical care,
also constitute sexual violence. Some, but not all, of these interventions are lawful. At common law, performing a medical
procedure without the consent of the patient is a battery.70 Nonconsensual gynecological exams may, under
certain circumstances, constitute criminal and tortious sexual abuse.71 While some states have passed laws
requiring people seeking abortions to undergo a vaginal ultrasound72another form of nonconsensual
penetrationadvocates have had some success persuading courts to strike down these laws on constitutional
grounds. 73 Prisoners retain a limited right to refuse treatment, but state interests significantly constrain this
right.74 For example, if certain substantive and procedural thresholds are met, medical professionals may medicate detained people with psychiatric
75
disabilities against their will. Courts have held that nonconsensual treatment with insulin for diabetes,76
nonconsensual testing for AIDS,77 nonconsensual vaccination for Hepatitis A,78 and nonconsensual
artificial nutrition and hydration79 do not violate prisoners constitutional rights. As I will discuss further below,
courts have also found some nonconsensual gynecological and rectal exams to be lawful. However, nonconsensual treatment may not always be
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80
permitted, particularly where the prisoner objects based on sincerely held religious beliefs. Deliberate denial of necessary medical care can also be
81
unlawful. In or out of prison, people often do give full, free, knowing consent to medical interventions. In some situations, providing medical care to
someone who cannot consentsomeone who is, for example, unconsciousmay be appropriate. Here, I am only considering those situations where a
person could have consented but did not, or where a person could not consent and no legitimate medical need supported the intervention. I dont argue
that every nonconsensual medical intervention is a form of sexual violence; while nonconsensual medical interventions may always be violent, the
nonconsensual medical interventions that involve stripping
violence is not necessarily always sexual. I focus on those
someone or forcing someone to strip; touching or penetrating the genitals, anus, breasts, or
reproductive organs; or harming a persons capacity for sexual pleasure, sexual acts, or reproduction.
Like searches, the physical acts of nonconsensual medical interventions are often indistinguishable from
other forms of sexual violence. Mandatory medical exams are widely imposed in prisons and jails, including gynecological exams.82
[Women prisoners] have experienced sexual violence in their private lives, in their domestic lives, in their
intimate lives. And then they go to prison where their bodies are handled by so-called doctors who are sticking
things into their vaginas and their anuses and it feels exactly like the sexual abuse that they have already
experienced.83 One imprisoned woman describes her physical pain and the doctors denial of her
experience during an exam as follows: [He] is the biggest man with the biggest hands... [H]e tried to
force his way into my cervix and he kept telling me it wasnt painful while I was crying and tears were
streaming down my face.84
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ImpactS2P
The School to Prison Pipeline prepares students of color for incarcerated life
Resistance Among Boys of Color in an Elementary After School STEM Program, Spring 1-1-2015, p. 19-20]
As we see boys of color subjected to these criminalizing processes in public spaces (Rios, 2011) and in the generational reproduction of criminal identities
(MacLeod, Truth, & Times, 2009), it is no surprise we see criminalizing processes in schools as well. Garland (2012) identifies it as a natural progression. Wacquant (2001) has viewed this
kind of criminalization as a symbiosis wherein schools in low-income neighborhoods have now taken
on the same processes, apparatus and treatments as prisons. In many urban schools employ police in
addition to School Resource Officers (SROs); private security guards now patrol hallways, students
are searched and passed through metal detectors on their way into school, video surveillance
monitors less public areas, dress codes and sometimes uniforms are strictly enforced, bars adorn
windows and exterior doors remain locked at all times barring unapproved entrance and exit (Nolan, 2011).
Even the presence of SROs originally assigned to schools to promote positive anti-drug interactions
with students - more often in low-income schools - may be increasing the criminalization of boys of color
through excessive hyper-policing and over-monitoring of students, and in the recruitment of SROs to handle school discipline rather than school
administrators (Theriot, 2009). Further, in multi-racial schools, boys of color are often segregated out of standard
classes, not only for low academic performance but also for behavior, into alternative programs and
schools which exhibit more extreme examples of similarities to prisons. In Texas, for example, boys of color
exhibiting low test scores have increasingly been sent to alternative education programs originally
designed and intended for juveniles with criminal records and persistent delinquent behaviors (Reyes, 2001). More benign behaviors of boys
of color are hyper-policed and hyper-criminalized as well (Rios, 2006). Actions such as socializing, standing up, not looking at the teacher and
talking out of turn are all examples of some of the kinds of behaviors that are hyper-policed by teachers, beginning in elementary
school. Even potentially ambiguous behaviors, such as rolling eyes or sighing are hyper-policed and
criminalized when exhibited by boys of color (Langhout, 2005). The processes of criminalizing boys of color begins in school (Noguera, 2009). By 4th and 5th grades, a troubling
number of boys of color are already labelled as criminals by teachers and administrators (Ferguson, 2001). Elementary
school boys of color are referred to with direct language indicating incarcerated futures. They are scolded, sent to backs of rooms, sent
out of rooms, sent home, isolated in the classroom and often not permitted to speak even when White
peers are allowed (Langhout, 2005). [Students of color] are disciplined and suspended more frequently than White students for subjective behaviors like disrespect, excessive noise, threats, and loitering (Meiners, 2007,
p. 33) (Winn & Behizadeh, 2011, p. 153). Teachers and administrators have come to expect this disparity, producing a culture
of normality with regard to the schoolprison nexus (Brown, 2009; Hirschfield, 2008; Wacquant, 2001). Criminalization in schools has longitudinal consequences for youth of
color, playing a significant role in pushing them into the school to prison pipeline. The school to prison pipeline is a funnel which not only sends boys
of color to prison, but also directly prepares them for an incarcerated life (Hirschfield, 2008). According to the New York Civil Liberties Union
The School to Prison Pipeline is a nationwide system of local, state and federal education and
(2007):
public safety policies that pushes students out of school and into the criminal justice system. This
system disproportionately targets youth of color and youth with disabilities. Inequities in areas such
as school discipline, policing practices, high-stakes testing and the prison industry contribute to the
pipeline. The School to Prison Pipeline operates directly and indirectly. Schools directly send students
into the pipeline through zero tolerance policies that involve the police in minor incidents and often
lead to arrests, juvenile detention referrals, and even criminal charges and incarceration. Schools
indirectly push students towards the criminal justice system by excluding them from school through
suspension, expulsion, discouragement and high stakes testing requirements. (p. 3)
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ImpactPolitical Prisoner Imprisonment
Power structures fear political prisoners and silence them because of their
revolutionary vision and its impact on society
Kioni-Sadiki and Odinga 14 (Dequi and Sekou, We Reserve the Right to Resist: Prison Wars
and Black Resistance, Pg86-88**)
It was the socio-political injustices of the 1960s that led thousands of poor and working-class, and
some middle- and upper-middle class young people to join the ranks of the Black Panther Party for
Self-Defense (BPP)/Black Liberation Army (BLA), Students for a Demo-cratic Society (SDS), The Weathermen, Prairie Fire, May 19th, Brown
Berets, the Republic of New Afrika (RNA),4 Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), Young Lords Party, the Red Guard and other revo-
lutionary organizations. It was a time when young people truly believed another world was possible and were willing to commit their lives to
fighting for the radical belief that all people - regardless of race, class or gender - have the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." As young
revolutionaries, they were inspired and motivated to join the People's struggle for national Liberation, witnes-
sing liberation struggles winning out over colonialism throughout South East Asia, Afrika, the Caribbean, South and Central America. They too
believed revolution would occur in their lifetime. It did not. And still has not.
In hindsight, we recognize how unprepared and ill-equipped the Movement was to counter the vicious state repression that swooped down to crush that
The casualties we suffer are
resistance and destroy the revolutionary struggles spreading like wildfire across the country and the world.
the decades-long political imprisonment, indeterminate prison sentences, death row, long-term solitary
confinement, persistent parole denials, aging in prison, near-death experiences and state-sanc-tioned
murder from poor nutrition, and the non-existent/negligent prison healthcare5 of a now much older
generation of revolutionaries. Still our PPs continue to suffer criminalization disappearance and the
silencing of the Movements from which they emerged, our inability to organize a unified strategy for
their release, and a power structure and ruling class that continue to fear the impact of their
revolutionary example, vision and courage on the masses of people.
That amerikkka means prisons is the nightmare reality shared by PP/POWs and their families and all
people in prison and their families . They are the living proof of this country's 240 years of trading
black bodies as commodities in the slave economy, followed by over 150 years of a criminal justice
system trading them as commodities in the prison economy. For enslaved Afrikans, this was the forced labor and
production of raw materials that allowed white slave owners, slave traders and their descendants to build and inherit vast family for-tunes. Today, this
is the exploited labor of an imprisoned population that allows corporations, shareholders and their
families to accumulate wealth. As history has shown us, naturally in this capitalist society, there is profit to be gained in
imprisonment. Today that profit is for those who build and maintain prisons, make and sell the uniforms, the
shoes, badges and guns, sell the food and cooking utensils, service the vending machines,
maintenance equipment and supply the offices, etc., added to which are the wardens, secretaries, and prison guards who
maintain their middle-class stability, steady employment, retirement pensions, cars, homes and vacations on the mass and political
imprisonment of black/brown bodies.
Resistance still exists despite the states attempt to shut it down

Thompson 14 (Heather Ann, an American historian, author, activist, and speaker from Detroit, Michigan-
won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in History, Lessons from Attica: From Prisoner Rebellion to Mass Incarceration
and Back, pgs 154-155, published online 12/10/2014)
Needless to say, the social and economic costs of this country's internationally unparalleled and historically unprecedented embrace of such a massive
and punitive carceral state have been staggering. Not only has the act of imprisoning so many Americans cost billions of dollars of public funds that
previously were ear-marked for necessities such as public education, but the fallout from such high rates of incarceration has
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also been devastating to the nation's already most-fragile communities.5 As study after study and
countless personal testimonies have made clear, mass incarceration has eroded families and
destroyed entire neighbor-hoods, it has orphaned several generations of children, it has ren-dered
many thousands of people permanently unemployable, and it has even eroded our very democracy.6
Although we know a great deal about how devastating the turn to mass incarceration has been, we still know remarkably little about how we got here.
Indeed, because we
have failed to examine the past with sufficient care and attention, not only are the
origins of this current crisis unclear, but we have little knowledge from the past that might help us to
build a different and more just future. There are two very specific things about our current state of affairs that we have failed to
understand. First, we have not fully appreciated the extent to which those who were imprisoned in much earlier decades of the twentieth century knew
very well that this ugly present that we find ourselves in was not only possible, but probable if the incarcerated themselves did not work hard to stave it
off. Indeed it was this insight that drove one of the most important movements of the 1960s and 1970s: the Prisoner Rights Movement.? Second, we
have failed to see the extent to which state officials - from the local to the federal level - were also well
aware of what was at stake in the 1960s and 1970s. They knew that if they were to have any hope of
achieving full control over the US criminal justice system, they would have to crush that same prisoner
rights movement. Indeed, in order for those in power to create the enormous, profit-generating, and
socially devastating penal system that they ultimately did, they first had to commit themselves to
stopping any resistance to such a system in its tracks. This they did, in horrific fashion, at Attica. And yet,
history also shows us that the state did not in fact succeed in completely squelching the humanity of the
incarcerated, and did not in fact manage to shut down all resistance. And thus, today, state desires to
have full control in this nation's criminal justice system remain vulnerable. A dawning new prisoner
rights movement remains the state's Achilles heel.
Rebellions are necessary to combat the exploitation of prisoners

Thompson 14 (Heather Ann, an American historian, author, activist, and speaker from Detroit, Michigan-
won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in History, Lessons from Attica: From Prisoner Rebellion to Mass Incarceration
and Back, pgs 170-171, published online 12/10/2014)
In short, the prerequisite for mass incarceration in America was a literal and psychological crushing of
this country's prisoner rights movement. The black and brown prisoners who filled the nation's penal
facilities in the 1960s and 70 s had known well that only their vig-ilance, their determined activism,
would keep the prisons from being run like slave plantations. They knew how close prisons already were to operating just
like those antebellum institutions, and therefore how important it was to resist an even more represOve penal future. The state and federal
officials who ran the prisons also knew this. Knowing what the stakes were at Attica, they shut it down brutally and
bloodily.
And, yet, recent events make clear that their victory at Attica was not total. Even the world's most punitive and massive
carceral state is neither secure nor permanent. What most state officials failed to under-stand then, and still fail to recognize, is
that prisoners are human beings and that, as such, they will always resist being treated like animals. To be sure,
state efforts to break the back of prisoner rights activism were, in the short run, highly effective. By
placing the intellec-tual leaders of the movement, as well as its most committed activists, such as Martin Sostre or Mumia Abu Jamal in solitary, by killing
others like George Jackson or L.D. Barkley, and by outlawing prison labor unions as well as clamping down on what the incarcerated could read and
write behind prison walls, they weakened the move-ment mightily. But recently, the movement has begun to rebuild . From Georgia
where prisoners
launched a massive strike to protest the exploitation they suffer, to California's Pelican Bay
where men in solitary began a massive hunger strike, to Ohio where men on death row have launched yet
another hunger strike, to Pennsylvania where folks and on the inside and outside worked together to get
Mumia Abu Jamal off death row, state officials are once again being put in check.
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Still, there are powerful lessons that rebellions such as that at Attica can teach us. When people come
together they can, indeed, bring an entire criminal justice system to its knees and demand to be
treated as human beings. But state repression also knows few boundaries and has little regard for what it
might cost to regain its control. And, thus, as the battle to humanize today's carceral system begins, the
rebellions that erupt will need to be witnessed not only by local obser-vers, but by an international and
documentary presence. Instead of troopers alone surrounding a given facility as a protest unfolds within it,
thousands of people - ordinary people and particularly the parents and children of those inside - must surround
it. And, next time, all citizens, not just the activists and rebels amongst us, must be made aware of the
real costs of the state having carte blanche to make criminal justice policy. Everyone must understand
that what happens in our nation's prisons happens, ultimately, to all of us. In short, this time, it can't be
a prisoners' rebellion alone - it must be a people's rebellion.
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ImpactPenal Neoslavery
We must position the prison regime as the continuance of chattelized imprisonment

and white supremacist genocidethe prison is penal neoslavery that demands
abolition
Childs, 15 Dennis, Ph.D. (UC Berkeley), Professor at UC San Diego (Slaves of the State: Black
Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary, The Last Trip Home, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2015)
When received in this light, the ghostly neo-abolitionist voices that have coauthored this work demand
that we read todays legally perpetrated and socially accepted terror system of penal neoslavery as a
continuance rather than a break from Americas centuries-long history of chattelized imprisonment
and white supremacist genocidethat we acknowledge that slaverys unspeakable yesterday is indeed
always now, even as liberal bourgeois history and white supremacist postracial cultural mythology
continue to pronounce its prehistorical death. As such, the songs of neoslavery that were performed
through the historically anonymous and ostensibly nonpolitical ghostly voices of black neoslaves from
the southern chain gang to the Depression-era penitentiary can still be heard emanating from todays
temporal boxes of U.S. neoslavery such as Angola, Chowchilla, Attica, Guantnamo Bay, and the SHU
boxes of Pelican Bay and Corcoranthe last three of which have recently witnessed hunger strikes by
thousands of black, Latino, Asian, Indigenous, poor white, and Muslim prisoners, whose soundings
against indefinite solitary confinement, state-of-the-art (in)human entombment, and U.S. state
terrorism make a renewed neoabolitionist demand on everyone within striking distance of these
words: If you are reading these words, you can no longer claim ignorance; to stand idly by now would
be complicity. A wise man once said, All that is necessary for evil men to prevail is for good men to
do nothing. We are under no illusions. The ultimate arbiter of our fateand this societys fateis the
people. YOU. YOU must rise up against this injustice and inhumanity. YOU must let the state know that
substantive change at every level of society is something the people demand.76
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ImpactAnti-Black Sexual Violence
The prison regime turns black people into a fungible object of sexual exchange.
Neoenslavement within the prison system render questions of sexual/gender identity
incoherent.
As D. Morgan Bassichis, Dean Spade, and others have pointed out, the
repressive isolation of and de facto social and penal
warfare against sexualized and gendered difference continues to leave incarcerated queer and trans
women, men, gender-nonconforming, and intersex people (most of whom are black and brown)
vulnerable to particularly brutal regimes of civil death under todays prisonindustrial complex.67 These
gendered and sexualized formations of terror and neo-enslavement range from physical brutality, to
serialized rape by fellow prisoners and prison staff, to being turned into a fungible object of sexual
exchange through sex traffickingde facto elements of chattelized carcerality that respect no
boundaries as to race, gender, or sexual identification even as women and queer bodies are their most
common targets.68 Indeed, while queer-identified and women prisoners in todays prisonindustrial complex are often the most vulnerable to gendered and
sexualized abuse, the indiscriminate nature of rape and sexual violence as a weapon of prison warfare is also expressed in the abject positionality of the turn-out or punk
a hetero/maleidentified body who, in the heteronormative discourse of male prison sex culture, has had his manhood forcibly deconstructed through serialized rape and
sexual slavery.69 One unspeakable modern example of this situation is offered in the second epigraph to this chapter by an anonymous, hetero-identified black male who
faced ritualized imprisonment at a moment, in the early 1980s, when the Reagan administrations version of the tough-on-crime domestic warfare modality of the
Nixon/Goldwater era inaugurated the largest increase in officially incarcerated people in post-1865 U.S. history.70 The unidentified subject describes himself as a 35 year-old
Black man, married, and an ex-offenderand an ex-punk, who was first imprisoned as a young teenager. He recalls how ritualized sexual rupture greeted him immediately
upon his first experience of imprisonment in a boys reformatorya form of subjection that he would face in each of the seventeen years of his confinement in youth and adult
facilities: When I was 14 I got busted for joy-riding . . . and sentenced to a year at [a reform school]. The first day there I was put into a dorm and one of the dudes . . . beat
me badly in front of the other guys. He topped his beating off by raping me and established my identity as a nigger punk. I spent that year servicing the boys in the dorm and
any of their friends that wanted sex. . . . That was when I realized that my position wasnt too different from my ancestors and that for the rest of the year I wasnt any different
from a plantation slave.71 Himes repeatedly, and uncritically, alludes to the repressively constructed racial/sexual positionality elaborated herethat of nigger punkin the
1952 version of his prison autobiography. And, while prison rape moves at the margins of a story based on the redressive capacities of his love affair with Rico, the
unspeakably banal practice of sexualized and gendered carceral terror completely encircles the romance plot in Yesterday, a fact revealed both in the punitive annulment of
Himes and Ricos relatively noncoercive relationship, and in moments such as the fire scene, when the narrator describes seeing an array of wolves turning the confusion of
the holocaust into an opportunity to rape that punk theyd always wanted to have. Even as the loving sexual and artistic relationship between Himes and Rico expresses the
problematic aspects of the ascription of situational homosexuality, or coerced same-sex relations, onto all sexual encounters in prison, the pervasiveness of sexual violence
in the noveland that which is expressed in the testimony offered by a nigger punk some five decades after Himess imprisonmentsuggests the degree to which the
thought categories we bring to bear onto sexual relations in the free-world cannot be grafted unproblematically onto the death-simulating predicaments of the prison world.72
Again, as in the case of chattel slavery, critical categories such as sexual/gender self-identification,
sexual object choice, and homo/hetero-erotic desire are rendered vexing, if not completely
inapplicable , in respect to unsocial spaces wherein human beings are transmuted into objects of
natal alienation, sexual exchange, sexual deprivation, legalized terror, and socially
acceptable/pleasurable entombment. Furthermore, the anonymous black mans assertion of the time-
bending capacities of his incarceration in a putatively modern northern carceral system in the 1980s
resonates directly with the other black neoslaves voices who have guided this book insofar as it
functions at the level of unhistorical counter-knowledge production. That is, his pained elaboration of
how the de facto state punishment regime of serialized rape shuttled his body into a chattelized
predicament dubiously akin to what his ancestors endured on the pre-1865 slave plantation amounts
to a late twentieth-century resounding of the timelessness of chattelized imprisonment. And, as such,
it also represents a ghostly reminder of how the Middle Passage carceral model continues to reactivate
from the very foundations of U.S. penal modernity, whether practiced on a modern slave plantation
such as Angola or a land-based slave ship such as the Ohio Penitentiary.
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ImpactAppartus of Humanness
The condition of possibility for the U.S. empire is chattel slavery and its afterlife
formation, the prison industrial complex. The affirmatives investment in the temporal
continuity of the nation-state is the cementation of the delineating apparatus of
humanness that works to protect and secure the homestead from the criminal
Baedan, 15 Copyleft rad queer (Between Strangers and Friends, in baedan: a journal of queer time
travel, book)
Tragically it seems the arc has shortened; or perhaps time has intensified. History perhaps moves in neither a line nor a circle, but
rather a spiral. Already an escalation of murder and terror at the hands of white supremacists (whether
in police uniforms or not) has answered the petitions. If we had wagered that the threat of rioting might make an officer hesitate before pulling the
trigger, police nationwide have disabused us of such a notion. If anything, since Ferguson, police departments have intensified their
campaign of racial terror. Already over seven hundred people have been killed by police in the US and
the year is only halfway through, all while spree shootings and arsons of black churches have become
a norm. Viewed in the course of a larger scope of time, the situation appears all the bleaker. Today, we couldnt disagree with Baldwins assessment in his final interview (shortly before his death in
1987) that since Kings death everything is worse. Its no secret that the end and supposed success of that movement
corresponded to the beginning of a massive expansion of the prison system in the US. The United
States currently keeps as many people in cages (a larger prison population than any nation in the
world) as were enslaved in 1840. Baldwins apocalyptic narrative reads as if it were written yesterday, but the states repressive apparatus
has grown in ways almost beyond comprehension. It appears that weve reached an impasse in our
understanding of social movements. Innumerable commentators have spent countless words on the events of the past year, but we remain without
a way to talk about the apparent futility of these attempts to dislodge white supremacy, or even slow as
protest or about the necessity of strong communities to make police obsolete, but next to nothing about how exactly
we might go about dismantling the apparatus of policing itself. We are at a loss and to say otherwise requires a tremendous dishonesty. Politics fails us, language fails us,
but Baldwin exposed this decades ago. He criticized the failures of language and understanding, and in his doing so we can see his influence on contemporary theorists such as Frank Wilderson III and
Saidiya Hartman. In his critique of language, we read him as a sort of proto-Afro-pessimist. He said: you see, whites want black writers to mostly deliver something as if it were an official version of the
black experience. But the vocabulary wont hold it, simply. No true account, really, of black life can be held, can be contained in the American vocabulary. As it is, the only way that you can deal with it is
Frank Wildersons
by doing a great violence to the assumptions on which the vocabulary is based. A call for such a violence against the preconditions of language coincides with
commentary on recent anti-police rioting in the US. In a radio interview shortly after the first wave of
rioting in Ferguson, he spoke to the near-impossibility of language to convey the experience of black
people, in the US, in their confrontation with the police. He described the burden put on himself and
others to come out against police brutality or police violence, whereas he positions himself against
police in their entirety. He argues that this sentiment appears nearly unsayable in the American vocabulary. For Wilderson, and well follow him
here, no conceivable demand can be posed (or met) by which policing in this country could be
disinherited of its lineage of slave-catching and the suppression of revolt; there are no reforms to be
made. By his account, black people have nothing to ask for. (Current events confirmed his argument shortly after the interview when Barack Obama and some progressives beganin the name of
transparency and accountabilitycalling for a proliferation of surveillance by means of body cameras on police officers. This parody became farce almost immediately when a New York grand jury
found no crime in the police murder of Eric Garner, despite the entire incident being caught on camera.) For Wilderson, the irreducible enmity of black people toward the policetheir non-demand
registers as incomprehensible in the white imaginary. Recognizing an aversion to the demand-form reveals something interesting about the post-facto naming of the movement emerging out of Ferguson
as Black Lives Matter. Rather than coalescing around a set of piecemeal reforms to policing or this or that party or demand, participants in the riots and blockages simply affirm their lives. While one could
read this as a lowest common denominator human ism which everybody should at least be able to support, there exists a way of reading wherein this simple assertion opens an unmediated hostility with
all the institutions and apparatuses which impede those lives. This hostility could open onto a confrontation with the linguistic, libidinal, and psychic structures that determine mattering as such, Wilderson
bases his arguments (around the futility of demand) on his efforts elsewhere to illustrate the failure of metaphor in the struggle for black liberation. In The Black Liberation Army and the Paradox of
Political Engagement, Wilderson argues that the combatants of the Black Liberation Army, unlike their counterparts in the Red Army Faction or the Irish Republican Army, have no recourse to what he
the RAP and IRA combatants justify

calls third term mediators, In his reading of the communiqus of these groups, he identifies the ways in which
confrontation with their enemy by means of symbolically fighting on behalf of a people or a nation. In their
texts, concepts such as the people, the nation, the land, or the working class function as a sort of
spatial grounding-wire between the fighters and their enemy, which absorbs the shock of violent
action. These interlocutors function temporally alsoas in a crisis or period of repressionand likewise justify armed action. Wilderson argues that black people in the US
cannot claim these spatial or temporal grounding wires: they have no native land on which to stake a
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claim, and their situation is inextricable from hundreds of years of incarceration, slavery and
dominatiofn which passes for normality. As evidenced by his reading of Assata Shakurs communiqus (written following her arrest, a year after the publication of
No Name in the Street), he argues that black combatants cannot successfully invoke a common interlocutor with their enemy. He figures them as barred from understanding as familial agents fighting over
a shared metanarrative of nation, class or people. As such, their violence takes on an unmediated quality; their words speak directly within the registers of sensation, emotion, pain, and desire for love.
The reaction of various white nationalists to the Black Lives Matter riots and actions partially reveals
the exile of black people from the fantasy of familial common ground in the United States. One
example is the neo Nazi skinheads who took to patrolling downtown Olympia, Washington after a
handful of anti-police demonstrations. These skinheads declared that their presence was necessary to
secure a future for white children against the threat of black insurrection. Another example is
the Ku Klux Klan organized confederate flag rally in Columbia, South Carolina which called on
whites to defend their heritage from the threat posed to it by recent Black Lives Matter mobilizations.
Taken together the pro-police and pro-heritage sentiments pay homage to the history of policing
as the delineating apparatus of humanness in the United States ( both in the sense of the systematic
domination of black people by police, but also of membership in police departments as a mechanism
for the assimilation of various ethnic groups into whiteness [i.e. Italians, Irish and Polish communities
in the last century]). In both cases, the partisans of the white nation aspire to secure the temporal
continuity of their imagined family in terms of their historical inheritance and also their childrens
future from the threat of blackness. While obviously extreme examples, the same impulse to defend
the symbolic coherence of the third term mediatorwhiteness, the Family, the Children, etc.from
an incommensurate blackness reveals itself everywhere in the discourse around racialized struggles.
For all their radical airs, the managers of revolt are no less afraid of the specter of blackness . We hear
their condemnation in thinly coded appeals to respectability, in shaming of unreasonable looters
and rioters, in the attempted mobilization of benevolent white allies to organize as a white block
supporting the self-supposed leadership of politicians and non-profits, in the discursive shift from
Black Lives Matter toward All Lives Matter, or in the way the media describes white spree-
shooters as deviants or mysterious drifters while simultaneously elevating individual crimes on
the part of black people to syneedoches of an entire race, An ontological abjection emerges here : a
disjunction in being and language , which Baldwin (like Wilderson) attributes to the experience of
blackness in the United States. We almost hear Frank when James described his experiences in the US differing from those of Algerians in France. They thus, held
something within them which they would never surrender to France. But on my side of the Ocean... we had surrendered everything, or had had everything taken away, and there was no place for us to go:
we were home. The Arabs were together in Paris, but the American blacks were alone.
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ImpactAnti-Blackness
The impact is the reproduction of a carceral system that institutionalizes anti-black,

anti-trans and anti-queer violences.
Gossett, 14 Lambda Literary Writer Retreat Fellow, black genderqueer and femme fabulous activist and writer (Che, We will not rest in peace AIDS activism,
black radicalism, queer and/or trans resistance, Queer Necropolitics, Edited by Jim Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco, Q Routledge)
The prison industrial complex is an always already anti-black, violently antiqueer and anti-transgender
enterprise that perpetuates what Saidiya Hartman names the afterlife of slavery (Hartman 2008: 6). It
institutionalizes forms of restricted life: following re-entry, a formerly incarcerated person loses
access to public housing , benefits and federal educational loans and faces chronic joblessness
due to stigma. Incarceration has been historically employed as a means of maintaining an anti-black
and white supremacist sociopolitical and racial capitalist order from antebellum black codes that
criminalized vagrancy (Dru Stanley 125 126) post-emancipation, to more recent attempts to extinguish the spirit
and destroy the momentum of black liberationist movements in the United States (ranging from
surveillance and sabotage of the Revolutionary Action Movement, to COINTELPRO, to the current
renewed targeting of Assata Shakur). Journalist Shane Bauer (2012) has documented how in California, the mere possession of black radical literature results in being
criminalized as gang related and put in solitary housing units (SHU) - a form of torture from which exit is uncertain, whose administration is often based on whether one informs on other incarcerated
Prisons thus continue the logic of COINTELPRO, which aimed to neutralize and eliminate
people (Bauer 2012: 1-4).
black freedom movement(s). The prison industrial complex is at once a manifestation of a disciplinary
and of a control society. The prison is one of the central and proliferating oppressive technologies
through which bio- and necropolitical violence and the apparatuses of surveillance that reinforce it
are naturalized. The insidious morphology of the carceral is such that even as it is dismantled via
lobbying for decriminalization and decarceration, on the one hand, it proliferates via extended
modes of surveillance and control ankle bracelets, probation and parole on the other. Carceral
violence is maintained in various penal registers and forms.
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ImpactLibidinal Economy
Impact - Black is driven through psychic integrations that drive the libidinal means of
negrophoba and necrophilia which are structuring claim to how individuals
experience violence
Wilderson in 14
http://sfbay-anarchists.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/frank-b-wilderson-iii-were-trying-to-destroy-the-world-antiblackness-
police-violence-after-ferguson.pdf, Were trying to destroy the world Anti-Blackness & Police Violence After Ferguson An
Interview with Frank B. Wilderson, III
Heres one little example of how this conundrum or paradox affects the way we can speak to White
people and our so-called allies of color. In Tulia, TX, in 1999, 45 Black people and about two Latinos were arrested in
a one-night drug bust. In other words, roughly 10 percent of the Black population were arrested in one night. All of the day we
were able to get most of the convictions overturned, because the undercover agent did not have evidence. There was one
undercover agent who indicted 45 Black people and two Latinos. But he did not come to court with cocaine. He came to court
with this word. And what was interesting to me about that was that when jurors were interviewed about that, and people said to
them, So you convicted these kids, some to 200 or 300 years, on no evil to happen to your child?, one of the jurors said
without any sense of ironyif it was my child, wed need evidence. So the problem situates it, i.e. in the rogue actions of the
police. The problem is in the libidinal economy, which is to say in the collective unconscious of
everybody else. And if we were to actually understand that better, wed understand that Blackness is
always-already criminalized in the collective unconscious. The only problem for white supremacy and anti-
Blackness when its happening to Black people in Mexico for example, is one of logistics, of mechanics, which is to 7 Police
brutality has never identified our problem. Our problem is one of complete captivity from birth to death, and
coercion as the starting point of our interaction with the State and with ordinary white citizens say, how
can we make the criminalization stick? Its not a question of something wrong taking place, that these Black people are suffer or
exist under police brutality. Policingpolicing Blacknessis what keeps everyone else sane. And if we can start to see the
policing and the mutilation and the aggressivity towards Blackness not as a form of discrimination, but
as being a form of psychic health and well-being for the rest of the world, then we can begin
to reformulate the problem and begin to take a much more iconoclastic response to it. JB - This idea that
there is a sort of necessity, for the quality of lifei.e. that the existence of an anti-Black perspective is life for those who are
involved in the mutilating, torturing, terrorizing Black people...whats preventing Black people from understanding this? Some
folks, such as Fanon, Frances Cress Welsing, etc., have attempted to grasp the psychic relation between the terrorizer and the
terrorized, but most folks wont go so far as to say that there is a health and even a sense of pleasure in that libidinal economy
for Whites to enact an anti-Black perspective. Whats preventing folks from understanding that? To read two Black authors,
Hortense Spillers and Fanons Black Skin White Masks, in particular for those moments where they are at a loss to address
what they have come up against. What we tend to do -- and Im not criticizing this, we have to help Black people make it through
the day, which is the job of Black psychologists and Black psychoanalysts -- but we also need people like me, who point to the
failures of what Fanon called the healthy infrastructure of the psyche. And then Id also suggest moving to the more
uncompromising literature of David Marriot and Jared Sexton, who will deal with psychoanalysis but will not offer any cure.
Heres the deal: in a nutshell, every other group lives in a context of violence which has what I would call a
sort of psychological grounding wire, which meansthat they can write a sentence about why they are
experiencing that violence. Native Americans can write a sentence that says Im experiencing violence
because this is an ongoing tactic within a strategy of colonization. White feminists can say the same, that
this is an ongoing tactic within a strategy of patriarchy. For a Black person to try and emulate that kind of
interpretive lens, the problem becomes a lot bigger. For us this is the ongoing tactic of a strategy for human
renewal. The violence against us becomes a tactic within a strategy to secure Humanitys place. Its not
a tactic in an ongoing strategy to take our land away, or to take our rights away. We never had any
rights. The other thing is that our psyche does not obey the objective laws of the structure. The simple way of
putting that would be to say that we exist in an external superviolence, and we exist in an internal soup which
has self-hatred as one of its main components. One of the things that Marriot and Fanon each say is that, generically
speaking, the structure by which human beings are recognized by other human beings and incorporated
into a community of human beings, is anti-slave. And slaveness is something that has consumed
Blackness and Africanness, making it impossible to divide slavery from Blackness. Even if I say to myself,
I am not a Slave, we dont make our own way in the world. So we know every day, before 9 walking out of the houseand I
think the American Black knows it quicker, like say at age 3, the Caribbean and African Black might know it a little bit later on in
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life, like Fanon says, I was 18 when I learned itthat we cannot enter into a structure of recognition as a being, an
incorporation into a community of beings, without recognition and incorporation being completely destroyed
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ImpactAnti-Queer Violence
Queer individuals have been criminalized and targeted by the state and have been
incarcerated at disproportionate rates. Only a dismantling of the Prison Industrial
System can eliminate anti-queer violence, not reform.
Lamble 11, (S. Professor at Birkbeck Law School University of London, Founder of the Bent Bars Project,
Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex AK Press)
Queer, trans, and gender-non-conforming people have been historically subject to oppressive laws,
gender policing, and criminal punishmenta legacy that continues today despite ongoing legal
reforms. Law enforcement officials (including police, courts, immigration officers, prison guards, and
other state agents) have a long history of targeting, punishing, and criminalizing sexual dissidents and
gender-non-conforming people. While many overtly homophobic and transphobic laws have been recently
overturned in Canada, the United States, and Britain, the criminalization and punishment of queer and trans
people extends well beyond formal legislation.13 State officials enable or participate in violence against
queer, trans, and gender-non-conforming communities by (a) ignoring everyday violence against queer and
trans people; (b) selectively enforcing laws and policies in transphobic and homophobic ways; (c) using
discretion to over-police and enact harsher penalties against queer and trans people; and (d) engaging
in acts of violence, harassment, sexual assault, and discrimination against queer and trans people.14
While some police departments are increasingly putting on a gay-positive public face, the problem of state
violence against queer and trans people nonetheless persists and has been well documented by numerous
police- and prison-monitoring groups.15 This ongoing legacy of violence should make queer and trans
people both cautious of the states power to criminalize our lives and wary of the states claim to
protect us from harm. Although some people believe that we can train transphobia out of law
enforcement agents or eliminate homophobic discrimination by hiring more LGBT prison guards,
police, and immigration officials, such perspectives wrongly assume that discrimination is a flaw in
the system, rather than intrinsic to the system itself. Efforts to make prison and police institutions more
gay-friendly perpetuate the myth that such systems are in place to protect us. But as the uneven history of
criminalization trends in Canada, the United States, and Britain so clearly demonstrate (that is, the way that the
system targets some people and not others), the prison industrial complex is less about protecting the
public from violence and more about controlling, labeling, disciplining, and in some cases killing
particular groups of peopleespecially those who potentially disrupt the social, economic, and
political status quo.16 While the state might stop harassing, assaulting, and criminalizing some people within
queer and trans communities (namely those upwardly mobile, racially privileged, and property-owning folks),
the criminal system will continue to target those within our communities who are deemed
economically unproductive, politically threatening, or socially undesirable. As people who have
historically been (and continue to be) targeted by this unjust system, queer, trans, and gender-non-
conforming communities must move away from efforts to make the prison industrial complex more
LGBT-friendly and instead fight the underlying logic of the system itself. Queer, trans, and gender-
non-conforming people, particularly those from low-income backgrounds and communities of color,
are directly targeted by criminalization, punishment, and imprisonment. We do not know exactly how
many queer, trans, and gender-non-conforming people are currently incarcerated. This is partly because most
governments do not collect information on the sexual and gender identity of prisoners and partly because
prisoners are not always safe to disclose their gender or sexual identities. However, we know that queer, trans,
and gender-non-conforming people in Canada, the United States, and Britain are frequently over-policed, over-
criminalized, and over-represented in the prison system. Levels of harassment, targeting, and arrest are
high, particularly for young queer and trans people, those from low-income communities, people with
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learning disabilities and mental health issues, and people of color. Trans community organizers in the
San Francisco Bay Area, for example, report that nearly half of the 20,000 transgender people in the
region have been in prison or jail.18 Queer, trans, and gender-non-conforming people are funneled into the
criminal system for many reasons but primarily due to systemic oppression. Because trans, queer, and
gender-variant people experience widespread discrimination, harassment, and violence, we are at
greater risk of social and economic marginalization. This translates into higher risks of imprisonment. We
know that queer and trans youth, for example, are more likely to be homeless, unemployed, bullied at school,
harassed on the street, estranged from family, and targeted by sexual violencefactors that greatly increase
the risks of criminalization and imprisonment especially for queer and trans people of color.19 Trans people in
particular, and those who are visibly gender-non-conforming, are routinely harassed by law enforcement and
security officials for undertaking basic daily activities like using the toilet, accessing public services, or walking
down the street. Groups like FIERCE! have shown how the school-to-prison-pipeline
disproportionately affects queer and trans youth. Whether dropping out of school because of severe
harassment and discrimination, feeling alienated from education curriculum, experiencing suicidal thoughts, or
turning to criminalized coping mechanisms like drug and alcohol use, queer and trans youth often have less
chances for success in school.22 Zero tolerance policies, heightened surveillance, and increased
police presence in schools further contribute to criminalization and dropout rates, particularly for
queer and trans youth of color. Quality of life ordinances, such as anti-social behavior orders and
safe streets acts, are also routinely used to remove queer and trans youth from public spaces and
criminalize their social activities.23 Coupled with problems at home, many queer and trans youth find
themselves homeless and unemployed.24 Once on the street, queer and trans youth have trouble accessing
services and supports to get their basic needs met. Many homeless shelters and social services, for example,
are not safe places for trans people (sometimes banning trans people outright), and problems with gender
categories on identity documents can restrict welfare access.25 Without income, housing, family, or
community support, survival often means often means working in criminalized economies like drug
and sex trade. Queer, trans, and gender-non-conforming youth who are bullied, harassed, and
assaultedparticularly those who dont fit the stereotype of the passive, innocent, white victimare blamed
and punished when they defend themselves. The recent case of the New Jersey 7, in which seven young
African American lesbians were criminalized for defending themselves against sexist and homophobic
harassment, provides a case in point.26 Given that criminalization and imprisonment both arise from, and
further exacerbate, experiences of social marginalization and oppression, efforts to address queer and trans
homelessness, unemployment, suicide, school dropout rates, harassment, and abuse cannot stop short of
prison issues./ PC
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ImpactBiometrics DA

through biometrics, pg 5)
through biometrics, pages 4-5)
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2000).

Similarly, school
More ev.
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through biometrics, pages 4)
Given the current post-9/11, post-Sandy Hook context, popular discourse reformulated the "super-predator into the
"teenage terrorist " as the new target of antiterrorism efforts anchored in "new levels of anxieties
about terrorism and old anxieties about the sources of disorder, danger, and criminality" (Massaro &
Mullaney, 2011, p. 597). Fuentes (2011) argues that in the post-9/11 era, the "lockdown approach to school security"
imagines students as "potential terrorists," thus requiring militarized policing and surveillance (p. 34).
These tactics draw directly from the "paradigm for the national security crackdown that swept the
country after September 11" and work in conjunction with the broader punishing strategies to enforce "state-backed globaliza-tion" and
corporate domination (Fuentes, 2011, p. 34; Saltman, 2011, p. 2). In this context, US public schools apply militarized national
security strategy to its classrooms and hallways viewed as yet another war on terror frontier
populated by could-be ter-rorists, school shooters, or criminals. The "lurking threats" of po-tential
school shooters or dangerous students "presumed to camouflage themselves within the clutter" of
school space necessitate the intensification of tracking, surveillance, and monitoring (Graham, 2010, p. 21).
Cities and schools, in turn, adopt biometric devices as a way to delineate the risky from the low-risk by
encoding bodies with risk profiles assumed to be anchored in their identities (irises, finger-prints, faces). These
devices then authorize preemptive security decisions like denying access to certain spaces or limiting
mobility (Amoore, 2011; Amoore & Hall, 2009; Amoore et al., 2008; Salter, 2006; Sparke, 2006). The continued blurring of the
military and civilian divide , in other words, has brought the "logic of pre-emption to the most mundane
and prosaic spaces" from pass-ports to customer loyalty cards to student ID badges aimed at "colonizing the future" to
US public schools (Amoore, 2009, p. 49; Graham, 2010, p.125). These biometric practices adopted by school
districts like Belleville mimic the US military's "predictive battle-space awareness" (McCue, 2005) tactics
used to fight the war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan, thus institutionalizing a "war-like architecture"
that deploys a "drawing of the lines between the self/ other, us/them, inside/outside that makes going
to war possible (Shapiro, 1997)" (Amoore, 2009, p. 51).
This security landscape brings into stark relief the processes and lasting effects of these colonial feedback-loops on everyday life in the US by
reproducing violent colonial relations within and outside of the US as biometric bordering "[comes] home" (Graham, 2010, p. 131). It also calls attention
to the diffuse and mundane ways in which these colonial practices burrow their way into our everyday lives, quietly militarizing communities,
neighborhoods, and schools across the country through biopolitical modes of governance. Schools absorb, reinvigorate, and reshape these colonial
Situating these school disciplinary regimes in the
tactics before they are re-circulated and made anew (Nguyen, 2013).
context of the new military urbanism helps us unravel their operations, move-ments, and effects, and
illuminates how militarized technologies of control circulate in order to reproduce neoliberal and
colonial re-lations of power in US school spaces. Most importantly, examining school security in this way
reveals the spatial logics that undergird biometric practices that both verify identity and regulate micro
forms of mobility.
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ImpactWar Inev
Domestic policing makes war inevitable both rely on self-valorizing violence that
inverts the relationship between self-defense and aggression in order to justify state
sponsored murder at home and abroad
Martinot 03 [Steve, lecturer at San Francisco State University in the Center for Interdisciplinary Programs,
The Cultural Roots of Interventionism in the US, Social Justice Vol. 30, No. 1 (2003), pp. 19-20]
"white democracy" that inhabits the
Beneath the historical conflation of American nationalism and "white nationalism," of representative democracy and
American identity, the need for a threat to instigate the renewal of a messianic project continually reoccurs, to confirm its
"white racialized identity." This is the "higher responsibility" to which the mainstream American
responds when called upon by government violence against others, and which would be abrogated by
the absence of intervention. (And this is not determined by the color of a person's skin; we are speaking about "white supremacy" here as a social
structure, a social ethos, to which one subscribes through one's subscription to the "white nation.") The paranoia and the self-valorizing
violence through which that "higher responsibility" expresses itself structures the very foundations upon which American
identity rests (in its land emptying and labor controlling endeavors). They constitute the structure of its interventionist ethic. As
different manifestations of the same cultural structure, white racialized identity and the ethic of
governmental intervention are parallel. Each operates according to a prioritization of allegiance and consensus, a cultural
paranoia that criminalizes others in order to construct a defensive solidarity, and a violence that relies on allegiance to
self-referentially confirm the paranoia. The three aspects of the attack sequence -- the identification of a criminal
national leader, a decriminalization of US violence in dealing with that criminal leader, and the self-
consensualizing legitimacy of US government strategies as forms of legality -- reflect these same
dimensions. It is the underlying white racialized identity that permits US interventionism to proceed
without ethical crisis. The interventionary ethos appears moral to white supremacy because it
reproduces the structure that constitutes that white supremacy. The assault on Afghanistan (retaliatiing for Sept. 11 by
destroying whole towns and killing many thousand civilians) reflected these three elements: an arbitrary criminalization of the
Taliban, an unprogrammatic military campaign to drive it off the land, and an arbitrary degree of
violence against that land's people -- all as a measure of US messianic rectitude. In its wake, the rhetoric of a "war
on terrorism" becomes empty, but that only better serves the gratuitousness required by messianic purpose by obviating the need for real political goals.
Similarly, against Yugoslavia, the demand for its abandonment of sovereignty, the destruction of its terrain with bombs
and ecological disaster (depleted uranium and demolished chemical plants), and the presumed equation of Serbian existence with
criminality all fulfilled the same structure. For the white American identity, the assault confirms the
messianic purpose by signifying that the destruction produced was indeed "humanitarian." And now, Iraq ...
Again. If interventionism requires no real political goal for itself beyond its rhetorically machinated
response to a criminalization it has imposed on another, then the messianism (of "democracy") thrown against the sovereignty of that perceived
"threat" is sufficient. Indeed, the paranoid inversion that sees the other's defense as aggression and its
own interventionary aggression as defense makes a programmatic political purpose all but
impossible.39 The ability to criminalize, and to manufacture an international solidarity against the other
is itself the acheivement of the goal, the confirmation that its paranoid perception was real. If, in its messianism, US interventionism it proves itself white
there is always a genocidal dimension to white

supremacist again and again, then it is an exterminationist messianism. As Joy James puts it,
supremacy, as well as a violently enforced allegiance to it.
323
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ImpactSelf-Defense Criminalization
Policing produces the archetype of the queer criminal that bars queer and trans people
from the right to self-defense
Mogul 12 [Joey L., Director of the Civil Rights Clinic at DePaul University College of Law, QUEER (IN)JUSTICE: THE
CRIMINALIZATION OF LGBT PEOPLE IN THE UNITED STATES]
The young, queer, criminal intruder archetype embodies the presumption that groups of queer youth
of color are predatory, dangerous, and determined to enter and occupy areas where they are not
wanted and do not belong (p. 41). Many of the youth criminalized in this way are poor or working class,
homeless, working in black or gray market economies, and gender nonconforming and/or transgender
(p. 41). Their mere presence in public spaces raises suspicion: [T]hey are always framed as up to no good (p. 41). The queer criminal
intruder archetype has been used to justify violence against young queer and trans people of color
because their very presence is seen as criminal behavior that invites or necessitates vigilante action (p.
41). Though the implications of this archetype for transgender women are not explicitly discussed in Queer (In)Justice, CeCe McDonalds
story illustrates how the archetype can play out in the lives of transgender women of color, whose dual
stigmatization on the basis of race and gender identity makes them disproportionately the targets of
violence directed at the LGBTQ community.34 On June 5, 2011, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, CeCe McDonald, a young, African-
American transgender woman was walking home with other black queer and trans youth when she and her friends were verbally harassed by a group of
intoxicated, older white people:35 They called CeCe and her friends faggots, niggers, and chicks with dicks, and suggested that CeCe was dressed
as a woman in order to rape Dean Schmitz, one of the attackers.36 CeCe and her friends responded with words, and the strangers became more
aggressive.37 A woman smashed her glass into CeCes face . . . punctur[ing] CeCes cheek all the way through, lacerating her salivary gland.38 There
was an ensuing fight, during which one of the attackers, Dean Schmitz, was fatally stabbed.39 CeCe was charged with second-degree murder.40
Despite widespread opposition from the queer and trans community in Minneapolis and across the country, CeCes prosecution went forward.41 She
ultimately accepted a plea bargain for second degree manslaughter42 and served nineteen months in a mens prison in St. Cloud, Minnesota.43 CeCe
asserted that she had been demonized by the mainstream media: She said the media had made it seem like [she] was on a rampage . . . just, like,
attacking people.44 CeCes
act of self-defense was further framed as inner rage that exploded during an
argument where Schmitz was stabbed.45 One article, published in the Star Tribune upon CeCes release from prison, appeared to
juxtapose a photograph of CeCe, post-release, smiling, alongside the grief experienced by Schmitzs family.46 Not only did the mainstream media
respond in a way that dismissed CeCes allegations of self-defense and painted her as a criminal intruder, the little that the trans-exclusive radical
feminist community had to say about her case was telling. Bloggers at GenderTrender, a well-known TERF blog, referred to CeCe as a convicted
transgender murderer.47 Another TERF blogger reblogged a piece announcing CeCes imminent release from prison, writing in response: That MAN
does not deserve to be let out of prison. AND HE IS A MAN . . . .48 Instead
of speaking out against the violence against
CeCe, first by Dean Schmitz and then by the criminal legal system, the TERF community portrayed her
as an out-of-control murderer because of her transgender status, and took the side of the white man
with a swastika tattoo who attacked her. The mainstream media and even certain progressive
movements have thus participated in the criminalization of queer and transgender people. They have helped
to reinforce and perpetuate the positive feedback loop between criminalization and societal discrimination by buying into the archetypes that criminalize
queer and transgender people, archetypes that are created by societal homophobia and transphobia. These archetypes serve to strengthen, in turn, the
very forces of intolerance that created them. Queer (In)Justice does not, and could not, describe all of the contexts in which queer criminal
archetypes reinforce and are reinforced by societal transphobia. However, the book does offer a framework with which
to gain greater insight into the way this feedback loop operates in both society and our own
progressive social movements. This is an important project if we are to promote accountability in our
social movements, build more inclusive and intersectional queer communities, and nourish inter-
movement solidarity.
324
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ImpactAfro-Pess Anti-Black Fungibility
The 13th amendment did not abolish slavery but rather produced a mode of social
reproduction predicated on the fungibility of blackness. Slavery is the material
substratum of U.S. modernity.
The postbellum experience of racialized criminal sanction that the Morrisons endured, as well as an
untabulatable number of other black people, speaks to the routinized manner by which white
supremacist juridical, statutory, and penal law conjured the nominally free black civil subject into a
criminalized, natally alienated, and fungible commodity.14 Indeed, notwithstanding the other horrifying aspects of Mentha Morrisons
testimony, one is struck by the utterly banal nature of her gestures toward the arrest, conviction, courthouse sale, and private subleasing of her husbands cold body/flesh as
would-be chain-gang prisoner and fictively indebted peon. How does the rather matter-of-fact nature of her rememory of her husband being arrested, sentenced to the chain
gang, only to be bought and sold to a prison plantation as a piece of criminally branded merchandise alter our understanding of the living history of southern neoslavery?15
If the Thirteenth Amendment was the primary legal weapon of black neoslavery, then what were the
ideologically determining factors that allowed for the profits and pleasures associated with the
auctioning, leasing, and subleasing of black bodies in the courthouse, the plantation field, and the coal
mine in the age of emancipation? Studies of the southern postbellum turn to convict labor have often explained the unprecedented demographic shift
in the Souths official spaces of incarceration that occurred after the Civil Warwith the number of officially imprisoned black people increasing from less than one percent
According to this line of analysis, the
before 1861 to as much as 90 percent in certain counties and states after 1865in terms of political economy.
move to prison slavery fulfilled the need for the recuperation of a formerly enslaved labor force and the
restoration and modernization of a war-torn and backward southern economy.16 The ultimate
message of this interpretive framework has been: if racism was an important immediate/local factor in
the new southern prison system, then the national and global macroeconomic factors of capitalist
profit and industrial modernization were its determinant historical forces. However, Morrisons
unhistorical account of the courthouse auctioning of her husband calls upon us to recognize that the
corporeal economies of white supremacy and black fungibility represented fundamental conditions of
possibility for the formations of terror, subjection, and genocidal domination that black people have
endured under convict leasing, the chain gang, the prison plantation, fictive-debt peonage, and the
penitentiary. To invoke Sylvia Wynter, the liberal white supremacist cultural manufacture of blackness
as metaphysical affliction was the social and philosophical edifice upon which southern capitalist
neoslavery was built and the ideological driving force behind the routinized disappearance and
reenslavement of nominally free black civil subjects.17 Mentha Morrisons testimony illustrates how the inhuman quality of postbellum
punishment was a product of the nationally projected ontological mythos of the Negro or Nigger as incorrigible and inhuman beinga fatal, material, and socially
determining fable that had been forged at law and custom for hundreds of years before her husbands courthouse auctioning.18 Finally, the fact that Jackson Morrisons
criminally branded and sold body ended up being coffled to a geography of racial internment that had been in operation since well before the Civil War underlines how the
supposed historical shift in penal demography that occurred after 1865 was not really so much of a shift at allthat Africans had faced mass inhuman punishment and
industrialized plantation imprisonment on grounds such as Smithonia, Parchman (Mississippi), and Angola (Louisiana) for generations before the openly declared turn to
Negro convict labor. Given her all-too-acute lived understanding of the ways in which the U.S. system of inhuman punishment did indeed amount to a predicament of de jure
reenslavement for her own family and others within her circle, we can imagine that Mentha Morrison knew full well that there was little chance that a single Cold womans
missive to one of the most powerful white men on the planet would yield anything more than it did. However, it is our recognition of her likely understanding of the very
impossibility of her task of calling on national white supremacist law to free her husband from local white supremacist law that underlines the haunting future-orientation of the
neo-abolitionist appeal that can still be heard emitting from her letter well over a century after its composition. A strident black apparitional demand on the neoslavery present
from deep within the neoslavery past can be heard most clearly in section 10 Will you please cause an investigation of that Camp to be made in the future, and while doing
so it will be found that there are numbers of persons (both men and women) serving as slaves there. If Morrisons appeal can be taken as less of a dead letter than an undead
indictment of a past that has never perished, of a living History that continues to see massive numbers of persons (both men and women [and gender-nonconforming people])
serving as slaves in modern living death camps such as those that currently entomb one out of every nine black men in the United States between the ages of twenty and
thirty-four19or the scores of immigrant detention camps that now line Americas hypermilitarized and imperially erected border with Mexicothen
it forces us
to understand that formations of the degree to which formations of chattelized imprisonment such as
Smithonia (Georgia), Cummins (Arkansas), Banner Mine (Alabama), Parchman (Mississippi), and
Angola (Louisiana) are not anachronistic figments of southern white supremacist exceptionalism or
premodern anachronism, but legal, methodological, and cultural foundations of the current U.S. mass
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production, consumption, and inhuman punishment of incarcerated black, Indigenous, brown, poor,
and Muslim bodies. Here I want to clarify that my engagement with the neo-abolitionist demand of
those such as Morrison, Abu-Jamal, and Davis for us to recognize the vicious continuities of racialized
incarceration as it has reached across the well-entrenched boundaries of liberal bourgeois historical
periodization is not an argument for a flattening or eliding of political, experiential, or social difference
between the past and present of U.S. racial genocide. Rather, the apparitional voices of slaves of the
state demand that we pay serious attention to the ways in which the chattel principle has infused the
sociality of black freedom from the moment of its de jure birth.20 Again, in the spirit of purposeful repetition, the
inseparability of freedom and reenslavement is analogized most audaciously within the Janus-headed
language of the very legal document that is advertised as the genesis of black civil personhood and
the extinguishment of Negro chattelhood. My reading of liberal legality and modern racialized
carcerality through the theoretical, epistemological, and pedagogical guidance of neoslaves past and
present presupposes a concentric/accumulative view of history rather than a linear/sequential onean
experientially informed conception of the dynamic interfacing of penal time, racialized carceral space,
and terrorized black unfree experience that discerns grim congruence in the very places that the liberal
white supremacist state implants the socially seductive illusion of progress and the repressive
ideological machinery of postracial amnesia.21 The adamant refusal of the liberal white nationalist
narrative of progress that unfolds within this book does not treat the past and present as homological
(or exactly the same); rather, it represents a politically interested unveiling of the gothic presence of
chattel slavery at the material substratum of U.S. modernity a presence that embodies not a
premodern or precapitalist mode of production, but an undead source of modern social
reproduction and the genealogical matrix of our current catastrophe of mass inhuman entombment.
When encountered in this light, the voices heard throughout this book ultimately signal how the racial
capitalist misogynist state has subjected millions of black people and other racially and criminally
stigmatized peoples to conditions that render the differences between past and present modes of
domination virtually indecipherable, if not completely nonexistent.
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Session II
ImpactAfro Pess Lethal Violence
The status quo for the black people is that of constant fear. Blackness is entrapped
between objective-subjective vertigo where black life and flesh is only cohered through
individual disorientation.
James, 07 [Joy, professor of the Humanities and professor of political science warfare in the American
homeland, policing and policing and prion in a penal democracy. Duke University Press Durham and London//
Daniels]
In the contemporary United States, the police operate as the unaccountable arbiters of lethal
violence, the agents of a domestic militarism that underwrites all expansionism and interventionism. They are, as a rule, aorded impunity in their discretion to use
what we continue to euphemize as excessive force, which really means any manner of
brutalization whatsoever, including socalled unjustied shootings. In each case, the police enjoy a
virtual immunity from prosecution and rarely experience even interruptions in salary. This free rein is
not only practical, howeverthe eect of negligent judicial oversight or disorganized civilian review boardsit is also codied as what the legal scholar Janet Koven Levit
terms constitutional carte blanche.There is simply no legal recourse against the violence and violation of the
police; police departments are, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report, agencies shielded from justice. At this point of extremity, the
power of life and death rests clearly in their hands, granted by ocial decree. Before the police, we do not live
under constitutional (or other) protection of any sort. We are, in short, naked before the state. Under
such conditions, it should surprise no one that racial proling as an institutionalized practice of the agencies of
the police is not only possible or pervasive but entirely legal. There is nothing hyperbolic about my argument here.
Reading the legal scholarship on racial proling, one gets a distinct sense of vertigo. What one nds there is an innite regress
around the standards of probable cause set forth in the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. A number of scholars have amply
demonstrated how, for instance, the recent cases of Illinois v. Wardlow (2000) and United States v. Whren (1996) eectively circumvented the standard of reasonable
suspicion that previously governed the conditions under which the police might stop and frisk pedestrians or motorists during routine trac stops. That earlier standard of
reasonable suspicion was established in Terry v. Ohio (1968), the case from which the well-known Terry stop takes its name. However, on even cursory examination, one
sees that Terry itself instituted a loophole around the Fourth Amendment denition of probable cause, all of which enabled the police greatly during its war on drugs, as
Reagan declared it in 1982. We might lament this persistent whittling away of the standards of suspicion, yet if we look closely at the doctrinal history of Fourth Amendment
protections, we nd again that probable cause itself reduces down to an equally vague and problematic standard of protection. As H. Richard Uviller remarks in Virtual
Justicehe citizens private spaces. It means damn good reason to believe,
327
Session II
ImpactAfro Pess Social Death
Jim Crow and Slavery never left us the mass incarceration of black people acts as a
continuation of anti-black structures that gave this country its roots. The Prison
Industrial Complex means social death of the black population
Wacquant 02 [LOC, sociologist, specializing in urban sociology, urban poverty, racial inequality, the body,
social theory and ethnography. | From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, New Left Review | pg 8 14] //shuler
Slavery, the Jim Crow system and the ghetto are race making institutions, which is to say that they do not simply
process an ethnoracial division that would somehow exist outside of and independently from them. Rather, each produces (or co-produces) this division
(anew) out of inherited demarcations and disparities of group power and inscribes it at every epoch in a distinctive constellation of material and symbolic
forms. And all have consistently racialized the arbitrary boundary setting African-Americans apart from
all others in the United States by actively denying its cultural origin in history, ascribing it instead to the fictitious necessity of biology. The
highly particular conception of race that America has invented, virtually unique in the world for its
rigidity and consequentiality, is a direct outcome of the momentous collision between slavery and
democracy as modes of organization of social life after bondage had been established as the major form of labour
conscription and control in a underpopulated colony home to a precapitalist system of production. The Jim Crow regime reworked the
racialized boundary between slave and free into a rigid caste separation between whites and Negros comprising all persons of
known African ancestry, no matter how minimalthat infected every crevice of the postbellum social system in the South. The ghetto, in turn,
imprinted this dichotomy onto the spatial makeup and institutional schemas of the industrial
metropolis. So much so that, in the wake of the urban riots of the sixties, which in truth were uprisings against intersecting caste and class
subordination, urban and black became near-synonymous in policy making as well as everyday parlance. And the crisis of the city came to stand for
the enduring contradiction between the individualistic and competitive tenor of American life, on the one hand, and the continued seclusion of African-
Americans from it, on the other. [26] As a new century dawns, it is up to the fourth peculiar institution born of the adjoining of the hyperghetto with the
carceral system to remould the social meaning and significance of race in accordance with the dictates of the deregulated economy and the post-
Keynesian state. Now, the penal apparatus has long served as accessory to ethnoracial domination by helping to stabilize a regime under attack or
bridge the hiatus between successive regimes: thus the Black Codes of Reconstruction served to keep African-American labour in place following the
the role of
demise of slavery while the criminalization of civil rights protests in the South in the 1950s aimed to retard the agony of Jim Crow. But
the carceral institution today is different in that, for the first time in US history, it has been elevated to the rank of main
machine for race making. Among the manifold effects of the wedding of ghetto and prison into an extended carceral mesh, perhaps the
most consequential is the practical revivification and official solidification of the centuries-old association of blackness within criminality and devious
violence. Along with the return of Lombroso-style mythologies about criminal atavism and the wide diffusion of bestial metaphors in the journalistic and
the massive over-incarceration
political field (where mentions of superpredators, wolf-packs, animals and the like are commonplace),
of blacks has supplied a powerful common-sense warrant for using color as a proxy for
dangerousness. [27] In recent years, the courts have consistently authorized the police to employ race as a negative signal of increased risk of
criminality and legal scholars have rushed to endorse it as a rational adaptation to the demographics of crime, made salient and verified, as it were, by
the blackening of the prison population, even though such practice entails major inconsistencies from the standpoint of constitutional law.
Throughout the urban criminal justice system, the formula Young + Black + Male is now openly
equated with probable cause justifying the arrest, questioning, bodily search and detention of
millions of African-American males every year. In the era of racially targeted law-and-order policies and their sociological
pendant, racially skewed mass imprisonment, the reigning public image of the criminal is not just that of a monstruuma being whose
features are inherently different from ours, but that of a black monster, as young African-American men from the inner city have come to personify the
explosive mix of moral degeneracy and mayhem. The conflation of blackness and crime in collective representation and government policy (the other
re-activates race by giving a legitimate outlet to the
side of this equation being the conflation of blackness and welfare) thus
expression of anti-black animus in the form of the public vituperation of criminals and prisoners. As writer
John Edgar Wideman points out: Its respectable to tar and feather criminals, to advocate locking them up and throwing away the key. Its not racist to be
against crime, even though the archetypal criminal in the media and the public imagination almost always wears Willie Hortons face. Gradually, urban
and ghetto have become codewords for terrible places where only blacks reside. Prison is rapidly being re-lexified in the same segregated fashion. [28]
Indeed, when to be a man of color of a certain economic class and milieu is equivalent in the public eye to being a criminal, being processed by the
penal system is tantamount to being made black, and doing time behind bars is at the same time marking race. [29] By assuming a central role in the
post-Keynesian government of race and poverty, at the crossroads of the deregulated low-wage labor market, a revamped welfare-workfare apparatus
designed to support casual employment, and the vestiges of the ghetto, the overgrown carceral system of the United States has become a major engine
of symbolic production in its own right. It is not only the pre-eminent institution for signifying and enforcing blackness, much as slavery was during the
328
Session II
as bondage effected the social death of imported African captives and
first three centuries of US history. Just
their descendants on American soil, mass incarceration also induces the civic death of those it
ensnares by extruding them from the social compact.
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Session II
ImpactAfro Pess Plantation
Prison is a continuum from the plantation to post-emancipation convict leasing to jim

crow to the prison and the ghetto we must understand the prison as a spatiotemporal
regime that entraps and grinds black life to death their consignment of prison to an
architectural site and historically contingent event disavows the fundamental
continuum of antiblack capture that governs all social and political relations
WACQUANT 02 [LOC WACQUANT sociologist, specializing in urban sociology, urban poverty, racial
inequality, the body, social theory and ethnography. New Left Review - Loic Wacquant: From Slavery to Mass
Incarceration http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2367// Daniels]
To grasp the deep kinship between ghetto and prison, which helps explain how the structural decline and functional redundancy of the one led to the
unexpected ascent and astonishing growth of the other during the last quarter-century, it is necessary first to characterize accurately the
ghetto. [14] But here we come upon the troublesome fact that the social sciences have failed to develop a robust analytic concept of the ghetto;
instead they have been content to borrow the folk concept current in political and popular discourse at each epoch. This has caused a good deal of
confusion, as the ghetto has been successively conflated withand mistaken fora segregated district, an ethnic neighbourhood, a territory of intense
poverty or housing blight and even, with the rise of the policy myth of the underclass in the more recent period, a mere accumulation of urban
pathologies and antisocial behaviours. [15] A comparative and historical sociology of the reserved Jewish quarters in the cities of Renaissance Europe
and of Americas Bronzeville in the Fordist metropolis of the twentieth century reveals that a ghetto is essentially a sociospatial device that enables a
dominant status group in an urban setting simultaneously to ostracize and exploit a subordinate group endowed with negative symbolic capital, that is,
an incarnate property perceived to make its contact degrading by virtue of what Max Weber calls negative social estimation of honour. Put differently, it
is a relation of ethnoracial control and closure built out of four elements: (i) stigma; (ii) constraint; (iii) territorial confinement; and (iv) institutional
encasement. The resulting formation is a distinct space, containing an ethnically homogeneous population, which finds itself forced to develop within it a
set of interlinked institutions that duplicates the organizational framework of the broader society from which that group is banished and supplies the
scaffoldings for the construction of its specific style of life and social strategies. This parallel institutional nexus affords the subordinate group a measure
of protection, autonomy and dignity, but at the cost of locking it in a relationship of structural subordination and dependency. The
ghetto, in short,
operates as an ethnoracial prison: it encages a dishonoured category and severely curtails the life chances of
its members in support of the monopolization of ideal and material goods or opportunities by the dominant
status group dwelling on its outskirts. [16] Recall that the ghettos of early modern Europe were typically delimited by high walls with one or
more gates which were locked at night and within which Jews had to return before sunset on pain of severe punishment, and that their perimeter was
subjected to continuous monitoring by external authorities. [17] Note next the
structural and functional homologies with the prison
conceptualized as a judicial ghetto: a jail or penitentiary is in effect a reserved space which serves to forcibly
confine a legally denigrated population and wherein this latter evolves its distinctive institutions, culture and
sullied identity. It is thus formed of the same four fundamental constituentsstigma, coercion, physical enclosure and organizational parallelism
and insulationthat make up a ghetto, and for similar purposes. Much as the ghetto protects the citys residents from the pollution of intercourse with the
tainted but necessary bodies of an outcast group in the manner of an urban condom, as Richard Sennett vividly put it in his depiction New Left Review -
Loic Wacquant: From Slavery to Mass Incar... http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2367 6 of 14 10/31/09 9:04 PM of the fear of touching
in sixteenth-century Venice, [18] the
prison cleanses the social body from the temporary blemish of those of its
members who have committed crimes, that is, following Durkheim, individuals who have violated the sociomoral
integrity of the collectivity by infringing on definite and strong states of the collective conscience. Students of
the inmate society from Donald Clemmer and Gresham Sykes to James Jacobs and John Irwin have noted time and again how the incarcerated
develop their own argot roles, exchange systems and normative standards, whether as an adaptive response to the pains of imprisonment or through
selective importation of criminal and lower-class values from the outside, much like residents of the ghetto have elaborated or intensified a separate
sub-culture to counter their sociosymbolic immurement. [19] As for the secondary aim of the ghetto, to facilitate exploitation of the interned category, it
was central to the house of correction which is the direct historical predecessor of the modern prison and it has periodically played a major role in the
evolution and operation of the latter. [20] Finally, both prison and ghetto are authority structures saddled with inherently dubious or problematic
legitimacy whose maintenance is ensured by intermittent recourse to external force. By the end of the seventies, then, as the racial and class backlash
against the democratic advances won by the social movements of the preceding decade got into full swing, the prison abruptly returned to the forefront
of American society and offered itself as the universal and simplex solution to all manners of social problems. Chief among these problems was the
breakdown of social order in the inner city, which is scholarly and policy euphemism for the patent incapacity of the dark ghetto to contain a
dishonoured and supernumerary population henceforth viewed not only as deviant and devious but as downright dangerous in light of the violent urban
upheavals of mid-sixties. As the walls of the ghetto shook and threatened to crumble, the walls of the prison were correspondingly extended, enlarged
and fortified, and confinement of differentiation, aimed at keeping a group apart (the etymological meaning of segregare), gained primacy over
confinement of safety and confinement of authorityto use the distinction proposed by French sociologist Claude Faugeron. [21] Soon the black
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Session II
ghetto, converted into an instrument of naked exclusion by the concurrent retrenchment of wage
labour and social protection, and further destabilized by the increasing penetration of the penal arm of
the state, became bound to the jail and prison system by a triple relationship of functional equivalency,
structural homology and cultural syncretism, such that they now constitute a single carceral continuum
which entraps a redundant population of younger black men (and increasingly women) who circulate in
closed circuit between its two poles in a self-perpetuating cycle of social and legal marginality with
devastating personal and social consequences. [22] Now, the carceral system had already functioned as an ancillary institution
for caste preservation and labour control in America during one previous transition between regimes of racial domination, that between slavery and Jim
Southern prisons turned black overnight as thousands of ex-
Crow in the South. On the morrow of Emancipation,
slaves were being arrested, tried, and convicted for acts that in the past had been dealt with by the
master alone and for refusing to behave as menials and follow the demeaning rules of racial etiquette.
Soon thereafter, the former confederate states introduced convict leasing as a response to the moral
panic of Negro crime that presented the double advantage of generating prodigious funds for the
state coffers and furnishing abundant bound labour to till the fields, build the levees, lay down the
railroads, clean the swamps, and dig the mines of the region under murderous conditions. [23] Indeed,
penal labour, in the form of the convict-lease and its heir, the chain gang, played a major role in the
economic advancement of the New South during the Progressive era, as it reconciled modernization
with the continuation of racial domination. [24
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ImpactModel Minority Kills Dissent
Model Minority myth is used to supress Asian-American radical enagement with racism
Chang 93 (Robert S. Chang, Toward an Asian American Legal Scholarship: Critical Race eory, Post-
structuralism, and Narrative Space, 81 CALIF. L. REV. 1241 (1993).h p://digitalcommons.law.sea
leu.edu/faculty/411
The portrayal of Asian Americans as successful permits the general public, government officials, and
the judiciary to ignore or marginalize the contemporary needs of Asian Americans. On the surface, the
label "model minority" seems like a compliment. However, once one moves beyond this
complimentary fagade, one can see the label for what it is-a tool of oppression which works a dual
harm by (1) denying the existence of present-day discrimination against Asian Americans and the
present-day effects of past discrimination, and (2) legitimizing the oppression of other racial minorities
and poor whites. That Asian Americans are a "model minority" is a myth. But the myth has gained a
substantial following, both inside and outside the Asian American community.7 9 The successful
inculcation of the model minority myth has created an audience unsympathetic to the problems of
Asian Americans. Thus, when we try to make our problems known, our complaints of discrimination or
calls for remedial action are seen as unwarranted and inappropriate. They can even spark resentment.
For example, Professor Mitsuye Yamada tells a story about the reactions of her Ethnic American Literature class to an anthology compiled by some
outspoken Asian American writers: [One student] blurted out that she was offended by its militant tone and that as a white person she was tired of
always being blamed for the oppression of all the minorities. I noticed several of her classmates' eyes nodding in tacit agreement. A discussion of the
"militant" voices in some of the other writings we had read in the course ensued. Surely, I pointed out, some of these other writings have been just as, if
not more, militant as the words in this introduction? Had they been offended by those also but failed to express their feelings about them? To my
surprise, they said they were not offended by any of the Black American, Chicano or Native American writings, but were hard-pressed to explain why
when I asked for an explanation. A little further discussion revealed that they "understood" the anger expressed by the Blacks and Chicanos and they
"empathized" with the frustrations and sorrow expressed by the Native American. But the Asian Americans?? [sic] Then finally, one student said it for all
of them: "It made me angry. Their anger made me angry, because I didn't even know the Asian Americans felt oppressed. I didn't expect their anger."80
This story illustrates the danger of the model minority myth: it renders the oppression of Asian Americans invisible.
This invisibility has
harmful consequences, especially when those in positions of power cannot see: To be out of sight is
also to be without social services. Thinking Asian Americans have succeeded, government officials
have sometimes denied funding for social service programs designed to help Asian Americans learn
English and find employment. Failing to realize that there are poor Asian families, college
administrators have sometimes excluded Asian-American students from Educational Opportunity
Programs (EOP), which are intended for all students from low-income families.
The Western representation of the Asian being the model minority constructs a
rhetoric of silence regarding violence and crushes dissent
Kannan 2014 [Vani, doctoral student in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric at Syracuse University, Model
Minority or Potential Terrorist? Affective Economies, Rhetorics of Silence & the Murder of Sunando Sen (7-
13)(34-35)
On December 27, 2012, a Hindu Indian-American named Sunando Sen was pushed to his death from
the 40th Street/Lowery 7-train station in Queens, New York, by Erika Menendez, who said she killed
him in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks. This attack is part of a 12-year history of retaliatory violence; in
the week following 9/11 alone, there were 645 bias incidents and crimes specifically aimed at people
of South Asian and Middle Eastern descent,2 and by early As the statistics indicate, Sens murder is far from an
isolated event. Though this study focuses on only one out of thousands of similar attacks, it models a type of analysis that is exigent in the post-
9/11 U.S. In light of the continued vigilante violence, there is a need to understand the mechanisms by which Sen was
constructed as a target of fear, anger, and hatred. Furthermore, Sens attack must be considered in light of the history of
Indian-American deracialization, which is linked to the model minority tropean intermediary racial location
between black and white6 that conceals a long history of racialization of Asian ethnicities and nationalities in the United States, most recently
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following 9/11. There is a need to examine representations of Indian-Americans to reveal traces of their historical deracialization. In the post-9/11
context, how is the deracialized Indian-American discursively constructed, and what ideologies are perpetuated in this silence about race?7 has been
constructed in post-9/11 popular mediaspecifically, the implications of popular media silence around the structural causes of racially-motivated violent
crime, the racialized discourses embedded in this silence, and the ideologies perpetuated by the circulation of these discourses. It also provides a
method for denaturalizing the deracialized representation of Sen set forth by popular media. To contextualize this analysis, we can begin by
considering historical conceptions and representations of Indian-Americans; this will allow us to identify and denaturalize traces of these histories in
contemporary popular media. Indian-Americans do not fit neatly on either side of the color line, and have historically inhabited a liminal, often
deracialized position. Rather than explore the historical differences in the racial formation of Muslim and Hindu diasporas in the U.S., I want to historicize
the deracialization of Indian-Americans and trace how this has been complicated in the wake of 9/11and, as Bill Ong Hing notes in Vigilante Racism:
The De-Americanization of Immigrant America, trace how institutional and interpersonal violence targeting Indian-Americans has endured: the
similarities between blatantly racist acts from one hundred years ago and today are troubling.8Institutional discrimination against Indian-Americans in
the continental United States can be traced to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, in which Asian-Americans were integrated into the U.S. racial system
as a non-indigenous, non-white, non-black group that was denied the right to citizenship and property.9 From
the late 1800s into the early
1900s, over six thousand Indians who had moved to California and the Pacific Northwest to work agricultural and
timber laboring jobs faced discrimination from the Asiatic Exclusion League, Samuel Gomperss American Federation of Labor, and the towns in which
they lived.10 U.S. immigration officials responded to pressure from these exclusionists by turning away more than 3,400 Indians who sought entry to the
U.S. between 1908 and 1920.11 The passage of the Alien Land Laws in 1913 cut short attempts by Indian immigrants to open small farms, and the
Supreme Court Case United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind ensured that Indian-Americans would not enjoy the
privileges afforded to whites.12 This casein which a high caste Hindu of full Indian blood sought
naturalization on the grounds that high-class Hindus belong to the Aryan race foreshadowed post-9/11 politics by racializing religion: The Court
ruled that the physical group characteristics of the Hindus render them readily distinguishable from the various
groups of persons in this country commonly recognized as [W]hite.14 Subsequent to this ruling, all South Asians
who had previously been granted citizenship lost it, and in 1924, the National Origins Act halted immigration to the U.S. from India.15
Immigration policies kept Indian immigration rates low for the next forty years, largely because low-wage agricultural workers from Mexico and the
Caribbean rendered Indian manual labor unnecessary.16 Marked by a racialized ethnicity, Indian-Americans were thus
othered without being neatly categorized as black or white, This none-white, non-black designation was
further complicated by the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which. recruited a pool of university-educated,
English-language-fluent Indian immigrants to fill the labor needs of the U.S. science and technology sector. As
Vijay Prashad explains in The Karma of Brown Folk, this is when the myth of the model minority took hold, largely as a
tactic for distinguishing Indian-Americans from Black Americans in the context of the Civil Rights movement:
[t]he struggles of blacks [were] met with the derisive remark that Asians dont complain; they work hard . . . [t]hat
some people of color achieve appreciable levels of success, for whatever reason, is used as evidence that racism poses no barrier to success (7-8).
Used to support color-blind, meritocratic ideologies, this group of soon-to-be-assimilated Indian-Americans was transformed into a deracialized model
minority. Immigration policyand with it, immigration waveshave shifted since 1965, but the myth of the model minority endures. In Unruly
Immigrants, Monisha das Gupta writes that the demographic and class differences arising from post-1965 immigration policy have led to the emergence
of distinct, often conflicting, needs and interests on the part of immigrants from South Asia (2006, p. 56). These varying socioeconomic needs are
obscured by the model minority trope, which has constructed the false sense that the Indian diaspora is an evenly successful, self-reliant, and almost-
white immigrant group.18 The historical construction of this trope sits in direct contrast to the history of institutional and interpersonal violence targeting
Indian-Americans, beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act and continuing today. 19 ..By
framing Sens murder as the product of
the perpetrators mental illness and situating it in a history of subway-related deaths, this reportage denies the
context of post-9/11 racism, and conceals the production of emotion that made the attack possible. This is not
meant to suggest that concealment is intentional on the part of journalists, but rather that rhetorics of silence
surrounding race are embedded in dominant discourse and reproduced in popular media. The reportage does
not recognizelet alone challenge or critique the structural and discursive metonymic linking of brown skin
with terrorism. This effectively works to reinforce the metonymic link, maintaining ArabMuslimSouthAsian
bodies as objects at risk of attack.By reporting on Sens murder in the context of mental health services and
subway-related deaths, the media analyzed here perpetuate deracialized representations of Indian-Americans, and in
doing so, construct a rhetoric of silence around post-9/11 vigilante violence and maintain an affective economy of anger, fear, and
hatred directed at the ArabMuslimSouthAsian body. These silences are further reinforced through the individualization of
Sens attack, and the fact that he is characterized with model minority virtues of hard work and entrepreneurship.Here, we
see race relegated to the margins, and as Ahmed writes, what is relegated to the margins is often, as we know from deconstruction, right at the centre
of thought itself.70 Considering this attack in light of Indian-American deracialization and the model minority
stereotype, it seems that post-9/11, this stereotype is doing harm in a new way: by constructing silences
around the racially-motivated nature of vigilante violence and with it, reinforcing violent affective economies.
We need to be critical of discourses surrounding post-9/11 vigilante violence to make sure they do not
unwittingly erase the histories and reinforce the affective economies that made the attacks possible. Iyer
makes a call to contextualize Sens murder within a history, past and present, of racism and xenophobia in our country (2013).
This work of historicizing post-9/11 racism is difficult, but also transformative; as Ahmed writes, I cannot learn this historywhich means unlearning the
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we must work to denaturalize and re-
forgetting of this history and remain the same.71 To unlearn the forgetting of this history,
contextualize narratives that do not take racial histories into account.
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ImpactModel Minority - Racism
violence can solve
4/2/15)//MNW
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myth creates the idea that some people deserve to be in the U.S. and some people dont. Some immigrants are lazy.
involuntarily and/or by force, such as a result of war or U.S. colonization and expansion projects abroad . My
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White supremacy !
Re-narrations]
It is just as the U.S. prison has morphed into a multilayered structure of civic and social death that
Asian Americans have galvanized viable, even thriving renditions of multicultural American civic life.
Such is the historical condition of possibility for these multiple, civil society-based Asian Americanisms: while the very articulation and material gravity of
Asian Americanism sits on the precipice and precedent of the 1965 Immigration Actan alleged liberalization of a historically racist and xenophobic
set of policieswe must contextualize this change in federal immigration law as a measure that further facilitated the effective expulsion of criminalized
populations from U.S. civil society. In this context, the
1965 Act amounts to a selective incorporation of an Asian
immigrant population into the normative workings of an embryonic, post-civil rights multicultural
civil society. It also suggests a state-proctored cultural and political validation of contemporary Asian-
American civil society over and against the durable immobilization, confinement, and enhanced penal
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segregation of other racially pathologized populations. Finally, in the wake of the Immigration Acts
demographic effects, we must retheorize the vexing versatility of the Asian-American model minority
paradigm as something other than a stereotype run amuck: that is, we must understand the
cultural figure of the Asian-American model minority (both collective and embodied) as a modality of
white supremacy and racial ordering that exceeds the empirical validity of the paradigm itself.
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ImpactModel Minority State Reform Bad
Alt is a prerequisite. Asian American discrimination is sutured within the United States
history any reform will be bound up in the racing of the law.
Saito 2001 (Natsu Taylor, professor at Georgia State University College of Law, 2001, "Symbolism Under Siege: Japanese
American Redress and the 'Racing' of Arab Americans as 'Terrorists,'" Asian Law Journal)=^.^=
Thus far, it has the makings of a feel-good story: a terrible thing happened, but the nation recognized its wrong
and stepped forward to provide some redress. The story confirms what so many want to believe, that despite
occasional aberrations this is a nation committed to democracy and the equality of peoples. Most people I
encounter are open to this story. Like many Japanese Americans, I am invited to tell it at high schools and
churches, even military bases. However, if we really care about achieving democracy and equality, we need to
look beyond this level of the narrative. Im. FUNDAMENTAL FLAWS IN THE NARRATIVE There are at least
two major flaws with the internment narrative. First, it accepts the notion that the internment was an aberration
rather than a logical extension of the treatment of Asians in America. Second, it implies that the wrong has
actually been righted. A. The Internment Was Not an Aberration in the Context of Asian American History
Implicit in the terms of the apology, which attributed the problem to wartime hysteria and racial prejudice, is the
notion that the internment was an aberration, an instance in which our nation temporarily strayed from its basic
commitment to due process and equal protection. But the internment was not an aberration. One need only
look at the social, political, economic, and legal history of Asian Americans in the United States, from the
enforcement of the 1790 Naturalization Act's limitation of citizenship to "free white persons,"3 to the
exploitation of Chinese labor in the mines and building of the railroads,39 to lynchings and Jim Crow laws,40 to
Chinese exclusion in the 1880s and the exclusion of the Japanese in the early 1900S,41 to the alien land
laws,42 and to the National Origins Act of 1924,43 to see that the military orders to exclude and then imprison
"all persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and non-alien"4 were really a logical extension of all that had
come before. Between the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 188245 and the National Origins Act of
1924,"' immigration laws were modified to prevent nearly all Asian migration to the United States. The 1790
Naturalization Act limited citizenship to "free white persons" and Asians were held in a series of cases to be
non-white.7 Thus, as Asians were incorporated into the U.S. racial hierarchy, "foreignness" became part of
their racialized identity.' Some forms of discrimination, such as segregation and lynchings, were blatantly race-
based, but much of it was structured, legally and socially, on the presumption that Asian Americans were not or
could not become citizens. State and local laws were enacted which levied special taxes on Asian Americans;
others prevented those aliens "ineligible to citizenship" from obtaining employment, possessing various kinds
of licenses, or owning land.49 Legalized discrimination was compounded by the perpetual "enemy" status
afforded Asians in popular American culture. Starting with depictions of the "yellow peril" hordes waiting to take
over the country in the 1880s, Asians were routinely portrayed as sneaky, inscrutable, fanatical, unassimilable
and, on top of that, fungible." They were foreign, disloyal and therefore an enemy, just as portrayed in the
rhetoric of the internment. In this context, the anti-Japanese sentiment and actions taken in the 1940s were
unusual only in scope, not in nature. Thus, as we look briefly at the history of Asians in America, we see the
internment emerging as a somewhat extreme, but not aberrant, manifestation of a well-entrenched pattern of
discrimination rooted in a racialized identification of Asian Americans as perpetually "foreign.' B. Flaw #2: The
Real Wrong Has Not Been Righted The second major problem with the standard internment narrative is that it
implies that the wrong has been recognized and corrected, or at least that it could not happen again. One of
the stated purposes of the Civil Liberties Act was to "discourage the occurrence of similar injustices and
violations of civil liberties in the future."52 To understand whether the wrong has been corrected, we must first
see if it has been correctly identified. The way the story is usually told, the wrong is one of racial prejudice
playing out against a group of people in ways we now recognize to have been excessive. The history of racial
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discrimination against Asian Americans certainly did not end with the internment. The Chinese, who were "our
friends" in World War II,53 rapidly became the enemy as China "went communist." The wars in Korea and
Vietnam reinforced this image, despite the fact that Asians were allies as often as they were enemies.54 The
refusal to distinguish among individuals and ethnic groups has persisted from General DeWitt's famous
pronouncement that "a Jap's a Jap"s through the beating death of Vincent Chin, a fifth generation Chinese
American killed by unemployed auto workers in Detroit who were angry at the Japanese automobile
industry,56 to the stories of hate crimes against "gooks" and "chinks" still recorded every month.57 It was this
history that made Asian Americans so suspicious of the allegations against and treatment of Wen Ho Lee, a
nuclear physicist accused but never actually charged with espionage.58 According to Neil Gotanda, "The
federal government, after years of investigation, has been unable to produce any evidence of espionage. The
spy charges have been maintained, not by evidence, but by constant allegations linking Wen Ho Lee to
China.59 He continues: The assignment to Wen Ho Lee of a presumption of disloyalty is a well- established
marker of foreignness. And foreignness is a crucial dimension of the American racialization of persons of Asian
ancestry. It is at the heart of the racial profile of Chinese and other Asian Americans.61 But while racism is
inextricable from the story of the internment, the primary "wrong" that should be addressed by reparations is
more complex. In what is still probably the best analysis of the Supreme Court's decisions in the internment
cases, Yale Law School professor Eugene Rostow, in 1945, summarized the wrong as follows: The Japanese
exclusion program thus rests on five propositions of the utmost potential menace: (1) protective custody,
extending over three or four years, is a permitted form of imprisonment in the United States; (2) political
opinions, not criminal acts, may contain enough clear and present danger to justify such imprisonment; (3)
men, women and children of a given ethnic group, both Americans and resident aliens can be presumed to
possess the kind of dangerous ideas which require their imprisonment; (4) in time of war or emergency the
military, perhaps without even the concurrence of the legislature, can decide what political opinions require
imprisonment, and which ethnic groups are infected with them; and (5) the decision of the military can be
carried out without indictment, trial, examination, jury, the confrontation of witnesses, counsel for the defense,
the privilege against self-incrimination, or any of the other safeguards of 61 the Bill of Rights. Rostow's
summary describes a wrong much larger than the "relocation" of 120,000 people on the basis of their race or
national origin for three or four years. It goes beyond the denial of Japanese Americans' civil rights and
liberties to a dismantling of protections that are supposed to extend to everyone within this system. Have
these problems been corrected? The 1943 and 1944 Supreme Court opinions in the Korematsu and
Hirabayashi cases have never been overturned. The coram nobis cases decided in the 1980s vacated the
convictions but, as Fred Yen says, "Unfortunately, proclamations of Korematsu's permanent discrediting are
premature. The Supreme Court has never overruled the case. It stands as valid precedent, an authoritative
interpretation of our Constitution and the 'supreme Law of the Land.'"2 Could it happen again? Would it? Given
the publicity and the reparations, it is unlikely that it will happen again to Japanese Americans, but that does
not mean it could not happen to other groups. The following section explores parallels I have observed
between the Asian American experience described above and the contemporary social, political, and legal
treatment of Arab Americans and Muslims in the United States. IV. HISTORY REPEATS AS WE WATCH:
THE TREATMENT OF ARAB AMERICANS TODAY A. The "Racing" of Arab Americans as "Terrorists" One
way to examine whether the wrong done to Japanese Americans during World War II has been righted is to
look at how the media and our political and judicial systems are responding to discrimination against Arab
Americans and Muslims3 in the United States today. The possibility that Arab Americans could be interned just
as Japanese Americans were lies just below the surface of popular consciousness, occasionally emerging as it
did in the movie The Seige.6 We have no more legal protections against such a scenario than we did in 1942.
However, we need not postulate the wholesale internment of Arab Americans to see how many of the issues
faced today by Arab Americans parallel those Asian Americans have encountered.5 Just as Asian Americans
have been "raced" as foreign, and from there as presumptively disloyal6 Arab Americans and Muslims have
been "raced" as "terrorists": foreign, disloyal, and imminently threatening. Although Arabs trace their roots to
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the Middle East and claim many different religious backgrounds, and Muslims come from all over the world and
adhere to Islam, these distinctions are blurred and negative images about either Arabs or Muslims are often
attributed to both. As Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations notes, "The common
stereotypes are that we're all Arabs, we're all violent and we're all conducting a holy war."67
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ImpactModel Minority Yu
The model minority myth utilizes individual efforts to hide the stuctures underneath -
increasing discriminatory standardized testing, privatization, the privileging of white
communities, and justifying the removal of government social services for other
people of color
Yu 7 (Tianlong, Assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Southern Illinois
University Edwardsville, Challenging the Politics of the Model Minority Stereotype: A Case for Educational
Equality, Equity & Excellence in Education)=^.^=
The influence of this model minority stereotype is widespread in education. The success of Asian Ameri- can
students can serve as a valuable lesson for all Amer- icans, declared former U.S. Undersecretary of Education
Linus Wright (1988). Wright, who had been Secretary of Education William Bennetts choice to succeed him upon Bennetts resignation, said that
the educational achievements of Asian Americans demonstrate the importance of values, particularly those of close ties between parents and
children. Like-minded politicians and educators, who promote conservative social and educational reforms, often express similar views. Let us first
examine the effects of the model minority stereotype on Asian American students. Since
its inception, the model minority rhetoric
has been discredited for its monolithic treatment and mistaken stereotyp- ing of Asian students as uniformly
successful academically. When the model minority narrative first received attention, James Coleman (1966) conducted a comprehensive
study of Equality of Educational Opportunity. The famous Coleman Report found that Asian American students as a group were not succeeding
influential works of Charles Silberman (1970),
academically, certainly not outwhiting the Whites (Success Story, 1971, p. 24). The subsequent
Colin Greer (1976), and William Ryan (1976) all showed similar findings about the school failures of minority students,
including Asian American students. The major lawsuit over English immersion, sink or swim instruction,
which went all the way to the Supreme Court in 19731974, with Lau v. Nichols, was brought on behalf of the
Chinese American students suing the San Francisco school system for not providing them equal
educational opportunities. The plaintiffs briefs are filled with statistics about the academic failures and difficulties faced by Asian American
students. More recently, both the 1990 and 2000 censuses show that academic success is not universal across Asian American
groups. For example, in 1998, the percentage of Southeast Asian adults with less than a high school diploma was 64%, which far exceeded the
national average for all Asian Americans (23%) (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000). Asian American subgroups, such as Hmongs, Viet-
namese, Cambodians, and Laotians, all rank far below the national average in education (Yin, 2001). Although the
enrollment number of Asian Americans in the nations prestigious universities is highly notable, the proportion of enrollment by students from different
Asian American ethnic subgroups ranges widely. For example, in 2000 Chinese Americans were nearly seven times more likely to attend University of
CaliforniaBerkeley than Filipino Americans, although Chinese and Filipino American populations in California were of equal size (Teranishi, 2002, p.
144). Disregarding all of these facts, politicians like Wright generally accept a stereotypical portrait of Asian Americans. In doing so, they simply turn their
backs on so many Asian American students who are victims of the education competition. These Asian American students are totally
left out by the politicians who are used to overgeneralizing issues driven by their political agenda. These
students are the students who need assistance; and yet, the assistance is purposefully denied under the
rhetoric of the model minority narative. The impact of the model minority label on the so-called Asian American
high achievers is also significant and, very often, negative. One such negative impact is that it causes
and/or reinforces peoples indifference and ignorance toward these students needs and problems. Since
Asian American students are generalized as super-bright, highly motivated overachievers who come from well-
to-do families, it is inconceivable that they could encounter any serious learning problems. Contrary to this popular
misconception, however, Asian American students are just like any other minority students who may experience
difficulties in school. They perform just as poorly as other minorities when schools do not come to their aid
(Toppo, 2002). Because of the model minority label, they may encounter more difficulties and problems than expected. They are often
subjected to unrealistically high expectations by their parents, their instructors, and even their peers. The pres-
sures could be so great that their academic performance and personal well-being suffer as a result. Thus, the
model minority label has created a mental trap for these Asian students. They have no other choices but to in-
ternalize the oppression imposed on them by the society. In addition, as Asher (2001) points out, internalized by many Asian
American parents and their children, the model minority concept turns out to be a hegemonic force that contributes to the
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damaging of young Asians academic and career choices, playing a detrimental role in the development of
their identities. For example, Asian American parents overwhelmingly lead their children to pursue safe careers in science-and business-related
areas, the tangible professional careers, curtailing their representation in the social sciences and humanities. This further marginalizes Asian Americans
in society. Ignoring these actual harmful effects on Asian Ameri- can students, conservative politicians and educators sell the model minority myth to
everyone. The core message of the model minority concept, namely, individual efforts matter more than
structural change, has become an integral part of their overall educational reform package. A closer examination of
the current educational reform movement will reveal this point more clearly. Two major trends characterize current national
educational reform: the privatization/commercialization of education and the standardization of teaching and learning. Within the
privatization/commercialization trend, education is increasingly viewed as a business and students as consumers.
Economic principles reign supreme: Efficiency and cost-benefit analysis become the rules; consumer choice and free
competition are the norms. Voucher plans and other choice programs are hailed as the solution to help poor children
and make declining schools work. Supplementary to the market mechanisms and initiatives, other policies
are proposed, which emphasize the standardization of curricula and assessment, the restoration of Western
tradition, and a return to traditional morality. Driven by the impulse to control both knowledge and values,
political establishments push for higher academic standards, high-stakes testing, and virtue-centered character
education. These reform agendas have been under serious challenges by thoughtful critics since their origin (see Apple, 1996, 2000, 2001, for
example). Connected to the larger conservative restoration in American society, these educational reform
policies do not attempt to challenge the fundamental school structure and culture based on the
capitalist system, which is the root cause of all school problems we face today . One of the major
problems of the reform movement is its individualist orientation. Freeman (2005) points out that the No Child Left
Behind Act (2001) keeps school reform a largely idiosyncratic process separated from wider social and
environmental contexts. While suggesting that educational improvement be effectively pursued independent
of external material realities and emphasizing academic competition among schools and individual students,
policymakers seriously ignore the social conditions of schooling while disregarding the close correlation
between school outcomes and social problems such as racism and poverty. Freeman (2005) argues, as colorblindness
permeates educational policies, the salience of race in American education is rendered invisible. Not only is race denigrated in educational policy,
other critical issues such as ethnicity, social class, gender, religion, and language also are trivialized. This leads to a fundamental problem of the
current school reform, namely, the de-emphasis of social justice and educational equality. Apple (1996) points out, Behind the educational justifications
for a national curriculum and national testing is an ideological attack that is very dangerous. Its effects will be truly damaging to those who already have
the most to lose in this society (p. 24). As Apple does, we must ask this question: Who are the benefactors in the reform movement and who are the
overlooked? Studies of school choice programs, past and present, reveal their unequal effects on different student groups (Fuller & Elmore, 1996;
Scott, 2005; Wells, 2002). Vouchers are promoted as a method of helping disadvantaged students; however, Mathis (2004) notes that vouchers
programs can only be practically available in the same resource-poor district, and the money given cannot possibly buy poor people a fraction of good
education. Besides, with the
flowing of funds from public schools to private schools, racial and cultural segregation is
exacerbated, which in turn will further marginalize disadvantaged people. The losers in the accountability race
are predetermined. Dilapidated urban schools and poor and minority children will surely lose the high-stakes competition. As we see, test scores
have been used not to determine what students are taught, but to punish failing students and schools (Kohn, 2000; Sirotnik, 2004). We must ascertain
that the biggest problem facing American education is the unjust distribution of social resources in schools and the
resulting unequal educational opportunities for children from different groups. The historical pattern of unequal educational opportunity has been well-
documented. Colin Greers (1976) comprehensive historical study indicated the fundamental failure of schools in America that served poor and ethnic
minority students. He therefore declared the great school legendthe time-honored faith that schooling effectively
paved the way to future economic mobility and social status, the faith that lies at the core of the model minority
narrativelargely mythical and absolutely illusory and disastrous for poor, minority kids. Jonathan Kozols (1992)
qualitative investigation showed the deplorable conditions of the inner-city schools that poor, black, and Latino children attended;
schools that had leaking roofs, overflowing toilets, overcrowded classrooms, outdated textbooks, and
unqualified teachers. Today, no one can declare that the situation has changed significantly. Kozol argued convincingly then, the savage
inequalities in the public school system were mainly caused by the shocking differences in educational spending between wealthy suburban schools
and poor inner-city schools. And today, we know our educational funding systems are [still] inequitable or inadequate. Education
spending
has gone up, but not for all children (Mathis, 2004, p. 49). Stuck in poverty-stricken schools, children of
African Americans, Latinos, and many Asian American subgroups suffer low academic achievement. Reports from
the National Assessment of Educational Progress constantly reveal the significant achievement gap between white and minority students in key subject
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In the midst of such an educational reform movement that
matters (Perie, Grigg, & Dion, 2005; Perie, Grigg, & Donahue, 2005).
increasingly pushes poor and minority people to the brink, the model minority concept continues to be
promoted, to inspire the predictable losers, and to de- ceive everyone. It must be noted that politicians may not always overtly
embrace the model minority concept. For example, in his remarks to Asian American community leaders in 2003, then Secretary of Educa- tion Rod
Paige admitted that the model minority theory is a myth. Nevertheless, Rod Paige and the Bush administration he served continue to promote the
reform agenda that places emphasis on accountability, standards, testing, and choicean agenda that is fundamentally in accordance with the spirit
of the model minority stereotype. Cast
within the conservative restoration in education, the model minority narrative now
goes hand in hand with the cultural value of meritocracy deeply embedded in American society and
emphasizes individual choice and efforts while devaluing the need for structural reform. Former Education Secretary
William Bennett (1994) claimed, There is no systematic correlation between spending on education and student achievement (p. 83). During his
tenure as Secretary of Education, Rod Paige complained many times that test scores had not improved despite record levels of spending on education
over the last decade. A consistent message sent by both is that resources and money do not help schools, values do. Bennett (1993) was an early
pioneer campaigning for the modern character education movement. Rod Paige, carrying on that tradition, was active in implementing the Bush
administrations policies to expand character education and involve religion-based organizations to participate in after-school programs.
Strengthening family ties, instilling hard work in children, while encouraging self-control and discipline, the
power elites prescribe the paths of personal salvation and individual success for struggling schools and poor
children. Given the severe lack of educational resources and opportunities, it might be extremely difficult for the
majority of poor, racial minority children in urban schools to achieve academic success. Actually, academic
success is rarely expected of those poor children and youth by the school authority (Kozol, 1992). Yet, politicians continu-
ally emphasize the isolated and publicized success stories of particular individuals, like some Asian students. Their theory is: Since some
children are willing to take advantage of the opportunities offered to them and succeed, then there must be
something inherently wrong with those who are not succeeding. Because of fundamental deficiencies in
them, such as family breakdown and the lack of motivation, some people just cannot solve their problem. This
kind of ethnic, genetic, and racial hypotheses is increasingly advanced to explain away the school failure of the
poor during the current reform movement (see Herrnstein & Murray, 1994, for example). However, missing
from this rhetoric is any mention of educational inequalities prevailing in the school system and the social and
structural problems, such as racism and class division, that perpetuate the inequalities. By blaming the victims,
the power elites relieve themselves from the responsibility of doing anything to provide an equal education for all. It is amazing
how all of these have been purposefully mixed together: the privatization of schools, vouchers, standards,
get-tough accountability schemes, character building, moral boosting, and the model minority stereotype.
However, it is not difficult to figure out that the core of the agenda is the emphasis on meritocracy and ignorance of educational equality. The
predictable effect of these reform moves is the continuing marginalization of the disadvantaged. This reality
must be honestly faced: American schools are unequal, just like the larger American society; poor and minority
children have fewer opportunities to learn and to succeed. Inequality does matter. The case of some Asian Americans is only an
exception. Some minority children can always rise above the odds; however, most cannotdue to the lack of social and educational conditions and
opportunities they need and deserve.
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ImpactModel Minority Rodriguez
The state produces the figure of the Model Minority as the condition of possibility for
the white supremacist carceral regime which destroys black and brown life. The
school is a key site for the production which must be challenged.
Rodrguez 05 (Dylan, Asian American activist, Asian-American Studies in the Age of the Prison Industrial
Complex: Departures and Re-narrations)=^.^=
Perhaps the pivotal enunciatively moment for the rise of the contemporary U.S. policing and imprisonment regimes was the cultural watershed of Barry
This mobilization, while failing in its bid to win Goldwater the executive
Goldwaters 1964 presidential campaign.
office, was wildly successful in generating a re-coded racial discourse of policing and criminality that
targeted the Black and Brown urban poor and working classes for political neutralization, if not
strategic social liquidation. Articulated at the historical pinnacle of the reformist civil rights movement
and in the face of accelerating and substantively radical Black, Native American, Puerto Rican,
Chicano, Asian, and domestic Third Worldist liberation struggles, Goldwaters rhetoric resonated with
the anxieties of a white civil society whose hegemony appeared to be in a state of epochal crisis. Law
and order was thus simultaneously a cultural production and political agenda, offering a white national community the promise of militarized rescue as
well as a sweeping structure of collective sentimentality. Goldwaters 1964 acceptance of the Republican presidential nomination contrived an
intersection of racial and criminal discourse, pitched to a white electorate ostensibly reeling from the civic disruptions of Black and Brown urban
rebellions. Rendering
a vision of white civil society bound by a rearticulated reactionary nationalist
solidarity, Goldwater in fact reawakened the dream of a militarized white supremacist state amidst a
crumbling American apartheid. His political fantasy, which amounted to a vision of post-civil rights White Reconstruction, was the
harbinger of a quickly cementing common sense: Now, my fellow Americans, the tide has been running against freedom. Our people have followed false
prophets. We must, and we shall, return to proven waysnot because they are old, but because they are true.... And this party, with its every action,
every word, every breath, and every heartbeat, has but a single resolve, and that is freedom... freedombalanced so that liberty lacking order will not become
the license of the mob and of the jungle.9 [emphasis added] Echoing the racial juxtapositions of Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness, Goldwater elaborated a
white populist conception of liberty and security defined through the militarized containment and repression of the lurking urban-mob-jungle threat. His
declaration of veritable domestic warfare in this nomination speech prefaced Richard Nixons watershed electoral victory in 1968 and established a
crucial discursive political schema for a reconfigured police prison hegemony. Foreshadowing what would soon become Nixons political mantra,
Goldwater elaborates, Security from domestic violence, no less than from foreign aggression, is the most elementary and fundamental purpose of any
History shows us
government, and a government that cannot fulfill that purpose is one that cannot long command the loyalty of its citizens.
demonstrates that nothingnothing prepares the way for tyranny more than the failure of public
officials to keep the streets from bullies and marauders.10 The exponential growth of the police
industry in the United States closely followed the dictates of the Goldwater-Nixon law and order bloc,
carried on the strength of a putative political mandate to reorganize, remilitarize, and refocus on the
restoration of a white national hegemony in crisis.11 An allegory of bodily confrontation between
innocent white vulnerabilitya construct that crystallized notions of white communal and bodily
security across geographies and classesand Black-Brown criminal physicality instantiated a binding
historical telos for the post-1960s White Reconstruction, a post-civil rights revival that required the
simultaneous and decisive disruption of U.S. based anti-racist and anti-imperialist liberation
movements and their counterpart urban insurrections. Law and orders discursive structure was, in an
important sense, a political articulation of white liberation, articulated through white civil societys
awakening to the possibility of its own discursive material disarticulation: the militant reformism of the
Civil Rights Movement had not only broken the legal structures of segregation and Jim Crow, but had
additionally foreshadowed a lapse and spasm within the white supremacist state and body politic. The
emergence of this definitive era of domestic and international liberation movements throughout the 1960s and 1970s encompassed political and juridical
assertions that directly antagonized the broadly conceived premises of the nations historical formation, while substantively challenging and destabilizing
the post-emancipation juridical and social structures of American white supremacy, including formalized segregation, wanton racist police violence,
lynching, and illegal land occupation. Such notions as Black liberation and Indian sovereignty, in particular, represented unanswerable demands on
the presumptive white body politic, precisely because both were phrased as domestic claims on the United States of America, putatively blaspheming the
Additionally, the racialized class displacements of rapid de-
sanctity of historically white localities.
industrialization in urban and rural centers of production offered fodder for white civil societys closing
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of ranksthat is, white supremacist capitals production of Black and Brown underground workers
(including undocumented people and those in extralegal occupations) and non-workers represented, to the Goldwater-
Nixon bloc, the very picture of a riot waiting to happen. Articulated through and against the progressive and radical counter-communities that threatened
the transformation of the American social formation and abolition of white supremacist socio-cultural structures, the White Reconstruction reasserted an
essential stewardship of the state through the versatile mechanism of racial criminalization. The emergent technology of crime production was spurred
by Nixons rise to national power and the subsequent, massive federal and local investment in militarized police forces. 12 In this context, Goldwaters
ominous forecast of tyrannys onset shot through a civic consciousness that was absorbing the possibility of white freedoms rollback, and while white
selfdefense formed the template for an aggressively militarizing state, the law-and-order message remained intensely grandiose and global. Goldwater
was, in an important sense, foreshadowing U.S. white civil societys globalization, envisioning a reconstruction that reached across the domestic sphere
I can see
and constituted a hegemonic white Atlantic: I believe that we must look beyond the defense of freedom today to its extension tomorrow ... .
and I suggest that all thoughtful men must contemplate the flowering of an Atlantic civilization, the
whole world of Europe unified and free, trading openly across its borders, communicating openly
across the world. This is a goal far, far more meaningful than a moon shot. ... I can also seeand all free men must
thrill tothe events of this Atlantic civilization joined by its great ocean highway to the United States. What a destiny, what a destiny can be ours to stand
as a great central pillar linking Europe, the Americans and the venerable and vital peoples and cultures of the Pacific. I can see a day when all the
Americas, North and South, will be linked in a mighty system, a system in which the errors and misunderstandings of the past will be submerged one by
one in a rising tide of prosperity and interdependence ... . But we pledgewe pledge that human sympathywhat our neighbors to the South call that
attitude of simpaticono less than enlightened self-interest will be our guide.13 Couched
in the rhetoric of civic security and
personal safety, this discourse offered white civil society political rescue and a new structure of
collective sentimentality, mobilized through a intersectional rearticulation of classical American
conceptions of both race and crime. The convocation of the Nixon administration in 1968 involved a wildly successful
extrapolation and institutionalization of the seminal Goldwaterist rhetoric. A newly authenticated and electorally validated White Reconstruction facilitated
the transformation of the policing, criminal justice, and imprisonment apparatuses by integrating the transparently racist codings of law and order into
their collectiveand always overlappingmodus operandi. In subsequent years, this process has even fabricated a novel schooling= penal nexus,
wherein a veritable war on young people of color has emerged, according to Giroux, as an attempt to contain, warehouse, control, and even eliminate
all those groups and social formations that the market finds expendable. 14 (I will discuss this nexus in more detail below.) Law and orders production of
a racially pathologized criminality has, in this way, provided the juridical torque necessary for new military and carceral organizations, technologies, and
territories. Militarized policing, criminal justice, and mass-scale imprisonment have emerged since 1964 as socially productive technologies, forging an
indelible linkage between the site and scene of the prison, the structured impunity of newly expanded and empowered police forces, and the
corresponding world of a consolidated and coherentthough always endangerednormative white civil society. It
is within this context that
Asian Americans qua model minorities have become pivotal social and cultural figures-fabrications,
positioned at the intersection of multiple racial antagonisms and situated within a specific projection of
white political desire. The cultural production and statecraft of the Asian-American model minority,
reproduced and institutionally inscribed by the administrative culture of dominant schooling
institutions (and accentuated in higher education), is wedged in a peculiar symbiosis with this militarization and
penal pedagogical shift in the war on poor urban Black and Brown youth. The Asian-American model
minority, as a cultural fabrication situated within a particular historical conjuncture, is something
even more than (as Prashad correctly asserts) a weapon in the war against black America: it is both the
condition of possibility and embodied site of reproduction of this domestic war, a seminal move in the
production of a national(ist) multiculturalism that fortifies and extrapolates historical white
supremacist social formationsincluding and especially the burgeoning U.S. prison regime. As such, the
Asian-Americanist contestation of the model minority myth as inaccurate, deceptive, (anti-Asian) racist, and=or an erasure of the material
subordination of poor and disenfranchised Asian populations tends to elide critical confrontation with the militarized and hegemonic discursive and
social structure through which the myth itself has been articulated. The rendition of the Asian immigrant model minority both facilitates and constitutes
the expansion of state capacities in the trajectory of mass-based Black/Brown punishment, providing the schema for an ascendantthough insistently
multicultural White-Asian alliance that manifests conspicuously in such instances as the 1980s and 1990s neoconservative movement to end affirm-
ative action policies (in which Asian Americans were continuously solicited and foregrounded as allies of a white supremacist pro-meritocracy
community leaders. The latter example provides an opportune moment of inquiry, if only because current Asian Americanist formations (including Asian
American Studies) have largely undertheorizedif not altogether ignoredthe implications of such a political coalescence. Emblematic of this
reactionary Korean AmericanLAPD coalition was a 2002 event entitled The March Against Crime, which occurred in the shadow of a massive and
nationally publicized investigation of LAPDs Ramparts Division, a scandal that revealed widespread corruption, brutality, and false testimony by LAPD
officers resulting in up to 3000 wrongful convictions, an overwhelming number of which were Black, Chicana=o, Mexicana=o, and Latina=o.30 In the
midst of these public revelations of the Ramparts Division as the instantiation of a low-intensity, localized urban state terrorist campaign against
Black=Brown communities in Los Angeles, the Korean Youth & Community Center (KYCC) and the Los Angeles Police Department (Wilshire Division)
widely circulated a flyer and email which announced, in resonance with Goldwaters rhetorical precedent: 10 YEARS AFTER THE L.A. RIOTS Our City
comes together to CLEAN our Streets. The flyer=email additionally urged its readers to speak out AGAINST CRIME and GRAFFITI; and show our
STRENGTH as a Com- munity. Contextualized by the heightened antagonism provoked by the Ramparts scandal, as well as the LAPDs infamous
record of militarizedand often spectacularviolence against racially- profiled people and communities, this presumptive invoking of our Community
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extrapolates the limits of the Goldwaterist racial paradigm. In fact, this Korean-American call for a police-powered street cleansing bespeaks the
political logic of a state.
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ImpactModel Minority Escobar
There is a defined hierarchy of power relations dependent on the racing of minorities.

Asian Americans are raced as the Model Minority, a myth that whitewashes Asians as
the American Dream. Liberal policies justify reform by remasculinizing the migrant as a
producer that can support the system went to college, have a job, pay their taxes
those are the good people. If they dont adhere to the Model minority youre a criminal.
This logic justifies violence on black, brown and yellow bodies.
Escobar 2010 (Martha D. doctor of philosophy in Ethnic Studies University of California San Diego, Neoliberal Captivity:
Criminalization of Latina Migrants and the Construction of Irrecuperability, thesis paper for Berk)=^.^=
The construction of migrant women as criminal threats to the nation, largely through the notion of public
charge, generates an environment that condones violence against them and their communities, including
deaths at the border, ICE raids, massive detentions, deportations, and family separations. These forms of
violence are conceptualized as logical consequences to migrants assumed illegal border crossings. De-
criminalizing efforts are responses to violence experienced by these communities. These attempts to afford
some level of protection come from many venues, including the media. However, these efforts are limited by
the current framework available to discuss migration. In this section I analyze strategies employed by Los
Angeles Times writers to sympathize with migrant families facing separation due to deportation. All twenty-four
articles sympathized with migrant families affected by deportations, which complicates our understanding of
how power works given that in all of these cases there is an attempt to generate support for these migrant
families. However, not all migrants are considered worthy of support. The examination reveals how the binary
constructions of redeemable good immigrants, those that work hard and do not engage in
criminalized acts, and disposable bad immigrants, those that are lazy and engage in criminalized
acts, work to discipline migrants into behaving like ideal citizens while normalizing the violence that
occurs to those that deviate from this norm. Furthermore, it highlights how in the public imagination the
migrant identity is feminized through the notion of public charge. Claims made to disassociate migrants from
state dependency are thus attempts to re- masculinize the migrant identity as exploitable workers. The
stories considered in the analysis follow similar patterns, including families paying taxes, owning homes,
having children who excel academically, and essentially fitting into the dominant family ethic. These stories
keep making news in large part because they problematize the American myths of the U.S. as a land of
opportunity and as a land of immigrants. In these cases, according to the authors, these families did
everything right and yet are denied their American Dream. More than a concern for these families, these
stories highlight concerns for the nation and how in these cases it fails to meet its expectations. I begin the
analysis with a brief discussion of how the racialization of Asians, in this case South Asians, in the U.S. as
model minorities works to ideologically construct the good immigrant identity. Significantly, of the twenty-four
articles considered, five centered the stories of Asian migrants. According to sociologist Lisa Sun-Hee Park
(2005), the construction of the Asian American model minority serves to discipline Asians by defining
their worth in accordance to how closely they follow the model minority myth. This myth maintains that Asian
Americans are able to integrate themselves into U.S. society because they hold similar cultural values as
Americans, which include hard work, diligence, and self-motivation. Asians that do not adhere to this
construction are deemed less deserving because they do not have the characteristics that are idealized to form
part of the American society (23-24). This construction does not only inform the experiences of Asians, but it is
used to discipline other racialized groups, including Blacks and Latinos. The question posed for these
groups is, If they made it, why cant you? In addition to functioning as a mechanism to discipline Blacks
and Latinos, it also ignores histories of Asian Americans and the continued struggle for social inclusion in the
U.S. The fact that several of the articles profiled Asian American families attests to the continued significance
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of the model minority myth and its use to differentiate between deserving and undeserving immigrants. The
ideological workings of the model minority myth are evident in two articles written by journalist Ann M.
Simmons (2004: B.4 and 2005: B.2), which covered the story of Jayantibhai and Indiraben Desai. The couple,
Jayantibhai, an Indian national, and Indiraben, a British national, overstayed their visas in the early 1980s and
made their lives in the U.S. Central to this discussion is Simmons attempt to portray the Desais in a positive
light by contrasting them with the hegemonic image of migrants as public charges. In three different places
within two articles Simmons makes the point that the Desais pay taxes, contrasting them with general notions
that migrants do not pay taxes and use resources. Simmons writes For more than 20 years, the Norwalk
couple worked hard. They bought a house, paid taxes and sent their two sons off to college. They were a
success story in the making, but for one thing: Their status as illegal immigrants. She includes these details
more than once, attempting to further separate them from the image of public charge. Implicit in Simmons
2005 article is the attempt to distance the Desais from the identity of criminals. The article is an attempt to
answer questions of when and why migrants are deported. She spends a significant amount of time discussing
deportation based on issues of criminality and argues that migration policies are less forgiving now than years
ago and Like Watanabe, the framework she employs is a contrast between good and bad migrants. The
Desais are different from other migrants. They are not criminals or public charges, implying that the
Desais deserve the ability to remain in the nation, in contrast to criminals, who are implicitly
undeserving and are the people that should be targeted. Simmons cites Carl Shusterman, the couples
attorney, who states that immigration judges used to be more forgiving of people who had put down roots in
the United States, paid their taxes and proved themselves to be model members of society (2005). Again, the
good migrant is one who pays taxes, owns their own home, sends their children to college, and does not
engage in criminal activity. These are the deserving migrants who should be given special considerations,
versus migrants who become public charges and engage in criminal activities. Patrick J. McDonnells (1997)
begins his article, Criminal Past Comes Back to Haunt Some Immigrants, by covering the story of South
Asian Saeid Aframian. The article was published one year after the enactment of 1996 federal legislation,
which expanded the definition of deportable criminal alien and applied it retroactively. McDonnell begins with
the following: To visit with Saeid Aframian is to spend time with a condemned man, someone far removed from
his previous life as a prosperous jewelry salesman and family man with a home in Bel-Air. His bearded face is
skeletal, his deep-set eyes bloodshot and he shuffles about in plastic slippers and a government-issue red
jumpsuit like a haunted soul. It's like a shadow has been following me and has finally taken over my life," a
sobbing, gaunt Aframian said recently during an interview at the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service
lockup on Terminal Island in San Pedro. "I really need one more chance. It's a matter of life or death.
Aframian, one of thousands of Persian Jews who fled to Southern California after the Islamic revolution in Iran,
faces deportation to a homeland where human rights advocates say religious minorities continue to be
persecuted. Although McDonnell covers various stories of migrants awaiting deportation, it is important to note
that he frames his article through the story of Aframian, South Asian migrant who McDonnell is attempting to
recuperate as deserving of belonging. Immediately, McDonnell marks Aframians story as significant in several
ways. Aframian is characterized as a prosperous jewelry salesman, a family man, and a home owner in Bel-
Air. Aframians depiction embodies what are considered to be ideal American characteristics, including hard
working, family oriented, and affluent, which is signaled through his homes location in Bel-Air. McDonnell
draws on the myth of American exceptionalism to make the case for Aframians stay by marking Iran as a site
of violence and persecution, while the U.S. is signaled as a haven for migrants. This is further evidenced as
Hengameh, Aframians wife, is quoted stating, I dont understand it [...] This is supposed to be the land of
freedom. While McDonnell demonstrates concern over Aframians deportation, in large part the article centers
on the contradictions that these deportations represent for American exceptionality. Critiquing the federal
legislations enacted the previous year, McDonnell notes that it makes no difference if the offenses triggering
deportation for those defined as aggravated felons occurred last week or decades ago, or whether the person
targeted has led an exemplary life since completing his or her sentence. The irrecuperability of migrants
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enforced by the new laws apparently contradicts notions of America as the land of freedom and opportunity.
Thus, more than these deportations, what is at stake is the failure of the U.S. to live up to its claims of
exceptionality. Within the same article McDonnell presents Refugio Rubios story. Rubio was arrested in 1972
for drug possession and served his sentence. In 1997 Rubio attempted to obtain citizenship in large part
because of the anti-migrant backlash. Through his fingerprints, his 1972 conviction came up and set the stage
for his deportation. McDonnell describes Rubio as A longtime field hand and laborer who has lived legally in
the United States for almost 34 years, Rubio built his own home in the Bay Area community of Vallejo, and is
the patriarch of a family that includes seven sons, all U.S. citizens, and seven citizen grandchildren. In this
example we witness the implicit contrast between good and bad migrants. Rubio is described as hard
working, self- sufficient, and having social ties to citizens. Rubio is presented as rehabilitated and is marked as
significant because his story highlights how the legal status of individuals can change, in his case making him
illegal. McDonnell cites Rubio, If I was a person who continued doing bad things, I could understand
this...But I never had trouble with the law again. I've always worked hard and paid my taxes, and my family has
never depended on the government. In part, these stories illustrate the impact that the language of welfare
and public charge has on the immigration debate. The following stories further highlight this point. Journalist
Teresa Watanabe published two articles (2003a and 2003b) in the Los Angeles Times written that cover the
story of the Cabrera family. Benjamin and Londy Cabrera resided in the Bell Gardens area of Los Angeles with
their two daughters, Diana, 11, and Jocelyn, 9. Benjamin migrated from Mexico and Londy from Guatemala
and they established their lives in the U.S. despite their undocumented status. The couple faced deportation
and fought to remain in the U.S., largely justified by Dianas academic achievement and gifted status. The
couple and their supporters maintained that Diana would be denied opportunities if they were deported.
Watanabe writes, Eleven-year-old Diana Cabrera is a straight-A honors student, hits top scores on statewide
achievement tests and has never missed a day of class. The Los Angeles native studies as much as six hours
a day. She's the smartest student I've had in 30 years of teaching, said JoAnn Burdi, who teaches Diana and
other gifted sixth-grade students at Bell Gardens Intermediate School, which serves low- income, mostly Latino
families east of Los Angeles (2003a: B. 1). Watanabe also notes Dianas other accomplishments, including
her two-year selection for a prestigious summer honors program at Johns Hopkins University. In 2002 Judge
Bruce J. Einhorn allowed the couple to remain in the U.S. based on the exceptional and extremely unusual
hardship this would cause on Diana and her academic achievement and noted the family had paid taxes,
committed no crimes and did not receive welfare. The federal Board of Immigration Appeals reversed the
opinion based on the fact that it would open the door for undocumented migrants with bright children like Diana
to remain in the U.S. Burdi is quoted again stating This is a family that does not rely on welfare. They speak to
us in English. They've done it all on their own. This is something our society should be proud of and
open our arms to and say: This is what should be a model of what's possible in America. The couples
acquisition of a $150,000 home and a brand new Nissan Frontier pickup are also noted by Watanabe. In a
second article (2003b: B.3) Watanabe continues the Cabreras story and discusses U.S. Senator Dianne
Feinsteins and Representative Lucille Allard-Roybals (D-East Los Angeles) introduction of legislation to grant
the Cabreras permanent legal residency. According to Feinstein, Some cases deserve special consideration
and this is one of them. In this second article Watanabe once again cites Dianas brightness and Einhorns
statement that the family paid their taxes, committed no crimes and had not received welfare. In both articles,
Dianas academic achievements are offered as evidence of the Cabrera couples civic performance as
productive and contributing members of society that are imparting the right morals and values onto their
children despite their undocumented status. Through the construction of the Cabreras story, Watanabe
reinforces notions of deserving and undeserving individuals, and consequently contributes to the
normalization of violence against people that deviate from the norm. Individuals who fall under the
categories of public charge and criminal are thus made expendable. In a more recent Los Angeles Times
article, staff writer Sonia Gorman (2007) describes the separation of the Muoz family by U.S. immigration
authorities as painful. Zulma Miranda and her husband, Abel Muoz, settled in San Diego although they were
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undocumented. The article centers on the impact of their deportation on the lives of Zulma and Abels three
children: Leslie, 16, Marcos, 13, and Adilene, 8. The parents now reside in Tijuana while the children live in
their San Diego home. Leslie assumed the role of parent for her younger siblings, including the economic
burden of paying bills and the home mortgage. Gorman describes the violence the children witnessed as
immigration agents came to their home and detained their parents and the many challenges the family faces
due to the parents deportation. Oswaldo Cabrera, director of the Latinoamerica International Coalition and
initiator of the campaign, Adopt an Immigrant, designed to symbolically show support for migrants, is quoted:
With these raids, they arent just getting criminals. They are breaking up innocent families. This is a great
injustice. The innocence of the Miranda and Muoz family is secured by differentiating criminals from
innocent families, naturalizing the punishment of criminals while attempting to secure protection of good
immigrants. Gorman then moves on to describe the family, Muoz supported the family by working as a
landscaper and butcher and then as an electrician, eventually earning up to $1,000 a week, he said. Miranda
stayed home with the children, and both parents volunteered in their schools. The family bought a home and
remodeled it. They paid taxes. They took trips to Universal Studios and Las Vegas. They became involved in
their church. The parents court testimony is also cited as they described their children as strong students who
earned numerous awards. Gormans article constructs the Miranda and Muoz family as the ideal American
family; Abel works and earns sufficiently to sustain his family while Zulma stays at home and cares for the
children, they are actively involved in their childrens life and in Church, own their own home, pay taxes, and
their children are excellent students. Gormans narrative presents the family as deserving migrants that,
because of unfair immigration policies, face the painful separation of their family. According to Gormans
narrative, immigration authorities caught the wrong migrants. Gormans narrative centers on the idea that in
America the sanctity of the family and the protection of the children are imperative. In these stories there is an
explicit attempt to represent migrants as deserving, evidenced owning their own home, not being
dependent on the state, working hard, and having their children in college or who are academically
gifted. The debate attempting to defend immigrant rights is limited by these narrow definitions of criminality
and dependency. The articles suggest that many of the families affected by immigration authorities practices
are deserving members of society, simultaneously rationalizing the violence that occurs to those that do not fit
this category. The idea of deserving members of society is constructed so narrowly, so bounded, that it
becomes extremely difficult to meet the requirements. Peoples compliance with this definition depends on
their conformity to racialized, gendered, sexualized, and classed expectations that uphold existing
hierarchical relationships of power. Transgression from prescribed roles marks people as less worthy. For
people constructed as criminals, deservingness is permanently foreclosed. The categorization of criminal
marks an individual as permanently undeserving, rationalizing any consequences they may face
during their lives, including various forms of violence. In the case of migrants, the notion of public charge,
first used in reference to black women and then remapped onto migrant women, informs their criminalization
and limits the framework of debate around migration. The fusing of criminality and state dependency that
occurred with the production of figures such as the welfare queen and the crack mother serve to discipline
migrants into good Americans.
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ImpactModel Minority Mahmud
Modernity, hegemony, economic competitiveness, liberal reform all of it is used to

reify antiblackness through American Exceptionalism/Settler
Colonialism/Orientalism/Model Minority Myth
Mahmud 2001 (Tayyab, Professor @ Seattle University, Genealogy of a State-Engineered Model Minority: Not Quite/Not
White South Asian Americans Seattle University of Law Digital Commons)=^.^=
Hegemonic self-understanding of the U.S., buttressed by "manufactured consent," rests on the notion of
American exceptionalism.7 This belief posits that American history and society are immune from the
foundational problems that plagued the "Old World," particularly entrenched class divisions and colonialism.
The historical record that the U.S. is itself a colonial settler state, whose foundations rest on genocide of
indigenous peoples and slave labor from Africa, and whose extra- continental colonial expansion and
entrenched imperial hegemony have given it a defining mould, is largely unacknowledged.8 After all "forgetting
...is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation." Prashad catalogues a representative sampling of American
socio- historical thought, which for over four hundred years has maintained a purportedly ontological divide
between the "East" (the Orient) and the "West" (the Occident).'l The Orient is seen as "poor and unfree, with
an especial endowment of ahistoricalness."" These immutable and timeless deficiencies of the Orient were
seen as the natural consequence of racial incapacities. For example, Ralph Waldo Emerson, that canonical
Ameri- can essayist of the human condition, had no doubt that "[i]t is race, is it not? that puts the hundred
millions of India under the domination of a remote island in the north of Europe."'2 The "West," and of course
America, is seen as everything that the "East" is not: rich, free, and dynamic--attributes often seen as issuing
from natural endowments of a superior race. It is in and through this discourse that America partook of the
mutually constitutive role of colonialism and modem Europe, whereby many foundational constructs of
modernity--reason, man, progress, and the nation-were developed in contrast with a racialized "non-Europe,"
with the later posited as not quite human, irrational, and outside history. Prashad recognizes that this process
created "a marked (not quite) human subject, one who is like the Subject of so much European philosophy,
but such a choice is not available as long as 'race' continues to be a searing category through which we
are so habitually forced to live."'3 Any explicit and detailed analysis of modernity clothed in purportedly
universal ideas of equality, freedom, rule of law, and representation is not Prashad's project. But his
encapsulation of American Orientalism substantiates Denise da Silva's evocative location of modernity's
promise of universality as always positioned against "the other side of universality... [a] moral and legal no
man's land, where universality finds its physical limits... a region of modem space that lies beyond the domain
of 'Universal Justice' .,,1 This ever-present "no man's land" adjacent to grounds of universality was built
upon the foundation of posited essential difference.15 Universality could relate to those excluded from its
reach only by positing them as qualitatively different; as "not-quite-human."' 6 The very scaffolding of the
identity of modem, civilized, and disciplined Europe rests upon grounds of difference from the "not-quite-
human Other[s]."" Implicated here are foundational norms of cognition and eligibility embedded in modernity's
universality that render the category of "human" recognizable only in counterdistinction to a persistent category
of "not-quite-human." In order to appreciate the underlying architecture of these norms and the myriad ways in
which they continue to furnish the scaffolding for cultural practices and public policies, it is indispensable that
we locate the genealogy of modem universality in the colonial career of modernity.
The rise and consolidation of modernity and colonial expansion of Europe being temporally coterminous, the
"axiomatics of imperialism" inform the foundational vocabularies of modern universality. As a result, modern
universality rests upon a conceptual partitioning and corresponding transformation of human populations into
a divide between, as Jean-Paul Satre put it, "men" and "natives."'9 The canonical "dark- skinned savage,"
constituted as the "not-quite-human" "Other," furnished the grounds to constitute the universal subject of
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modernity, i.e., the civilized, rights-bearing European.2 In this maneuver, one can see in operation ostensive
self-definition by negation, the assumption of identity by reference to what one is not.2' This inaugurates
modem constructions of race and the braiding of the latter with truncated operationalizings of
universality. This mutually constitutive relationship leads Peter Fitzpatrick to posit that modem construction of
race produces universality and supplies the grounding for modem law.' Undergirding the posited divides
between culture/nature, civilized/savage, progressive/stagnant, modem constructions of race supply the
common conceptual denominator that inform global distributions of privilege and subordination. 23 The global
reach of this posited essential difference issued from the fact that colonialism lies at the heart of the
construction of modem Europe?' Modernity's promise of equality, liberty, and representation could co-exist with
colonial subjugation only by constituting the colonized as fundamentally different from the colonizer, as "not-
quite- human," with race supplying the dividing marker.5 The rule of essentialized racial difference, the
animating principle of colonialism, furnished the grounds for exclusions built at the very heart of
liberalism, the hegemonic political ideology of modernity.2 It is important to underscore that exclusions
based on race are not incidental and exceptional to modem universality and liberalism. While deployment of
racial difference facilitates specific regimes of exclusion, the positing of originary racial difference is a strategy
of engulfment foundational to the construction of the modem subject and the architecture of modem law.27
Consequently, any inquiry of race positioning and race relations in the United States, such as the one Prashad
undertakes, must address the "political horizon of Western culture, namely imperialism."' More specifically, we
need to locate the intersections of immigration regimes and race relations within the hegemonic "epistemic
graphing of imperialism." Hegemonic modem discourses posit race as a pre-conceptual, pre- political category.
This elides the fact that race as constituted today is a modem category, one that partakes of the distinctive
feature of modernity: the interpenetration of power and knowledge. Race, as an operational category of
power/knowledge, constitutes a particularized variety of a modern subject amenable for appropriation
and positioning in modem material and discursive structures. In the modem imagery, the category of race
helps suture history and science, time and space, nation and the rights-bearing subject.' Modern
power/knowledge constitutes and deploys race as a suturing category that connects body, place of origin, and
consciousness to facilitate assignment of eligibility for rights-bearing subjecthood. It may be productive to
designate this process as racing the constitutive process that connects the body and place of origin with
consciousness, thereby constituting subjects available for insertion into hierarchical grids of domination and
subordination. In this process subjection and marginalization is rationalized and legitimated on grounds of pro-
fessed biological and immutable characteristics of the subordinated. Racing, then, is a modem technology of
power/knowledge that facilitates insertion of the body into the population in a subordinated position, with such
positioning assigned to "natural," pre-political deficiencies. This insight can furnish a very productive point of
departure for the critical projects of anti-essentialism and anti-subordination: when you want to see racism,
look for racing not race. The concept of racing underscores that the law does not act upon pre-formed
subjects; it inescapably partakes of the process where subject-formation and subjection are inescapably
intertwined.33 Critical legal scholars must remain mindful of the facts that all human ideas and that all fields of
knowledge are structured by "the laws of a certain code of knowledge."' ' A question remains: under what
"code of knowledge" can universality coexist with its raced other side while professing fidelity to ideas of
Enlightenment? The answer is suggested by the observation that Enlightenment's "untruth consist[s] ... in the
fact that for [it] the process is always decided from the start."35 Here one is confronted with "the willed
(auto)biography of the West [that] still masquerades as disinterested history. ' Universality is tainted by the
consolidation of History--the unilinear, progressive, Eurocentric, and teleological history--as the dominant mode
of perceiving and experiencing time and being.37 The problem of order in modernity is one of "time-space
distanciation--the conditions under which time and space are organized so as to connect presence and
absence., 38 Modernity's complicity with colonialism, however, forces it to assign the "other" to a "space
without places, time without duration."39 In History, the canonical progeny of the colonial career of modernity,
time overcomes space-a process whereby, in time, the distant "other" is supposed to become like oneself.' The
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"other's" pres- he subordinated.32 ent becomes Europe's past, while Europe's present becomes the "other's"
future. History furnishes the foundational grammar of colonialism/imperialism: What can be, and what cannot
be, properly spoken of, conceptualized, even thought, within the ontology and epistemology of progressive,
linear time, and the difference between civilized Europe and its uncivil "other." Linear History choreographs
"the mirror dance of colonial meaning-making,' ' and enables "the linear, progressivist claims of the social
sciences-he major imperializing discourses.''42 The grammar of History furnishes the license for Europe to
"save" and "uplift" the "other." It defines the "world-historic mission," the "burden" of the sovereign, rights-
bearing subject of History, the European, to civilize the "other" and bring it into History.43 Linear History, the
self-professed condition that makes modernity possible, designates the nation-state as the agency that will
realize modernity. The very birth of nationalism was "coeval with the birth of universal history." The nation,
however, is a "capital paradox of universality."' While universality imagines the nation as unbound, its
actualization situates it in particularities of belonging. Consequently, the process of nation-building is a
process of exclusion; coherence of the nation rests on exclusion of what is its "other;" destruction or
domestication of the alterity of the "other." Due to this compulsion, "the discourses of race and nation are
never very far apart.",47 Where nation-building rests on "othering" of difference, this "othering" in the final
analysis is raced--the body, the place of origin, and consciousness are sutured to assign eligibility to
membership in the nation (i.e., citizenship), the key to representation and the protections of the law. In this
light, the concept of racing helps us appreciate that "'race' is a relational concept that does not have fixed
referents. It reminds us that "naturalization of social phenomena and the suppression of the historical process
which are introduced by its appeal to the biological realm can articulate a variety of different political
antagonisms."4'8 C. American Orientalism and the Exotic "Other" American orientalism catalogued by Prashad
has to be located in the context of the grammar supplied by History and by universality coterminous with its
racialized other side. It is this grammar that facilitated pervasive deployment of modem categories of race,
racial difference and race types, and the essential difference between Europe(an) and its "others." This
grammar enabled Thomas Jefferson, the author of the American Declaration of Independence, to pronounce
that an "unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation
of these [Negro] people."49 James Madison, a founding father of the republic, deploys this grammar to opine
that "the freed blacks ought to be permanently removed beyond the region occupied by, or allotted to a
White population.... If the blacks, strongly marked as they are by Physical & lasting peculiarities, be retained
amid the Whites . . . [they will] always secretly confederate against the ruling and privileged class; and
be always uncontrolled by some most cogent motives of moral and respectable conduct."50 Abraham
Lincoln, the celebrated emancipator of slaves, uses this grammar to declaim that "I will say then that I am not,
nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white
and black races ... that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negros, nor of
qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with the people; and I say in addition to this that there is a
physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races
living together on terms of social and political equality."51 In Plessy v. Ferguson, this grammar facilitated
the U. S. Supreme Court's pronouncement that "[the object of the 14th Amendment was undoubtedly to
enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but, in the nature of things, it could not have
been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political,
equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either."52 Validating the fruits of the
modem constructions of race, the Court declared that "[l]egislation is powerless to eradi- cate racial instincts,
or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in
accentuating the difficulties of the present situation. If the civil and political rights of both races be equal, one
cannot be inferior to the other civilly and politically. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the constitution
of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane."53 Prashad recognizes "[t]he resilience of race in
our lives cannot be easily dismissed in favor of an imputed universalism," an understanding that both
undergirds and is substantiated by his study. While South Asia, or India as it was known then, found itself
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positioned on the racialized other side of universality, Prashad effectively brings into focus another constant
theme of American Orientalism, namely to see India as mysterious and spiritual. Here the exoticised "other"
was posited as desirable. Alongside the "ahistorical" and materially degraded India lay another India: "the real
India was the spirit... [which may furnish] the solution to modem alienation."5 If the "soul" was a casualty of
modernity, it could be rejuvenated "through an engagement with this thing called 'In- dia.' '56 This engagement,
indeed, was orchestrated without much delay, but only on the margins of "real" life. The "oriental menagerie""7
was the site, with morbid pleasure the mode and self-confirmation the product. Prashad takes us on a tour of
the circus, the vaudeville house, the Great Asiatic Caravan, Museum, and Menagerie of 1849, the Congress of
Nations of 1874, the Ethnological Congress of 1884, and, of course, Holly- wood, to see India as, in the Detroit
Journal's words, "a land of ghastly and beautiful mysteries."5' Here, one was supposed to see the non-
Christian Indians' "essentially depraved natures," 59 so much in need of Christian salvation and the manifestly
destined despotic paternalism of colonialism, that world-historic "white man's burden." The resilience of
these images and longevity of this discourse still shines through travel guides, development models, and the
neo-liberal restructuring projects orchestrated by managers of globalization.60 But even in the clamor of de-
humanizing spectacles, one could hear the faint voices of struggles for human dignity and solidarity from both
sides of the divide. Prashad notes that, where The Nation wondered when "our impressions of the East [will]
cease to be derived from the 'Arabian Nights,"' 6' an Indian activist dedicated his 1873 tract to the "good people
of the United States," hoping that the struggle against slavery will be taken up by his compatriots "as their
guide in the emancipation of their Sudra [oppressed castes] Brethren from the trammels of Brahmin thrall-
dom.6 2 Du Bois saw parallels between the struggles of African Americans and the colonized people of India,
and reminded Indians that, "European exploitation desires the black slave, the Chinese coolies and the
Indian laborer for the same ends and the same purposes, and calls them all 'niggers."'63 Supporters of
Irish independence and founders of the American Civil Liberties Union joined Indian revolutionaries to found
the Friends of Freedom for India in 1920. The seeds of solidarity of desis with the oppressed and the
marginalized in America had been sown, even if in temporarily infertile soil. The demand for India's mysterious
spirituality as an antidote for alienation spawned by materialism survived the freak shows peddled as science
fairs. If a glimpse of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, as he rode by in the "pick of the day" from his Rolls Royce
stable, did not uplift your spirit, you could always consult Deepak Chopra's practical guide on "spiritual laws of
success.'"6' Prashad, armed with wit, humor, and above all remarkable facility for social inquiry, turns to
uncover the genealogy and function of this phenomenon. Labeling it "New Age orientalism, he locates its
origins in the post-World War 11 period when the American economic juggernaut and imperial hegemony
ran into demands for racial justice, gender equality, youth autonomy, and sexual liberation. While the
truly marginalized joined the struggle and built solidarities, others chose to step out to the sidelines
and turn inward. The later, mostly white and affluent, sought remedies for alienation induced by material
abundance--remedies that would not threaten their privileges, but would help drown the noise of
protest from the other side of the tracks. Enter yoga, EST, TM, Zen, Krishna Consciousness, organic food
stores, and of course, India. Prashad zeros in on Deepak Chopra, the latest poster boy of this reactionary
move. Prashad succinctly distills the Chopra remedy: "work hard and be as self-interested, self-indulgent, and
selfish as possible." Never did the contemporary hegemonic forces find a more slick message or a more sly
messenger. While celebrating consumer indulgence, Chopra wants the dispossessed to take responsibility for
their own predicament: if you don't have access to medical coverage, turn inward and purify your soul. No
threat to designer stores in shopping malls, Chopraism "allows the isolated individual to forget the historical
production of inequality and of suffering and, tragically, to take complete responsibility for the detritus history.
67 Prashad shows how Chopra borrows uncritically from an eighth century B.C. text, misogynist in content and
belonging to an era of hierarchically fixed status groups. The product, then, is a "snake oil" of "escapism that
not only trivializes the conundrums of the people in the United States but ...also mocks the real crises of people
in South Asia." Prashad's critique of Chopra raises a question about our evaluation of passages between the
"West" and the "rest," between "here" and "there." The problematic issue is not the very act of "going" or
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"coming," but the terms on which one does so. Under the dictates of modernity's world-historic mission, one is
supposed to go "there" to make "there" like "here," to "save-help-uplift" the "natives." This passage has
assumed many guises over time--"saving souls," "civilizing mission," "diffusion of modernization,"
"promotion of human rights," "neo-liberal restructuring," and "globalization." On with the march of
History, orchestrated by the ever-sovereign, always eligible, subject of History. On the other hand, people
come from "there" to "here" to usually "save- help-uplift" themselves, not the "natives." In this passage there is
no illusion of being the sovereign agent of historical change. Problematic passages from "there" to "here"
issue when they form part of the project to deploy labor power of "others" in the "West"--slaves from Africa,
coolies from China, and indentured labor from India. There is a desirable mode of passage from "here" to
"there," too. Many go "there" to help themselves. They go in search of a virgin beach, an exotic aroma, an
oriental rug, erotic sex, even friendship and solidarity. Conversely, when one "comes" from "there" to "here" in
order to "save-help-uplift" the "native," morbidity issues quickly: Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and Chopra furnish
examples of such passages. So the principled position should be that any passage between "here" and "there"
is fine as long as the project is not to "save the natives," as long as one does not appropriate all agency either
under the delusion of being the sovereign subject of History or of being the sole custodian of any secret elixir of
life. II. MODERN WORLD-SYSTEM'S FIRST "MODEL MINoRrrY" Prashad then turns to the genealogy of
affixing the "model minority" label onto South Asians in America. This is not an unbroken story of some
unilinear "natural" progression. His rendering of this fractured tale substantiates that constructions, adoptions
and deployments of identities are not simple acts of unencumbered volition, but emerge along the fault lines
between operations of power and strategies of resistance. This process, of necessity, is a dynamic one.
South Asians are no exception to the rule that identities are protean and are always in the making. Contests
about identity implicitly rehearse two different approaches of conceptualizing identity. One approach posits
identity as consisting of "one, shared culture, a sort of collective 'one true self, hiding inside the many
other, more superficial and artificially imposed 'selves,' which people with a shared history and
ancestry hold in common.' 7 The result is an understanding of identity as stable, trans-historical, and
unchanging. A more productive approach posits similarities of identity trumped by differences, discontinuities,
and fractures. Rather than excavation of any essence, then, locating identity entails a re-telling of the past.
Under this approach, "far from being grounded in a mere 'recovery' of the past, which is waiting to be found,
and which, when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the
different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past.",7' Seen through
the latter lens, insertion of South Asia into the modern global world system furnishes the primary
coordinates to locate diasporic South Asian identities. A. The Colonial Indentured System and South
Asian Identities Prashad alludes to, but does not examine in any detail, the global forces of accumulation and
migration unleashed by capitalism as it reached beyond its European origin to bring the whole world under its
sway. South Asia has been historically known for its continental expanse and kaleidoscopic diversities. In the
pre-modem milieu, affiliations of identity were grounded within particularities of narrow spatial contexts. Family,
clan, tribe, caste, religion, region, occupation, etc., furnished the primary coordinates of a sense of belonging.
As colonialism linked South Asia to an increasingly global economy, with out-migration of labor from the region
being the pivotal component of this linkage, an alternative identity, one sutured with the sub-continent of
origin, came to be dominant in the diaspora. This process gave a foundational and lasting form to a
composite "Indian" identity. The construction of this identity is also the story of the modem world system's first
"model minority." The indenture system, "a new system of slavery,"73 furnished the particular context for this
process of identity formation and deployment. The indentured system formed part of unfree labor systems
deemed "an anomalous necessity"'7" of the global expansion of capitalism and the resulting articulation of
varied modes of production. It served as a bridge between slavery and "free" contract labor. Slavery was
abolished in the colonies of Europe in a first half of the nineteenth century. This resulted in a crisis in the
plantation colonies in the Caribbean, South Pacific and Africa, where profitability issued from a favorable ratio
between abundant land and slave labor. The solution was found in the indenture system, whereby South
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Asia was to furnish laborers that "cost not one-half that of a slave."76 In the one hundred years between
1830 and 1930, over 30 million South Asians were dispatched to other British colonies as indentured labor.7 In
order to deploy South Asian labor as a means of control and subordination of the recently freed slaves of
African origin, a prototype of the "model minority" discourse was inaugurated. While Africans were increasingly
portrayed as lazy, unreliable, violent, and unable to understand and honor contracts, South Asians were
extolled for their docility, industriousness, family ties, and fidelity to contracts. How- ever, these
constructions of subjects and identities remained contingent and responsive to availability of alternative labor
sources and patterns of negotiation with conditions of production adopted by different groups. Once hitherto
purportedly submissive and docile South Asian indentured labor fashioned strategies of resistance and self-
preservation, they were quickly designated as being effeminate, filthy, avaricious, and unreliable.79 As new
opportunities to recruit "coolies" from China unfolded, South Asians were positioned unfavorably in the colonial
imaginary in distinction with the "fully alive to the necessity of authority... tractable and manageable" Chinese.
Here one can discern racing in operation, with contingency and contradiction always attendant: the behavioral
characteristics assigned to different labor groups were posited as natural and immutable; suturing of body,
mind, and place of origin to assign eligibility and exclusion. The fact that the assigned characteristics and
resulting identities were subject to repeated reconstructions did not impede entrenchment of the racially
informed ideology of biological determination. This rapid rise and fall of the modem world system's first "model
minority" within the political-economy of plantation colonies left a lasting imprint on South Asians, particularly
those in the diaspora. An imprint that partook of grammars of modernity and "epistemic graphing of
imperialism."8 Within the heart of the colonial indentured system, modem constructs of race, culture, and
nation furnished the building blocks to forge a composite "Indian" identity." Identity rests upon alterity--one is
the other of the other. In pre-colonial South Asia, identities coalesced around spatially limited differences such
as family, clan, language, religion, region. Labor drawn from the kaleidoscopic heterogeneity of South Asia
was positioned similarly in the global economy through the indenture system. Material and discursive
structures accompanying the indenture system reconstituted the heterogeneity of South Asian labor as a
singularity. Diversity of identifications also yielded to a collective identity forged in resistance to a shared
experience. Thus, both technologies of power and strategies of resistance attending the indenture system
furnished the field of possibility for a composite "Indian" identity. B. Global Political-Economy and Construction
of Identities In the global political-economy, the composite "Indian" identity was constituted and sustained
particularly by the positioning of South Asians as sandwiched between white colonial settlers and the "natives."
Racial hierarchies informed by the grammar of History and colonial technologies of divide et impera combined
to design this positioning. In Africa, the Caribbean and South Pacific, South Asians were deployed as "colonial
auxiliaries," "colonial middlemen," an "ethnic group" occupying an intermediate niche in the economy as
traders, shopkeepers, moneylenders, and professionals.83 South Asians were also often positioned at the
middle rungs of colonial administrative apparatuses with tripartite salary structures. As legislative councils were
formed in some colonies to placate demands for representation, white settlers, South Asians, and the "natives"
were often allocated one-third of the seats each, in complete disregard to their respective numbers. Colonial
reconstruction and recognition of differentiated customary laws for different "racial groups" again set the
"Indians" apart from the "natives." These colonial regimes of governance, on the one hand, furnished the
framework for systems of apartheid, and on the other, sowed seeds of lasting conflict and resentment between
"Indians" and the "natives." The fusion of orientalist constructions of India with racialized global placements of
labor had a defining effect: "Gradually the word 'Indian' came to imply 'race', even before it clearly meant
'nation."''M As a result, conflicts of interest between "Indians" and the "natives" engendered by colonial
technologies of control came to be constituted and exacted as racial animus between the two groups. These
conflicts continue to animate many a polity in the Caribbean, South Pacific, and Africa. A telling example of this
phenomenon is the chronic and continuing constitutional crisis in Fiji, animated by political conflicts between
ethnic Fijians and ethnic Indians. As I turn to the induction of South Asian Americans in the American "model
minority" discourse of the late twentieth century, this encapsulation of the earlier "model minority" career of
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South Asians in the global colonial order should help us appreciate the purposes, processes and con-
sequences of such positionings. It reminds us of "the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial
subjectivity and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural
difference."' Labor migrations orchestrated by colonialism as part of the global economy, in particular the
indentured system, gave foundational and lasting form to a composite "Indian" identity. This identity, envel-
oping the heterogeneity of South Asians, continues to animate the recep- tion of South Asians in diaspora,
particularly in Europe and in European colonial settler societies like the United States. III. SouTH ASIANS
COME TO AMERICA
In the U.S., reinforcement of the composite "Indian" identity issued through interpellation by the primary
American structure of recognition, racial difference assigned on grounds of visible physiological (pheno- type)
features. This suturing of bodies with their place of origin was further accomplished by American immigration
regimes, operating as "one of the central disciplinary arms of the U.S. state. ' s Prashad picks up the story at
the turn of the nineteenth century when South Asians started coming to the U.S. in any appreciable numbers.8
During the hay day of Indian indentured presence in the Caribbean, between late 1800s and early 1900s, a few
thousand Indians, mostly Sikhs from the Punjab, came to the West Coast and were engaged as farm labor.
Confronted with anti-miscegenational legal frameworks and social conventions aimed at "protecting" white
women from nonwhites, many married Mexican women, adding another hue to the mosaic of South Asian
presence in the U.S. Their attempts to normalize this presence were thwarted by a racist social milieu and
legal regimes aimed at stemming the perceived "tide of Asiatics." In response to the arrival of the Punjabi
immigrants, the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League changed its name to the Asiatic Ex- clusion League.
The rise of Asian exclusionary forces fostered the first anti South Asian riots, first in Washington (1907) and
then in California (1910). 90 The victims of these riots were overwhelmingly those immigrants who had the
entered the agricultural labor force or were engaged in lumberyards and railroad construction. The few South
Asian professionals and businessmen did not confront similar hostility." This was an early example of the
intersection of race and class in the lives of South Asians in the U.S., which was to have profound
implications for the fashioning of the "model minority" discourse in the twentieth century. Far from being a
model for anything, at this point, as Prashad reports, California Bureau of Labor Statistics concluded that "the
Hindu has no morals.... [H]e is the most undesirable immigrant in the state. His lack of personal cleanliness,
his low morals and his blind adherence to theories and teachings, so entirely repugnant to American principles,
make him unfit for association with American people."' Public policy mirrored the racist and nativist tenor of the
society. The Alien Land Act of 1913, the National Origin Act of 1914, and the "Pacific Barred Zone" of the 1917
Immigration Act combined to effectively shut the door on immigration from South Asia.93 In response to the
Ozawa Case,94where the U.S. Supreme Court decided that a Japanese native was not eligible for citizenship
because he was not "Caucasian" and therefore not "white," some South Asians claimed eligibility on account
of being Caucasians; a claim resting on pronouncements of Arian race theorists.95 The Supreme Court,
speaking through Justice Sutherland, held in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 6 that "in accordance with
the understanding of the common man from whose vocabulary they were taken," the words "white persons"
meant Caucasians from Northwestern Europe. Consequently, immigration from South Asia was reduced to a
trickle, and, until the mid-1960s, the very small South Asian presence in America remained marginal and
largely invisible. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, ushered in the second phase of South Asian
immigration to the U.S. Prashad shows how this new immigration regime formed part of the American
response to Soviet launch of the Sputnik space rockets and a perceived "science gap." Be- sides, this regime
sought to meet the demand for medical personnel to staff the Medicaid and Medicare programs recently put in
place. Over the next twenty-five years, the new regime, designed primarily to attract skilled labor from
around the world, resulted in a substantial migration of highly skilled South Asians, particularly in the
fields of science, engineering, and medicine. For example, between 1966 and 1977, 20,000 scientists with
Ph.D.s, 40,000 engineers, and 25,000 doctors came from India alone.'Prashad shows how broader global
developments informed immigration to the U.S. during this phase. American need for skilled workers was met,
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on the one hand, by Indian investment in scientific education and, on the other hand, by Britain's increasing
restrictions on immigration for South Asia.98 This contributed significantly in making highly skilled South Asian
labor available for the American economy. The progeny of the marriage between American "state engineering
through immigration controls and ...the beneficence of more socialized systems of education in South Asia"99
was a substantial influx of highly educated, highly paid, professionals from South Asia. They became
increasingly visible within their professional and class milieus. This phase came to an end by the late 1980s, as
a combination of prolonged recessions and rising anti-immigrant sentiment resulted in restrictive immigration
policies. The Immigrations and Nationality Act Amendments of 1976, the Health Professionals Education
Assistance Act of 1976, and the Immigration Act of 1990, erected stringent barriers to immigrants' entry into
the labor pool. The immigration of highly educated professionals continued but at a greatly reduced rate.
Recently, rising demand for skilled labor in the information technology sector has prompted some temporary
modifications in the immigration control regime. By virtue of these modifications, a sizable number of
information technology professionals from South Asia came to the U.S. But, by virtue of their mode of
immigration and positioning in the economy, they are best seen as part of the second phase migration.
The third, and current, phase found its opening in the family reunification provisions of the Immigration and
Nationality Act of 1965. As the skilled immigrants of the second phase secured a footing, the family re-
unification regime facilitated immigration of their extended families. Just as the immigration of highly skilled
labor steadily decreased, immigration of less educated and economically vulnerable South Asians increased.
For example, in 1996, of the 65,599 immigrants from South Asia, only 12,315 entered under employer
preference provisions, while 47,091 entered under family preference provisions.1" The third phase also
witnessed an influx of political and economic refugees. Expulsion of South Asians from East Asia and
dwindling demand for labor in the oil- producing region around the Persian Gulf combined with increased
economic transformations and political instability in South Asia to furnish the push factor of this migration.
Other than professionals, the third- phase South Asian immigrants, at best, occupied working class jobs.
Running cheap motels, small neighborhood stores, marginal gas stations, and taxi-driving came to define their
existence. Their socio-economic vulnerabilities started to become visible. For example, among the
immigrants from India between 1987 and 1990, eighty percent only had a high school education, nine percent
were unemployed, and twenty percent lived below the poverty line.'"' Adding to the South Asian presence is a
new generation, mostly children of the second-phase immigrants who are born and raised in America. They
have become an increasingly visible presence in schools and colleges across the land. Having identified the
three phases of South Asian immigration to the U.S., Prashad turns to these immigrants' engagements with
their respective broader socio-political milieus. The first-phase immigrants, few in number and concentrated on
California farms, remained socially marginal in their new home. Ostracized by the Whites, many of the men
married women of Mexican origin. Their preoccupation remained to gain a toehold to sustain existence in a
context of blatant racism and anti- Asian hysteria. Having witnessed the emergence of the nationalist
movement in India, living in proximity to the unfolding Mexican Revolution and having struggles of the
indenture system under their belt, many responded to legally sanctioned racism and exclusionary regimes
through political activism. Protests against exclusion and discrimination, often in concert with other Asian
immigrant working class, became common. The high water mark of these struggles was the formation of the
Ghadar (Rebellion) Party in San Francisco in 1913 by South Asian immigrants. This political initiative, which
drew its inspiration and name from the 1857 anti-colonial rebellion in India, had an agenda of anti- racism and
anti-colonialism. Branches of the party soon sprouted among Indian indentured laborers in many plantation
colonies and in India itself. In the U.S., the initiative was ruthlessly crushed. 2 Many of its leaders were tried for
sedition and deported. Memories of these struggles remain alive among the South Asian farmers in California
and South Asian political activists."
The second-phase highly skilled immigrants had come of age in South Asia in the period after decolonization.
They had been spared dis- criminations of colonial rule and had not participated in the independence
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movement. They came to the U.S. starting in the late 1960s, after civil rights legislation had been enacted.
They did not have to live under Jim Crow regimes and legally sanctioned racial segregation. Not having
participated in, or even witnessed, the civil rights movement, they had had no occasion to build solidarity with
other people of color. Their earning capacity, class affiliations, and profeciency in the English language
facilitated joining the white flight into the security of suburbia,
where they settled into a fractured existence. They participated in the "public" domain of employment and
wealth accumulation and concurrently retreated to the "private" domain of home and culture. During this phase,
in Prashads words, "the desi sunder[ed] the world into two: the outside world, the world of the workplace, is a
world of capital that must be exploited as much as possible, and the inside world, the world of home, is a world
of culture that must be protected and cherished."" The identities of these South Asians were marked by their
entering an implicit "social contract with a racist policy by making a pledge to work hard but to retain a
social life at some remove from U.S. society."' Prashad shows convincingly how their class position and
isolation from significant cross-sections of American society facilitated the "most enduring and
efficient rite of passage into American culture: negative appraisals of the native-born black
population."' ' Anti-Black racism among desis is increasingly being commented upon.'' Desi racism appears
to follow the pattern whereby "some members of recent immigrant communities have used Blacks as a kind of
'welcome mat,' as a way of affirming, through anti-Black hostility, their own insecure sense of American
identity. ' 1 8 Commentators recognized the debate among South Asians as late as the 1970s about whether
or not South Asians should seek or accept a minority status and give up "the emotional and psychological
advantages of being considered 'Caucasians,' as they were then classified by the Census Bureau."' 9 Visibility
of South Asians in high-skilled professions quickly gave rise to "[t]he stereotype of the Indian American as
techno-migrant."" The emerging racist discourse of "model minorities," the post Civil Rights white supremacist
device of blaming the victims of racial oppression for their predicament, was quick to designate these South
Asians as yet another model for racial minorities, particularly African Americans. Identities are malleable
indeed. The South Asian in whose hands "[a] threshing machine ...would be like an elephant in the hands of an
American," '' now was posited as one whose "enduring belief is that hard work brings rewards. That is why
[he] pursue[s] higher education ... [and] place[s] great value in individual responsibility and entrepreneurship."'
While Representative Richard Gephardt praised South Asians for being both "'highly talented' and 'very
successful,"' 3 for racist ideologues of the Right, who are quick to credit supposedly inherent deficiencies of
African Americans for their plight, a new position of attack became available. For Denesh D'Souza, the
notorious desi apologist for American racism, the predicament of African Americans had been rendered "more
acute by 'the embarrassing fact of Asian American success which has become evident to most people in
recent decades.""' Prashad sees through the maneuver, and succinctly brings the bottom line into sharp relief:
the "model minority" discourse turns South Asians in America into "not simply a solution for black
America but, most pointedly, a weapon deployed against it.""' Prashad demonstrates how this discourse
conveniently ignored the fact that these desi immigrants were screened, selected, and deployed exclusively in
high productivity sectors of the economy by a specific legal regime. He is unequivocal that these "attainments
are not caused by natural or cultural selection; rather, they are the result of state selection whereby the U.S.
state, through the special-skills provisions in the 1965 Immigration Act, fundamentally reconfigured the
demography of South Asian America."'" 6 Before immigration, they mostly belonged to the elite or urban upper
middle classes, an affiliation that facilitated access to higher education, English language, and among the
second phase desis came to subscribe to this racist mythology and implicitly to the reactionary political project
of which this myth is a constitutive element. Prashad notes with regret that many South Asian Americans find
merit in the claim that "immigrants of the right sort are a special breed,""' and imagine themselves positioned
"outside the racist hermeneutic circle."' 9 Isolation from and even opposition to movements seeking economic
opportunity, social justice, and human dignity was the logical outcome. Prashad captures the positioning of
second-phase South Asian American in the race matrix of America well: Desis realize that they are not "white,"
but there is certainly a strong sense among most desis that they are not "black." In a racist society, it is hard to
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expect people to opt for the most despised category. Desis came to the United States and denied their
"blackness" at least partly out of a desire for class mobility (something, in the main, denied to blacks) and a
sense that solidarity with blacks was tantamount to ending one's dreams of being successful (that is, of being
"white"). But this state engineered "model minority" remained "not quite/not white."12' The message from white
America was "we want your labor, we don't want your lives."'22 It was from this position that second-phase
South Asian Americans signed "a social contract with a racist policy by making a pledge to work hard but to
retain a social life at some remove from U.S. society (one that is sanctified as specially spiritual and thus an
acceptable, even if lesser, lifeworld).' 23 In this fractured existence, desis "[a]nxious about the capacity of U.S.
cultural forms to entrance them... cherish what they conceptualize as their cultural forms in the home (and
impart these with persistent care to young children)."' 24 The desire to turn marketable cultural the "private"
realm of "home" into a site to stage "authentic" culture quickly trained on "family values." Prashad notes that
"[miany desis concede that the West is superior in the art of techno-management but hold that it is inferior in
the art of family management."'7 The woman is then posited as the repository of "authentic" culture, and
her subordination in general, and control over her sexuality in particular, becomes the primary agenda
of protecting "family values." Isolated from the profound changes that are unfolding in gender and sexual
relations in South Asia itself,'26 the drive for cultural "authenticity" imprisons desis's imagination in the
gendered ethos of feudal aristocracies of yesteryears, augmented by orientalist renderings of the same.
Frowning upon dating and inter-racial marriage, promotion of "arranged marriage," and the search for a
"traditional" (read submissive) wife become the norm. As Prashad points out, "when one accepts that men
are culturally authorized to dominate women, it is not far before even violence is sanctioned.',17 The "culture
defense" for domestic violence, increasingly heard in the courts of law in relation to many exoticised "others,"
comes in the train.' 28 This imagined "authentic" culture, however, as Prashad rightly observes, "will not be
culture as the lives of the people but as something of a fantasy culture, a nostalgia of distance, without the
creative contradictions that provide the lively cultural forms negotiated by the peoples still on the
subcontinent."'2 9 Far from recommending a divorce with South Asia and assimilation of desis with mainstream
America, an impossible task in itself for anybody "not quite/not white," Prashad suggests that rather than
worrying about importing desi culture tout court, migrants must worry about which aspects of desi culture to
select. They need to imaginatively account for the origins of the various "cultural" resources and draw from
them with care to solve our contemporary problems. There are other visions of the homeland (and
consequently of desi culture). He substantiates the last remark by reminding us of the antidiscrimination and
anti-colonial struggles of the first-phase desis. After recounting the heroic careers of the leaders of the
GhadarParty, Prashad bemoans how second-phase desis see struggle and radical political activism as being
"antidesi."'3 For this group, [diesi traditions are imagined to be dedicated hard work and cultural conservatism.
The ideas of social justice are rarely considered.... Conservative thought is wedded to the idea that history has
ended and
that now people must get on with the job of making a living and ensuring a similar future for their children. The
history of South Asia has a different conclusion for Prashad: "Radicalism is as South Asian as Gandhi.' 33 The
second-phase desis, partially un-homed in their new home, then reach back to reconnect with the homeland. In
recent years, this connection has taken a particularly reactionary form: "the turn to religion, especially a
syndicated form of Hinduism." ' 34 While Prashad focuses on desi Hindus, the same is true of some other
religious groups, particularly desi Muslims.1 35 The political ascendancy of reactionary religious forces in
South Asia is facilitated in no small measure by financial contributions by the well-heeled second-phase desis.
The demographic changes wrought by the third phase is changing all that. The context of the lived experience
of the economically vulnerable and more visible desis brings them face to face with issues that second- phase
desis were able to avoid. Unemployment, job discrimination, hate crimes, police brutality, lack of access to
adequate health care, poverty, and overt racism have become everyday experiences. These problems are
accentuated by the "forever immigrant and foreigner" construction that desis share with other Asian
Americans. Moreover, the generation born and raised here has felt compelled to give voice to silences within
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the desi communities that surround issues of gender equity, domestic violence, sexuality, cultural chauvinism,
and self-determination. Young desis on college campuses are increasingly exposed to curriculum reform
debates, controversies of multiculturalism, identity politics, resurgent student activism, and innovative
strategies to combat racism, sexism, and homophobia.'37 Many live and work in spaces where interaction with
other people of color, the working class, and the marginalized is the norm. One outcome is a mushrooming of
political initiatives, both organized and informal, to build solidarities with similarly placed non-desi communities,
and to design strategies to protect economic, political, and human rights of vulnerable sections of desis.
Examples of desi progressive initiatives include organizations like Sakhi, Narika, Manavi, Trikone, New York
Taxi Workers Association, SAMAR, and the South Asian Network. While the progressive initiatives are growing
rapidly under the leadership of the young and the marginalized, the second-phase desis' practices of
isolation, racism, and reactionary political alignments also persist. The economic wherewithal of second-
phase desis facilitates their continued control over the mainstream desi media and cultural and political
associations. This control ensures that the class interests and political alignments of second-phase desis
continue to define the agenda of the desi communities at large. While increasingly challenged by the third-
phase desis, the hegemony of second-phase desis remains entrenched. V. BUILDING SOLIDARITIES,
ACHIEVING JUSTICE The model minority discourse constructs desis as apolitical and docile. This portrayal
conveniently elides the deep roots of radicalism in South Asian history, both as it unfolded in the subcontinent
and in North America. Prashad notes salient examples of this phenomena. He highlights the anti-colonial
struggle initiated by the GhadarParty in California in the early 1900s, which quickly spread throughout the
plantation colonies of the Caribbean. He lists the progressive initiatives taken by groups of desis in response to
political developments in South Asia. Lastly, he identifies desi women, youth, and gay and lesbian organization
that are attempting to create social spaces to resist patriarchy, sexism, homophobia, and racism within the desi
communities. Prashad underscores the fact that children of desi immigrants are increasingly refusing "to
submit to ... disciplinary regimes set in place for their parents."' He notes that the increasing visibility of desis
on college campuses has set in motion a process of "'reverse assimilation', the rediscovery of one's ethnicity
and the urge to engage that difference in one's social life." While all these are positive building blocks, the task
remains committing "model minority suicide," ' and "to forge a politics of identification' with other subordinated
groups. Prashad endorses the call for "creation of a 'racial project,' that is 'simultaneously an interpretation,
representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along
racial lines."", Prashad cautions that mobilizing in terms of identities towards collective action is not easy, as
prejudices between communities of color are formidable obstacles. The key to building solidarity is participation
in political struggle, because "the most profound bonds are built in the heat of the struggle, especially when
one demonstrates to the collectivity that one is prepared to share the burden of other's misery.'
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ImpactModel Minority = Anti Blackness
Model Minority Myth hurts African Americans and gives and excuse for white
Americans to not address racism
NPR 17 (Kat Chow, digital journalist, model minority Myth again used as a racial wedge between Asians and
Blacks, April 19, 2017, http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/04/19/524571669/model-minority-myth-
again-used-as-a-racial-wedge-between-asians-and-blacks)
A piece from New York Magazine's Andrew Sullivan over the weekend ended with an old, well-worn trope: Asian-
Americans, with their "solid two-parent family structures," are a shining example of how to overcome discrimination. An essay
that began by imagining why Democrats feel sorry for Hillary Clinton and then detoured to President Trump's policies drifted to this troubling ending: "Today,
Asian-Americans are among the most prosperous, well-educated, and successful ethnic groups in
America. What gives? It couldn't possibly be that they maintained solid two-parent family structures, had
social networks that looked after one another, placed enormous emphasis on education and hard
work, and thereby turned false, negative stereotypes into true, positive ones, could it? It couldn't be
that all whites are not racists or that the American dream still lives?" Sullivan's piece, rife with
generalizations about a group as vastly diverse as Asian-Americans, rightfully raised hackles. Not only
inaccurate, his piece spreads the idea that Asian-Americans as a group are monolithic, even though
parsing data by ethnicity reveals a host of disparities; for example, Bhutanese-Americans have far
higher rates of poverty than other Asian populations, like Japanese-Americans. And at the root of
Sullivan's pernicious argument is the idea that black failure and Asian success cannot be explained by
inequities and racism, and that they are one and the same; this allows a segment of white America to avoid any
responsibility for addressing racism or the damage it continues to inflict. "Sullivan's comments showcase a classic and
tenacious conservative strategy," Janelle Wong, the director of Asian American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, said in an email. This strategy, she said,
involves "1)
ignoring the role that selective recruitment of highly educated Asian immigrants has played in
Asian American success followed by 2) making a flawed comparison between Asian Americans and
other groups, particularly Black Americans, to argue that racism, including more than two centuries of
black enslavement, can be overcome by hard work and strong family values." "It's like the Energizer Bunny," said Ellen
D. Wu, an Asian-American studies professor at Indiana University and the author of The Color of Success. Much of Wu's work focuses on dispelling the "model minority" myth,
and she's been tasked repeatedly with publicly refuting arguments like Sullivan's, which, she said, are incessant. "The thing about the Sullivan piece is that it's such an old-
fashioned rendering. It's very retro in the kinds of points he made." Since
the end of World War II, many white people have used
Asian-Americans and their perceived collective success as a racial wedge. The effect? Minimizing the
role racism plays in the persistent struggles of other racial/ethnic minority groups especially black
Americans. On Twitter, people took Sullivan's "old-fashioned rendering" to task. But this is exactly why few people are actually qualified to write *well* and *smartly*
on race. They haven't studied it, they sound dumb. Andrew Sullivan may want to start by studying immigration policy to see just *which* Asians are allowed into this country in
the 1 place. "During World War II, the media created the idea that the Japanese were rising up out of the ashes [after being held in incarceration camps] and proving that they
had the right cultural stuff," said Claire Jean Kim, a professor at the University of California, Irvine. "And it was immediately a reflection on black people: Now why weren't
black people making it, but Asians were?" These arguments falsely conflate anti-Asian racism with anti-black racism, according to Kim. "Racism that Asian-Americans have
experienced is not what black people have experienced," Kim said. "Sullivan is right that Asians have faced various forms of discrimination, but never the systematic
dehumanization that black people have faced during slavery and continue to face today." Asians have been barred from entering the U.S. and gaining citizenship and have
been sent to incarceration camps, Kim pointed out, but all that is different than the segregation, police brutality and discrimination that African-Americans have endured.
Many scholars have argued that some Asians only started to "make it" when the discrimination against
them lessened and only when it was politically convenient. Amid worries that the Chinese exclusion laws from the late 1800s
would hurt an allyship with China in the war against imperial Japan, the Magnuson Act was signed in 1943, allowing 105 Chinese immigrants into the U.S. each year. As Wu
wrote in 2014 in the Los Angeles Times, the Citizens Committee to Repeal Chinese Exclusion "strategically recast Chinese in its promotional materials as 'law-abiding, peace-
loving, courteous people living quietly among us'" instead of the "'yellow peril' coolie hordes." In 1965, the National Immigration Act replaced the national-origins quota system
with one that gave preference to immigrants with U.S. family relationships and certain skills. In 1966,
William Petersen, a sociologist at the University of
helped popularize comparisons between Japanese-Americans and African-Americans. His
California, Berkeley,
New York Times story, headlined, "Success Story, Japanese-American Style," is regarded as one of the most influential
pieces written about Asian-Americans. It solidified a prevailing stereotype of Asians as industrious and
rule-abiding that would stand in direct contrast to African-Americans, who were still struggling against
bigotry, poverty and a history rooted in slavery. In the opening paragraphs, Petersen quickly puts African-Americans and Japanese-
Americans at odds: "Asked which of the country's ethnic minorities has been subjected to the most discrimination and the worst injustices, very few persons would even think
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of answering: 'The Japanese Americans,' ... Yet, if the question refers to persons alive today, that may well be the correct reply. Like the Negroes, the Japanese have been
the object of color prejudice .... When new opportunities, even equal opportunities, are opened up, the minority's reaction to them is likely to be negative either self-
defeating apathy or a hatred so all-consuming as to be self-destructive. For the well-meaning programs and countless scholarly studies now focused on the Negro, we barely
know how to repair the damage that the slave traders started. The history of Japanese Americans, however, challenges every such generalization about ethnic minorities." But
as history shows, Asian-Americans were afforded better jobs not simply because of educational attainment, but in part because they were treated better. "More education will
help close racial wage gaps somewhat, but it will not resolve problems of denied opportunity," reporter Jeff Guo wrote last fall in the Washington Post. "Asian Americans
some of them at least have made tremendous progress in the United States. But the greatest thing that ever happened to them wasn't that they studied hard, or that they
benefited from tiger moms or Confucian values. It's that other Americans started treating them with a little more respect." At the heart of arguments of racial advancement is
the concept of "racial resentment," which is different than "racism," Slate's Jamelle Bouie recently wrote in his analysis of the Sullivan article. "Racial
resentment" refers to a "moral feeling that blacks violate such traditional American values as
individualism and self reliance," as defined by political scientists Donald Kinder and David Sears. And,
Bouie points out, "racial resentment" is simply a tool that people use to absolve themselves from
dealing with the complexities of racism: "In fact, racial resentment reflects a tension between the egalitarian self-image of most white Americans
and that anti-black affect. The 'racist,' after all, is a figure of stigma. Few people want to be one, even as they're inclined to believe the measurable disadvantages blacks face
are caused by something other than structural racism. Framing blacks as deficient and pathological rather than inferior offers a path out for those caught in that mental maze."
Petersen's, and now Sullivan's, arguments have resurfaced regularly throughout the last century. And they'll likely keep resurfacing, as long as people keep seeking ways to
As the writer Frank Chin said of Asian-Americans in 1974:
forgo responsibility for racism and to escape that "mental maze."
"Whites love us because we're not black." Sometimes it's instructive to look at past rebuttals to tired arguments after all, they hold up much
better in the light of history.
violence can solve
4/2/15)//MNW
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myth creates the idea that some people deserve to be in the U.S. and some people dont. Some immigrants are lazy.
involuntarily and/or by force, such as a result of war or U.S. colonization and expansion projects abroad. My
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ImpactModel Minority Harms Low Income API
Model Minority Myth Hurts Low Income-Low Achieving Asian and Pacific Islander
students
Centre for American Progress 11 (Theodora Chang, Education policy analyst at the Centre for American
Progress, Moving Education Beyond the Model Minority Myth, 5/12/11,
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/news/2011/05/12/9600/moving-education-beyond-the-
model-minority-myth/)
Popular media would have us believe that all Asian American and Pacific Islander students are part of
the model minority or are parented by tiger moms who push them towards overachievement in
areas such as math and music. The fact is that these students
The common assumption is that Asian American and Pacific Islander students excel in school without any outside help.
are far from homogenous when it comes to academic achievement, and actually share the educational
challenges facing other students of color. The latest demographic data from the U.S. Census Bureau underscore why we cannot ignore the diverse educational needs of these students. According to newly released results
from the 2010 Census, Asian American and Pacific Islander populations grew faster than any other racial group between 2000 and 2010. The Asian American population increased by 43 percent while the Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander population increased b y more than one-third.Low academic
achievement is a pressing issue for Asian American and Pacific Islander students. A 2010 Education Trust-West report identified alarming gaps in California, a state with a significant proportion of these students . Among Pacific Islander students in the eighth grade, only 44 percent score at the proficient
level in English; this figure is 46 percent for Cambodian students and 40 percent for Laotian students. While almost 80 percent of Korean students reached proficiency in Algebr a I, only 35 percent of Laotian students and 23 percent of Samoan students scored at that level. By the time Asian American and
Nationwide, Asian American and Pacific Islander students

Pacific Islander students reach the end of high school, 7 out of 10 of them are not prepared for college-level coursework.
also struggle with high school and college completion. Forty percent of Hmong adolescents do not
complete high school. While 27 percent of Americans have at least a bachelors degree, only 14
percent of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders do. . Roughly Asian American and Pacific Islander students also experience challenges related to income and language access
one-third of Asian American students and more than half of Pacific Islander students come from low-
income families. Nearly one out of four students is an English language learner and/or lives in a
linguistically isolated household with parents who have limited English proficiency. Closing
achievement gaps for Asian American and Pacific Islander students needs to be part of our larger
effort to improve the achievement of educationally disadvantaged children Good teachers are .
paramount to raising the achievement levels of all students. Ensuring fiscal equity is also critical, since 30 percent of Asian American and Pacific Islander students attend high-poverty
schools. Expanding learning time can provide English language learners with more instruction.The upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the nations main education law, is an important opportunity to address the educational needs of all students. In addition to policy
changes, more disaggregated data is needed to better understand trends in academic achievement across various states. The Census results remind us that as our nation grows increasingly diverse, conversations around achievement gaps and their solutions must include Asian Americ an and Pacific
Islander communities and their students.
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***Alts***
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AltAbolitionist Pedagogy - Rodriguez

complex.
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locating abolitionist praxis within a longer political genealogy that anticipates the task of remaking the world under transformed material
our society.20 In
refracts the most radical and revolutionary dimensions of a historical Black freedom struggle
circumstances, this position
of
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that this resistance to engaging with abolitionist praxis seems to also derive from a deep and broad epistemological and cultural

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AltAbolition Gossett
A rigorous, non-reformist analysis of the PIC is key to generate strategies of safety and
connection.
Gossett 14 (Che, scholar at the BCRW, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial
Complex Abolitionist Imaginings: A Conversation with Bo Brown, Reina Gossett, and Dylan Rodriguez,
AK Press)
I am ever inspired and empowered by the visionary and community-centered work done by my sister Reina
Gossett; ever impassioned by the intensity and sheer force of Dylan Rodriguezs abolitionist critiques; and ever
oriented and grounded by Bo Browns history and present of organizing with radical anti-prison and queer
liberationist movements. At this critical juncture, this conversation offers a collective, cross-cutting dialogue
about prison abolition and gender self-determination in this present era of mass incarceration and
criminalization. Reina Gossett, Dylan Rodriguez, and Bo Brown have been organizing around, writing in
resistance to, speaking out against and through suffering, loss, and hate violence that our communities are
facing on a daily basis. This conversation highlights the ways that prison abolitionist activists and academics
inform, challenge, and help nurture and develop each other. It demonstrates not only the immediate urgency of
abolition and trans liberation but also the relevance of histories of community resistance and resilience to our
present struggle. Che Gosset: How were you politicized around prison abolitionism? Dylan Rodriguez: First,
let me say how important it is that we situate our biographies of politicization within our specific
political-historical contexts rather than as universalizing stories of radicalization. There is often a
temptation to inhabit and perform radical political positions as if they were the inevitable result of traumatic
and/or spectacular individual experiences with violence, oppression, and so forth. The fact is, we usually
become radical political workers not simply because we have personal grievances with corrupt and unjust
social systems, but rather because we encounter the mundane, insistent, nourishing, and contentious
influences of some community of activists, teachers, survivors, and intellectuals (by which I mean people who
think a lot, not just people who get paid to think and write). In this sense, I see my politicization toward prison,
police, and penal abolition as a logical outcome of the people and political-intellectual traditions that Ive been
close to during the last two decades. There were two overlappingreally inseparabledimensions to the
process of both clarifying and (more importantly) identifying with an abolitionist analysis and political-
intellectual position: participating in the formation of Critical Resistance as a (truly novice) activist and
organizer produced an intimacy with a deep, historically specific sense of futility, urgency, and frequent
desperation that I eventually realized is organic to the work of engaging liberationist and anti-racist work in a
time of heightenedbut no less normalizedwarfare and institutionalized dehumanization. This is why Ive
spent most of my adult life trying to figure out how to conceptualize the prison and policing regimes, in their
comprehensive social-institutional totality, as genocidal (or at least proto-genocidal) systems. Let me put it this
way: If our examination of the prison regime constantly leads us to the conclusion that particular populations,
bodies, places, and communities are not meant to thrive or survive existing institutional arrangements, then
what political practices can we conceive that directly deal with this condition as a state of emergency? This
leads to the second major aspect of my politicization toward abolition, and thats the sometimes undervalued
activist work of focused study, research, and analysis. Anybody who wants to contact me can ask me for my
personal bibliography, and Ill be happy to send ittoo many books, essays, articles, poems, and stories to
name here. But let me expand on this dimension just a bit: Many of us, as activists, who are otherwise
constantly thinking about and critically analyzing what were doing, far too frequently ignore or
abandon radical intellectual work as if it was an unaffordable luxury thats best taken up by academics,
lawyers, and artists. I think this intellectual underdevelopment kills radical movements and empowers
the liberal-to-conservative political circuitry that would like to see this condition of (proto-)genocide
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man aged, reformed, and controlled rather than destroyed and transformed. Bo Brown: I was a white
working-class Butch; bar dyke on the weekends. Then I was a social prisoner due to a conviction for a less
than $50 theft from the post office where I was working. I was what we now call a social prisoner in prison for
less than a year in a federal prison in San Pedro, California. I was in prison in September 1971 when George
Jackson was killed. In fact, I was reading Blood in My Eye. I was still in prison when Attica happened, a month
later. So that kind of slammed open my eyes to a lot of stuff. Even though I was pretty young23pretty
inexperienced, pretty nave, you know, didnt know a whole lot about the rest of the world. Even though I had
no real political perspective or language, I knew that was some fucked up shit that went down. It was so wrong
and really outright criminal. Murders were committed. Yet they got away with it right there in front of our eyes
on TV for the whole world to see. Reina Gossett: In my life, politicization happens as a deepening process, so
it was years of fermentation rather than a single event that deepened my abolitionist politics. I found out about
Critical Resistance New York City the spring after the RNC. This was a time when Bush had won re-election
and abolitionists in New York City had been really engaged in organizing in response to militarization in NYC
and the war in Iraq. I entered during a time of reflection, burnout, and inspiration. Because of gentrification in
Brooklyn, the CR office moved from Crown Heights to the West Village. What I was witnessing were people
throughout different activist spaces engaging abolition, even people deeply invested in reform work. At that
moment, along with other students, I was doing creative writing and poetry workshops at Island Academya
high school for teenagers on the Rikers Island Jail. I had strong desires for a political home to hold these
experiences and make sense of them, to make my life intelligible to myself beyond the fear and shame I felt
around my own trauma with the PIC. The possibility of being involved in abolition presented a moment when
traumatic experiences and shameful experiences could be transformed into the possibility of something more
powerful: Yes, we have agency, yes, we are not innocent, and yes, there is something larger at work that
causes ourselves and our loved to get caught up in prisons, jails, cop cars, detention centers, TSA private
screenings, etc. In that initial moment it felt like Critical Resistance NYC worked to create room for a lot of
people. I felt inspired by so many queer people in a room working together and it made the Brecht Forum a
space of political possibility; there were people doing childcare, and a lot of people from La Casita, the drug
treatment program for women with children, came down from the South Bronx to be there. At that first meeting,
people who had done a lot of work to create the space were leaving, which felt like the space didnt mandate
that you stay, even if you were one of the co-creators. Later, traveling to the Gullah Sea Islands and the Penn
Center with CR deepened my connection to the spiritual/soulful aspects of this lineage of resistance and
liberation. It was a powerful moment of entering a place that held such rich history of black resistance,
resilience, loss, and joy. It also helped expand my understanding beyond a thinking process, meaning that the
PIC doesnt just affect our material condition but also our spirits, psyches, and connection to land so any
meaningful response and resistance has to be about more than our material condition. This was all a decade
after first reading George Jacksons Blood in My Eye, learning about Mumia, attending an Afro-centric summer
and after-school program and developing a sense of wonder about my familys involvement in the black
freedom movement, and many years after starting to visit my father while he was incarcerated in prison and
psychiatric institutions. This makes me believe that coming into contact with the PIC or critical analysis was
important, but entering a community of people committed to the process of abolition, which meant commitment
to each other, was where transformation really occurred in my life. The 2007 Transforming Justice Conference
deepened and challenged my understanding of abolition politics. Many trans women, formerly incarcerated,
were talking about their lives in the context of state violence and PIC abolition. Prior to that, I felt a real growing
edge when it came to creating abolitionist spaces that trans people, but particularly trans women of color, could
access. It challenged me to make sure I was not leaving myself at the door when I entered abolitionist spaces.
This reminded me of the legacy of trans people resisting state violence and whose stories have been
suppressed both in and out of abolitionist movements. So for my own politicization process it wasnt
just what caught my attention, but what held and challenged me, what grew my soul and sense of
somebodiness. This means to me that politicization is a sacred momenta sacred processand
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throughout my life sacred spaces have held and increased those moments and processes. CG: PIC
abolitionism indexes so many apparatuses of state violence, surveillance, and policing, as well as modes of
resistance, healing, and accountability. How you do make the concept politically intelligible and tangible
through your own work? DR: Ill spend anything from many minutes to many hours (depending on who
Im talking to and working with) illustrating how the formation of the prison and policing regimes are
inseparable from the apparatuses of racial genocide on which the United States is based. How is the
prison a paradigmatically anti-black genocidal institution? Where do we find the connections between policing
and the land displacement, cultural genocide, and geographic incarceration of native and indigenous peoples
in and beyond North America? What is the concept of civil death and how does it shape a society in which 2
million people are locked up by the state? Whats the critical difference between an activism that addresses
police brutality and one that addresses police violence or even domestic warfare? If we askand begin to
answerquestions like this, we can demystify the prisons apparent normalcy and political
invincibjility, and build a different set of historical and political assumptions that recast our
understanding of the prison regime as a focal point of a collective, radical political creativity
abolitionismthat takes seriously the monumental challenges of freedom, liberation, self-
determination, and anti-violence. Ill put it another way: If one is willing to commit to an unapologetic,
rigorous analysis of what prisons are, where they come from, and what they do, in a way that respects
and challenges the intellect and sensibilities of the person or people one is engaging, the abolitionist
position makes more sense than not. This is not to say that we dont need to engage in simultaneous
conversations about how to deal with repressive, oppressive, and exploitative forms of structural
violence that would not simply disappear with the abolition of the prison regime. Rather, its to say that
simply establishing the abolitionist concept as something thats grounded in a historical analysis and
political logic results in different sets of urgent questions that no longer presume the existence of
policing, imprisonment, or even the militarized nation-state itself. BB: If youre about your politics, you
know that all that shit comes out of the same asshole. Its all about who runs it, who profits from it:
Theres a medical industrial complex, a prison industrial complex, a business indus trial complexits
all about the wealthy getting wealthier. Its all connected. So you have to look at all that. Im working
toward a world in which we dont really need a prison industrial complex, a world that treats people like
human beings, a world that doesnt create a War on Drugs, a world that doesnt destroy the education
system and determines that the people who are somehow classified as uneducable or the wrong
color or the wrong class will be tracked to prison, because there will be no jobs available to them, etc.
A more equitable world, a more humane world, a world thats not about moneythats the primary
thinga world thats not about slavery. RG: Ive spent a lot of time wondering about how abolition is
tangible in my work, and I have shifted in my practice in making abolitionist politics real. While I was involved
with CR I put energy into creating a tangible abolitionist practice by challenging people to wonder if
incarceration was a solution to violence by asking a lot of questions; the campaign to stop New York City from
building a new jail in the South Bronx on a toxic land site, slated to be a womens jail with a nursery, fit really
well into this. Because we had been organizing to mobilize large-scale community opposition to the jail, we
created a good moment to highlight how reforming and managing the prison industrial complex rather
than abolition far too often leads to an expansion of state violence. In that case, the state used the fact
that Rikers Island was (and is) in horrible condition and completely inaccessible for people to visit, as an
excuse to build pristine new neighborhood jails so that communities could access their loved ones more easily
in prison. So it became an important moment to engage the state and organize to stop this escalation of state
violence. After my involvement in the campaign and witnessing how often campaigns can make it hard for folks
to not burn out, I moved into the place of wondering how to make abolition intelligible through a range of daily
practices. A lot of people were really trying to incorporate principles of prevention, intervention,
reparation, and transformation into how we practiced our political work. It is not enough to just be
urgent and in opposition to state violence but uncritically practice it through exclusion, alienation,
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sexism, ableism, transphobia, and homophobia and a racist politic of policing authenticity.
Prefigurative politics really resonated with me, meaning I wanted the work I did to prefigure the world
or communities I wanted to live in. A lot of the bridge or transitional space between these two ways of
practicing politics was held in spaces that were not actively organizing around state violence and
domestic warfare, or at least not framing it the same way. Thought a lot about Southerners on New
Grounds (SONG) framework of spirits, land, labor, and bodies being both sites of violence and colonialism as
well as sites of beautiful places of resistance and healing, the prison industrial complex fits really well into that
framework. This marked a real shift in my politics and signaled my movement into internal practices and away
from campaigns, with an emphasis on slowing down the work. CG: How have queer, genderqueer, trans, and
gender-non-conforming PIC abolitionists organized internally to foreground gender liberationist and queer
politics within the abolitionist movement? How might non-trans allies address cisgender supremacy within the
abolitionist movement and help to center the politics of gender self-determination? DR: These are two of
several questions that are shaping and reshaping progressive-to-radical social movements generally, and
abolition particularly. Youve asked related questions hereone descriptive and one speculativeand both are
reflective of present-tense conditions in the prison regime that focus on gender as a site for the invention and
deployment of state violence. One of the most remarkable developments in the abolitionist struggle over
the last decade or so has been the emergence of a radical queer analysis of state violence that pushes
our understanding of how gender (and for that matter, sexuality) is not simply one discrete axis within
intersecting logics of oppression and repression, but is actually a technology through which the state
creates new forms of systemic bodily vulnerability and disintegration. So what do we make of the prison
regime if its constantly deforming and redefining its institutionalizations of gender over and against the actual
gender identifications of its captives, officers, and administrators? In this sense, I think weve seen the
emergence of a queer, genderqueer, trans, and gender-non-conforming intellectual and organizational
leadership in abolitionist collectives and other social movements, including and especially those collectives and
movements that dont appear at first glance to be especially focused on gender and sexual oppression as
their primary critical engagements. My sense of this development is that this community of activists is finely
attuned to the ways in which their bodies and identities are acutely vulnerable to the comprehensive,
oppressive violence of the state: from being subjected to abstract normative definitions of their allegedly
deviant sexual and gender identitiesa process that leads to both reactionary, state-condoned homophobic
violence and self-harm, including suicideto their increasingly evident vulnerability, to gender-specific forms of
racial and class criminalization, as is the case with the states targeting of sex workers, black and brown
gang-classified youth, and undocumented migrants. This sensibility can and does translate into a dense,
complex, and politically explosive political positioning that can and must be engaged by non-queer and non-
trans people. This is why Im always a bit suspicious of and hesitant to embrace the allies rubricbecause if
we really take the queer, trans, gender-non-conforming political position seriously, we have to understand that
to undertake the work of gender self-determination and gender liberation, we dont simply stand
alongside/behind our queer/trans peers; we inhabit a position with them in absolute political intimacy. BB:
Because they [queer, genderqueer, trans, and gender-non-conforming PIC abolitionists] do the work and they
bring their issues. If you dont do the work then you dont get the say. Im a working-class person, and I believe
that the product belongs to the people who do the worknot the people who wrote the theory. We [the George
Jackson Brigade] were a very integrated group, especially for our time period; there were people in the
underground at that time period who said that queers could not be revolutionary and would have to be dealt
with after the revolution. We were just the opposite. We were lesbian, we were gay, we were bisexual;
transsexual[ity] was not necessarily an issue at that time, the way that it is now. Thats who we were and then
we did the work. And we did a lot of work around prisons. One of the first bombings was the Department of
Corrections in support of a prison struggle, in the maximum-security prison in the state of WashingtonWalla
Walla. Later there was a long, forty-seven-day lockdown or a strike by prisoners in Walla Walla, and it was the
longest strike in state history and actually it might be the longest strike in prison history that we know of where
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the prisoners were demanding better treatment: an end to torture, better food, basic things. The mainstream
press had never talked to a prisoner; they only talked to the people in charge. We did some research and
found that the mainstream press was owned by the same private utility company who had workers on strike;
some of the same people who were on the prison board who were on this board and that board, and there was
a financial connection, and we wrote that in a communiqu and said all this shit is connected, and the demand
in the communiqu was that a prisoner be interviewed. They [non-trans allies] have to do the work to
understand that its a civil rights issue. Its not about I want to get married so I can be accepted by
mainstream society; its about I would like to live my life, I would not like to be oppressed,
suppressed, beat up and spit on on the street, whatever the fuck you as the oppressor feels like doing
to us. Because everybodys not the same in this world, nor should they be. RG: The 2007 Transforming
Justice Conference in San Francisco around gender self-determination was integral to PIC abolition. It was
organized primarily by trans and gender-non-conforming women who had been incarcerated or otherwise
survived the PIC. Because it was organized with an understanding of how organizing against transphobia and
a commitment to gender liberation and self-determination are key components in creating real safety, it really
concretized a new set of possibilities within the abolitionist movement. As opposed to some of the organizing
with other abolitionist spaces, this conference already began with an understanding that trans and gender-non-
conforming peoples lives matter. That meant that the energy it so often takes trans people to convene in other
abolitionist spaces where gender self-determination is held could be used for building relationships. The
Transforming Justice Alliance continued to grow this work during Critical Resistance 10 (CR10) through
plenary speakers, workshops, and film. Last April, a contingent of Transforming Justice members met with the
disability justice collective here in NYC. Were expanding our understanding around sites of incarceration and
policing, made a decision to gather again in 2012 in Atlanta and do it in a way that prioritizes relationships,
resilience, and strategizing. During CR10, the Gender Liberation/Self-determination working group, which was
part of the CR10 planning committee, struggled with how to have gender self-determination and trans histories
and communities held in that space, and it was a constant negotiation. However, we successfully engaged all
of the planning process and ensured gender liberation throughout the entire weekend: from childcare, to
plenaries, as well as logistics like bathrooms access and pre-conference prioritizing outreach to trans and
gender-non-conforming communities. CG: In thinking about the legacy of trans activism against prisons and
policing and the bio and necropolitical dimensions of incarcerationbe they the regulation of gender
expression and hormonal access, or the outing of HIV status and denial of carewhat are ways in which the
inside/outside struggle against the PIC has been shaped by trans and queer liberationist movements
especially by people of color? DR: These movements have initiated a decisive altering of the ways in
which we do and think political work against the PIC, aiming toward abolition. These critical
interventions, in my experience, are spurred by major discursive, theoretical, analytical, and
conceptual disruptions and transformations of formerly prevalent and heteronormative activist
assumptions: For example, when we speak of medical neglect, medical abuse, or lack of access
to care, we can no longer assume a normative, prototypical, male or female body as the object of
racist and gender-oppressive state violence. Instead, we need to understand how it is often precisely when
the prison medical and psychiatric apparatuses are working well that they are mobilizing some of their most
fundamental violence against peoples already fragile sense of bodily integrity and emotional well-being. In
other words, what trans and queer liberation politics teaches us is that there is really no such thing as a good
or humane imprisonment regime within our historical conditionsthere are only differing capacities and
political/juridical tolerances of a range of physiological destructiveness against people held captive. So by
focusing on the peculiar and acute ways that trans and queer people are actually imprisoned, we get a
far deeper insight into the institutional logics of the prison in its deadly totality. BB: Well, you have to go
back to Stonewall: Wasnt that about queer and trans people in a bar in the Village, in New York? And then you
have Kuwasi Balagoon, a black liberation army member. It took people a long time to time to be able to say
that, and now they can say that he was a black gay man and that he was a revolutionary. Of course he did his
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part in that part of the struggle and in his community and remained who he was, true to himself. And I think that
the formation of TIP in San FranciscoTrans In Prisonand those kinds of organizations that are specific,
that work within the context of the broader prison industrial complex, are essential. RG: I think this question
requires deep reflection on the real importance of trans history within anti-authoritarian and abolitionist spaces
and how these trans legacies are passed on to people or not and held or not within the larger left/activist world.
Too often, in abolitionist movements, we imagine that trans lives have just started to exist, that there is no
legacy of trans people engaging abolition. We often do not know or retell how trans people organized around
state violence and the PIC, like the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries organizing against police
violence alongside the Black Panthers and the Young Lords. We forget that, until recently, organizing led by
trans people was in resistance to violence from the police. We fail to remember that in the year following
Stonewall, the first gay march in New York City endedon purposeat the Womens House of Detention,
which held Panther 21 members Joan Bird and Afeni Shakur. We hardly like to share that trans activists like
Sylvia Rivera and whole communities of trans women were kicked out of burgeoning gay and lesbian
movements, feminist movements, and anti-authoritarian movements in order to consolidate power, make the
movement more attractive to institutional power, and win minor concessions from the state. Least of all, we do
not talk about how this violent exiling of trans women from radical spaces continues to happen to this day. If
we ignore the way this legacy and history of trans and gender-non-conforming people being pushed
out of and marginalized within abolitionist movements shapes current trans and gender-non-
conforming struggles, then were only getting part of the story and are perpetuating historical exile and
isolation; we are perpetuating violence. That said, I dont believe it is enough to nostalgically and uncritically
call upon STAR, the leadership of trans people during the Stonewall Rebellion or the Comptons Cafeteria Riot,
each time we talk about trans people resisting the PIC. When recalling STAR and trans leadership in the anti-
state violence movement, we often dont have enough understanding of the social history to name not only the
amazing accomplishments but equally important the moments in which more growth and development was
needed: What compromises should not have been made? What ethics could have been better foregrounded?
This tendency makes our history less dimensional and more flattened, and ultimately diminishes our ability to
make connections and see political patterns. Right now I am grieving the exile of our political lineage and lives
from abolitionist spaces; I am longing for my history and struggling to piece it together. As a black trans
woman who is queer and an abolitionist, I want to know more about how trans people have supported
or rejected abolitionism and gender self-determination within a range of political movements. More
than any compiling of organizations or individual activist names within a general abolitionist history, I
want a fuller scope of our social history that extends beyond when we were simply only oppressed or
acted incredibly exceptional. I really believe in order for this to happen we have to challenge the
hierarchy of intelligible abolitionist history that keeps our stories as trans and gender-non-conforming
people from ever surfacing in the first place. Rather than simply reclaiming our lineage, lets start to
change the context. Trans people and trans resistance against the PIC have existed for a very long time, and
our movements deserve a more complex understanding of the way we have shaped these movements.
Reproductive justice workparticularly done by and on behalf of incarcerated trans and gender-non-
conforming people and supported by trans people on the outsideis an exciting piece of work I want to hold.
Gabriel Arkles, formerly a staff attorney at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, gave a brilliant talk at Critical
Resistance 10 on reproductive justice and trans people in providing a real framework to challenge the
eugenicist underpinnings of the PIC. Gabriel reminded the abolitionist audience that trans peoples access to
different treatments or interventions like hormones and surgery are real and legitimate medical needsmost of
which do not permanently end our ability to physically reproduceand not getting them can damage trans
peoples health and ability to function in the world. Gabriel then goes on to name six ways that prisons act
as forces of reproductive injustice and carry out eugenicist practices. These include: Isolation from
partners: Simply locking up huge numbers of trans people during the years when they could be having
children, Isolation from families: Keeping trans people away from raising their children when they are
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incarcerated and have their convictions used against them in custody and visitation cases; abuse, neglect, and
termination of parental rights cases; and in adoption proceedings, Conditioning safety on trans people
giving up their ability to have children: The only way that trans people are put into facilities that match their
gender is by having a type of surgery that may or may not be right for them, that is nearly impossible to get,
and results in sterilization, Denying medical care: Denials are not only profoundly damaging the physical
and mental health of trans people in prisons and robbing them of the ability to make intimate decisions about
their own bodies and to self-determine their own gender, but they can also lead to loss of reproductive capacity
in another way, Keeping incarcerated people from having children together: Explicitly a part of the agenda of
prison officials to make sure that trans women and non-trans women in prisons, who are mostly women of
color and disproportionately disabled, cannot have children together, and to make sure that trans men and
non-trans men in prisons, who are mostly men of color and disproportionately disabled, cannot have children
together, The final way that the prison industrial complex interferes with the ability of trans people to
have children and limits the population of trans people is by literally killing trans people. Trans and
queer liberationist movements expand and transform the conversation around incarceration and reproductive
justice and deeply impact the struggle against the PIC. Trans and queer liberationist movements continue to
push reproductive justice spaces to remember that there are women who are incarcerated in mens prisons
and that reproductive justice conversations need to expand to center trans women and gender-non-conforming
people. CG: What are ways in which the abolitionist movement needs to change and adapt in order to address
current realities facing incarcerated and ICE-detained trans and gender-non-conforming people, especially
women and people of color? DR: To begin, I would largely defer on this question to people who are much more
deeply enmeshed in the political and intellectual work around the specificity of these conditions of
imprisonment. I think I still have a lot to learn from the experiences and analyses being generated by people
who are closely and rigorously engaging this form of state violence, and perhaps this is the best way to
respond to the question youve posed. I dont know that the thing were naming as the abolitionist movement
has calcified to the point that it has developed a truly parochial, common set of political paradigms and
protocolsat least, not in its current rendition as a latetwentieth- and earlytwenty-first-century radicalism
(one could say there were at least two predominant, contradictory understandings of abolition during the
middle-to-late part of the nineteenth century, as it was taken up by white abolitionists and enslaved and non-
enslaved black abolitionists). Im not saying that there arent some persistent assumptions guiding this
emerging movement that reproduce oppressive racial, gender, sexual, and class logics; rather, what Im getting
at is that the field of abolitionist politics and discourses is contingent, fragile, and flexible enough at this
moment that it may not be a question of whether it needs to change and adapt to accommodate the material
and historical truths of imprisoned/detained trans and gender-non-conforming people. Instead, the issue may
be one of whether and how multiple abolitionisms can articulate with each other in a way that poses a
legitimate threat to transform the current condition. What wed be talking about is a conception of political
struggle that visualizes the abolition/transformation of various, specific, perhaps non-comparable forms of
imprisonment that are sometimes lumped together within the same institutional designation: prison. It may be
the case that we cant and shouldnt attempt to compare (or conflate) the sometimes drastically different forms
of policing and imprisonment targeting different bodies and populations, and instead engage them as relatively
specific, but structurally connected forms of state violence. This, I think, might give the work of abolition a rich
set of political tools as well as organizing strategies. With all respect to my colleagues whove spent much time
and energy constructing them, I dont think there can be such a thing as a singular or definitive abolitionist
mission statement. We need many of them, and each needs to rigorously understand what its mission
is attempting to engage. BB: One thing that I think the prison movement doesnt have is a lot of
information about this group. People need to make the information available; once people know the
facts, I think its pretty self-explanatory. Thats what I think could happen with this in this age of computers, is
that Web sites that are about prison abolition should be linked or somebody needs to be coming up with
numbers and concepts and storieslike what is happening. I dont see that stuff too much on the Web. [At]
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Prison Activist Resource Center (PARC), where I do my prison abolitionist work, we have a resource directory
and we have a pretty large LGBT section that goes in to prisoners, about somewhere between 5,000 and
10,000 of those a year go in to prisoners, and based on the replies that we get back, prisoners tell us on
average they share this with fifteen other prisoners. Were trying to solicit their stories and were trying to
create a blog page where we can excerpt stories from prisoners letters and put that up, so people out here in
the free world can understand, because they cannot understand, because they dont know. If you want to
support prisoners, you dont take over the movement; you encourage prisoners to create their own movement
and you support that movement. You cant run that from out here, but you have to make a way available to
them for them to have a voice, and you can do support work on a daily basis just like you do all your other
support work. You live your politics by supporting your work and making a way for others to support their own.
RG: (A lot of the information in this answer can be found in the Welfare Warriors Research Collaborative
publication A Fabulous Attitude, which I co-authored.) Last spring, NYC-based members of Transforming
Justice, including the Audre Lorde Project, Queers for Economic Justice, and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project
met with two members of the Disability Justice Collective, Mia Mingus and Sebastian Margaret, to talk about
the overlapping ways that ableism, poverty, transphobia, and racism construct the prison industrial complex.
We talked a lot about expanding our understanding of places of incarceration to include psych hospitals, group
homes, and homeless shelters, but also we talked about how we can intentionally do abolitionist work in a way
that centers the disabled people within Transforming Justice and our communities. The conversation really
depended on our commitment to disability justice as an abolitionist process, not just a principle that we hold.
According to the US Census, 54.4 million people in the US live with disabilities, and a recent study by the
Center for Economic and Poverty Research found that half of adults who experience poverty are disabled. This
is something that the Welfare Warriors Research Collaborative found when asking our community members
about their experiences with poverty and disability. We also found that a substantial number of low-income
queer and trans people dealt with police violence because of the NYPDs ableist racism and
homophobia/transphobia. We werent surprised when we learned that the percentage of people who named
they dealt with police violence because of policing of disability was the same as the percentage of people who
said they dealt with police violence because of policing of sex work. Of course, we also understood that it
wasnt just disability or sex work that the police were regulating, but also that the folks who were disabled or
sex workers were most often low-income, homeless, and people of color who were queer and trans. The
experiences of shame and isolation when navigating police violence are central issues for trans and gender-
non-conforming people, especially people who are people of color, immigrants, low-income, and disabled.
When we asked people how they navigate, 71 percent of people said they rely only on themselves when
dealing with immigration issues; nearly half said they rely only on themselves when dealing with legal issues. If
we want to create an abolitionist movement that faces the realities of people navigating the prison
industrial complex, then we must create strategies to generate safety and connection. So many low-
income trans and gender-non-conforming people in New York City are not leaving their homes or their
shelters as a proactive way of navigating transphobia and other forms of violence. If were trying to
build a grassroots movement that encompasses all of us, we need to make sure shame and isolation
are challenged and incorporated into our organizing. Of course we are also not victims; we are fighting
back and navigating state violence all the time, and trans people are doing incredible work around the shame
and isolation that the prison industrial complex creates. When the Welfare Warriors Research Collaborative
asked our community, low-income queer and trans people, how we healed from discrimination and violence,
114 community members answered: We tell others what happened (54 percent); we write in journals (40
percent); we have fun (35 percent); we exercise (30 percent); we meditate (31 percent); we make art (25
percent); and we pray (58 percent). CG: How might the abolitionist movement speak to the demands and
needs of categories of labor excluded from mainstream union politics such as sex work and incarcerated work?
How do these labor politics fit into configurations of class struggle by low-income LGBTQ communities of color
fighting campaigns for economic justice in both the neoliberal city and rural areas? DR: This is crucial and
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difficult work because it has to address an intense confluence of unions internal political hegemonies, late-
neoliberal capitals repression and disposal of entire categories of workers, and the particular forms of
criminalization reserved for laborers who are already presumed to be destined for some form of early death or
imprisonment: Here Im thinking of prison labor, undocumented workers, sex workers, and young (urban and
rural) black and brown people whose only access to a real income is through the underground economy. So,
there has to be an alternative to mainstream union politics, since the structural conditions confronting
these kinds of workers are quite literally not legible to a conventional union membership or agenda.
In other words, when youre focusing on workers who are not only fighting for basic economic survival
(what we often call economic justice), but are simultaneously engaging the systemic violence of
criminalization and policing, as well as the spectrum of institutionalized violence formed around the
disciplining and enforcement of normative genders and sexualities, you are transcending and really
obliterating the parameters of a union politics. So I have no programmatic thoughts for how abolitionist
struggles might adequately address this state of crisis, but I do think that an immediate step would be to
develop a more multilayered, dynamic, and complex understanding of what criminalization is, how it works,
when and where its mobilized, why its technologies change and dont change, and so forth. To adequately
comprehend the sites of struggle your question lays out is to build an understanding of how the technologies of
criminalization not only lead to people being policed and locked up, but also lead to the most hyper-vulnerable
workers being excluded or marginalized from entire categories of political advocacy. Criminalization is a
violence of the social imagination that constantly creates the prison and policing regime, and works to
eliminate certain people from the realm of legitimate politics. Abolitionism is uniquely positioned to
illuminate and expound on this. BB: You have to do the work, you have to put the information out there, you
have to form a group that builds respect in the movement by being there, and then you have to demand a
voice. Were queers, we know, we have to take a space for ourselves, thats the only way well ever get
any space. And we cant just go fuck that and walk away. Its a process; we have work to do to earn
it, we have to do it based on our politics. The thing you learn in prison is everybodys a number,
anybody can say anything, but not everybody can do anything; anybody can talk the talk but not
everybody walks the walk, and if we want people to pay attention to us and take us seriously, we have
to walk the walk. We have to do work and then we have a right to demand, and we should be strong in
those demands. And we all know that organized queers have never been known to be the quiet ones.
RG: When the Welfare Warrior Research Collaborative, a research and activist group made up of low-income
queer and trans people, mostly of color, interviewed our community about interactions with the police, the
people who identified as trans and the people who identified as currently homeless had the highest rate of
interactions with the police. Of seven people who identified as sex workers, five of people had been strip-
searched more than once. Nine people reported policing targeting based on gender expression, five of these
nine people said they had been strip-searched more than once. Thirty people reported that police stereotype
and target them based on sexual identity, and of these thirty people, fourteen said they have been strip-
searched at least once. As Angela Davis explains, the abolitionist movement and radical feminist
movements must understand strip searches performed by police and prison guards as a form of
sexual violence, if uniforms are replaced with civilian clothesthe guards and the prisonersthen
the act of strip searching would look exactly like the sexual violence that is experienced by the
prisoner who is ordered to remover her clothing, stoop and spread her buttocks. Some imagine that if
you stretch the politics of large unions to include everyone, all workers, then that will garner the greatest
amount of protection for people. Some might imagine that this would protect queer and trans folks who
consistently navigate this kind of sexual violence from the police. Personally, I have great doubt that
mainstream union politics will ever expand enough to encompass the priorities of low-income trans people
within informal and underground economies, as well as the quite formalized system of incarcerated labor.
Abolition is relevant for people excluded from unions and union politics because people and
communities are already taking care of and protecting themselves. For people who are doing work that
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is criminalized, an abolitionist politic supports relevant questions such as How do we protect
ourselves, each other, and practice justice without getting the state involved? CG: What kinds of political
alternatives does the abolitionist movement offer in the face of current prevailing post-racial and neoliberal
ideology? DR: I can speak in a very incomplete way to what abolitionism can offer in terms of a radical racial,
anti-racist politics. In my interpretation of it, the logic of an abolitionist position is that it is a direct and
radical historical confrontation with the living legacies of anti-black racial slavery, racial colonialism,
white supremacist nation-building, as theyve differently converged in a nation-building project. So one
of the most compelling political alternatives abolition can offer is a pedagogical commitment to
learning and teaching how these systems are central to our everyday, historical present. The
fraudulence of a post-racial (or even post-racist) society is not hard to showyou can just go to the US
governments own socioeconomic and criminal justice data to demystify the bullshitbut whats far more
difficult is building a racial/anti-racist politics that is about liberation rather than reform and the abolition of
genocide rather than genocide management. BB: We are not post-racial; we have racism that occurs every
fucking day. I think they should not be fooled by the hype: Who owns the media? Its not people of color. I
would say the media takes this and that and says this movement [Obamas election] means were past
race; this in itself is a new chapter of racism. Its a way of saying, we dont have to worry about that
anymore, even though we know that racism occurs every day in our lives and all around us. Dont be
fooled by the bullshit. Theyll [the big money that owns media] take any opportunity, they pay people millions of
dollars to figure out how to talk to us and convince us that things are different than how they are. If racism had
ended, there wouldnt be more than two million, gazillion, however many people of in prison; 60 to 70 percent
of them are people of color. Who gets jobs? Who has the highest unemployment rates? All the numbers are
there: We are not past racism. It took us 500 and however many years to get us where we are; its not gonna
change in a day or in one election. We made a step maybe, which theyll try and take away from us as soon as
they can. But I mean what the fuck is the Tea Party about? Its not about tea; it aint about trans, either. RG:
We are neither post-racial nor post-racism. I think that abolitionist movements center and respond to the
incredible amount of racist state violence and warfare that people every day have to navigate, and
make clear links between the prison industrial complex and chattel slavery, colonialism, white
supremacy, and anti-black racism. But it is unclear how an abolition movement operates as a political
alternative beyond holding up the lie of post-racial ideology and promoting a politic, like Dylan said, that is
about liberation rather than reform, and the abolition of genocide rather than genocide management.
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AltAbolition Meiners
Only abolition can effectively collapse institutions of structural violence, education
reform only acts as prison reform that allows the carceral state to expand its power
Meiners 13 (Erica Meiners is a professor of education and women's and gender studies at Northeastern Illinois University Why Prison?, edited by David Scott,
Cambridge University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/socal/detail.action?docID=1303675 Published 2013, DOA: 7/26/17).
EL
As prison reform organisations lobby for alternatives to incarceration (particularly for populations afforded exceptionality
status, like pregnant women and juveniles), it is important to trace how these alternatives are created, developed and implemented and to track the relationships of these alternatives to the
carceral state. The construction of alternatives to incarceration also offers us the opportunity to engage with the changing conceptions of the state and the corresponding ways identities are
sutured, often through affect, to these new state practices/ formations. By alternatives to incarceration and punishment, I refer to a range of programmes like the culture of calm in Chicago
public schools (Huston, 2010) and, more widely, the
limited moves in some school systems to include forms of restorative
justice and the extension in many states to include boot camps and military programmes into their
menu of public educational options. I also include the growing number of programmes that are often court-mandated for at-risk youth: anger management
(men) and self-esteem (women). Academics and those invested in prison reform (or educational reform) are often
called to support these alternatives and we often evaluate, grant-write and endorse these options
because these are alternatives to prison or detention for young people. Yet these alternatives, often
provided by community-based, non- profit entities that wield considerable power, participate in
forming a neoliberal state capable of government from a distance (N. Rose, 1999; see also Cooper and Sim, Chapter 10 of this
volume). It is not immediately clear whether these programmes extend or soften the carceral state. The relationships between these programmes and the state are nuanced, forming networks
of power that remind us that the decentralisation key to neoliberal policies does not mean that the state withdraws rather, the
states relationships and abilities
to negotiate power, to govern from a distance, shift and potentially expand. A key concern is whether
young people are made more vulnerable by supporting and implementing, for example, the
proliferation of anger management programmes in lieu of in-school detentions. Questions remain as we move into this
terrain: how do these programmes facilitate or advance our collective goals of liberation? and how do these programmes function as part of the carceral state? When community
When schools
programmes such as Alcoholics Anonymous become court- mandated and/or state-organised, potentially radical, democratic and healing practices are transformed.
start to offer restorative justice practices and these practices are tied to juvenile justice systems, there
must be assessments about what is won and what is lost with these moves. These should not be investigations that limit us
but rather challenge and question our work. Victor Rios (2011) in his ethnographic research in Oakland, California, with forty young Latino and black men over a three-year period, the
overwhelming majority of whom had their first encounter with police in or near a public school, offers scholars and organisers concrete insights into how increasingly integrated carceral
systems prison, police, school and more punish young men. While studying sociology in graduate school, Rios chafed at the frameworks provided to understand poverty, as these failed to
highlight a key factor he had learned: the carceral state is not broken; it is doing precisely what it was designed to do.
The state had not abandoned the poor; it had reorganized itself, placing priority on its punitive
institutions, such as the police, and embedding crime control discourses and practices into welfare
institutions, such as schools. For Rios, the pathways taken by young men he works with are neither surprising nor arbitrary. While mainstream media may feature
stories of outrage at the arrest or detention of young people, including those I have cited in this article (Salecia Johnson and Alexa Gonzales), as Rios states, the experiences of
these youth are not surprising. Rios reminds us that the carceral state is a designed and manufactured
set of interlocking systems and the response is not to tweak or adjust this system. We do not need
better trained police in schools, or improved juvenile justice prisons. We must rebuild schools and
communities that do not require these structures: abolition. While an abolition epistemology also
pushes for an end to the school- to-prison pipeline through the elimination of punitive school
disciplinary policies, we must also work to open up other avenues and question how our communities
and practices have naturalised punishment and isolation (see Scott, Chapter 15). Prisons, Angela Y. Davis (2005: 967) states,
have thrived over the last century precisely because of the absence of those resources and the persistence of some
of the deep structures of slavery. They cannot be eliminated unless new institutions and resources are
made available to those communities that provide, in large part, the human beings that make up the
10
prison population. To build stronger and safer communities and schools, we must transform our conceptions of what makes us
secure and what makes our lives and communities just. If we are invested in moving away from our punishing democracy, our schools-to-
prisons pipeline, our incarceration nation, it is not enough to take down prisons: we must name how our democratic institutions continue to
shut out millions from the best of pathways and then remake these institutions. This has never been more vital. Horrified
at the downstate trips to adult prison offered to Chicagos 15-year-old youth of color? Then let us reshape our institutions to ensure that other pathways, including college and/or flourishing
wage employment, are not just imaginable but available and expected.
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AltAbolition Critical Criminology
The alternative is to affirm abolition our alternative opens up space in education

spaces to challenge the normalized logics of the state that are mobilized through
education and daily lives. This challenge of dominant ideologies will allow for more
revolutionary praxis to materialize, vote neg to affirm this space as a place to adopt
revolutionary praxis rather than just reform, reform only continues, intensifies, and
misshapes the current systems of the carceral state.
Brown and Schept 16 [Michelle, Prof. Sociology @ U Tennessee; and Judah, Prof. School of Justice Studies @ Eastern Kentucy, "New abolition, criminology and a critical carceral
studies." Punishment & Society, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1462474516666281]
A critical carceral studies is required to intervene in dominant criminological narratives about the
carceral state in order to broaden and sharpen abolitionist analytical vantages. We offer an abolitionist
perspective as a mode of analysis, a way in which to meaningfully disrupt our foundations and to
retrieve the invisible histories of subjugation and freedom that criminology was built intentionally with-
out. Such unsettling disturbs the prisons naturalized place in American physical landscapes, cultural
discourses, lived experiences, and moral economies as well as in the intellectual landscape and
knowledge production of criminology. It asks what could have been there instead as well as what was
always there and unacknowledged. It asks how conservative and liberal discourses played and continue to play primary roles in the production of this
space and the formation of the carceral state. It insists criminologists give attention to the racialized social suffering and
devastation that mass incarceration has produced across generations, and the incredible survivability
of the abolitionists that have risen out of this experience. Against these contexts, the keywords and dominant
discourses of criminology may be productively destabilized. And while this article has focused upon the unprecedented
circumstances of the United States in relation to both mass incarceration and abolition, we are not
suggesting that the modes of analysis specific to the prison industrial complex and new abolition are
generalizable. The global project and epistemologies of abolition require careful historical and
contextual work. We are in need of new frameworks that will allow us to recognize the specific forms of
carcerality that materialize in multiple contexts planet-wide and the freedom and emancipatory
struggles they engender. As Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, UK, and European scholars have made clear, anti-carceral critiques
develop out of the specific historical structures of cultural context. What we offer comes from a unique historical conjuncture
symptomatic of the United States. We look forward to new and innovative histories and modes of analysis born of
abolition, ways to pursue what Davis (2016: 139) names as the possibility of political alliances that will move us in
the direction of transnational solidarities from Ferguson to Palestine, Christmas Island to Lampedusa. Criminology has been an important
contributor to the empirical narrative of how the state became carceral, that is how the powers to police and punish drive the
boundaries and borders of everyday life. The challenge that remains is to work with and learn from
those in the crucible of carceral experience in order to move through critique to the rigorous,
promising work of envisioning and practicing a world otherwise. In that sense, the project of abolition remains an invitationan
open questionfor criminologists.
The dismantling of the carceral state ideology is a prerequisite to material abolition of

prisons and the extensions of the prison regime that are in all of our lives, we must do
this through spaces like debate where this praxis has legitimate consideration, there is
no way we can do this through the state
Brown and Schept 16 [Michelle, Prof. Sociology @ U Tennessee; and Judah, Prof. School of Justice Studies @ Eastern Kentucy, "New abolition, criminology and a critical carceral
studies." Punishment & Society, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1462474516666281]
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Criminology has been a key site, in its varied forms, for the reproduction of the very carceral logics we aim to dismantle. The
ways in which we assume,
write, and lecture about carceral and police power play an important role in carrying the regime
forward, reproducingreformingits logics, training the next generation of its players and, in the
process, further calcifying its legitimacy (Schept et al., 2015). Abolition of the materiality or edifice of the prison
industrial complex will require the abolitionthe dismantling, changing, and building anewof the
normative discourses and vocabularies, the ways of thinking and being, that constitute the conditions of the prisonindustrial complexs (PIC)
possibility and which derive their legitimacy in part from criminology (Foucault, 1980). One key contribution of new abolitionist work is the
interruption of dominant understandings of crime, law, punishment, safety and accountability, and
justice, and the generation of alternative vocabularies and analyses from which to begin to work our way out of the carceral state. This work brings the undiscussable into
the discussion, asking us to reconceptualize violence, victims, perpetrators, rehabilitation, safety, and
accountability through the affective and emotional lives of the actors closest to and locked within the
PIC. To take seriously the embeddedness of carceral logics as well as the lived experience of carcerality produces epistemological
engagements that necessarily and foundationally destabilize the keywords of criminology. Such work
goes far to ensure that survivability and precarity become visible as political events within the
structural context of US criminal justice. This pursuit is one avenue by which to create the conditions
for the legibility of everyday racialized state violence (Martinot and Sexton, 2003) and its attendant oppressions out
of which may come a transformative set of questions and possibilities about the nature of injury, harm, and accountability. We introduce this possibility
through the systematic dismantling of a series of criminological keywords, a disruption that, if central
to our foundations, analysis, and practice, might open up transformative spaces within our training,
pedagogy, and practice. Mass incarcerationand the US system of criminal justicedepends upon criminalization. While this is problematic in and of itself
for those who value understanding the structural conditions that create harm (and acts defined as crime ), mass incarceration in the carceral era
depends upon the production of vulnerability through forms of neoliberal dispossession and its
consequent criminalization at an unprecedented scale. This assemblage is apparent in the
criminalization of poverty, addiction, homelessness, and mental illness (Beckett and Herbert, 2009; Wacquant, 2009);
children and youth (Rios, 2011); women (Richie, 2012); migrants (Moran et al., 2013; Mountz and Loyd, 2014; Weber and Pickering, 2011); race
(Alexander, 2012); sexuality (Spade, 2011; Stanley and Smith, 2011); and disability (Ben-Moshe et al., 2014), to name a few categories, creating a vast
swathe of new carceral subjects. To be clear, the carceral subject is a form of life that inhabits states of precarity
continuously and is thus dedicated to projects of survivability. Criminologists must contend with the reality that the
disciplines interdependency with the state agencies that comprise criminal justice is what
produces (and reproduces through reformation) criminalization and the carceral (Morrison, 2004). Normative treatments of
violence as fundamentally interpersonal, individualized, and natural deny the multiple forms of
structural violence inflicted by the neoliberal state through its prosthetic institutions (policing, prisons, detention,
etc.), legislative and administrative policies (dismantling of welfare, criminalizing of poverty, perpetual wars), and collusions with corporate power
to secure accumulation and divest from the social wage. Without an understanding of these structural relations, most efforts
to respond to crime reproduce configurations of violence. A move away from criminalization means an
effort to reconceptualize crime and address violence without sole reliance (or, in some cases, any reliance) upon
criminal justice, specifically law enforcement or imprisonment. In the US, these efforts are increasingly prevalent
across cities where organizers share training, curricula, and workshops that emphasize emergent strategies in pushing back
against community violence, school-to-prison pipelines, imprisonment, and police violence. As Dean Spade
writes of abolition in his visionary and definitive treatment of the killing effects of administrative law upon transgender persons, Across the country, racial- and economic-
justicecentered feminist, queer, and trans organizations are developing methods of addressing violence that do not involve the police or criminal courts. This work has been
taken up in different forms and with different areas of focus. Groups working on these strategies in recent years include Safe OUTside the System (SOS Collective) of the
Audre Lorde Project in New York City; For Crying Out Loud! and Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA) in Seattle; The Northwest Network of Bisexual, Trans,
Lesbian and Gay Survivors of Abuse, Creative Interventions in Oakland, Community United Against Violence (CUAV) in San Francisco, Philly Stands Up!, Project NIA in
Chicago, and generationFIVE and Generative Somatics, among many others. Indeed, both authors are active in such nascent community groups in the more remote contexts
of urban Appalachia, where regional organizers are trained by and/or study the curricula of national leaders and key organizational centers in racial justice and abolitionist
efforts. Abolition, in this sense, is again familiar in that it is about understanding more fullyacross time and spacethat we cannot talk about the root conditions of crime,
violence, and precarity unless we are talking about health (Loyd, 2014), education (Meiners, 2007), economy (Aviram, 2015; Schept, 2015; Wacquant, 2009), and other forms
of racial and social justice at the local and national level, with an understanding that these discussions and modes of organizing have been ongoing historically outside of and
unrecognized by criminology. Following Davis (2003) and Gilmore (2007),
we must resist the urge to envision abolition as an
alternative metaphorical and material edifice that can fill the footprint of the prison (Davis, 2003: 107). Rather,
seen as a set of relationships, abolition and abolitionist reforms focus on building up health,
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education, housing, jobs, and alternative approaches to harm as they also dismantle the prison. In this
manner, abolition is predicated upon the nature and possibility of freedom and emancipated forms of life . A
key lesson for criminologists in this pursuit is the acknowledgment of criminal justice as foundational to the exercise of violence and one of our largest obstacles in the pursuit
of social change. Criminology must ask what it offers in terms of an understanding of the needs of survivability and its contribution to life-extending, liberating work. In
American jurisprudence, the subject of the law is only legible as a rights-bearing individual. Notions of individual culpability and
responsibility justify the exertion of police and carceral power; notions of a free will compromised
through addictions, mental illness, or prior victimizations might mitigate the severity of the states
response but still create an individualized subject prone to coerced incapacitation and treatment by
the state. Groups who have suffered violence at the hands of the stateracial minorities, LGBTQ communities, immigrants, and refugees, as a small sampledo not
gain the kind of recognition through law and rights claims that supports structural transformation. Reliance upon the law as a space for claims
to dignity (Christie, 1981; Simon, 2014) too often risk reproduction of these liberal formations. The vast majority of
policy reform efforts in American criminal justice begin at the compromised locus of law and the
individualized neoliberal subject. A critical carceral studies is attuned to the confluence of liberal legal constructs with neoliberal penalitys reliance on
responsibilization and governance through risk (Harcourt, 2010). Critical carceral studies increasingly takes up a nuanced approach to law, critically examining reification and
even reliance on law in pursuits of social justice while considering the efficacy of legal strategies to secure certain non reformist reforms (Gorz, 1967), such as increased
environmental justice victories, decriminalization, and decarceration strategies that shrink the carceral net, and minimum wage or guaranteed employment campaigns (Stein,
2014). Non-reformistreforms aim to prevent additional harms such as economic displacement and
racialized social control. While the logic of visibility and inclusion is one of the main attractions of rights claims, abolitionists are, in
general, wary of legal reforms that have created more insidious ways to entrench carceral practices
(Murakawa, 2014). In the colorblind era of contemporary US politics, the persistence of exclusion, discrimination, and inequality alongside the so-called bi-partisan consensus
on prison reform reveals the ways in which law normalizes, obscures, and reproduces the sexism, racism, and anti-queer and transgender politics constitutive of racial
capitalism. Hate crime, victims rights, rape elimination acts, and antidiscrimination laws are avenues that have also served to individualize the production of harm, isolate
victim survivors, reproduce the tools of punishment and exclusion, and expand the carceral regime. Expressing a deep skepticism of laws promises, critical race and queer
theorists have long insisted that a political project that seeks inclusion in a framework that sustains state violence and inevitably reproduces other forms of exclusion cannot be
transformative (Bell, 1992; Brown 1995; Munoz, 2009; Spade, 2011; Thuma, 2015). Given that abolition has largely been a pursuit of women of color, queer and feminist
women and men, and trans and gender-diverse people, their focus has been on the struggles with power that underlie law reforms as the site for transformation. As Meiners
efforts to pursue administrative and
(2007: 170) writes, the horizon of abolition in the contemporary US invokes a both/and necessity where
legal reforms and reduce immediate suffering in the confines of the carceral state are everyday work on
the one hand, but always in connection to efforts to place, understand, and connect this labor to a larger movement and historical struggle for freedom, without which
cooptation is imminent. The key way in which criminology and abolition challenge the foundational legitimacy of punishment is
in the historical prisoncrime disconnect (Garland, 2001; Mauer, 2006). This remains a disconnection that requires uncoupling in popular thinking
and public discourse. While there is nothing novel about pointing out that state punishment is reserved for poor people (Reiman and Leighton, 2015) and people of color
(Alexander, 2012; Mauer, 2006) in the carceral era, punishment is still undertheorized by criminologists as criminogenic in its own right, having produced social, psychic,
political, and economic harms of unprecedented proportions that are the conditions for current abolitionist projects. Nonetheless,
the violence of the
state and capital is barely recognized as such, let alone subject to the kinds of sanctions that the
criminal law metes out to those in violation of its most minute provisions. The rise of the debtors
prison, the criminalization of everyday life through regulatory infractions that fill municipal budgets , and
the uprisings in Ferguson, Baltimore, and other American cities are distinctive ways in which to understand this carceral project in the current US (Kilgore, 2014c; Shapiro,
2014).
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AltAbolition Dillion
The Prison Industrial Complex lives on within the education system. We cant just get
rid of the prison, we must work to abolition all forms of politics that replicate the
structure of the prison. Its try or die we have to imagine ANYTHING better rather
than to surrender ourselves to the state
- This cards dope cuz its like we cant surrender we have to fight back against this shit Im not ok with just
sitting here while people are suffering we have to run away no matter what comes out of it anything is
better than this BS
Dillon 13 [Stephen, assistant professor of Queer Studies, holds a B.A. from the University of Iowa and a
Ph.D. in American Studies with a minor in Critical Feminist and Sexuality Studies from the University of
Minnesota | Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State, Dillon | Vol. 1 pg 228
232] //shuler
There is another critical warning embedded in Daviss speech. There is a danger in Critical Prison studies mistaking the end of the prison for the end of
power. Fugitive Life positions the prison as site from which to advance the study of power; the object is important, but not essential. The
prison
could disappear tomorrow and the forms of power that gave rise to its reign could live on in other
forms. Indeed, this is one of the lessons of the Control Unit at Lexington. The Lexington unit was shut down, but a new unit opened up in Florida,
another in California, another in Colorado, and on and on. All the while the Federal Prison at Marion has held prisoners in isolation since 1972. The end
of Lexington was a symptom that could have been misunderstood as a solution. Daviss writing from prison addresses the problem of mistaking the
prison for power when confronting and theorizing the politics of incarceration. In the 1971 essay Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation,
sole purpose of the police was to intimidate blacks and to to persuade us with their
Davis argues that the
violence that we are powerless to alter the conditions of our lives.529 Davis theorizes the violence of police and
prisons as pervasive and unrelenting. Throughout the essay, Davis names the complicity between an anti-blackness as old as liberal freedom and new
forms of penal and policing technologies that emerged in the 1970s in response to political upheaval and insurrection. Davis calls for the abolition of
what she terms the law-enforcementjudicial- penal network in addition to arguing for the construction of a mass movement that could contest the
victory of fascism.530 Yet, in line with the political imaginaries at the time, Davis wanted more than an end to the prison and the violence of the police.
Like other early black feminist writing, Davis did not just call for the overthrow of one form of state power so that a new one may take its place. Instead,
The prison was made
Davis implied that the social order itself must be undone. For Davis, the prison was not the primary problem.
possible by the libidinal, symbolic, and discursive regimes that actualized the uneven institutionalized
distribution of value and disposability along the lines of race, gender, and sexuality. Davis called for the
total epistemological and ontological undoing of the forms of knowledge and subjectivity that were
produced by the racial state. In short, hope, for Davis, meant that the prison could not have a future, and more so, that
a world that could have the prison would need to end as well. This insight of Daviss is why Critical Prison studies must
engage queer of color and feminist of color scholarship. The critique of the prison advanced by many scholars of the prison does not
comprehend the forms of devaluation that render poor women of color and queer people of color
vulnerable to the power that makes the prison possible. As I have been arguing through Fugitive Life, the prison is
more than an institution, more than cement and steel walls, more than razor wire. In her 1979 essay, Coming of
Age: A Black Revolutionary the Black Panther and Black Liberation Army member Safiya Bukhari described this when she wrote, The maturation
process is full of obstacles and entanglements for anyone, but for a black woman it has all the markings of a Minotaurs maze. I had to say that, even
though nothing as spectacular takes place in the maturation process of the average black woman.531 Like the writings of Assata Shakur and Davis,
Bukhari argues that everyday life in the free world mimicked and replicated her experience of incarceration. For her, black womens lives are a story of
humiliation, degradation, deprivation, and waste that [starts] in infancy and [lasts] until death, but unlike stories of spectacular repression and brutality in
the prison, the forms of subjection and subjugation black women experience are so banal that metaphors fail to describe them.532 For Bukhari, the
Greek myth of the Minotaurs maze describes the impossibility of escape that confronts black women and other people surrounded by capitalism, white
supremacy, and sexism. Yet the analogy fails because the impossibility of escape is not isolated to a maze or a prisonit describes the mundane
contours of the world. Bukhari, Davis, and Shakur are three women who have all been prisoners and fugitives, and their critiques of the prison and
neoliberalism emerged from these two symbiotic positionalities. The fugitive and the prisoner are figures we can turn to as
the sites of an immanent critique of the states policing and penal powersfigures produced by those
same formations. As fugitives and prisoners, Davis, Shakur, and Bukhari could see what they could not see beforeinvisible things became
glaring in an absence they no longer inhabited, and what had always been visible became strange and unfamiliar. Running away was a
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tactic that challenged the power of the neoliberal-carceral state, yet it also opened up new formations
of knowledge and politics. Yet, like Jennys flight from the police and the regulatory power of knowledge in American Woman, Davis,
Shakur, and Bukhari were not only forced to flee the police and disappear into the world of the underground; they have also been fugitives from
They were always trying to flee the forms of knowledge constitutive of the racial
normative modes of thought.
state, the prison, heteronormativity, and new formations of global capital. For all three, there might not be a
way out, but that does not mean you stay put. In his correspondence with Barbara Smith, the white anti-racist and antiimperialist
political prisoner David Gilbert describes the imperative to escape through his transcription of a poem to Smith written by the Turkish political prisoner
Nazim Hikmet, Its This Way. I stand in the advancing light, my hands hungry, the world beautiful. My eyes cant get enough of the trees - theyre so
hopeful, so green. A sunny road runs through the mulberries, Im at the window of the prison infirmary. I cant smell the medicine carnations must be
blooming nearby. Its this way: being captured is beside the point, the point is not to surrender .533 Even though
Gilberts body is immobilized, and will be until he dies, he remains committed to producing modes of thought that take flight. This is the lesson
of the fugitive, a lesson Critical Prison studies must grasp if the affects, desires, discourses, and ideas central to the prison are to end along with
its cages, corridors, and guard towers. The prisons end must exceed the institution. The fugitive can lead the way.
Even if escape is impossible, we still have to run.
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AltImaginative Abolition
Thus, our alternative is one of imaginative abolition. Instead of finding despair, we find
power in abolition. In order to build a world without prisons, we need to imagine our
abolition in the here-and-now. Abolition is a transtopia, abolition is education.
McDonald, 14 CeCe, freedom fighter (Forward, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison
Industrial Complex: Expanded Second Edition, 2014
My political education began while I was incarcerated for defending myself against a racist and
transphobic attack. During my time in prison, I began reading books about revolutionary politics, like
the autobiographies of Assata Shakur and Huey P. Newton, Angela Daviss Are Prisons Obsolete?, and
the first edition of Captive Genders. It was here that I learned about Miss Major, who helped lead the
Stonewall Uprising, and how strong trans women of color like her were kicked out of the official story
by transphobia, capitalism, racism, sexism, and so many other things that dull the light of our
intellectual past. Our schools are filled with clichd textbooks and false histories, and once Id read up,
I realized Id been hoodwinked for most of my life. These radical books helped move me in a direction
where I can now continue this legacy that these profound leaders have left. While inside, I started
sharing this knowledge with the other prisoners who I talked to at lunch, dinner, and break time. In the
beginning, I was scaredI was a trans woman surrounded by so many men, but they were really inviting and
sincere. They wanted to know who I was as a person, as a trans woman, and they wanted to know my
struggles as a trans woman. This surprised me because the media portrays people in prison as angry, evil, and
deceiving. For me it was the oppositethose behaviors came from the staff more than they did from the other
inmates. I figured, if I can connect with these people that society deems criminals, then why cant I do
this with everybody who is oppressed? I would explain things like capitalism, sexism, transphobia, and
the prison industrial complex using analogies from my life, because we all know it can get boring when
people just get really intellectual about it. We have to make prison abolition inviting, so people can see
it from their own perspective. Building these relationships with other inmates was really deep for me,
because its easy to believe the lies the media says about people in prison. I always believed I would never be
one of those people who ended up incarcerated, especially because growing up, I saw my father in prison.
Most people in prison arent the criminals that the media portrays us to be. A lot of people in prison are
political warriors who stood up for our freedom, and were here because of their work. Trans women of color
are also targeted by the police state, and we have the highest rates of incarceration and violence. Millions of
other people also get caught up in this system that evolved from the slave trade and is still maintained
through racism, imperialism, patriarchy, and every other form of hierarchy. Like slavery, there is no
other way around the violence of the PIC, so we have to destroy it. We cant hold onto these powerful
institutions that oppress people and expect that they will go away just because we reform them. Of
course, change is good, but in instances of systematic oppression, like prisons, there is no way for it
to be reformed. Thats just like saying we can reform racismtheres no better form of racismyou
have to abolish it. Racism lives within the prison industrial complex, and in order to end that, to end
racism, wed have to abolish all those powerful institutions that allow that energy to navigate through
our lives. When I was in prison I would sit in my cell and think about how, if I got struck by lightning,
maybe I would gain superpowers so I could start kicking down all these walls. This was my form of
imaginative abolition , but I also apply it to real life. For me kicking down the walls is educating
people, and constantly educating myself. There are so many ways that we can work toward justice, but
first we have to find out what justice actually is without just throwing people in prison and believing
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thats it. As alternatives to locking people up, we can put these people back in our communities and
help them understand how they became part of this system that was created for our downfall. Right
now Im working on rebranding prison abolition in a way that connects to the people around me. You can still
be cute, and wear talons, and be an abolitionist. Along with talking about the PIC, we have to actually do
things to end it. We easily use words like activist and ally, but we often dont live up to them. Im so sick of
people walking around saying they are an advocate, activist, or ally. No, boo, if you say you showed up to a
meeting once and but just spend your day sitting online, thats not activism. There are people who put their
lives on the line every day for us to just be able to walk outside. If you know me, you know that my slogan is
The show aint over because you can put a ring on it. The mainstream LGBTQIA community believes that
because we now have gay marriage everything is better. We have to understand that there might be progress,
but we also have to look at the way trans women are being slain. There is so much work left to do, so if you
say you are an activist, Im going to hold you to that standard. And if you say you are an ally, Im going to
hold you to that standard. Currently Im working on a curriculum thats built off of books like Captive
Genders, for people who are in prison. Im building an activist training program so that people in
prison can use this information. Its going to be a school, basically, and Im going to be one of the
teachers. Im also working on building an outside component of the program, so we can tell the Department of
Corrections that once prisoners graduate from the program, we want these people to come work for us, which
will hopefully help with peoples parole. Our goal is to train people to come out of prison and to be ready to
organize in the streets, and help end recidivism by making sure people have stable housing, a livable wage,
and dont have to depend on the things that keep our people criminalized. Its fucked up to hear about the
murders of trans women every day, but I dont think prison is the solution. People that murder trans women
almost never get charged, anyway. Ending violence against trans women of color without prisons is definitely
achievable, its just going to take more than one, or two, or three, or four people. Abolition can happen but
we have to be willing to take initiative as a communityand I mean everybodyto want this, and to
feel this, and to end mass incarceration. To get there, we need to end all oppression, and books like
Captive Genders help us get there. For me, in a post-prison world, we will have free cookies for
everybody, unicorns, and really cute clothesit will be a trans-topia. Outside of imagining prison
abolition, we can hoot and holler and be mad all we want, but its not going to mean shit unless we do
the work, and we all in on this.
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AltEveryday Abolition
Our alternative is a praxis of abolition that begins with questioning the ideological
underpinnings of the affirmative. Voting negative invests in the prefiguration of
alternative worlds by practicing abolition as an everyday process.
Lamble, 11 Professor at the University of London, Birkbeck College of Law (S., TRANSFORMING CARCERAL LOGICS: 10 Reasons to Dismantle the Prison Industrial
Complex Through Queer/Trans Analysis and Action, from Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex,
AK Press)
Abolition is a broad-based,
Prison abolition is not a call to suddenly fling open the prison doors without enacting alternatives. Nor is it an appeal to a utopian ideal.
practical vision for building models today that practice how we want to live in the future. Practicing
alternatives requires different starting points , questions, and assumptions than those underlying the
current system. The existing criminal justice model poses two main questions in the face of social harm: Who did it? How can we punish them? (And increasingly, how can we make money
from it?). Creating safe and healthy communities requires a different set of questions: Who was harmed?
How can we facilitate healing? How can we prevent such harm in the future?97 Developing alternatives with these latter goals in
mind prioritizes the needs of people who have been harmed and emphasizes more holistic, prevention-oriented responses to violence. Such frameworks not only re duce the need for prisons, but also
work to strengthen communities by reducing oppression and building community capacity more broadly. Abolitionist strategies differ from reformist tactics
by working to reduce, rather than strengthen, the power of the prison industrial complex. 98 Prison
reforms, however well-intentioned, have tended to extend the life and scope of prisons. So-called
gender-responsive prisons are a prime example; reforms intended to address the needs of women
have led to increased punishment and imprisonment of women, not less. By contrast, abolitionist strategies embrace tactics that undermine the prison system
rather than feed it. There are many different approaches to abolition, some of which are outlined in the classic Instead of Prisons Handbook.99 To highlight a few: Starve the system. Abolition
means starving the prison industrial complex to deathdepriving it of financial resources, human
resources, access to fear-mongering, and other sustaining rhetoric. 100 Enacting a moratorium on
prison expansion is one key strategy; this means preventing governments and private companies from
building any new prisons, jails, or immigration detention spaces; prohibiting increases in police and
prison budgets; and boycotting companies that make a profit from imprisonment. Starving the prison system means
fighting new laws that increase prison time or create new criminal offenses (for example, hate crimes laws and mandatory minimum sentences), and redirecting money and resources into community-
Prisons are just one of the many cages that harm our communities. Racism,
based alternatives. Stop using cages.
colonialism, capitalism, and ableism are other kinds of cages, which both sustain the prison system
and give it force. Dismantling the prison industrial complex means working to eliminate all cages that
foster violence and oppression. Taking this broad approach is especially important when developing
alternatives, since some strategies (like electronic tagging or surveillance cameras) simply replace old
cages with new ones. Getting people out of cages and preventing people from being put in those
cageseven one person at a timeis a key abolitionist strategy. Develop effective alternatives. Dismantling the prison industrial complex is
impossible without developing alternative community protocols for addressing violence and harm. Creating abolitionist alternatives means encouraging non-punitive responses to harm, enacting
community-based mechanisms of social accountability, and prioritizing prevention. Such alternatives include restorative/ transformative justice initiatives, community-based restitution projects, social and
economic support networks, affordable housing, community education projects, youth-led recreational programs, free accessible healthcare services, empowerment-based mental health, addiction and
Prison abolition is
harm reduction programs, quality employment opportunities, anti-poverty measures, and support for self-determination struggles.101 Practice everyday abolition.
not simply an end goal but also an everyday practice. Being abolitionist is about changing the ways we
interact with others on an ongoing basis and changing harmful patterns in our daily lives. Abolitionist
practice mean questioning punitive impulses in our intimate relationships, rethinking the ways that we
deal with personal conflicts, and reducing harms that occur in our homes, workplaces, neighborhoods,
and schools. In this way, living abolition is part of the daily practice of creating a world without
cages.
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AltIntimate Abolition
Thus, vote negative to engage in a praxis of intimate abolition. Our alternative attunes
itself to contours of the prison regime that operate in the here and nowthe intimate
affects, desires and ideologies central to state-sanctioned violence. Without the alt, the
impact is slow quiet, death for those targeted by the carceral regime.
For
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Can

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racial state, the prison, heteropatriarchy, and new formations of global capitalism. For them, there
394
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AltAbolition-Study
Thus, our alternative is abolition-study. The education-based regime of study is

configured by white supremacist colonialism. Abolition-study is the precondition for
studious play.
Returning to the debate from the early 19th century on the question of what is to be done with freed
blacks, across the differences of all the participants in this debate the egalitarian elitists,
accommodating separatists, and the white, paternal liberals and conservativesthey shared a
commonality of promulgating narratives that reduced the possibilities for regimes of study to the
education-based one. Conversely, they neglected to consider alternative regimes of studydespite the
fact that the free blacks who were the objects of their debate were themselves already enacting such
regimes, such as in escaped slaves maroon communities. To break out of the current continuation of
such debates that limit themselves to such education-focused simplifying narratives, we need to take a
decolonial perspective on the epistemologies that are promoted or suppressed through education
institutions. Thus, as a way to redress the problems with the retention of modernist/colonialist assumptions in Olsons abolition-democracy, I complement it with an
approach of decoloniality, and what Mignolo calls decolonizing democracy, inspired by the autonomous indigenous self-governance in the Zapatista territories of Chiapas
(Mignolo 2011, 228). Further,
as a complement to Olsons approach that redresses his lack of attention to the
political constitution of knowledge, I advocate for both abolition-study and decolonial-study, that is,
critical investigation of the ways that white supremacy and coloniality intertwine in the education-
based regime of study and promotion of abolitionist/decolonial movement-embedded study. This view
can allow for seeing how abolitionist-study and decolonial-study can take place both within and
outside education institutions, while simultaneously confronting the white supremacist, colonial
configuration of study that is hegemonic within them. An examination of the often neglected history of
maroon communities offers an alternative regime of study: a model of intersecting abolition,
decolonial, and exodus types of study. Although Olson offers a narrative of abolitionist-democracy that varies from liberal democracy to certain
extents, by focusing on the history of formal abolitionism, thus overshadowing marronage, he limits the possible extent of his critique of the assumptions of liberal democracy
and, thereby, reproduces some of the aspects of that form of democracyparticularly some of its modernist assumptionsin his own alternative form of democracy, the
abolition-democracy. Thus,
as a way to extend his critique of liberal democracy in more radical directions, I
examine the hidden history of marronage with an eye toward theorizing its alternative, abolitionist,
decolonial forms of democracy, and especially highlighting the ways in which these involve forms of
study. The practices of maroon communities present the basis for articulating radically different
conceptions of democracy, equality, and freedom, ones that are not linked with states, capitalism,
racial divisions, or the categories of modernity (e.g., the nature/society, time/space, and primitive/modern dichotomies). Thus, I
characterize maroons as a decolonial option presenting alternative communal futures (Mignolo 2011). To
understand these maroon communities and marronage without falling back on modernist assumptions, in the following I theorize their contributions to abolitionist, decolonial,
The latter concepts provide a
exodus projects using the concepts of the common, commons, and undercommons, which are elaborated in Chapter 2.
way to highlight the importance of regimes of study in marronage that are alternative to that of the
education-based regime, and that are central for fugitive slaves to navigate the undercommons
relations within and against and with and forbetween their maroon commons and the white,
colonial, capitalist commons. This narrative approach provides an antidote to the normal use of
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modernist assumptions, such as in the ideal of public education, that delegitimizes and suppresses
such alternatives.
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AltBlack Studies
Black studies should be used to develop nuanced analyses of forms of violence and
modes of resistance
Weheliye 14 [Alexander, Prof. Introduction: black studies and black life, The Black Scholar, June 22 2014,
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Introduction%3a+black+studies+and+black+life.-a0381947360]
Overall, black studies should strive to continuously work on transforming ideas, interactions,
strategies, archives, and dreams to realize just how comprehensively coloniality of Man suffuses the
disciplinary and conceptual formations of knowledge we labor under, and how far we have to journey
in decolonizing these structures. However, creating these repositories of knowledge should not
entailas it has so oftento reinvent the proverbial wheel in each generation to ensure the continued
institutional and conceptual life of the black studies project, but rather occasion the critical re-visiting
and elaboration of the ideas generated and institutional structures fostered by previous intellectuals
without circumscribing what that may mean. Moving forward, black studies should interrogate and
offer critical elaborations of the deep connections between different forms of oppression and
obliteration without anchoring these links in either complete sameness or difference. We need to
devise truly global ways for conceptualizing how different forms of violence affect specific
communities and their modes of resistance against them, all the while not losing sight of the deep
historical and conceptual relays between racial slavery, Native American genocide, Asian indentured
servitude, structures of gendered and sexual violence, and various forms of colonialism, just to name
a few. Rather than flattening differences or presuming that these are so specific as to be radically
incommensurate, high-lighting their constitutive relationality from the vantage point of black studies
will facilitate imagining different ways of inhabiting this worldand perhaps the next onesin a more
just manner.
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AltBlack feminism
Black feminist theorizing breaks down the necropolitical functions of neoliberal-
carceral state
Dillon 13 [Stephen, assistant professor of Queer Studies @ Hampshire College, Fugitive Life: Race,
Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State,
https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/153053/Dillon_umn_0130E_13833.pdf?se]
For Shakur, the
regulations of a burgeoning neoliberal-carceral state possessed life in ways that rendered
the free world an extension of the prison. An assemblage of race, gender, capital, policing, and penal technologies produced a
symbiosis between the deindustrialized landscape of the late 20th century urban United States and the gendered racisms of an emerging prison-
industrial complex. Diffuse structural networks of racism and sexism mimicked the steel bars of a cage. This is the complicity between
freedom and captivity, the entanglements between the living and the living dead, and the
hemorrhaging of a buried past into the imagined progress of the present . For Shakur, prison looked like
and felt like nineteenth century chattel slavery: We sit in the bull pen. We are all black. All restless. And we are
all freezing.1 In the essay, affect continually forces the past to open directly onto the present.2 The sensations
and feelings of frozen skin speaks in a way that words cannot. In prison, shivering black flesh weighted with
chains looked like slavery to Shakur. As a fugitive who now has political asylum in Cuba, she understands
herself as a twenty-first century runaway slave, a maroon woman.3 Although Shakurs essay does not name neoliberalism
explicitly, we can read it as a black feminist theorization of neoliberalism at the very moment of its
emergence. Indeed, it is a narration of the drastic racialized and gendered restructurings of social and
economic life in the 1970s United States from the perspective of someone detained for resisting those
changes. Written by a captured member of the underground black liberation movement, the text names the discourses and
(state) violence neoliberalism requires yet erases. Neoliberalism is most certainly an economic
doctrine that prioritizes the mobility and expansion of capital at all costs, but its mechanisms exceed
the liberation of the market from the repression of the state. As Shakur indicates, one of the conditions of possibility for the
emergence of the neoliberal state is the kinship shared between the free world and the prisonan
affinity structured and produced by an antiblackness inaugurated under chattel-slavery. More over, as Shakur
argues throughout the essay, the technologies of immobilization utilized by the neoliberal state specifically
target black women, a process connected to the emergence of the black feminist movement in the late
1960s and early 1970s. By reading black feminist texts from the 1970s as implicit theories of neoliberalism, we can come to understand the
formation and implementation of neoliberalism in a new light. Shakur not only connects an emergent neoliberalism to a
rapidly expanding prison regime, she also links the contemporary prison to chattel slaveryan institutional,
affective, and discursive connection apprehended by Angela Daviss phrase, From the prison of slavery to the slavery of
prison .28 The connections made by Shakur between the prison and neoliberalism, and between slavery and the prison, have been thoroughly explored by many
scholars.29 Indeed, during the past two decades, a
growing body of scholarship has affirmed and extended Shakurs
analysis of blackness, slavery, and the prison by exploring what Saidiya Hartman calls the afterlife of
slavery.30 By centering racial terror in a genealogy of the prison, scholars have come to understand
the barracoons, coffles, slave holds, and plantations of the Middle Passage as spatial, discursive,
ontological, and economic analogues of modern punishment that have haunted their way into the
1
Ibid, 79.
2
See Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
3
Christian Parenti, "Assata Shakur Speaks from Exile: Post-Modern Maroon in the Ultimate Palenque," interview from October 24,
2000, http://www.assatashakur.org/maroon.htm (accessed October 2nd, 2010).
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present.4 If the carceral becomes a functional surrogate for slaverys production of social and living death, then Shakurs text also hints at another connection that has
garnered less attentionslaverys haunting possession of neoliberalism. While the prisons connection to slavery and the market
has been well explored, the contemporary markets relationship to chattel slavery has largely been
overlooked. If slaverys antiblack technologies inhabit and structure the prison, how do they live on in the operations of the market? What is the relationship between
an anti-blackness inaugurated under the Atlantic slave trade and the methods of population management used under neoliberalism? How does the absence, death, and loss
left behind by slavery connect to the formation of the contemporary neoliberal-carceral state? What
is the connection between the
necropolitics of chattel-slavery and the biopolitics of neoliberalism? To answer these questions, I read
two texts written by captive black women in the 1970s United States: Assata Shakurs "Women in Prison: How
We Are and Angela Davis's "Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves." Both texts
were composed at the very moment of the neoliberal-carceral states emergence and index the ways that black
feminism developed under and critiqued this formation. Throughout the chapter, I examine how Shakur and
Davis theorize the relationship between the carceral, the market, the population, and the body. While Daviss
essay explores black womens experiences of terror and resistance under chattel slavery in order to contest
the discourse of the black matriarch, Shakurs essay describes black womens experiences of gender,
sexuality, race, violence, and incarceration in the early 1970s. I also include a discussion of Sherley Anne
Williamss 1986 novel Dessa Rose. Although the novel was written in the mid-1980s, in the author's note, Williams cites Davis's essay
and the rise of the prison in the 1970sas providing the inspiration for the novel. Williams uses fiction to recover the histories of enslaved black women
Davis could not discover in the written record. Williams turns Davis's brief description of a uprising on a slave coffle led by a pregnant black woman into
All
a novel that theorizes the racialized, gendered, affective, and economic politics of chattel slavery and its regimes of incarceration, torture, and terror.
three texts emerge from the late twentieth-century prison (and an emergent neoliberal state) in order to
theorize chattel slavery as a history of our social, political, and economic present. Yet the texts do not
undo normative conceptions of time by deploying the conventions of fact; rather, they use fiction,
memory, and imagination to connect the forgotten, the lost, and the dead to the now. These texts
insist that the absence of memory shapes the contours of the present. While many projects on the legacy of slavery
I attempt to engage the past through its

utilize demographic data to measure slaverys extension into our present in concrete terms,
forgetting. I leave behind the world of facts, proof, and Truth in order to connect the powers of the
market across time and space through non-normative epistemologies that rely on affect, memory, and
imagination. As a matter of fact, it was the reason and rationality of mathematics, demographics, and
insurance that produced millions of corpses in the service of making millions of commodities . To be
clear, this chapter has three goals. First,
it connects the powers of market under slavery to powers of the market
under neoliberalism by exploring how black feminists made sense of the afterlife of slavery under an
emergent neoliberal state. Second, it uses black feminist engagements with loss, to assert that death
and loss undo to the progress of time so that the past lives on, and possesses the present. By engaging
death, loss, and forgetting, the texts I analyze connect penal and economic technologies in the 1970s United
States to the carceral nature of the market under chattel slavery. Finally, by constructing a critical
genealogy of the market through the writings of black feminists working within and under the
neoliberal-carceral state, I argue that under neoliberalism, the market supplements and mimics the
prison.
Black feminist thought challenges dominant epistemologies that produce anti-

blackness
Dillon 13 [Stephen, assistant professor of Queer Studies @ Hampshire College, Fugitive Life: Race,
Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State,
https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/153053/Dillon_umn_0130E_13833.pdf?se]
4
Dennis Childs, "'You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet': Beloved, the American Chain Gang, and the Middle Passage Remix," American
Quarterly Vol. 61:2 (June, 2009): 273-275.
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In the closing section of Shakurs essay What of Our Past? What of Our History? What of Our Future? she seamlessly connects the past, present, and
Black feminism is a
future in an attempt to develop the psychological force needed to build a strong black womens movement.63
movement that emerged amid the crises of global capitalism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and
state power that spanned the 1960s and 1970s. Neoliberalism is the state and corporate response to
these crises.64 Black feminism also emerged out of the failures of white feminism to center (or even
think about) race and white supremacy and the inability of the black nationalist and black liberation
movements to theorize and analyze gender, sexuality, and heteropatriarchy. In this way, the white
feminist and black nationalist movements were complicit with the forms of power they imagined they
opposed. When white feminism failed to critique the white supremacy of the state, and black
nationalists were unable to critique heteropatriarchy, both formations solidified racialized and
gendered discourses that contradicted (and undid) their aspirations for freedom and liberation. Following
Grace Hong, we can place Shakur and Daviss essays within the epistemological formation women of color feminism" that arose in the 1970s and
Women of color feminism emerged and expanded
1980s to mark the contradictions of late twentieth century U.S. capitalism.
alongside the neoliberal-carceral state, and in the case of Shakur and Daviss work, from within the
prison . By analyzing race, gender, class, sexuality, and the state as interlocking and colluding
mechanisms of power, women of color feminism can name the ways multiply-determined difference is
simultaneously central to and yet incessantly disavowed in the production and reproduction of
capital. Most critically, it understands race, gender, and sexuality not as static categories of
identification, but as processes that produce value and disposability for individuals, populations, and
forms of knowledge. 65 For Hong, women of color feminism names that which cannot be apprehended under normative ideals or hegemonic
epistemologies. As a way of knowing, women of color feminism names the repressed, the erased, and the expunged at the very moment of their
black feminists have argued that slavery is central to the economic,
formation and articulation. For more than 40 years,
political, and social present in contrast to dominant epistemologies, which relegate slavery to a
quarantined and dormant past. In so doing, black feminism is one epistemological formation that is able to
challenge the ways that the normal and banal are mobilized to obscure violence, terror, and death. By
showing how slaverys afterlife shapes the present, black feminists have made visible forms of
violence that are hidden by their routineness and normality. Black feminist scholars have worked tirelessly to make visible
what often goes unseen and unsaid, to reckon with the endings that are not over and to make connections between past and present that are unthought.
Black feminism engages the shadows and what is living there, naming what has never entered the archives that constitute evidence and fact.66 As we
will see, the work of Davis, Shakur, and Williams analyzes what is unthought, unknown, or illegible with in dominant forms of analysis .
If chattel
slavery's foundational relationship to the contemporary distribution of life and death is often under
theorized, overlooked, or erased within normative epistemologies (and within progressive, radical,
feminist, and queer formations), its connection to capitalism is an epistemological impossibility.
According to Walter Johnson, under the historical terms that frame western political economy, understanding slavery as capitalism is unthinkable
In both Smithian and Marxist
because there are no adequate epistemological instruments available to make sense of such a connection.67
economics, slavery is an un-theorized foundation to the history of capitalism, "an un-thought (even
when present) past to the inevitable emergence of the present."68 Slavery is understood to have a
temporal relation to capitalism instead of a spatial one. That is, slavery is theorized as pre-capitalist, as
opposed to animating, colluding with, or being indistinguishable from capitalism.69 The problem of slaverys
status as the unthinkable history of capitalism is not isolated to the shortcomings of economic theoryit stems from western liberal epistemologies. As
Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues, the Haitian Revolution was unthinkable in Europe and the United States because it challenged the ontological ordering of
the planet under racism and colonialism. According to Trouillot, in 1791 there was not one public debate on record in England, France, or the United
Simply, slavery did not
States on the right of slaves to achieve self-determination, let alone the right to do so through armed resistance.70
present an ethical dilemma for the white world; its moral crises were unthought.71 In a similar way, the slave
occupies the position of the unthought within dominant epistemologies. While the structural position of
the worker has animated much of the left for the last two hundred years, the positionality and demands of the
slave elude hegemonic and resistant forms of thought. For example, Boggs writes that black people remain
invisible in the white radical imagination because white Marxists regard black militants as unfinished
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products who will arrive at the understanding that racism arises from capitalism and that the working
class in the irreconcilable foe of capitalism. By doing so, the needs, demands, insights, and theories
of the black freedom struggle are made invisible and are thus unthought. Yet, the slave is not just rendered
invisible when unthought, the slave is often unthinkable even when she is present. For instance, in Commonwealth, their third book on biopolitics,
empire, and capitalism, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write: As a first approximation, then, think of this form of class struggle as a kind of maroonage.
Like the slaves who collectively escaped the chains of slavery to construct self-governing communities and quilombos, biopolitical labor-power
subtracting from its relation to capital must discover and construct new social relationships, new forms of life that allow it to actualize its productive
powers. But unlike the maroons, this exodus does not necessarily mean going elsewhere. We can pursue lines of flight while staying right here, by
transforming the relations of production and mode of social organization under which we live.72For Hardt and Negri, the forms of
class struggle required under the biopolitics of contemporary capitalism are like the tactics mobilized
by slaves, even though in the end, the essence of maroonage (escape) is not required; the multitude can
change the conditions of power by staying right where they are. By constructing equivalence across time and positionality, Hardt and Negri
erase the specificity of chattel slaverythe literal steel chains used to torture and immobilize slaves
are compared to the metaphorical chains used by capital to manage the labor of the multitude. In this
way, Hardt and Negri reproduce the fungibility of the slave (the slave will be whatever it is most useful
for the slave to be). This is what Frank Wilderson calls the ruse of analogy where grammars of
suffering that are irreconcilable are made equivalent. Simply, the alienation and exploitation of the
multitude (or the worker) is not comparable to the slaves expulsion from humanity.73 Thus, the very
attempt to empathetically identify with the slave results in the slave's obliteration. As Hartman writes, "Only if I
can see myself in that position can I understand the crisis of that position."74 In order to empathize with the slave, Hardt and
Negri insert the multitude into the position of the slave, thus eradicating the slave. The slave becomes
a worker, and is thus no longer a slave.75 For Johnson and Trouillot, slaverys connection to capitalism and
freedom is unthinkable due to the epistemological boundaries of liberal Western thought. However, as
evidenced by Hardt and Negri, even if the slave is not forgotten, even when she enters the realm of the
thinkable, even when the slave is present, she is often erased. One can stare directly at the slave and
not see her. When the slave is made equivalent with what she is not, she is disappeared. As such, the
slave and slaverys structural relation to the national order and capital is unthinkable and frequently
unthought.76 Subsequently, race and white supremacy are constructed as appendages to the state and capital, as opposed to foundations. If
slaverys relationship to capitalism and the present more broadly is unthinkable and unthought, then
black feminism is uniquely situated to engage such epistemological impossibilities. According to
Hong, women of color feminism necessarily engages the erasures inherent in regimes of knowledge.
As an analytic, it confronts what is unthinkable and unknowable.
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AltQueer of Color Critique
Queer of Color Critique challenges both racist and heteronormative epistemologies
Gumbs 10 [Alexis P; Queer Mother and Afrofuturist Trouble-Maker; We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves The
Queer Survival of Black Feminism 1968-1996]
If we reground our queer intervention in a queer of color critique, which was in a large part developed by
the Black feminists under discussion in this dissertation (Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Barbara Smith, Alexis
DeVeaux), who were explicitly invested in mothering and the domestic as sites of intellectual and
political production of an alternative social value for life itself, we will be able to actually intervene in
the narrative that is reproducing our oppression. There is a reason that the centrist state effectively
makes same-sex parenting illegal, and that the religious right tries to ban queer teachers from schools.
The pedagogical work of mothering is exactly the site where a narrative will either be reproduced or
interrupted. The work of Black mothering, the teaching of a set of social values that challenge a social
logic which believes that we, the children of Black mothers, the queer, the deviant, should not exist, is
queer work. Therefore, as a queer theorist I theorize that work. I am both pointing out the complicity of a
race-neutral (i.e. white) queer construction AND critique of the reproductive narrative in the
REPRODUCTION of the project of differential life value through the criminalization and targeting of racialized
mothers, as well as arguing the importance of an genealogy of queer theory, which as argued by Roderick
Ferguson among others, starts with Barbara Smiths Towards A Black Feminist Literary Criticism and the
Combahee River Collective Statement. Building on the work of Ferguson, Munoz, Evelyn Hammonds and
others, assert that a queer of color critique illuminates and queers the reproductive narrative through
which queer theory has constructed its own genealogy.48
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AltBlack Rage
Rage is Not Fundamentally DestructiveThe Fate of Black People Depends Upon the
Reassertion of Rage. Black female rage is therapeutic. The notion that rage is
destructive or rein trenches violence is a white supremacist justification to refuse
those colonized to express their anger towards institutions. Mainstream white culture
is terrified of our rage therefore will always socially script us as violent.
Hooks 96 [bell, Killing Rage,
http://www.thinkingtogether.org/rcream/archive/Old/S2006/comp/KillingRage.pdf]
Confronting my rage, witnessing the way it moved me to grow and change, I understood intimately that it had
the potential not only to destroy but also to construct. Then and now I understand rage to be a necessary
aspect of resistance struggle. Rage can act as a catalyst inspiring courageous action. By demanding
that black people repress and annihilate our rage to assimilate, to reap the benefits of material
privilege in white supremacist capitalist patriarchal culture, white folks urge us to remain complicit
with their efforts to colonize, oppress, and exploit. Those of us black people who have the opportunity to
further our economic status willingly surrender our rage. Many of us have no rage. As individual black people
increase their class power, live in comfort, with money mediating the viciousness of racist assault, we can
come to see both the society and white people differently. We experience the world as infinitely less hostile to
blackness than it actually is. This shift happens particularly as we buy into liberal individualism and see our
individual fate as black people in no way linked to the collective fate. It is that link that sustains full awareness
of the daily impact of racism on black people, particularly its hostile and brutal assaults. Black people who
sustain that link often find that as we "move on up our rage intensifies. During that time of my life when racial
apartheid forbid possibilities of intimacy and closeness with whites, I was most able to forget about the pain of
racism. The intimacy I share with white people now seldom intervenes in the racism and is the cultural
setting that provokes rage. Close to white folks, I am forced to witness firsthand their willful ignorance
about the impact of race and racism. The harsh absolutism of their denial. Their refusal to
acknowledge accountability for racist conditions past and present. Those who doubt these perceptions
can read a white male documenting their accuracy in Andrew Hackers work Two Nations: Black and White,
Separate, Hostile, Unequal. His work, like that of the many black scholars and thinkers whose ideas he draws
upon, highlights the anti-black feelings white people cultivate and maintain in white supremacist capitalist
patriarchy. Racial hatred is real. And it is humanizing to be able to resist it with militant rage. Forgetfulness
and denial enable masses of privileged black people to live the good life without ever coming to terms with
black rage. Addictions of all sorts, cutting across class, enable black folks to forget, take the pain and rage
away, replacing it with dangerous apathy and hard-heartedness. Addictions promote passive acceptance of
victimization. In recent times conservative black thinkers have insisted that many black folks are wedded to a
sense of victimization. That is only a partial truth. To tell the whole truth they would have to speak about the
way mainstream white culture offers the mantle of victimization as a substitute for transformation of
society. White folks promote black victimization, encourage passivity by rewarding those black folks
who whine, grovel, beg, and obey. Perhaps this is what Toni Morrisons character Joe Trace is talking
about when he shares in Jazz the knowledge his play-father Mr. Frank taught him, the secret of
kindness from white peoplethey had to pity a thing before they could like it. The presence of black
victimization is welcomed. It comforts many whites precisely because it is the antithesis of activism.
Internalization of victimization renders black folks powerless, unable to assert agency on our behalf.
When we embrace victimization, we surrender our rage.
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And using Black Rage as a politic to deal with hyper visible violence has always been
denounced and disenfranchised in political spaces even though it speaks to the core
concerns of black people.
Smith 15 (Mychal Denzel Smith is a contributing writer at The Nation, a blogger at TheNation.com and a
Knobler Fellow at the Nation Institute. He has appeared in various publications, including The
Guardian, Ebony, The Grio, The Root, The Huffington Post and GOOD magazine. The Rebirth of Black Rage
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/32370-the-rebirth-of-black-rage#)
Black rage, as a political message, had all but disappeared from the cultural and political landscape
by the time my generation came of age. The aspirations of the black political class had shifted from the
anger that animated the civil-rights and Black Power era to seeking influence through electoral politics,
where black rage does not translate into votes. Jesse Jackson had gone from agitator and organizer to
presidential candidate, while Oakland, New Orleans, Chicago, Baltimore, New York, and many other cities had voted their first black mayors
into office, and Douglas Wilder, in my home state of Virginia, had become the nations first elected black governor. The Rev. Al Sharpton
could still command media attention, but his expressions of rage were diluted by his celebrity-activist
status and the larger-than-life persona that made him a prime target for caricature. The world of hip-hop that West came out of
had also long since excised political anger in favor of narratives of material wish fulfillment. Of course,
there were always artists like Dead Prez and the Coup, groups with a radical, socialist Black Power
message, but the days of Public Enemy and NWA selling millions of records of uncut black rage and
becoming part of mainstream American culture were no more. Whereas Ice Cube had once crashed the Billboard charts
with an album featuring the song I Wanna Kill [Uncle] Sam, by the time Kanye West reached prominence, most rappers were searching for an In da
Club clone. Thats what was important about Wests George Bush doesnt care about black people
comment. This kind of rhetorical expression of black rage was marginalized throughout most of the
relatively prosperous 1990s, when there was no longer a Reagan or a Bush to serve as an identifiable
enemy, and the nations children were being taught that racism was essentially over because we were
committed to celebrating multiculturalism. The second Bush proved an easier foil than his Democratic predecessor,
but his historic appointments of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice gave him the sort of symbolic
cover weve come to accept as evidence that racism is a nonfactor. In 2001, when Bush took office, a
Gallup poll showed that 32 percent of black people believed that relations between blacks and whites
would eventually be worked out, and by 2004 that number had risen to 43 percent. Black rage, at its
most potent, cuts through that kind of bullshit. Black rage announces itself at the Womens Convention in Akron,
Ohio, and says, Aint I a woman? Black rage stands before hundreds of thousands at the Lincoln Memorial and says, America has given
the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds. Black rage
says to the Democratic National Convention, Im sick and tired of being sick and tired. Black rage
says Fuck tha Police and Fight the Power. At its best, black rage speaks to the core concerns of
black people in America, providing a radical critique of the system of racism that has upheld all of our
institutions and made living black in America a special form of hell. But that anger has not only drawn
attention to injustice; it has driven people to action, sparking movements and spurring them forward .
At the very least, the public expression of black rage has allowed communities and people who have felt isolated in their own anger to know that they are
not alone. This is what Wests telethon moment did. It was replayed over and over, adopted as slang, fit to whatever situation one was in, because it
gave language to the pain we felt watching the nightmare in New Orleans play out after Hurricane
Katrina made landfall. When the levees broke and the water rose, a city full of black people attempted to wade through it alone. The sick, the
young, the elderly were being left for dead in one of the most wealthy countries in the world. The media spoke of people attempting to survive as if they
were savages (a study by linguist Geoffrey Nunberg showed that in articles that used either refugee or evacuee to describe the survivors, refugee
was far more likely68 versus 32 percentto appear in stories that also mentioned poor and/or black people). And you couldnt help but think,
because you knew it was true, that had this been a city with a larger white population, there wouldnt have been so much death and destruction, or at
least there would have been greater relief. When West said, George Bush doesnt care about black people, he
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wasnt just speaking about George W. Bush . It was an indictment of an America that doesnt care
about black people, and that elected a president to carry on the tradition.
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AltBlack Trans Rage
Our alternative is one of black rage. The affirmation of the ontological reality of
blackness makes possible rupture within sociality. Black rage is a tool of protection for
black people in a world that demands respectable and rational responses to white
supremacy.
Jordan, 14 - PhD candidate at Emory (Taryn, Field of Expertise Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies,
"The Politics of Impossibility: CeCe McDonald and Trayvon Martin - the Bursting of Black Rage", Georgia State
University Scholar Works)
We are living in a period of time in which it seems almost no individual ideology or nationalist politic based on identity alone can provide a clear pathway to change.
Asking the question again, What does it feel like to be a problem? I answer that in this context it
feels like rage, like silence, like love, like sadness, like I dont give a fuck (nihilism). Black rage in
particular is one of the primary feelings of blackness, an affect that is experienced on multiple
registers of the body and psyche combined, an affect that is simultaneously incredibly sad and
bursting with energy and force. The crushing feeling of blackness is still a system of silences impregnated with various centuries-old affect stemming
from the peculiar institution of American slaveryfeelings of failure, fear, pain, despair, rage, love, and liberation, to name a few. Discourse fails to
adequately describe the functioning of black rage for black people or racialized rage for othered bodies
in general; thus to get closer to the meaning of what black rage is, group session respondents were asked to bring an object, image or media clip that represents black
rage specifically and/or racialized rage more generally. Respondents shared the various media clips and stories with the rest of group explaining why they each brought
specific items or media. What they provided was incredibly interesting; one examples that stands out is how Respondent #3 described black rage as a scene of the fictional
retelling of the death of Hitler in the film Inglorious Bastards, written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. In his fictional rewriting of history, a band of American and European
allies storm a theater performance where they believe Hitler is present. The main objective of the attack is to assassinate Hitler and kill as many Nazi and Nazi sympathizers
present in the theater as possible. The clip is a multiple sensory experience, the theatre is on fire, the only sounds heard are screaming and bullets exiting the chamber of a
automatic gun. The final image shown is the impaling of Hitlers chest and head with bullets. The character shooting Hitlers face is a mixture of tenseness, pleasure, and
release. The scene for Respondent #3 represents how black rage moves through her body physically and emotionally. The act of killing Hitler, represents her desire to kill
white supremacy, an act she described as, an appropriate amount of death (Respondent #3). Further Respondent #1 described black rage as the tectonic sounds of the
electronic synthesizer, or the thumping dark rhythmic sounds of a drum. The notion of rage represented through sound was
influenced by the jarring lyrics to hip hop artist JA Rules song, Fuck You, which hurls at the listener,
I better murda them before they murda me. For Respondent #1 the intensity of the song conjures the reasons why black folks should be
angry. Within the lyrics, a feeling of the possibility of death and the need to kill before being killed is
indicative of the distinctive relationship between blackness and deathone that is present in some of
her favorite hip-hop songs. These two descriptions of black rage affirm the intensity, the pain and the
ontological reality of blackness; they suggest that to be black in America is to be a death-bound being.
Black rage is akin to a large burning room with the sounds of bullets leaving the chamber of a rifle ready to burstexplode at any time. Black rage is beats on
a druma reverberation of sounds echoing through metal; black rage is electric. Black rage is a
feeling that arises in response to the realities of blackness experienced in the everyday lives of black
people. Rage however in of itself as a feeling borders upon the boundaries of psychological meaning,
the bursting of the psyche, which could also be accompanied by the possibility of violence. Rage
differs from anger in nuance; I prefer rage to anger due to the possibility of violence within the affect,
rage as a feeling is both felt within the psyche as well as felt in the body. Research respondents describe physically feeling
rage in the throat down through the bowels and describe experiencing a temporary loss of self or of the bodyleaving one to feel as though an extreme amount of time has
passed when it has only been minutes or seconds (Respondent #2). Further black rage is incredibly powerful because it is the very
emotion that one is not supposed to reside within. Black indignation is strictly forbidden, policed , and
circulates on the register of the stereotype due to the prevailing respectable notion that peace and
inaction are the only way to respond to white supremacy and/or the possibility of death. Religious leaders,
politicians, and police officers live in constant fear of black rage because rage in response to black death or black social death can keep one alive as evidenced in the case of
CeCe McDonald or mobilize thousands of people across the globe to take radical action in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the death of Travyon Martin.
The power of black rage can shift the trajectory of political movements, which is proven by movement
work from the past. Black Nationalism birthed from rage and frustration when the status quo of peaceful protest, the political strategy of the civil rights movement,
focused upon turning the other cheek. When Stokely Carmichael chanted black power black power at the March Against Fear in 1966, he said it while pumping his fist in
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Thus black
the air and with an earnest look on his face. A new movement was born in the wake of rage that emerged from the feeling and reality of black non-being.
rage becomes political when intertwined with the material realities of both social and material death.
Each and every single time a black person dies at the hands of the state or by a white supremacist
vigilante we tap into a collective black affective economy that keeps the everpresent reality of death
present in our realities lest we forget. Black people know how to handle death because we intimately know that systemic injustices can end our lives
at any moment, at any juncture, and for any reason. Culturally death, social or material it is something we have become
accustomed to; the colloquial phrase All I have to do is be black and die is a phrase uttered by elders
passed on through generations. Stated in moments of extreme frustration or feelings of
powerlessness, this phrase is key to affective black ontology. An affective black ontology is found in
the black non-being or black social death. The notion of non-being evokes the reality that blackness in
its current form cannot simultaneously function as a subjecta subject is literally a human who is
recognizable by the state apparatus, one who can enjoy the protections of the state police, who can
fully participate in civic life, a life where you understand that to be human means that you will dieone
day, but it does not mean that death is a ever presently awaiting you. Black non-being is the physical
manifestation of black slavery, Jim Crow, and white supremacy on the skin. Black people are a
constant reminder of the ugly parts of the American past and the persistent problem, to re-invoke
DuBoiss question, of black American life in the present. Black material and social death has been
present throughout modern (neo)colonial history but literal black death in combination with black rage
creates an opening, a space, for a possible rupture in the social fabric that stitches our lives together.
The possibilities of black rage and social death working in concert are present in the case study of
CeCe McDonald, who as a black transgender working class woman is deeply cemented in notions of
non-being due to her blackness and her counter gender identity that does not align with the gender
she was assigned at birth. CeCes moment of rage did not set off a massive black political response
problematically however her moment of rage bursted apart what it means to be black and trans* for
queer communities. Instead CeCes use of black rage allowed for her to disrupt the narrative that
trans* women must die by killing her transmisogynist attacker with a pair of scissors she kept in her
purse for protection. Black rage became a tool of protection for CeCe, similar to the scissors she kept
in her purse, which on an individual level helped to keep her alive that evening. Collectively, her use of
black and trans* rage ignited the queer community to rally for her cause and set off a conversation in
the queer and transgender communities on anti-black racism in combination with gender based
transphobic attacks.
Our (black/queer) rage is a form of survival pedagogyin which we are able to exist in a
system that devalues our
Gumbs 10 [Alexis, black queer feminist, Phd. Duke University, academic, organizer, revolutionary)
Survival. The condition of bare life. The mythology of differential fitness. The continuity of property and properties. But survival is more than this.
Survival, as it emerges as a key word in the theory and poetics of Audre Lorde and June Jordan is a poetic term. It provides the
basis for the reconsideration of its own meaning, and the reconsideration of the meaning of life, that
which survival queerly extends despite everything. Survival is a pedagogy: secret and forbidden
knowledge that we pass on, educating each other into a set of skills and beliefs based on the queer
premise that our lives are valuable in a way that the economization of our labor, and the price of our
flesh in the market of racism deny. Survival is a mode of inquiry, providing a repertoire of critical
insights, gained from discerning what approach to a political and economic framework we can afford
from one moment to the next. Survival is an afterlife; by continuing to exist we challenge the
processes that somehow failed to kill us this time. Survival is a performance, a set of aesthetic
invocations that produce belief and resonance. Survival is a poetic intervention into the simplistic
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conclusion of the political narrative: we were never meant to survive. The we that was never meant to
survive is a challenge to the gospel of individualism. The content of that we is at stake because survival redefines who we
are. For those of us who constitute the collection of people addressed by Audre Lordes A Litany for Survival, the meanings of our lives
have been slandered within an economy that uses narratives of racial inferiority, gender determinism,
and sexual subjectivity to devalue our bodies, our breathing, our time. If we are survivors, who we
are is the question of survival, and whether we survive depends on the generation of a set of relationships that prioritizes who we are to
each other through our queer acts of loving the possible collectivity represented in each of our bodies.
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AltQueer Insurrectionism
The only alternative is abolition Police? we want them gone. Prisons? fire to them all.
A fag is bashed because his gender presentation is far too femme. A poor transman cant afford his life-
saving hormones. A sex worker is murdered by their client. A genderqueer persyn is raped because ze
just needed to be fucked straight. Four black lesbians are sent to prison for daring to defend
themselves against a straight-male attacker.1 Cops beat us on the streets and our bodies are being
destroyed by pharmaceutical companies because we cant give them a dime. Queers experience,
directly with our bodies, the violence and domination of this world. Class, Race, Gender, Sexuality,
Ability; while often these interrelated and overlapping categories of oppression are lost to abstraction,
queers are forced to physically understand each. Weve had our bodies and desires stolen from us,
mutilated and sold back to us as a model of living we can never embody. 1 Free the New Jersey 4. And
lets free everyone else while were at it. Foucault says that power must be understood in the first instance
as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their
own organization; as the processes which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms,
strengthens or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a
chain or system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another;
and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is
embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies. We
experience the complexity of domination and social control amplified through heterosexuality. When
police kill us, we want them dead in turn. When prisons entrap our bodies and rape us because our
genders arent similarly contained, of course we want fire to them all. When borders are erected to
construct a national identity absent of people of color and queers, we see only one solution: every
nation and border reduced to rubble .
We are able to critique and attack the multiplicities in the regime, queer resistance has
always been a struggle against capitalism, racism, patriarchy and empire.
The perspective of queers within the heteronormative world is a lens through which we
can critique and attack the apparatus of capitalism. We can analyze the ways in which Medicine, the
Prison System, the Church, the State, Marriage, the Media, Borders, the Military and Police are used to
control and destroy us. More importantly, we can use these cases to articulate a cohesive criticism of
every way that we are alienated and dominated. Queer is a position from which to attack the normative -
more, a position from which to understand and attack the ways in which normal is reproduced and reiterated.
In destabilizing and problematizing normalcy, we can destabilize and become a problem for the Totality. The
history of organized queers was borne out of this position. The most marginalized - transfolk, people of
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color, sex workers - have always been the catalysts for riotous explosions of queer resistance. These
explosions have been coupled with a radical analysis wholeheartedly asserting that the liberation for
queer people is intrinsically tied to the annihilation of capitalism and the state. It is no wonder, then, that
the first people to publicly speak of sexual liberation in this country were anarchists, or that those in the last
century who struggled for queer liberation simultaneously struggled against capitalism, racism and
patriarchy and empire. This is our history.
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AltQueer Insurrectionism vs Marxism
Purist class analysis isnt enough, we demand social war.

When we speak of social war, we do so because purist class analysis is not enough for us. What does a
marxist economic worldview mean to a survivor of bashing? To a sex worker? To a homeless, teenage
runaway? How can class analysis, alone as paradigm for a revolution, promise liberation to those of us
journeying beyond our assigned genders and sexualities? The Proletariat as revolutionary subject
marginalizes all whose lives dont fit in the model of heterosexual-worker. Lenin and Marx have never
fucked the ways we have. We need something a bit more thorough - something equipped to come with
teethgnashing to all the intricacies of our misery. Simply put, we want to make ruins of domination in all
of its varied and interlacing forms. This struggle inhabiting every social relationship is what we know
as social war. It is both the process and the condition of a conflict with this totality.
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AltRefusal
The alternative is a refusal of the promise project of empire in order to produce

alternative solidarities and resistances
Agathangelou, et al 08 [Anna M., Associate Professor, York University, Postcolonial theory, Feminist
Political Economy, STS and Decolonial justice movements, M. Daniel Bassichis, and Tamara L. Spira,
Assistant Professor of Queer Studies in Fairhaven College and the American Cultural Studies Department at
Western Washington University. Intimate Investments: Homonormativity, Global Lockdown, and the
Seductions of Empire. Winter 2008. Pg. 137-139]
Global lockdown thus functions as one of the looming underbellies and conditions of possibility of the (un)freedoms and (non)futures being promised by
neo-liberal empire. Consigning the collective traumas of slavery and colonization to a remote and irrelevant
past while drawing on their logics to instantiate its rule, global lockdown shows itself to be neither
cruel and unusual nor exceptional, but rather as foundational. Importantly, these (un)freedoms and
(non)futures carry very different promises and pleasures depending on our relationship to the human
surplus motor-ing the global political economy. Global lockdown, then, is not simply the newest outside, but quite literally the
material redefining off what life can even mean in the wake of so much necessary death. We have thus far argued that across diffuse
spaces and moments the homonormative turn, the neoliberalization of the economy, the war on
terror, and global lockdown we see different dimensions of a promise project, which is also a project forever
seeking to (re)consolidate empire. On the one hand, there are those for whom subjectivity, capital, and
satiating pleasures and rights are being forever promised. This occurs, we argue, at the expense of
compliance with, or perhaps distraction from, the larger structural underpinnings of social relations and
processes. On the other hand, there are the (non)subjects for whom the same promise has not been
issued, the abject(s) whose lives and deaths are completely nonspectacular within the dominant
imaginations. Adding to this contradiction is the dimension that even the promises themselves are tenuous: indeed, as elite queers privilege
homonormativity over more radical political and economic praxes, neoconservative forces continue to criminalize queerness. While first and foremost
queers outside this elite or national racial strata are produced as exterminable sodomites, the category of the abject and killable always threatens even
elite queers in first world spaces. This is part of the politico-economic and affective logics that have fueled a frenzied search for an end to pain: continue
imperial soldiering in exchange for a mirage of security, or spend your energies fighting other queers for a prized space as most radical. With such a
paucity of choices, our
energies are directed away from building solidarities and exhausted by fixing on
individualized solutions and fueling the (re)production of neoliberal, neoconservative, homonormative,
and ultimately heteronormative worlds. If the neoliberal turn has been part of a larger strategy of
counterinsurgency mobilized in the wake of revolutionary decolonization movements threatening
capitalism, (hetero)sexism, and white supremacy, it is important to pause on some of the impacts of
that (counter)mobilization. In this paper we have worked to foreground the affective logics that function on
the level of feeling and desire in the service of a neoliberal project of a world remade. To begin to
articulate the ways in which our most intimate sensibilities our fears, desires, mourning, and yearning are being
mobilized by a regime of global lockdown is to make urgent the production of solidarities not premised
upon exploitation, profit, or death. For those engaged in movements dismantling the prison industrial complex
and any form of imperial violence, it is precisely these affective economies to which we must be attentive.
If we do not work to articulate the ways in which we become libidinally and erotically invested in the
status quo of mass lockdown in effect, the various promises that the prison issueswe run the risk of reproducing the
racialized and sexualized economies of benevolence and exploitation that fortify so much of
conservative, liberal, and even radical praxis. However, as we have sought to argue, the price of such dismissals is nothing
less than participation in imperial violence that, ultimately, impacts us all. Amidst the many affective
callings and seductive offerings we are issued, we must continue the work of imagining alternative
ways to feel, be, and love in this moment of intensified empire-building. To become completely drawn into challenging
homonormativization without attention to the larger structural underpinnings of social relations and processes may ultimately prove unproductive as it
misses the larger imperial logics that may be embodied differentially in other sites. Moreover, it becomes impossible to discern the relationship between
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Foreclosing potential and increasingly crucial
our own struggles and the set of promises and nonpromises offered to other others.
solidarities, we are drawn into our own corners and ultimately diverted from the possibilities of
massive, cross-bordered mobilizations, movements and revolutionary projects. In the place of this
vision, we offer first and foremost a disruption of complicity, a refusal of empires promise project.
The series of wars in which empire asks us to participate are utterly genocidal , rather than
constituting processes that enable our security and healing. As members of different and overlapping communities and
struggles, the authors have each grappled personally with this process. As activists and intellectuals who are engaged in struggles around war,
migration and traficking, labor and homelessness, mass imprisonment, and state violence against queer and transgender communities, we are
as members of the
confronted with the seductive yet ultimately murderous promises that are described in this essay. Moreover,
academy at different levels (undergraduate student, graduate student, and faculty member), we have witnessed how the
strategies of promise and nonpromise projects have worked to fragment, divide, and conquer people
of color, working-class people, queers, transgender people, postcolonial subjects, and others within
powerful academic zones of knowledge production. Recognizing that we can never be outside
empires seductive offerings, we engage these questions out of rage, hope, and the desire to form life-
sustaining solidarities and intimacies. We strive with others toward a politics that enables intimacies
as both means and ends, as a strategy of movement-building in which relationships are formed not to
instantiate empires incessant production of internal and external enemies, but to disrupt it. This is a
politics that would challenge histories that dichotomize and fragment our worlds, and instead offer
praxes of erotic resistance in which we might be able to glimpse a breathing space for reconstituting
connections and relations based in collectivity and healing. With this analysis in mind, all attempts to separate and make
discrete struggles for social justice and transformation those working for prison abolition, sexual and gender freedom, decolonization, and the end to
war, for example prove unsuccessful. They are always already imbricated in one another. When
one struggles to resist coercive
sexual or gender regimes heternormativization as well as homonormativization one is already engaging in a politics
deeply implicated in the wars on terror, poverty, and drugs, and in the (neo)slaveries of the prison industrial
complex. This is true not only because of the devastating impacts these wars have had on queer communities and sexually aberrant (non)subjects
the
locked away, and because of the ways in which a racializing sodomoti cation is drawn on to produce the criminal and the terrorist. Indeed,
violence and death that we authorize and face operate through and within our libidinal, erotic, and
affective investments, investments that we must engage directly and rigorously if we are to disrupt the
seductive workings of power in their most intimate dimensions. If, then, all queer politics are already organizing around
and implicated in the buildup of global lockdown and imperialist war, the question is not if a praxis of decolonization and abolitionism is pertinent to queer
struggles, but how and why it is. If
it is true that our deepest desires, feelings, and arousals are tapped into for
imperial production, it also becomes crucial to ask how we might organize, mobilize, and form
alternative intimacies and desires. These alternatives, which continue to be nurtured in radical and
revolutionary movements and collectivities, are forged as a disruption to individualized, consumptive,
and privatized erotics in the name of broader collective projects of freedom and transformation that
cultivate the pleasures of substantial connection and the production of more egalitarian relations.
These are the intimacies that form the core of decolonizing imaginaries, those that understand sexual
freedom only through collective self-determination. It is only when we engage the traumas as well as
the yearnings of our pasts and our futures that we might be able to seize the possibilities increasingly
foreclosed by empires seductive promises.
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AltHip Hop Pedagogy
Nocella and Socha, 13 - Anthony Nocella, Ph.D., award-winning author, community organizer, and
professor is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology, Gender and Womens Studies, Peace and
Conflict Studies, and Environmental Studies at Fort Lewis College and Kim Socha, Professor of English at
Normandale Community College (Old School, New School, No School Hop Hops Dismantling of School and
the Prison Industrial Complex, International Journal of Critical Pedagogy , vol. 4. no.3, pp. 40-54)
Hip hop has and can continue to provide different versions of history and reality from those ideas
taught in mainstream schools (Comissiong, 2007). Most importantly, the alternatives provide messages that
can educate youth of color and stop the school-to-prison pipeline. The rap group Dead Prez has been
especially efficient in critiquing the U.S. school system, noting the need for hip hop to give alternate
versions of the truth regularly taught in Americas classrooms: dead prez feel they learned more
from their recordsthe counter-knowledge provided by African-American music, especially hip hop
for this generation than from any school teacher [] An important component to dead prezs criticism of the educational system and its
inability to reach many African-Americans is their framing of the dominant knowledge as false, specifically as lies. [] Thus dead prezs discrediting of
the current education system as one that teaches lies is an important technique for producing a
counter-knowledge , and for ultimately re-educating what they see as a miseducated group of people.
(Marshall, 2011, paras. 5, 6, 7. 8) Hip hop continues to be a movement against the oppression that stems from authoritarian power structures of a white-dominated system,
just as Dead Prez infers. Indeed, much of hip hop is against violence, specifically the brutality inherent in racism, classism, and incarceration. Thus,
what are
often seen as aggressive lyrics are better viewed as responses to the violence that African Americans
regularly face in heavily-policed neighborhoods. To see this rebellion at work, one need only look at a
classic anthem of hip hop music: Fight the Power (1989) by Public Enemy. Public Enemy was a model for the overtly
conscious and political style of hip hop music in the 1980s and 90s (Boyd, 2003, p. 52). Fight the Power critically examines and challenges the larger systems of
domination that create oppression on the local level. Chuck D of Public Enemy acknowledges the educational authority of
hip hop, famously calling their music CNN for black people. In a 2004 interview with Mother Jones, Chuck D gives an
example of the type of political message to which he refers: You should be a person inside the world
with knowledge of your terrain. And if you lock yourself into the 2,000-by-3,000-square-mile, lower-48 box of the United States, youre going to be
frustrated by its limitations. You gotta think outside the box (Chang, 2004, para. 11). This is a potent message for youth of color: know
your world from a global perspective, know the world that exists outside of your immediate
environment, and question the world depicted on T.V. Hip hop undermines persons and systems of
dominance. Two such systems that have and do affect youth more than any other are schools and
prisons . In turn, hip hop has been an avenue for exposing the school-to-prison pipeline, as defined above. Biggie Smalls emphasizes this predicament in Juicy
(1994), explaining that his album is dedicated to all the teachers that told me / Id never amount to nothin. In Juicy, Smalls admits to street hustling, but also to hustlin to
feed his children, something that his teachers, and neighbors who called the police on him, did not consider. Smallss lyrics demonstrate the connection between an ineffective
school system (the teachers who demeaned him) and ju venile crime by showing that those responsible for educating him had no insight into or sensitivity toward his life
outside the classroom. The school system, as many hip hop artists note, promotes white male history while oppressing and marginalizing those of color, women, people with
disabilities, and the LGBTQIA community. Of course, this does not mean that no white males, or the educational system in general, care about Americas disenfranchised
youth. Rather,
as Parmar, Nocella and Shykeem (2011) argue, school administrators are hesitant to
acknowledge that racism, and (mental and institutional) slavery are still alive and perpetuated in the
school system by the practice of ideological beliefs that at-risk students are deficient and in need of
saving and rescue, when in fact, they are at risk of being targeted and profiled by the police . (p. 294)
Without this acknowledgement, the school-to-prison pipeline will continue as an unspoken
substructure of urban schooling, one that does not allow for resistance, or critical feedback from
students and the urban community. Thus, the voices of resistance against schools by urban Black youth have come predominantly through hip hop
music and culture. Far from being the province of academics and activists alone, the school-toprison pipeline is a continued topic for hip hop artists as well. Hip hop is a form
of narrative through which individuals express their experiences, and education is a commonly commented upon aspect of those experiences. As Dyson explains (2007), rap
music emphasizes the social isolation, economic hardship, political demoralization, and cultural exploitation (p. 63) that occur in poor urban communities, and although hip
hop is not solely concerned with the ghetto poor, [] its major themes and styles continue to be drawn from the conflicts and contradictions of black urban life (p. 63). One of
those contradictions is that education was to be an avenue of emancipation for African-Americans, but it has turned into yet another path through which urban youth become
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enslaved (Ogbar, 2007). In Poetry Behind the Walls (2011), Parmar, Nocella and Shykeem cite the U.S. Constitution of the United States Thirteenth Amendment (1865) to
demonstrate that slavery is not a mere historical footnote; rather, it continues in the prison system: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime
whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction (U.S. Const. am. 13). Modern slavery manifests
as prisoners are paid from pennies to minimum wageminus fines and victim compensationfor everything from grunt work to firefighting to specialized labor, making and
Recently, Alexander (2010) has
packaging products for corporations such as Starbucks, Microsoft, and Victorias Secret (Winter, 2008, para. 1).
reported that more African Americans are under correctional control todayin prison, in jail, on
probation or parolethan were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began (p. 175). The reality
of modern day slavery is irrefutable, and it begins with the school-to-prison pipeline. Social critics,
educators and advocates who care about youth of color must address the continuing issue of slavery
as well as the historical events that caused and maintain oppression, such as youth incarceration. Hip hop
artists carry on as a major force in exposing these truths. Even before the term school-to-prison pipeline came into prominent use in the early 2000s by radical education and
prison abolition activists-scholars, Tupac Shakur exposed its reality as something that both he and other urban youth of color experience (Dyson, 2011; McQuillar & Johnson,
2010). In Dear Mama (1994) he raps of being an incarcerated elementary school student huggin on [his] mama from a jail cell. Tupac asks powerful question in these
lyrics: Who would think that a mother would have to visit her child in jail when he should be spending his days getting an education, as do most American youth? Even if
children from urban communities want to go to school, there are so many obstacles for them to get there, from parents who may be drug addicted to dangerous
neighborhoods through which they traverse to reach school. Educational administrators and teachers must begin to recognize
the daily experiences of youth and not simply tell these children to come in smiling and positive,
leaving their baggage in front of the schoolhouse only to be picked up again once classes are
dismissed. Teachers may dismiss the reality of their students experiences outside the classroom, or they blame parents, who were once students of this broken
system themselves, for the criminal activity of minors because the typical white middleclass teacher cannot relate to their students lives and/or they are not critically educated
In Propaganda (2000a) Dead Prez explains this
about white dominance and how whiteness proceeds as the norm in American culture.
regrettable dynamic by arguing that todays children are being fed a miseducation, that results in a
type of social control further exacerbated by the police and media. Dead Prez forcefully depicts the truth about a wrecked
educational and media system that sends youth into the handcuffs of the police, and they show that this miseducation continues with each new generation of Black youth
As they conclude in Propaganda, this aint living, and inherent in those
who are exposed to Americas school system.
words is their urging their listeners to take control of their lives. As a complement to this message, in The Show Goes On
(2010), Lupe Fiasco shows his support of youth and those teachers who continue to believe in them. Fiasco raps in praise of fathers who stay to raise their children and for
children who work to get out of the ghetto. At the same time, he decries whose within urban neighborhoods to recruit youth into lives of crime. However, most significantly,
he saves his five in the air for teachers who let kids know that while there are internal and external forces holding them back, ultimately, the World is theirs! Far from being
a negative hip hop anthem, this is a potent message telling youth of color that there are alternatives to incarceration. He implores fathers to be there for their children, asks
urban children to both be proud of who they are but to also seek passages out of the ghetto, and he decries those in the ghetto who recruit children into lives that will likely
lead to incarceration. Most significantly, Fiasco applauds those teachers who are unwilling to give up on their students and who, unlike Biggies teachers, send them the
message that they can and will amount to something because the world belongs to them too. Unfortunately, there is a lack of urban teachers who are able to earn that five in
the air of which Fiasco raps. Rather
than seek the roots of the school-to-prison pipeline, teachers often label
disruptive students as trouble-makers, violent, deviant or disabled. Rapper Nas explains this in his
song Bridging the Gap (2005), for his artistic spirit, manifested through graffiti, caused him to be
labeled as a juvenile delinquent, and although he loved to read the books his father gave him, such
as those by Malcolm X, his teachers labeled him dyslexic. Once again, hip hop exposes what Marshall terms counter-knowledge for
the subaltern, a term indicating marginalized individuals and groups existing outside dominant systems of power. For example, Nas, like Fiasco, demonstrates the need for
fathers to be there for their children to remind them that they are not delinquent or disabled (Dyson & Daulatzai, 2010). Rather, they are being miseducated. So, instead of
reading a textbook about the bogus history of Thanksgiving, urban youth can read about Malcolm X. Ultimately, however, our hope is that someday there will be enough urban
educators to tell the truth about American history through critically rendered textbooks even as students continue to get those messages through hip hop music, as the two
can certainly coexist. In
They Schools (2000b) Dead Prez explains very clearly, and with a great amount of
frustration, that the current education system in the U.S. promotes white supremacy and is shaping
youth of color to enter the prison system, not feed their families, pay rent or empower their
communities. They pose school, not education, as a joke and a 12 step brainwash camp developed
and supported by those who control the whole social system. Rather than receiving transformative
educations, teachers imply that only by pulling up their pants (in other words, not sagging their jeans)
will they have a chance in the world created by their very oppressors. Of the many striking words that
Dead Prez uses to critique the school system, their final line about loving education is most essential,
for it shows that students want to learn but are obstructed by an institution that will not teach them
how to navigate through their often challenging lives. Teachers are too busy telling students to pull up
your pants; in other words, leave behind hip hop culture , which most certainly includes fashion, and
try to be more like the American mainstream. In a similar vein, Mos Def uses his song Mathematics (1999) to show how rap can relate to
math, and more importantly, how math is socio-political with messages beyond 1 + 1 = 2. Hence, it is not that Math, Science, or English cannot be fun for youth, but that
teachers cannot relate to the urban youths experiences, and therefore have a difficult time teaching them in a meaningful way that will resonate with their life experiences
(Prier, 2012). Alternatives do exist. For example, urban educators who teach history can use Hip-Hop U.S. History: The New and Innovative Approach to Learning American
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History by Blake Harrison and Alexander Rappaport (2007). Unfortunately, not enough urban educators are familiar with texts such as Harrison and Rappaports. Therefore,
when urban youth leave school and enter the prison pipeline, it is too easy for mainstream white America to assume that those children either cannot be educated or do not
want to be educated. This is a lie. They do want education, but they must balance that desire with crack-infested neighborhoods, police brutality, and the mere ability to
These realities are regularly overlooked in Americas school system, and as
survive against a white supremacist society.
Dead Prez advises in They Schools (2000b), until Black Americans have some shit where [they]
control the fuckin school system/Where [they] reflect how [they] gon solve [their] own problems, the
educational disparities amongst Black youth and the school-to-prison pipeline will continue unabated.
Additionally, it does not help that the schools themselves are criminalizing normal childhood behaviors. In Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jailhouse
(2011), Annette Fuentes argues that school buildings have become prisons for poor urban youth of color. In Stop the School-to-Prison-Pipeline (2012), a staff writer from
Truthout writes, As police have set up shop in schools across the country , the definition of what is a crime
as opposed to a teachable moment has changed in extraordinary ways. In one middle school were
familiar with, a teacher routinely allowed her students to take single pieces of candy from a big
container she kept on her desk. One day, several girls grabbed handfuls. The teacher promptly sent
them to the police officer assigned to the school. What formerly would have been an opportunity to
have a conversation about a minor transgression instead became a law enforcement issue. (Staff, para. 6)
When did schoolhouses become jailhouses? One possible answer is the war on drugs. As crack-cocaine was pumped into poor urban communities by the U.S. government in
the 1970s (Webb, 1999), it led to the emergence of the war on drugs during Ronald Reagans presidency in the 1980s. It was then that the prison industrial complex was born.
At that time, approximately five hundred thousand people were imprisoned in the U.S.; only a decade later, there were approximately two million people in prison, mostly with
drug related charges (The punishing decade, 2000, para. 1). Next, the prison industrial complex became eager for bodies to fill cell beds and provide cheap prison labor, so
they created the school-to-prison pipeline and constructed schools as prisons, with guards and metal detectors, security cameras, and K-9 police offers performing random
locker searches (Fuentes, 2011). With
the rise of academic repression from kindergarten to higher education
(Nocella, Best, and McLaren, 2010), there is a renewed need for resistance and an innovative
transformative educational paradigm of which hip hop must be a part. Another excellent example of this trend is the
organization Save the Kids (STK), named by incarcerated youth. STK is a national movement with chapters all over the U.S. that promotes alternatives to youth incarceration
and keeping youth away from violence, and this includes use of hip hop activism, pedagogy and workshops. Schools are fundamental in shaping society; they can either
promote social justice or oppression. Kindergarten to twelfth grade schools cannot take all the blame, as all teachers are products of higher education. Sadly, there are some
Educators should not simply teach
professors who write and teach about social justice, yet never leave their ivory towers to fight for social justice.
about social justice movements and lecture about the prison industrial complex (Davis, 2003). Rather,
they must engage and participate in activism that may cause them to risk as much or more than their
students, community members and others who lack the privileges that professors have if their real
objective is to end modern slavery in the U.S.. Schools and universities, along with teachers, staff, and
administrators in those institutions, commonly perpetuate white supremacist, patriarchal,
heteronormative, ableist education, which fosters the school-to-prison pipeline that hip hop artists
seek to upend. Continuing to challenge the dominant educational agenda is the field of critical pedagogy as it pertains to urban education; this is the field of study
dedicated to deconstruction of the modern educational school system, or the school industrial complex, based on domination, and to reconstruct education by students and
community members on the values of peace, inclusion, and social justice. Critical Urban Education argues that urban schooling is a socially constructed geography that
proliferates gross inequities and discrimination (Nocella, Parmar, Stovall, under review) Critical
pedagogy will not solve all problems in
Americas schools, but with the aid of hip hop, it will hopefully bring an end to the conventional Euro-
centric educational standards with which we are all too familiar. Until educators and others in
governing roles and positions start risking their social dispensations and look critically at the school-
to-prison pipeline, nothing will change. Fortunately, with the aid of Nocella, STK, the organization introduced above, developed the Institute for Hip
Hop Knowledge (IHKK). IHHK was created to respect hip hop culture, educate teachers on youth experiences as told through rap music, and to teach politics and organizing
skills to kids. IHHK has further created the Jam Master Jay Hip Hop Library, Tupac Hip Hop Activist Academy, the Hip Hop Research Initiative, and the Biggie Small Hip Hop
As critics, we must be willing to let go of the power, space, and place that we dominate
Education Certificate.
and control as educators, administrators, staff, politicians, parents, and adults. Through Americas
school system, we continue to govern and control youth and other oppressed groups. Youth, students,
and the community, rather than politicians and corporations, must have more say in how schools and
universities are run, and this includes curriculum. In the words of Dead Prez (2000b), we must be
willing to change the fuckin school system. We must provide services that will assist in ending systemic social problems such as poverty,
community and domestic violence, drug addiction, police brutality, and homelessness. The late Paulo Freirefather of critical pedagogy and one of the most influential
educators in the twenty-first centurysimplifies the problem between oppressed and oppressor by stating, The oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole,
but rather selected leaders (p. 124) such as CEOs, presidents, principals, military generals, executive directors, and even teachers. But
how can any of
these oppressors, especially teachers, focus solely on the ABCs and 123s while communities are
dying from drugs and violence, while others are being locked up for selling drugs, and with still others
unsure if they will make it home safely from school? Hip hop offers the most relevant critiques of Americas education system, and it is up
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to a new generation of critical urban educators to continue to make changes that will keep youth of color and those mired in poverty out of the prison system, resulting in an
end to modern slavery.
Hip Hop disrupts the disembodied whiteness of the debate space

Polson 12 (2012, Dana Roe Polson (PhD in Language Literacy and Culture, UMBC, Baltimore city public
and public charter schools high school teacher), Longing for Theory: Performance Debate in Action, E-Book
pp. 251-252, RaMan]
Further, the hip-hop music that animates many critical debate rounds is a sonic disturbance to this quiet
white space, an aural representation of the Black bodies playing it. The presence of music in a debate round,
the Blackness of hip-hop, etc., all conspire against this disembodied whiteness. As Duane Hartman said:
[Performativity] deals with the performance of the body. And being able to identify something by the
performance of the body. And that doesnt necessarily have to be active, you know, it could just be looking
at you. What makes a woman a woman is based on the performance of that body. And so that gender
becomes a performative identity. And so their argument became the way in which we express ourselves
within debate, is based on the performance of our bodies as Black males, Black females. (Hartman, group
interview I, p. 11) What might the unique styles and expressions that Ede Warner and Jon Bruschke (both
veteran collegiate debate coaches) called for look like? Jason Burton described the beginnings of
performance debate at the University of Louisville as an effort to increase participation of Black students.
He said that the Ede Warner, who was the founder of that program, began to introduce hip-hop music into
debate rounds as a way of doing so (Jason Burton, group interview I, p. 3). The beginnings, then, had to do
with changing the style of debate to include culturally Black art as part of the debate performance.
These performances often still include hip-hop music, often pre-recorded, as part of debate. In
addition, to give just a few examples, students from Paul Robeson High School have played West African
percussion and danced, read narratives about their families, created poetry. Student participant Jessica
Cooper describes singing in debate, as a way of being comfortable in debate by making it relate to her
experience: ... in debate we, like Ill sing my first speech because like, like first it was like a way for me to be
comfortable in the round....For me, singing was a way for me to make myself comfortable and a way for me to
make debate relate to me and my community (Jessica Cooper, interview, p. 2).
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AltAfro-Pess/Radical Demands
We must theorize slavery as maximum captivity in order to produce a structural
analysis capable to think of the resistance necessary to disrupt that system all other
coalitions purchase their coherence at the expense of the blackness that must be cast
off by definition beginning with the demand for the end of this world is not a
transcendental that replicates civil society but rather is an imperative a more radical
approach that the inclusionary politics of the AFF
Sexton 16 (Jared, Professor of African-American Studies) 2016 (Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word,
Rhizomes Journal, C.A.)
[4] The reticence expressed about the force and signification of Afro-Pessimism, which in some quarters has bloomed into open
if largely uninformed resistance, has taken on the logic of preemptive strike. Though we have little engagement in print thus far,
due in part to the recentness of the published literature, certain discussions are nonetheless afoot on the left "devoted to blaming
pessimism for whatever crisis is thought to occupy us at the moment." Afro-Pessimism, in this case and on this count, is
thought to be, in no particular order: a negative appraisal of the capabilities of black peoples, associating blackness with
lack rather than tracing the machinations through which the association is drawn and enforced, even in the black psyche, across
the longue dure; a myopic denial of overlapping and ongoing histories of struggle and a fatal misunderstanding of the
operational dynamics of power, its general economy or micro-physics, reifying what should be historicized en route to analysis; a
retrograde and isolationist nationalism, a masculinist and heteronormative enterprise, a destructive and sectarian ultra-
leftism, and a chauvinist American exceptionalism; a reductive and morbid fixation on the depredations of slavery that
superimposes the figure of the slave as an anachronism onto ostensibly post-slavery societies, and so on. [5] The last
assertion, which actually links together all of the others, evades the nagging burden of proof of abolition and,
moreover, fails to acknowledge that one can account for historically varying instances of anti-blackness while
maintaining the claim that slavery is here and now. Most telling though is the leitmotif of offense, and the felt need among
critics to defend themselves, their work, their principles and their politics against the perceived threat. In place of thoughtful
commentary, we have distancing and disavowal. The grand pronouncement is offered, generally, without the impediment of
sustained reading or attempted dialogue, let alone careful study of the relevant literature. The entire undertaking, the movement
of thought it pursues, is apprehended instead as its lowest common denominator, indicted by proxy, and tried in absentia as
caricature.[1] [6] Astonishingly, all of this refuses to countenance the rhetorical dimensions of the discourse of Afro-
Pessimism (despite the minor detail that its principal author is a noted creative writer and its first major statement is found in an
award-winning literary work of memoir) and the productive theoretical effects of the fiction it creates, namely, a meditation on a
poetics and politics of abjection wherein racial blackness operates as an asymptotic approximation of that which disturbs every
claim or formation of identity and difference as such.[2] Afro-Pessimism is thus not against the politics of coalition simply because
coalitions tend systematically to render supposed common interests as the concealed particular interests of the most powerful
and privileged elements of the alliance. Foremost, Afro-Pessimism it seeks, in Wilderson's parlance, "to shit on the
inspiration of the personal pronoun we" (143) because coalitions require a logic of identity and difference, of collective
selves modeled on the construct of the modern individual, an entity whose coherence is purchased at the
expense of whatever is cast off by definition. The subject of politics is essentially individual and there
is in effect always another intervention to be made on behalf of some aspect of the group excluded in
the name of the proper.[3] The ever-expansive inclusionary gesture must thus be displaced by another
more radical approach: an ethics of the real, a politics of the imperative, engaged in its interminably
downward movement. This daunting task entails making necessity out of virtue, as it were, willing the need for the black
radical imagination and not just its revisable demand. If certain scholars whose work has been instructive or inspirational
for Afro-Pessimism miss this point too, it may have something to do with the search for a method of gaining agency that,
while rightly suspending the assumption of an a priori agent, nonetheless rushes past the hidden structure of violence
that underwrites so many violent acts, whether spectacular or mundane. [7] Such may provide reassurance for those
informed by the basic assumptions and animated by the esprit de corps of the theoretical orientations and conceptual frames in
question, but it cannot be mistaken for an adequate defense of a disposition. We would do well, on this score, to heed Joshua
Dienstag's rather germane suggestion in Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit that "some thought should be given to why this
word functions so well as a gesture of dismissal" and, likewise, to "the routine use of 'pessimist' and its cognates as a casual
intellectual put-down" (Dienstag 2006: x). For present purposes, Afro-Pessimism as epithet would be the obverse of the unasked
question: Why has this discourse found its articulation now? Rather than simply motivating speculation about the psychological
states and political commitments of theorists, commentators, students, advocates or adherents; the intervention and implications
of Afro-Pessimism, however they are adjudged, "need to be addressed at the theoretical level at which they arose" (Dienstag
2001: 924). Dienstag writes further: Critics have often mistaken a depiction of the world for a choice about our future, as if
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[scholars] had rejoiced at the decline or decay they described. [...] Yet, despite the abuse they attract pessimists keep
appearingand this should not be surprising since the world keeps delivering bad news. Instead of blaming pessimism,
perhaps, we can learn from it. Rather than hiding from the ugliness of the world, perhaps we can discover how best to withstand
it (Dienstag 2006: x).[4] [8] As if they rejoiced about the wrong things and, by contrast, failed to rejoice about the right ones. Why
not turn this (moralistic) accusation into (political-intellectual) opportunity? Indeed, the moniker "Afro-Pessimism" emerges at a
certain inaugural moment as the embrace of a critical outlook deemed, upon review, to be disappointing or discouraging to an
ostensibly progressive, even modernist anti-racism (Hartman 2003). Dtournement. Resignification. A simple enough term for
withstanding the ugliness of the worldand learning from itmight be suffering and Afro-Pessimism is, among other things, an
attempt to formulate an account of such suffering, to establish the rules of its grammar, "to think again about the position of the
ex-slave," as Bryan Wagner puts it in his Disturbing the Peace, "without recourse to the consolation of transcendence" (Wagner
2009: 2). The difficulty has to do with the special force that the consolation of transcendencebe it cultural, economic,
geographical, historical, political, psychological, sexual, social or symbolicbrings to bear on the activity of thinking, no less of
speaking and writing, about those whose transcendence is foreclosed in and for the modern world.
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AltRefusal/Pathology of Blackness
Only a refusal to create a distance from the pathology of blackness, to work inside of it
can produce the end of the world, and therefore sociality
Sexton 10 (Jared, Director, African American Studies School of Humanities , Associate Professor, African
American Studies School of Humanities, Associate Professor, Film & Media Studies School of Humanities at
University of California Irvine, The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism)
What I find most intriguing about the timbre of the argument of The Case of Blackness, and the black optimism it articulates
against a certain construal of afro-pessimism, is the way that it works away from a discourse of black pathology
only to swerve right back into it as an ascription to those found to be taking up and holding
themselves in the stance of the pathologist in relation to black folks. I say this not only because there is, in
this version of events, a recourse to psychoanalytic terminology (fetishization, obsession, repetition,), but also because
there is at the heart of the matter a rhetorical question that establishes both the bad advice of a wild analysis and a tacit
diagnosis affording a certain speakers benefit: So why is it repressed? The it that has been afflicted by the psychopathology
of obsessional neurosis is the understanding, which is also to say the celebration, of the ontological priority or previousness of
blackness relative to the antiblackness that establishes itself against it, a priority or previousness that is also termed knowledge
of freedom or, pace Chandler, comprehension of the constitutive force of the African American subject(s) (Chandler 2000:
261). [21] What does not occur here is a consideration of the possibility that something might be
unfolding in the project or projections of afro-pessimism knowing full well the danger of a kind of
negative reification associated with its analytical claims to the paradigmatic (Moten 2004: 279). That is to
say, it might just be the case that an object lesson in the phenomenology of the thing is a gratuity that folds a new encounter into
older habits of thought through a reinscription of (black) pathology that reassigns its cause and relocates its source without ever
really getting inside it. In a way, what were talking about relates not to a disagreement about unthought positions (and their de-
formation) but to a disagreement, or discrepancy, about unthought dispositions (and their in-formation). I would maintain this
insofar as the misrecognition at work in the reading of that motley crew listed in the ninth footnote regards, perhaps ironically,
the performative dimension or signifying aspect of a generalized impropriety so improper as to appear as the same old
propriety returning through the back door. Without sufficient consideration of the gap between statement and enunciation here,
to say nothing of quaint notions like context or audience or historical conjuncture, the discourse of afro-pessimism, even as it
approaches otherwise important questions, can only seem like a tragically neurotic instance of certain discourse on the
relation between blackness and death (Moten 2007: 9).xiii Fanon and his interlocutors, or what appear rather as his fateful
adherents, would seem to have a problem embracing black social life because they never really come to believe in it, because
they cannot acknowledge the social life from which they speak and of which they speakas negation and impossibilityas their
own (Moten 2008: 192). Another way of putting this might be to say that they are caught in a performative contradiction enabled
by disavowal. I wonder, however, whether things are even this clear in Fanon and the readings his writing might facilitate. Lewis
Gordons sustained engagement finds Fanon situated in an ethical stance grounded in the affirmation of blackness in the historic
antiblack world. In a response to the discourse of multiracialism emergent in the late twentieth-century United States, for
instance, Gordon writes, following Fanon, that there is no way to reject the thesis that there is something wrong with being black
beyond the willingness to be black in terms of convenient fads of playing blackness, but in paying the costs of antiblackness
on a global scale. Against the raceless credo, then, racism cannot be rejected without a dialectic in which humanity experiences
a blackened world (Gordon 1997: 67). What is this willingness to be black, of choosing to be black affirmatively rather than
reluctantly, that Gordon finds as the key ethical moment in Fanon? [23] Elsewhere, in a discussion of Du Bois on the study of
black folk, Gordon restates an existential phenomenological conception of the antiblack world developed across his first several
books: Blacks here suffer the phobogenic reality posed by the spirit of racial seriousness. In effect, they more than symbolize or
signify various social pathologiesthey become them. In our antiblack world, blacks are pathology (Gordon 2000: 87). This
conception would seem to support Motens contention that even much radical black studies
scholarship sustains the association of blackness with a certain sense of decay and thereby fortifies
and extends the interlocutory life of widely accepted political common sense. In fact, it would seem that
Gordon deepens the already problematic association to the level of identity. And yet, this is precisely what Gordon
argues is the value and insight of Fanon: he fully accepts the definition of himself as pathological as it
is imposed by a world that knows itself through that imposition, rather than remaining in a reactive
stance that insists on the (temporal, moral, etc.) heterogeneity between a self and an imago originating in
culture. Though it may appear counterintuitive, or rather because it is counterintuitive, this acceptance
or affirmation is active; it is a willing or willingness, in other words, to pay whatever social costs
accrue to being black, to inhabiting blackness, to living a black social life under the shadow of social
death. This is not an accommodation to the dictates of the antiblack world. The affirmation of
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blackness, which is to say an affirmation of pathological being, is a refusal to distance oneself from
blackness in a valorization of minor differences that bring one closer to health, to life, or to sociality.
Fanon writes in the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, The Black Man and Language: A Senegalese who learns Creole
to pass for Antillean is a case of alienation. The Antilleans who make a mockery out of him are lacking in judgment (Fanon
2008: 21). In a world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and black inferiority, of white existence and black
nonexistence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperativeabove all, dont be black (Gordon 1997: 63)in this
world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn toward the shame, as it were, that resides in the
idea that I am thought of as less than human (Nyongo 2002: 389).xiv In this we might create a transvaluation of pathology
itself, something like an embrace of pathology without pathos.
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AltViolent Revolution
We must embrace violent revolutions as a disruption of the political economy. Solves
the AFF.
Wilderson 2011
[Frank B., University of California Irvine African American Studies/Drama Department, The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and
Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents, InTensions Journal, Issue 5, Fall/Winter 2011]
Many pacifist scholars and activists consider the strategies and tactics of armed revolutionaries in First
World countries to be short-sighted bursts of narcissism.xvii What pacifist detractors forget, however, is that for Gramsci,
the strategy of a War of Position is one of commandeering civic and political spaces one trench at a time
in order to turn those spaces into pedagogic locales for the dispossessed; and this process is one
which combines peaceful as well as violent tactics as it moves the struggle closer to an all-out violent
assault on the state. The BLA and their White revolutionary co-defendants may have been better Gramscians than those
who critique them through the lens of Gramsci. Their tactics (and by tactics I mean armed struggle as well as courtroom
performances) were no less effective at winning hearts and minds than candle light vigils and orderly protests. If the end-game
of Gramscian struggle is the isolation and emasculation of the ruling classes ensemble of questions, as a way to alter the
structure of feeling of the dispossessed so that the next step, the violent overthrow of the state, doesnt feel like such a
monumental undertaking, then I would argue the pedagogic value of retaliating against police by killing one of
them each time they kill a Black person, the expropriating of bank funds from armored cars in order to
further finance armed struggle as well as community projects such as acupuncture clinics in the Bronx where
drug addicts could get clean, and the bombing of major centers of U.S. commerce and governance, followed by
trials in which the defendants used the majority of the trial to critique the government rather than plead their case, have as
much if not more pedagogic value than peaceful protest. In other words, if not for thepathological pacifism
(Churchill) which clouds political debate and scholarly analysis there would be no question that the BLA, having not even read
Gramsci,xviii were among the best Gramscian theorists the U.S. has ever known. But though the BLA were great Gramscian
theorists, they could not become Gramscian subjects. The political character of ones actions is inextricably bound to
the political status of ones subjectivity; and while this status goes without saying for Gilbert and Clark, it is always in
question for Balagoon and Bukhari. [34] How does one calibrate the gap between objective vertigo and the
need to be productive as a Black revolutionary? What is the political significance of restoring balance to the inner
ear? Is tyranny of closure the only outcome of such interventions or could restoration of the Black subjects inner ear, while
failing at the level of conceptual framework, provide something necessary, though intangible, at the level of blood and sweat
political activism? These unanswered questions haunt this article. Though I have erred in this article on the side of paradigm as
opposed to praxis, and cautioned against assuming that we know or can know what the harvest of their sacrifice was, I
believe we are better political thinkersif not actorsas a result of what they did with their bodies, even
if we still dont know what to do with ours. *
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AltAbolition is Complete Disorder
The only alternative is a program of complete disorder only absolute negation of civil
society can give the term prison abolition any meaning
Wilderson 2010 (Frank B., Professor of Drama @ UC Irvine- Red White and Black, pp.41-42)
Slavery is the great leveler of the Black subject's positionality. The Black American subject does not
generate historical categories of entitlement, sovereignty, and immigration for the record. We are "off
the map" with respect to the cartography that charts civil society's semiotics; we have a past, but not a
heritage. To the data-generating demands of the Historical Axis, we present a virtual blank, much like that which the Khoisan presented to the
Anthropological Axis. This places us in a structurally impossible position, one that is outside the articulations of hegemony. However, it also places
hegemony in a structurally impossible position because--and this is key--our
presence works back upon the grammar of
hegemony and threatens it with incoherence. If every subject--even the most massacred among them,
Indians--is required to have analogs within the nation's structuring narrative, and the experience of one
subject, upon whom the nation's order of wealth was built, is without analog, then that subject's
presence destabilizes all other analogs. Fanon (1968: 37) writes, "decolonization, which sets out to change the
order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder." If we take him at his word, then we must accept that no
other body functions in the Imaginary, the Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a repository of
complete disorder as the Black body. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real,
for in its magnetizing of bullets the Black body functions as the map of gratuitous violence through
which civil society is possible: namely, those bodies for which violence is, or can be, contingent.
Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Symbolic, for Blackness in America
generates no categories for the chromosome of history, and no data for the categories of immigration or sovereignty. It is an
experience without analog--a past without a heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the
Imaginary, for "whoever says 'rape' says Black" (Fanon), whoever says "prison" says Black, and whoever
says "AIDS" says Black (Sexton)--the "Negro is a phobogenic object" (Fanon). Indeed, it means all those things: a phobogenic
object, a past without a heritage, the map of gratuitous violence, and a program of complete disorder. Whereas this realization is, and should be, cause
for alarm, it should not be cause for lament, or worse, disavowal--not at least, for a true revolutionary, or for a truly revolutionary movement such as prison
abolition.If a social movement is to be neither social democratic nor Marxist, in terms of structure of political desire, then
it should grasp the invitation to assume the positionality of subjects of social death . If we are to be honest with
ourselves, we must admit that the "Negro" has been inviting whites, as well as civil society's junior partners, to
the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been,
and remain today--even in the most anti-racist movements, like the prison abolition movement--invested elsewhere.
This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro-white, but it is usually anti-Black,
meaning it will not dance with death. Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous
to the U.S. This is not because it raises the specter of an alternative polity (such as socialism, or community control of existing resources), but
because its condition of possibility and gesture of resistance function as a negative dialectic: a politics
of refusal and a refusal to affirm, a "program of complete disorder." One must embrace its disorder, its
incoherence, and allow oneself to be elaborated by it, if indeed one's politics are to be underwritten by
a desire to take down this country. If this is not the desire that underwrites one's politics , then through
what strategy of legitimation is the word "prison" being linked to the word "abolition"? What are this
movement's lines of political accountability? There is nothing foreign, frightening, or even unpracticed about the embrace of disorder
and incoherence. The desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by disorder and incoherence is not anathema in and of itself. No one, for example, has ever
been known to say "gee-whiz, if only my orgasms would end a little sooner, or maybe not come at all." Yet few so-called radicals desire to be embraced,
and elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of Blackness--and the state of political movements in the U.S. today is marked
by this very Negrophobogenisis: "gee-whiz, if only Black rage could be more coherent, or maybe not
come at all." Perhaps there is something more terrifying about the joy of Black than there is in the joy of sex (unless one is talking sex with a Negro).
Perhaps coalitions today prefer to remain in-orgasmic in the face of civil society--with hegemony as a handy prophylactic, just in case. If, through this
stasis or paralysis they try to do the work of prison abolition, that work will fail, for it is always work from a position of coherence (i.e., the worker) on behalf
social formations on the Left remain blind to the
of a position of incoherence of the Black subject, or prison slave. In this way,
contradictions of coalitions between workers and slaves. They remain coalitions operating within the
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logic of civil society and function less as revolutionary promises than as crowding out scenarios of
Black antagonisms, simply feeding our frustration. Whereas the positionality of the worker (whether a factory worker demanding
a monetary wage, an immigrant, or a white woman demanding a social wage) gestures toward the reconfiguration of civil society, the positionality
of the Black subject (whether a prison-slave or a prison-slave-in-waiting) gestures toward the
disconfiguration of civil society. From the coherence of civil society, the Black subject beckons with the incoherence of civil war, a war
that reclaims Blackness not as a positive value, but as a politically enabling site , to quote Fanon, of "absolute
dereliction." It is a "scandal" that rends civil society asunder. Civil war, then, becomes the unthought, but never forgotten, understudy of hegemony. It is
a Black specter waiting in the wings, an endless antagonism that cannot be satisfied (via reform or
reparation), but must nonetheless be pursued to the death.
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AltEnd of the World
End the world
Wilderson 16 (Frank, Prof. Film Studies/Rhetoric @ University of California, Irvine, The Inside-Outside of Civil Society: An
Interview with Frank B. Wilderson, III, 20-21)
Black Studies in general and Afro-pessimism in particular present non-Black academics with more than an
intellectual problem. It presents them with an existential problem.The reason is because theres an aspect
of Afro-pessimism that we dont talk about, I dont even talk about it with my wife every day, which is that were you to follow
it to its logical conclusion, its calling for the end of the world, you know, it wants the death of everyone else in
the same way that we experience our death, so that one could not liberate Blacks through Afro-
pessimism and be who one was on the other side of that. Thats the unspoken dynamic of Afro-
pessimism. Precisely why its not spoken is because, as the British would say, its not cricket, its not proper in mixed society
because theres a kind of hatred toward the world that simmers under Afro-pessimism that is a hatred of
other peoples capacity to be, whereas, by contrast, other forms of Black resistance simmer with a hatred of other peoples
racist acts and intentions. A Black Studies founded on Afro-pessimism presents more than a thinking problem
for white people doing Afro-pessimism: it presents a kind of problem of being because ultimately the work is
moving towards the destruction of the very academic whos doing the work. And not everyones down for that [laughter]. As Saidiya
Hartman said to me, when she was my mentor on my committee for my dissertation, you have to find a way to veil, to
kind of camouflage this work because no one whos not Black reading this wants to be as free as this
work would make them. Theyd be free of their cultures, theyd be free of their families, theyd be free of all the coordinates
that ground them. They would find themselves in the abyss of nonexistence that you and I are in. Thats not exactly what they
want. They want to help us while maintaining their own sovereignty. John Brown went to the gallows [laughter]. This is a gallows
feeling that doesnt simply say, oh, isnt it a shame that Black people are socially dead; it condemns everybody else for being
socially alive, prior to their actions. What happens on the left is that nobody on the left has a problem making that statement with
respect to capitalism. Everybody can say I dont give a damn about the personality or the good intentions of individual capitalists.
What I want is the end of the capitalist class. No one would say, oh show Hitler a little bit of love because he was a vegetarian
and didnt kill any animals [laughter]. Nobody would say that. They say, death to all fascists. What Afro-pessimism says
is death to Humanity. Thats a harder thing to swallow.
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AltSolves Militarism
The expansion of prison regime at home and abroad begins with the desire to
disappear the Black Other. Opposition to US militarism cannot succeed unless we first
grapple with the US prison in all its formations as a machine for the murder of
blackness.
Sexton and Lee 06 [Jared, Prof African American Studies @ UC-Irvine, and Elizabeth, Prof Geography @
U British Columbia, Figuring the Prison: Prerequisites of Torture at Abu Ghraib, Antipode, p. 1005-
For those who would describe Abu Ghraib as a space of exception, a deviation from the norm, a place of unregulated chaos existing in stark opposition to standard military operations, we can only reply
that it was the very theater of operations, the shooting war and scene of combat unfolding around Abu Ghraib, that enabled and permitted the horrors eventually revealed inside (Gregory 2004). It was, in
other words, the incorporation of the prisonrefurbished by US forces from the rubble to which it had been reduced by an Iraqi crowd during the
storming of Baghdad in March 2003into the arena of ongoing military intelligence that defined its protocols (Hersh 2004). In this respect, Abu Ghraib seems
not so much an exception as it is a facet of the rule, a foreseeable consequence of imperial design and
rampant militarismall of which requires states of confinement in order to execute the necessary dirty
work. Analysis that does not situate the prison in this broader context misrecognizes the prison per se. This
is why any call for reforms at Abu Ghraibfor the humane treatment of prisoners, the end of abuse, the cessation of torturethat does not connect such demands indelibly to the end of
military occupation and the withdrawal of troops, which is to say the positive restoration of Iraqi sovereignty, does not simply fail to address the roots of the problem. It also contributes,
directly or indirectly, to the elaboration of a better prison and, by fiat, a better and more intractable
occupation, capitulating, as it were, to the current stage of the US imperium. We are by now well aware that torture is
endemic to the contemporary prisonindustrial complex, that this recent and rapid build up of the American Gulag has stretched
across more than half a dozen administrations from both sides of the aisle, that it represents one of the few truly successful bipartisan
projects of the last half century and that it involves, by definition, the collaboration or coalescence of
all three branches of the federal government and a related coordination of activities at the state and
local levels. In fact, as Paul Wright finds, mass incarceration is the most thoroughly implemented social experiment in American history (quoted in Silverstein 2003:1).8 [Foonote 8: As Franklin
(2004) notes: The prison has become a central institution in American society, integral to our politics,
economy, and culture. Between 1976 and 2000, the United States built on average a new prison each week and the number of imprisoned Americans increased tenfold.] It thus
seems profoundly mistaken to discuss recent events at Abu Ghraib as an extension or projection of mass imprisonment in the US and, at the same time, an effect of the peculiarities of the current
administration, the agenda of hard-line elements within the Republican Party, the short-term interests of the US corporate class or particular sectors of the domestic political economy. For Susan Sontag,
to take only the most well-known example, the photographs from Abu Ghraib are representative of the fundamental corruptions of any foreign occupation together with the Bush administrations
distinctive policies (Sontag 2004). Yet, the breadth and longevity of both the great prison buildup and the myriad of US foreign occupations renders problematic the notion of distinctive policies for the
present administration. On the matter of US foreign policy objectives, we must ask: distinctive at what level, strategic or tactical? What, after all, is the strategic difference between Clintonesque mul-
tilateralism, wherein the US pursues consensus issues among the elite through a manhandling of the UN, NATO, the IMF and World Bank (Ali 2000; Chomsky 1999), and a recrudescent unilateralism,
wherein the US openly flouts international institutions and/or simply drags them into its wake (Feffer 2003)? For radical critique, one would think these are differences of degreetactical distinctionsnot
differences of kind. Rather than join the clamor that has arisen on the subject of Abu Ghraib, weighing in on precisely what it tells us about the folly of Op- eration Iraqi Freedom or the ferocity of the
neoconservative program or the miserable character of contemporary US society, we may do better to consider why so many observers, observers who quite frankly know better, have seen fit to speak of
it in such evocative, often melodramatic and bewildered, language? In the scramble to provide explanation for the litany of violencepresuming that such images of violence shock and confuse and
disorient viewing audiences, rather than corroborating our existing knowledge and outrage and dissentour critical commentators have, each in their own ways, attempted to reduce an elusive and
disturbing political, economic, social, and cultural complex to a fixed aspect or moment or source in US society, to fashion an identifiable and stable object of criticism and opposition. Though the tropes
vary somewhat, it is the Janus head that has surfaced, if inexactly, as the leitmotif of this drive (Carby 2004), a restorative figure upholding the possibility that the ideal, to say nothing of the infrastructure,
of American democracy is, in fact, the other face of the gruesome visage revealed behind the prison wall, the promise on the periphery of the current and continuous mortification: the better angels of the
indomitable democratic experiment, the old Spirit of 76: infinitely redeemable and fundamentally decent (Whitney 2004). We submit, in contrast, that this overarching metaphorical initiative is as inapt as
those that serve as its supports. Without the buttressing of its figurative keystone, the initiative may give way altogether. Social critics across a range of publication venues have asserted, time and again,
that there is a linkage between the atrocities at Abu Ghraib and the legacies of racism and other forms of oppression in the United States, particularly the history and present of anti-blacknesswhether
that link is one marked by scattered recollection or one that discloses a direct, but hidden, line (Carby 2004). But for all this imaginative trafficking, none has felt obliged to explicate the linkages, to justify
the association, or to carry it to its logical conclusion. The latter would require, at the very least, speculation on the ramifications for the domestic front of opposition to the Iraq war, well beyond the
In asking whether the Left is, at

rollback of the Pa- triot Acts and the enhancements of Homeland Security, which is to say, a return to the US of the Clinton administration.
bottom, willing to bring its critique of US imperialism back home, to say that occupation is corrupt
abroad as well as at home, we find that the mobilization of hazy and indistinct metaphors of black ex-
perience is neither incidental nor optional. Rather, the imprecision of terms is mandatory to the discourse and such comparative comments are passing by
definition. As we will see, to dwell at any length within the analogy, to meditate on the production of its conceptual space, only diminishes the rhetorical purchase of the endeavor. Why, then, forge the
analogy in the first place? Why recall it, repeat it, cite it? In order to establish what point? Simply that the US is plagued by problems more long-standing and deep-rooted than is admitted by the tendency
to represent Abu Ghraib as an aberration or anomaly? Even so, why make an argument en route that has to do with the enduring history of anti- black racism? What conceptualization of anti-blackness
its placement in time and spaceis enabled by and embedded within this gesture? Despite their insertion into chains of equivalence in the critical literature on Abu Ghraib, the frequent references to the
historical experience of blacks in the USanalogies made to the estate of chattel slavery and the subsequent institutions of lynching and mass imprisonment function as supplemental to all other
gestures of comparison: for instance, to the brutalities of European colonialism in India (Ghosh 2005), to the barbarities of Nazism on the European continent (Brown 2004), to the desolation of Stalins
As
untold gulags (Blumenthal 2004), to the sexual exploitation, violence, and general nastiness of the multibillion dollar pornography industry and its popular culture (Brison 2004).
productions of slaverys afterlife, the institution of lynching in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries and the emergence of mass imprisonment in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries should be understood as altogether interleaved elements in the evolution of the invariant
social control and spatial containment, the permanent social incarceration, of blacks (Wacquant 2002). Yet, whereas the
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other noted historic instances inscribe political dispositions that brook viable, if not always unambiguous oppositiondecolonization, the end of military occupation, the fall of the regime, the dismantling or
rollback of imperial encroachments, transformations in the political economy of sex work, etcfor the conjured figures of black suffering in the US, there is, it seems, no political correlate. This impossible
correlation begs a number of urgent questions, questions shaped and incited by a political milieu that includes both the violence at Abu Ghraib and its opposition, but that are aimed at a certain
transfiguration. How, at the outset, might we begin to (re)formulate or (re)phrase the question of black freedom struggle today? How, in other words, are we to speak of or with or in relation to the forces of
black radicalism after Emancipation, post-civil rights, during an era in which a new nigger or replacement Negro appears at each turn (eg exploited and embattled immigrants from Latin America and
Asia, profiling and targeted Muslims, Arabs, etc), an era in which black suffering circulates everywhere as a criterion of political appraisal but resonates nowhere (sometimes not even among blacks) as a
cause worthy of its own name, let alone a collective effort warranting a certain pride of place? If we cannot square the circle of oppressions as we are wont to do, if we cannot simply assume or assert an
affinity of suffering as the common ground of a united front or a global Left, then how is opposition to US imperialism (its military adventures, its economic machinations, its political black- mail) to proceed
in such a way that it does not authorize the alienation or forfeiture, the endless deferral or deactivation, of the most belated of black demands? Is there language that can synchronize and coordinate
(solidarity with) an Iraqi (or Afghani or . . .) demand for independence and self-determination, and (solidarity with) a black demandin and beyond the United States, throughout the African Diasporafor
the reparation of everything?9 [Footnote 9: This point is not meant to diminish in any way the concrete platforms that have been developed already by the international reparations for slavery movement
(Bittker 2003; Robinson 2001). Rather, it is to recognize that such platforms, though rich and far reaching in their potential impact, actually represent a contraction or discounting of the incalculable debt
incurred by the US, the West, and the world at the expense of African- descent peoples across the last five centuries. In fact, even if the economic legacies of transatlantic slavery and colonialism in Africa
and the Americas were redressed through, say, a global redistribution of capitalits impact would induce not crisis, which the capitalist system can accommodate, but catastrophe.] If not, then why not?
Even if we can agree that Abu Ghraib is more than a symptom of the Bush regime, still we must interrogate the analogical impulse that has disseminated on the heels of Sontags Regarding the torture of
others (2004). As the author rightly opines, [t]o acknowledge that Americans torture their prisoners [of war] would contradict everything this administration has invited the public to believe about the
virtue of American intentions and Americas right, flowing from that virtue, to undertake unilateral action on the world stage (Sontag 2004). What, then, exactly, is contradicted by the acknowledgment that
Americans torture their prisoners within the fortress gates of the US? Official virtue is similarly impugned, of course, but what right is thereby cancelled? Does it cancel the states right to pursue the
domestic equivalent of invasion of a sovereign entity, a sort of unilateralism within the homeland? Are we to assume that over three decades of mass imprisonment, or a near century of lynching before it,
or the centuries-long slave regime from which the latter comes into view, are pursued according to the dictates of some US Grand Strategy? In point of fact, the situation is much worse. The profound
continuity of black captivity across the entire history of the United States indicates not its utility but rather its excess in relation to the shifting winds of political expedience (including otherwise paramount
economic rationalities), its status as what we might call pre- political, a condition of gratuitous (and not only instrumental) violence that founds the very order of the political and that affords the frame of
intelligibility for political conflicts proper. Is this not why the question of black emancipation and the prospect of black freedom has always raised, and catastrophically delivered on, the specter of civil war;
why it has required the most exceptional deployments of repressive state power, on all sides; why it has presented the most fundamental questions about the constitution (and Constitution) of the nation-
state?10 The rituals of torture exposed at Abu Ghraibstaged events both reckless and deliberate, a whole theatrics of humiliation, terror, sexual degradationprovide, not contradiction or hypocrisy, but
the necessary counterpart to the American principles of democracy, dignity, and freedom; what Zizek calls the obscene underside of U.S. popular culture . . . the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and
obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values (Zizek 2004).11 In this sense, what the notorious images of frivolous brutality circulating
throughout the global media environment evoke, however obliquely, is the ambient combat, and the attendant culture of authoritarianism, that operates without direct announcement and acknowledgment
within the United States as an affirmation of its birthright in and as a slave society.12 This ancient internal warfare is foundational and constitutive; the primary division of humanity it enables launches the
syntax of western modernity, the state(s) of democratic citizenship, the promise and compromise of civil societynot the division between the exploiters and the exploited or the rich and the poor, but
the repression, torture, and

rather the free and the enslaved, subject and object, person and property (Barrett 2006). The obscene underside of the popular culture,
sexual coercion that constitute the underbelly of a particular version of democracy, which has
achieved dominance in the world (Davis 2004:45), and the myriad peculiar institutions of social incarceration
it has engendered, is the most intimate possession of black existence in the USfrom the political and
libidinal economies of chattel slavery (still determinate in current affairs despite wishful thinking from all quarters) to the official
endorsements of institutionalized lynching (practices commandeered in recent generations by the proper authorities) and the codification of
Jim Crow segregation (whose revival cancels apace the detours thrown up by the modern Civil Rights Movement) to the formation of the urban
ghetto (which retains its powers of quarantine even in the aftermath of the long hot summers and the short flight of a fragile black lumpen bourgeoisie) to the rise of the
modern day prison (whose ghastly presence supplies the hallmark of the so-called post-civil rights era) (Nast 2000).13 The latter, it bears repeating, now
warehouses well over 2 million people; it carries out a range of invisible punishments over another
nearly 5 million maintained in its orbit as probationers and parolees; and it produces a ruinous
cascade of collateral consequences for the millions more considered family, friend, and community
to those who are most immediately disappeared and monitored (Mauer and Chesney- Lind 2002). We are indicating something of the
generative force of the prison, but it must be stated as well that the prison (and its repercussions) is more appropriately understood as a component of an even broader offensive on the
apparatuses of the welfare state, a malevolent social transformation for which black communities remain the
epicenter poor black women above all insofar as they inhabit the mesh of hyper- segregation, mass
imprisonment, and the discipline and punishment of workfare austerity. That is to say, the
peacetime assault finds its raison detre and its most compelling rationalization in the persistence
of the domestic black population, and the frontline of this racist carceral regime obtains in the ever-
increasing powers of the police exercised particularly over the lives of black women and men
(irrespective of class status or educational background), a development for which the term racial
profiling marks only the tip of the iceberg (Sexton forthcoming). In the US, there is among both state officials and the general public a long historical
preoccupation with weapons of mass destruction in regard to blacks. Black people have been deemed, since well before the inception of the United States,
perennial threats to national security not for having such weapons (which might actually lend collective bar- gaining powerwitness Iran or North Korea at present),
but for being such weapons and thus always in need of containment, surveillance, sanction, deportation, elimination; a point
that underscores the accuracy of Lewis Gordons formulation of racism as a desire for black people
to disappear (Gordon 1997:63). What concerns us in this respect is the problematic rendering by many commentators of the torture at Abu Ghraib as, for instance, eerily or hauntingly
reminiscent of black lynchings, while those same commentators display considerably less vigilance and indignation about the similar, and entirely contemporary, treatment of a prototypically black
prison population here in the United States. Nearly all will acknowledge, perfunctorily, the violations of human rights in Lockdown America (Parenti 2000) carefully documented by international
monitoring groups, yet few have moved beyond concerns for reform of current practices of incarceration, loosening their most repressive aspects, or rescinding the most egregious of drug laws. More to
the point, the analogy between the foreign military prison and the domestic prison tends to obfuscate as much as it seeks to illuminate, since it is unable to remark the critical difference between what is
happening in the respective carceral formations and why. Differences not at the empirical levelmany practices were exported wholesale or transposed with little variation (Peirce 2004)but at the
structural level, the level at which Wilderson (2004) elaborates what he terms the political ontology of race.14 Now, there are compelling reasons for this general failure of discern- ment, but this fact
makes it no more defensible. While departments of the same repressive state apparatus are called to question in each case, even the most preliminary examination makes clear that divergent aspects of
its functioning are at stake at either end of the comparison; divergence between the hard site at Abu Ghraib and, say, Louisianas Angola Prison, or, more broadly, between the War on Terror and the
War on Drugs. This is why, at one level, domestic political opposition to the US invasion of Iraq, or the vaster post-Cold
427
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War US militarism, cannot hope to mount viable criticism, much less effective political intervention, if it
cannot subject to radical critique the local police forces and the ancillary juridical institutions with
which they interact daily. So much goes for the welfare of POWs as well. The disinclination of left intellectuals to datewhether activist, academic, or bothto engage the
question of prison abolition on the domestic front finds its counterpart in the hedg- ing of their responsible commentary on the military occupation (in Afghanistan, in Iraq) and the accumulation of
There is a significant difference, after all, between calling for the immediate
unlawful enemy combatants.15
enforcement of Geneva Conventions in the global network of US military prisons (unlikely in any event) and
calling for the dismantling of the network itself, the closure and demolition or conversion of its
physical plant, and the release of the prisoners held captive within its walls (no more likely, of course, but no more fanciful either).
For those who pause in lieu of subsequent reconstructive efforts, those animated by questions like, What is to be done with former prisoners and the myriad social problems faced by them and their
communities? or What will happen to Iraq now that it has been devastated by the war, how will it be rebuilt, and who will oversee its renewal? we couldbut will not hereentertain any number of policy
packages and spending conversion schemes, none of which seem incredibly difficult to imagine (though most register as alien to the current political landscape) and all of which would certainly be better
, there is something disingenuous about the

than present proposals for maintaining the relevant custodial relationship (Ali 2003; Davis 2003).16 Yet
unwillingness to advocate the abolition of prisonat home and abroadunless and until a clear
alternative is on hand. Disingenuous because it bespeaks a refusal to engage the lived experience of
the imprisoned, to enter serious dialogue across prison walls, to become conversant with the archive
of research and testimony about their political location, about existence in a state and status of civic
death. This disposition, which, needless to say, concedes to criminalization, has a general salience, given that prisoners in the US are officially
disregarded and popularly despised as a class. However, the particular virulence that characterizes the institutionalized fear and
hatred of prisoners in the US, both men and increasingly women, is thoroughly coded by race, and racial blackness
unquestionably functions here as its chief abbreviation. In racial constructs, the hyper-black-as-
prisoner is slave and so she stands distinctly debased from all other racial formations in society (James
2005a:xiii, emphasis added). Thus we offer that the societal derogation of the imprisoned draws its principal affective power
and its strictest ideological cast from the deep wells of anti-blackness, and that the prisonization of
the US is more accurately discussed as a reverberation or derivation of the social death implanted at
the heart of black existence, the quintessence of racial slavery and the principle legacy of its afterlife in
altered structural modalities (Hartman 1997; Patterson 1982). The reticence of the Left to engage arguments, and
efforts for prison abolition within the US and to center therein the ongoing struggle for black freedom,
serves to hamstring its critical resistance to US imperialism abroad, leaving it open to capitulation on
the emancipation of those with which it seeks to forge solidarity. It does so by approaching sovereignty as a matter of degree. Still, it is not
hard to imagine scenariosindeed, they already existin which the Left licenses itself to pursue radical platforms against imperialism, which is to say abolitionist campaigns overseas, while allowing the
historical condition of blacks, irreducible to the shifting objectives of empire (or Empire), to serve as little more than convenient metaphor: source of insight and outrage, but only insofar as the trouble is
quarantined to the past (as lessons learned) or rendered on scales too small or too big to demand action (as either nagging residue or eternal national shame). On this note, we should admit that there is
something unconvincing, unpersuasive, and perhaps even fraudulent about the analogical links drawn between, on the one hand, the scandal at Abu Ghraib and, on the other, the fetid history of lynching
or the contemporary horrors of mass imprisonment or both. The pretense is due not so much to the moral non-equivalence of the respective institutions (Winn 2004) as to their strict political in-
commensurability. Thinking productively about this incommensurability, rendering it legible, requires, above all else, the working through of a persistent screen memoryfor them and for usthat
dispatches racial slavery as an allegory for regarding the torture of others: As an African American, these actions are all too familiar to me . . . When Blacks arrived from Africa during the 1600s, they were
stripped of their clothes, pride, dignity and religion. Africans that were enslaved in America went through a tortuous process known as seasoning, which is a term referring to the process of breaking
down the African physically, emotionally, and psychologically, hence making him/her submissive. Once the slaves arrived in America, members of the dominant culture raped women repeatedly, men
were publicly humiliated and children were sold and separated. It is probably safe to assume that at Abu Ghraib the similarities vastly outweigh the differences. (Slater 2004)
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AltUptopianism Good
Rethink utopianism as not an unrealistic trade off with change, but rather the realistic
demand for change
Weeks 11 (Kathi Weeks PhD, Political Science, University of Washington)The Problem with Work
Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork politics, and Postwork Imaginaries: The Future Is Now Utopian Demands and
the Temporalities of Hope
https://libcom.org/library/future-now-utopian-demands-temporalities-hope 2011
In the current political climate, the demands for basic income and shorter hours could of course be dismissed
as "merely utopian." Rather than waste time on impractical and untimely demands, so the argument goes,
feminists and others should conserve their meager energies and set their sights on more politically feasible
goals. This familiar logic makes it easy to write such demands off as unrealistic, and therefore as potentially
dangerous distractions from the necessarily modest and small-scale parameters of political reform. That is, the
supposed utopianism of these demands is often considered a ftal flaw. One could perhaps contest the claim
that these demands are aptly designated utopian in this time and place, and certainly I have tried to point out
their practicality in relation to current economic trends. But there is another way to respond to the critique.
What if the utopianism of these demands is not a liability but an asset? 'What if we were to respond to the
charge of utopianism not with embarrassment or defensive denial but with recognition and affirmation? And
what might such a utopianism without apology look like? Rather than deny the applicability of the appellation
"utopian" to escape its pejorative connotations, in this chapter I want to accept the label, reconsider utopianism
as a distinctive mode of thought and practice, and explore what a utopian demand is and what it can do.
The utopian demand is the cry for long term social change, not instant pragmatic
reform
Weeks 11 (Kathi Weeks PhD, Political Science, University of Washington)The Problem with Work
Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork politics, and Postwork Imaginaries: The Future Is Now Utopian Demands and
the Temporalities of Hope
https://libcom.org/library/future-now-utopian-demands-temporalities-hope 2011
Of course, part of what is in dispute here is the status of the term. The definition of "utopia" in this chapter is
broadly conceived, including not just the more traditional list of literary and philosophical blueprints of the good
society, but also, as I will describe, a variety of partial glimpses of and incitements toward the imagination and
construction of alternatives. One of these more fractional forms, the "utopian demand" - as I use the phrase - is
a political demand that takes the form not of a narrowly pragmatic reform but of a more substantial
transformation of the present configuration of social relations; it is a demand that raises eyebrows, one for
which we would probably not expect immediate success. These are demands that would be difficult - though
not impossible - to realize in the present institutional and ideological context; to be considered feasible, a
number of shifts in the terrain of political discourse must be effected. In this sense, a utopian demand
prefigures - again in fragmentary form - a different world, a world in which the program or policy that the
demand promotes would be considered as a matter of course both practical and reasonable. It is not, however,
just the status of the program or policy that is at stake; as the proponents of wages for housework recognized,
the political practice of demanding is of crucial importance as well.
Alt
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Session II
AltPerformance Good - Solvency
Our performative pedagogy makes whiteness visible and undermines white supremacy
Warren and Fassett, 2004 [John T, Asst. Prof. Communication @ Bowling Green, Deanna L., Asst. Prof.
Communication @ San Jos State University, Theatre Topics 14.2 (2004) pg. 411-430]
To do this work, we look outward from these spectacular instances of violence and examine the minute and
mundane processes that make these acts possible. In our courses, we examine how instances of racism, homophobia,
and other forms of oppression are generated through everyday communicative/performative actsthat is,
both aesthetic and reiterative. Thus, we seek to understand difference (specifically race) as a performative construct that is always already
aesthetic (that is, constructed for an audience or public) and reiterative (that is, repeated and ongoing). By focusing on race as one form of
oppression, we examine whiteness as a systematic production of poweras a normative social process
based upon a history of domination, recreating itself through naturalized everyday actsmuch like heteronormativity or
misogyny. Though in this writing we address whiteness, in particular, as a system of power and privilege, such an
exploration helps mark the unmarked (Phelan)making visible the workings of a number of oppressive social
relationships. To render whiteness visible requires careful analysis and constant critique of our taken-
for-granted norms. But, as our students question, to what end do we do what we do? We both base our courses, at least in part, in and cultural
studies means that we infuse all course content with issues of power, refusing to allow matters of race and
difference to be [End Page 411] marginalized.
Performance Good Challenges Dominant modes of knowing/distancing and

objectification of objects of knowledge in the academy (Challenges View from
Nowhere)
Conquergood 02 [Dwight, Prof. Communication & Performance Studies @ Northwestern, Performance
Studies: Interventions and Radical Research, TDR 46. 2 Summer, pp.145-46]
But de Certeau's aphorism, "what the map cuts up, the story cuts across," also points to transgressive
travel between two different domains of knowledge: one official, objective, and abstract-"the map"; the
other one practical, embodied, and popular-"the story." This promiscuous traffic between different
ways of knowing carries the most radical promise of performance studies research. Performance studies
struggles to open the space between analysis and action, and to pull the pin on the binary opposition between theory
and practice. This embrace of different ways of knowing is radical because it cuts to the root of how
knowledge is organized in the academy. The dominant way of knowing in the academy is that of empirical observation and
critical analysis from a distanced perspective: "knowing that," and "knowing about." This is a view from above the object of
inquiry: knowledge that is anchored in paradigm and secured in print. This propositional knowledge is shadowed by another
way of knowing that is grounded in active, intimate, hands-on participation and personal connection:
"knowing how," and "knowing who." This is a view from ground level, in the thick of things. This is knowledge that is
anchored in practice and circulated within a performance community, but is ephemeral. Donna Haraway locates
this homely and vulnerable "view from a body" in contrast to the abstract and authoritative "view from above," universal
knowledge that pretends to transcend location (1991:196).
Performance is a fugitive communication that challenges epistemic violence that

excludes alternative ways of knowing
Studies: Interventions and Radical Research, TDR 46. 2 Summer, pp.146]
Since the enlightenment project of modernity, the first way of knowing has been preeminent. Marching under the banner of
science and reason, it has dis-qualified and repressed other ways of knowing that are rooted in
430
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embodied experience, orality, and local contingencies. Between objective knowledge that is consolidated in texts, and local
know-how that circulates on the ground within a community of memory and practice, there is no contest. It is the choice between science and "old wives'
tales" (note how the disqualified knowledge is gendered as feminine). Michel Foucault coined the term "subjugated
knowledges" to include all the local, regional, vernacular, naive knowledges at the bottom of the hierarchy- the
low Other of science (I980:81-84). These are the nonserious ways of knowing that dominant culture neglects, excludes,
represses, or simply fails to recognize. Subjugated knowledges have been erased because they are
illegible; they exist, by and large, as active bodies of meaning, outside of books, eluding the forces of
inscription that would make them legible, and thereby legitimate (see de Certeau 1998; Scott 1998). What gets squeezed out by this
epistemic violence is the whole realm of complex, finely nuanced meaning that is embodied, tacit, intoned, gestured,
improvised, coexperienced, covert-and all the more deeply meaningful because of its refusal to be spelled
out. Dominant epistemologies that link knowing with seeing are not attuned to meanings that are masked, camouflaged,
indirect, embedded, or hidden in context. The visual/verbal bias of Western regimes of knowledge blinds
researchers to meanings that are expressed forcefully through intonation, silence, body tension,
arched eyebrows, blank stares, and other protective arts of disguise and secrecy-what de Certeau
called "the elocutionary experience of a fugitive communication" (2000:133; see Conquergood 2000). Subordinate people do
not have the privilege of explicitness, the luxury of transparency, the presumptive norm of clear and direct communication, free and
open debate on a level playing field that the privileged classes take for granted.
Performance Good Textcentrism Bad Resists White Supremacy/Will to Know the

Other, To reduce other to object
Studies: Interventions and Radical Research, TDR 46. 2 Summer, p.150-1]
Geertz's now classic depiction of the turn toward texts in ethnography and cultural studies needs to be juxtaposed with Zora Neal Hurston's much earlier
and more complex rendering of a researcher reading the texts of subordinate others: The theory behind our tactics: "The white man is always trying
to know into somebody else's business. All right, I'll set something outside the door of my mind for him to play with and handle. He can read my writing
but he sho' can't read my mind. I'll put this play toy in his hand, and he will seize it and go away. Then I'll say my say and sing my song." ([I935] I990:3)
Hurston foregrounds theterrain of struggle, the field of power relations on which texts are written,
exchanged, and read. Whereas Geertz does not problematize the ethnographer's will-to-know or access to the texts of others, Hurston is
sensitive to the reluctance of the subordinate classes "to reveal that which the soul lives by" (2)
because they understand from experience the ocular politics that links the powers to see, to search,
and to seize. Aware of the white man's drive to objectify, control, and grasp as a way of knowing,
subordinate people cunningly set a text, a decoy, outside the door to lure him away from "homeplace"
where subjugated but empowering truths and survival secrets are sheltered (hooks 1990). In Hurston's brilliant
example, vulnerable people actually redeploy the written text as a tactic of evasion and camouflage,
performatively turning and tripping the textual fetish against the white person's will-to-know. "So driven in
on his reading," as Williams would say, he is blinded by the texts he compulsively seizes: "knowing so little about us, he doesn't know what he is
missing" (Hurston [1935] 1990:2). Once provided with something that he can "handle," "seize," in a word, apprehend, he will go away and then space
By mimicking the reifying
can be cleared for performed truths that remain beyond his reach: "then I'll say my say and sing my song."
textualism of dominant knowledge regimes, subordinate people can deflect its invasive power. This
mimicry of textualism is a complex example of "mimetic excess" in which the susceptibility of
dominant images forms, and technologies of power to subversive doublings holds the potential for
undermining the power of that which is mimed (Taussig I993:254-55). Note that in Hurston's account, subordinate
people read and write, as well as perform. With her beautiful example of how a text can perform subversive work,
she disrupts any simplistic dichotomy that would align texts with domination and performance with
liberation. In Hurston's example, the white man researcher is a fool not because he values literacy, but because he
valorized it to the exclusion of other media, other modes of knowing. I want to be very clear about this point:
textocentrism-not texts-is the problem.
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Session II
Personal experience checks against the homogenizing function of academic/expert
discousre
Reid-Brinkley 08 (Assistant Professor PhD and Debate Coach at University of Pittsburgh "THE HARSH
REALITIES OF ACTING BLACK: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE
REPRESENTATION THROUGH RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE" Chapter 3 pg 67-69
Jones argues that without the three tier process debate claims are based on singular perspectives that privilege those with institutional and economic
power. The Louisville debaters do not reject traditional evidence per se, instead they seek to augment or supplement what counts as evidence with other
forms of knowledge produced outside of academia. As Green notes in the double-octo-finals at CEDA Nationals, Knowledge surrounds me in the
60
streets, through my peers, through personal experiences, and everyday wars that I fight with my mind. The thee-tier process: personal
experience, organic intellectuals, and traditional evidence, provides a method of argumentation that
taps into diverse forms of knowledge-making practices. With the Louisville method, personal experience and
organic intellectuals are placed on par with traditional forms of evidence. While the Louisville debaters (we)see
the benefit of academic research, (we)they are also critically aware of the normative practices that
exclude racial and ethnic minorities from policy-oriented discussions because of their lack of training
and expertise. Such exclusions prevent radical solutions to racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia
from being more permanently addressed. According to Green: bell hooks talks about how when we rely solely on one perspective to
make our claims, radical liberatory theory becomes rootless. Thats the reason why we use a three-tiered process. Thats why we use alternative forms
of discourse such as hip hop. Thats also how we use traditional evidence and our personal narratives so you dont get just one 82 perspective claiming
61
The use of hip hop and
to be the right way. Because it becomes a more meaningful and educational view as far as how we achieve our education.
personal experience function as a check against the homogenizing function of academic and expert
discourse. Note the reference to bell hooks, Green argues that without alternative perspectives, radical libratory
theory becomes rootless. The term rootless seems to refer to a lack of grounded-ness in the material
circumstances that academics or experts study. In other words, academics and experts by definition
represent an intellectual population with a level of objective distance from that which they study. For the
Louisville debaters, this distance is problematic as it prevents the development of a social politic that is
rooted in the community of those most greatly affected by the status of oppression.
Our politic is the only way to demand a subversive encounter

Warren and Fassett, 2004 (The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved Theatre Topics 14.2
(2004) 411-430John T. Warren is an assistant professor in the School of Communication Studies at Bowling
Green State University, where he teaches courses in performance, culture, identity, and power. Deanna L.
Fassett is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at San Jos State University,
where she teaches courses in instructional communication and critical, feminist, and performative pedagogies)
Performative pedagogy, as a method and theory of the body, can ask questions in a way that points to the
structure and machinery of whiteness. It can put flesh to the concept of whiteness. It can point to whiteness's
perceived absence. It can name the norm. Performative pedagogy, in this way, can serve as a pedagogy of
the oppressorit can ask those in positions of power (via sex, race, class, or sexuality) to question their
own embodied experiences by demanding that they encounter the other through the mode of performance.
For if whiteness functions in dominant discourse as the unmarked center of cultural power, then a
performative pedagogy can and must ask how we can create a ground for subversion. Performative
pedagogy, as a method of enfleshment that brings theory to the body, can question the normal, stable,
inevitable actualization of race, nurturing subversive possibility.
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It is particularly within discursive spaces such as debate that whiteness operates to
ensure the continuation the fascination with the bodies of the Other granting it mastery
over those particular bodies while allowing whiteness to operate as the universal
turning case. We must start at the level of the body
Winnubst 06 [Shannon, Associate Prof. of Race, Queer, and Feminist theory @ Ohio State University;
Queering freedom pp. 45-47]
How does the white male propertied Christian (straight) body circulate as this unmarked, unseen, and thus powerful body? How does it
inhabit this mode of rationality and emerge as an unlimited body? First of all, I want to emphasize that this demarcation of social differences occurs at
the level of the body. Despite high modernitys disavowal of embodiment, the body continues to be the site of racial, sexual, and even class, religious, and
nationalist differentiation. Embodiment itself is not deemed a philosophical category in high modernity, despite Lockes empiricist epistemology.24 The singular function and significance of
embodiment is its role as the negative counterpart, and thus appropriate limit, to rationality. To discuss embodiment in and of itself, without deriving it through this binary logic, is not only
impossible but unthinkable, as is evident in the ongoing post-Hegelian attempts to do so in European philosophy. Embodiment is a fundamental and constitutive blind spot, a disavowal that
enacts the logic of the limit by assuming rationalitys ability to delimit the intelligible from the sensible. It subsequently renders much of modernitys epistemological
and political projects possible: transcendental truth, objectivity, universal freedom, individualism, and the language of rights are all
conditioned by a disavowal of the body. But this disavowal of embodiment also fundamentally structures phallicized whitenessthe
nexus of categories, structures, and values at work in the subjectivity of white male propertied (straight) Christianity. The disavowal of embodiment grants
phallicized whiteness the power to perpetrate racial and sexual violence in western cultures. One owns ones body, and this mode of
relating to it as private property allows one to dispense with it, to disavow its meaningful existence in ones life or the world. How do embodiment and its
disavowal lie at the heart of philosophical high modernity and its concept of freedom, the subjectivity of phallicized whiteness, and the political
power of each of these? And how are these enactments of the logic of the limit? The differences that we find carved into female and non-white bodies in the post-bellum era of the U.S. effectively distinguish discrete
kinds of bodies. Female, black, brown, non-Christian, yellow, poor bodies are delimited on the basis of their bodily appearances. They are trapped in and by their bodies: they do not exercise proper authority of ownership
over them. Someone or some other force owns these bodies. This entrapment by their bodily characteristics imposes brutal limitations upon their freedom and their individuality: they are not free to do as they please and,
perhaps more damningly, they are read as kinds of bodies, not as individuals. The logic of the limit functions in at least two ways here: it carves discrete differences into specific bodies, delimiting them as different from
others (e.g., raced bodies are discrete and different from sexed bodies); and it simultaneously delimits the freedom and individuality accorded to those different bodies. To the contrary, the white male Christian propertied
(straight) body appears wholly unaffected. He is neither reduced to his bodily characteristics, nor limited in his freedom or individuality. He owns his body, properly controlling its power in the social world. The white male
Christian propertied (straight) body speaks, acts, and desires not on behalf of his sex, race, class, or religion (or sexuality), but exclusively on behalf of himselfthe autonomous individual. He is not bound to or limited by the
kind of body he inhabits, if he properly inhabits or is affected by materiality at all. How does this work? How does phallicized whiteness inhabit the body in such a way as to ensure that it transcends the body and becomes a
whitenesss deployment of cultural and discursive

subject, while non-white bodies are fully reducible to the body and thus objects or abjected others? How does phallicized
practices ensure a continued fascination with the body of others, while simultaneously marking out the space of the
disembodied or transcendent as the space of power? How are embodiment and disembodiment functioning in these philosophical and socio-political deployments of phallicized
whiteness? In his provocative book White, Richard Dyer argues that whiteness in the modern world gains its hegemonic power through its
disembodiment. Following the pattern of privileged subject positions (masculinity, the middle class, heterosexuality, Protestant Christianity in the contemporary U.S.), whiteness functions largely through its
invisibility, through its disavowal of race itself: one is not white in the U.S., one is just a person. Whiteness poses as the universal and naturalized order of things. Whiteness is not a color or a race; it is just human. It just is, as
the history of western metaphysics easily shows. In mutually grounding gestures, it renders itself both invisible and ubiquitous. These dynamics then sediment one another: the more transparent and invisible whiteness
whiteness operates as the universal, unmarked signifier

becomes, the more normalized and omnipresent it becomes, and so on. But at the core of this disavowal of race,
through its disavowal of embodiment itself. Echoing Lacans phallus, whiteness functions through its remaining veiled. And a primary site of this veiling is
its ontological denial of embodiment itself. She continues: We have already encountered the ways that whiteness gains its hegemonic power through its
disavowal of race, its own invisibility, and ultimately its own disembodiment. It is this invisibility that renders whiteness ubiquitous, the universal signifierthe same
position that the phallus holds in Lacans account of the symbolic. Echoing Lacans phallus, whiteness functions through its remaining veiled. And a primary site of this
veiling is its ontological denial of embodiment itself. The body becomes, just as it is in Lacans accounts of ego-formation in a phallic symbolic, an optical illusion. It is the
body that recognizes itself as an optical illusion that can subsequently control the visual field, the field of optics.36 (And we wonder why modern philosophers were so
enamored with the emergent field of optics.) Other bodies are too realtoo fleshy to recognize that the field of appearances, which is the field of social
power, is a game of optics. Other bodies eyes have not inhabited the proper space of the symbolic that renders this recognition of optical illusions possible. As Dyer
draws this game of optics out in the specific register of representation, the ideal of white male heterosexuality emerges in the figure of Christ, who inhabits precisely
the space of the symbolic that allows the recognition of optical illusions: the principle of incarnation is to be in the body but not of it. This tension between the flesh and
the spirit, an exemplary Lacanian splitting, is what distinguishes whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality from their oppositional counterparts in the phallicized binary
symbolic. (And that only oppositional counterparts are considered itself indicates the power of the phallus in this symbolic field.) With several ironic twists of apparent
embodiment and transcendence, the white male heterosexual body disavows its own corporealityits own particularity and
specificity so that it can function as the universal signifier and appear as the controlled, contained body. It recognizes its body
as nothing more than an optical illusion and, accordingly, transcends it into a realm of masteryof all bodies. In this process of
disembodiment, whiteness functions perfectly as the phallus. For whiteness, the appearance of bodiesboth how they appear and that they are not
realensures the continued mastery of the symbolic field. The white straight male body appears as the normal bodywithout marking,
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Session II
without distinction, perfectly contained, and, subsequently, in power. The logic of space and embodiment that insists upon reading bodies as bound by
skin not only puts the visual markings of race and sex fully into play, but also perpetuates the logic of containment in which whiteness itself, as that
which is perfectly contained exactly because it is not a body, thrives. Controlling its optical illusion as the body that is perfectly contained,
whiteness is never where it appears: it is somewhere else, veiled beyond capture.
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Session II
AltModel Minority Asian Rage
The alternative is Asian rage, an embodied experience which flips the script on the
docile model minority and sparks emotional connections in our communities
Asian American rage is a tool we weaponize rage to collapse the myth of the model
minority, and to break down white supremacy. Under the paradigm of the model
minority, Asians are perceived as docile, our grief is accepted but our anger is seen as
ungrateful. Our rage turns these perceptions on their head instead of internalizing
the melancholy of the status quo, our rage empowers and resists.
Chandra 14 (Ravi, san fransico psychiatrist, Asian American Anger: Its A Thing!)=^.^=
Asian Americans very easily find themselves under threat as well. While we might call Rodgers anger self-
centered and say Asian American cultural anger responds to bigger threats, the latter still holds tensions that
must be reckoned with on a personal level. We might find cultural anger more justifiable, but it is tied to
identity struggles that impact relations between all individuals. We could cite a long and undeniable history of
racism and violence against Asian Americans in the U.S., from the earliest Chinese immigrants through
Japanese American internment to the continuing hate crimes against South Asians post 9-11. We recently
passed the 32nd anniversary of the murder of Vincent Chin in Detroit, a seminal moment in Asian American
history. There are still those who deny this was a hate crime, including one of the murderers yet the fact
remains that Chins murderers got off essentially scot-free. A Chinese American mans life was worth only
three years of probation and a $3720 fine that was never even paid. The list goes on. Balbir Singh Sodi,
murdered days after 9-11 in Mesa, Arizona. Fong Lee, a 19-year old Hmong American man who was brutally
shot multiple times in the back while he was on the ground, by a Minneapolis police officer in 2006. Cau Bich
Thi Tran, a 25-year old Vietnamese American mother of two shot by a San Jose policeman in 2003 three
seconds after he entered her house responding to her own 911 call, claiming he mistook her vegetable peeler
for a weapon. Sunando Sen, an Indian immigrant pushed to his death on a New York City subway track in
2012 by a woman who stated she was retaliating for 9-11. The six people killed and four injured by a white
supremacist in the Oak Creek, Wisconsin Sikh Temple massacre in 2012. In 2012, at least 4.1% of hate crimes
reported to the FBI were against Asians and Pacific Islanders, but critics counter there is significant
underreporting. 54% of Asian American teens reported being bullied in a recent survey, far above the rates of
whites and other minorities. When we raise our voices in anger about violence and harassment targeting our
communities, we are not crying wolf. The isolated incidents are not isolated they are part of a pattern of
hatred directed against all minority groups. There is a serious and significant danger to which we remain alert
and sensitive. Asian Americans are victims of bias that renders them outsiders and others to be
discriminated against, harassed and even killed. Trauma can also be transmitted intergenerationally. There is
evidence that experiences of parents and ancestors leave their marks on gene expression and thus can
predispose children to anger and other difficult emotions and alter their response to stress. Men (and women)
also absorb the stories of their families and forebears struggles, here and abroad. In Korea and in Korean
Americans, for example, there is a word for this han a collective feeling of oppression and cultural suffering
that becomes woven into personal identity. As Asian Americans, we often think in terms of group identity and
affiliation so I think there is an Asian American han, which vies with cultural amnesia and dissociation from
the totality of the Asian American experience to define the Asian American soul. Some of us cant forget;
others try to flee into the supposed safety of the river of forgetfulness, and so perpetuate the problem. This is
all occurring at the same time that some Asian American groups are experiencing financial prosperity and
success. We are stereotyped as the Model Minority, which ignores the great diversity between groups
and also the complicated stories within groups and individuals (see Jenn Fangs and Marie Myung-Ok
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Lees analyses at Reappropriate.com and Salon.com, respectively). Asians are seen as quiet, docile,
submissive, and silent worker drones who do their job without complaint, and for their service are held up as
ideals by even our own Amy Chua (in her recent book The Triple Package), causing a backlash of
resentment and hostility, as well as internal and external conflict as Asian Americans struggle to find and
assert their own identities. Anger arises in the context of discrimination, violence, racism, misunderstanding
and even dismissal of our perspectives, potentials, histories and individualities. Where financial success does
not occur, as in many parts of the Asian American experience, the complications of poverty and
disenfranchisement violence, mental and physical health problems, and so forth cause deep and
interlocking problems, and plenty of food for anger. Success might in itself be soothing but it is incomplete
and therefore, is not. Financial success, even when it occurs, cannot compete with relational or moral victory,
and does not translate into freedom from suffering. The successful Asian American man can feel excluded,
unrelated and demoralized everywhere from the big screen to the boardroom to the bedroom. When not
excluded, he and his cultures are openly mocked, stereotyped, appropriated and insulted, an
ignorance-fueled hazing by some in the white majority. Despite this, he is viewed as having no right
to be angry. All speak to a sense of emasculation and disempowerment, isolation and injustice, silencing,
marginalization and victimization. While it feels at times (for some of us) that the landscape is changing quickly,
we cannot feel distant to racial and cultural inequities. As human beings, no matter our socioeconomic status,
we remain sensitive to the suffering of not only our groups but all groups. The instant we become insensitive to
others suffering is the instant we become party to the perpetuation of that suffering. You may have heard this
slogan: If youre not angry, youre not paying attention. We cant help but pay attention, so anger is one of our
understandable reactions. We get to this feeling honestly. But in the end, the righteous anger of the socially
conscious may be an aspirational anger, available only to those relatively unburdened by more proximal
issues, such as family conflicts. To paraphrase Tolstoy, happy families are all of a piece; unhappy ones tell
myriad dark tales. Yet there are themes common to the genesis of the frustrated, angry Asian American man.
All of us are victims, first, of our own families and their limitations. Children are always on the front line of their
familys issues from the time of birth. Amy Chua, for example, infamously promoted the Tiger Mom parenting
strategy, but she angered Asian American men and women who were harmed by harsh, critical parents. Dr. Su
Yeong Kim showed that harsh and tiger parenting led to higher rates of depression, lower self-esteem, and
poorer performance in school in Chinese American children. The ranks of the angry and suffering often come
saddled with issues created by their family situations. The children of immigrants are often frustrated by a large
generation and cultural gap with their parents. They can feel torn between worlds. Expectations for success
at school and work, for obedience can run high, leaving them in a double bind of both loving their parents
and being angry or disappointed with them, of trying to please parents and also trying to assert themselves.
Male children especially may be prized at home and put on a pedestal, yet feel alienated or socially stunted in
the outside world, feeling that their family situation didnt prepare them to relate to the broader American scene
and women in particular. Emotional growth may be devalued, and they are sometimes alienated from parents
who dont understand the pressures they experience due to race or class. Sexuality can be repressed at home,
and uncertain outside. Until recently, Asian males were categorically seen as less masculine, less powerful,
and thus less desirable to women, leading to self-esteem issues and understandable anger. Anecdotally, Asian
American males have longer periods of being single than either white males or Asian American women
leaving room for frustration and anger directed at Asian American women and whites. And of course, the man
who feels undesirable or disempowered might take out his frustrations on the nearest available person with
lower status his wife, girlfriend or women more generally. Men might seek power and control in their
relationship when unable to attain them outside the home. Patriarchy, more than culture, explains misogyny
and Asian families can be patriarchal, privileging men and boys and allowing them to feel entitled towards
women, or especially disappointed when spurned. Anger at controlling or smothering mothers may lead to
confusion and anger about identity and relationships. Anger at fathers complicates the assertion and
development of masculinity. Asian Americans may feel silenced by their own families, who value face over
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dealing with conflicts or mental illness. Nerd, gaming and pop culture, including a subset of male Asian
Americans, is often particularly misogynistic, as Arthur Chu of recent Jeopardy-fame pointed out in the Daily
Beast recently. Frustration and aggression may be unchecked and in fact kindled and reinforced in this
alternate family that provides a validation of a kind of masculinity and an escape from isolation at the very
least. The Asian American man can feel not only relationship-less but stateless, a refugee adrift in a sea of
longings, unmoored and un-amoured, always on the edge of social defeat, scanning the horizons for some
island to call home. Perpetually estranged by the presumptions and rejections of others, the stereotypes and
gross and subtle racisms of a limited cultural imagination, he is always reminded of outsider status and
exclusion. To be unloved, to not be touched, to have your masculinity indicted first by your family, then popular
culture, then the women youre attracted to is a decidedly unpleasant and, even excruciating scenario. It is a
situation conducive to unhappiness, resentment, and alienation yet it is not uncommon for the young Asian
American man. Feeling frustration and anger is understandable, but it is complicated. Expressing it outwardly
towards more powerful targets invites blowback and retribution. Stifling it lends to passivity. Misogyny and
abuse become, then, a safe expression of power against an even more vulnerable victim. While Ive
highlighted the potential sources of conflict between Asian American men and women, I should point out that
many Asian American men are angry on behalf of women as well. Weve seen the abuse of our mothers,
witnessed mistreatment of our sisters, friends and colleagues, and carry anger towards the perpetrators. We
worry for our daughters. Our masculine rage and concern is protective and empathic, we aim to be responsible
and responsive to womens issues. But this doesnt immunize us from the problems of anger, or shield us from
sometimes also being hurt by and angry with the women in our lives. You can be enlightened to everyone but
your family, as the saying goes; thus anger enters our relationships and complicates them. Speaking for
myself, as Ive witnessed the explosive effects of anger, I feel particularly self-conscious and wary of being in
angers grasp, even so-called righteous anger or moral outrage. But were still not free, either of the stimuli
for anger or the need for it. Poet and community activist Bao Phi says one thing that Ive been thinking about
lately is how other people can accept Asian peoples grief, but not our anger. Other people can accept, and in
many cases consume, the stories of tragedies and sorrow from Asian and Asian American people. They have
a harder time accepting, validating, or seeing our anger. Anger at injustice, at being silenced. Im a person that
accepts my anger, and is comfortable talking about it. Beyond that, theres not much to say, really. I mean, I
didnt become a poet to make friends. I didnt write about these things to be popular. If the goal was to be
popular, I wouldnt be a poet. I dont invite hatred, and I certainly dont enjoy being hated. But, as you say, the
people who take the time to really read my work understand that it comes from the challenge of love, and with
hope we can all be better. Including my own jagged, flawed self. As psychiatrists, we know the importance of
empathizing with and validating anger we know that it often comes from a place of hurt. Anger can be an
activator, empowering the angry person to take charge of their lives in a meaningful way. Anger in relationships
and human relations is unavoidable, at least on occasion, and provides an energy and intensity that might be
in some way necessary for the relationship. With perspective and mindfulness, conflict can help couples
become closer, better friends. Anger at society, when received with empathy, can lead to constructive change.
Phil Yus Angry Asian Man blog advances the cause of awareness and activism about issues of discrimination.
His yearly message in ads for the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival is Stay Angry,
CAAMFest! Indeed, the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) and many other non-profit institutions vital
to our communities were born out of a sense of disaffection with the status quo and a wish to change it. Anger
is necessarily part of what we bear, a marker of discontent. Anger resonates across Asian America, as it does
across all distressed and marginalized communities.
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The notion of an objective/universal context comes from a space occupied
exclusively by white males and is no longer the reality. The only way to challenge
oppression is by using narrative to voice our own contexts.
Chang 93 (Robert S., Toward an Asian American Legal Scholarship: Critical Race Theory, Post-structuralism, and Narrative
Space, 81 CALIF. L. REV. 1241 (1993). h p://digitalcommons.law.sea leu.edu/faculty/411)
Thus, one of the tasks of Asian American Legal Scholarship is to break the silence that surrounds our
oppression. An important tool in breaking this silence is the use of personal narrative. Narrative will allow us to
speak our oppression into existence, for it must first be represented before it can be erased. In the face of this
institutional disapproval, outsiders can either conform to the dominant objective mode of discourse or con-
tinue telling their stories. One problem with the former is that many people find this dominant objective voice to
be foreign.' In addition to being foreign, the dominant voice may not adequately capture the power and
intensity of dealing with racism as effectively as a narrative-based legal scholarship can.'3 7 In order to pursue
the latter course, however, the case must be made for narrative. 138 I describe two strategies for validating
narrative. The first, and as I will argue, ultimately unsuccessful, stategy takes place within the rational/empirical
mode.139 The second strategy takes place within post-modem or post-structural theory." By placing the use of
narrative squarely on post-structural theory, I hope to dispel the notion expressed by one commentator that
"postmodern 'theory' can be perceived as the discourse of privileged members of society who claim to explain
and justify different voice scholarship and, in so doing, attempt to colonize the writing of minorities and
outgroup members." When the legal academy was made up exclusively of white males, a legal scholar did not
have to reveal the context from which he spoke because everyone occupied the same context. This shared
context fostered a false sense of acontextuality, where one could pretend to be aper- spectival because only
one perspective was represented.' 4 2 With the entry of women and persons of color into the legal academy
and with their use of personal narratives in scholarship, whether perspective matters has become a contested
issue. Other disciplines recognize the importance of perspective. 43 Even science, once the model for the
study of law, has recognized that the perspective of the observer matters.145 For example, there was a long-
standing dispute among physicists about whether light was a wave or a particle.' 46 Adherents of the wave
theory, limited by their perspective, were unable to see that light sometimes behaved like a particle. Like- wise,
adherents of the particle theory were unable to see that light sometimes behaved like a wave. Each group
was unable to see what the other group saw; the groups were unable to see that light could be both wave and
particle.47 Just as science has learned that the perspective of the observer can not only affect, but can also
determine, what is observed, law must also recognize the importance of perspective. Professor Laurence Tribe
reminds us, "[d]ifficult as it is to view the world from someone else's perspective, not to make the effort is to
ignore what science learned long ago.' 148 The lesson from science for the legal academy is simple: Listen.
The government and its education system are always removed from the emotions to
their policies and people it creates. Only by asserting our emotions can we break the
stereotypes of the Asian American.
Lee 14 (David Byunghyun, political activist and journalist for Gawker, Transformed into White Gods: What Happens in America
Without Love, http://gawker.com/transformed-into-white-gods-what-happens-in-america-wi-
1494266254?fb_action_ids=10202199292958075&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=[6725848
59458453]&action_type_map=[%22og.likes%22]&action_ref_map=[] January 14) =^.^=
*Altered for racist and ableist langauge
It started before a friend told me that he wanted to date white women and before another friend told me fuck
white people. It started before two 14-year-old girls on their way to a birthday party were crushed to death on
the Yangju Highway, before George Bush put North Korea on the Axis of Evil, and even before either of my
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parents was born. The Korean government ignored prostitution at American military bases so the soldiers
would stop raping civilians and the Korean people boiled leftover hotdogs, spams, and beans from American
military bases to create military soups, once known as the Lyndon B. Johnson soup. MacArthur was hailed
as a national hero and phrases like even shit tastes better American were thrown around while, halfway
around the world, America did its best to continue its worst by beating and killing its own people. A decade
later, people in both countries held hands and sang All You Need Is Love with four British boys from
Liverpool, but neither really started confronting the growing hatred towards each other or their own people. And
I am their child. I am the child of these two nations with unresolved past, with public love and private hate, with
open disdain and secret fetish, and with sons and daughters who grow up to lose their parents. Before I knew
any of this, I knew I had two passports while my parents only had one. I had the blue passport that they didnt
have and was told that being born in Queens was a good enough reason for me to have it. I had no memory of
the place because our family moved to Korea when I was three. But whenever New York City came on the
news, my parents would call out and say Look, theres your city! They told me and my brother that Abe
Lincoln and Neil Armstrong were part of our history. They told us that we belonged to the strongest nation in
the world. History books said the same thing. Hollywood movies said the same thing. Olympic Games said the
same thing. And when another Korean found out that I had this blue passport, I saw in their faces that they
were thinking the same thing. In 1998, I liked being Korean. I loved being American. Sometime that year,
Aunt June came from California with a giant bag of assorted candies. I had been saving up lollipops in my
candy box for months and had only collected five or six. So when Aunt June came with enough candies to fill
the box ten times over, the message I received was clear: Fuck saving, heres three thousand candies
theres more of these where Im from. Although I could never get myself to like the Laffy Taffys or the
Lemonheads and ended up throwing most of the candies away, I wanted to go where Aunt June was from. And
while I sat on the sofa opening a bag after another, tasting candies, and spitting them out, mom sat across
from Aunt June and listened to her stories. She heard about Aunt Junes white engineer husband, her two
story house with a peach tree in the back, and her son who had just skipped second grade. Three years later,
Aunt June called my mom and asked if she wanted to send me to America. My mom and I were so
enchanted by the illusion of America that we agreed in a heartbeat. In 2001, I moved alone to Aunt Junes
house in California and my dad told me over the phone that my new name would be David. And at this time, I
was more ready to be David than any other. Aunt June bought me a pair of Jordans that she called Nike IIs,
jean shorts with side pockets, and a bunch of polo shirts in different colors. She suggested that I slip a book in
my side pocket to accentuate the cool, so I grabbed a yellow Nancy Drew book and slid it in my right pocket.
And in the morning of my first class in America, I spiked my new four on the top, two on the sides hair with
lavish amount of L. A. Looks Mega Hold. Over the weekend, I watched cartoon episodes on Disney so Id have
something to talk about with the kids. But when I met the kids in Mrs. Drippess third grade class at Desert
Christian, they carried Pokmon lunch boxes and backpacks. They watched Dragon Ball Z. Jackie Chan was
still cool enough to have his own cartoon show and his Rush Hour 2 was one of the highest grossing films of
that year. Even Jet Li had a number one movie alongside DMX around this time. When I arrived in America,
kids and adults were already consuming Asian culture and other twisted, distorted, and untrue forms of
Asianness. So in 2001, I let others fetishize my Asianness, because I was desperate to become
American. Along with the rest of the boys, I just watched Dragon Ball Z in which the Asian martial arts gods
fought aliens by turning supersaiyen. When a character goes supersaiyen, his skin become pale, brown eyes
become blue, black hair turns blond, and the strength increases fiftyfold. I watched and enjoyed Asian
characters transforming into white gods without being hurt, because that hierarchy made sense. And it made
sense to Asian American kids across America, to the Asian kids in Asia, and to the Asian animators who
created this visual endorsement of white supremacy. And after all, thats what many of our parents wanted for
usto become white, become powerful, and become what they couldnt be. These were brave parents
who packed their bags and moved their families to America or sent their children to live with friends, relatives,
and strangers. But these were also scared parents who renamed their kids as Davids, Daniels, Jessicas, and
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Amys. They gave up on keeping their family together by sending their children to host families, or they left their
careers to become storekeepers; dry cleaners; nail salon, massage parlor, and donut shop owners; cooks;,
and domestic workers so that their children would have the choices and paychecks that they could never have.
They wanted their kids to be able to permeate the white spaces and escape their horizon of
Koreatowns, Chinatowns, and ethnic churches. If you're not white, you're missing out because this
shit is thoroughly good. I'm not saying white people are better, but I'm saying that being white is
clearly better. Who could even argue? Louis C. K. says in Chewed Up. And this is exactly what our
parents thought. So when they saw that their children could perform as white, they encouraged it without
teaching us or telling us to love our Asian side. And as the line between performing as white and being white
blurred, so did the line between thinking white people are better and thinking that being white is better. In
hindsight, our biggest mistake was having believed in the line at all. In middle school, we grew out of the
Dragon Ball Z phase and entered the Jackass phase. To us puberty-stricken Christian school kids, Jackass
and its spinoff shows like Viva la Bam and Wildboyzin which white dudes ran around not giving a fuck about
others, themselves, and the consequenceswere not only funny, but even somewhat admirable. Aunt June
had a son named Billy who I looked up to like my older brother, and he incorporated this not-giving-a-fuck
mentality into himself in the form of Asian jokes. He was the funny Asian kid in his grade who didnt care about
saying racist jokes about himself and the other Asians. That gave him a pass on saying other racist jokes
toward other groups of people as well. As little brothers do, I learned from Billy and performed this character to
my friends. On a daily basis, I told jokes involving Asian parents, bad driving skills, nerds, rice and
eggrolls, small dicks, dog eaters, squinty eyes, accents, kung fu, and William Hung. And as long as my
friends laughed, it felt great. I invited other kids to do the same with their race or ethnicity. There were only
about 60 kids in my grade and soon, these racist jokes became a part of our language. Saying one more of
these jokes became easier and easier. With no other Asian, black or Hispanic students to tell us that the jokes
were hurtful, we just continued with white students laughing at our jokes and encouraging us on. The worst and
most hurtful jokes, we often told ourselves. And we thought not giving a fuck, not being so sensitive, but,
instead, being cool with it was our way of saying that we were not what we made fun of. But every once in a
while, I secretly feared that I wasnt so different from what I made fun of. I was scared, despite all my Asian
disses, that I was still an Asian boy who joked his ass off to become American and failed. So I
overcompensated by over-consuming culture. I read books, listened to music, watched movies, and watched
television more than any of my friends. I broke every Accelerated Reader record at my school, watched every
movie in the IMDB Top 250 that I could find, listened to whatever album got over 8.0 on Pitchfork, and watched
whatever television show that kids talked about in school. I figured that if I knew more, read more, watched
more, and listened to more of American culture than any of my friends, no one could tell me that I wasnt
American. In 2004, I hated being Korean, but I was obsessed with being American. Around this time,
however, my parents sensed that I was slipping away. They saw that I spoke English well, that I had white
friends and girlfriends, and that I could becomeas they wisheda part of them. But they missed being a
part of my life. And they feared that they would lose a son and never get him back. They feared that I would
lose a family and become lost. So my parents found an international school in Korea where I could continue
studying in English. They called me back to Korea in 2005 and I agreed, somewhat reluctantly, and returned to
Korea. The international school was filled with other Korean kids who had American citizenships. They were
also sons and daughters of scared Korean parents who'd given them the most boring and safe American
names. And even here, the kids didnt blend in with other Korean kids, but formed their own community of
Asian Americans. We were all fixated on consuming and learning American culture, and didnt even try to learn
or love the people and the culture we lived among. These confused kids watched the Super Bowl without
knowing the rules, called each other n-word and Gs and said shit like, Youre from California? Im so
jealous! Kids made fun of Korean accents, and the teachers sent students to the principals office for speaking
Korean. The school sponsored programs like Habitat for Humanity and volunteer trips to South Asian
countries, when, five minutes from the school, people lived in unauthorized housing, not knowing when the
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government or the landowners might force them to move out. In 2005, these Asian-American kids and I were
bad at loving our Korean side. And like many of our parents before us, we continued to uncritically accept all
things American. After two years there, I moved to Texas with my brother, to the house of a friend of my
mom's. My brother had stayed in Korea after our family left New York, so he spoke little English and had no
idea what America would be like. But he had all the same illusions that I had. He willingly consumed American
culture like me and dreamed about going to an American college and living up to his blue passport. But at
Paschal High School, teachers proudly talked about the existence of two different schools within oneone
school with kids taking honor and AP classes and another with kids taking regular classesand they
didnt care that the system separated most black and brown students from white students. They used
phrases like better opportunity and academic excellence, but they didnt love their students enough to
teach or motivate all of them equally. The socioeconomic and racial divide was evident even during lunch
times, when one group of students ate 40-cent government lunch while the other group ate homemade lunches
or bought lunch from the in-school Pizza Hut vendor. On my first day of school, my English teacher told
me that I looked like the Chinese kid in Disturbia. I had no idea what that meant. Then a white student
said to me during class: Your eyes are so black, its almost like you dont have an iris. A couple days later,
the school asked me to take an English proficiency test in which a lady asked Man is big, bears are bigger,
and dinosaurs are? and Grass is green and sky is? My soccer coach, when I told him not to call me Bruce
Lee, said Other Asian kids liked it when I called them Bruce Lees. Then a kid in my soccer team told me to
show him my dick, because he'd heard Asian dicks were small. When I asked for my college counselors help
because I didnt even know what SATs were, she laughed and said Thats such an Asian thing to ask.
Then, the week before my college applications were due, she went on a vacation without writing my
recommendation letter. The office ladies refused to call her cell phone, because we needed to respect her
privacy. After the due date, she returned and said Oops, sorry. When I asked my English teacher if she
could check my essay, she returned it the next day, unmarked, except for the comment interesting. A couple
weeks before graduation, some students asked me to be in a photo and represent diversity so they could get
Obama to come and speak. For the first time, I started to feel something that I hadnt felt when I was with other
nine-year-olds in California or the confused Korean kids in Seoul. I knew that I wasnt seen as an American by
these people. And I thought, maybe, I had been deceiving myself into thinking that I was something that I
couldnt ever be. The term Asian American didnt make sense to me. The people who we described as
successful Asian Americans seemed to be the ones who successfully grew out of their Asianness and become
Americans. Nobody I knew had ever articulated what being an Asian American really was. Having an accent
was a failure. Not speaking their parents language was not. Having no white friends was a failure. Having no
Asian friends was not. Having a white partner was a success. Having black and brown partners was not. Many
Asian American kids ate kimchi at home, loved ramen noodles, had Asian parents, and had exposure to Asian
culture and language. Yet, they hid and distanced themselves from Asianness. They tweaked their last names
on Facebook to sound white and separated themselves from Asian kids from Asia saying Im from New
Jersey, Im from North Carolina, and Im just American. In 2010, I didnt feel Korean. And I felt unwanted
as an American. I have taken language classes, econ classes, art classes, sociology classes, film classes,
and English classes in college. I have learned to start sentences with I feel like. . . or I think its interesting
that. . . I've learned to define people and their experiences. I've learned to use and misuse detached
academic words like diversity, privilege, and safe space in my arguments and conversations.
But I've never been asked to see my relationship to the people we defined. I was never asked to use
love in the place of these impersonal words we leaned on. I have written about gay marriages, black cinema,
Asian images, womans rights, but never about love. And never with love. I have forgotten about that word for
so long that I couldnt remember how I wanted to be loved, how I loved, and how I failed to love. And the more
I thought about it, the more I realized that I havent ever loved myself. When I watched Bobby Lee, Ken Jeong,
and Psy, I hated myself as a Korean. When I watched a YouTube video of white guys harassing a Korean girl
saying Why cant you get plastic surgery like every other Korean bitches and yelling We gotta get the boobs
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in there, I hated myself as an American. But even before these incidents, I have seen Korea failing to love its
own people, America failing to love its own people, and both countries failing to love each other. About four
years ago, my brother went back to Korea, after three years in America. He started having nightmares, so he
would stay up as long as he could until his body gave up to sleep. And when he sleeps, he shrieks. He wakes
up crying. My mom called me one day to tell me that he drank alone at a bar and punched through five
windows. What happened in America? she asked. And a couple months ago, my friend Daniel said to me
after watching Louis C. K. perform: I think white people are just better. A couple weeks later, I got a call from
another friend saying that Daniel went crazy, ran around Third Avenue barefooted, and the police took him to a
hospital. I went through two password-protected doors at Beth Israel to see him, and he told me that he ran for
his life because he saw Im in your area pop up on his computer screen. He said that when he tried to run
away, a man in a red hoodie carrying a knife came to kill him. He said things that I couldnt even understand,
and then started writing down names of white artists that we idolized for years. They always knew, he said.
What? What the fuck happens in America? What happens in America that my brother spends three years
here and starts having nightmares too freighted to forget? What happens in America that my best friend
who loved and consumed American culture all his life says, after spending two years in NYU, that
white people are just better? What happens in America that makes him run for his life because he thinks
someone is coming to kill him? I couldnt tell you what. But I can tell you how America failed to love. I can tell
you that America doesnt love its inarticulate. Instead of asking my brother How can I help? or What can I
do? teachers suggested lower level classes and punished with words and grades. College professors did the
same. When he turned in essays much more articulate than his speech, they asked Who helped you? and
What did you plagiarize? Instead of thinking about why all their friends and girlfriends are white, white
students ask Why do they only hang out with other black kids? or Why do they only date other Asians?
They say minorities are being exclusive. And in the classrooms, rather than trying to understand and love, we
learn to define and patronize other people and their experiences. America tries constantly to ignore the
weak and break the strong. Korea has no love for itself or for the others. We worship, consume, and
imitate forms of whiteness, forms of blackness, and forms of Asianness, but we still label them
Yankees, niggers, chinks, and Japs. And America and Korea both dont love their beautiful or the ugly. We
define and limit beauty. Korea decided that double eyelids are beautiful, so we put them artificially on those
who dont have them. America cant love a crooked smile, so our kids live with metal in their mouth for three
years. Were bad lovers, so we continue the cycle of hate and self-hate. We let the producers of 21
whitewash Asian characters. We let Spike Lee remake Oldboyand cast Josh Brolin as its lead. We let shows
like Friends and Girls show only white relationships and use Asian and black actors and actresses to play
interim lovers. We let SNL go thirty-nine years without casting a single Asian comedian. We make talented
Asian actors come to America and play ninjas and yakuzas. We cast Asian actors and models with
stereotypical Asian faces and un-stereotypical Asian bodies. We fetishize them by giving sexiest man
of the year or sexiest woman of the year. And we ignore Baldwins warning that we could lose our
faithand become possessed. We lose our faith in ourselves and lose our faith in our ability to love. And
instead, we partake in phony performances and dialogues of love. Drake singing Shout out to Asian girls,
let their lights dim-sum is not love. A commercial saying White, black, brown, yellow, purple, green,
were all the same is not love. I want to hear our pop culture honestly try to articulate love. I want to stop
reading buzzwords like safe space that generate the false illusion of safety and the false sense of
invasion. I want to see us love and fight for each other when no one is watching.
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AltModel Minority Conscientization
The alternative is to use debate as a site for Asian American conscientization, which
allows us to break free from the model minority myth on a communal level
Western individualism isolates Asian Americans stories in educational settings are

key to breaking isolaiton and forming community-based, critical consciousness to
engage in racial institutions
Osajima 7 (Keith, Professor of Race and Ethnic Studies at University of Redland, Replenishing the Ranks:
Raising Critical Consciousness Among Asian Americans, Journal of Asian American Studies Volume 10,
Number 1, pg 59-83, Feb 2007)//MNW
While the respondents identi ed relevant information as a key to their development, exposure to information on racism and Asian Americans is not the
conscientization is a social process, where
only element of an education for critical consciousness. The interviews reveal that
connections, support and encouragement from others play a critical facilitative role. For many respondents,
the development of their critical consciousness had not happened in isolation, working or studying on their own.
Instead, relationships with other people had contributed to their growth in a variety of ways. First, contact and
conversation with others had helped respondents to break a sense of isolation in their lives. The chance to talk
to other Asians about their lives and experiences with discrimination had helped respondents to see that their
individual experiences were not unique. As they had seen similarities and patterns, it was easier for them to
see how broader forces, like racism, shaped their individual lives. Their descriptions of this process were
quite consistent and similar. Joe Yamamoto, a third-generation Japanese American, had grown up in central California. In high school, Joe
had liked to party and had come close to not graduating. After working a series of jobs, he had decided to head back into school, rst at a community
college and then at a University of California campus, to pursue his interest in math. Joe had not identi ed as a Japanese American. He had been aware
that things happened to him, perhaps because he was Japanese, but did not make any connections to racial discrimination. At the University of
California, Joe had enrolled in an Asian American Studies course, mainly because it ful lled a general education requirement. During
the class,
interactions with fellow Asian students, along with information on racism against Asians in the United States,
had led Joe to realize, for the first time, that he was treated differently because of his race. Describing an in-class
interactive activity where students were put in pairs and asked to interview each other about their lives, Joe articulated this process of self-discovery: We
found a lot of similarities between ourselves. . . . That was the rst time I got a chance to hear other people say the exact same things that I had gone
through. . . its because Im Asian, because Im Japanese that I run into different kinds of experiences than my Caucasian friends do. And its because of
my race. Its not because I wear blue jeans or anything else, its because of how I look.26 Pearl Cruzs understanding of Asian American womens issues
It was like therapy, group therapy to sit
had been formed largely in conversation with other women in an Asian American Studies class:
around and swap stories about when I was growing up. So that was great, sharing things that everybody had
experienced and thought they were the only ones who had experienced.27 Soon Park had developed a stronger
understanding of racism through her interactions with others in an Asian American student organization. I asked her what it was about being in the
student group or being in classes that had helped her to develop a commitment to working in the Asian American community, Soon offered the following
response: I think more understanding how other Asians have the same experiences as I do, and Im not the only one. I remember going to one of my
first meetings and theres maybe 10 people, and it was more like a rap session. I remember people talking about their experiences about racism, what
happened to them and thinking thats really awful. I cant believe thats happened to that person and thinking all these things happened to me. Were
all in the situation where we all share this common kind of pain and experience.28 In the context of American
society, it is understandable how breaking through the sense of isolation can facilitate the development of
critical consciousness. Isolation is closely tied to the powerful ideological emphasis on individualism in
the United States . Andrew Barlow notes that Ameri- cans are told that their well-being is up to them, that people
must fend for themselves as far as their personal welfare is concerned.29 A consequence of growing up with this view
is implicit in the interviews. Respondents had interpreted their experiences, good and bad, through individual lenses, as events that happened, in
Through interactions with other Asian Americans, they had realized they were not
isolation, only to them.
alone, that others had similar family and cultural experiences, and experiences with racial
discrimination. This discovery had led them to question their individualistic interpretations and had
opened the possibility that their lives could be understood as part of an Asian American experience.
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Debate is a space for young Asian Americans to develop the critical thinking skills
needed to become politically active and critically conscious advocates, giving them the
language to name and shape their world
The fact that these
young Asian Americans, from widely varying class, geographic, political, and ethnic
backgrounds, could find their way to Asian American activism speaks to the real possibility that young people
can become critically conscious and politically active. Their active involvement is especially noteworthy given the post-Civil Rights
climate that surrounds them, where the political momentum has shifted to the right and hopes for student activism are often drowned in a sea of apathy
or hopelessness. These
Asian Americans had gone against the grain and had become politically involved. They had
realized what Cornell West calls the
politics of conversion, where the tendency toward nihilism is countered by a
chance for people to believe that there is hope for the future and a meaning to struggle.18 So, what had happened to
change and shape their views? What had contributed to the development of their critical consciousness? Analysis of the interviews reveals common
In talking about how they
patterns of factors and conditions that contribute to the development of an Asian American critical consciousness.
had become interested in Asian American issues, respondents invariably pointed to moments when new
information and perspectives profoundly affected their thinking by helping them to see how their lives, as Asian
Americans, were shaped by larger historical and social forces. In this way, the information had carried significant
meaning and relevance, helping them to understand their lives in new ways. For Brian Kim, for example,
conscientization had begun in an Asian American history course. It really changed my view on how this society works and
where we t in. He said, I just never thought of what our history is here or what my, say our ancestors came here for, the first generation. I just never
knew. That first class had inspired Brian to switch out of his pre-med studies and declare a major in Asian American Studies. Echoing Cornell Wests
notion of conversion, Brian says, So thats where I am now. So you see Im a converted Asian. An Asian American psychology class
had exerted a transformative impact on Margaret Eus thinking. Information about the Asian American
experience was meaningful because it had helped her to make sense of experiences in her life and family. It had
offered language and concepts that explained why and how racism and sexism operated: That was the first time that academically I was
reading something that was so relevant to my experience and my identity. . . .[E]verything made so much
sense. It was like somebody was explaining my life history, my life pattern on paper, and in theory and in literature.19 David Tan echoes Margarets
comments. Like many of his peers, David Tan had not been interested in political activism when he graduated from high school. He was all about
having fun. When he had entered college, he said,I was paying attention more to the women than to the professors. But, information in an Asian
American Studies class had resonated deeply with David; his professor had offered insights that not only helped him to understand his life experiences,
but also inspired him to learn more: He went into the issues of family relations, generational con icts, the model minority, anti-Asian violence. Just
everything that happened in my life, he explained it. Thats when I realized, this is what I want to do. I need to learn more.20 While formal Asian
the classroom was not the only place where respondents had
American courses had played pivotal roles in conscientization,
been exposed to life-altering perspectives and information. David Tans critical consciousness had deepened
through his participation in a student group. The group had showed the movie, Who Killed Vincent Chin, about the 1982 slaying of a
Chinese American man by two unemployed, white auto workers. It had struck a deep nerve. As David had watched Vincent Chins mother ght to win
justice for her son, David had thought of his grandmother and the struggles she faced as an immigrant, non-English-speaker woman. Here, the content
of the movie and articles had intersected with Davids life and led him to make new connections: Thats
an example of that sort of
connection, of seeing things and knowing how race played a part and seeing how those kinds of elements
played itself out in my life and my familys life, especially for my grandmother .21 Pearl Cruz had begun to change when a
friend invited her to attend a meeting to organize a campus protest. Watching and listening to powerful and articulate women of color speak out about
racism and sexism had inspired Pearl: I went home that summer and devoured every piece of feminist literature I could get my hands on. So Im just
sitting there reading like a maniac all summer long, just digesting what had happened that year. . . . It was really something, it hit me all at once.22 Ryan
Suzukis interest in issues of oppression had first been piqued in diversity training workshops he took as a resident advisor. Later, in graduate school, a
key mentor, Ricardo Munoz, had helped Ryan to develop his conceptual and analytic understanding. Munoz had pushed Ryan to do more reading about
the systematic nature of oppression in the United States. Ryan describes Munozs in uence as follows: He really put a much more intellectual analysis to
things. . . . It was more about the systematic things that were going on, about changing structures, about resources, those kinds of things, rather than
just that a person needs to be sensitized.23 In these cases, we begin to see more precisely what it means to have a relevant and meaningful
education. For Joe, Ryan, and David, conscientization meant being able to see themselves in larger social
structural contexts, not simply as individuals but as people whose lives intersect with and are shaped
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by race and racism . For Brian, information about the history of Asian Americans had prompted critical re ections on two levels. First, because
he had never known about the history of Asian Americans, the class had given him new information that had helped him to understand his family history.
Second, it had led him to critically re ect upon his previous education. He questioned why he hadnt learned any of this before? Why was his
experience absent from U.S. history courses? This process had led him to think more critically about the racism embedded
in his educational experiences. Margaret had experienced a similar reaction. She had realized that her education had only taught her about
European American history, prompting her to ask, how many students were out there who never would take this class. . . and would never really know
more than one version of history? Her Asian American courses had provided the analytic tools and language needed to see the reason and logic of
racism, sexism, and heterosexism. Conscientization for these respondents meant being able to name their
world. That is, a meaningful education had helped them to recognize and understand the impact
that societal conditions and forces of oppression have on their lives and the lives of others . As Freire
writes, the process of conscientization, or education for critical consciousness, involves a constant clari cation of
what remains hidden within us while we move about in the world, and it provokes recognition of the
world, not as a given world, but as a world dynamically in the making.24 Such recognition often
inspires people to work against that oppression, thus beginning their active efforts to transform the
world.25 Naming the world was an important step toward actively changing it.
Conscientization interrupts normal explanations of life to generate criticaly conscious

students who engage in political activism
Given the profound change that conscientization had effected in the lives of respondents, it is not surprising
that many of them wanted to be in positions where they could help to create for others the educational
experiences that were so meaningful to them. They took leadership positions in student organizations; they
helped to organize and put on educational programs; they worked in community organizations; they pursued
graduate studies; and they took positions in student affairs to work closely with new cohorts of Asian American students. Pamela Kim, who wanted to
become a professor of Asian American Studies, best expresses their desire: One of the reasons why I want to be a professor of Asian American Studies
is because I want to help these kids who are going through the same things that I did. I want to help them gure things out, to help educate them about
these issues because I had no idea about them while I was growing up. I could see what these kids are all going through in college, and it helps to be
where you can pop those bubbles that they have around themselves.37 As they go about the task of trying to replenish the ranks
by raising critical consciousness amongst new groups of Asians, a number of lessons learned from their
collective experiences may provide helpful guides. From the interviews, we can identify critical elements that
contribute to conscientization. While these elements do not guarantee that conscientization will follow, incorporating them into ones practice
may enhance the possibility that efforts will be successful. First, respondents described the importance of obtaining information and
conceptual tools that helped them to cognitively understand how their lives and the lives of others are shaped
by larger historical and social- structural forces. An Asian American Studies course on a college campus was the most common source
of relevant information, but as we have seen exposure can take place in many venues. People can learn from reading on their own, from student groups,
and from multimedia sources. Second, breaking through isolation and interrupting the tendency to explain their life
experiences solely in individual terms re ects a social dimension to conscientization . Contact and
conversation with other Asian Americans was often the most effective way to help respondents make con-
nections between their lives, the experiences of others, and information on the Asian American experience.
Connections to key mentors and peers provided a safe environment in which to think and question further. Third, respondents described
important affective aspects of conscientization. When respondents talked about important moments in their
education or key social support that made a difference, invariably they referred to how they felt about these
experiences. They were angered by the realization that their schooling had not taught them about racism or the Asian American experience. They
felt inspired by the experiences of other Asian Americans who struggled to overcome harsh conditions. They were excited to learn more. Fourth,
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respondents commitment to Asian American issues was deepened when they transformed understanding into
action. Involve- ment in protests, organizing, programming, teaching, and research gave respondents a chance to extend
their knowledge and learn from efforts to make change. Finally, the study indicates that conscientization occurs when the
discrete elements work in combination. No respondent described his or her conscientization in terms of a
single element. It was not a purely intellectual or cognitive experience in a classroom, absent of social or
affective elements. Nor was it a purely social or affective experience without information and conceptual tools. Instead, respondents described
multifaceted and interrelated experiences that reinforced each other, inspiring further thinking and commitment to action. For activists seeking to raise
the critical consciousness of Asian Americans, the studys ndings carry implications for practice. For some, combining elements in a single venue, like an
introductory course or a training program, will be the main focus. In these cases,
the study suggests that the course or program
should offer substantive content and concepts to lay the cognitive foundation needed for people to see
themselves in relation to the world. It also should include social activities to break isolation and opportunities for people to share stories
with each other in a non-judgmental, safe environment. On a broader level, the study suggests that there is a value in and need to offer a
range of experiences across campus and community to increase the likelihood that students will combine, on
their own, elements that contribute to conscientization. Pressure to have one person, course, or program that single-handedly
transforms students lives subsides when we recognize that the interrelated process of conscientization bene ts from contributions across diverse
different parts of the campus and
segments of the community. The importance of combining influences also casts new light on how
community can work collaboratively to raise critical consciousness. Breaking from binary constructions that
often pit academic programs against student life activities, or divide academe from community, the study
shows how conscientization arises when people are exposed to and combine lessons learned from a variety of
sources. This process implies that increased appreciation for the work done across campus and community,
along with greater coordination of influences, is an important dimension of conscientization.
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AltModel Minority Zheng
Zheng 2008 (Eddy, Asian American abolition activist, The New Faces of Justice: Autobiography at 33 APALSA Conference
Keynote Address, http://scholarship.law.berkely.edu/aalj/vol15/iss1/11)
I am 33 years old and breathin'

it's a good year to die
to myself
I never felt such extreme peace
despite being mired in constant ear-deafening screams from the cage occupants - triple CMS 2 , PCs 3, gang
validated,
drop outs, parole violators, lifers, drug casualties, three strikers, human beings
in San Quentin's 150 year old solitary confinement I don't want to start things over
@33
I am very proud of being who I am
I wrote a letter to a stranger who said
"You deserve to lose at least your youth,
not returning to society until well into middle age..."
after reading an article about me in San Francisco Weekly I told him
"A hundred years from now when we no longer exist on this earth of humankind the seriousness of my crime
will not be changed or lessened. I can never pay my debt
to the victims because I cannot turn back the hands of
time...I will not judge you."
whenever I think about my crime I feel ashamed
I've lost my youth and more
I've learned that the more I suffer the stronger I become
I am blessed with great friends I talk better than I write
because the police can't hear my conversation the prison officials labeled me a trouble maker
I dared to challenge the administration
for its civil rights violation
I fought for Ethnic Studies in the prison college program
I've been a slave for 16 years under the 13th Amendment
I know separation and disappointment intimately
I memorized the United Front Points of Unity
I love my family and friends
my shero Yuri Kochiyama and a young sister named Monica who is pretty wanted to come visit me
somehow I have more female friends than male friends
I never made love to a woman
sometimes I feel like 16
but my body disagrees
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some people call me a square
because I don't drink, smoke, or do drugs
I am a procrastinator but I get things done
I've never been back to my motherland
I started to learn Spanish
escribia una poema en espanol
at times I can be very selfish and vice versa
I've never been to a prom, concert, opera, sporting event
or my parents' house
I don't remember the last time I cried
I've sweat with the Native Americans, attended mass with the Catholics, went to service with the Protestants,
sat and chanted with the Buddhists
my mind is my church
I am spoiled
in 2001 a young lady I love stopped loving me
it felt worse than losing my freedom
I was denied parole for the ninth time
I assured Mom that I would be home one day
after she pleaded me to answer her question truthfully
"Are you ever going to get out of prison?"
the Prison Industrial Complex and its masters attempted to
control my mind
it didn't work
they didn't know I've been introduced to Che, Yuri Kochiyama,
Paulo Freire, Howard Zinn, Frederick Douglass, Assata Shakur, bell hooks, Maurice Cornforth, Malcolm X,
Gandhi, George Jackson, Mumia, Buddha,
and many others...
I had about a hundred books in my cell
I was internalizing my politics
In 2000 I organized the first poetry slam in San Quentin I earned my associate of art degree
something that I never thought possible
I've self-published a zine
I was the poster boy for San Quentin
some time in the '90s my grandparents died
without knowing that I was in prison
@30
I kissed Dad on the cheek and told him that I love him for the first time
I've written my first poem
I called myself a poet to motivate me to write
because I knew poets would set us free
in 1998 1was granted parole
then it was taken away
the governor's political career superseded my life
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some time in the 90s
I participated in most of the self-help programs
in 1996 1 really learned how to read and write
I read my first history book "A People's History
ofthe United States"
my social conscious mind was awakened
in 1992 1passed my GED in Solano Prison
I learned how to take care of my body from '89 to '93
in 1987 1turned 18 and went to the Pen from youth authority
the youngest prisoner in San Quentin's Maximum Security Prison
I was lucky people thought I knew kung fu
@16
I violated an innocent family of four and scarred them for life
money superseded human suffering
I was charged as an adult and sentenced to life with a possibility
no hablo ingles
I wish I could start things over I was completely lost
@12
I left Communist China to Capitalist America
no hablo ingles
I was spoiled
in 1976 1 went to demonstrations against the Gang of Four life was a blur from 1to 6
on 5/29/69
I inhaled my first breath.
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AltModel Minority Asian-Black Solidarity
Empirically proven that refusal works The great failure of American empire in
Veitnam was precipitated by an Asian-Black solidarity in which both the Vietcong and
Black soldiers refused to fight against one another on behalf of American militarism.
Beginning with black liberationist call for an end to this world is a key starting point
Sexton 06 [Race Nation and 252-3
Blacks, then, suffer a peculiar relation to the U.S. empire in the historic instance: neither its subjects
( certainly not its authors or beneficiaries) nor its objects (at least not in the most direct sense). This
peculiarity was underscored dramatically during the notorious U.S. war in Southeast Asia (1965 75)
wherein black soldiers, overwhelmingly conscripted, were not only disproportionately offered up as cannon
fodder (after long being segregated and retained in noncombat functions, depicted as cowardly and inept,
denied access to the social capital of military heroism, etc. all components of the typical critique of the racism
internal to the armed forces) but were also differentiated by the enemies of the U.S. military invasion and
occupation. nnRacially targeted propaganda appealed to the cruel ironies of black military service (ironies
already well known and articulated by mid-century) and offered ideological support to the struggle for freedom,
justice, and equality that was, at the time, intensifying and mutating stateside as it raised the galvanizing cry of
Black Power. More important, I think, were the notable combat tactics of Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army
soldiers, which frequently targeted white soldiers for ambush and sniper attacks while leaving unharmed (if
at all possible) contingents of black soldiers on hand, a veritable racial partition of attack. In this circumscribed
domain, the campaign of Vietnamese guerrilla fighters sought to exploit in parts strategically, in parts
earnestly the living legacy of antiblackness among U.S. fighting forces not only by suggesting a
political affinity between blacks and Asians as victims of white supremacy (whether European colonialism
or U.S. imperialism) but also by enacting a displacement of the racially distributed vulnerability to
violence that otherwise slated blacks for gratuitous assault without recourse. Muhammad Alis famous
1966 statement, I aint got no quarrel with them Viet-Cong. No Viet- Cong ever called me nigger, takes
on added weight in this light. Black troops, for their part, contributed actively to this antagonistic milieu
with, among other things, hundreds of fraggings of white junior officers, the repeated refusal of high-risk
assignments, and, on several occasions, open rebellion and riot against the system of overseas military
policing and prisons in which they were, predictably, overrepresented as captives. In the contemporary theater
of operations in occupied Iraq, this historical discrepancy which has hardly been mitigated, even if it is newly
mediated promised to reassert itself briefly with the fragging incident involving U.S. Army Sergeant Asan
Akbar, a native-born black.2 But the racial politics of U.S. militarism, so prominent at the height of black
political movement and social upheaval in the 1960s and 1970s, have been consistently and unsurprisingly
convoluted by the combined effects of corporate media machinations and the marked disarray of black
politics domestically.3 The global antiwar movement, while eloquent on the menace of the former, has
missed the latter point almost entirely. In its drive for popular (if not populist) appeal, a drive fueled by the
euphoria of mass demonstrations on the eve of the U.S. invasion, political opposition to the war on terror
across the global North has borrowed freely from the rhetorical repertoire of black freedom struggle in
and beyond the United States, but it has displayed a striking disinterest in either the political energies
or the lived experience of actually existing black communities.
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Solidarity between Asian Americans and black communities is not only possible, its
happened throughout history. Multiracial coalitions break down the tools of the white
supremacy.
Varner 2016 (Natasha, editor of pri, Despite history, Japanese Americans and African Americans are working together to claim
their rights February 23, https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-02-23/despite-their-history-japanese-americans-and-african-americans-are-
working)=^.^=
During World War II, the fates of Blacks and Japanese Americans crossed in ways that neither group could
have anticipated. While Japanese Americans were being forced to abandon the lives they'd built on the West
Coast, African Americans were in the midst of the Great Migration out of the South. During the war, many
Black migrants set their sites on the West Coast, where labor shortages in the defense industry brought new
employment opportunities. Vacated Japanese American neighborhoods provided space for these new arrivals
to establish themselves, but the process of putting down roots did not come easy. Take Los Angeles, for
example. While Black laborers were welcomed in the citys defense industries, the lives and families they
brought with them were not. Restrictive housing covenants barred people of color from living in white
neighborhoods, so the newly vacated Japanese American neighborhood known as Little Tokyo was one of the
few places that had space available to arriving African Americans. About 80,000 people most of them
African American took up residence in an area that had been home to approximately 30,000 Japanese
Americans before the war. Little Tokyo was rechristened Bronzeville and Black-owned businesses replaced
shuttered Japanese Americans establishments. The deserted Kawafuku restaurant reopened as Shepp's
Playhouse, one of many night clubs that hosted the likes of Coleman Hawkins, T-Bone Walker and Herb
Jeffries from the Duke Ellington band. As the Black community began to thrive, overcrowding and
governmental neglect led to an increase in crime and public health concerns in Bronzeville. The neighborhood
was treated as a blight by the city of Los Angeles, with officials regularly issuing evictions and abatement
notices in response to living conditions they deemed substandard. This was the cruel irony of the structural
racism Black residents faced in wartime Los Angeles: They were punished for the inevitable outcomes of
overcrowding that the citys restrictive housing covenants had caused. Even as African Americans were
struggling for their own basic rights in Los Angeles, individual stories document an incredible showing of
support for incarcerated Japanese Americans. Takashi Hoshizaki, for example, recalled the shock and joy he
felt at discovering his Black neighbors, the Marshalls, had traveled all the way to the Pomona detention facility
in order to bring apple pie and ice cream to his family. Boyle Heights resident Mollie Wilson had a number of
Japanese American friends in pre-War Los Angeles. Throughout their incarceration, she kept in regular contact
with several of them, sending morale-boosting letters, cards, pictures and gifts. Hugh McBeth, a Los Angeles-
based Black attorney and the leader of California's Race Relations Commission, was an outspoken defender
of Japanese Americans during the war. A November 1943 article in the progressive Black newspaper, the
California Eagle, called the "persecution of the Japanese-American minority ... one of the disgraceful
aspects of the nations conduct of the Peoples War." As noted in Scott Kurashige's history of the
era, columnist Rev. Hamilton T. Boswell consistently called for cooperation between communities of color
and condemned the incarceration of Japanese Americans as "the greatest disgrace of Democracy since
slavery." In a showing of support, the newspaper discontinued use of the racial slur "Jap," even though
mainstream news outlets would continue using it for years to come. After the war, Japanese Americans who
returned to Los Angeles rightfully wanted to reclaim their homes and businesses, but they found a profoundly
different community than the one theyd left behind. With their neighborhood brimming with new residents,
many ended up crowded into temporary housing units. The California Eagle argued that Japanese Americans
should be permitted to reclaim their former homes and encouraged its readers to stand in solidarity with those
returning from incarceration. Even so, tensions sometimes directly provoked by white media and politicians
rose to the surface, but so too did new opportunities for interethnic alliance. As Kurashige argues,
"Prominent white politicians and media outlets predicted violent turf battles between Black and
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Japanese Americans would erupt. Black and Japanese American activists, by contrast, envisioned a
new level of interethnic political cooperation developing from heightened interaction between their
communities." Regardless of the many instances of Black and Japanese American alliance during and after
World War II, some wartime tensions persisted long after the war itself had ended. This strife was not unique to
Los Angeles. Even John Okada called attention to it in his classic novel No-No Boy, set in post-war Seattle:
"He walked gingerly among the Negroes, of whom there had been only a few at one time and of whom there
seemed to be nothing but now. They were smoking and shouting and cussing and carousing and the sidewalk
was slimy with their spittle.Go back to Tokyo, boy. Persecution in the drawl of the persecuted." In some
instances, overt anti-Black sentiments rose to the surface in the decades following World War II. Pediatrician
and activist Dr. Clifford Iwao Uyeda emerged as a vocal critic of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1961, he issued
racist missives contending that Japanese Americans had overcome far greater discrimination than their Black
peers, but without sharing their "excessive crime rate." He also argued that "the re-education of the minority
groups themselves towards better citizenship" should come before other efforts. Employing the same racist
line of thinking, Hokubei Mainichi editor Howard Imazeki challenged African Americans to improve their own
communities before asking for equal rights. Countering these anti-Black narratives were numerous stories of
Japanese Americans supporting Black rights and standing up to racism. There was Joe Ishikawa who worked
with African Americans to desegregate swimming pools in post-war Lincoln, Nebraska. Yuri
Kochiyama famously allied herself with the Civil Rights Movement and Black nationalists like the Republic of
New Africa. After meeting Malcolm X at a courthouse in 1963, they forged a friendship that would last until his
death. Just 16 months after their first meeting, Yuri witnessed Malcolm Xs assassination and rushed to his
side in his dying moments, a tragic moment poignantly captured in a Time Life photograph. Another Japanese
American woman, Ina Sugihara, became a civil rights organizer while living in New York. In 1943, she became
a founding member of the Congress of Racial Equity (CORE) and created multiracial coalitions through the
Japanese American Citizens League and the watchdog agency, the Fair Employment Practices Committee. In
1945, she wrote presciently about the importance of multiracial alliances to fight discrimination, saying: "The
fate of each minority depends upon the extent of justice given all other groups."Despite her commitment
to coalition-building, anti-Black attitudes impacted Sugihara on a personal level. After her 1955 marriage to
Willis Jones, an African American man, she was increasingly marginalized within her own community. Anti-
Black sentiments persisted in the Japanese American community despite the history of support from and
collaboration with African Americans, but those sentiments rarely went unchallenged. The monthly newsletter
Gidra, considered by many to be the voice of the Asian American movement, became a strong anti-racist
agent and proponent of multiracial coalition-building. In the June-July 1970 issue, Mickey Nozawa condemned
the Japanese American Citizens League community center in Long Beach for an incident in which a mixed
group of Japanese American, Black and Chicano youth were denied entry. Nozawa wrote, "How can we ever
bring about meaningful changes in this blatantly racist nation if we allow racism to be practiced within our own
community?"The same issue of Gidra included an exclusive interview with Bobby Seale, the National
Chairman of the Black Panther Party who was being held at the San Francisco County Jail while awaiting
extradition to Connecticut. In a lengthy discussion of the aims of the Black Panther Party, Seale touched upon
the fact that resistance to shared oppressions should be seen as a foundation for multiracial alliance."In
general, I see the struggle moving with all the people and not just with Black people alone. I see the Asian
people playing a very significant part in solving the problems of their own community in coalition, unity, and
alliance with Black people because the problems are basically the same as they are for Brown, Red, and poor
White Americans the basic problem of poverty and oppression that we are all subjected to."Despite this
legacy of allegiance, anti-Blackness lingered in some Japanese American communities, no doubt stoked by
racist narratives perpetuated by American white supremacy and the model minority myth. Rather then letting
this be a gradual, generational shift, writers like Kim Tran have proposed ways that Asian Americans can
broach the thorny subject of anti-Black racism within their own families. "The Black community frequently
serves as our negative definition the people we dont want to be," Tran writes. "White supremacy fed us
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anti-Black racism and many of us believe it out of fear and hope." There are signs that these currents of
racism might be ebbing while coalitions between Asian Americans and Blacks rise. Asian American groups
like #Asians4BlackLives stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Meanwhile, Asian American
students are speaking out against anti-Black policies on their college campuses. With the work of pioneers like
Yuri Kochimaya, Ina Sugihara, Bobby Seale, and the writers of Gidra and the California Eagle to turn to,
they have a strong precedent of multiracial coalition-building to draw upon.
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***A2:***
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A2: Framework Education
The alternative is a prerequisite to education. The aff is not education without

abolition.
Farley 05 [Anthony Paul, Associate Professor, Boston College Law School | Perfecting Slavery, Boston
College Law | Research Paper No. 53 pg. 12 14] //shuler
Abolition. The word calls to the slave but slaves are not called. Slaves cannot be called. Freedom is the
only calling. Everything not called is a thing, an object, and if the object takes the form of the human then it is abject. Frederick
Douglass wrote: If a slave ran away and succeeded in getting clear, or if a slave killed his master, set fire to
a barn, or did anything very wrong in the mind of a slaveholder, it was spoken of as the fruit of
abolition. Hearing the word in this connection very often, I set about learning what it meant.30 There, in the above passage from Douglasss
narrative of his life, we read of the call that became his calling, abolition, but slaves cannot be called. Education is the call and
abolition is the same call (I set about learning what [abolition] meant31). Education requires abolition. Abolition
requires education. Freedom is the only education. One can only be called to freedom. Abolition called
Douglass. Abolition became Douglasss calling.32 The tree of knowledge produces the forbidden fruit of abolition.33 What happens to the slave who
responds to the call, who enables herself to call and to be called? What, in other words, happens to the slave who learns to read and to write? [T]he
most common widely known penalty for learning to read and write was amputation.34 It is difficult to remember these dismemberments and so we
screen them with juridical memories of progress up from a slavery that never ended.
Education and freedom are the same call, the
same calling. We who have slavery with us still are made up of memory and forgetting. Freedom is our
calling. Slaves are not called. Education is required to pursue our calling. Education is dangerous to
slavery, to the system of white-over-black. James Baldwin, speaking to Harlem teachers, noted: The paradox of education is
precisely thisthat as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of
education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for [themself] himself, to make [their]
his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not.35
Baldwin continued: [I]f I were a teacher in this school, or any Negro school . . . dealing with Negro children, who were in my care only a
few hours of every day and would then return to their homes and to the streets, children who have an apprehension of their future which with every hour
grows grimmer and darker, I
would try to teach themI would try to make them knowthat those streets, those
houses, those dangers, those agonies by which they are surrounded are criminal. I would try to make each child
know that these things are a result of a criminal conspiracy to destroy him. I would teach him that if he intends to be [an adult], he must at once decide
that he is stronger than this conspiracy and that he must never make his peace with it. And that one of his weapons for refusing to make his peace with it
and for destroying it depends on what he decides he is worth.36 C.L.R. James, writing on the revolution in Haiti, observed of the small, privileged class
of slaves that while most slavishly imitated their masters, albeit in a lesser key, a few used their positions to become dangerous, to become the
revolutionaries who would later burn down every plantation: Permeated with the vices of their masters and mistresses, these upper servants gave
themselves airs and despised the slaves in the fields. . . . But a few of these used their position to cultivate themselves, to gain a little education, to learn
all they could. The
leaders of a revolution are usually those who have been able to profit by the cultural
advantages of the system they are attacking, and the San Domingo revolution was no exception to this
rule.37 The leaders of the revolution in Haiti were slaves who, like Douglass, took and ate of the
forbidden fruit of abolition.38 The leaders of that revolution, in other words, were slaves who had educated themselves.39 James
Baldwin understood this and warned the post-Brown school children of Harlem and their teachers that the institutions within which they lived were a
It is with education, then, that the study of
criminal conspiracy with which tomorrows revolutionaries must never make . . . peace.40
memory and forgetting begins. C.L.R. Jamess description of the Haitian beginning is useful in understanding the beginning of white-over-
black in the United States: From the underworld of two continents they came, Frenchmen and Spaniards, Maltese, Italians, Portuguese and Americans.
For whatever a mans origin, record or character, here his white skin made him a person of quality and rejected or failures in their own country flocked to
White-over-
San Domingo, where consideration was achieved at so cheap a price, money flowed and opportunities of debauchery abounded.41
black is a calling (From the underworld of two continents they came). Education is a calling. Education in whiteover-
black is necessary to live within the world and time belted by the colorline for in that world and time
white-over-black is everyones calling. White-over-black is a business and a pleasure, it is the business of pleasure, and it is the
pleasure of business. White-over-black is sublime and earthly and divine and other many-splendored things besides these.42 White-over-black is the
Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions
orientation needed to use the maps of all our territories:
of existence as a foundation, there is built a superstructure of diversified and characteristic
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sentiments, illusions, habits of thought, and outlooks on life in general. The class as a whole creates and shapes
them out of its material foundation, and out of the corresponding social relationships. The individual in whom they arise, through tradition and education,
may fancy them to be the true determinates, the real origin of his activities.43 Everyone, then, in a white-over-black order of things, is called to that
order. The order to which we are called (our social conditions of existence) is the structure of thought itself (of our diversified and characteristic
sentiments, illusions, habits of thought, and outlooks on life in general). In a white-over-black order of things the order to which we are all called is white-
over-black. That
calling to order is itself the material foundation of white-over-black. White-over-black
occurs when those marked as white are made mind and those marked as black are made matter and it
is also what we call thinking.
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A2: Framework- New Languages
The importance of debate is the ability for us as debaters to develop new ways of
thinking and speaking
Brandli, 16 B.A. in African America Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park (Nathan, The
Politics of Prison Abolition: An Organizers Guide to Effective Abolition Research and Activism,
http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/19150/Brandli_ResearchPaper.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y)
Prison abolition is a revolutionary movement, and as Isiah says there is no time like the present to
fight for it. The energy is here. The time is now. Weve got to get people more aware of this issue in
order to spread this across the country and bring it to the forefront of the political realm [and] of the
philosophical realm. Ya know, the way of thinking as far as how people think of crime and poverty and
other societal issues that are tied to it. I think college campuses is where it needs to be. (Isiah) Those who
advocate for prison abolition must be prepared to maintain a vision of the future that is drastically
different from our current system, and continue to present a message that is contradictory and foreign
to the status quo yet suggested enough to still contain many endless possibilities. They must also be principled in
their fight for important reforms when engaging with a struggle against the Prison Industrial Complex and other systems of oppression. But just as importantly
prison abolitionists must understand what it means to be a revolutionary and to struggle for what is
yet to come. As C.L. R. James states: A revolution is first and foremost a movement from the old to the new, and
needs above all new words, new verse, new passwordsall the symbols in which ideas and feelings
are made tangible. The mass creation and appropriation of what is needed is a revealing picture of a whole people on their journey into the modern world,
sometimes pathetic, sometimes vastly comic, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, but always vibrant with the life that only a mass of ordinary people can give.
(Ransby, 2003) We
cannot become wrapped up in the same language and ideas as the current message, the
current system, or the current status quo. Prison abolition like any revolutionary movement requires
new languages and terminologies that will produce new ways of thinking. But it is not enough to simply adopt new language
or new ways of thinking, and it is not enough to only learn about the issues and become a prison abolitionist in a theoretical sense. There is no such thing as an academic
revolutionary. All meaningful political work requires a melding of theory with practice to form collective and individual praxis. Being a prison abolitionist and a revolutionary
means taking the time to engage directly with the experiences of suffering and oppression and actually organize against it. As Angela Davis says: While theoretical work,
intellectual work, is extremely important, the work of the activist will determine whether or not we will move to a new stage . . . everyone should learn how to become an
activist on some level, in some way. Everyone who considers herself or himself a part of this overall progressive movement must establish some kind of organizational ties,
and must definitely participate in one or more movements. (James 1998) Being a prison abolitionist and becoming involved in this movement means engaging in substantial
When we
forms of activism. It is this work that determines whether the ideas that we internalize and promote are made meaningful in the real world and everyday life.
engage in such activism in the context of a movement with a clear vision and set of principles anything
is possible, including enormous changes in the way that everyone thinks. This is ultimately what a revolution is about. As
David Graeber says: Revolutions are thus planetary phenomena. But there is more. What they really do is transform basic assumptions about what politics is ultimately
about. In the wake of a revolution, ideas that had been considered veritably lunatic fringe quickly become the accepted currency of debate. Before the French Revolution, the
ideas that change is good, that government policy is the proper way to manage it, and that governments derive their authority from an entity called the people were
considered the sorts of things one might hear from crackpots and demagogues, or at best a handful of freethinking intellectuals who spend their time debating in cafs. A
generation later, even the stuffiest magistrates, priests, and headmasters had to at least pay lip service to these ideas. Before long, we had reached the situation we are in
today: that its necessary to lay out the terms for anyone to even notice they are there. Theyve become common sense, the very grounds of political discussion. (Graeber
2013) As we move forward towards the goal of abolition it is important to keep these things in mind: that the changes we wish to see in the world start and end with changing
Therefore it is important to always continue to nurture our imaginations, remain dedicated to
peoples minds.
trying to change the world, and maintain a sense of optimism. Optimism is an absolute necessity,
even if its only optimism of the will as Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect. What has kept me
going has been the development of new modes of community. I dont know whether I would have
survived had not movements survived, had not communities of resistance, communities of struggle.
(Davis, 2016). Where there is a will there is a way. Prisons can and will be abolished, as long as we
maintain and nurture the political agency and the will to ultimately make them obsolete.
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A2: Framework- Scholarship
Scholarship first - The state expands the domain of its capacity to wage domestic
warfare through the continual reiteration of narrative statecraft this produces a
resignation the extent to which abolitionist pedagogies are possible is directly
related to how normalized the narratives of statecraft are their scholarship forfeits
the creative possibilities of abolition in favor of narratives that teach us to fixate on
short term policy goals. (long)
Rodriguez 08 [Dylan, Professor and Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies @ Univ. California-Riverside, Warfare and the terms of
Engagement, Abolition Now!: Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex, p.91-5]
We can broadly understand that "the state" is in many ways a conceptual term that refers to a mind-
boggling array of geographic, political, and institutional relations of power and domination. It is, in that
sense, a term of abstraction: certainly the state is "real," but it is so massive and institutionally
stretched that it simply cannot be understood and "seen" in its totality. The way we come to
comprehend the state's realness-or differently put, the way the state makes itself comprehensible,
intelligible, and materially identifiable to ordinary people-is through its own self- narrations and
institutional mobilizations. Consider the narrative and institutional dimensions of the "war on drugs," for example. New York City mayor Edward Koch, in a gesture of masculine challenge to the Reagan-era
Feds, offers a prime example of such a narration in a 1986 op-ed piece published on the widely-read pages of The New York Times: I propose the following steps as a coordinated Federal response to [the war on drugs]: Use the full resources of
the military for drug interdiction. The Posse Comitatus doctrine, which restricts participation of the military in civilian law enforcement, must be modified so that the military can be used for narcotics control . . . Enact a Federal death penalty for
drug wholesalers. Life sentences, harsh fines, forfeitures of assets, billions spent on education and therapy all have failed to deter the drug wholesaler. The death penalty would. Capital punishment is an extraordinary remedy, but we are facing
an extraordinary peril . . . Designate United States narcotics prisons. The Bureau of Prisons should des-ignate separate facilities for drug o enders. Segregating such prisoners from others, preferably i n remote locations such a s the Yukon or
desert areas, might motivate drug o enders to abandon their trade. Enhance the Federal agencies combating the drug problem. The Attorney General should greatly increase the number of drug enforcement agents in New York and other cities.
He should direct the Federal Bureau of Investigation to devote substantial manpower against the cocaine trade and should see to it that the Immigration and Naturalization Service is capable of detecting and deporting aliens convicted of drug
crimes in far better numbers than it now does. Enact the state and local narcotics control assistance act of 1986. is bill provides $750 million annually for five years to assist state and local jurisdictions increase their capacities for enforcement,
corrections, education and prosecution. These proposals offer no certainty for success in the fight against drugs, of course. If we are to succeed, however, it is essential that we persuade the Federal Government to recognize its responsibility to
the state (here momentarily manifest

lead the way. Edward Koch's manifesto reflects an important dimension of the broader institutional, cultural, and political activities that build the state as a mechanism of self-legitimating violence:
constantly tells stories about itself facilitated by a politically willing and accomplice
in the person of the New York City Mayor)
corporate media. This storytelling-which through repetition and saturation assembles the popular
"common sense" of domestic warfare-is inseparable from the on-the-ground shifting, rearranging, and
recommitting of resources and institutional power that we witness in the everyday mobilizations of a state waging intense,
localized, militarized struggle against its declared internal enemies. Consider, for example, how pronouncements like those of Koch, Reagan, and
Bratton seem to always be accompanied by the operational innovation of different varieties of covert ops, urban guerilla war, and counterintelligence warfare that specifically emerge through the state's declared domestic wars on
crime/drugs/gangs/etc. Hence, it is no coincidence that Mayor Koch's editorial makes the stunning appeal to withdraw ("modify") the Posse Comitatus principle, to allow the Federal government's formal mobilization of its global war apparatus for
battle in the homeland neighborhoods of the war on drugs. To reference our example even more closely, we can begin to see how the ramped-up policing and massive
imprisonment of Black and Latino youth in Koch's 1980s New York were enabled and normalized by
his and others' attempts to storytell the legal empowerment and cultural valorization of the police, such that
the nuts-and-bolts operation of the prison industrial complex was lubricated by the multiple moral parables of domestic warfare. This process of producing the state as an active,
tangible, and identifiable structure of power and dominance, through the work of self-narration and
concrete mobilizations of institutional capacity, is what some scholars call "statecraft." Generally, the
state materializes and becomes comprehensible to us through these definitive moments of crafting:
that is, we come to identify the state as a series of active political and institutional projects. So, if the state's self-
narration inundates us with depictions of its policing and juridical arms as the righteously punitive and justifiably violent front lines of an overlapping series of comprehensive, militarized, and culturally valorized domestic wars-for my generation,
the "war on drugs," the generation prior, the "war on crime," and the current generation, localized "wars on gangs" and their planetary rearticulation in the "war on terror"-then it is the material processes of war, from the writing of public policy to
the hyper-weaponization of the police, that commonly represents the existence of the state as we come to normally "know" it. Given that domestic warfare composes both the common narrative language and concrete material production of the
state, the question remains as to why the establishment left has not confronted this statecraft with the
degree of absolute emergency that the condition implies (war!). Perhaps it is because we are
underestimating the skill and reach of the state as a pedagogical (teaching) apparatus, replete with
room for contradiction and relatively sanctioned spaces for "dissent" and counter-state organizing. Italian
political prisoner Antonio Gramsci's thoughts on the formation of the contemporary pedagogical state are instructive here: The State does have and request consent, but it
also "educates" this consent, by means of the political and syndical associations; these, however, are
private organisms, left to the private initiative of the ruling class. Although Gramsci was writing these words in the early 1900s, he had already identified
the institutional symbiosis that would eventually produce the non-profit industrial complex. e historical record of the last three decades shows that liberal foundations such as the Ford, Mellon, Rockefeller, Soros and other financial entities have
become politically central to "the private initiative of the ruling class" and have in fact funded a breath-taking number of organizations, grassroots campaigns, and progressive political interests. e questions I wish to insert here, however, are
whether the financially enabling gestures of foundations also 1) exert a politically disciplinary or repressive force on contemporary social movements and community based organizations, while 2) nurturing an ideological and structural allegiance
to the state that preempts a more creative, radical, abolitionist politics. Several social movement scholars have argued that the "channeling mechanisms" of the non-profit industrial complex "may now far outweigh the effect of direct social control
by states in explaining the . . . orthodox tactics, and moderate goals ofmuch collective action in modern America." The non-pro t apparatus and its symbiotic relationship to the state amount to a sophisticated technology of political repression and
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social control, accompanying and facilitating the ideological and institutional mobilizations ofa domestic war waging state. Avowedly progressive, radical, leftist, and even some misnamed "revolutionary" groups find it opportune to assimilate into
this state-sanctioned organizational paradigm, as it simultaneously allows them to establish a relatively stable financial and operational infrastructure while avoiding the transience, messiness, and possible legal complication of working under
decentralized, informal, or even "underground" auspices. us, the aforementioned authors suggest that the emergence of the state-proctored non-pro t industry "suggests a historical movement away from direct, cruder forms [of state repression],
The regularity with which progressive organizations immediately forfeit

toward more subtle forms of state social control of social movements."
the crucial political and conceptual possibilities of abolishing domestic warfare is a direct reflection of
the extent to which domestic war has been fashioned into the everyday, "normal" reality of the state.
By extension, the non-profit industrial complex, which is fundamentally guided by the logic of being
state-sanctioned (and often state-funded), also reflects this common reality: the operative assumptions
of domestic warfare are taken for granted because they form and inform the popular consensus. Effectively
contradicting, decentering, and transforming the popular consensus (for example, destabilizing assertive assumptions common to progressive movements and organizations such as "we have to control/get rid of gangs," "we need prisons," or
"we want better police") is, in this context, dangerously di cult work. Although, the truth of the matter is that the establishment US le, in ways both spoken and presumed, may actually agree with the political, moral, and ideological premises of
Leaders as well as rank-and-file members in avowedly progressive organizations can and must
domestic warfare.
reflect on how they might actually be supporting and reproducing existing forms of racism, white
supremacy, state violence, and domestic warfare in the process of throwing their resources behind
what they perceive as "winnable victories," in the lexicon of venerable community organizer Saul Alinsky. Our historical moment suggests
the need for a principled political rupturing of existing techniques and strategies that fetishize and
fixate on the negotiation, massaging, and management of the worst outcomes of domestic warfare.
One political move long overdue is toward grassroots pedagogies of radical dis-identification with the
state, in the trajectory of an anti-nationalism or anti-patriotism, that reorients a progressive
identification with the creative possibilities of insurgency (this is to consider "insurgency" as a politics that pushes beyond the defensive maneuvering of
"resistance"). Reading a few a few lines down from our first invoking of Fanon's call to collective, liberatory action is clarifying here: "For us who are determined to break the back of colonialism, our historic mission is to authorize every revolt,
every desperate act, and every attack aborted or drowned in blood." While there are rare groups in existence that offer this kind of nourishing political space (from the L.A.-based Youth Justice Coalition to the national organization INCITE!
Women of Color Against Violence), they are o en forced to expend far too much energy challenging both the parochialisms of the hegemonic non-pro t apparatus and the sometimes narrow politics ofthe progressive US le . CONCLUSION:
ABOLITION AND RADICAL POLITICAL VISION I have become somewhat obsessed with amplifying the need for a dramatic, even spectacular political shift that pushes against and reaches beyond the implicit pro- state politics of left
abolition of domestic warfare, not unlike precedent (and ongoing) struggles to abolish colonialism, slavery, and programmatic genocide,
progressivism. Most importantly, I am convinced that the
necessitates a rigorous theoretical and pragmatic approach to a counter- and anti-state radicalism that attempts to fracture the
foundations of the existing US social form- because after all, there is truly nothing to be redeemed of a society produced through
such terror-inspiring structures of dominance. This political shift requires a sustained labor of radical vision, and in the most crucial ways is actually anchored to "progressive"
it is precisely the
notions of life, freedom, community, and collective/personal security (including safety from racist policing/criminalization and the most localized brutalities of neoliberal or global capitalism). Arguably,
creative and pragmatic work of political fantasy/ political vision/political imagination that is the most underdeveloped
dimension of the US establishment left's organizational modus operandi and public discourse. While a full discussion is best left for another essay, we might consider the post-1960s history of the reactionary,
neoconservative, and Christian fundamentalist US right, which has fully and eagerly engaged in these political labors of fantasy/vision/imagination, and has seen the desires of their wildest dreams met or exceeded in their struggles for political
It might be useful to begin by thinking of ourselves as existing in a relationship of deep historical

and cultural hegemony.
obligation to the long and recent, faraway and nearby historical legacies of radical, revolutionary, and liberationist struggles that
have made the abolition of oppressive violence their most immediate and fundamental political desire.
Scholarship first - The state expands the domain of its capacity to wage domestic
warfare through the continual reiteration of narrative statecraft this produces a
resignation the extent to which abolitionist pedagogies are possible is directly
related to how normalized the narratives of statecraft are their scholarship forfeits
the creative possibilities of abolition in favor of narratives that teach us to fixate on
short term policy goals. (longer)
Behind the din of progressive and liberal reformist struggles over public policy, civil liberties, and law,
and beneath the infrequent mobilizations of activity to defend against the next onslaught of racist,
classist, ageist, and misogynist criminalization, there is an unspoken politics of assumption that takes
for granted the mystified permanence of domestic warfare as a constant production of targeted and
massive suffering, guided by the logic of Black, brown, and indigenous subjection to the expediencies
and essential violence of the American (global) nation-building project. To put it differently: despite the
unprecedented forms of imprisonment, social and political repression, and violent policing that
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compose the mosaic of our historical time, the establishment left (within and perhaps beyond the US)
does not care to envision, much less politically prioritize, the abolition of us domestic warfare and its
structuring white supremacist social logic as its most urgent task of the present and future. Our non-
profit left, in particular, seems content to engage in desperate (and usually well-intentioned) attempts
to manage the casualties of domestic warfare, foregoing the urgency of an abolitionist praxis that
openly, critically, and radically addresses the moral, cultural, and political premises of these wars. Not
long from now, generations will emerge from the organic accumulation of rage, suffering, social
alienation, and (we hope) politically principled rebellion against this living apocalypse and pose to us some
rudimentary questions of radical accountability: How were we able to accommodate, and even culturally and politically normalize the strategic, explicit, and openly racist
technologies of state violence that effectively socially neutralized and frequently liquidated entire nearby populations of our people, given that ours are the very same populations that have historically struggled to survive and overthrow such
how could we live with ourselves in this

"classical" structures of dominance as colonialism, frontier conquest, racial slavery, and other genocides? In a somewhat more intimate sense,
domestic state of emergency, and why did we seem to generally forfeit the creative possibilities of
radically challenging, dislodging, and transforming the ideological and institutional premises of this
condition of domestic warfare in or of short-term, "winnable" policy reforms? (For example, why did
we choose to formulate and tolerate a "progressive" political language that reinforced dominant racist
notions of "criminality" in the process of trying to discredit the legal basis of "Three Strikes" laws?) What
were the fundamental concerns of our progressive organizations and movements during this time, and were they willing to comprehend and galvanize an effective, or even viable opposition to the white supremacist state's terms of engagement
(that is, warfare)? This radical accountability reflects a variation on anti- colonial liberation theorist Frantz Fanon's memorable statement to his own peers, comrades, and nemeses: Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in
relative opacity. In the underdeveloped countries preceding generations have simultaneously resisted the insidious agenda of colonialism and paved the way for the emergence of the current struggles. Now that we are in the heat of combat, we
must shed the habit of decrying the efforts of our forefathers or feigning incomprehension at their silence or passiveness. Lest we fall victim to a certain political nostalgia that is often induced by such illuminating Fanonist exhortations, ought to
clarify the premises of the social "mission" that our generation of US based progressive organizing has undertaken. In the vicinity of the constantly retrenching social welfare apparatuses of the US state, much of the most urgent and immediate
work of community-based organizing has revolved around service provision. Importantly, this pragmatic focus also builds a certain progressive ethic of voluntarism that constructs the model activist as a variation on older liberal notions of the
to respond to this political problem requires an

"good citizen." Following Fanon, the question is whether and how this mission ought to be fulfilled or betrayed. I believe that
analysis and conceptualization of "the state" that is far more complex and laborious than we usually
allow in our ordinary rush of obligations to build campaigns, organize communities, and write grant
confronted on multiple fronts by an abolitionist politics. In so many ways, the US progressive/left establishment is filling the void created by what Ruthie Gilmore has
called the violent "abandonments" of the state, which forfeits and implodes its own social welfare capacities (which were already insufficient at best) while transforming and (productively) exploding its domestic war-making functionalities (guided
by a "frightening willingness to engage in human sacrifice"). Yet, at the same time that the state has been openly galvanizing itself to declare and wage violent struggle against strategically targeted local populations, the establishment left
remains relatively unwilling and therefore institutionally un-able to address the questions of social survival, grassroots mobilization, radical social justice, and social transformation on the concrete and everyday terms of the very domestic wares)
We can broadly understand that "the state"

that the state has so openly and repeatedly declared as the premises of its own coherence. PITFALLS OF THE PEDAGOGICAL STATE
is in many ways a conceptual term that refers to a mind-boggling array of geographic, political, and
institutional relations of power and domination. It is, in that sense, a term of abstraction: certainly the
state is "real," but it is so massive and institutionally stretched that it simply cannot be understood
and "seen" in its totality. The way we come to comprehend the state's realness-or differently put, the
way the state makes itself comprehensible, intelligible, and materially identifiable to ordinary people-is
through its own self- narrations and institutional mobilizations. Consider the narrative and institutional dimensions of the "war on drugs," for example. New
York City mayor Edward Koch, in a gesture of masculine challenge to the Reagan-era Feds, offers a prime example of such a narration in a 1986 op-ed piece published on the widely-read pages of The New York Times: I propose the following
steps as a coordinated Federal response to [the war on drugs]: Use the full resources of the military for drug interdiction. The Posse Comitatus doctrine, which restricts participation of the military in civilian law enforcement, must be modified so
that the military can be used for narcotics control . . . Enact a Federal death penalty for drug wholesalers. Life sentences, harsh fines, forfeitures of assets, billions spent on education and therapy all have failed to deter the drug wholesaler. The
death penalty would. Capital punishment is an extraordinary remedy, but we are facing an extraordinary peril . . . Designate United States narcotics prisons. The Bureau of Prisons should des-ignate separate facilities for drug o enders.
Segregating such prisoners from others, preferably i n remote locations such a s the Yukon or desert areas, might motivate drug o enders to abandon their trade. Enhance the Federal agencies combating the drug problem. The Attorney General
should greatly increase the number of drug enforcement agents in New York and other cities. He should direct the Federal Bureau of Investigation to devote substantial manpower against the cocaine trade and should see to it that the
Immigration and Naturalization Service is capable of detecting and deporting aliens convicted of drug crimes in far better numbers than it now does. Enact the state and local narcotics control assistance act of 1986. is bill provides $750 million
annually for five years to assist state and local jurisdictions increase their capacities for enforcement, corrections, education and prosecution. These proposals offer no certainty for success in the fight against drugs, of course. If we are to
succeed, however, it is essential that we persuade the Federal Government to recognize its responsibility to lead the way. Edward Koch's manifesto reflects an important dimension of the broader institutional, cultural, and political activities that
the state (here momentarily manifest in the person of the New York City Mayor) constantly tells stories about itself
build the state as a mechanism of self-legitimating violence:
facilitated by a politically willing and accomplice corporate media. This storytelling-which through
repetition and saturation assembles the popular "common sense" of domestic warfare-is inseparable
from the on-the-ground shifting, rearranging, and recommitting of resources and institutional power
that we witness in the everyday mobilizations of a state waging intense, localized, militarized struggle against its declared internal
enemies. Consider, for example, how pronouncements like those of Koch, Reagan, and Bratton seem to always be accompanied by the operational innovation of different varieties of covert ops, urban guerilla war, and
counterintelligence warfare that specifically emerge through the state's declared domestic wars on crime/drugs/gangs/etc. Hence, it is no coincidence that Mayor Koch's editorial makes the stunning appeal to withdraw ("modify") the Posse
how
Comitatus principle, to allow the Federal government's formal mobilization of its global war apparatus for battle in the homeland neighborhoods of the war on drugs. To reference our example even more closely, we can begin to see
the ramped-up policing and massive imprisonment of Black and Latino youth in Koch's 1980s New
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York were enabled and normalized by his and others' attempts to storytell the legal empowerment and
cultural valorization of the police, such that the nuts-and-bolts operation of the prison industrial complex was lubricated by the multiple moral parables of domestic warfare. This
process of producing the state as an active, tangible, and identifiable structure of power and
dominance, through the work of self-narration and concrete mobilizations of institutional capacity, is
what some scholars call "statecraft." Generally, the state materializes and becomes comprehensible to
us through these definitive moments of crafting: that is, we come to identify the state as a series of
active political and institutional projects. So, if the state's self-narration inundates us with depictions of its policing and juridical arms as the righteously punitive and justifiably violent front
lines of an overlapping series of comprehensive, militarized, and culturally valorized domestic wars-for my generation, the "war on drugs," the generation prior, the "war on crime," and the current generation, localized "wars on gangs" and their
planetary rearticulation in the "war on terror"-then it is the material processes of war, from the writing of public policy to the hyper-weaponization of the police, that commonly represents the existence of the state as we come to normally "know" it.
the question remains as to why the establishment

Given that domestic warfare composes both the common narrative language and concrete material production of the state,
left has not confronted this statecraft with the degree of absolute emergency that the condition implies
(war!). Perhaps it is because we are underestimating the skill and reach of the state as a pedagogical
(teaching) apparatus, replete with room for contradiction and relatively sanctioned spaces for
"dissent" and counter-state organizing. Italian political prisoner Antonio Gramsci's thoughts on the formation of the contemporary pedagogical state are instructive here: The
State does have and request consent, but it also "educates" this consent, by means of the political and
syndical associations; these, however, are private organisms, left to the private initiative of the ruling
class. Although Gramsci was writing these words in the early 1900s, he had already identified the institutional symbiosis that would eventually produce the non-profit industrial complex. e historical record of the last three decades shows
that liberal foundations such as the Ford, Mellon, Rockefeller, Soros and other financial entities have become politically central to "the private initiative of the ruling class" and have in fact funded a breath-taking number of organizations,
grassroots campaigns, and progressive political interests. e questions I wish to insert here, however, are whether the financially enabling gestures of foundations also 1) exert a politically disciplinary or repressive force on contemporary social
movements and community based organizations, while 2) nurturing an ideological and structural allegiance to the state that preempts a more creative, radical, abolitionist politics. Several social movement scholars have argued that the
"channeling mechanisms" of the non-profit industrial complex "may now far outweigh the effect of direct social control by states in explaining the . . . orthodox tactics, and moderate goals ofmuch collective action in modern America." The non-pro
t apparatus and its symbiotic relationship to the state amount to a sophisticated technology of political repression and social control, accompanying and facilitating the ideological and institutional mobilizations ofa domestic war waging state.
Avowedly progressive, radical, leftist, and even some misnamed "revolutionary" groups find it opportune to assimilate into this state-sanctioned organizational paradigm, as it simultaneously allows them to establish a relatively stable financial
and operational infrastructure while avoiding the transience, messiness, and possible legal complication of working under decentralized, informal, or even "underground" auspices. us, the aforementioned authors suggest that the emergence of
The regularity with

the state-proctored non-pro t industry "suggests a historical movement away from direct, cruder forms [of state repression], toward more subtle forms of state social control of social movements."
which progressive organizations immediately forfeit the crucial political and conceptual possibilities of
abolishing domestic warfare is a direct reflection of the extent to which domestic war has been
fashioned into the everyday, "normal" reality of the state. By extension, the non-profit industrial
complex, which is fundamentally guided by the logic of being state-sanctioned (and often state-
funded), also reflects this common reality: the operative assumptions of domestic warfare are taken for
granted because they form and inform the popular consensus. Effectively contradicting, decentering, and transforming the popular consensus (for example,
destabilizing assertive assumptions common to progressive movements and organizations such as "we have to control/get rid of gangs," "we need prisons," or "we want better police") is, in this context, dangerously di cult work. Although, the
Leaders as well as rank-

truth of the matter is that the establishment US le, in ways both spoken and presumed, may actually agree with the political, moral, and ideological premises of domestic warfare.
and-file members in avowedly progressive organizations can and must reflect on how they might
actually be supporting and reproducing existing forms of racism, white supremacy, state violence, and
domestic warfare in the process of throwing their resources behind what they perceive as "winnable
victories," in the lexicon of venerable community organizer Saul Alinsky. Our historical moment suggests the need for a principled
political rupturing of existing techniques and strategies that fetishize and fixate on the negotiation,
massaging, and management of the worst outcomes of domestic warfare. One political move long
overdue is toward grassroots pedagogies of radical dis-identification with the state, in the trajectory of
an anti-nationalism or anti-patriotism, that reorients a progressive identification with the creative
possibilities of insurgency (this is to consider "insurgency" as a politics that pushes beyond the defensive maneuvering of "resistance"). Reading a few a few lines down from our first invoking of Fanon's
call to collective, liberatory action is clarifying here: "For us who are determined to break the back of colonialism, our historic mission is to authorize every revolt, every desperate act, and every attack aborted or drowned in blood." While there are
rare groups in existence that offer this kind of nourishing political space (from the L.A.-based Youth Justice Coalition to the national organization INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence), they are o en forced to expend far too much energy
challenging both the parochialisms of the hegemonic non-pro t apparatus and the sometimes narrow politics ofthe progressive US le . CONCLUSION: ABOLITION AND RADICAL POLITICAL VISION I have become somewhat obsessed with
abolition of
amplifying the need for a dramatic, even spectacular political shift that pushes against and reaches beyond the implicit pro- state politics of left progressivism. Most importantly, I am convinced that the
domestic warfare, not unlike precedent (and ongoing) struggles to abolish colonialism, slavery, and programmatic genocide, necessitates a rigorous theoretical and
pragmatic approach to a counter- and anti-state radicalism that attempts to fracture the foundations of the existing US social form-because after all, there is
truly nothing to be redeemed of a society produced through such terror-inspiring structures of
dominance. This political shift requires a sustained labor of radical vision, and in the most crucial ways is actually anchored to "progressive" notions of life, freedom, community, and collective/personal security (including safety
it is precisely the creative and pragmatic work of political fantasy/

from racist policing/criminalization and the most localized brutalities of neoliberal or global capitalism). Arguably,
political vision/political imagination that is the most underdeveloped dimension of the US establishment left's organizational modus operandi
and public discourse. While a full discussion is best left for another essay, we might consider the post-1960s history of the reactionary, neoconservative, and Christian fundamentalist US right, which has fully and eagerly engaged in these
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It might be useful to begin by
political labors of fantasy/vision/imagination, and has seen the desires of their wildest dreams met or exceeded in their struggles for political and cultural hegemony.
thinking of ourselves as existing in a relationship of deep historical obligation to the long and recent, faraway and nearby historical legacies
of radical, revolutionary, and liberationist struggles that have made the abolition of oppressive
violence their most immediate and fundamental political desire.
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A2: Perm Refuse Compromise
Refusing the permutation is an act of abolitionthe 2AR will go for the argument that
the permutation is good enoughthat presumption of alliance and unity in the
permutation is the compulsory deferral of abolitionist possibilities
Dylan Rodrguez, 15 Prison abolitionist, Professor and Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC
Riverside, July 17th, 2015, The production of freedom and liberation from within collective rebellion,
insurgency, and community: Dylan Rodrguez on Abolition, http://abolitionjournal.org/dylan-rodriguez-abolition-
statement/)/HEX
Let us not sever abolition from the people who inhabit and constantly remake it, over the course of an
apocalypse that remains uncontained. Abolitionists are the people who imagine, practice, wage, and
thrill in the radical and irrevocable destruction of things for sake of something/anything else, whether
its the end of things as we know them or some kind of revolutionary possibility. In this sense, they are
ordinary people who produce the extraordinary, creating the long precedent for a way of being-in-the-
world that we only periodically name as abolition. Abolition is possibility, creativity, radical and humble generosity
that at times feels like violence. It is refusal to presume alliance and unity , while deploying both to do
what is necessaryknowing that, in the end, this is not about rescuing Humanism from the deadly-
killing trap of the world-form thats created it. It is the production of freedom and liberation practices
from within collective rebellion, insurgency , and communityhowever fleeting and endangered all of
the above might be. It is a willingness to be caught up in contradiction, not settling with it,
understanding that the process may feel even dirtier and uglier than the easy sellout. It is talking,
teaching, learning, arguing, refusing to just agree for the sake of agreeing. It is to confront the most
morbid shit while holding onto a sense of humor. It is knowing that this thing, abolition, is a perpetual
practice, not a definitive end.
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A2: Perm radical lefty politics
The absence of a theorization of anti-blackness in Affirmative ensures the reproduction

of anti-blackness in their politics they cannot respond to the condition by which
whites are deputized in the policing paradigm and black people magenetize bullets
their politics disavows the antiblackness at the heart of even leftist organizing and
crowds out alternative positions that start with the antiblack paradigm of police (AT
Perm)
Wilderson III 03 (Frank B., Professor of Drama and African American Studies at the University of California at
Irvine, The Prison Slave as Hegemonys (Silent) Scandal, 2/30/2003)//HL
It makes no difference that in the United States the casbah and the European zone are laid one on top of the other. What is being asserted here is an
isomorphic schematic relationthe schematic interchangeabilitybetween Fanons settler society and Martinots and Sextons policing paradigm. For
Fanon, it
is the policeman and soldier (not the discursive, or hegemonic, agents) of colonialism that make one town white
and the other black. For Martinot and Sexton, this Manichean delirium manifests itself by way of the U.S. paradigm of policing
that (re)produces, repetitively, the insideoutside, the civil societyblack world, by virtue of the
difference between those bodies that do not magnetize bullets and those that do. Police impunity
serves to distinguish between the racial itself and the elsewhere that mandates it . . . the distinction
between those whose human being is put permanently in question and those for whom it goes without
saying.7 In such a paradigm, white people are, ipso facto, deputized in the face of black people, whether they
know it (consciously) or not. Whiteness, thenand, by extension, civil society cannot be solely represented as some monumentalized
coherence of phallic signifiers but must first be understood as a social formation of contemporaries who do not magnetize bullets. This is the essence of
their construction through an asignifying absence; their signifying presence is manifested by the fact that they are, if only by default, deputized against
those who do magnetize bullets. In short, white people are not simply protected by the police. They arein their
very corporealitythe police. is ipso facto deputization of white people in the face of black people accounts for Fanons materiality and
political contestation
Martinots and Sextons Manichean delirium in America. What remains to be addressed, however, is the way in which the
between civil societys junior partners (i.e., workers, white women, and immigrants), on the one hand,
and white-supremacist institutionality, on the other hand, is produced by, and reproductive of, a
supplemental antiblackness. Put another way: How is the production and accumulation of junior partners social capital dependent on an
antiblack rhetorical structure and a decomposed black body? Any serious musing on the question of antagonistic identity
formationa formation, the mass mobilization of which can precipitate a crisis in the institutions and
assumptive logic that undergird the United States of Americamust come to grips with the
contradictions between the political demands of radical social movements, such as the large prison
abolition movement, which seeks to abolish the prison-industrial complex, and the ideological
structure that underwrites its political desire. I contend that the positionality of black subjectivity is at the heart of those
contradictions and that this unspoken desire is bound up with the political limitations of several naturalized and uncritically accepted categories that have
their genesis mainly in the works of Antonio Gramsci namely, work or labor, the wage, exploitation, hegemony, and civil society. I wish to theorize the
symptoms of rage and resignation I hear in the words of George Jackson when he boils reform down to a single word, fascism, or in Assatas brief
the failure of radical social
declaration, I hated it, as well as in the Manichean delirium of Fanon, Martinot, and Sexton. Today,
movements to embrace symptoms of all three gestures is tantamount to the reproduction of an
antiblack politics that nonetheless represents itself as being in the service of the emancipation of the
black prison slave. By examining the strategy and structure of the black subjects absence in, and
incommensurability with, the key categories of Gramscian theory, we come face to face with three unsettling
consequences: 1. The black American subject imposes a radical incoherence on the assumptive logic
of Gramscian discourse and on todays coalition politics. In other words, she or he implies a scandal.
2. The black subject reveals the inability of social movements grounded in Gramscian discourse to
think of white supremacy ( rather than capitalism ) as the base and thereby calls into question their
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claim to elaborate a comprehensive and decisive antagonism. Stated another way, Gramscian discourse and coalition
politics are indeed able to imagine the subject that transforms itself into a mass of antagonistic identity formationsformations that can precipitate a
crisis in wage slavery, exploitation, and hegemonybut they are asleep at the wheel when asked to provide enabling antagonisms toward
unwaged slavery, despotism, and terror. 3. We begin to see how Marxism suffers from a kind of
conceptual anxiety. There is a desire for socialism on the other side of crisis, a society that does away not with the category of worker but with
the imposition that workers suffer under the approach of variable capital. In other words, the mark of its conceptual anxiety is in its
desire to democratize work and thus help to keep in place and ensure the coherence of Reformation
and Enlightenment foundational values of productivity and progress. This scenario crowds out other
postrevolutionary possibilitiesthat is, idleness.
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A2: Perm Anti Black Fungibility
The Perm attempts to produce a commonality between the slave and the human
through empathic correctives that redeem whiteness and adjust antiblackness to a
problem of exploitation this reproduces antiblack fungibilty and makes black
resistance impossible
Hartman and Wilderson 03 [Sadiya, prof. of African-Am history @ Columbia, and Frank, Professor of
Drama @ UC Irvine, The Position of the Unthought]
A body that you can do what you want with. In your discussion of the body as the property
F.W -Yes, that's clarifying.
of enjoyment, what I really like is when you talk about Rankin. Here's a guy - like the prototypical twentieth-century white
progressive - who's anti-slavery and uses his powers of observation to write for its abolition, even to his
slave-owning brother. He's in the South, he's looking at a slave coffle, and he imagines that these slaves being
beaten could be himself and his family. Through this process it makes sense to him, it becomes meaningful.
His body and his family members' white bodies become proxies for real enslaved black bodies and, as
you point out, the actual object of identification, the slave, disappears. S.V.H. - I think that gets at one of the
fundamental ethical questions/problems/crises for the West: the status of difference and the status of
the other. It's as though in order to come to any recognition of common humanity, the other must be
assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced: "Only if I can see myself in that position
can I understand the crisis of that position." That is the logic of the moral and political discourses we
see everyday - the need for the innocent black subject to be victimized by a racist state in order to see
the racism of the racist state. You have to be exemplary in your goodness, as opposed to .. . F.W. - [laughter] A nigga on the warpath! S.
V.H. - Exactly! For me it was those moments that were the most telling - the moments of the sympathetic ally,
who in some ways is actually no more able to see the slave than the person who is exploiting him or her
as their property. That is the work Rankin does and I think it suggests just how ubiquitous that kind of violence, in fact, is.
F.W - You've just thrown something into crisis, which is very much on the table today: the notion of allies.
What you've said (and I'm so happy that someone has come along to say it!) is that the ally is not a stable category.
There's a structural prohibition (rather than merely a willful refusal) against whites being the allies of
blacks, due to this - to borrow from Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth again - "species" division between what it means to
be a subject and what it means to be an object: a structural antagonism. But everything in the academy on race works
off of the question, "How do we help white allies?" Black academics assume that there is enough of a structural
commonality between the black and the white (working class) position - their mantra being: "We are both
exploited subjects" - for one to embark upon a political pedagogy that will somehow help whites become
aware of this "commonality." White writers posit the presence of something they call "white skin
privilege," and the possibility of "giving that up," as their gesture of being in solidarity with blacks. But
what both gestures disavow is that subjects just can't make common cause with objects. They can only
become objects, say in the case of John Brown or Marilyn Buck, or further instantiate their subjectivity
through modalities of violence (lynching and the prison industrial complex), or through modalities of empathy. In other
words, the essential essence of the white/black relation is that of the master/slave - regardless of its
historical or geographic specificity. And masters and slaves, even today, are never allies. S.V.H. - Right. I think
of the book as an allegory; its argument is a history of the present. F.W - Thank you! I'm so glad you said it's an allegory of the pre sent. Because
now we've got two problems on the table, two crises - or rather, we have many crises, but only two that
I can identify at the moment. One is how we deal with the common sense around allies, whether it be in
teaching literature to undergraduates or going to hear Cornel West speak with Michael Lerner, or listen
ing to KPFA, since, in point of fact, it may be that the progressive community is actually as big an enemy to black
revolution as Newt Gingrich. And the other I could put as, "How do you go to the movies?" How does one, knowing
what one knows, sit through anything? Because it seems like every film - if it is in any way going to communicate
some type of empathy that the audience can walk away with - has to have black death as its precondition.
S.VH. - Yes, yes. Monster's Ball is a great example.15 Not only is Leticia's husband executed, but her son must also die as the pre condition for her new
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life with her husband's executioner. And the death requirement is rendered as a romance .
Rather than closing with a note of
ambivalence, the film actually ends with her smiling over the romantic music, as if to suggest that she's gotten over it, and
the future awaits them. And I think that is the frightening hypocrisy of the context we are living in.
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A2: Perm Trade Off
Perm Fails abolitionist pedagogy requires the rejection of the 1AC nation-building
project the perm is progressive resignation to the imperatives of the state in favor of
supposed winnable policy reform. This complicity with violence that normalizes the
condition of domestic warfare and ultimately forfeits the urgency of an abolitionist
politic.
This introductory litany of dread reminds us thatdomestic warfare is both the common language and intensely materialized
modality of the US state. While this form of legitimated state violence certainly predates Reagan's "war on drugs" and his/its inheritors, the scope and depth of domestic warmaking seems to be mounting with a
peculiar urgency in our historical moment. To take former NYPD and current LAPD Chief William Bratton on the strength of his own words, the primary work of the police is to engage
aggressively in "the internal war on terrorism," which in these times entails everything from record-
breaking expansions of urban police forces, to cross-party consensus in legislating state offensives
against criminalized populations of choice, and the reshuffling of administrative relationships between
the militarized and juridical arms of local and federal government to facilitate the state's various
localized "wars on gangs." It is in this context that we can urgently assume the political burden of critically assessing the work of progressive US based community and non-profit organizations, grassroots
movements, and issue-based campaigns: that is, if we are to take the state's own language of domestic warfare seriously, what do we make of the political, ideological, institutional, and financial relationships that progressive movements,
campaigns, and organizations are creating in (uneasy) alliance with the state's vast architectures of war? Under what conditions and sets of assumptions are progressive activists, organizers, and scholars able to so militantly oppose the
We are collectively witnessing,

proliferation of American state violence in other parts of the world, while tolerating the everyday state violence of US policing, criminal law, and low-intensity genocide?
surviving, and working in a time of unprecedented state-organized human capture and state-produced
physical/social/ psychic alienation, from the 2.5 million imprisoned by the domestic and global US
prison industrial complex to the profound forms of informal apartheid and proto-apartheid that are
being instantiated in cities, suburbs, and rural areas all over the country. this condition presents a profound crisis-and political possibility-for
people struggling against the white supremacist state, which continues to institutionalize the social liquidation and physical evisceration of Black, brown, and aboriginal peoples nearby and far away. If we are to approach racism, neoliberalism,
militarism/militarization, and US state hegemony and domination in a legitimately "global" way, it is nothing short of unconscionable to expend significant political energy protesting American wars elsewhere (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) when
there are overlapping, and no less profoundly oppressive, declarations of and mobilizations for war in our very own, most intimate and nearby geographies of " home." this time of crisis and emergency necessitates a critical examination of the
political and institutional logics that structure so much of the US progressive left, and particularly the "establishment" left that is tethered (for better and worse) to the non-pro t industrial complex (NPIC). I have defined the NPIC elsewhere as the
set of symbiotic relationships that link political and financial technologies of state and owning class social control with surveillance over public political discourse, including and especially emergent progressive and le ist social movements. is
definition is most focused on the industrialized incorporation, accelerated since the 1970s, of pro-state liberal and progressive campaigns and movements into a spectrum of government-proctored non-pro t organizations. It i s i n the context o f
the formation o f the NPIC a s a political power structure that I wish to address, with a less-than-subtle sense of alarm, a peculiar and disturbing politics of assumption that often structures, disciplines, and actively shapes the work of even the
most progressive movements and organizations within the US establishment le (of which I too am a part, for better and worse): that is, the le 's willingness to fundamentally tolerate- and accompanying unwillingness to abolish- the
Behind
institutionalized dehumanization of the contemporary policing and imprisonment apparatus in its most localized, unremarkable, and hence "normal" manifestations within the domestic "homeland" ofthe Homeland Security state.
the din of progressive and liberal reformist struggles over public policy, civil liberties, and law, and
beneath the infrequent mobilizations of activity to defend against the next onslaught of racist, classist,
ageist, and misogynist criminalization, there is an unspoken politics of assumption that takes for
granted the mystified permanence of domestic warfare as a constant production of targeted and
massive suffering, guided by the logic of Black, brown, and indigenous subjection to the expediencies
and essential violence of the American (global) nation-building project. To put it differently: despite the
unprecedented forms of imprisonment, social and political repression, and violent policing that
compose the mosaic of our historical time, the establishment left (within and perhaps beyond the US)
does not care to envision, much less politically prioritize, the abolition of us domestic warfare and its
structuring white supremacist social logic as its most urgent task of the present and future. Our non-
profit left, in particular, seems content to engage in desperate (and usually well-intentioned) attempts
to manage the casualties of domestic warfare, foregoing the urgency of an abolitionist praxis that
openly, critically, and radically addresses the moral, cultural, and political premises of these wars. Not
long from now, generations will emerge from the organic accumulation of rage, suffering, social
alienation, and (we hope) politically principled rebellion against this living apocalypse and pose to us some
rudimentary questions of radical accountability: How were we able to accommodate, and even culturally and politically normalize the strategic, explicit, and openly racist
technologies of state violence that effectively socially neutralized and frequently liquidated entire nearby populations of our people, given that ours are the very same populations that have historically struggled to survive and overthrow such
how could we live with ourselves in this

"classical" structures of dominance as colonialism, frontier conquest, racial slavery, and other genocides? In a somewhat more intimate sense,
domestic state of emergency, and why did we seem to generally forfeit the creative possibilities of
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radically challenging, dislodging, and transforming the ideological and institutional premises of this
condition of domestic warfare in favor of short-term, "winnable" policy reforms? (For example, why did
we choose to formulate and tolerate a "progressive" political language that reinforced dominant racist
notions of "criminality" in the process of trying to discredit the legal basis of "Three Strikes" laws?) What
were the fundamental concerns of our progressive organizations and movements during this time, and were they willing to comprehend and galvanize an effective, or even viable opposition to the white supremacist state's terms of engagement
(that is, warfare)? This radical accountability reflects a variation on anti- colonial liberation theorist Frantz Fanon's memorable statement to his own peers, comrades, and nemeses: Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in
relative opacity. In the underdeveloped countries preceding generations have simultaneously resisted the insidious agenda of colonialism and paved the way for the emergence of the current struggles. Now that we are in the heat of combat, we
must shed the habit of decrying the efforts of our forefathers or feigning incomprehension at their silence or passiveness. Lest we fall victim to a certain political nostalgia that is often induced by such illuminating Fanonist exhortations, ought to
clarify the premises of the social "mission" that our generation of US based progressive organizing has undertaken. In the vicinity of the constantly retrenching social welfare apparatuses of the US state, much of the most urgent and immediate
work of community-based organizing has revolved around service provision. Importantly, this pragmatic focus also builds a certain progressive ethic of voluntarism that constructs the model activist as a variation on older liberal notions of the
to respond to this political problem requires an

"good citizen." Following Fanon, the question is whether and how this mission ought to be fulfilled or betrayed. I believe that
analysis and conceptualization of "the state" that is far more complex and laborious than we usually
allow in our ordinary rush of obligations to build campaigns, organize communities, and write grant
confronted on multiple fronts by an abolitionist politics.
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A2: Perm Afro Pess
The perm fails by structurally adjusting the absolute derlicition of blackness to civil
society this dooms our abolitionist politic because the coalitions they produce still
solicit hegemony and that reduces The 1ACs investment to reformism in the face of the
prison-industrial-complex ensures that civil society will recuperate itself and black
demands are made coherent to the extent that they maintain stability of white
supremacy
Wilderson 03 [Frank B. Wilderson, The Prison Slave as Hegemonys (Silent) Scandal | pg. 1] //shuler
THERE IS SOMETHING ORGANIC TO BLACK POSITIONALITY THAT MAKES IT ESSENTIAL to the
destruction of civil society. There is nothing willful or speculative in this statement, for one could just as well
state the claim the other way around: There is something organic to civil society that makes it essential to the
destruction of the Black body. Blackness is a positionality of absolute dereliction (Fanon),
abandonment, in the face of civil society, and therefore cannot establish itself, or be established, through
hegemonic interventions. Blackness cannot become one of civil societys many junior partners: Black
citizenship, or Black civic obligation, are oxymorons. In light of this, coalitions and social movements,
even radical social movements like the Prison Abolition Movement, bound up in the solicitation of
hegemony, so as to fortify and extend the interlocutory life of civil society, ultimately accommodate
only the satiable demands and finite antagonisms of civil societys junior partners (i.e., immigrants,
white women, and the working class), but foreclose upon the insatiable demands and endless
antagonisms of the prison slave and the prison-slave-in-waiting. In short, whereas such coalitions and
social movements cannot be called the outright handmaidens of white supremacy, their rhetorical
structures and political desire are underwritten by a supplemental antiBlackness.
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A2: Perm Studious Play
The perm fails, studious play is knowledge production empowered by the denial and
naturalization of the Carceral state.
Agathangelou, Anna M. York University, Canada. Bruno Latour and Ecology Politics: Poetics of Failure and
Denial in IR. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 2016, Vol. 44(3) 321-347 accessed through Sage.
Does IRs failure and denial of environmental questions or political ecology point to grammars and bindings
constitutive of a certain materialist analytic? Does IRs archival practices bring into being an ethos that evades
what Jasanoff calls the co-production of epistemic and social norms?22 Does the relational ontology
entailed in the idea of the Anthropocene present an opportunity to rethink life beyond
categories of being ... not just as individuals, organisms or random agglomerations?23 Or, does it
simply represent another stage of racialised and neo-colonial knowledge production,
wherein the limits of thoughts inability to think its outside become the co-constitutive
means for ethical education, justice, and action? What is our theory of being or life that takes
seriously forms of life that move beyond a human dwelling? Will this being include wet- lands, tidal changes,
beaches, or coral erosion? What if this figuration provides a new spacing for an imminent way of being, but
must first make its way through carbon imaginaries and their contingent historical formations? What happens
to critical IR theory and postcolonial theory? In what follows, I critically assess how failure and denial
are used by IRs scholarly community as signifiers. Informed by a postcolonial, STS,
and queer sensibility,24 the commentary is at once experiment and artifice,25 an inventive
composition, and a post- constructivist analysis. In particular, I problematise the epistemologies of pre-defined
positions, especially the dichotomisation of survival and war as politics with that of nature and the outsider,
thereby pushing for an analytic of politics that takes the co-production26 of science and socio-ecological orders
and their dynamic, mutually constituting, human, non-human, and inhuman life forces and formations,
seriously. The article proceeds as follows: I first show how IR scholarship brings ideas and entities
into being, necessitating and normalising certain perceptions at the costs of others. In
short, I examine how a globalising IR machine becomes constituted. Next, in conversation with Latours
keynote presentation at the Millennium conference and some of his shorter texts, I discuss his confrontation of
failure and denial in IR. In the third section, I point to theatres ability to stretch our understanding of the
political beyond this strange idea that we were [and still are] under a State of Nature27 with ecology at the
forefront. At this point, I turn to STS28 and postconstructivisms attempts to systematically
rupture the failure and denial in IR and IR theorisations. In my conclusion, I suggest IR theorists
should recognise the methods through which knowledge and power are co-produced (i.e.
the co-production of civic epistemologies and social order), the diversity of human and nonhuman ecological
entities, and the ways various projects such as mining and dyke constructions risk undermining fertile soils,
processes, and life formations. I propose that the failure to involve and grapple with the politics
of the (dis)engagement of knowledge [u n l e a r n i n g]claims of communities29 as knowledge-
producing entities, and as creative sources of building multi-pronged solidarities, denies the ability of IR to
gesture towards more decolonial relationships.30 Instead, IR ought to be practising an expanded
reality, stretched to take into account human, non-human, and inhuman relationalities, compositions, and
processes. In short, tracking and trac[ing] a far more fragile discussion on the interactive spaces
in which things come to be defined and known is essential to tracing and unraveling...
ways of knowing.
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Top down criticisms of power/biopolitics/neoliberalism misrecognize the logic of

slavery as a haunting. The Necropolitics of the prison industrial complex and other
carceral technologies possess the present, and inhabit the organization of death.
Stephen Dillon 2012 Possessed by Death: The Neoliberal-Carceral State, Black Feminism, and the Afterlife
of Slavery Reflections: Managing Bodies.
I consider how the necropolitics of slavery inhabit and drive the biopolitics of neoliberalism. I
argue that under neoliberalism, the marketwhich, along with the prison, is structured by
antiblackness functions as a carcral technology. Further, I argue that Shakur's text helps us
to understand the ways that slavery's logics and technologies not only haunt but also possess the
present. If haunting names the lingering presence of the dead in the realm of the living the
present absence of what is there and yet hidden, the feeling that there is something in the room with
you even when your eyes tell you otherwisethen possession is when the ghost does not haunt,
but rather, takes hold. Possession is when the ghost inhabits and controls. The spirit of
slavery does more than meddle in the present; rather, it has intensified, seduced, enveloped,
and animated contemporary formations of power. Possession names the ways that the
operations of corporate, state, individual, and institutional bodies are sometimes beyond the self-
possessed will of the living. Something else is also in control, something that may feel like
nothing even as it compels movement, motivates ideology, and drives the organization of life
and death. In this way, slavery is not a ghost lingering in the corner of the room rather, its
spirit animates the architecture of the house as a whole. The past does not merely haunt the
present; it composes the present. As Toni Morrison writes, "All of it is now, it is always now."
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A2: Reform First
Abolition means that we have to admit that we cant reform what is working exactly as
it should be
PRISON RESEARCH EDUCATION ACTION PROJECT 76 [Radical collective, INSTEAD OF
PRISONS: A HANDBOOK FOR ABOLITIONISTS,
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/instead_of_prisons/chapter1.shtml]
It's time to stop talking about reforming prisons and to start working for their complete abolition. That means
basically three things: First, admitting that prisons can't be reformed, since the very nature of prisons requires
brutality and contempt for the people imprisoned. Second, recognizing that prisons are used mainly to punish
poor and working class people, and forcing the courts to give equal justice to all citizens. Third, replacing
prisons with a variety of alternative programs. We must protect the public from the few really dangerous people who now go to prison.
But more important, we must enable all convicted persons to escape the poverty which is the root cause of the crimes the average person fears most:
crimes such as robbery, burglary, mugging or rape. Prison Research Project, The Price of Punishment, p. 57 Fervent pleas to abolish prisons
collectively present powerful testimony to the necessity of bringing an end to caging: The spirit of the Lord is upon me because He has anointed me; He
has sent me to announce good news to the poor, to proclaim release for prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind; to let the broken victims go free, to
proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. Jesus, quoted in Luke 4, 16-30 That Jesus called for the abolition of prison, comes as no surprise. However,
during the past century, there have been constant and unexpected calls for prison abolition. Here we present a few from the wide spectrum of abolitionist
voices. Judge Carter, of Ohio, avowed himself a radical on prison discipline. He favored the abolishment of prisons, and the use of greater efforts for the
prevention of crime. He believed they would come to that point yet .... Any system of imprisonment or punishment was
degradation, and could not reform a man. He would abolish all prison walls, and release all confined within
them... Minutes of the 1870 Congress of the American Prison Association/American Correctional Association There ought to be no jails;
and if it were not for the fact that the people on the outside are so grasping and heartless in their dealings with
the people on the inside, there would be no such institutions as jails .... The only way in the world to abolish crime and criminals
is to abolish the big ones and the little ones together. Make fair conditions of life. Give men a chance to live .... Nobody would steal if
he could get something of his own some easier way. Nobody will commit burglary when he has a house full.
The only way to cure these conditions is by equality. There should be no jails. They do not accomplish what they
pretend to accomplish. If you would wipe them out there would be no more criminals than now. They terrorize
nobody. They are a blot upon any civilization, and a jail is an evidence of the lack of charity of the people on the outside who make the jails and fill
them with the victims of their greed. Clarence Darrow, An Address to the Prisoners in the Cook County Jail, Chicago, Illinois-1902 The proposal
toward which the book points... is...nothing less than that penal imprisonment for crime be abolished.... The author can hardly escape the apprehension
that the mass of the public will dismiss this as preposterous and impossible. And yet nothing is more certain in my opinion than that penal imprisonment
for crime must cease, and if it be not abolished by statute, it will be by force. Julian Hawthorne, The Subterranean Brotherhood (New York, McBride,
Nast, 1914) pp. xii-xiv We must destroy the prison, root and branch. That will not solve our problem, but it will be a good beginning.... Let us substitute
something. Almost anything will be an improvement. It cannot be worse. It cannot be more brutal and more useless. Frank Tannenbaum, Crime and
the Community (New York, Ginn, 1938) The American prison system makes no sense. Prisons have failed as deterrents to crime. They have failed as
The prison cannot be reformed. It rests
rehabilitative institutions. What then shall we do? Let us face it! Prisons should be abolished.
upon false premises. Nothing can improve it. It will never be anything but a graveyard of good intentions.
Prison is not just the enemy of the prisoner. It is the enemy of society.
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A2: Reform GoodQT Specific
The only prison responsive to gender violence is the prison that does not exist
Reform of the prison expands carceral techniques beyond the prison walls into ever
more intimate aspects of our lives
Stanley and Spade 12 (Eric A. Stanley is finishing a PhD in the history of consciousness at the University
of California, Santa Cruz, and is editor of the collection Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison
Industrial Complex,. Dean Spade is assistant professor at the Seattle University School of Law, teaching
administrative law, poverty law, and law and social movements) Queering Abolition Prison, Now? From
American Quarterly, Volume 64, Number 1, March 2012, American Studies Association)
Stanley: For me, one of the central ethics of working in solidarity with imprisoned people is to understand them as experts on imprisonment. I think it is important for any nonimprisoned person to
work to amplify the voices of those currently or formally incarcerated in hopes of disrupting their forced silence and disappearance. While holding on to this reality I also wanted to 120 American
Quarterlyexpand the idea of most impacted, a term that has recently come into use in antiprison organizing. The problem with this term is that it can, and sometimes does, assume to know in advance
who inhabits the category of most impacted, which helps obscure the ways the prison industrial complex is a shifting set of relations. This is not to say that we turn away from the theory produced by those
in prison, but that we work to build a more complex analysis that might account for the multiple points of intersection that often go unnoticed. This more complicated understanding of the PIC points toward
while we must attend to the specificity of trans/queer folks on the inside, we

its productive powers. In this I mean to suggest that
must also understand how the prison, as one of the primary ordering principles of modernity,
produces the gender binary. Building this analysis, as Dean suggests, highlights how an abolitionist politic is necessary if we want
more than to simply exchange some bodies for others. Indeed, it is not enough that we work toward better
conditions and the freedom of trans/queer imprisoned folks, although we must work for both, but if we leave the structure
of the PIC intact it will, and must, find new ways to (over)fill its walls. Spade: An important part of understanding the limits of the
contemporary gay and lesbian rights politics framework is understanding how it has made the mistake of uncritically adopting and centering a legal equality strategy. There
are many problems with that strategy and many factors that contribute to its inability to produce meaningful transformative change to the conditions that most significantly harm queer and trans people.
does not touch the broader administrative frameworks that

One of those problems is that it, at best, addresses sites of explicit legal exclusion, but
structure the most significant violence being faced by queer and trans people. Equality law reforms, such as the Em-ployment
Non-Discrimination Act or the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act or the quest for same-sex marriage recognition, that have been the main targets of
lesbian and gay rights politics and sucked up most of the resources of that work in recent decades, do not address the violent imposition of racialized
gender norms that structure all the forms of confinement where poor people and people of color are
concentrated under various administrative regimesfoster care group homes, juvenile punishment
facilities, psychiatric hospitals, immigration prisons, adult criminal punish-ment facilities, and
homeless shelters. Gender segregation, gendered dress codes, gendered behavioral codes, and
hierarchical systems of gender violence organize these spaces, under and through the work of various
structures and agents of law enforcement, and all of that violence remains unremarked and untouched
by the kinds of law reform agendas produced in calls for equality. 121Queering Prison Abolition, Now? When we put
those violent disciplinary spaces at the center of our inquiries about the relationships between law and people who violate norms of gender
and sexuality, we get a very different image of how resistance to homophobia and transphobia might concern law and order, and we better understand the direct,
constant, relentless gendered violence that imprisonment produces and relies on. Thinking about
imprisonment as gender violence helps us get out of the false idea that we can have a government that
promotes gender equality while we still have imprisonment, and helps clear up the fantasy that we
could have some kind of prison system that is safe for queer or trans people or women. From many points of the
political spectrum people are now willing to argue that the current criminal justice system is broken. Reformers often suggest prisons are wasteful and do not act as deterrents, while others argue the
criminal justice system is racist, classist, homophobic, and more. However, in contrast, an abolitionist analysis argues that the system is not
broken but, according to its own logics, it is working perfectly. How has this discussion affected your thinking, and how do you analyze this
debate? Spade: Its interesting to think about the parallel conversation going on about whether our immigration system is broken. These conversations about these two broken systems that operate to
exile, cage, and torture immigrants, poor people, people of color, and people with disabilities always seem to rely on an idea that we need these systems, we just need to clean them up or fix them up
somehow. I think that abolitionists are asking, in a variety of ways, if we can imagine letting go of the idea that some people need to be caged, exiled, or kept out. If we know that the logics that support
criminalization and immigration enforcement are lies these systems do not keep us safer but actually increase and perform violence, these systems do not improve our economic well-being but actually
enhance exploitation and consume enormous resources, these systems do not heal harm but in fact cause and exacerbate harmthen our advocacy cannot and should not participate in those logics by
assuming that exile and caging are, indeed, necessary. When we decide that there is no problem that is best solved by exile or caging, we get to ask all the other questions about how we want to actually
solve complex, serious problems, some of which we have really well-developed answers to and some of which people are still working to build responses to. Some have clear models that have worked
historically or in other places, others require innovative thinking. Abolition is the commitment to engage in those creative processes rather than to continue to122 American Quarterly assume the
necessity of a set of practices that have always been and will always be, as long as they are in use, harmful, targeted at certain populations because of processes of racialization and gendering,
rationalized through patriarchy, ableism, settler-colonialism and white supremacy, and unredeemable. Stanley: Organizations like Transgender, Gender Variant, Intersex Justice Project, Critical
Resistance, and others have helped give language to the em-bodied knowledge many already live. In other words, carceral life is haunted by the presence of suspended death. Thus prisons function
precisely through being overcrowded, violent places with deadly health care, insufficient food, and widespread physical and sexual assault. Prison reform, while often necessary, if done without a larger
abolitionist analysis, helps maintain the common sense that prisons are both necessary and can be made better. For example, recently in California we have seen conversations and proposed legislation
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that uses feminist rhetorics of reform to suggest that we need to move toward gender responsive prisons. The basic idea is that the current prison system is harming women (as defined by the state)
because it does not account for their specific needs. We have even seen the call for transgender-specific prisons as a remedy to the
transphobia experienced by trans and gender nonconforming people on the inside. What abolition
helps us understand, and why I believe it to be a central pedagogical and organizing optic, is that the
only prison that would be responsive to gender is one that ceases to exist. Queer (In)Justice: Rightracism, sexism, homophobia,
and transphobia in the criminal legal system cannot be excised because they are foundational to it there is no way it exists without these systems of
domination, and it was established to enforce them. So while we might engage in strategic harm
reduction aimed at offering relief to queers caught in its web and wresting more of us from its
maw, we cant stop therequeer liberation and sexual and gender self-determination require
that we reach toward abolition, not just of prisons, and for some of us, police, but of the systems
that produce them, and which replicate systems of policing and punishment beyond prison walls. There was
some particularly illuminating discussion at the recent Drug Policy Alliance conference in Los Angeles about how legislation implement-ing the Supreme Courts mandate to
reduce prison population in California is producing and reproducing systems of surveillance and
policing outside prisons, and ultimately draining rather than increasing resources to individuals and
communities affected by the war on drugsand the ways in which each reform to the criminal legal system
carries the seeds of new systems of control and domination. These experiences and realities confirm that we must look
beyond reform to transformation of our very ways of thinking. Seems important to place work on immediate harm reduction within a larger
strategic context so that each step along the way signals progress toward the deeper goal of fundamental change and transformation. The danger comes when we focus so exclusively on
short-term change that we lose sight of the deeper goal. If were working in solidarity with hunger-striking prisoners at Pelican Bay to end the brutality and
torture so foundational to extended solitary confinement, for example, we can do so in ways that both address/support the immediate needs of prisoners and use that work to expose, educate around, and
organize against the evil of the system itself.In the wake of the more recently reported queer and trans youth suicides, anti-bullying legislation has gained much traction. While acknowledging
the daily violence many youth face, how might a queer abolition analysis press on this conversation?
LGBT inclusion in schools justifies increased carceral practices that target queer
youth of color and do not solve LGBT oppression the equality discourse of the 1AC
produces the figure of the respectable queer that distances herself from criminalization
and attaches herself to the goals of American Exceptionalism
Stanley: Both the medias fascination and their deaths, whose ends are ascribed under the sign of suicide, open up important questions
around the relation-ship between public education and the ways we comprehend violence. For
many trans/queer youth (including myself ), physical confrontation and psychic torture built the architecture of
our educational years. This is also the same reason so many of us drop out or are kicked out of school
and our homes at an early age. Other students often commit these harms as ambassadors of the larger
cultures of white supremacy, gender normativity, and homophobia they exist in. However, in my case, and the
case of many others, school officials, from teachers to high-level administrators, either knowingly ignore this violence or actively participate in and support it. Much like
hate crimes enhancements, most anti-bullying measures are only retrospective and symptomatic.
After harm is done, they might extend the length or severity of the punishment yet do not, and I would
argue, cannot, prevent violence. They also support the idea that placing people in prisons, which are
sites of pure violence, will someone make people less hostile. Furthermore, there are no guarantees that the laws that are passed,
even with good intention, have the effects we desire. For example, in November 2011 Michigan passed the Matts Safer Schools bill named after Matt Epling, an openly
gay eighth grader who committed suicide after experiencing intense bullying and threats of violence in 2002. Through amendment, the law was transformed adding a
protection for those who bully because of moral or religious values. In effect, this antibullying law forms a new legal protection for those who work toward the death of
trans/queer youth. I think this is a | 124 American Quarterly clear example of how structures of violence, like the law, are methodologically antithetical in producing liberation
and safety. It
seems, from our historical vantage point, almost impossible to even imagine what an actual safe school
would look like for trans/gender nonconforming and queer youth (along with many others). The force of the PIC,
here taking the form of antibullying legis-lation, maintains its power through the constriction of our
ability to envision a world beyond or against its reach. Queer (In)Justice: And without the ability to imagine
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other pathways to safety and security for LGBTQ folks, what is posited as our best hope is that
bullying laws will finally place the state on our side and the side of LGBTQ youth who navigate and
confront soul-destroying violence and violation in families, schools, and communities, and unequivocally signal
that society will no longer tolerate violence and hatred against us. But, like other get tough on crime measures supporting
intensified policing and harsher punishments, it is inevitable that this latest manifestation will produce
more rather than less violence and injustice for queersboth by failing to protect so many of us who
fall outside the states view of deserving victim and by increasing the presence and power of law
enforcement in our midst. What have we learned from hate crimes legislation? Are we safer? Is the
violence diminishing? No. Anti-queer violenceespecially for queers of color (including immigrants
and Indigenous people); queers who are poor, homeless, and low income; and transgender and gender
nonconforming peopleremains a depressingly consistent, though seri-ously underreported, feature of the political
and social landscape and of efforts to place our safety in the hands of the very criminal legal system that is a major perpetrator of anti-LGBTQ violence. Law
enforcement officials charged with enforcing these laws remain among the top categories of
perpetrators of homo-phobic and transphobic violence, according to data collected by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence
Programsincluding the ever-increasing number of armed police officers flooding our schools, particularly in communities of color, in the name of preventing violence,
Standing with queer and trans youth requires us to push ourselves to
including violence against queer and trans youth.
imagine responses to homophobic and transphobic violence that place individual incidents within the
broader contexts that inform them and that actually produce increased safety rather than increased
punishment in our names. Spade: I echo the concern that antibullying measures primarily operate, like hate crime
laws, through an individualizing punishment lenstrying to find the bad people and punish them.
This kind of approach obscures the systemic and structural nature of violence in schools and instead
scapegoats | individual kids who happen to get caught saying the purportedly forbidden but actually foundational messages. Given
that punishment apparatuses in schools, like all punishment apparatuses, are targeted at poor kids
and kids of color, and that those are the students who are already subjected to dispro-portionate
suspension and expulsion and police involvement in disciplinary matters, adding more punishing
power through antibullying legislation will result in further barriers to education for the populations
already facing the most obstacles in public education systems. We need to figure out how to move away from punishment in this
realm as in others, transforming the culture of schools and families to prevent the crises facing queer and trans youth rather than trying to find bad kids and kick them out of
school. Much of the mainstream LGBT movements politics (gay marriage, gays in the military, adoption) argue for rights through discourses of
equality and American exceptionalism. How might you all characterize the relationship between these arguments and the cultural logics of the PIC?
Spade: An important pitfall of rights discourse is that it tends to require those advocating for rights to produce narratives of deservingness, asserting that the population said to
be seeking equality wants the same rights that others already have. This population must also distinguish itself from those who do not deserve these same rights. This
means that rights seekers tend to frame themselves as hard workers, citizens, family members,
taxpayers, and law abiding. These claims explicitly or implicitly declare that the group is not
criminalized people, people depending on stigmatized state benefits, people ex-cluded from the workforce by ableism, undocumented immigrants, and people
whose sexual/gender behaviors and/or caregiving and caretaking arrangements defy family formation norms. These rights strategies tend to affirm
the laws role in creating and maintaining classes of undeserving outsiders marked for death. When gay and
lesbian rights activists push for immigration reform that would allow gay and lesbian citizens to apply for immigration status for their long-term partners like straight citizens
can, their talking points affirm the immigration systems brutal enforcement of family formation norms as well as the existence of a system in which most undocumented queer
and trans people will not have a path to legal immigration status, since most do not have a citizen partner. When gay and lesbian rights advocates push for hate crimes
legislation, they affirm the notion that policing and punishment produces safety, and they cast gay and lesbian people as not criminals and invoke the violence of police and
prosecutors for protection. All rights strategies require these kinds of deservingness frameworks and invoke the same logic of sorting the population into those whose lives
should be promoted and protected and those who constitute a threat and must be abandoned or caged. For this reason, rights strategies both fail to offer relief to those facing
Legal equality purports to
the worst conditions, and simultaneously affirm and legitimize the systems producing those violent conditions.Queer (In)Justice:
remedy injustice, but takes no account of historic power differentials, or the roots and impacts of long-
term structural violence and institutionalized discrimination over generations. Both formal and
informal policing and punishment of sexual and gender nonconformity can and will continue, even
when legal equality is the law of the landindeed, as Dean points out, it is already present within arguments for rights and equality.
Efforts to obtain equal rights for LGBT people in the United States explicitly silence and distance
themselves from the reali-ties of criminalized queerswho in fact remain the vast majority of LGBT
people. In Queer (In)Justice we quote Ruthann Robsons critique of LGBT rights agendas as being premised on an understanding that distance
from criminality is a necessary condition of equality. The reality is that control-ling narratives deploying imagery of LGBTQ people as
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inherently criminal, immoral, and pathological will never simply fade away once legal equality for LGBT people is achieved, no matter how hard we try to wash them off and
erase the members of our communities who bear their brunt. Until they are directly confronted and we work to dismantle them, these mythic political/cultural constructsand
Our goals must extend beyond rights and
the systems of domination they servewill continue to undermine and limit possibilities.
equality within a system established to deny the humanity of so many of us to nothing short of
liberation for all of us. That, and nothing less, is the promise of queering abolition.
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A2: Better Prisons
Nah, there are no better prisons. The prison isnt broken, its working exactly as
intended
Lydon 16 (Lydon, Jason M. Winter 2016 Issue. "Once There Was No Prison Rape: Ending Sexual Violence
as Strategy for Prison Abolition." philoSOPHIA, vol. 6 no. 1, 2016, pp. 61-71. Project MUSE, Jason Lydon is
the founder and National Director of Black and Pink. Jason founded Black and Pink in 2005 after his own
incarceration. He has been the full time National Director since 2012 and will be stepping down from the
position in September 2017. Jason is responsible for overseeing all the projects of Black and Pink, leading the
national campaigns, speaking publicly for the organization, and ensuring financial strength and sustainability
for the organization. yr)
This article focuses on the particular tension between prison reformist campaigns and abolitionist vision in efforts to address the needs of survivors of sexual violence in
prison. Prison
reform advocates, from conservative and progressive sides, have relied on punishment-expanding efforts to bring an end to sexual assault in
prison. They rely
on state actors and disciplinary actions to control individual acts of sexual violence. Abolitionist
organizers, however, have offered very little to meet the immediate needs of incarcerated survivors. In an
attempt to not extend the reach of state power, many abolitionists have failed to provide immediate
support or relief to individual survivors of sexual violence in incarceration settings. I will discuss this dynamic and
offer some potential ways for abolitionists to more authentically meet the immediate needs of incarcerated survivors. A little over a year after being released from prison, I
founded Black and Pink, a nationally networked grassroots organization focused on meeting the immediate needs of LGBTQ prisoners while simultaneously working to
abolish the prison industrial complex. In our statement of purpose we describe ourselves as an open family of LGBTQ prisoners and free world allies who support each
other. Our organizing efforts include: a pen pal program, community power-building among currently incarcerated and court-involved people, and a free newspaper for
prisoners filled with prisoner-generated content. Black and Pink is an explicitly abolitionist organization. Abolition, for us, means that we believe
the U.S. prison system1 is not broken but rather that it works exactly as it is intended to. The
assertion that the U.S. prison system is not broken forces us to question what its function is. While
abolitionists are not a monolith, there are key underpinnings to abolitionist understandings of the prison
system. Abolitionists assert that the U.S. prison system has been built up with the purpose of, among other
things, maintaining systems of anti-Blackness (Alexander 2012), regulating and disciplining non-normative
gender/sexuality (Mogul, Ritchie, and Whitlock 2012), controlling im/migration (Walia 2013), suppressing
resistance (Churchill 2001), and establishing a capitalist response to surplus labor (Gilmore 2007). This
understanding of the prison system has been developed from the lived experience of prisoners (James 2005, Jackson 1970, James 2013) as well as research by academics
Abolition can be thought of as both the end goal, a world with no prisons, and also as
and grassroots community organizers.
the method of getting us to the goal. As an abolitionist organizing effort, composed primarily of prisoners, Black and Pink recognizes that
we must work to eliminate the immediate suffering experienced by prisoners without expanding the power of
the punishment system. Abolitionist scholar Ruthie Wilson Gilmore refers to such efforts with these principles
as non-reformist reforms. Gilmore likens this to removing bricks from the system while struggling to tear the
walls down. Angela Y. Davis similarly explores this dynamic. In an interview with Dylan Rodriguez, Davis states, The seemingly unbreakable link
between prison reform and prison developmentreferred to by Foucault in his analysis of prison historyhas
created a situation in which progress in prison reform has tended to render the prison more impermeable
to change and has resulted in bigger, and what are considered better, prisons. The most difficult
question for advocates of prison abolition is how to establish a balance between reforms that are
clearly necessary to safeguard the lives of prisoners and those strategies designed to promote the
eventual abolition of prisons as the dominant mode of punishment. (2004) It is very difficult for abolitionists
to involve ourselves in the dominant efforts to address sexual violence in prison. The reason for this is a
fundamental disagreement on the purpose of prisons, as illustrated by an excerpt from an article on Nonconsensual Sexual Behavior in the
2002 anthology Prison Sex: Practice and Policy, in which four self-described prison reformers open with the following: For decades, a cancer has gone untreated and has
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overtaken the ability of U.S. Corrections institutions to provide safe and humane treatment for its charges. . . . (Hensley 2002). The
idea that prisons serve to
provide safe and humane treatment to prisoners is completely at odds with the abolitionist analysis that
prisons function as a tool of racial and class control, relegating those society considers disposable to concrete
and steel cages. It is understandable that an alliance between reformists and abolitionists is difficult, and even
impossible, when their understandings of the prisons core function are so different. Abolitionists and reformists do, however,
work together on campaigns quite often. In California, abolitionists and reformists worked closely together to support hunger-striking prisoners in Pelican Bay State Prison who
were protesting the torture of solitary confinement. In Illinois, abolitionists and reformists worked together to shut down the TAMMS supermax prison. In Massachusetts,
abolitionists and reformists worked together on a campaign to stop an initiative that would charge prisoners five dollars daily for their incarceration. Given these examples,
which illustrate that abolitionists and reformist can and often do find common ground, I find myself wondering, what makes sexual violence in prison so different?
There are no better prisons if we build them we will fill them gender inclusive
prisons just means more queer and trans people dying a slow death in prison
CURB 07 [Californians United for a Responsible Budget, CURB is a statewide coalition of over 40 organizations working to curb prison spending
by reducing the number of people in prison and the number of prisons in California, How Gender Responsive Prisons Harm Women, Children, and
Families, http://curbprisonspending.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/curb_report_v5_all_hi_res.pdf. AB)
In 1970, there were about 5,600 people in womens prisons in the entire U.S.; today there are over 11,000 in California alone. With increasing reliance
on imprisonment as the catchall solution to social problems, the
womens prison population has grown by almost 500% since
1980. Over 80% of people in womens prisons are serving time for actions classified as nonviolent, property or drug-related crimescrimes of
survival. People of color are represented disproportionately in prison systems across the nation, comprising around 60% of people
in womens prisons. African Americans make up nearly 30% of people in Californias womens prisons, but comprise only about 7% of women in
the state. Many people in womens prisons suffer from severe and often life-threatening physical and/or mental
illnesses, reflecting lack of access to preventative care to women and transgender people from communities of
color and low-income communities. Being in prison damages ones health. Many people in womens prisons
are co-infected with HIV and Hepatitis B and/or C. HIV rates are at least 10 times higher among prisoners than
in the general population, and the rate is higher among people in womens prisons than in mens prisons.
Hepatitis C has reached epidemic levels in California prisonsthe CDCR estimates that 40% of the prison
population is infected, with 60% of people in womens prisons infected. Meanwhile, prison healthcare is minimal at best,
especially for this population, whose specific health concerns largely go unaddressed. There is a dearth of access to treatment, but also to education
about serious yet preventable conditions. The recent takeover by the Federal courts of the states prison health care system is expected to improve
health care, but even Constitutionally-acceptable prison health care does not prevent significant health
deterioration among prisoners. And inside prison, violence against women and transgender people in the form
of human rights abusesincluding medical neglect, brutality, and sexual abuseoccurs regularly. Outside prison,
the imprisonment of millions of people of color has a devastating long-term impact on the communities from which prisoners come. Economies
are deeply affected by the loss of potential wage earners who are removed and sent to prison. Approximately
70% of people in womens prisons are mothers, and the majority were the primary caretakers of their children before they were sent to
prison. Their removal from the community destroys entire families, leaving children to be raised by the state. Children who have imprisoned parents are
imprisonment operates as a form of
more likely to end up in the juvenile justice system and prison themselves. Furthermore,
reproductive control, as women who are imprisoned are effectively denied the right to reproduce. Thus massive
imprisonment destroys a communitys ability to create a future. The harms endured in womens prisons have proven impervious to reform attempts,
policy changes or class action lawsuits, despite landmark victories by prisoners and their advocates. Abuses continue despite their illegality and offense
to human rights and common practice. In this climate, there is a pressing need for policy that reduces the numbers of Californians and families impacted
by these abuses. The best way to do that is to reduce the number of people in Californias prisons for women and shrink the CDCRs overall capacity to
imprison people. In contrast to policies to reduce the number of people in womens prisons, the FRCCC prison expansion proposal uses the grave needs
of people in womens prisons to manipulate public sentiment in favor of rehabilitation and services to expand a failing system at the same time that
Californians overwhelmingly oppose prison expansion and increased spending: EXPANDING CAPACITY WOULD EXACERBATE OVERCROWDING,
NOT ALLEVIATE IT. As the Governors California Performance Review Commission on Prisons concluded, the key to reforming the system lies in
reducing the numbersnot in expanding capacity. Increasingly, the states only and ubiquitous answer to any problem within the prison system
whether it be the need for more and better programming, disastrous medical and mental health care or the fact that there are too many people in
prisonis bricks, mortar and expansion. But, as State Senator Gloria Romero and others have cautioned, "You can't build your way out of this problem.
Increasing the number of cells will only increase the number of people in prison.
History teaches us: if we build them, we will over- fill
them. As far back as 1882, when Folsom Prison was built to replace the already decrepit and crumbling San
Quentin, expansion after expansion have failed to address the rising number of people in prison, conditions,
public safety, or the lack of programming and services. The current plan offers no indication it will produce different results. When
Californias most recent prison, Delano II, opened in June 2005, CDCR Secretary Rodrick J. Hickman named it Californias last prison, yet already
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more prisons are being proposed and Delano II is filled beyond capacity. Building more prisons, public or private, ties up an increasing percentage of
state funds for more correctional staff, operations, and debt service. More space has never, and will never, pave the way for increased programming or
better conditions. It's time to stop pretending that increased capacity, no matter how gender responsive, is part of
the solution. DECENTRALIZING THE WOMENS PRISON SYSTEM WOULD THWART OVERSIGHT, FURTHER ENDANGERING PEOPLE
HOUSED IN THE PROPOSED MINI PRISONS. In response to overwhelming evidence of unaddressed violence, medical neglect, and abuse, the
CDCR, federal courts, and watchdogs are working to centralize control of Californias prison system to increase oversight, address the myriad scandals,
and ensure that people are treated equally no matter where they are imprisoned. Counter to this objective, the expansion proposal scatters prisoners
throughout the state in mini-prisons unaccounted for in any existing oversight plan. Resulting health care decentralization would be particularly onerous.
All evidence points to the CDCRs failure to provide even baseline medical services, i.e. pap smears, or
appropriate care for older prisoners, particularly surrounding womens and transgender healthcare issues.
These abuses would be exacerbated by decentralization and result in further marginalization of the healthcare
needs of women in prison. The proposal also threatens to create a patchwork of contracting agenciespublic, nonprofit, and privatethat
would operate these new prisons. The CDCR is incapable of administering such a system. For example, community hospitals across the state have
begun refusing accepting patients from prison because the CDCR owes millions of dollars for past treatment .
Because the CDCR has been
unable to guarantee even basic constitutional and human rights, advocates and people in prison spend much
time monitoring and exposing abuses. By scattering people throughout a system of new mini-prisons, the limited oversight won by
advocates would be nearly impossible to maintain. Importantly, without the possibility of oversight mechanisms, people in prison would be rendered
invisible to policymakers, increasing barriers to ongoing litigation aimed at prison reform. For instance, the closest model California currently has to the
proposed system of mini-womens prisons is the Community Prisoner Mother Program (CPMP). The lack of access advocates have to these facilities
has contributed to the fact that they are not being monitored for compliance under Plata v. Davis, a major ongoing class action lawsuit designed to
address Constitutionally deficient health care conditions in California prisons and resulting in the appointment of a federal health care receiver to
manage Californias failing prison healthcare system, even though they are clearly covered. THE EXPANSION PLAN DECREASES COMMUNITY
SERVICES. The proposal provides for new CDCR- controlled facilities or the transformation of residential therapeutic programs into locked facilities
staffed with guards. Thus, the proposal allows CDCR to take over a huge swath of existing community resourcesthe exact resources that currently can
help people stay out of prison. This proposal would displace community treatment beds, which are already in short supply. The result, perversely, would
be to route these resources through the prison systemlow-income Californians would have to go to prison to get community treatment. Increased
spending by CDCR would further squeeze funds for services outside CDCR control. THE EXPANSION PLAN INCREASES CALIFORNIAS TAX
BURDEN. Ironically, while reducing community services, the expansion plan would result in significant additional fiscal costs. It is much more expensive
to provide services in prison than outside because of added CDCR costs and often less effective. What we really need is more voluntary treatment
centers in our community, not to hand over our already short supply to the CDCR. THE EXPANSION PLAN MISLEADINGLY APPROPRIATES THE
LANGUAGE OF COMMUNITY- BASED AND ALTERNATIVE TO INCARCERATION. Contrary to what the proposal claims, transferring people to
smaller prisons under CDCR control does not constitute an alternative to incarceration, and prisons that are less far away are not community- based.
Moving thousands of people from Californias womens prisons into FRCCC beds to make room to imprison others is an expansion of the prison system.
THE EXPANSION PLAN REPLICATES PROGRAMS RIFE WITH ABUSE AND INEFFECTIVENESS. It is instructive to look below the surface at the
CDCRs CPMPs. There is little or no oversight over these prisons, and credible accounts of misused funds. Services they claim to provide sometimes
just do not exist. Basic conditions are often filthy, including documented exposure to mold and lead, which are especially toxic to infants. Women can be
sent back to traditional state prison if they cannot control their child. In practice, this means a crying toddler can result in her mother being expelled
from the program. Additionally, beds are left vacant, while judges send pregnant women to prison based on the erroneous assumption that they will be
placed in a CPMP, when in reality very few of the already small number of women who even qualify are let into the program. What we are seeing in
practice is more women being sent to prison, not more women in prison being sent to a CPMP. EXPANDING THE PRISON SYSTEM, WHETHER THE
ADDED CAPACITY IS DESIGNATED FOR MEN OR WOMEN, IS BAD FOR ALL CALIFORNIANS. If over 4,000 people are moved out of one of the
states womens prisons, it stands to reason that at least one of these prisons could be closed, which would actually help shift resources from prisons to
basic needs and services. However, there is no commitment to do this. Last session, AB 2066 did not state as its legislative intent to close a womens
prison, and the Governor proposed to convert the added capacity into a mens prison in FY 2020/2021. This session, the language in AB 76 facilitates
the conversion of a womens prison into a mens prison with legislative approval. To truly address the damage mass imprisonment causes for women
and girls in California, we also need to address the negative impact the continued mass imprisonment of men has on families and communities. We
cannot be responsive to the needs of people of any genders in California if we continue our commitment to
imprisonment as bedrock social policy. THE EXPANSION PLAN FORECLOSES THE POSSIBILITY OF REAL, SINCERE
CHANGE. We all agree change is needed urgently. This prison expansion plan is neither an imperfect proposal that will improve the lives of women,
nor is it a good first stepit takes us backwards by creating more of a failed and costly system : the CDCR. It is a rehash of the
states failed experiment with Community Corrections Centers now dressed up in gender responsive language. More people in prison is never better
than the huge number of people locked up now. Fewer treatment beds for people in the community is not better that what we have now. California would
not be better off with private and public prisons instead of just public prisons.
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A2: Prisons Keep us Safe
This is a myth.
Lamble, 11 Professor at the University of London, Birkbeck College of Law (S., TRANSFORMING CARCERAL LOGICS: 10 Reasons to Dismantle the Prison Industrial
Complex Through Queer/Trans Analysis and Action, from Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex,
AK Press)
Prisons and police do not make queer, trans, and gender-non-conforming communities safer. The biggest myth of prison industrial complex is that prisons
and cops keep us safe . Yet when we examine state track records, prisons have failed to protect
communities from violence. Just as criminal justice remedies for domestic violence have not kept women safe from harm, so too have prisons failed to protect queer, trans, and gender-non-conforming
people.85 Although queer, trans, and gender-variant people are disproportionately subject to harassment, bullying, sexual assault, and violence, many do not feel safe going to the police for help. A recent U.K. study found that 1 in 5 lesbian and
gay people had been a victim of homophobic hate crime in the last three years, yet 75 percent did not report it to the police. The incidents ranged from insults on the street to physical and sexual assaults. Of those incidents reported, half resulted
Trans people are particularly vulnerable when reporting

in no action being taken, and two thirds of those who reported were offered no advice or support services.86
incidents to police, not only because of ID issues, but also because police routinely assume that trans
people are suspects rather than witnesses or victims of crime. Some argue that the answer to this problem is to encourage people to report violence to police
and to advocate for criminal punishment against those who commit such acts of violence. But the introduction of hate crimes laws has not reduced violence against queer, trans, and gendernon- conforming people. In fact, when we examine the
Prisons have a terrible track record when

overall impact of the criminal system, imprisonment has never worked effectively to protect communities from harm. Heres why: Re-offending:
it comes to re-offending. In Britain, approximately 65 percent of prisoners are reconvicted within two years of being released. For young men aged 18 to 20, reconviction rates tend to hover around 75 percent.88
Though recidivism rates vary among particular groups and offenses (most people convicted of murder, for example, do not re-offend), Canada and the United States have similarly high re-offense rates overall.89 A growing body of evidence also
suggests that prison expansion tends to increase re-offense rates .90 Deterrence: Prisons and punishment are poor mechanisms for deterring crime. Considerable
evidence indicates, for example, that harsher sentences do not reduce crime, particularly with respect to youth. In some cases, harsher punishments may actually increase re-offense rates.91 Indeed, US states with the lowest incarceration rates
also have the lowest crime rates.92 The logic that punishment will deter harm wrongly assumes that violence is the result
of individual , rational decisions made in contexts of free choice. While some violent acts are indeed premeditated (especially white-collar crime),
most harms arise from a more complex set of social, political, and economic factors. Because prisons do not address but rather
exacerbate these factors, the deterrent effects of imprisonment are limited. As former Senior Home Office researcher Carol Hedderman notes, Prison will never be an effective crime-
control tool because the evidence clearly demonstrates that it actively creates or compounds the
factors that contribute to offending .93 Rehabilitation: Rehabilitation programs have limited success and in some cases can actually cause more harm than good.94 This is partly because most
rehabilitation programs assume that the main problem lies in the individual rather than in broader social, economic, and po litical circumstances. Moreover, prison-based rehabilitation programs
operate within coercive and disciplinary contexts and rarely coincide with adequate economic and
social supports following release. By contrast, voluntary harm-reduction programs that take place within supportive community settings are generally more successfuland much less expensive.95
The systematic failure of imprisonment is not only noted by antiprison activists, but also widely recognized among criminologists, legal professionals, and even government officials. As the Daubney Commission (appointed by a Conservative
Government) in Canada reported, It is now generally recognized that imprisonment has not been effective in
rehabilitating or reforming offenders, has not be shown to be strong deterrent, and has achieved only
temporary public protection and uneven retribution. The use of imprisonment as a main response to
a wide variety of offences against the law is not a tenable approach in practical terms.96 Addressing
violence within and against our communities is a far too serious, urgent, and widespread an issue to
be left to a system that has proven to be an utter failure when it comes to community safety.
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A2: Rapists
Link turn!
Spade 12 (Dean, Against Equality: Prisons Will Not Protect You, Nov 1, 2012, Print)
4. Prisons arent places to put serial rapists and murderers, prisons are the serial rapists and murderers. If we
acknowledge that the vast majority of people in prisons and jails are there because of poverty and racism,
not because they are dangerous or violent, and if we acknowledge that prisons and jail utterly fail to make anyone who
spends time in them healthier or less likely to engage in violence, and if we recognize that prisons and jail are spaces of extreme violence, and that kidnapping and caging
people, not to mention exposing them to nutritional deprivation, health care deprivation, and physical attack is violence, it becomes clear that criminalization and
immigration enforcement increase rather than decrease violence overall.
The PIC is a gendering apparatus that produces the queer criminal archetype who
commits violent rape to justify prison expansion the truth is that prison is a place
that rapes the imprisoned, not a safe containment space for rapists
Violence is, unfortunately, something all people understand at some fundamental level. At the interpersonal level, that is between identifiable actors in a discreet scenario, common-sense definitions of
violence are accurate. It is obvious to most people that when one person inflicts physical pain on another outside of mutual consent by both parties, violence has occurred. Even harsh or intense verbal
interactions can be considered violence, especially if such language has been known to cause psychological trauma. Violence immediately becomes more complicated when structures or even
technologies are implicated in sustained violent acts. Indeed, the World Health Organization (WHO) defines violence as: The intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against
oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation. 33 The last two
results of use of force or power, maldevelopment or deprivation, suggest that violence can occur over a long period, perhaps even being generational in nature or the result of complex projects that hinder
what would otherwise be an expected development. The diversion of a river that is the sole source of drinkable water for a community, for example, constitutes both deprivation and infliction of
maldevelopment. In the U.S., We the People of Detroit characterize the continued water shutoffs in Detroit and the poisoning of Flints water supply as intentional results of austerity to dismantle the wealth
and assets of Michigan's African American communities. Following We the People of Detroits fights against household water shutoffs, the United Nations accused the city of human rights violations. 34
The neutrality problem intersects with concepts of violence when the construction and subsequent maintenance of engineering projects pose a threateither direct and immediate or gradual and
compounding to individuals or groups. Violence need not always be as intentional or direct as it is in interpersonal interactions and can, in fact, be obscured by ones mundane work schedule. We
contend that when engineers refuse to take an explicit position in such cases, or export concerns of violence to policy makers, elected officials, or managers, they are just as likely to perpetuate violence
as prevent it. Not only does assuming a position of neutrality limit self-reflection on the part of the engineer, but it also places the engineer on the side of those who perpetuate it when no critique is offered
up as resistance. 118 the imposition and maintenance of chattel slavery, and the exclusion of un-desirables at the borders. At the same time, there has always been resistance to and movements
toward abolition of systems of domination that queer communities of color by projecting sexual and gender nonconformity onto them in service of these larger agendas. For us, it is essential to
recognize that queering the conversation around abolition extends far beyond highlighting the ways LGBTQ people are targeted by and resist the criminal legal system to examining the ways in which
gender, sex, and sexuality have been deployed within larger political, economic, and social processes driving mass incarceration in the United States. At this particular moment of crisis for the PIC, where
the mass incarceration of astronomical numbers of people, the vast majority of whom are people of color, is being challenged on all frontsfrom the streets to the mainstream media to the floor of
Congress to the halls of the Supreme Courtthere is a tremendous need and opportunity to queer the conversation. These three books are critical companions to Michelle Alexanders The New Jim
Crow, and essential ingredients to the conversations her work and that of many others, including Davis and Julia Sudbury, to name just a few, has ignited. Not only are LGBTQ peoplelargely of color
and gender nonconformingamong the 2 million people currently behind bars and 6 million under the control of the criminal legal system, but in order to appreciate the full scope and nature of the forces
it is critical to examine policing and pun-ishment of

driving mass incarceration and facilitating the (re)creation of a racially coded criminal underclass,
sexual and gender nonconformity as a central and essential tool in the policing and punishment of
race and poverty, as well as an independent function of law enforcement. As economic and political conditions change the face
and form of policing and punishment to acutely heighten levels of violent classification and isolation inside prisons and dramatically expand surveillance and regulation outside prison walls, there is
also an opportunity to weave together analyses from each of these texts to gain a better understanding of the operation of administrative regulation as a tool, function, and extension of the PIC
with particular ramifications for trans/queer and gender nonconforming folk who navigate these systems. | 119Queering Prison Abolition, Now? All three of these books suggest that we must pay attention
the PIC is a
to the specificity of trans/queer (and otherwise LGB) prisoners as those directly affected by the prison industrial complex. However, the analysis goes farther, suggesting that
gendering apparatus; can you all expand on that? Queer (In)Justice: In addition to recognizing their clear role as gendering institutions that police and enforce sexual and gender
conformity, we also name prisons as queer spaces more broadly. Most obviously, prisons are sex-segregated institutions where options for
normal sexual activity are unavailable, and therefore all sexual activity is banned, whether it
is consensual sex among inmates or even masturbation, for fear that queer sexualityand
resistance to the dehumanization that denial of sexuality representswill flourish. This denial of
sexual intimacy and agency is a quintessential queer experience. The notion of prisons as queer spaces also reflects
the critical role they play as mythmaking institutions, which serve as a breeding ground for raced, gendered, and classed
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archetypal amalgam of criminality, disease, predation and out-of-control sexuality. The archetypal
queer criminalizing narratives incubated and fostered within their walls are then deployed to
police and regulate all of us on the outside within the larger project of the carceral state. One need
look no farther than the average TV crime drama to observe their almost banal operation: during an
interrogation, a young suspect is compelled to confess by police officers who tell the youth to cut a
deal, otherwise they will be sent to prison where they will become someones bitch. While often left unsaid, the
images conjured up in the popular imagination are often that of a Black lesbian or gay man preying on
and turning out an unconsenting individuala myth that is belied by the facts and lived experiences of
LGBTQ people in prison, where people who are or are perceived to be trans/queer are exponentially
more likely to be targets of sexually assault by staff and prisoners alike. But this reality is almost
irrelevantthe prison imagery has served its purpose as a weapon to secure compliance beyond
trans/queer communities while painting all queers with the brush of sexual depredation that
contributes to our criminalization and violation inside and outside prison walls.
483
Session II
A2: Safety
Increased surveillance does not make our communities safer

Parents want security guards and surveillance cameras in schools because they perceive schools as unsafe spaces.
Teachers want detention and a school discipline officer because they dont know what to do with students in their
classrooms who harm themselves or their peers. People often ask for more police on the streets and tougher laws
because they want to feel safe. The prevailing contemporary carceral logic recycles the false notion that safety can be achieved through essentially more of the same: more guards, fences, surveillance, suspensions, punishment
etc. Yet building more youth detention centres and prisons, funnelling more youth into suspensions or expulsions and
placing more police and cameras in schools will not make schools safer, or our communities stronger. Scholars that
are invested in work that interrupts and transforms the school-to-prison nexus must build other futures and
participate in rethinking safety. Building safer schools requires not only challenging mass incarceration/ hyper-
incarceration policies but also grappling directly with questions and feelings of safety and, in particular, how a
gendered and often racialised fear for example, of sexual assault of white women and children is publicly
deployed to augment the prison system (see Gottschalk, Chapter 12). Our classrooms are not immune from these
stereotypes and fears. Our schools receive and can reproduce powerful mythologies: violent teenaged super
predators, bad neighbourhoods, crack babies, bad and lazy parents and disordered and dangerous youth. Shifting from a
punishment and detention-based approach to a definition of safety that incorporates relationships and community inside and outside our schools requires engagement with the lived experience of being and feeling safe (see Oparah, Chapter 14). This is complicated
We need research and organising that explores what schools and communities are doing to create safe and strong
work.
environments without relying on more detention rooms, truancy officers, surveillance cameras and school security
guards. Unpacking carceral logic from feelings and experiences of being unsafe or fearful can demonstrate how
punishment logic masks the real question: how do we build stronger and safer communities? As many, from Audre
Lorde (1984) to Feel Tank Chicago (2008: 3) have pointed out, politics and political engagement is a world of
orchestrated feeling. Addressing questions of fear and safety in a landscape where sexual and other forms of harm are endemic is difficult because building responses to these forms of state and interpersonal violence necessitates
multifaceted labours. We must consider how our responses mobilise disgust, defensiveness and pity and to subsequently use this thinking to shape our organising efforts. In schools, these practices are no different, and we need allies willing to focus research and
Ending the
other labours on the fledgling restorative and transformative justice practices that are happening in schools: peace circles, peer juries, motivational interviewing and many other forms of relationships and community building.
school-to-prison pipeline requires building other sustainable frameworks for public safety and engaging the question
of why prisons have been naturalised as responses to harm in our communities.
484
Session II
A2: Safe Spaces
The push for safe spaces is a form of public safety discourse used to justify further
carceral interventions into every realm of life-especially schools. We must shift the
conversation around safety away from the carceral logic.
Meiners 11 [E. R., Education and Gender and Womens Studies, Northeastern Illinois University, Ending the
School-to-Prison Pipeline/Building Abolition Futures, 2011. BS]
Parents want security guards and surveillance cameras in schools because they perceive schools as
unsafe spaces. Teachers want detention and a school discipline officer because they dont know what
to do with students in their classrooms who harm themselves or their peers. People often want more
police on the streets and tougher laws because they want to feel safe. People want, need and deserve safe schools
and communities, but what makes these spaces feel and be safe or unsafe? The prevailing contemporary
carceral logic recycles the false notion that safety can be achieved through essentially more of the
same: more guards, fences, surveillance, suspensions, punishment, etc. Inviting abolition futures
pushes us to name how this more of the same. Our schools receive and can reproduce powerful
mythologies: violent teenaged super-predators, crack babies, bad and lazy parents and disordered
and dangerous youth. The work to challenge mass incarceration as a public safety strategy is also
made difficult by how common sense the ideas of both incarceration and exclusion appear, as well as the
real lived experiences of violence and unsafety of many. But shifting from a punishment- and detention-based approach to a
definition of safety that incorporates relationships and community inside and outside our schools requires engagement with the lived experience of being
and feeling safe. This is complicated and vital work. We need research and organizing that explores what schools and communities are doing to create
safe and strong communities without relying on more detention rooms, truancy officers, surveillance cameras and school security guards.5 Unpacking
carceral logic from feelings and experiences of being unsafe or fearful can demonstrate how punishment logic masks the real question: how do we build
stronger and safer communities? This is local and affective work, and we must do this together. As many, from Audre Lorde
(1984) to Feel Tank Chicago point out, politics and political engagement is a world of orchestrated feeling (Feel Tank 2008, }3). Addressing questions
of fear and safety in a landscape where sexual and other forms of harm are endemic is difficult, because building responses to these 5 Formal and ad
hoc groups are focused on this nationally and I track their work: Story Telling and Organizing Project/Creative Inventions and the Audre Lorde
Project/Safe Outside the System. Locally, I am involved with Project Nia, a group providing transformative justice. Accountability is difficult. We dont
have great tools but abolitionist organizations are at the forefront of trying to imagine and build new tools.
Urban Rev (2011) 43:547565 559 123 forms of state and interpersonal violence necessitates multifaceted labors. We must consider how our responses
mobilize disgust, defensiveness and pity, and to subsequently use this thinking to shape our organizing efforts. In schools, these practices are no
different, and we need allies willing to focus research and other labors on the fledgling restorative and transformative justice practices that are happening
in schools: peace circles, peer juries, motivational interviewing and many other forms of building relationships and community. Ending the
school-to-prison pipeline requires building other sustainable frameworks for public safety.
485
Session II
A2: No Alternatives to Prison
Alternatives to the prison system exist community patrols, intervention, health care
Martin 14 (Jose, writer for the Rolling Stone, Policing is a Dirty Job, But Nobodys Gotta Do It: 6 Ideas for a
Cop-Free World, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/policing-is-a-dirty-job-but-nobodys-gotta-do-it-6-
ideas-for-a-cop-free-world-20141216, published online 12/16/2014)
But police are not a permanent fixture in society . While law enforcers have existed in one form or another for centuries, the
modern police have their roots in the relatively recent rise of modern property relations 200 years ago, and the "disorderly conduct" of the urban poor.
Like every structure we've known all our lives, it seems that the policing paradigm is inescapable and everlasting, and the only thing keeping us from the
precipice of a dystopic Wild West scenario. It's not. Rather than be scared of our impending Road Warrior future, check out just a few of the practicable,
real-world alternatives to the modern system known as policing:
1. Unarmed mediation and intervention teams
Unarmed but trained people, often formerly violent offenders themselves, patrolling their neighborhoods to curb
violence right where it starts. This is real and it exists in cities from Detroit to Los Angeles. Stop believing that police
are heroes because they are the only ones willing to get in the way of knives or guns so are the members of groups like Cure Violence, who were the
subject of the 2012 documentary The Interrupters. There are also feminist
models that specifically organize patrols of local
women, who reduce everything from cat-calling and partner violence to gang murders in places like
Brooklyn. While police forces have benefited from military-grade weapons and equipment, some of the most violent neighborhoods have found
success through peace rather than war.
2. The decriminalization of almost every crime
What is considered criminal is something too often debated only in critical criminology seminars, and too rarely in the mainstream. Violent offenses count
for a fraction of the 11 to 14 million arrests every year, and yet there is no real conversation about what constitutes a crime and what permits society to
put a person in chains and a cage. Decriminalization doesn't work on its own: The cannabis trade that used to employ poor Blacks, Latinos, indigenous
and poor whites in its distribution is now starting to be monopolized by already-rich landowners. That means that wide-scale decriminalization will need
to come with economic programs and community projects. To quote investigative journalist Christian Parenti's remarks on criminal justice reform in his
book Lockdown America, what we really need most of all is "less."
3. Restorative Justice
Also known as reparative or transformative justice, these models represent an alternative to courts and jails. From
hippie communes to the IRA and anti-Apartheid South African guerrillas to even some U.S. cities like Philadelphia's experiment with community courts,
spaces are created where accountability is understood as a community issue and the entire
community , along with the so-called perpetrator and the victim of a given offense, try to restore and
even transform everyone in the process. It has also been used uninterrupted by indigenous and Afro-descendant communities like
San Basilio de Palenque in Colombia for centuries, and it remains perhaps the most widespread and far-reaching of the
alternatives to the adversarial court system.
4. Direct democracy at the community level
Reducing crime is not about social control. It's not about cops, and it's not a bait-and-switch with another callous institution. It's giving people a sense of
purpose. Communities that have tools to engage with each other about problems and disputes don't have
to consider what to do after anti-social behaviors are exhibited in the first place. A more healthy
political culture where people feel more involved is a powerful building block to a less violent world.
5. Community patrols
This one is a wildcard. Community

patrols can have dangerous racial overtones, from pogroms to the KKK to George Zimmerman. But they
can also be
an option that replaces police with affected community members when police are very
obviously the criminals. In Mexico, where one of the world's most corrupt police forces only has
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credibility as a criminal syndicate, there have been armed groups of Policia Comunitaria and
Autodefensas organized by local residents for self-defense from narcotraffickers, femicide and police.
Obviously these could become police themselves and then be subject to the same abuses, but as a temporary solution they have
been making a real impact. Power corrupts, but perhaps in Mexico, withering power won't have enough time to corrupt.
6. Here's a crazy one: mental health care
In 2012, Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed up the last trauma clinics in some of Chicago's most violent neighborhoods. In New York, Rikers Island jails as
many people with mental illnesses "as all 24 psychiatric hospitals in New York State combined," which is reportedly 40% of the people jailed at Rikers.
We have created a tremendous amount of mental illness, and in the real debt and austerity dystopia we're living in, we have refused to treat each other
for our physical and mental wounds. Mental
health has often been a trapdoor for other forms of institutionalized
social control as bad as any prison, but shifting toward preventative, supportive and independent
living care can help keep those most impacted from ending up in handcuffs or dead on the street.
Community support through reformative justice is vital to long-term healing

Loubriel 16 (Jennifer, writer for Everyday Feminist, Why Our Punitive Justice System Doesnt Work And
3 Alternatives to Prisons, http://everydayfeminism.com/2016/05/punitive-justice-alternatives/, 5/17/16)
When it comes to our current justice
Like most issues, nothing is going to change unless we get to the roots of the problem.
system, that problem really boils down to oppression, violence, and a lack of healing.
Transformative justice tackles this because it seeks to provide people who experience violence with
immediate safety and long-term healing and reparations while holding people who commit violence
accountable within and by their communities .
This definition comes from the organization Generation FIVE, who developed this model based around child sexual abuse.
Transformative justice is used to respond to violence by focusing both on the individual and on the
larger community.
It works so that survivors can be in control and heal while both perpetrators and the larger community are held accountable this means the changing
not only changing individual behaviors but all the conditions that allowed violence to even happen.
Transformative justice works because it
always keeps people at the center. We have to examine our own truths
when it leads to others being hurt. We have to look at what weve always been taught, what is never
being said, and how we interact with one another.
More alternatives care-centered policies and decriminalization leads to

transformative change
Loubriel 16 (Jennifer, writer for Everyday Feminist, Why Our Punitive Justice System Doesnt Work And
3 Alternatives to Prisons, http://everydayfeminism.com/2016/05/punitive-justice-alternatives/, 5/17/16)
This is what I understand: When I look around my neighborhood, I see a lot of people just trying to live. I see a lot of activities that are
done both for survival and for fun. I see community.
But what the state sees are people actively defying it. What the police see are people disobeying. This is why
decriminalization of actions that mostly target marginalized people like sex work, drug-related offenses, and broken
windows crimes is so important.
Decriminalization can work to reduce stigma and violence against members of our community . It
helps us to rethink some of those prejudices that we internalized against others.
It would also help us to create new polices that are focused on care.
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We need to think about the environments and situations that might cause crime, rather than focusing
on crime as inherently wrong. We need to implement programs and policies of support around people rather than maintaining order.
Focusing on why someone does something why they feel like they had to do something makes it
easier to come from a place of empathy rather than punishment.
Care-centered policies focus both on the individual and on larger communities. It tells us to focus on the whole
story.
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A2: Real politics
Slavery is the precondition for the intelligibility of empire and its discontents.
Blackness must be disbarred from the conceptual apparatus of the political in order for
debates about the appropriate limits to sovereignty and capital to occur.
We can note further that the institution of transatlantic racial slavery whose political and economic
relations constitute, present tense, the social fabric of Western modernity in general, of the Americas in
particular, and of the United States most acutely cannot be explained (away) by the acquisition of fixed
capital, the minimization of variable capital, or the maximization of profits, much less by the dictates of gunboat
diplomacy, the expansion of strategic overseas military installations, or the idiosyncrasies of the White
House. It may seem so at times, but only insofar as contemporary observers, or our historical counterparts,
fundamentally misrecognize the nature of racial slavery: as a brutal regime of labor exploitation; as the
atrocious adjunct to land conquest and the extermination, containment, and/or forced assimilation of indigenous
peoples; or as an endeavor functional to, rather than in excess of and at times at odds with, the advent and
maturation of Eurocentric capitalism. Of course, all of these procedures have been important to the history
of racial slavery (and vice versa), but none is essential to its origins, its development 252 Radical History
Review and, above all, its pernicious afterlife.1 Rather, enslavement the inaugural enterprise for the age of
Europe, the precondition for the American century and its coveted sequel is enabled by and dependent
on the most basic of operations: symbolic and material immobilization, the absolute divestment of
sovereignty at the site of the black body: its freedom of movement, its conditions of labor, its physical
and emotional sustenance, its social and sexual reproduction, its political and cultural representation.
Beyond its economic utility, this rendering of the black as the object of dispossession par excellence
object of accumulation, prototypical commodity, captive flesh structures indelibly the historical proliferation
of modern conceptions of sovereignty that now dominate political and legal discourse globally and
provide the crucial frames of intelligibility for both imperialism and anti-imperialism, empire and its
discontents. With blacks barred by definition from the very notion of the sovereign (whatever their nominal
legal status, wherever their tentative place of residence), those not marked by the material and symbolic
stigma of slavery have the exclusive and positive capacity to debate about sovereignty: to trivialize its
importance and rationalize its violation or to struggle in its defense, to name and lament its loss, and wage war
for its recovery.
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A2: Capitalism explains slavery
Capitalism cannot explain or account for the transatlantic slave trade
We can note further that the institution of transatlantic racial slavery whose political and economic
relations constitute, present tense, the social fabric of Western modernity in general, of the Americas in particular,
and of the United States most acutely cannot be explained (away) by the acquisition of fixed capital, the
minimization of variable capital, or the maximization of profits, much less by the dictates of gunboat
diplomacy, the expansion of strategic overseas military installations, or the idiosyncrasies of the White House. It
may seem so at times, but only insofar as contemporary observers, or our historical counterparts,
fundamentally misrecognize the nature of racial slavery: as a brutal regime of labor exploitation; as the
atrocious adjunct to land conquest and the extermination, containment, and/or forced assimilation of indigenous
peoples; or as an endeavor functional to, rather than in excess of and at times at odds with, the advent
and maturation of Eurocentric capitalism. Of course, all of these procedures have been important to the
history of racial slavery (and vice versa), but none is essential to its origins, its development 252 Radical History
Review and, above all, its pernicious afterlife.1 Rather, enslavement the inaugural enterprise for the age of
Europe, the precondition for the American century and its coveted sequel is enabled by and dependent on the
most basic of operations: symbolic and material immobilization, the absolute divestment of sovereignty at the
site of the black body: its freedom of movement, its conditions of labor, its physical and emotional sustenance,
its social and sexual reproduction, its political and cultural representation. Beyond its economic utility, this
rendering of the black as the object of dispossession par excellence object of accumulation,
prototypical commodity, captive flesh structures indelibly the historical proliferation of modern
conceptions of sovereignty that now dominate political and legal discourse globally and provide the
crucial frames of intelligibility for both imperialism and anti-imperialism, empire and its discontents. With
blacks barred by definition from the very notion of the sovereign (whatever their nominal legal status, wherever
their tentative place of residence), those not marked by the material and symbolic stigma of slavery have the
exclusive and positive capacity to debate about sovereignty: to trivialize its importance and rationalize its violation
or to struggle in its defense, to name and lament its loss, and wage war for its recovery.
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A2: Antiblackness is contingent
Racial profiling is the sin qua non of modern policing the crisis management of the
black population is intrinsic to the maintenance of civil society in which the drama of
human conflict occurs
In the United States, homegrown white supremacists, and the lions share of their more moderate neighbors,
have long considered black people to be weapons of mass destruction. Racial profiling, the hallmark of
Homeland Securitys dreadful encroachments, cut its fearsome teeth several years prior to the passage of
the USA PATRIOT Act. Prior, as well, to the American Civil Liberties Unions (ACLU) Driving while Black
campaign in the late 1990s; prior to the launch of President Ronald Reagans infamous war on drugs in the early
1980s, and even to President Richard Nixons earlier consolidation of the first truly nationwide police apparatus
in the late 1960s. In fact, the genealogy of this nefarious police practice is properly charted beyond the
twentieth century, reaching back, with stunningly little modification, to the ethos of the colonial slave patrols
of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Given this line of descent, it is not unreasonable to say
that racial profiling is the sine qua non of modern policing. In the consternated deliberations of national
security, official and unofficial, from the founding of the republic to the trumpeting of the new world order,
the social control and crisis management of the black population has always figured centrally, even or
perhaps especially when matters of emancipation or racial equality have by no means enjoyed the focus
of debate. Across the sweep of U.S. history, policing the color line has required no credible threat of
invasion, no evidence of insurrectionary design, no proven stockpile of illicit chemical agents or
radioactive material, no particular breach of domestic or international law, no sensational moral or ethical
transgression (though all of these items, real or imagined, have factored in the relevant discourses, public and
private). It has only required the presence within the polity, economy, culture, and society of a so-
called problem people, dwelling as the absence of human presence.
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A2: Crime DA-Police are the Criminals
The mark of a criminal is not in any crime but in the fantasy of rampant disobedience
that must be exorcised from the civil space at all costs. The police function as a
technique of control that criminalizes disobedience on both sides of the prison wall
racial profiling demands the ordering of civil space as a form of murderous delusion
that marks us all virtually criminal and bars racialized others from self-defense.
Martinot 15 [Steve, Instructor Emeritus at the Center for Interdisciplinary Programs at San Francisco State
University, The Violence of Police Politics, Counterpunch.org, https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/20/the-
violence-of-police-politics/]
Insofar as the state, and the prison administration, know that solitary confinement drives people insane
through isolation and torture, its use signifies that the state desires this outcome. That is a political desire, a desire to
do irrevocable damage to people. It happens silently, as punishment for thinking autonomously, for
self-respect against the violence of imprisonment, as a political stance. On the street, however, when
comparable irrevocable damage occurs, as when a cop shoots someone, he must give an account. He was reaching in his waistband,
and I felt threatened (Gary King). He attacked me and tried to grab my gun (Michael Brown, shot as he stood a 100 feet away). She became
uncooperative, and made a threatening gesture. These appear as mantras in all parts of the country. The uniformity of these
excuses give them away as formulas, not reasons. They are tacit admissions that no threat existed, only disobedience,
and self-defensive resistance. In California, a small 80 year old black woman, a grandmother, was shot
6 times as she stood in her driveway with a one inch kitchen paring knife in her hand for having
ignored the cops screams to drop your weapon. A black teenager in North Carolina, while
undergoing some emotional trauma, was shot on his own living room floor in front of his mother for
resisting being handcuffed. To disobey an unauthorized command is to defend ones freedom. For a
cop to demand obedience, under threat of arrest or execution, is to criminalize that freedom. Inside
prison, it is unfreedom that is criminalized. On both sides of the wall, what is the same is the police
demand for obedience, for acceptance of lesser status as a person and a withholding of rights. It
marks the power to control. And insofar as it happens to people of color mostly, it is racialized control.
Control, obedience, and the imposition of lesser status dimension a process of racialization. And like all
anti-democracy, it deploys extremes. A homeless man, camped on a hill above Albuquerque, faces four cops training their rifles on him
(in the police video). When he agrees to come down off the hill, picking up his bundles, the cops shoot a stun grenade, and then open fire with bullets.
They approach his corpse, and like demented drunkards, shoot him again and again while shouting drop your weapon. It is a form of dementia, able
to shift from berserk activity to a calm voice in seconds. The cop in McKinney, Texas, ran around like a crazed man rounding up all the black kids in
reach after an integrated swimming pool party, leaving the white kids alone. He threw a 14 year old black girl in a bathing suit to the ground twice and
pulled his gun on another who came to help her. Then he goes over to two black teenagers he had handcuffed, and says: I personally told you to get on
the ground, and stay there. What did you do when I walked away? You did just what everybody else did, which was illegal [indicating the others who had
fled in self-defense]. You did it, and you got caught. Now you are going to pay for it. In the tones of a scolding housemother, he implies that we
are
all in some kind of military institution, under any cops command, who can then act as a commanding
officer. This may be the fantasy these cops live under, but the racism and the arbitrary violence that
this fantasy unleashes as institutional power is unconstitutional in its abrogation of due process. It is the atrocious character of this
fantasy that it rationalizes shooting anyone who doesnt acceed to be regimented in that way. This wanton
withholding of the right to dignity, self-respect, or sanctity of personhood through the use of guns and
fantasy constitutes a political dementia. The term dementia refers to a psychological condition of unbalanced reason or a crazed
sense of reality. But it is political insofar as it involves profiling as the foundation for demanding obedience.
As policy, it renders each cop a threat to humanity. In 2013, in Liberty City, FL, Tremaine McMillan, a 14
year old black teenager, was attacked by cops for what they perceived as a dehumanizing stare. In a
subsequent interview, an officer, speaking for the police department, calmly explained that McMillans body
language was already resisting an officer, letting the officer know that this person could become agitated and violent, and thus was
an immediate threat to the officer. Spoken in an academic tone of voice, the psychotic nature of what is said become demonic. The teenager
was sentenced to two years probation for looking at a cop wrong. It is the element of profiling that renders each incident
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beyond the law, insofar as profiling contraverts law enforcement. In law enforcement (the proper domain and activity of the police), when a crime is
committed, the police look for a suspect to charge with the crime. In profiling, the police commit an act of suspicion, and then look for a crime with which
to charge their suspect. One has to be oneself beyond the law to place other people beyond the law. In addition, military regimentation is a form of
To have absolute power on the street is to have no one in control over oneself,
absolute power over the individual.
and thus to be, in a political rather than a psychological sense, out of control.
The policing paradigm is a slaveholder mentality a form of political dementia that

regulates who can be seen as human by enacting violence on those deemed unworthy
of human dignity. The police are the real criminals they hold our desires for liberation
hostage through the threat of imprisonment.
Martinot 15 [Steve, Instructor Emeritus at the Center for Interdisciplinary Programs at San Francisco State
University, The Violence of Police Politics, Counterpunch.org, https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/20/the-
violence-of-police-politics/]
the political dementia exhibited by the police parallels that of the
Police dementia reflected in prison cruelty. In its wanton cruelty,
prison system, and expresses most clearly the police-prison nexus. For the police to act as they do,
harassing and violating whole communities (of color), they require a growing prison industry. And for
prison industry to grow, it depends on the police acting as they do. They combine as a common political project. Neither can be
understood without understanding the other. The cruelty in prison escapes being seen as demented because it has become routine. Solitary confinement is
imposed on those who think critically and politically. And it can be imposed for decades, in order to drive a person mad. We know of
those individuals who have withstood this torture and survived. But those who succumb remain unsung. It becomes an expression of
institutional political dementia that prison administrations can regard prisoners as imprisoned in
order to be punished, where legitimately prison itself is to be the punishment. For the most part,
punishment is meted out (without judiciality) in prison for the crime of thinking of oneself as human,
due some respect and dignity as a human being. It is perhaps this facet of the police-prison nexus that explains
why, after the huge upheavals in protest against police killings, the killings increase. Where, in 2012, 380 unarmed
people of color were killed by the police (cf. Malcolm X Grassroots Movement), which averages one person killed every 28 hours, in 2014, that number jumped to around
1,100 (or close to 3 people a day killed by police). In March of 2015, over a hundred people have killed by police nationwide. It appears that the police not only instigate the
outrage, but use it to increase their violence. It
is a sign of institutional dementia. Because people protest their
dehumanization, the violation of their humanity will be enhanced. It is a slaveholder mentality, to
torture people until they abandon all hope of being seen, and seeing themselves, as human. Berkeley
Suppression of Demonstrations The truly grasp the political nature of this dementia, we should look at how the
police deal with political protests. On Dec. 6, 2014, in Berkeley, massive protests were called against
the failure of St. Louis and NYC grand juries to indict the murderers of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.
The world had seen the pictures and heard the testimonies of people about these gratuitous murders. Yet, the political structure rendered those killings legitimate. All over
the country, there were demonstrations against this ethical corruption (aka injustice) of political institutions. In the melee that extended itself through the night, many people
were injured by truncheon strikes, punches and kicks by the police, tear gas, rubber bullets, and tasers. They included students, teachers, city officials, and all classes of
residents. Unable to ignore these events, the city council called special meetings in January and February, 2015) at which hundreds of people testified to what they had
suffered. Then, in June 2015, the police issued its own report (at a Police Review Commission meeting). It was an account of their actions from their own perspective rather
than a response or even recognition of the damage and injury to which people had testified. The report consisted of an oral reading of the report, accompanied by slides and
videos. Its overture consisted of slides of two leaflets that were openly anti-police, after which the report described (with videos) how a cordon of officers was constructed in
front of the police station because that was the site where the demonstrators were going to express their protest and their call for justice. After describing this cordon, which
was called a skirmish line, the rest of the report went into detail of the many confrontations with mobile demonstrators as they evaded the police. The politics of police
presence was fully established by these two opening items. Nothing was said about other leaflets issued by different organizations, of which there were many, leaving the
impression that those two leaflets represented a uniform sentiment. That is, the report opened with a biased sense of the demonstrations position. And the video of the
skirmish line was stark in its presentation of gratuitous police violence. Whenever anyone walked too close to the line, they were violently shoved away by the nearest officer,
even before the main body of demonstrators had arrived. In other words, the line itself represented a desire for violence, the ability to shove people, on the part of the police.
In the report, the skirmish line is represented as maintaining a safety zone for the officers. Yet the shoving and violence was wholly one-sided, and arbitrary because it was
arbitrary where the police established that line, and accidental who walked near it. Far from a defensive safety zone, the line had an offensive character in its placement and
its hostility. Both represented prior criminalization of the demonstrators, a massive act of profiling. In
presenting a paradigm of violence, the
skirmish line manifested a desire both for violence by the police, and a desire for a hostile response
by the people so that the police could respond to that as an aggression against social peace. It is that
desire that makes the operation political rather than judicial like throwing a 14 year old black girl on
the ground twice in order to charge her with resisting. It is this political desire for a response, against which the police can claim self-
defense, that marks the vast majority of police killings. One approaches a black person with hostility, hoping they will attempt to preserve their dignity and self-respect; and
when they do, they can be criminalized for disobeying an officer and resisting arrest. Interestingly, the report concludes that the skirmish line was a faulty tactic. The skirmish
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line may have exacerbated the situation because the crowd had been peaceful up to this point. This too is a misrepresentation. The term exacerbate signifies an existing
situation made worse by the action in question. Clearly, the skirmish line and the pushing were the initiation of a situation, not an exacerbation. It was exacerbation that the
police desired, not peace. The
political effect of this police presence and violence was to shift the demonstrators
focus from the national issue of police injustice to the Berkeley police themselves, rendered the police
a counter-demonstration. As such, the police became the embodiment of the injustice the
demonstrators were protesting. In profiling the demonstration as criminal, the police actually
personified that injustice, thus allying themselves with the refusal of justice in other cities. Where the
people demonstrated for justice, the police demonstration became a support for injustice. Where the
people called for prosecution of killers, the police presence became a call for their protection and
valorization. Where the demand for justice was a call for lawfulness, the police counter-demonstration
exhibited unlawfulness and provocation. And in thus making themselves an aggressive force, they made themselves a target for political
attention, against which to respond as if aggressed against. Subsequent police proclamation that a demonstration is illegal only labels a situation that meets the political desire
and goal of the police. Finally, it is the
police-prison nexus, the fact that each depends on the other, that contextualizes the police desire
for violence. As an opportunity to criminalize protest as aggressive, and thus rationalize their own initiatory violence as self-defense, their self-
decriminalization is of a piece with prison operations that see the prison as a place to punish people
for having been imprisoned, rather than as punishment itself. This implies, for people in prison, that
they have been kidnapped by a criminal organization (nationwide) to be held ransom for total control of
the people on the street.
The prison is white supremacist organ of state reproduction and civ ordering
common sense about criminal others is genocidal logic that justifies the
extermination of difference in order to cohere the concept of the white human
Rodriguez 07 [Dylan Rodriguez, University of California, Riverside, AMERICAN GLOBALITY AND THE U.
S. PRISON REGIME: STATE VIOLENCE AND WHITE SUPREMACY FROM ABU GHRAIB TO STOCKTON
TO BAGONG DIWA Kritika Kultura, Issue 9, November 2007]
Thus, as
the US prison, jail, INS/Homeland Security detainee and incarcerated youth population approaches and
surpasses the 2.5 million mark (as of this writing), the quantitative evidence refracts the prisons qualitative
transformation into a fundamental organ of state reproduction and civic ordering. Variable,
overlapping, and mutually constituting white supremacist regimes have in fact been fundamental to
the formation and movements of the United States, from racial chattel slavery and frontier genocide to
recent and current modes of neoliberal land displacement and (domestic-to-global) warfare. Without
exception, these regimes have been differently entangled with the states changing paradigms,
strategies, and technologies of human incarceration and punishment (to follow the prior examples: the
plantation, the reservation, the neoliberal sweatshop, and the domestic-to-global prison). The historical nature
of these entanglements is widely acknowledged, although explanations of the structuring relations of force tend to either isolate or historically
compartmentalize the complexities of historical white supremacy. For the theoretical purposes of this essay, white
supremacy may be
understood as a logic of social organization that produces regimented, institutionalized, and
militarized conceptions of hierarchized human difference, enforced through coercions and violences
that are structured by genocidal possibility (including physical extermination and curtailment of peoples collective capacities to
socially, culturally, or biologically reproduce). As a historical vernacular and philosophical apparatus of domination,
white supremacy is simultaneously premised on and consistently innovating universalized
conceptions of the white (european and euroamerican) human vis--vis the rigorous production, penal discipline, and frequent social,
political, and biological neutralization or extermination of the (non-white) sub- or non-human. To consider white supremacy as essential to American
social formation (rather than a freakish or extremist deviation from it) facilitates a discussion of the modalities through which this
material logic
of violence overdetermines the social, political, economic, and cultural structures that compose
American globality and constitute the common sense that is organic to its ordering.
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***Aff Answers***
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PermReform and Abolition
Reform v Abolition is arbitrarythe plan is key to reduce material violenceour

strategies are commensurable.
Davis & Rodriguez 2k [Angela Davis, prof in the History of Consciousness program @ UC, prison-related
activist since 1970; interviewed by Dylan Rodriguez, Assistant Prof @ UC; The Challenge of Prison Abolition:
A Conversation; Social Justice, 27:3=81 (2000:Fall) p.212]
Angela: The seemingly unbreakable link between prison reform and prison development -- referred to by
Foucault in his analysis of prison history -- has created a situation in which progress in prison reform has
tended to render the prison more impermeable to change and has resulted in bigger, and what are
considered "better," prisons. The most difficult question for advocates of prison abolition is how to
establish a balance between reforms that are clearly necessary to safeguard the lives of prisoners
and those strategies designed to promote the eventual abolition of prisons as the dominant mode of
punishment . In other words, I do not think that there is a strict dividing line between reform and
abolition . For example, it would be utterly absurd for a radical prison activist to refuse to support the
demand for better health care inside Valley State, California's largest women's prison, under the
pretext that such reforms would make the prison a more viable institution . Demands for improved
health care, including protection from sexual abuse and challenges to the myriad ways in which
prisons violate prisoners' human rights, can be integrated into an abolitionist context that elaborates
specific decarceration strategies and helps to develop a popular discourse on the need to shift
resources from punishment to education, housing, health care, and other public resources and
services. Dylan: Speaking of developing a popular discourse, the Critical Resistance gathering in September
1998 seemed to pull together an incredibly wide array of prison activists -- cultural
workers, prisoner support and legal advocates, former prisoners, radical teachers, all
kinds of researchers, progressive policy scholars and criminologists , and many others.
Although you were quite clear in the conference's opening plenary session that the purpose of Critical
Resistance was to encourage people to imagine radical strategies for a sustained prison abolition
campaign , it was clear to me that only a few people took this dimension of the conference seriously. That is,
it seemed convenient for people to rejoice at the unprecedented level of participation in this presumably
"radical" prison activist gathering, but the level of analysis and political discussion generally failed to
embrace the creative challenge of formulating new ways to link existing activism to a larger abolitionist
agenda. People were generally more interested in developing an analysis of the prison-industrial complex that
incorporated the local work that they were involved in, which I think is an important practical connection to
make. At the same time, I think there is an inherent danger in conflating militant reform and human
rights strategies with the underlying logic of anti-prison radicalism, which conceives of the ultimate
eradication of the prison as a site of state violence and social repression. What is required , at least in
part, is a new vernacular that enables this kind of political dream. How does prison abolition
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necessitate new political language, teachings, and organizing strategies? How could these strategies
help to educate and organize people inside and outside the prison for abolition?
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PermCritical AFF
The perm is a move towards self-abolition a parallel politic with the call of abolition of
the alternative that disidentifies with the figure of the Human
We must reject any appeal to the register of innocence. To claim that someone deserves freedom or protection because of
an absence of transgressionthat one is experiencing undeserved oppressionimplicitly distances
oneself from the a priori or gratuitous nature of the violence that the Black body magnetizes, the
tautological absence of any pretense that occasions it. This would be a baseline: stop defending ones
innocence. 2. Should a chain of local revolts spread and intensify to the point where it manages to destitute the constituted power structures enveloping us,
collapsing their symbolic hold over the hearts and minds of its subjects and exposing the coup de force that always underpins them, we must attack any effort to replace it
with a newly signifying constituent power. As some friends stated recently, The legitimacy of the people, the oppressed, the 99% is the Trojan horse by which the
constituent is smuggled back into insurrectionary destitution. This is the surest method for undoing an insurrectionone that doesnt even require defeating it in the streets. To
make the destitution irreversible, therefore, we must begin by abandoning our own legitimacy. We have to give up the idea that one makes the revolution in the name of
something, that theres a fundamentally just and innocent entity which the revolutionary forces would have the task of representing. One doesnt bring power down to earth in
order to raise oneself above the heavens.15 In other words, the revolutionary process must not be understood as the
constitution of a new law or constituent social body, but should rather be measured by our capacity to
destitute the governmental and economic mechanisms of labor, and of the capture of life more
broadly. Beyond the simple destruction of power lies its deactivation. 3. We must call into question the
entire framework of expropriation in the widest sense of the term: the expropriation of once-possessed
land, of culture, of relational capacity and of labor from the hands of the State and the capitalist,
patriarchal class. We must no longer envision the remedy for suffering as entailing the recovery of a lost wholeness, entitlement or plenitude of which one is
presently deprived. This is undoubtedly a more di cult conversation (particularly in the case of indigenous struggles), but one which I think is worth having. In the past
15 years of radical feminist, anarchist, queer and left-communist theory, we can see a widespread
tendency to gravitate in the direction of thoughts such as these. What cuts across these tendencies
and links them to one another beyond their otherwise significant differences is the way folks have
begun to wrestle seriously with a fundamental tension that will animate any future revolutionary or
insurrectional practice to come, namely, the tension between autonomy and self-abolition. Though with very
different emphases, this tension between autonomist organization and identity abolitionism can be found in Tiqqun, in US insurrectionary queer anarchism of the late 2000s
(e.g. the informal Bash Back! network), recent currents in materialist and nihilist feminism, as well as in communization theory (journals like Thorie Communiste, Troploin,
Meeting, Ri Ra , Endnotes, Blaumachen, Sic, etc.). A few quotes might serve to illustrate this tension: Autonomy is a means by which we
develop shared affinities as a basis for abolishing the relations of domination that make that self-
organization necessary. And yet, even as we do this, we want to be freed of the social relations that
make us into women, queers, women of color, trans*, et cetera. We want to be liberated from these
categories themselves, but experience teaches us that the only way out is through. -LIES, A Journal of Materialist
Feminism17 Identity Politics are fundamentally reformist and seek to end a more favorable relationship between different subject positions rather than to abolish the
structures that produce those positions from the beginning. Identity politicians oppose classism while being content to leave class society intact. Any resistance to society
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must foreground the destruction of the subjectifying processes that reproduce society daily, and must destroy the institutions and practices that racialize and engender bodies
within the social order. [...] With the revolution complete and the black ag burned, the category of queer must too be destroyed. [...] [Bash Back] isnt about sustaining
identities, its about destroying them. -Queer Ultraviolence: A Bash Back! Anthology18 [I]t is no longer possible to imagine a transition to communism on the basis of a prior
victory of the working class as working class. [...] There is nothing to arm in the capitalist class relation; no autonomy, no alternative, no outside, no secession. [...] [I]n any
actual supersession of the capitalist class relation we ourselves must be overcome; we have no position apart from the capitalist class relation... [I]t is a rupture with the
reproduction of what we are that will necessarily form the horizon of our struggles. Despite tremendous and certainly irreconcilable differences between these groups, what
these theoretical camps share is the assumption that an overcoming of the existing conditions of suffering and exploitation will ultimately require not a valorization,
empowerment, or even autonomization of presently existing oppressed subject positions, but rather the simultaneous abolition of the conditions of oppression and the social
relations and the identities they produce: the liquidation rather than the consolidation and empowerment of identity. This emphasis on the liquidation of
present forms of desire, self-identification, and subjectication is arguably something relatively new. For example, it very clearly
runs counter to classical anarchisms emphasis on individual self-expression, freedom and the like. As
some friends recently pointed out, For more than a century, the figure of the anarchist indicate[d] the most extreme point of western civilization. The anarchist is the point
where the most hard-lined a formation of all western actionsthe individual, freedom, free will, justice, the death of godcoincides with the most declamatory negation. The
anarchist is a western negation of the west.20 We might do well to ask whether, from an afropessimist point of view, insurrectional
anarchism, queer theory and communization theory remain humanist negations of the Human? If so, is this
necessarily so? My hypothesis is this: to the extent that they can escape this, it is in the direction of a thought of self-abolition. That is, to the extent that struggles actively
refuse to validate, affirm, or strengthen the forms of subjectivity presently produced under capitalism, white supremacy and cis-sexist patriarchy, these struggles can be
potentially aligned withor at least, less likely to stomp all overthe possibility of Black liberation.21 Self-abolition therefore constitutes the
only possible horizon for a non-Black struggle that does not reinforce anti-Blackness. This leads to what we might
characterize as a negative identity politics. Put differently, when read through an afropessimist logic (as I understand it), what is vital in the queer,
anarchist or communist tendencies toward self-abolition is generally not their theorization of race,
which often remain unsatisfactorily 22, but their tendency to locate the means and aims of
revolutionary struggle in the immediate self-abolition of and by their respectively oppressed group per
se. Though this may take its point of departure from a grammar of suffering marked by the exploitation of variable capital, or the marginalization of ones queer identity, both
of which constitute human grammars on Wildersons reading, by refusing to regard the plenitude of existing subjectivity (labor power, or queerness, etc.) as in need of a
formation, they at least potentially avoid recomposing the human community around this same grammar and community, thereby opening up the possibility for an overlap
with the struggle against White supremacy from other directions. Since it draws its affective coordinates not from Black suffering (analogy) but from a disidentication with the
Hu- man community emerging from the position in which it occupies, self-abolition remains a regulative Idea rather than an actionable maxim. The role of it as an Idea is
confer a sort of negative coherency on empirical acts. Again, that this must be ideational rather than empirically empathic is necessitated by the ruse of analogy, i.e. the fact
that Black suffering cannot appear phenomenally to non-Black bodies except on condition of being
structurally adjusted to non-Black grammars.23 Hence there is only an indirect or ideational liaison
between these paradigms, i.e. between the self-abolitionism of non- Black life and the anti-political
program of the slave that Wilderson (drawing from Cesaire) distils into the phrase:the end of the
world. As distinct Ideas, self-abolition and the end of the world are not synthetic or integral. Instead,
they are perhaps best conceived of as parallel vectors, parallel precisely insofar as their potential
crossing constitutes a presently unthinkable vanishing point in socio-historical conjuncture. Despite this
paradigmatic distance, the past year has witnessed moments that defy this schema, moments in which, under the aleatory impetus of an event, the social hostility configuring
each line leads them to converge. This is what happened during the seventeen-day revolt in the San Francisco Bay Area following the Darren Wilson non-guilty verdict in
December of 2014, in which diverse groups of people were led to collectively block freeways, rail lines, roads and ports, to frontally attack the police, as well as to paralyze the
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quotidian functioning of the metropolis through the widespread looting and destruction of commercial spaces. Such intensely confictual ruptures enact a kind of larval,
potential, and fugitive convergence between paradigmatic lines, yet whose miserable separation must resume as soon as order is restored on the ground, and the situation
becomes once again governable. I will close with some tentative theses: actually stand in antagonistic relations to one another at another level. We must
therefore reject any model of solidarity premised on reciprocal recognition, on empathy, sympathy or
charity, or on the assumption of common interests. 2. The only consistent and honest fight is one we engage in for our own reasons,
oriented immanently around our own idea of happiness. By the latter is meant not an individual psychological state, but rather the a protective complicity and feeling of
increased power that arises between people who, based on a shared perception of the lines of force surrounding them, act together to polarize situational conflicts in pursuit of
ungovernable forms of life, in whatever experimental forms this might take in the present. 3. If we fight because our own lives compel us to, and it is our own idea of happiness
that orients us in these struggles, what is left of anti-racist solidarity? While the notion of a solidarity with Black suffering cannot be stripped of a
certain paradigmatic incoherence, if it means anything at all it must be premised not on an attempt to identify, recognize, or
render visible Black suffering, but on a disidentification with ourselves. That self-abolition is a
regulative Idea means that it is inexistent in the present. If my struggles can be said to align
themselves with the possibility of Black liberation, this is not in the moment I declare my support for
it, or my willingness to be authorized by whatever initiative the nearest Black person is calling for.24
Rather, it is when we collectively clear the path for an assault on the conditions that enforce those
identities that paradigmatically constitute a self that we contribute to 4. At what Wilderson refers to as the paradigmatic
level, the geometry of self-abolitionist solidarity is therefore one of parallel rather than convergent lines. My own struggles and those of the friends Im closest to proceed as if
along a parallel line with Black self-emancipation, which it must make every e ort to avoid obstructing as we continue to dismantle the conditions reproducing our own
identities. Perhaps we can put things this way: the meeting point between Blackness and those who envision themselves as its allies is not in a paradigmatic commonality to
affirm, but in what we wish to deny in ourselves that might free the way for someone else to end a selfor something more importantpresently impossible so long as we
exist. making things easier for others. 5. This nonlinear thought of self-abolition aims not to re-center white identity, but
rather to decenter and multiply the fronts from which the material and symbolic apparatus of
Humanity can be destituted. To orient our struggles around such a paradigmatic geometry in no way
denies the importance of insurrectional moments such as the revolts in Ferguson, Oakland, Baltimore,
etc. in which the aleatory power of events led parallel lines to cross momentarily, producing explosive
and fugitive moments in which distinct grammars of su ering pushed folks together into the same
streets, elaborating shared gestures and complicitiesrags, gasoline, knowing looks, that they
might together attack the forms of social mediation through which Humanity and anti-Black capitalism
as a whole is reproduced. The res started in these moments still burn in the hearts of those who lived and witnessed them. Yet while their light may serve as
a passional orientation for an uncertain future, we need paradigmatic cartographies to pursue it.
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Alt BadReform First
Abolition trades off with reform---beginning with abolition detracts from reformation
and wont work
Herbert 8 (Nick Herbert [Minister of state for policing and criminal justice and Conservative MP for Arundel
and South Downs], The abolitionists' criminal conspiracy, The Gaurdian, Sunday, 27 July 2008 10.00 EDT)
Last week saw an International Conference on Penal Abolition. With such a heady ambition, what can be next? A global conference to abolish crime?
The ambition of an eccentric minority to abolish prison isn't just dotty. It's [It is] a distraction from a
real and pressing agenda, which is to reform prisons which simply aren't working. A century ago, prisons had hard
labour and treadmills. Today, they have colour TVs in cells. Jails may have changed, but the enduring
truth that they are necessary has not. We will always have a small minority of offenders who, by their
behaviour, pose so great a threat to the lives and property of the law-abiding majority that they must
be kept apart from us. Ignoring this reality and arguing for the total abolition of prison is a hopelessly
utopian goal that does the credibility of penal reformers no service. The case for penal abolition rests on a series of
tenuous assertions. Let's set aside the obvious, if uncomfortable, fact that part of the purpose of prison is to punish. It's said that short-term prison
sentences don't work, because recidivism rates are shockingly high and there is little time for any restorative programmes to work. But since the
evidence is that longer sentences have lower recidivism rates, and provide the opportunity to rehabilitate offenders, this might be an argument to
lengthen sentences, not abolish them altogether. After all, another purpose of prison is to incapacitate offenders. Of course, overcrowded prisons that
are awash with drugs, and a system which gives short-term prisoners no supervision or support on release, is almost calculated to fail. But this could
equally be an argument the one which the modern Conservative party is making for a complete transformation of prison regimes and a system of
It's a logical non sequitur on a grand scale to argue that because
support for offenders when they are released from jail.
short-term prison sentences currently aren't working, we should therefore stop using them at all.
Abolitionists say that short-term prison sentences have a poorer recidivism rate than community sentences. In fact, both have a lamentable record and
one that has deteriorated in the last ten years. But the difference is hardly surprising, since the worst recidivists are bound to end up in jail. According to
Home Office figures (pdf), only 12% of those sentenced to prison have no previous convictions. Over half have five or more previous convictions, and
over a third have ten or more. Those who say that prison should be reserved for serious or serial offenders tend to ignore the fact that it already is.
Serial offenders who end up with custodial sentences have usually run through the gamut of weak community sentences already. If we want to avoid
magistrates having little choice but to send them down, the logical thing to do is to make community sentences far more effective. Yet the perverse
reaction of the abolitionists is to recommend that the very community disposals that have, by definition, already failed are used again. Over a third of
unpaid work requirements are not completed. Drug rehabilitation requirements have an even worse record fewer than half are completed. If a fraction
of the energy and resources that are being devoted to the cause of penal abolition were directed to thinking seriously about how better to design non-
custodial punishments, short-term prison sentences would be less necessary. What do the abolitionists really want? If it's the
end of all custody, including for the most serious and dangerous offenders, then we can dismiss their
demands as truly silly. If it's the abolition of short-term custodial sentences, then the effect on the overall prison population will be minimal.
Justice ministry tables show (pdf) that over 87% of the current prison population are serving sentences of over 12 months. Abolishing prison for those
serving, say, six months or less would mean watering down 60,000 sentences but it would reduce the prison population by less than 7,000. The more
effective and sustainable way to reduce the prison population in the long term is to reduce re-offending, as the Conservative party's radical "rehabilitation
revolution" proposes. It
would be nice to live in a society where there were no prisons, just as it would be nice
if there were no hospitals because there was no illness. But until someone steps forward with a ten-
year plan to Make Crime History, jails are here to stay. The challenge is to create prisons with a
purpose not to hold lazy conferences making futile calls for their abolition.
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Alt BadCrime
Crime DA the alt is a hopelessly utopian goal that disavows how there are real
criminals that need to be kept away to keep us safe. Our aff would work in alignment
with prison reform to resolve their impacts.
Herbert, 8 Nick, Conservative MP for Arundel and South Downs (The abolitionists' criminal conspiracy,
July 27th, 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/jul/27/prisonsandprobation.youthjustice)
Last week saw an International Conference on Penal Abolition. With such a heady ambition, what can be next?
A global conference to abolish crime? The ambition of an eccentric minority to abolish prison isn't just
dotty. It's a distraction from a real and pressing agenda, which is to reform prisons which simply aren't
working. A century ago, prisons had hard labour and treadmills. Today, they have colour TVs in cells.
Jails may have changed, but the enduring truth that they are necessary has not. We will always have a
small minority of offenders who, by their behaviour, pose so great a threat to the lives and property of
the law-abiding majority that they must be kept apart from us. Ignoring this reality and arguing for the
total abolition of prison is a hopelessly utopian goal that does the credibility of penal reformers no
service. The case for penal abolition rests on a series of tenuous assertions. Let's set aside the
obvious, if uncomfortable, fact that part of the purpose of prison is to punish. It's said that short-term
prison sentences don't work, because recidivism rates are shockingly high and there is little time for
any restorative programmes to work. But since the evidence is that longer sentences have lower
recidivism rates, and provide the opportunity to rehabilitate offenders, this might be an argument to
lengthen sentences, not abolish them altogether. After all, another purpose of prison is to incapacitate
offenders. Of course, overcrowded prisons that are awash with drugs, and a system which gives short-term
prisoners no supervision or support on release, is almost calculated to fail. But this could equally be an
argument the one which the modern Conservative party is making for a complete transformation of prison
regimes and a system of support for offenders when they are released from jail. It's a logical non sequitur on a
grand scale to argue that because short-term prison sentences currently aren't working, we should therefore
stop using them at all. Abolitionists say that short-term prison sentences have a poorer recidivism rate than
community sentences. In fact, both have a lamentable record and one that has deteriorated in the last ten
years. But the difference is hardly surprising, since the worst recidivists are bound to end up in jail. According
to Home Office figures (pdf), only 12% of those sentenced to prison have no previous convictions. Over half
have five or more previous convictions, and over a third have ten or more. Those who say that prison should
be reserved for serious or serial offenders tend to ignore the fact that it already is. Serial offenders who end up
with custodial sentences have usually run through the gamut of weak community sentences already. If we want
to avoid magistrates having little choice but to send them down, the logical thing to do is to make community
sentences far more effective. Yet the perverse reaction of the abolitionists is to recommend that the very
community disposals that have, by definition, already failed are used again. Over a third of unpaid work
requirements are not completed. Drug rehabilitation requirements have an even worse record fewer than half
are completed. If a fraction of the energy and resources that are being devoted to the cause of penal abolition
were directed to thinking seriously about how better to design non-custodial punishments, short-term prison
sentences would be less necessary. What do the abolitionists really want? If it's the end of all custody,
including for the most serious and dangerous offenders, then we can dismiss their demands as truly
silly. If it's the abolition of short-term custodial sentences, then the effect on the overall prison population will
be minimal. Justice ministry tables show (pdf) that over 87% of the current prison population are serving
sentences of over 12 months. Abolishing prison for those serving, say, six months or less would mean
watering down 60,000 sentences but it would reduce the prison population by less than 7,000. The
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Session II
more effective and sustainable way to reduce the prison population in the long term is to reduce re-
offending, as the Conservative party's radical "rehabilitation revolution" proposes. It would be nice to
live in a society where there were no prisons, just as it would be nice if there were no hospitals
because there was no illness. But until someone steps forward with a ten-year plan to Make Crime
History, jails are here to stay. The challenge is to create prisons with a purpose not to hold lazy
conferences making futile calls for their abolition.
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Session II
Alt BadNihilism
Political nihilism spreads beyond the classroom it empowers violent conservatives like Trump
foresaking compromise is a dangerous, academic luxury
Claudio 16, (assistant professor of development studies and southeast Asian studies at the Ateneo de
Manila University, Intellectuals have ushered the world into a dangerous age of political nihilism,
qz.com/721914/intellectuals-have-ushered-the-world-into-a-dangerous-age-of-political-nihilism/)
On the surface, it would seem that intellectuals have nothing to do with the rise of global illiberalism. The
movements powering Brexit, Donald Trump and Third-World strongmen like Philippine president Rodrigo
Duterte all gleefully reject books, history and higher education in favor of railing against common enemies like
outsiders and globalization. And youll find few Trump supporters among the largely left-wing American
professoriate. Yet intellectuals are accountable for the rise of these movementsalbeit indirectly.
Professors have offered stringent criticisms of neoliberal society. But they have failed to offer the public viable
alternatives. In this way, they have promoted a political nihilism that has set the stage for new movements
that reject liberal democratic principles of tolerance and institutional reform. Intellectuals have a long history of
critiquing liberalism, which relies on a philosophy of individual rights and (relatively) free markets. Beginning
in the 19th century, according to historian Francois Furet, left-wing thinkers began to arrive at a consensus
that modern liberal democracy was threatening society with dissolution because it atomized individuals, made
them indifferent to public interest, weakened authority, and encouraged class hatred. For most of the 20th
century, anti-liberal intellectuals were able to come up with alternatives. Jean-Paul Sartre famously defended
the Soviet Union even when it became clear that Joseph Stalin was a mass murderer. French, American,
Indian, and Filipino university radicals were hopelessly enamored of Mao Zedongs Cultural Revolution in the
1970s. The collapse of Communism changed all this. Some leftist intellectuals began to find hope in small
revolutionary guerrillas in the Third World, like Mexicos Subcomandante Marcos. Others fell back on pure
critique. Academics are now mostly gadflies who rarely offer strategies for political change. Those who do
forward alternatives propose ones so vague or divorced from reality that they might as well be proposing
nothing. (The Duke University professor of romance studies Michael Hardt, for example, thinks the evils of
modern globalization are so pernicious that only worldwide love is the answer.) Such thinking promotes
political hopelessness. It rejects gradual change as cosmetic, while patronizing those who think otherwise. This
nihilism easily spreads from the classroom and academic journals to op-ed pages to Zuccotti Park, and
eventually to the public at large. For academic nihilists, the shorthand for the worlds evils is neoliberalism.
The term is used to refer to a free market ideology that forced globalization on people by reducing the power of
governments. The more the term is used, however, the more it becomes a vague designation for all global
drudgery. Democratic politics in the age of neoliberalism, according to Harvard anthropologists Jean and John
Comaroff, is something of a pyramid scheme: the more it is indulged, the more it is required. They argue that
our belief that we can use laws and constitutional processes to defend our rights is a form of fetishism that is
ultimately chimerical. For the University of Chicago literary theorist Lauren Berlant, the democratic pursuit of
happiness amid neoliberalism is nothing but cruel optimism. The materialist things that people desire are
actually an obstacle to your flourishing, she writes. According to this logic, we are trapped by our own
ideologies. It is this logic that allows left-wing thinkers to implicitly side with British nativists in their
condemnation of the EU. The radical website Counterpunch, for example, describes the EU as a neoliberal
prison. It also views liberals seeking to reform the EU as coopted by the right wing and its goalsfrom the
subversion of progressive economic ideals to neoliberalism, to the enthusiastic embrace of neoconservative
doctrine. Across the Atlantic, Trump supporters are singing a similar tune. Speaking to a black, gay, college-
educated Trump supporter, Samantha Bee was told: Weve had these disasters in neoconservatism and
neoliberalism and I think that he [Trump] is an alternative to both those paths. The academic nihilists and the
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Trumpists are in agreement about a key issue: The system is fundamentally broken, and liberals who believe
in working patiently toward change are weak. For the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos,
indifference is the the hallmark of political liberalism. Since liberals balance different interests and rights,
Santos writes, they have no permanent friends or foes. He proposes that the world needs to revive the
friend/foe dichotomy. And in a profane way, it has: modern political movements pit Americans against
Muslims, Britain against Europe, a dictatorial government against criminals. Unfortunately, academic anti-
liberalism is not confined to the West. The Cornell political scientist Benedict Anderson once described liberal
democracy in the Philippines as a Cacique Democracy, dominated by feudal landlords and capitalist families.
In this system, meaningful reform is difficult, since the countrys political system is like a well-run casino,
where tables are rigged in favor of oligarch bosses. Having a nihilist streak myself, I once echoed Anderson
when I chastised Filipino nationalists for projecting hope onto spaces within an elite democracy. Like
Anderson, I offered no alternative. The alternative arrived recently in the guise of the Duterte, the new
president of the Philippines. Like Anderson and me, Duterte complained about the impossibility of real change
in a democracy dominated by elites and oligarchs. But unlike us, he proposed a way out: a strong political
leader who was willing to kill to save the country from criminals and corrupt politicians. The spread of global
illiberalism is unlikely to end soon. As this crisis unfolds, we will need intellectuals who use their intellects for
more than simple negationprofessors like the late New York University historian Tony Judt, who argued that
European-style social democracy could save global democracy. Failing that, we need academics who
acknowledge that liberal democracy, though slow and imperfect, enables a bare minimum of tolerance in a
world beset by xenophobia and hatred. For although academics have the luxury of imagining a completely
different world, the rest of us have to figure out what to do with the one we have.
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Alt BadIndividualism
The alt does not challenge materially challenge institutions Occupy proves state
action is needed to avoid individualism
Cutler 11/15/16 (Sophia, writer and dancer residing in Montreal, Occupying Trump, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/donald-trump-occupy-
wall-street-zuccotti-park/)
Others correctly noted that Occupy wasnt a traditional political movement that made demands upon the
state. It instead turned inward, believing the consensual and nonhierarchical community it was building in
Zuccotti constituted a demand in itself . Sympathizers touted the camp as the instantiation of a new
social awareness, a new way of relating to one another. [W]e are literally laying the framework for a new world by building it here and now
and it works, the New York City encampment proclaimed. This consensual social experience centered on the autonomy
of the individual . Occupiers were not held accountable to any particular agenda or leadership. As one
participant put it at a general assembly meeting, None of us are leaders; [therefore] we are all leaders. Today, as high school students walk
out en masse and anti-Trump protests sweep the country, the memory of Occupy should give us
pause. Instead of creating a political movement that materially attacked the institutions of the 1
percent, many occupiers vowed to transform themselves and raise awareness at the individual level .
Some responses to Trumpism have fallen into the same trap treating the election of a far-right
demagogue as an opportunity for soul-searching or a reason to rail against individual Trump voters . But just as
tending urban gardens didnt fundamentally challenge the prerogatives of capital, safety pins wont
bring down the reactionary figures taking the reins of government . To stop Trump, well have to
reject some of Occupys central precepts . Occupy Individualism Occupys emphasis on the individual
sprang from its horizontalist antecedents particularly the May 1968 occupations in France. Kalle Lasn and Micah White, who
launched Occupy with their famous Adbusters meme, explicitly cited the leaderless, anti-hierarchical student demonstrations in Paris as their inspiration.
Yet its telling that the sixties critique of uniformity and authority was appropriated not only by subsequent social movements, but by capitalism. Calls to
live, to express oneself, to be free now survive as tag lines for soft-drinks and SUVS. In their book The New Spirit of Capitalism, Luc Boltanski and Eve
Chiapello go so far as to argue that capitalism co-opted the 68 demands for autonomy to create our contemporary postindustrial economy of worker
instability and commanded flexibility. The ease with which the sixties ethos of autonomy was co-opted by capital didnt seem to trouble Lasn and White,
however. They saw the rise of autonomous politics as a source of potential rather than a sign of a weakened and splintered left. In their famous July
2011 call to occupy, Lasn and White celebrated a worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics. They quoted Raimundo Viejo, an activist with the 15-M
movement in Spain: [B]ack then our model was to attack the system like a pack of wolves. There was an alpha male, a wolf who led the pack, and
those who followed behind. Now the model has evolved. Today we are one big swarm of people. Following this leaderless model, Lasn and White took
no ownership of the movement. In fact, neither even visited Zuccotti Park that fall. Instead, they shared their idea with a listserv of ninety thousand
redeemers, rebels, and radicals and allowed it to evolve on its own. While they suggested ending Citizens United as one unifying demand, they left it to
the occupiers themselves to formulate one demand in a plurality of voices. But the one-plank platform never materialized. As the protest expanded to
include thousands of occupiers in hundreds of cities, the mainstream media increasingly pressed Occupy to lay out a set of policy desires. The fast-
approaching winter months exacerbated these pressures, as camps across the country scrambled to figure out how to sustain an outdoor occupation in
the cold. Occupys system of consensus-based decision-making turned this into a tiring and time-
consuming, if not effectively impossible, task. Inspired by Spains acampadas, the occupiers opened general assemblies to everyone. If
someone vehemently disagreed with a proposal, they could block it, and it would have to be adapted until a super-majority of ninety percent supported
the proposal. It did not matter if the dissenter was new to a movement others had been invested in for weeks; they had just as much of a say as the
original Occupiers. As a result, a simple decision like how to take care of laundry could take hours to make.
The Occupys New York City General Assembly explained why the process was so important to the movement: The care we take in a consensus
process to hear everyones opinions and weave them into a whole is a living demonstration that each one of us is important. Its a counter to systems
that tell us some people count while others dont. In consensus, everyone matters. Consensus-based decision-making, then, was understood as a way
to include marginalized voices in a movement that claimed to represent the 99 percent. But Occupy fostered inclusivity through
individualism rather than organized collective action . In countless interviews about the movement,
participants cautioned, I can only speak for myself. The ubiquitous caveat frustrated attempts to
understand Occupy as a whole and to advance a collective project. Discussion became confined to personal
experiences and opinions. Instead of a rallying point of unison, We are the 99% became a Twitter hashtag for the individual to express his personal
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struggles. In casting individual experiences as fundamentally unknowable to others, occupiers ignored
the feminist insistence that the personal is political. The second-wave slogan emerged as a reaction to the capitalist credo
of personal responsibility, pointing to the ways in which individual experiences were not merely private but in fact defined and shaped by political and
social institutions. Distinct, yes but still fundamentally collective. As Occupy gradually took shape, it moved in the opposite
direction, loading the burden on the individual. Too often, the political was nothing but the personal . Too
frequently, occupiers focused on kill[ing] the one-percenter within instead of pressuring the state to
rein in the 1 percent. All of this was fine with Adbusters. As Whites latest book makes clear, the anti-consumerist,
culture-jamming magazine still regards resistance as a matter of changing ones thought patterns and
lifestyle choices. In The End of Protest a self-styled new playbook for revolution the Adbusters editor touts a subjectivist theory of
protest, arguing that by transforming ones inner reality, one can transform ones external material reality. In our global struggle to
liberate humanity, he writes, the most significant battles will be fought on the spiritual level inside
our heads, within our imagination and deep in our collective unconscious. While its easy to laugh at
his claim that climate change is happening because of the state of our minds , this sort of magical
thinking survives in the recent outpouring of praise for Occupy as consciousness-raising. It also lives on
in the call to check ones privilege, which often imagines that self-edification rather than structural
change can solve inequality . But realizing ones individual privilege does nothing to dismantle the
prison industrial complex , or block environmentally destructive legislation , or improve wages for
workers . As Barbara J. Fields remarks: Ideology is not a set of attitudes that people can have as they have a
cold, and throw off the same way. Human beings live in human societies by negotiating a certain social terrain,
whose map they keep alive in their minds by the collective, ritual repetition of the activities they must
carry out in order to negotiate the terrain. If the terrain changes, so must their activities, and therefore
so must the map. Fields definition of ideology puts the power of personal autonomy in its place. Rather than a law unto itself,
the individual is situated in the prevailing system of authority. Before the individual can be changed,
the system must be restructured. Lessons From Occupy Both Fields conception of ideology and the shortcomings
of Occupy are worth keeping in mind as we mobilize against Trump and his racism, sexism, and
Islamophobia. An effective opposition movement cannot be about privilege checking or soul
searching . It must challenge the structures and forces that brought Trump to power. Campus safe spaces
wont do this. Neither will safety pins. Instead we must stand against the disastrous effects of deregulation,
privatization, and a disintegrating social safety net. We must organize collectively against an
economic system that uses racism, xenophobia, and misogyny to pit worker against worker. Taking
on an entire economic and political system sounds daunting. Especially in the face of a rising far
right , smaller victories like moral denunciations and attitudinal shifts may seem like our only
option.
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SP2Aff First Step
Sexual health and health care more broadly are key factors in the school to prison
pipeline the Aff is a first step in providing sexual health programs that can intervene
Edelman 2k7 (Marian Wright, works for the Childrens Defense Fund; 25 E Street NW, Washington, DC.
The Cradle to Prison Pipeline: An American Health Crisis, published in the NCBI journal 7/4/0017. The
National Center for Biotechnology Information is part of the United States National Library of Medicine, a
branch of the National Institutes of Health. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1955386/ 7/25/17)
A major factor in determining whether a child enters the prison pipeline is access to health care. Currently, nine
million children in America are without health insurance. Among low-income communities, there is a high
incidence of teen pregnancy and low-birthweight babies. Physical and mental developmental delays among
young children are commonly left undiagnosed and often go untreated. Unlike the children from affluent
families, children from low-income families rarely have access to institutions that can intervene and address
their health problems. Few public schools in economically depressed neighborhoods have the resources to
recognize health issues such as dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity disorder, or post-traumatic
stress disorder and then to provide counseling and therapy for children with these disorders. Instead, their
behavior is more often perceived as insubordinate or disruptive than it is recognized as symptomatic of a
disorder or of the environment in which these children live. In these cases, zero-tolerance disciplinary
standards are frequently applied, and thousands of students are expelled and even arrested for subjectively
defined behaviors such as "disorderly conduct" and "malicious mischief". We must dismantle the Cradle to
Prison Pipeline now because all children are sacred. What is required are collaborative efforts at the
community, municipal, and state levels. To start with, we should demand the passage of legislation that would
guarantee health care, including mental health care, to all children. We need new investment to support
proven community health delivery programs such as the National Campaign to Prevent Teen
Pregnancy, which promotes community and school programs focused on delaying sexual activity, and
the Nurse-Family Partnership, which supplies nurses for home visits to low-income, first-time mothers
through their pregnancies and for two years after they give birth. Other valuable programs provide early
intervention in cases of family violence. A healthy child is an empowered child. Communities should strive to
replicate model umbrella programs that mentor and empower children such as the Harlem Children's Zone, the
Boston TenPoint Coalition, and the CDF Freedom Schools program. The effects of the Cradle to Prison
Pipeline constitute a scourge of epidemic proportions. We must act to dismantle the prison pipeline now. We
fail at our peril. The future of our nation is at stake.
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SP2Perm Solves
Perm solves inclusions of hiv/aids discourse in the context of anti-queer and trans
violence in the prison enables disease prevention and response
Fink, OGrady and Fortier, 09 (Marty Fink, Ashley Fortier and Liam Michuad OGrady, Liam OGrady works in Family Continuity for female
inmates and ex-inmates, Marty Fink is an Assistant Professor in ProCom with a focus on queer and trans studies at The University of Ryerson, You Improvise to
Survive: HIV Prevention, survival strategies & queer cultures of self-defense, Journal of Prisoners on Prisons (University of Ottawa Press) 2009, DOA: 7/25/17,
http://www.againstequality.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/improvisetosurvive.pdf) EL
Alongside this array of structural and policy-level conditions lie personal negotiations of histories of death, mourning, and
disappearance. These are experiences that cannot be assessed discretely from the material conditions
of incarceration to which gay and queer and trans communities are subject. As such, they directly impact the form and
content of the resources and the resource development process. For many among our community on the inside, this negotiation of death presents
itself as a second cohort of mourning, loss and disappearance. While gay, queer, and trans
communities were decimated from AIDS on the outside throughout the 1980s and early 90s, many
inside today are experiencing a second wave of death from suicide, overdose, medical negligence, and
AIDS. Acknowledging this forces us to ensure that our work is directly informed and impacted by these overlapping traumas. In addition, we must equally contend with the
fact that the lived effects of peoples experience of HIV/AIDS have shifted dramatically over the course of the past decade or so, both inside and out. We must acknowledge
that HIV/AIDS among many non-incarcerated communities in North America is now largely viewed with less urgency than when the epidemic seemed to spread unabated in
the 1980s and early 90s. While
the sense of crisis is now projected onto other locations and populations
allegedly outside of our national culture, this experience of HIV/AIDS as manageable and less
urgent is then transposed inside prisons in spite of that fact that in many prisons, rates of
transmission among inside gay, trans and queer communities are higher than ever among gay, trans,
and queer communities on the outside. This is to say nothing of virulent and medication-resistant HIV strains emanating from carceral sites north
and south of the US-Canada border. Alongside this, we must equally acknowledge that a number of our contacts, penpals, and collaborators have been inside for ten, twenty,
or thirty years. Amazon, a long-term collaborator with the project who is incarcerated in California, was last out in 1980. For those of us on the outside who are younger, we
the potential for
dont have access to pre-AIDS sexual cultures or pre-AIDS queer identities. It is our correspondence with our penpals that provides us directly with
intergenerational dialogue where it has been systematically removed as a possibility, as much of our
queer lineage was erased through the devastation wrought by AIDS. While few of these negotiations of death, trauma, or
history emanate directly from carceral structures, they interact with peoples experiences of incarceration, and are actively reproduced through the material conditions of
queer/trans incarceration and punishment. These encounters with antiqueer violence are not only reproduced in the
silences, omissions, and erasures in much of existing HIV/AIDS prevention discourse and materials
that fail to account for the lives of communities inside prisons , they are also reproduced through much of existing abolitionist and
prison activist agendas and discourses in failing to account for the lives and realities and desires of gay and queer and trans communities inside prisons. We
can not
assess the lack of relevant prevention resources as separate from the lack of discourse or discussion
about sexuality, gender, or queer desire, because in the process these very omissions, silences and
erasures become folded into the very landscape of antiqueer violence coordinated by the prison
system itself. In the process, the very navigations of loss, trauma, and community decimation are
reproduced, and unfold alongside the invisibility that characterizes incarcerated gay, lesbian, queer
and trans experience.
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SP2Aff as Transformative Justice
You can think of the aff as a shifting of resources as an act of transformational justice
Kitto, 15 - Josh, freelance political journalist (Rape culture: would prison abolition help women? 24
February 2015, https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/josh-kitto/rape-culture-would-prison-abolition-
help-women)
'Transformative justice' is contingent on broader social and personal transformation. Just as prison
abolition is only conceivable by shifting resources to healthcare and education systems and
removing the violence of poverty, 'transformative justice cannot simply depend on the community
being inherently more accountable than the courts: it also has to identify the absence of reparations
and accountability for the victims - and redistribute power to them. While consent-based sex education
is entrenched in discourse about how to tackle rape culture, and an important first step in beginning a
shift towards transformative justice, there must also be a broader realisation of reproductive autonomy
to redistribute power - for example abortion on demand, and trans-appropriate healthcare. A
transformative discourse about tackling rape culture would also consider the institutionalised violence of local authority
care homes - which feed women and children into the violence of homelessness, addiction, and prisons. Children's
rights are also vital to conceiving social and personal transformation as a means of dismantling rape
culture. Children need more than comprehensive sex and relationship education: they also need greater democratic
power in schools, and in their lives. Without the broader empowerment of those vulnerable to patriarchal and
sexual violence, transformative justice mechanisms no more provide accountability and reparations for rape
survivors than our current carceral apparatus. And community accountability is anemic without addressing the
ways in which women, particularly women of colour, women with disabilities and trans women, are trapped by
the violence of poverty, or state violence. In moving beyond a model of incarceration that exacerbates
rape culture, transformative justice has to take account of survivors' complex needs. It must ensure
community accountability does not simply whitewash the systems that enable patriarchal violence.
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Institutions Inevitable
Institutions are inevitable and engaging them is key studying, understanding, and
reforming institutions is the only way to prevent unchecked abuses of power and
atrocities
Marti and Fernandez 13 (2013, Ignasi, Associate Professor Strategy and Organization, EMLYON
Business School, OCE Research Centre, France, and Pablo, Professor, IESE Business School, University of
Navarra, The Institutional Work of Oppression and Resistance: Learning from the Holocaust, Organization
Studies August 2013 vol. 34 no. 8 1195-1223)
Oppressive institutional work In our examination of the Holocaust, we focused initially on the purposeful everyday practices
that involved a concerted effort (i.e. institutional work) by the Nazis and others to gradually regulate the lives of
their targeted populations and separate them, first symbolically, then physically through spatial segregation and ultimately
concentration camps and death. The different types of oppressive work we referred to ranging from categorization, seclusion and creation of social
distance to the unleashing of absolute violence share one fundamental aspect: They all contribute to transforming the universal structures of human
relatedness to the world: space and time, social relations, and ultimately the relation to the self. They do it, however, in different degrees. Considering
One might observe different forms of
such processes and transformations will expand our understanding of agency and institutions.
oppression as characterized by the degree to which they allow actors different spaces of autonomy and leave
room and potential for agency. Some types of oppressive work restrict people only by culture and norms; whereas others produce conditions
that are significantly more stringent, such as those imposed on the Jews shortly after the Nuremberg laws were passed to severely limit their access to
the job market or the running of business; use of public transportation; attendance in school; or participation in religious ceremonies. The creation of
taxonomy of categories into which every individual can be pigeonholed appears to be a crucial type of institutional work. Such actions were undertaken
by the Nazis in classifying their target population(s) as Homo sacer or subhuman (Agamben, 1998). Moreover, such escalation of oppression is eased
by the creation of social distance between the oppressors (as well as those who benefit from oppression) and the oppressed by means of authorization,
routinization or different types of rhetorical devices notably what we called camouflage language. Once the categories are created, the oppression
continues with spatial separation, dispossession of property and sometimes even ones names, and increasingly violent responses to any
noncompliance. Here we are fully entering the terrain of what Goffman called total institutions (Goffman, 1961). In them, one can see different degrees of
self-violation and, concomitantly, of spaces of autonomy. The oppressive work applied in ghettos was different from that used in death camps, each
featuring distinct types of institutional work. The most extreme setting the death camp allowed for almost no resistance as the oppressors exercised
near-total control, destroying any vestiges of independent social life (and, in many cases, life itself). How relevant are those forms of oppression to
present-day organizational phenomena, and how do they contribute to our understanding of institutional work? We argue that different forms of
oppressive work can be observed today, although certainly none with the horrifying purposes of and the results attained by the Nazis. These
occurrences range from well-known oppressive institutional orders to the most regular organizations under the modern, capitalist institutional order.
These and others not discussed here offer what we believe is an important opportunity for students of institutional work. Even though less harrowing
than the Holocaust, total institutions of today may still be sadly characterized by humans being belittled and
dehumanized; sometimes spatially circumscribed; heavily guarded; often stripped of markers of individual identity; clearly categorized as the
other; and often terrorized and treated with violence. Such instances include genocides (Pina e Cunha et al., 2010;
Stokes & Gabriel, 2010); the treatment of prisoners of war in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib (Greenberg & Dratel, 2005); institutions such as asylums and
mental hospitals (Grob, 1983) or work camps; and cases of forced labour, human trafficking or forced marriage (Bales, 1999). For example, human
trafficking has grown over the years as an industry to become according to the United Nations the fastest-growing form of organized crime (United
Nations, 2001) one which is considered a high-profit, low-risk trade for the organizers. Children and women are trafficked for forced prostitution,
domestic servitude, unsafe agricultural or sweatshop labour, or sold as brides. Cases such as that of Nigerias Niger Delta (Akpan, 2010) are well
reported. More broadly speaking, forced labour can be found in many countries today, and the International Labour Organization estimates at least 12.3
million people in forced labour worldwide (other estimates show that figure to be as high as thirty million; see Bales, 2004; Crane, 2013). A rather well-
known example concerns workers in the charcoal camps of Brazil (Bales, 1999).12 One can observe in these cases the creation of geographical and
examples like these abound.
social distance, which ease the treatment of enslaved human beings and contributes to their alienation. Sadly,
While differing in forms and degrees of oppressive work, they nonetheless share a common theme: the effort and intent to
shatter the human capacity to resist. We believe the study of various types of oppressive work brings an important perspective to
discussions about the paradox of embedded agency (Holm, 1995; Seo & Creed, 2002) by focusing not on how institutional change is possible, but on
how through which types of institutional work it can be made impossible. Milder forms of oppressive work can be found today in humiliating practices
that pervade developed and less developed countries alike. Some examples are those regulations imposed on immigrants, both documented and
undocumented, who seek work permits, access to social welfare services or asylum. Through increasingly stringent regulations, tedious processes that
are often experienced as arbitrary, and fearful controls, people are invited to accept and embody imposed, sometimes meaningless, categories. Such
categories notably affect peoples perception of their rights and civic participation, impact their job-seeking patterns and efforts, and make them suspects
in the eyes of others.13 An insightful study of Central American immigrants in the United States finds that this can lead [the immigrants] to accept their
self-depreciation as normal (Menjvar & Abrego, 2012, p. 1413), echoing similar findings from Europe (Escandell & Ceobanu, 2009; McLaren, 2003).
Other examples of humiliating practices which are gaining prevalence in todays society include airport security checks and other work legitimated by
9/11 and the war on terror (Molotch, 2012), and the use of different surveillance tools and measures intended to prevent theft by employees.14
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Routinization and authorization play an extremely important role in these practices, which all contribute in varying degrees to damaging peoples pride
and dignity by imposing a sense of inferiority and subordination (Lindner, 2010). A final and rather puzzling element in most of these practices is that
they are often legally sanctioned. Thus, a
promising research agenda is to examine oppression through formal
structures of power that are publicly respected rather than focus exclusively on the wilful exercise of
violence with the intention to inflict suffering. Which carriers of power and what types of institutional work negatively impact the
quotidian practices of human beings and reduce their capacity to act? Finally, a vast body of research by anthropologists, sociologists of work, and
critical management scholars has shown how milder, often hidden forms of oppressive work find their way into many contemporary versions of capitalist
workplace organization. These types of oppression feel natural, yet they are no less important. In such settings, work discipline is not necessarily
enforced by abuse, violence or arbitrary constraints and categorization, but is expressed in other ways. One example would be rigid and exacting
guidelines for physical appearance, such as Walt Disney Worlds instruction that fingernails should not extend more than one-fourth inch beyond
fingertips (Leidner, 1993, p. 9). Leidner, drawing on the work of Hochschild (1983) also reports how in some cases organizations seek to extend control
through emotional labour too, hoping to direct how [the employees] view themselves and how they feel (Leidner, 1993, p. 64). Alternately, workers are
asked to be open to change on short notice, take risks continually, and become ever less dependent on regulations and formal procedures (Delbridge,
1998; Harris-White, 2003). Reflecting on this trend, Sennett (1998) argues that pursuit of flexibility has produced new structures of power and control,
rather than created the conditions which set us free. Although mild compared to the extreme of genocide described in this paper, and sometimes even
hidden, such forms of oppressive work still affect the capacity of human beings to act, think and feel. It seems reasonable to consider them as well in
expanding our understanding of agency and institutions. Resisting: Anti-oppressive institutional work The prevailing perspective on resistance continues
to claim that individuals willingly subject themselves to systems of domination (Willmott, 1993). This structural vision is strengthened by the idea that
groups and individuals usually fail in their attempts to resist oppression (Allen, 2008; Burawoy, 1979; Gaventa, 1992). However, as we have seen,
resistance did occur even in the midst of the most horrifying efforts to fully shatter it. An important insight derived from the analysis of oppressive work
and resistance in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe is the fact that the parameters of resistance are set, in an important manner, by the institutions of
oppression. To the extent that oppressive forms of work are effective, they may fully preclude any forms of resistance. The Nazi project of human
destruction reached its peak with the creation of the Muselmnner, whose capacity to (re)act and to resist had been completely obliterated. As several
authors have argued, they became the living dead and ceased to be fully human. Hence, they were no longer capable of doing any type of work (Levi,
2009; Sofsky, 1997). Acts of resistance that do occur under circumstances of most severe oppression are often either individual and mundane (e.g.
walking erect and washing ones face) or collectively but utterly desperate (e.g. revolts by the Sonderkommandos in Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor),
which may be partially understood in terms of how the level of oppression structures the available options. Thus, depending on the circumstances
people confront, their resistance may oscillate from organized but hidden collective acts (e.g. illegal press, theatre performances and the school system
in the Warsaw ghetto) to violent overt confrontations (e.g. revolt in the last days of the Warsaw ghetto) to silent, anonymous acts (e.g. of sabotage and
foot dragging) to essentially individual, small-scale efforts such as writing. We attribute this to the existence of some sort of correlation between the two
forms of work explored in this article: oppressive and anti-oppressive. Future studies might focus on such oscillation and look at how different types of
institutional oppressive work are confronted by different forms of resistance. Future research might also probe the intent of those efforts and how that
may impact the specific types of anti-oppressive work done. Is the resistance aiming to fully disrupt the oppressive machinery or to nibble away part of
its effects? Is the resisters goal survival, or simply reminding oneself and others that he or she remains a human being? Addressing questions like this
might bring a new perspective to discussions and today criticisms about the heroic character of most accounts of institutional entrepreneurship. Are
(arguably non-heroic and mundane) acts such as writing, walking erect or washing ones face acts of resistance and instances of anti-oppressive work?
We have argued that they are, provided they are effortful acts performed with the intention of resisting the takeover of ones autonomy and very
humanity. Furthermore, the spectrum of acts of resistance provides students of institutional theory and agency a strong reminder of the need to seriously
consider how the nature of the institutional order(s) shape the options (Hwang & Colyvas, 2011) and ultimately the lives of people inhabiting them
(Creed, DeJordy & Lok, 2010; Hallet & Ventresca, 2006). As stated above, our argument is that different forms of anti-oppressive work seen in the
Holocaust are present and observable in the most ordinary organizations under the modern, capitalist institutional order (see Bauman, 1989; Clegg et
al., 2006). If the objective of the work of oppression is to drive some goals, claims and aspirations to the realm of the impossible and limit peoples
capacity to think, feel and act independently, our understanding of the reasons and methods behind everyday forms of institutional work can be
advanced by studying acts of resistance (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006). Such work can include both active and passive elements, which has been
demonstrated by scholars from diverse traditions studying the contemporary workplace organization (Crowley, 2012; Fleming & Spicer, 2007; Vallas,
2012). Overt forms of collective resistance, which require organized coordination and planning, have received much attention by institutionalists over the
last decade particularly those employing the colourful imagery of social movements (Schneiberg & Lounsbury, 2008; Tilly & Tilly, 1998). Other
examples of active strategies include various forms of machine sabotage, foot dragging, theft, and criticizing supervisors in their absence (Hodson,
2001; Scott, 1990). Finally, people do play dumb, feign ignorance, withhold enthusiasm, dissimulate and avoid work. These are well-known examples of
passive strategies of resistance. While many of these instances stop well short of outright defiance, what is left to scholars interested in institutional work
is to examine how the intent to do anti-oppressive work is inscribed in the acts, and what difference such acts does make to the acting individuals. On
institutions, through different mechanisms and carriers, shape patterns of
the mediations of power Institutional theory suggests that
thought, action and organization (Battilana & DAunno, 2009; Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Zilber, 2002). We argue that the study of
oppression and resistance offers new, rather neglected, possible angles to study how actors go about
creating, maintaining and transforming institutions. We elaborate on two of them. The first one is the study of physical violence.
Recent empirical studies of institutional reproduction and change have concentrated on the tactical, strategic, manipulative and persuasive aspects of
power to the virtual exclusion of its coercive, bodily and forceful dimensions (Clegg et al., 2006; Lawrence, 2008). However, the study of oppression
reminds us that the use of different rhetorical weapons and social skills (Fligstein, 2001) is not necessarily the end of the story. In order to obtain
compliance, human beings are granted education, indoctrinated, given access to media and sometimes even taught sociology (Moore, 1978), but in
some cases compliance is attained through fear and even terror, by means of physical coercion and abuse, restricted mobility, rape or forcing people to
kill their kin. Less horrendous examples of situations where compliance was attained by force can be seen in todays United States or Europe. For
instance, Central American immigrants interviewed by Menjvar and Abrego (2012) explained how their fear of moving around in the cities in search of
employment or social services had fundamentally changed their lives. Likewise, some workers labour long hours under hazardous conditions for low
pay, subjected to employer abuse with little or no means of self-protection (perhaps out of fear of losing their jobs). In these situations, physical safety
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and economic survival may depend on silence, which can appear as conformity and compliance (Sennett, 1998; Vallas, 2012). The focus on oppressive
work illustrates how violence can be facilitated by the use of camouflage language, routinization, categorization, and the use of fully legitimate and
formal structures of power namely, the law. All of these mechanisms create social distance between the oppressors and the victims. Yet, in the end, as
Where the exercise of power is concerned, we should look
Barley points out: words break no bones (Barley, 2008, p. 507).
not only at who has it and why, but also at how such power is exercised. More specifically, we should ask how
different forms of physical violence (or the threat of such) are mobilized to perform institutional work. While terms such as oppression and violence are
frequently regarded as obsolete, they are not. Such phenomena, even if considered to be rare and analytically extreme, are common in the world. Since
they are likely to play an important role in a large number of processes of institutional creation, maintenance and disruption, they are relevant and timely
for our research community. The second new angle that we hope to bring to the study of institutional work is the focus on the grey zone (Levi,
1989/2009). One of the more puzzling elements about the Holocaust is the fact that some of the Jews e.g. Jewish authorities, Sonderkommandos
contributed both actively and passively to the extermination of their own people. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of Germans, Poles, French and
Lithuanians contributed to the system of domination, not only through their roles as administrators but also by indifference. We believe important new
insights can be gleaned by examining who inhabits the grey zone and why, in different situations (with varying degrees) of oppression. This is
particularly true with regard to institutional maintenance, which has attracted only modest empirical interest (Dacin, Munir & Tracey, 2010; Zietsma &
Lawrence, 2010). Thus, a promising research agenda is to examine how those populations targeted for oppression (e.g. the Jews, agricultural labourers,
women) and those who do not necessarily have an obvious motive to oppress others (e.g. Lithuanians during the Holocaust; co-ethnic supervisors),
contribute willingly or not to the reproduction of the system of domination, and through which types of institutional work. Furthermore, can anti-
oppressive work actually contribute to oppression by reproducing/reinforcing those institutional arrangements that enable it? Studies of resistance in the
workplace illustrate the irony of how some of the most defiant workers (Vallas, 2012, p. 25) those particularly rigid in their opposition to managerial
policies succeed only in reaffirming managements position (Courpasson, Dany & Clegg, 2011; Fleming & Spicer, 2007; Vallas, 2012; Willis, 1977).
The contradictory nature of the grey zone and who inhabits it thus represents a promising direction for research in institutional theory one that
demands less clear-cut distinctions between challengers and incumbents in accounts of institutional reproduction and change. Things that matter? A
final element that may come more forcefully into our conversations through the study of oppression and resistance is the relevance of morality. In
existing accounts of institutional entrepreneurship and work, the status of morality is awkward and ambiguous if it appears at all. In that respect, they are
similar to most sociological narratives which, according to Bauman (1989) do without reference to morality. In Making Social Science Matter, Bent
Flyvbjerg argues that among the three things necessary to re-enchant and empower social science there is the need to take up problems that matter to
the local, national, and global communities in which we live, and we must do it in ways that matter; we must focus on issues of values and power
(Flyvbjerg, 2001, p. 167). Recent calls by management scholars point out that we institutionalists in particular (Clegg, 2006; Munir, 2011) have failed
to focus on problems that matter and to address contemporary issues of broader societal relevance, such as the current global financial crisis
(Lounsbury & Hirsch 2010; Munir, 2011); forced labour, including for children (Bales, 1999; Crane, 2013); growing job precariousness (often masked as
flexibility); or repression in Syria and censorship in China. Moreover, beyond that lack of attention to todays social issues, the question of values and
power is rarely discussed in studies of institutional work. As recently expressed by Creed and colleagues, In the management literature, institutional
change and agency are most often discussed without reference to their underlying moral or political vision (Creed et al., 2010, p. 1380). Are we
suggesting that articles should include a moral (or moralizing?) discussion? Certainly not. The point we want to make is that today there is a marked
need for debate and reorientation of values (Bauman, 2008; MacIntyre, 2006) and organization theorists might want to have a say. Indeed, some
scholars have taken on the task. For instance, Khan, Munir and Willmott (2007) examined the elimination of the long-standing institutional practice of
child labour from the worlds largest soccer ball manufacturing cluster in Pakistan; and Creed and colleagues looked at how marginalized GLBT
ministers had to be the change they wanted to see in their churches(DeJordy & Lok, 2010, p. 1355). Nevertheless, should we settle for limiting
discussions on values and morality to just those studies dealing with issues that appear to be morally problematic? Put differently, are there really
relevant settings and contexts for which we can do without reference to morality? Flyvbjerg (2001, p. 167) suggests that doing that would mean the
perpetuation of science as usual. Instead, he argues for the emergence of what he calls a phronetic social science, whose objective is contributing to
societys capacity for value-rational deliberation and action. We think it is worth contributing to such emergence and we see potential for doing that. For
instance, revisiting recent work by Suddaby, Cooper and Greenwood on the role of large accounting firms in the emergence of a transnational regulatory
field in professional services, the reader learns how the new emerging dominant logic reduces the concern for citizens rights and the public interest,
emphasizing instead commercialism and the protection and promotion of capital markets (Suddaby et al., 2007, p. 356). These insights join a large
number of other studies that show the growing marketization of our society (Bourdieu, 1998; Davis, 2009). Is this a matter on which we, organization
scholars, want to say something beyond the fact that it occurs? Likewise, in a recent article Mair and colleagues (2012) study how an intermediary
organization in southern Asia builds inclusive markets as a means to generate economic and social development for the least advantaged societal
groups. However, while they explicitly attend to the institutions at play and their consequences in form of market and community marginalization, their
article seems to assume that market inclusion is all good, and leaves it unproblematized. We see in here food for further reflections and research.
Finally, those interested in how actors are able to do institutional work (Battilana & DAunno, 2009; Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006) should ask this key
question: Are there or might there be types of social structures, practices, beliefs and technologies that would prevent those
who inhabit them from becoming agents? Or if this seems to suggest too extreme a state of affairs although historically manifested
in the figure of the Muselmann are there or might there be types of institutional work that seriously threaten the
possibility of agency for others? That certainly appears to be the case in todays world. Addressing
questions like that might shed new light on the subject of embedded agency by bringing to our
attention what the pre-conditions of agency are , thus helping to explain how institutional change is
possible if actors are fully conditioned by the institutions that they wish to change (Greenwood & Suddaby,
2006; Holm, 1995; Seo & Creed, 2002). As we elaborated above, in different forms and to varying degrees oppressive work transforms the capacity of
human beings to act, think and feel. If
people feel their capacity to shape their lives has been taken from them
(Nussbaum, 2000); or that they have been pushed into herds like animals (Marcuse, 1991) or treated with no dignity (Hodson, 2001), is there still
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any point in discussing how they may transform or create institutions? We believe it does . But we should
be well aware that without some minimum control and dignity, institutional work and for that matter, any sort of work and even life becomes
unbearable (Frankl, 1984/1959; Marcuse, 1991). People need to feel and be treated as worthy human beings in order to envision and execute acts of
agency. Thus, we need to focus on how the denial of human dignity and worth occurs if we want to have a more complete understanding of agency and
institutions. It also seems
necessary to study what actions people may take to regain their dignity (Sennett, 2003;
we need to reflect on how
Scott, 1990) and take pride in their accomplishments, no matter how modest they may appear to others. Finally,
such studies can offer a solid ground for helping us to construct new institutional orders (or change
existing ones), with a renewed commitment for a more humane and respectful set of practices, beliefs and technologies for those inhabiting them.
In short, we need to study what institutional orders should be pursuing for each and every human being,
so that they are empowered and granted conditions and spaces for moral agency.
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Consequences Key
Their desire to ignore the consequences of their advocacy causes alt failure ---must
evaluate consequences of proposals
Christopher A. Bracey 6, Associate Professor of Law, Associate Professor of African & African American
Studies, Washington University in St. Louis, September, Southern California Law Review, 79 S. Cal. L. Rev.
1231, p. 1318
reducing conversation on race matters to an ideological contest allows opponents to elide inquiry into whether
Second,
the results of a particular preference policy are desirable. Policy positions masquerading as principled ideological stances
create the impression that a racial policy is not simply a choice among available alternatives, but the
embodiment of some higher moral principle. Thus, the "principle" becomes an end in itself, without reference to
outcomes. Consider the prevailing view of colorblindness in constitutional discourse. Colorblindness has come
to be understood as the embodiment of what is morally just, independent of its actual effect upon the lives of racial minorities. This explains Justice
Thomas's belief in the "moral and constitutional equivalence" between Jim Crow laws and race preferences, and his tragic assertion that "Government cannot make us equal [but] can only recognize,
respect, and protect us as equal before the law." 281 For Thomas, there is no meaningful difference between laws designed to entrench racial subordination and those designed to alleviate conditions of
Critics may point out that colorblindness in practice has the effect of entrenching existing racial
oppression.
disparities in health, wealth, and society. But in framing the debate in purely ideological terms, opponents are able to avoid
the contentious issue of outcomes and make viability determinations based exclusively on whether racially
progressive measures exude fidelity to the ideological principle of colorblindness. Meaningful policy debate is
replaced by ideological exchange, which further exacerbates hostilities and deepens the cycle of resentment.
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Extinction OW
Extinction outweighs structural violence
Anders Sandberg, James Martin Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, et al., with Jason G.
Matheny, Ph.D. candidate in Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Special
Consultant to the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and Milan M. irkovi, Senior Research
Associate at the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade and Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Novi Sad in Serbia and
Montenegro, 2008 (How can we reduce the risk of human extinction?, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September 8th, Available
Online at http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/features/how-can-we-reduce-the-risk-of-human-extinction)
The facts are sobering. More than 99.9 percent of species that have ever existed on Earth have gone extinct . Over the long run, it
seems likely that humanity will meet the same fate. In less than a billion years, the increased intensity of the Sun will initiate a wet greenhouse effect, even without any human interference,
making Earth inhospitable to life. A couple of billion years later Earth will be destroyed, when it's engulfed by our Sun as it expands into a red-giant star. If we colonize space, we could survive
longer than our planet, but as mammalian species survive, on average, only two million years, we should consider ourselves very lucky if we make it to one billion. Humanity could be
extinguished as early as this century by succumbing to natural hazards, such as an extinction-level asteroid or comet impact, supervolcanic eruption, global methane-hydrate release, or nearby
supernova or gamma-ray burst. (Perhaps the most probable of these hazards, supervolcanism, was discovered only in the last 25 years, suggesting that other natural hazards may remain
the probability of any one of these events killing off our species is very lowless than one in 100 million per
unrecognized.) Fortunately
year, given what we know about their past frequency. But as improbable as these events are, measures to reduce their
probability can still be worthwhile. For instance, investments in asteroid detection and deflection technologies cost less, per life saved, than
most investments in medicine. While an extinction-level asteroid impact is very unlikely, its improbability is outweighed by its
potential death toll. The risks from anthropogenic hazards appear at present larger than those from natural ones. Although great progress has
been made in reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the world, humanity is still threatened by the possibility of a global
thermonuclear war and a resulting nuclear winter. We may face even greater risks from emerging technologies. Advances in synthetic biology might make it
possible to engineer pathogens capable of extinction-level pandemics. The knowledge, equipment, and materials needed to engineer pathogens are more accessible than those needed to build
nuclear weapons. And unlike other weapons, pathogens are self-replicating, allowing a small arsenal to become exponentially destructive. Pathogens have been implicated in the extinctions of
many wild species. Although most pandemics "fade out" by reducing the density of susceptible populations, pathogens with wide host ranges in multiple species can reach even isolated
individuals. The intentional or unintentional release of engineered pathogens with high transmissibility, latency, and lethality might be capable of causing human extinction. While such an
event seems unlikely today, the likelihood may increase as biotechnologies continue to improve at a rate rivaling Moore's Law. Farther out in time are technologies that remain theoretical but
might be developed this century. Molecular nanotechnology could allow the creation of self-replicating machines capable of destroying the ecosystem. And advances in neuroscience and
computation might enable improvements in cognition that accelerate the invention of new weapons. A survey at the Oxford conference found that concerns about human extinction were
dominated by fears that new technologies would be misused. These emerging threats are especially challenging as they could become dangerous more quickly than past technologies, outpacing
Such remote risks may seem
society's ability to control them. As H.G. Wells noted, "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."
academic in a world plagued by immediate problems, such as global poverty, HIV, and climate change. But as
intimidating as these problems are, they do not threaten human existence. In discussing the risk of nuclear winter, Carl Sagan
emphasized the astronomical toll of human extinction: A nuclear war imperils all of our descendants, for as long as there will
be humans. Even if the population remains static, with an average lifetime of the order of 100 years, over a typical time period for the biological
evolution of a successful species (roughly ten million years), we are talking about some 500 trillion people yet to come. By this
criterion, the stakes are one million times greater for extinction than for the more modest nuclear wars that kill "only"
hundreds of millions of people. There are many other possible measures of the potential lossincluding culture and
science, the evolutionary history of the planet, and the significance of the lives of all of our ancestors who contributed to
the future of their descendants. Extinction is the undoing of the human enterprise. There is a discontinuity between risks
that threaten 10 percent or even 99 percent of humanity and those that threaten 100 percent. For disasters killing less than
all humanity, there is a good chance that the species could recover. If we value future human generations, then reducing
extinction risks should dominate our considerations. Fortunately, most measures to reduce these risks also improve global security against a range of
lesser catastrophes, and thus deserve support regardless of how much one worries about extinction. These measures include: Removing nuclear weapons from hair-trigger alert and further
reducing their numbers; Placing safeguards on gene synthesis equipment to prevent synthesis of select pathogens; Improving our ability to respond to infectious diseases, including rapid
disease surveillance, diagnosis, and control, as well as accelerated drug development; Funding research on asteroid detection and deflection, "hot spot" eruptions, methane hydrate deposits, and
other catastrophic natural hazards; Monitoring developments in key disruptive technologies, such as nanotechnology and computational neuroscience, and developing international policies to
reduce the risk of catastrophic accidents.
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Reform Good - State Not Always Racist
Too sweeping to say working-through-State never counters racism heres 7 concrete
examples:
Seligman 11 Brad Seligman Lead Counsel, Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc The nationwide class action
gender discrimination case against Wal-Mart Stores and founder of the Impact Fund, which provides financial
and technicalassistance and representation for complex public interest litigation Clearinghouse REVIEW
Journal of Poverty Law and Policy JanuaryFebruary 2011
http://www.impactfund.org/downloads/Resources/UsingLawForChange-Seligman.pdf
Litigation as a tool for social change has a long and proud tradition in the United States. In the nineteenth century
cases were brought to challenge discriminatory laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act and to
advance labor rights and the rights of women and people of color. In the twentieth century the epic
battle to dismantle Jim Crow laws and the separate but equal doctrine culminated in the famous
Brown v. Board of Education decision. In the 1960s federal rules were developed to make class action
litigation more feasible, and courts approved massive institutional-change cases against industries
and governmental units.1 In the 1970s environmental litigation, aided by the passage of federal laws such as the National
Environmental Policy Act, became common. Starting in the 1980s, however, social justice litigation has become more challenging to pursue
due to more conservative judges, tougher class certification and substantive law decisions, more demanding attorney-fee and cost-recovery
requirements, the decline in federal enforcement of civil rights and environmental laws, and cutbacks and restrictions on legal services funding.2 Still,
such litigation remains a potent weapon for change . In recent years the environmental justice and disability rights movements
have shown that the path remains open for innovative litigation. Today we nevertheless must
be more strategic and thoughtful
about how we use litigation. Here I describe a holistic model of social justice litigation that includes adroit
use of the media, coalitions, and working partnerships with community and grassroots organizations and
other forms of advocacy. I explore the range of procedural devices in the social justice litigators tool box. And I remind readers to take pride
in and enjoy their work.
And, meaningful reformism now disproves sweeping claim.

Farber 98 Daniel A., Associate Dean for Faculty and Research, and Henry J. Fletcher Professor of Law,
University of Minnesota. J.D., summa cum laude, University of Illinois School of Law, 1975, KRINOCK
LECTURE SERIES: IS AMERICAN LAW INHERENTLY RACIST?, 15 T.M. Cooley L. Rev. 361, lexis
PROFESSOR FARBER: As I was getting ready to leave for the airport, my wife gave me a final piece of advice about this debate. She said, "Don't be
too reasonable." Nevertheless, I would like to begin by stressing some common ground that I think may get lost because the debate format naturally
encourages us to take adversarial positions. In reality, Professor Delgado and I share a great deal in our views of law and American society. Both of us
see the issue of racial inequality as being central and requiring the most serious possible attention. Both of us reject the conservative dogma of color
blindness, and both of us, as I think will be shown tonight, believe that one imperative need is for dialogue and discussion of this topic if we are to make
any progress. So we do have something in common. But we also have a fundamental disagreement, I think, a disagreement that is illustrated by the fact
that we are on the opposite sides of this debate about the inherent racism of American law . As Professor
Delgado said in his introductory remarks, critical race theory'sview is essentially that racism is embedded in the DNA of American law. And that in effect,
racism is not merely a widespread blemish on American law, but is instead, a radical infection that goes right to the heart of the legal system. I disagree
with that for reasons that I will hopefully make clear. [*375] I think that this thesis rests on a one-sided view of the legal system. I think that it is based on
a misunderstanding of some of the fundamental principles of the system. I think in the end, despite what I know are Professor Delgado's good intentions,
that the inherent racism position (and critical race theory, in general) risks being more destructive than constructive
in terms of advancing our national conversation on race. I noticed that Professor Delgado postponed the issue of inherent racism,
or the inherency of racism, until his next ten minutes. I may also put off, to some extent, my discussion of that point as well, though I will refer to it briefly.
Let me begin with the vision of the American legal system that Professor Delgado presented in his first twenty minutes. I do not intend to deny the reality
one might
of the dark side of American law in American legal history, and that dark side has indeed been very bad at times. Nevertheless, I think
equally point to some more positive aspects of American legal society, and that we get only a skewed and
incomplete picture if we focus only on one side of the picture: if we ignore the Thirteenth, n15 Fourteenth, n16
and Fifteenth n17 Amendments; if we ignore Brown v. Board of Education n18 and the work of the Warren Court; if we
ignore the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, n19 1965, n20 and 1990; n21 and if we ignore or minimize the commitment to affirmative action
that many American institutions, especially educational institutions, have had for the past two decades. I do not think you have to be a
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triumphalist to think that these are important developments-you only have to be a realist. Similarly, as serious as the problem of racial inequality remains
in our society, it
is also unrealistic to ignore the considerable amount of progress that has been made.
Consider the emergence of the black middle class in the last generation or generation and a half, and the [*376]
integration of important American institutions such as big-city police forces, which are important in the day-to-day lives of many
minority people. The military has sometimes been described as the most successfully integrated institution in American society. We all know, as well,
that the number of minority lawyers has risen substantially. In state and federal legislatures, there was
no such thing as a black caucus in Congress thirty or forty years ago, because there would not have been enough black people
present to call a caucus. And do not forget the considerable evidence of sharp changes in white attitudes over
that period in a more favorable and tolerant direction.
Reforms are possible and desirable---tangible change outweighs the risk of cooption
and is still a better strategy than the alt
Omi and Winant 13 [Michael Omi, and Howard Winant, Resistance is futile?: a response to Feagin and
Elias, Ethnic and Racial Studies Volume 36, Issue 6, p. 961-973, 2013 Special Issue: Symposium - Rethinking
Racial Formation Theory]
Feagin and Elias's account, white racist rule in the USA appears unalterable and permanent. There is little sense that the
In
white racial frame evoked by systemic racism theory changes in significant ways over historical time.
They dismiss important rearrangements and reforms as merely a distraction from more ingrained
structural oppressions and deep lying inequalities that continue to define US society (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21). Feagin
and Elias use a concept they call surface flexibility to argue that white elites frame racial realities in ways that suggest change, but
are merely engineered to reinforce the underlying structure of racial oppression. Feagin and Elias say the phrase racial democracy
is an oxymoron a word defined in the dictionary as a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms. If they mean the USA is a contradictory and incomplete democracy in
respect to race and racism issues, we agree. If they mean that people of colour have no democratic
rights or political power in the USA, we disagree. The USA is a racially despotic country in many ways, but in our view it is also in many respects a racial
democracy, capable of being influenced towards more or less inclusive and redistributive economic policies, social policies, or for
that matter, imperial policies. What is distinctive about our own epoch in the USA (post-Second World War to the present) with respect to race and racism? Over the past decades there has been a steady drumbeat of efforts to contain
and neutralize civil rights, to restrict racial democracy, and to maintain or even increase racial inequality. Racial disparities in different institutional sites employment, health, education persist and in many cases have increased. Indeed, the
post-2008 period has seen a dramatic increase in racial inequality. The subprime home mortgage crisis, for example, was a major racial event. Black and brown people were disproportionately affected by predatory lending practices; many lost
their homes as a result; race-based wealth disparities widened tremendously. It would be easy to conclude, as Feagin and Elias do, that white racial dominance has been continuous and unchanging throughout US history. But such a
Feagin and Elias claim that we overly inflate the significance of the changes
perspective misses the dramatic twists and turns in racial politics that have occurred since the Second World War and the civil rights era.
wrought by the civil rights movement, and that we overlook the serious reversals of racial justice and persistence of huge
racial inequalities (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21) that followed in its wake. We do not. In Racial Formation we wrote about racial reaction in a chapter of that name, and elsewhere in the book as well.
Feagin and Elias devote little attention to our arguments there; perhaps because they are in substantial agreement with us . While we argue that the right wing was able to rearticulate
race and racism issues to roll back some of the gains of the civil rights movement, we also believe that there are limits to what the right could achieve in the post-civil rights political landscape. So we agree that the present prospects for racial
US racial conditions have changed over the post-Second World War

justice are demoralizing at best. But we do not think that is the whole story.
period, in ways that Feagin and Elias tend to downplay or neglect. Some of the major reforms of the 1960s have proved irreversible; they
have set powerful democratic forces in motion. These racial (trans)formations were the results of
unprecedented political mobilizations, led by the black movement, but not confined to blacks alone.
Consider the desegregation of the armed forces, as well as key civil rights movement victories of the 1960s: the Voting Rights Act, the Immigration
and Naturalization Act (Hart- Celler), as well as important court decisions like Loving v. Virginia that declared anti-miscegenation laws
unconstitutional. While we have the greatest respect for the late Derrick Bell, we do not believe that his interest convergence hypothesis
effectively explains all these developments. How does Lyndon Johnson's famous (and possibly apocryphal) lament upon signing the Civil Rights Act on 2 July 1964 We have lost the
South for a generation count as convergence? The US racial regime has been transformed in significant ways. As Antonio Gramsci argues, hegemony proceeds through the
incorporation of opposition (Gramsci 1971, p. 182). The civil rights reforms can be seen as a classic example of this
process; here the US racial regime under movement pressure was exercising its hegemony. But Gramsci insists that such reforms which he calls passive
revolutions cannot be merely symbolic if they are to be effective: oppositions must win real gains
in the process . Once again, we are in the realm of politics, not absolute rule. So yes, we think there were important if
partial victories that shifted the racial state and transformed the significance of race in everyday life. And
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yes, we think that further victories can take place both on the broad terrain of the state and on the more immediate
level of social interaction: in daily interaction, in the human psyche and across civil society. Indeed we have argued that in many ways the most important accomplishment of the anti-
racist movement of the 1960s in the USA was the politicization of the social . In the USA and indeed around the globe, race-based movements demanded
not only the inclusion of racially defined others and the democratization of structurally racist
societies, but also the recognition and validation by both the state and civil society of racially-defined
experience and identity. These demands broadened and deepened democracy itself. They facilitated not only the democratic
gains made in the USA by the black movement and its allies, but also the political advances towards equality, social justice and inclusion accomplished by other new social movements: second-wave feminism, gay liberation, and the
environmentalist and anti-war movements among others. By no means do we think that the post-war movement upsurge was an
unmitigated success. Far from it: all the new social movements were subject to the same rearticulation (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, p. xii) that produced the racial ideology of colourblindness and its variants; indeed all
these movements confronted their mirror images in the mobilizations that arose from the political right to counter them. Yet even their incorporation and containment, even their
confrontations with the various backlash phenomena of the past few decades, even the need to develop the highly
contradictory ideology of colourblindness, reveal the transformative character of the politicization of
the social. While it is not possible here to explore so extensive a subject, it is worth noting that it was the long-delayed eruption of racial subjectivity and self-
awareness into the mainstream political arena that set off this transformation, shaping both the
democratic and anti-democratic social movements that are evident in US politics today.
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Broad Coalitions Key
Uniting different coalitions is necessary to overcome white supremacy---the alt
recreates white divide and conquer
bell hooks 3, social critic extraordinaire, Beyond Black Only: Bonding Beyond Race,
http://prince.org/msg/105/50299?pr
African Americans have been at the forefront of the struggle to end racism and white supremacy in the United
States since individual free black immigrants and the larger body of enslaved blacks first landed here. Even though much of that struggle has been directly
concerned with the plight of black people, all gains received from civil rights work have had
tremendous positive impact on the social status of all non-white groups in this country. Bonding between enslaved Africans, free Africans, and
Native Americans is well documented. Freedom fighters from all groups (and certainly there were many traitors in all three groups who were co-opted by rewards given by the white power structure) understood the importance of solidarity-of
struggling against the common enemy, white supremacy. The enemy was not white people. It was white supremacy. Organic freedom
fighters, both Native and African Americans, had no difficulty building coalitions with those white folks who wanted to work
for the freedom of everyone. Those early models of coalition building in the interest of dismantling
white supremacy are often forgotten . Much has happened to obscure that history. The construction of reservations (many of which were and are located in areas where there are not large
populations of black people) isolated communities of Native Americans from black liberation struggle. And as time passed both groups began to view one another
through Eurocentric stereotypes, internalizing white racist assumptions about the other. Those early
coalitions were not maintained . Indeed the bonds between African Americans struggling to resist racist domination, and all other people of color in this society who suffer from the same system,
continue to be fragile, even as we all remain untied by ties, however frayed and weakened, forged in shared anti-racist struggle. Collectively, within the United States people of color
strengthen our capacity to resist white supremacy when we build coalitions . Since white supremacy emerged here within the context of
The concrete
colonization, the conquering and conquest of Native Americans, early on it was obvious that Native and African Americans could best preserve their cultures by resisting from a standpoint of political solidarity.
practice of solidarity between the two groups has been eroded by the divide-and-conquer tactics of
racist white power and by the complicity of both groups. Native American artist and activist of the Cherokee people Jimmie Durham, in his collection of essays A Certain Lack of Coherence, talks about the 1960s as a
time when folks tried to regenerate that spirit of coalition: In the 1960s and 70s American Indian, African American and Puerto Rican activists said, as loudly as they could, This country is founded on the genocide of one people and the
enslavement of another. This statement, hardly arguable, was not much taken up by white activists. As time passed, it was rarely taken up by anyone. Instead the fear that ones specific group might receive more attention has led to greater
Bonds of solidarity between

nationalism, the showing of concern for ones racial or ethnic plight without linking that concern to the plight of other non-white groups and their struggles for liberation.
people of color are continuously ruptured by our complicity with white racism. Similarly, white immigrants to the United States, both past
and present, establish their right to citizenship within white supremacist society by asserting it in daily life through acts of discrimination and assault that register their contempt for and disregard of black people and darker-skinned immigrants
mimic this racist behavior in their interactions with black folks. In her editorial On the Backs of Blacks published in a recent special issue of TIME magazine Toni Morrison discusses the way white supremacy is reinscribed again and again as
immigrants seek assimilation: All immigrants fight for jobs and space, and who is there to fight but those who have both? As in the fishing ground struggle between Texas and Vietnamese shrimpers, they displace what and whom they canIn
race talk the move into mainstream America always means buying into the notion of American blacks as the real aliens. Whatever the ethnicity or nationality of the immigrant, his nemesis is understood to be African AmericanSo addictive is
this ploy that the fact of blackness has been abandoned for the theory of blackness. It doesnt matter anymore what shade the newcomers skin is. A hostile posture toward resident blacks must be struck at the Americanizing door. Often
people of color, both those who are citizens and those who are recent immigrants, hold black people responsible for the hostility they encounter from whites. It is as though they see blacks as acting in a manner that makes things harder for
everybody else. This type of scapegoating is the mark of the colonized sensibility which always blames those victimized rather than targeting structures of domination. Just as many white Americans deny both the prevalence of racism in the
United States and the role they play in perpetuating and maintaining white supremacy, non-white, non-black groups, Native, Asian, Hispanic Americans, all deny their investment in anti-black sentiment even as they consistently seek to distance
jockeying for white approval

themselves from blackness so that they will not be seen as residing at the bottom of this societys totem pole, in the category reserved for the most despised group. Such
and reward obscures the way allegiance to the existing social structure undermines the social welfare
of all people of color . White supremacist power is always weakened when people of color bond
across differences of culture, ethnicity, and race . It is always strengthened when we act as though
there is no continuity and overlap in the patterns of exploitation and oppression that affect all of our
lives. To ensure that political bonding to challenge and change white supremacy will not be cultivated among diverse groups of people of color, white ruling groups pit us against one another in a no-win game of who will get the prize
for model minority today. They compare and contrast, affix labels like model minority, define boundaries, and we fall into line. Those rewards coupled with internalized racist assumptions lead non-black people of color to deny the way racism
we have yet
victimizes them as they actively work to disassociate themselves from black people. This will to disassociate is a gesture of racism. Even though progressive people of color consistently critique these standpoints,
to build a contemporary mass movement to challenge white supremacy that would draw us together.
Without an organized collective struggle that consistently reminds us of our common concerns,
people of color forget. Sadly forgetting common concerns sets the stage for competing concerns. Working within the system of white supremacy, non-black people of color often feel as though they must compete
with black folks to receive white attention. Some are even angry at what they wrongly perceive as a greater concern on the part of white of the dominant culture for the pain of black people. Rather than seeing the attention black people receive
as linked to the gravity of our situation and the intensity of our resistance, they want to make it a sign of white generosity and concern. Such thinking is absurd. If white folks were genuinely concerned about black pain, they would challenge
racism, not turn the spotlight on our collective pain in ways that further suggest that we are inferior. Andrew Hacker makes it clear in Two Nations that the vast majority of white Americans believe that members of the black race represent an
inferior strain of the human species. He adds: In this view Africans-and Americans who trace their origins to that continent-are seen as languishing at a lower evolutionary level than members of other races. Non-black people of color often do
not approach white attention to black issues by critically interrogating how those issues are presented and whose interests the representations ultimately serve. Rather than engaging in a competition that sees blacks as winning more goodies
from the white system than other groups, non-black people of color who identify with black resistance struggle recognize the danger of such thinking and repudiate it. They are politically astute enough to challenge a rhetoric of resistance that is
based on competition rather than a capacity on the part of non-black groups to identify with whatever progress blacks make as being a positive sign for everyone. Until non-black people of color define their citizenship via commitment to a
democratic vision of racial justice rather than investing in the dehumanization and oppression of black people, they will always act as mediators, keeping black people in check for the ruling white majority. Until racist anti-black sentiments are let
go by other people of color, especially immigrants, and complain that these groups are receiving too much attention, they undermine freedom struggle. When this happens people of color war all acting in complicity with existing exploitative and
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As more people of color raise our consciousness and refuse to be pitted against one
oppressive structures.
another, the forces of neo-colonial white supremacist domination must work harder to divide and
conquer. The most recent effort to undermine progressive bonding between people of color is the institutionalization of multiculturalism. Positively, multiculturalism is presented as a corrective to a Eurocentric vision of model
citizenship wherein white middle-class ideals are presented as the norm. Yet this positive intervention is undermined by visions of multiculturalism that suggest everyone should live with and identify with their own self contained group. If white
supremacist capitalist patriarchy is unchanged then multiculturalism within that context can only become a breeding ground for narrow nationalism, fundamentalism, identity politics, and cultural, racial, and ethnic separatism. Each separate
group will then feel that it must protect its own interests by keeping outsiders at bay, for the group will always appear vulnerable, its power and identity sustained by exclusivity. When people of color think this way, white supremacy remains
For even though demographics in the United States would suggest that in the future the nation will be
intact.
more populated by people of color, and whites will no longer be the majority group, numerical
presence will in no way alter white supremacy if there is no collective organizing, no efforts to build
coalitions that cross boundaries . Already, the white Christian Right is targeting large populations of people of color to ensure that the fundamentalist values they want this nation to uphold and
represent will determine the attitudes and values of these groups. The role Eurocentric Christianity has played in teaching non-white folks Western metaphysical dualism, the ideology that under girds binary notion of superior/inferior, good/bad,
white/black, cannot be ignored. While progressive organizations are having difficulty reaching wider audiences, the white-dominated Christian Right organizes outreach programs that acknowledge diversity and have considerable influence. Just
as the white-dominated Christian church in the U.S. once relied on biblical references to justify racist domination and discrimination, it now deploys a rhetoric of multiculturalism to invite non-white people to believe that racism can be overcome
through a shared fundamentalist encounter. Every contemporary fundamentalist white male-dominated religious cult in the U.S. has a diverse congregation. People of color have flocked to these organizations because they have felt them to be
places where racism does not exist, where they are not judged on the basis of skin color. While the white-dominated mass media focus critical attention on black religious fundamentalist groups like the Nation of Islam, and in particular Louis
Farrakhan, little critique is made of white Christian fundamentalist outreach to black people and other people of color. Black Islamic fundamentalism shares with the white Christian Right support for coercive hierarchy, fascism, and a belief that
some groups are inferior and others superior, along with a host of other similarities. Irrespective of the standpoint, religious fundamentalism brainwashes individuals not to think critically or see radical politicization as a means of transforming their
lives. When people of color immerse themselves in religious fundamentalism, no meaningful challenge and critique of white supremacy can surface. Participation in a radical multiculturalism in any form is discouraged by religious
coalition building between people of color threatens to disrupt white

fundamentalism. Progressive multiculturalism that encourages and promotes
supremacist organization of us all into competing camps. However, this vision of multiculturalism is continually undermined by greed, one group wanting rewards for
itself even at the expense of other groups. It is this perversion of solidarity the authors of Night Vision address when they assert: While there are different nationalities, races and genders in the U.S., the supposedly different cultures in
multiculturalism dont like to admit what they have in common, the glue of it all-parasitism. Right now, theres both anger among the oppressed and a milling around, edging up to the next step but uncertain what it is fully about, what is means.
The key is the common need to break with parasitism. A based identity politics of solidarity that embraces both a broad based identity
politics which acknowledges specific cultural and ethnic legacies, histories , etc. as it simultaneously
promotes a recognition of overlapping cultural traditions and values as well as an inclusive
understanding of what is gained when people of color unite to resist white supremacy is the only
way to ensure that multicultural democracy will become a reality .
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A2 Law Doesnt Change
Law is responsive to the public---an invigorated civil society is key

Cole 16 JD @ Yale, Professor of Law @ Georgetown, litigated many significant constitutional cases in the
Supreme Court, including Texas v. Johnson and United States v. Eichman, which extended First Amendment
protection to flagburning; National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, which challenged political content
restriction on NEA funding; and Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, which challenged the constitutionality of
the statute prohibiting material support to terrorist groups, which makes speech advocating peace and human
rights a crime. He has been involved in many of the nations most important cases involving civil liberties and
national security, including the case of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen rendered to Syria by U.S. officials and
tortured there (David, Engines of Liberty: The Power of Citizen Activists to Make Constitutional Law, p. 223-
230)
2. Most of the work of constitutional law reform takes place outside the federal courts. Constitutional law is conventionally understood as something
Framers did in centuries past, and that judges do in written opinions today. Since very early in the nations history, the courts have had the power to
review the actions of the political branches and to declare them null and void if they violate the Constitution. To exercise that power, courts must interpret
most of the work
the Constitution, and by those acts of interpretation, they develop constitutional law. But as the campaigns here make clear,
that goes into the transformation of constitutional doctrine takes place outside the federal courts altogether.
Overlapping state, federal, and international legal systems offer multiple possibilities for doing the groundwork
necessary for constitutional change, whether in city councils, state legislatures, state courts,
Congress, the executive branch, or international forums. The advocates featured here pursued their claims
wherever they found a promising forum. Gay rights groups and the NRA looked principally to the states, deploying a federalist
strategy in an attempt to establish principles in state statutory and constitutional law long before presenting their issues head on in the federal courts. In
both cases, constitutional reform was achieved state by state before it was ready for federal recognition. The NRA also looked to the
legal
academy, and seeded and encouraged a major scholarly undertaking to unearth historical evidence to support its view that the Second Amendment
was originally understood to protect an individual right to bear arms. By the time the Supreme Court addressed the question, the academy had marked
the war, in both Heller and McDonald, the Court cited and relied heavily on the evidence and arguments the scholars had developed over two decades.
In the war on terror, human rights groups initially directed much of their advocacy overseas, using the international language of human
rights and enlisting the aid of foreign populations and governments to pressure the US government to respect those rights in their treatment of foreign
nationals. They provided information to the media, lobbied Congress and the executive branch, and pursued a strategy of transparency and
shaming directed at the public at large, at home and abroad. All three campaigns also filed suits in federal court. But in each instance, that was only a
small part of the overall campaign. The courts are often more the culmination than the catalyst for constitutional change. 2 3. Framing and messaging
are as essential to a constitutional campaign as formal legal argument. Each of the campaigns discussed here succeeded in part because it was able to
advance a frame for understanding the issue that proved more appealing than those of their adversaries. Gay rights groups learned, after the
devastating loss of Proposition 8 in California in 2008, that it was better not to speak in terms of rights when advocating for marriage equality. Appeals to
notions love and commitment, they found, were more likely to reach people torn between their fidelity to traditional values and their empathy for same-
sex couples seeking to marry. Relatedly, from the outset marriage equality advocates stressed the similarities between gay and straight couples,
invariably choosing as plaintiffs couples who had been together a long time, had families, and were admirable and upstanding members of their
communities. For its part, the NRA steeled away from images of violence and aggression to frame the right to own a weapon as a check on tyranny, and
integral to the right and obligation to protect ones home and loved ones from danger. Human rights groups successful supplanted President Bushs
frame of us versus them with law versus lawlessness. The appeal of a message is in part a function of its content, but also who delivers it. Again, all
three campaigns sought out effective messages. The NRA routinely stresses the number of women and police officers in its organization; gay rights
groups recruited straight people, the more conservative the better, to make their case; and human rights groups looked to retired military leaders and
former government officials for support and legitimacy. All made an effort to identify unlikely spokespersons in order to expand their core of support. 4.
Constitutional law is designed to stand above ordinary politics, and it is not and should
The work of constitutional reform is intensely political.
not be directly responsive to political pressure in the way that legislation or executive action is. The justices role is not to represent
constituents, and they are afforded life tenure precisely so that they can decide cases independently. But as the constitutional developments traced here
illustrate, public and elite opinion are nonetheless central to the process of constitutional change. A major feature of
all three campaigns included appeals to politicians and the public at large, often conducted through traditional political channels. The NRA, for example,
has done much more to protect gun rights through its involvement in elections for public office than through federal court litigation. By grading every
federal and state elected official on their respect for fun rights, and by supporting its friends and attacking its foes, the NRA ensures that the political
process itself will be sensitive to gun rights. Gay rights groups similarly engaged wholeheartedly and single-mindedly in political campaigns. They
invested millions of dollars had thousands of volunteers and paid staff in referendum campaigns. They devoted as much time and energy to campaign
ads and public persuasion as to legal analysis. They supported legislators who backed their case, and campaigned against those who opposed their
claims. They understood that the route to a constitutional right ran through the people and their representatives at least as much as through the federal
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courts. A political campaign requires the mobilization of supporters, and here, too, politics and constitutionalism converged.
The NRA is dedicated to fostering a sense of identity in its members and supporters so that they can be more easily mobilized to act in the political
arena by voting, campaigning, or contacting their elected representatives. Their success in this regard is the envy of every other non-profit
organization. Gay rights groups have similarly fostered a sense of community and identity among gay and lesbian Americans, and encouraged their
supporters to press for marriage equality by volunteering for referendum and electoral campaigns, and contacting their representatives, and speaking
openly about the issue. Human rights organizations lack the natural constituency that gay rights and gun rights groups enjoy. But they, too, engaged in
extensive political work to further their ends, lobbying foreign governments and international institutional allies (such as the American Bar Association),
pressing Congress and executive
using the media to propound their rule of law message, advising presidential candidates, and
branch for reform on such issues as torture, Guantanamo, NSA surveillance, and drone warfare. None of
this work is constitutional in the formal sense; all of it could be described as ordinary politics, not constitutional law. Yet it all
played a necessary role in the overall campaign of each group to advance its constitutional ideal. 5. Constitutional reform
is slow, difficult, and incremental. When constitutional law finally changes, it seems to happen overnight. The Supreme Court recognized the right of
same-sex couples to marry on June 26, 2015; the right to bear arms on June 26, 2008; and the constitutional right of Guantanamo detainees to habeas
corpus on June 12, 2008. Yet the processes that led to these decisions took decades. Change happens slowly incremental steps. Take the fight for
marriage equality. Evan Wolfson writes a paper exploring the concept at Harvard Law School; some progressive cities and firms extend limited domestic
partnerships benefits to same-sex partners of their employees; state family law affords same-sex partners of their employees; state family law affords
same-sex couples parental rights analogous to straight couples; local nondiscrimination laws are amended to included discrimination on the basis of
sexual orientation; states begin to enact and then to expand domestic partnership laws to include same-sex partners; a state court requires civil unions
as a matter of state law; another state court recognizes a state constitutional right to same-sex marriage; marriage equality begins to win in legislatures
and popular referenda; the Supreme Court invalidates DOMA; and then, and only then, the Supreme Court recognizes a constitutional right to marry.
Each step along the way was a small one, but that is most often how change occurs in constitutional law. Appearances to the contrary, reform is slow
and steady, not revolutionary. 6. Civil
society organizations play a crucial part in constitutionalism. Constitutional
change reflects a transformation in how we constitute ourselves, so it should not be a surprise that
collective engagement is required to bring it about. And given how long and arduous the task of
constitutional reform is, it is unlikely to happen without the involvement of institutions devoted to the
effort. Only institutions have the fortitude, capacity, expertise, and resources, and persistence
necessary to see the big picture and commit to the long haul. From the Hawaii Supreme Court decision in Baehr vs.
Levin in 1993 to the US Supreme Courts 2015 decision in Obergfell v. Hodges was more than two decades. And the struggle began long before the
Hawaii Supreme Court decision, with the Mattachine Society in the 1950s, running through the HIV / AIDS crisis and encompassing challenges to a
range of legal and social disabilities imposed on gay and lesbian citizens. All of that work was necessary to make marriage equality possible, and little of
it would have been done without the enduring resolve of gay rights organizations. The same is true of the right to bear arms. The NRA worked
diligently from 1975, when it first established a political office, to make the Second Amendment right to bear arms a reality. It cultivated a large and
committed membership base, lobbied state and federal legislators, graded and endorsed candidates for state and federal office, supported academic
research, and educated its members, supporters, and the general public about the importance of the right and the costs of regulation. Without these
efforts, the Second Amendment today would likely still protect only state militias. So, too, with human rights in the war on terror.
Although many of the Bush administrations initiatives were reined in by his second term, the work that made these reforms possible dated back at least
the job of
to the post-World War II campaign to rectify the wrong of Japanese internment. Even in the relatively short period after 9/11, moreover,
building and maintaining pressure for the recognition of constitutional and human rights required
sustained advocacy in multiple countries, Congress, the media, and the federal courts. None of these campaigns would have
been feasible without institutions. Activists and academics alike often talk loosely about the
importance of social movements, and in the marriage equality case in particular, progress is attributable not only to specific civil
society institutions but to a broader social movement. But the gun rights and civil liberties struggles show that constitutional transformation can be
Transformation can be achieved by engaged civil society organization
achieved by engaged civil society organizations.
even without a preexisting broad-based social movement. Conversely, movements without a solid
institutional base are unlikely to succeed; consider, for example, Occupy Wall Street, a movement that inspired
lots of debate, but in the absence of strong institutions, appears to have fizzled without achieving lasting
reform. Behind any truly successful movement for constitutional transformation are the civil society
organizations that speak for, lead, and enable the movement, and that have the capacity to press for change with unwavering focus over the long
term. 7. The Constitution lives in, and depends on, us. The preceding accounts contain an important and empowering lesson about constitutional
practice. We all can, as Margaret Mead said, create social change or here, constitutional change if we act together in a sophisticated and dedicated
fashion. Nothing else ever has. Constitutional law
is not something that hovers in the sky above us, or in an old piece
of parchment to be divined intoned, and enforced by judges in robes seated behind the well in formal
courtrooms. It is something that we can all take part in shaping. And indeed, by constantly striving to
perfect it, we help ensure that constitutional law remains a vibrant and living force, and not just a dead letter
bequeathed to us two centuries ago by a small group of wealthy and prominent white men. Civil society is
the means by which citizens not only transform constitutional law, but make it their own. If you care about
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If you care about constitutional rights, the way forward should be clear: find or
constitutional law, but make it their own.
found associations of like-minded citizens, engage broadly and creatively, and do not leave constitutional
law to the lawyers, much less the judges. Of all the people I interviewed for this book on American constitutionalism, perhaps no one said it
better than the renowned British defense lawyer Gareth Pierce. She operates in the UK in a national legal system without a written constitution, but her
words nonetheless ring as true as in her own country: You know how it is, campaigning. Its years and years of starvation, famine, and then suddenly a
feast for the suspect communityAnd it
may be dangerous to think that a campaign can achieve something
without using absolutely every tool you might have, regardless of what the law is. Constitutionalism ultimately
depends on such campaigns. We must be willing to engage as citizens, in coordination with others, in
public disputes over core values. Such popular constitutional engagement does not reject the role of courts, but recognizes that courts
are only part of the process of making rights real. My aspiration is that the remarkable achievements of Evan Wolfson, Marion Hammer, Michael Ratner,
and their innumerable allies will inspire other to join the struggle for justice, because that is the lifeblood of constitutional law. That is also where hope
lies. As Roberto Unger and Cornel West have written: Hope
is more the consequence of action than its cause. As the
experience of the spectator favors fatalism, so the experience of the agent produces hope 3 By
providing avenues for citizen action, civil society groups nurture the liberty and foster the hope that are
essential to a vibrant, living, and lived Constitution.
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A2 Liberalism Bad
Liberalism isnt a monolithit can be rehabilitated to combat group subordination.

Attempts to abandon it entirely will fail.
Charles MILLS, the John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University,
12 [Occupy Liberalism! Or, Ten Reasons Why Liberalism Cannot Be Retrieved for Radicalism, Radical
Philosophy Review, Vol. 15, No. 2, 2012, p. 305-323,
http://pages.uoregon.edu/koopman/siap/readings/Mills_Charles_RPR.pdf]
From this perspective, it will be appreciated that liberalism
is not a monolith but an umbrella term for a variety of
positions. Here are some examples-some familiar, some perhaps less so: Varieties of Liberalism Left-wing (social democratic) vs. Right-wing
(market conservative) Kantian vs. Lockean Contractarian vs. Utilitarian Corporate vs. Democratic Social vs. Individualist Comprehensive vs. Political
Ideal-theory vs. Non-ideal-theory Patriarchal vs. Feminist Imperial vs. Anti-imperial Racial vs. Anti-racial Color-blind vs. Color-conscious Etc. It
is not
the case, of course, that these different species of liberalism have been equally represented in the
ideational sphere, or equally implemented in the institutional sphere. On the contrary, some have been dominant while
others have been subordinate, and some have never, at least in the full sense, been implemented at all. But nonetheless, I suggest they all count as
liberalisms and as such they are all supposed to have certain elements in common, even those characterized by gender and racial exclusions. (My
motivation for making these last varieties of liberalism rather than deviations from liberalism is precisely to challenge liberalism's self- congratulatory
history, which holds an idealized Platonized liberalism aloft, untainted by its actual record of complicity with oppressive social systems.) So the initial
question we should always ask people making generalizations about "liberalism" is: What particular variety of liberalism do you mean? And are your
generalizations really true about all the possible kinds of liberalism, or only a subset? Here is a characterization of liberalism from a very respectable
source, the British political theorist, John Gray: Common to all variants of the liberal tradition is a definite conception, distinctively modern in character, of
man and society.... It is individualist, in that it asserts the moral primacy of the person against the claims of any social collectivity; egalitarian, inasmuch
as it confers on all men the same moral status and denies the relevance to legal or political order of differences in moral worth among human beings;
universalist, affirming the moral unity of the human species and according a secondary importance to specific historic associations and cultural forms;
and meliorist in its affirmation of the corrigibility and improvability of all social institutions and political arrangements. It is this conception of man and
What generate the different
society which gives liberalism a definite identity which transcends its vast internal variety and complexity.2
varieties of liberalism are different concepts of individualism, different claims about how egalitarianism
should be construed or realized, more or less inclusionary readings of universalism (Gray's characterization sanitizes
liberalism's actual sexist and racist history), different views of what count as desirable improvements, conflicting
normative balancings of liberal values (freedom, equality) and competing theoretical prognoses about how best they
can be realized in the light of (contested) socio-historical facts. The huge potential for disagreement about
all of these explains how a common liberal core can produce such a wide range of variants. Moreover, we
need to take into account not merely the spectrum of actual liberalisms but also hypothetical liberalisms that could be generated through novel framings
of some or all of the above. So one would need to differentiate dominant versions of liberalism from oppositional versions, and actual from possible
variants. Once
the breadth of the range of liberalisms is appreciated-dominant and subordinate, actual and potential-the
obvious question then raised is: Even if actual dominant liberalisms have been conservative in various
ways (corporate, patriarchal, racist) why does this rule out the development of emancipatory, radical
liberalisms? One kind of answer is the following (call this the internalist answer): Because there is an immanent
conceptual/normative logic to liberalism as a political ideology that precludes any emancipatory
development of it. Another kind of answer is the following (call this the externalist answer): It doesn't. The historic
domination of conservative exclusionary liberalisms is the result of group interests, group power, and
successful group political projects. Apparent internal conceptual/normative barriers to an
emancipatory liberalism can be successfully negotiated by drawing on the conceptual/normative
resources of liberalism itself, in conjunction with a revisionist socio-historical picture of modernity .
Most self-described radicals would endorse-indeed, reflexively, as an obvious truth-the first answer. But as indicated from the beginning, I think the
second answer is actually the correct one. The obstacles to developing a "radical liberalism" are, in my opinion,
primarily externalist in nature: material group interests, and the way they have shaped hegemonic varieties
of liberalism. So I think we need to try to justify a radical agenda with the normative resources of liberalism
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rather than writing off liberalism. Since liberalism has always been the dominant ideology in the United States,
and is now globally hegemonic, such a project would have the great ideological advantage of
appealing to values and principles that most people already endorse. All projects of egalitarian social
transformation are going to face a combination of material, political, and ideological obstacles , but this
strategy would at least reduce somewhat the dimensions of the last. One would be trying to win mass support for policies
that-and the challenge will, of course, be to demonstrate this-are justifiable by majoritarian norms, once reconceived and
put in conjunction with facts not always familiar to the majority. Material barriers (vested group interests) and
political barriers (organizational difficulties) will of course remain. But they will constitute a general obstacle for
all egalitarian political programs, and as such cannot be claimed to be peculiar problems for an
emancipatory liberalism. But the contention will be that such a liberalism cannot be developed. Why? Here are ten familiar
objections, variants of internalism, and my replies to them. Ten Reasons Why Liberalism Cannot Be Radicalized (And My Replies) 1.
Liberalism Has an Asocial, Atomic Individualist Ontology This is one of the oldest radical critiques of liberalism; it can be found in
Marx's derisive comments, for example in the Grundrisse, about the "Robinsonades" of the social contract theory whose "golden age" (1650-1800) had
long passed by the time he began his intellectual and political career: The individual and isolated hunter or fisher who forms the starting-point with Smith
and Ricardo belongs to the insipid illusions of the eighteenth century. They are Robinson Crusoe stories .... no more based on such a naturalism than is
Rousseau's contrat social which makes naturally independent individuals come in contact and have mutual intercourse by contract .... Man is in the most
literal sense of the word a zoon politikon, not only a social animal, but an animal which can develop into an individual only in society. Production by
individuals outside society ... is as great an absurdity as the idea of the development of language without individuals living together and talking to one
another.3 But several replies can be made to this indictment. To begin with, even if the accusation is true of contractarian
liberalism, not all liberalisms are contractarian. Utilitarian liberalism rests on different theoretical foundations, as does the late
nineteenth-century British liberalism of T. H. Green and his colleagues: a Hegelian, social liberalism. 4 Closer to home, of course, we have John
Dewey's brand of liberalism. Moreover, even within the social contract tradition, resources exist for contesting the assumptions of the
Hobbesian/Lockean version of the contract. Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1755) (nowhere given proper credit by Marx5)
rethinks the "contract" to make it a contract entered into after the formation of society, and thus the
creation of socialized human beings. So the ontology presupposed is explicitly a social one . In any case,
the contemporary revival of contractarianism initiated by John Rawls's 1971 A Theory of justice makes the contract a thought experiment, a "device of
representation," rather than a literal or even metaphorical anthropological account. The communitarian/ contractarian debates of the 1980s onwards
recapitulated much of the "asocial" critique of contractarian liberalism (though usually without a radical edge). But as Rawls pointed out against Michael
Sandel, for example, one needs to distinguish the figures in the thought experiment from real human beings.6 Andradicals should be wary
about accepting a communitarian ontology and claims about the general good that deny or marginalize
the dynamics of group domination in actual societies represented as "communities." The great virtue
of contractarian liberal individualism is the conceptual room it provides for hegemonic norms to be
critically evaluated through the epistemic and moral distancing from Sittlichkeit that the contract, as an
intellectual device, provides. 2. Liberalism Cannot Recognize Groups and Group Oppression in Its
Ontology-I (Macro) The second point needs to be logically distinguished from the first, since a theory could acknowledge the social shaping of
individuals while denying that group oppression is central to that shaping. (So #1 is necessary, but not sufficient, for #2.) The Marxist critique, of course,
was supposed to encapsulate both points: people were shaped by society and society (post- "primitive communism") was class-dominated. The ontology
radicals would demand a richer ontology that can accommodate the
was social and it was an ontology of class. Today
realities of gender and racial oppression also. But whatever candidates are put forward, the, key claim is that a liberal
framework cannot accommodate an ontology of groups in relations of domination and subordination.
To the extent that liberalism recognizes social groups, these are basically conceived of as voluntary
associations that one chooses to join or not join, which is obviously very different from, say, class, race, and gender memberships. But this
evasive ontology, which obfuscates the most central and obvious fact about all societies since
humanity exited the hunting-and-gathering stage-viz., that they are characterized by oppressions of one
kind or another-is not a definitional constituent of liberalism . Liberalism has certainly recognized
some kinds of oppression: the absolutism it opposed in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, the Nazism and Stalinism it
opposed in the twentieth century. Liberalism's failure to systematically address structural oppression in supposedly
liberal-democratic societies is a contingent artifact of the group perspectives and group interests privileged by
those structures, not an intrinsic feature of liberalism's conceptual apparatus. In the preface to her recent
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Analyzing Oppression, Ann Cudd makes a striking point: that hers is the first book-length treatment of the subject in the analytic tradition. 7
Philosophy, the discipline whose special mandate it is to illuminate justice and injustice for us, has had very little to say about
injustice and oppression because of the social background of the majority of its thinkers. In political theory and
political philosophy, the theorists who developed the dominant varieties of liberalism have come overwhelmingly from the hegemonic groups of the
liberal social order (bourgeois white males). So it is really not surprising that, given this background, their socio- political and epistemic standpoint has
Consider Rawls, famously weak on gender and with next to
tended to reproduce rather than challenge group privilege.
nothing to say about race. Rawlsian "ideal theory," which has dominated mainstream political philosophy for the last four
decades, marginalizes such concerns not contingently but structurally . If your focus from the start is
principles of distributive justice for a "well-ordered society," then social oppression cannot be part of
the picture, since by definition an oppressive society is not a well-ordered one. As Cudd points out, A Theory of
justice "leaves injustice virtually untheorized," operating on the assumption "that injustice is merely the negation of justice." 8 But radically
unjust societies-those characterized by major rather than minor deviations from ideality-will be
different from just societies not merely morally but metaphysically. What Cudd calls "nonvoluntary social groups" will
be central to their makeup, so that a conceptualization of such groups must be central to any adequate account of social oppression: "without positing
social groups as causally efficacious entities, we cannot explain oppression." Contra the conventional wisdom in radical circles, however, she is insistent
that the ontology of such groups can be explained "[using] current social science, in the form of cognitive psychology and modern economic theory, and
situat[ing] itself in the Anglo-American tradition of liberal political philosophy."9 Identifying "intentionalist" and "structuralist" approaches as the two broad
categories of competing theorizations of social groups, she recommends as the best option a compatibilist position, holding that while all action is
intentionally guided, many of the constraints within which we act are socially determined and beyond the control of the currently acting individual; to put a
slogan on it, intentions dynamically interact within social structures .... My theory of nonvoluntary social groups fits the description of what Philip Pettit
calls "holistic individualism," which means that the social regularities associated with nonvoluntary social groups supervene on intentional states, and at
the same time, group membership in these and voluntary social groups partly constitutes the intentional states of individuals. 10 If Cudd is right, then,
such a theorization can indeed be developed within a liberal framework, using the resources of
analytic social and normative theory. But such a development of the theory is not merely permissible, but should be
seen as mandatory, given liberalism's nominal commitment to individualism, egalitarianism, universalism, and
meliorism. These values simply cannot be achieved unless the obstacles to their realization are identified
and theorized . Social-democratic (left) liberalism, feminist liberalism, black liberalism, all historically
represent attempts to take these structural realities into account for the purposes of rethinking
dominant liberalism. 11 They are attempts to get right, to map accurately, the actual ontology of the
societies for which liberalism is prescribing principles of justice. What Cudd's book demonstrates is that it is the
ignoring of this ontology of group domination that is the real betrayal of the liberal project. A well-ordered
society will not have nonvoluntary social groups as part of its ontology. So the path to the "realistic utopia" Rawls is supposedly outlining
would crucially require normative prescriptions for eliminating such groups. That no such guidelines are
offered is undeniably an indictment of ideal-theory liberalism, which is thereby exposed as both
epistemologically and ontologically inadequate. But that does not rule out a reconceptualized
liberalism, a non-ideal-theory liberalism that, starting from a different social metaphysic, requires a
different normative strategy for theorizing justice. 3. Liberalism Cannot Recognize Groups and Group Oppression in Its
Ontology-II (Micro) But (it will be replied) liberalism suffers from a deeper theoretical inadequacy. Even if it may be
conceded that liberal theory can recognize oppression at the macro-level, it will be argued that its individualism prevents it
from recognizing how profoundly, at the micro-level, individuals are shaped by structures of social
oppression. Class, race, and gender belongings penetrate deeply into the ontology of the individual in
ways rendered opaque (it will be claimed) by liberalism's foundational individualism. But what those seeking to retrieve liberalism would
point out is that we need to distinguish different senses of "individualism." The individualism that is foundational to liberalism is
a normative individualism (as in the Gray quote above), which makes individuals rather than social collectivities
the locus of value. But that does not require any denial that individuals are shaped in their character (the
"second nature" famously highlighted by left theory) by oppressive social forces and related group memberships. Once
the first two criticisms have been refuted-that liberal individuals cannot be "social," and that the
involuntary group memberships central to the social in oppressive societies cannot be accommodated
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within a liberal framework-then this third criticism collapses with them also. One can without inconsistency
affirm both the value of the individual and the importance of recognizing how the individual is socially
molded , especially when the environing social structures are oppressive ones. As already noted, dominant
liberalism tends to ignore or marginalize such constraints, assuming as its representative figures
individuals not merely morally equal, but socially recognized as morally equal, and equi-powerful rather than group-
differentiated into the privileged and the subordinated . But this misleading normative and descriptive
picture is a function of a political agenda complicit with the status quo, not a necessary implication of
liberalism's core assumptions. A revisionist, radical liberalism would make the analysis of group
oppression, the denial of equal standing to the majority of the population, and their impact on the
individual's ontology , a theoretical priority . Thus Cudd's book, after explicating the ontology of involuntary groups, goes on to
detail the various different ways, through violence, economic constraint, discrimination, group harassment, and the internalization of psychological
nothing in her account is meant to imply either that they thereby cease
oppression, that the subordinated are shaped by group domination.12 But
to be individuals, or that
their involuntary group memberships preclude a normative liberal condemnation of
the injustice of their treatment.
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A2: Wilderson---Policy Key
Policy focus key to combat racism---anti-blackness is not ontological
Jamelle Bouie 13, staff writer at The American Prospect, Making and Dismantling Racism,
http://prospect.org/article/making-and-dismantling-racism
Over at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates
has been exploring the intersection of race and public policy, with a focus on white
supremacy as a driving force in political decisions at all levels of government. This has led him to two conclusions: First,
that anti-black racism as we understand it is a creation of explicit policy choicesthe decision to exclude,
marginalize, and stigmatize Africans and their descendants has as much to do with racial prejudice as does any intrinsic tribalism. And second,
that it's possible to dismantle this prejudice using public policy. Here is Coates in his own words: Last night I had the luxury of sitting
and talking with the brilliant historian Barbara Fields. One point she makes that very few Americans understand is that racism is a creation. You read Edmund Morgans work
and actually see racism being inscribed in the law and the country changing as a result. If
we accept that racism is a creation, then we
must then accept that it can be destroyed. And if we accept that it can be destroyed, we must then accept that it can be destroyed by us and that
it likely must be destroyed by methods kin to creation. Racism was created by policy. It will likely only be ultimately
destroyed by policy. Over at his blog, Andrew Sullivan offers a reply: I dont believe the law created racism any more than it can create lust or greed or envy
or hatred. It can encourage or mitigate these profound aspects of human psychology it can create racist structures as in the Jim Crow South or Greater Israel. But it can no
more end these things that it can create them. A complementary strategy is finding ways for the targets of such hatred to become inured to them, to let the slurs sting less until
they sting not at all. Not easy. But a more manageable goal than TNCs utopianism. I can appreciate the point Sullivan is making, but I'm not sure it's relevant to Coates'
argument. It is absolutely true that "Group loyalty is deep in our DNA," as Sullivan writes. And if you define racism as an overly aggressive form of group loyaltybasically just
prejudicethen Sullivan is right to throw water on the idea that the law can "create racism any more than it can create lust or greed or envy or hatred." But Coates is making
there's nothing natural about the black/white divide that has defined American history.
a more precise claim: That
White Europeans had contact with black Africans well before the trans-Atlantic slave trade without the
emergence of an anti-black racism . It took particular choices made by particular peoplein this case, plantation owners
in colonial Virginiato make black skin a stigma, to make the "one drop rule" a defining feature of American life for more than a hundred years. By
enslaving African indentured servants and allowing their white counterparts a chance for upward mobility,
colonial landowners began the process that would make white supremacy the ideology of America. The
position of slavery generated a stigma that then justified continued enslavementblacks are lowly, therefore we must keep them
as slaves. Slavery (and later, Jim Crow) wasn't built to reflect racism as much as it was built in tandem with it . And
later policy, in the late 19th and 20th centuries, further entrenched white supremacist attitudes. Block black people from
owning homes, and they're forced to reside in crowded slums. Onlookers then use the reality of slums to deny
homeownership to blacks, under the view that they're unfit for suburbs. In other words, create a
prohibition preventing a marginalized group from engaging in socially sanctioned behaviorowning a
home, getting marriedand then blame them for the adverse consequences. Indeed, in arguing for gay marriage and
responding to conservative critics, Sullivan has taken note of this exact dynamic. Here he is twelve years ago, in a column for The New Republic that builds on earlier ideas:
Gay men--not because they're gay but because they are men in an all-male subculture--are almost certainly more sexually active with more partners than most straight men.
(Straight men would be far more promiscuous, I think, if they could get away with it the way gay guys can.) Many gay men value this sexual freedom more than the stresses
and strains of monogamous marriage (and I don't blame them). But this is not true of all gay men. Many actually yearn for social stability, for anchors for their relationships, for
the family support and financial security that come with marriage. To deny this is surely to engage in the "soft bigotry of low expectations." They may be a minority at the
moment. But with legal marriage, their numbers would surely grow. And they would function as emblems in gay culture of a sexual life linked to stability and love. [Emphasis
added] What else is this but a variation on Coates' core argument, that society can create stigmas by using law to force particular
kinds of behavior? Insofar as gay men were viewed as unusually promiscuous, it almost certainly had something to do with the fact that society refused to
recognize their humanity and sanction their relationships. The absence of any institution to mediate love and desire encouraged behavior that led this same culture to say
If the prohibition against gay marriage helped create an anti-gay
"these people are too degenerate to participate in this institution."
stigma, then lifting itas we've seen over the last decadehas helped destroy it. There's no reason racism
can't work the same way.
529
Session II
A2: Revolution Backlash
Militantly oppositional black resistance generates backlash from the right and the left---it materially
reverses efforts towards racial justice
SHELBY 7 Tommie Shelby, Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy at Harvard, 2007, We Who Are Dark: The
Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity
Even if it were possible lo effectively mobilize a multicorporatist Black Power program without running afoul
of democratic values or compromising broader egalitarian concerns, this form of black solidarity may not be
pragmatically desirable because of factors that are exogenous to black communities. Thus far I have discussed this
program without much consideration for how other ethnoracial groups would be likely to respond to its institutional realization. It is reasonable to
assume that Black Power politics would engender a counter mobilization on the part of nonblacks, and not
Just whites, seeking to protect their own interests. Indeed, if Carmichael and Hamilton were correct about the essentially ethnic
basis of American politics, we should fully expect this kind of resistance. With increased political centralization and
organizational autonomy, openly aimed at advancing black interests, we would also likely see a rise in white
nationalism, where some whites increase their collective power through greater group self-organization and
solidarity, as they have often done in the past and, to some extent, continue to do even now. Such resistance would not come solely from racists,
however. Some potential allies would also be alienated by this nationalist program and may consequently become
(further) disillusioned with the ideal of racial integration, indifferent to black problems, or disaffected from black
people. Nonblacks would naturally view their relegation to "supporting roles" within black political organizations
as a sign that their help in the struggle for racial justice is unneeded or unwanted; that their commitment to
racial justice is in question; that blacks are more concerned with advancing their group interests than with
fighting injustice; or that blacks do not seek a racially integrated society. Moreover, because those who have
status and exercise power within institutions generally have a stake in preserving these institutional
structures, even if they no longer serve the goals for which they were initially established, nonblacks have well-founded reasons to
worry that black political organizations may, through sheer inertia or opportunism, become ends in
themselves. Thus, although institutional autonomy might increase the organizational independence of blacks, the overall power of the
group could be reduced because of isolation from other progressive forces. This situation would be particularly
disastrous for blacks who live in minority-black electoral districts, for they cannot elect effective political representation without the support of like-minded
nonblack citizens.
530

Abolition K - Session 2 - UTNIF 2017

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UTNIF 17 Abolition K

Abolition GRIPE Core

Abolition GRIPE Core ........................................................................................................................................ 1

Thus, our alternative affirms abolitionist pedagogies as the precondition to authentic

The (Pedagogical) Necessity of the Impossible

There is, in the end, no teaching formula or pedagogical system that

abolitionist praxis does

there are opportune moments in which it is useful to come

audacity . [End Page 17] pg. 12-17

Inmates working at UNICOR (the federal prison industry

The School to Prison Pipeline is a nationwide system of local,

There is a biometrics DA the affirmative solidifies the militaristic deployment of

That same year, another

The affirmative promotion of U.S. hegemonic control as a method of peacemaking is

Thus, our alternative affirms abolitionist pedagogies as the precondition to authentic

The (Pedagogical) Necessity of the Impossible

There is, in the end, no teaching formula or pedagogical system that

abolitionist praxis does

there are opportune moments in which it is useful to come

This is especially true in the context of STEM. STEMs emphasis on race-neutrality

The School to Prison Pipeline is a nationwide system of local,

Inmates working at UNICOR (the federal prison industry

That same year, another

The affirmative promotion of U.S. hegemonic control as a method of peacemaking is

When she does describe the specific

By repeating that the prisons power is the same

It also demonstrates that a struggle over

For the Black feminist thinkers discussed in this chapter, intersectionality is

Sex-Education correctives to Abstinence-only relies on racialized connotations of

The affirmatives investment in sexual education programs that emphasize agency,

While most of the attacks

The 1AC Shalet evidence advocates for anti-bullying legislation

Anti-bullying legislation will be implemented alongside comphensive sex ed three

Child protection discourse produces an innocence/guilt binarism that criminalizes

Abolition work also requires that

As 14 year olds are transferred to adult court, seven- and

When she does describe the specific

By repeating that the prisons power is the same

It also demonstrates that a struggle over

For the Black feminist thinkers discussed in this chapter, intersectionality is

When she does describe the specific

By repeating that the prisons power is the same

It also demonstrates that a struggle over

For the Black feminist thinkers discussed in this chapter, intersectionality is

The absence of a theorization of anti-blackness in Affirmative ensures the reproduction

The affirmatives investment in liberal democracy works to negate alternative futures

Thus, our alternative affirms abolitionist pedagogies as the precondition to authentic

The (Pedagogical) Necessity of the Impossible

There is, in the end, no teaching formula or pedagogical system that

abolitionist praxis does

there are opportune moments in which it is useful to come

Their capitalism root cause arguments reentrench an anti-black framework that

The affirmatives deferral of abolition within their anti-capitalist framework is the

what might prison industrial complex abolition look like

in the context of racial capitalism, the prison industrial complex, colonial

make room, that is, for another kind of life to flourish.

Thus, our alternative affirms abolitionist pedagogies as the precondition to authentic

The (Pedagogical) Necessity of the Impossible

There is, in the end, no teaching formula or pedagogical system that

abolitionist praxis does

there are opportune moments in which it is useful to come

In asking whether the Left is, at

the repression, torture, and

domestic political opposition to the US invasion of Iraq, or the vaster post-Cold