Rules for this puzzle: No intentional red herrings, no oddball (fishiness) methods of presenting coordinates (UTM, for example, or also having coordinates read backwards), and no leaving off the N33 and W96 just to make it more difficult. There may be more than one layer on this puzzle. Collaboration is allowed and you may ask me for hints after there has been a FTF. KEYWORD PUZZLE!
1AC – Advantage
In the squo, police are actively involved in the bargaining process – there’s no oversight or regulation.
Abel 17 [Jonathan, Professor of Criminal Law at Penn State University, "Cops and Pleas: Police Officers' Influence on Plea Bargaining", Published by the Yale Law Journal, April 1, 2017. https://www.yalelawjournal.org/essay/cops-and-pleas-police-officers-influence-on-plea-bargaining] SJ MC
From the opening credits of Law & Order to the pages of the United States Reports—and in many other sources in between—descriptions of the prosecution team divide its functions into two parts. Police officers patrol the streets, investigate cases, and make arrests. Prosecutors handle the adjudication—dismissing charges, negotiating pleas, and taking cases to trial. In this traditional dichotomy, the police are not involved in the plea bargaining between prosecutor and defense counsel, the most common means by which cases are disposed. Officers’ lack of involvement in plea bargaining seems to coincide with a more general intuition that executive officials, such as police officers, ought not take part in judicial functions, like deciding upon guilt and punishment, which plea bargaining essentially does. This embrace of separation of powers is not a mere academic or ethical construct. It describes the way many officers and prosecutors think of their respective roles in the criminal justice system—a system in which ninety to ninety-five percent of cases are disposed of by plea.1 The separation of powers in plea bargaining, as one prosecutor put it, is “an important bulwark against overreaching by police.”2 Nonetheless, the power to arrest and the power to decide on guilt and punishment are far less separate in practice than they first appear, and police officers in jurisdictions around the country are actively involved in plea bargaining. This Essay illustrates how officers have found ways to influence plea bargaining, both with and without prosecutorial approval. In some jurisdictions, police play a formal role in the negotiations, meeting with the prosecution and discussing what pleas should be offered. In other jurisdictions, prosecutors insist that police not be involved at all, lest their involvement compromise the prosecutor’s independent review of the arrest and investigative work done by the police. In still other jurisdictions, no formal policy exists regarding police influence, so prosecutors and police officers consult in an ad hoc manner about pleas. Officers around the country have even found ways to influence plea negotiations in the face of opposition from prosecutors. The very fact that they play any role at all in the plea process challenges the way we think about the balance of power and the internal politics of the prosecution team. The issue of police influence on pleas is part of a larger question about how officers and prosecutors ought to work together. Not surprisingly, this larger question has generated much controversy among prosecutors and police, as the two halves of the team struggle to define whether they should stay in their own lanes—investigation for police, adjudication for prosecutors—to avoid friction, or whether the friction is a productive feature of institutional design that prevents either side from overreaching its authority. Involve police in plea bargaining? Keep them at arm’s length? These are the poles of a debate for which there are no definitive policy prescriptions, despite the implications for plea bargaining and policing—implications that call into question basic aspects of how we think about the working group of prosecutors and police, commonly known as the “prosecution team.” Despite its significance, the plea-bargaining clashes and cooperation within the prosecution team have received little attention from scholars, legislators, or judges. The legislature and judiciary have provided no guidelines on how prosecutors and police officers should interact on plea negotiations, so prosecutors and officers around the country remain free to fashion any arrangement they see fit. The lack of academic and judicial attention to police influence on pleas may be a function of the low visibility of plea bargaining itself. Pleas do not produce the pageantry and fanfare of trials. Although nearly all criminal cases are resolved through pleas, the actual negotiations that take place are not easily observed because they occur behind the scenes. What back-and-forth prosecutors and police have about plea bargaining is all the more veiled because of the premium the prosecution team places on presenting a unified front to the public. For these and other reasons, police involvement in plea bargaining has flown beneath the radar, despite its implications for both plea bargaining and policing.
Police intervention in plea bargains obscures misconduct, increases propensity for sentence lengths, and allows their biases to decide convictions
Abel 17 [Jonathan, Professor of Criminal Law at Penn State University, "Cops and Pleas: Police Officers' Influence on Plea Bargaining", Published by the Yale Law Journal, April 1, 2017. https://www.yalelawjournal.org/essay/cops-and-pleas-police-officers-influence-on-plea-bargaining] SJ MC
This Essay addresses the gap in the existing literature by describing the mechanics and implications of police influence on plea bargaining. Using interviews with prosecutors, police officers, and other criminal justice officials, this Essay provides a novel account of how police navigate the plea-bargaining system. It also lays out implications, desirable and undesirable, that flow from police involvement in plea negotiations. There are numerous implications for the plea-bargaining process. For example, if officers have more influence on pleas, bad arrests may more easily become bad convictions. Officer influence may also shift the “market price” for certain plea bargains, if prosecutors and officers have systematically different views of what a charge is worth or of the importance of resolving the case without trial. The involvement of officers in the negotiations might also change the way defense attorneys bargain. There are likely a number of effects on policing, as well. The obvious risk of increasing police involvement is that it allows officers to increase the considerable discretion they already exercise by extending that discretion from the street into the courtroom. But there are potential benefits, too. Involving officers in plea bargaining may reduce on-the-street abuses if it gives officers more of a stake in building cases that are worthy of court. Some of the most harassing police conduct occurs when officers act knowing full well—but not caring—that the illegal stop, search, seizure, or use of force will scuttle any future court case. The exclusionary remedies that are supposed to deter these Fourth and Fifth Amendment violations, however, only matter if officers are invested in what happens to their cases. In addition to its practical implications, police involvement in plea bargaining also poses a challenge to the current academic accounts of plea bargaining and the prosecution team. In recent years, the prosecutor has increasingly been described as the dominant figure in the criminal justice system, in large part because of his dominion over plea bargaining. This Essay’s account of police involvement in plea bargaining challenges that view. It also complicates the growing literature about the need to separate executive and judicial functions within the prosecutor’s office, for such discussion of separation of powers never considers the ways in which police involvement in plea bargaining destabilizes the attempts of prosecutors’ offices to balance their executive and judicial functions. In a system where juries and judges decided cases, police influence on prosecutors’ plea decisions would not be so important. Juries and judges would have the final say over guilt and punishment. But in our system of ubiquitous pleas, no neutral third party reviews the prosecution team’s decisions about what plea to offer, and these offers essentially determine the defendant’s guilt and punishment. The influence officers have on this process matters precisely because it will not be checked by any outside force. For this reason, it is critical to understand the various systems and normative implications of police influence on plea bargaining. Indeed, the need to understand this influence is all the more pressing because, in the present system, the influence officers exert on pleas typically occurs in an ad hoc manner that permits arbitrariness, bias, caprice, and discrimination. A first step toward addressing police involvement must certainly be transparency and intentionality about when officers choose to get involved in a plea and when they do not.
The plea bargaining process uniquely is hard to review, but there are at least some institutional training for prosecutors that ensures they make legitimate decisions – not so for police.
Horwitz 98 [Andrew Horwitz, Roger Williams University School of Law, Taking the Cop Out of Copping a Plea: Eradicating Police Prosecution of Criminal Cases, 40 Ariz. L. Rev. 1305, 1378 (1998), https://docs.rwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1099&context=law_fac_fs] SJ MC
A criminal prosecutor in the American legal system is vested with an enormous amount of discretion in the handling of a criminal case.1 In the vast majority of situations, that discretion is exercised at early stages in a prosecution in ways that cannot and will not ever be reviewed, either by the judiciary or by anyone else.2 Most obviously, the basic decision to charge a person with a crime and the secondary decision of what charge or charges to file are almost entirely beyond any form of review.3 Any of a multitude of pre-trial decisions, including bail requests, discovery, and plea negotiations, are similarly outside the scope of any effective review.4 The United States Supreme Court has noted that most prosecutorial decisions do not lend themselves readily to judicial review and, except for some very narrow exceptions, should remain beyond the scope of judicial review for broader policy reasons.' Consequently, the criminal justice system functions largely on a tremendous leap of faith that those who wield the government's prosecutorial power will wield it in a fair and just fashion. In large part, this leap of faith is justified by the prosecutor's legal training, by the prosecutor's oath of obedience to a binding code of legal ethics, and by the fact that the prosecutor, at least on the state level, is an elected official who is expected to be responsive to the electorate. Despite those justifications, a surprising number of jurisdictions in the United States entrust the prosecution of criminal cases to police officers who are not licensed to practice law, who are not obligated to follow a legal code of ethics, and who have no particular obligation to be responsive to the electorate. The prosecution of criminal cases by police officers is a widespread practice in the lower state courts in this country. In one national survey published in 1981, twelve percent of the judges sitting in misdemeanor criminal courts indicated that a prosecuting attorney "infrequently" or "never" conducted the trial of misdemeanor defendants.' In those state cases in which a prosecuting attorney did not appear at the trial, the charges were prosecuted by a police officer seventy-five percent of the time, with the arresting officer handling the overwhelming majority of the cases.' There is also evidence that the police prosecution of misdemeanor offenses before federal magistrates in various United States Magistrates Courts is a relatively common practice.8 In only two of the many states in which police prosecute misdemeanor cases-South Carolina and New Hampshire-have the highest courts specifically ruled on and endorsed the practice, in each case finding that a police officer who prosecutes a criminal case is somehow not engaged in the practice of law.9 In three other states-Massachusetts, Maine, and Iowa-police prosecution is arguably authorized by statute, either directly or by implication. l In the federal system, the practice of police prosecution exists without any statutory authority and has been the subject of appellate review in only three published cases.' In the majority of jurisdictions in which police prosecution is common, the legality and wisdom of the practice has never been directly considered in any published court decision, despite the fact that it is not authorized by statute and appears to fly in"the face of court rules and statutes prohibiting the unauthorized practice of law. Because police prosecution exists in many jurisdictions with little or no legal authority, and because of the large numbers of defendants who have been prosecuted in this fashion, the fact that the practice has rarely been the subject of appellate review and has never been the subject of scholarly commentary 2 is quite extraordinary. This Article represents an effort to remedy, at least in part, this lack of attention to an extremely troubling practice.
No punishment or binding consequences for police allow corruption to run rampant
Horwitz 98 bracketed [Andrew Horwitz, Roger Williams University School of Law, Taking the Cop Out of Copping a Plea: Eradicating Police Prosecution of Criminal Cases, 40 Ariz. L. Rev. 1305, 1378 (1998), https://docs.rwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1099&context=law_fac_fs] SJ MC
It is clear that a police prosecutor is much more likely to be subject to certain kinds of institutional biases than is a prosecuting attorney. Several examples should serve to clarify the point. The arresting officer in a criminal case, who in many jurisdictions is also the prosecuting officer, may be in some jeopardy concerning allegations ofpolice brutality, false arrest, or various other violations of an individual's rights. One way of providing greater protection for the officer is to be sure that criminal charges are filed, because a case that never makes it through the charging stage puts the officer in a much worse posture in terms of civil or criminal litigation.' Indeed, a significant body of literature suggests that police officers commonly file charges that are largely or entirely untrue in order to try to insulate themselves from such allegations.3" Another way of providing that kind of protection is to secure an agreement from the individual that [they] he or she will not file civil charges in exchange for an agreement not to charge him or her with a crime.36 While some courts, including the United States Supreme Court, have enforced these sorts of waiver agreements under certain circumstances,37 there are significant ethical restraints upon an attorney considering such an agreement.38 Whether charges are filed or not filed for these purposes, the public is poorly served by the injection of these issues into the decision of whether or not to prosecute. One last form of institutional bias arises due to the differing levels of immunity that attach to prosecuting attorneys and police officers. In Imbler v. 43 Pachtman, the United States Supreme Court held that prosecuting attorneys, who had traditionally enjoyed absolute immunity from civil liability at common law for acts performed within the scope of their official duties, would also have absolute immunity from civil liability under 42 U.S.C. § 1983.44 The Court noted that "[t]he function of a prosecutor that most often invites a common-law tort action is his decision to initiate a prosecution, as this may lead to a suit for malicious prosecution if the State's case misfires."'45 The Court then detailed a number of hazards that anything short ofabsolute immunity would create. Primarily, the Court suggested that a prosecutor's exercise of discretion would be inappropriately altered "if he were constrained in making every decision by the consequences in terms of his own potential liability in a suit for damages. 46 Furthermore, the Court suggested that "a prosecutor understandably would be reluctant to go forward with a close case where an acquittal likely would trigger a suit against him for damages."'47 Because even the threat of litigation could result in those problems, the Court held that any form of qualified immunity would be insufficient to protect the public good. In contrast, the Supreme Court held in Piersonv. Ray48 that police officers would enjoy the benefit of a "defense of good faith and probable cause" to actions under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, similar to the protection that police officers enjoyed at common law.49 As the Court went to great lengths to point out in Imbler,there is a world of difference for the potential civil litigation defendant between absolute immunity, which stops a law suit prior to the discovery stage, and this form of qualified immunity, which relies on the proof of factual issues at a trial."0 Thus, all of the fears and concerns expressed by the Supreme Court in Imbler are very much alive and well in the arena of police prosecutions.
1AC – Solvency
Resolved: State attorney generals ought to abolish plea negotiations involving police in the United States criminal justice system.
Horwitz 98 [Andrew Horwitz, Roger Williams University School of Law, Taking the Cop Out of Copping a Plea: Eradicating Police Prosecution of Criminal Cases, 40 Ariz. L. Rev. 1305, 1378 (1998), https://docs.rwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1099&context=law_fac_fs] SJ MC
The Supreme Court's opinions in Young v. United States ex rel. Vuitton et Fils2" and Vasquez v. Hiller3 78 offer very strong support for the proposition that allowing a police officer to prosecute a criminal case is an error that falls into that category. The plurality opinion in Young held that a prosecution conducted by a prosecutor with a conflict of interest was an error that could not be subjected to harmless error analysis, largely for the reasons just noted. After describing the appointment of an interested prosecutor as "an error whose effects are 3' 7 9 pervasive," the Court continued: Such an appointment calls into question, and therefore requires scrutiny of, the conduct of the entire prosecution, rather than simply a discrete prosecutorial decision. Determining the effect of this appointment would thus be extremely difficult. A prosecution contains a myriad of occasions for the exercise of discretion, each of which goes to shape the record in a case, but few of which are part of the record...". To assess the impact of a conflict of interests on the attorney's options, tactics, and decisions in plea negotiations would be virtually impossible. Thus, an inquiry into a claim of harmless error here would require, unlike most cases, unguided speculation." 380 Similarly, the Court explained its "continued adherence to a rule of mandatory reversal" in Vasquez by noting the "difficulty of assessing [the] effect on any given defendant" of discrimination in the grand jury selection process. 38' A police prosecutor acing as the charging authority, much like a grand jury, and then acting as prosecutor of those charges, would have a completely indeterminate impact on the entire criminal proceeding. Any effort to determine from a dry record, after the fact, how the process might have proceeded had a licensed attorney handled the case, would involve, as the Court noted in Young, nothing more than "unguided speculation." 382
AG is normal means
Otwin Marenin 95, “THE STATE OF PLEA BARGAINING IN ALASKA”, Journal of Crime and Justice Volume 18, 1995 - Issue 1, https://doi.org/10.1080/0735648X.1995.9721039
In 1975, Alaska's Attorney General banned plea bargaining by prosecutors. The ban and a later evaluation of its impacts are frequently cited in the literature to support arguments that plea bargaining can be abolished with little effect on the efficient functioning of the court system. These conclusions, though, are inaccurate. Plea bargaining did not disappear in Alaska following the ban and plea bargaining is alive and well now. The research design used to assess the impact of the ban was flawed; the causal inferences drawn by the authors of the evaluation study are unpersuasive and invalid Also, substantial changes in legal guidelines and case law have occurred in Alaska since 1980. The literature on pleabargaining, hence, needs to be more careful in checking the conclusions it accepts as valid and it needs to keep abreast of changes which affect generalizations about plea bargaining derived from the Alaska experience.
Partial bans won’t get circumvented
—prosecutors follow rules even if they’re not enforced
—Alaska + El Paso empirics
—no pressure to circumvent (still pb in non-capital cases)
—other policies are normal means and solve
Gazal 5
Oren, Humphrey Faculty Fellow, Michigan Law School. Assistant Professor, University of Haifa, Faculty of Law, “PARTIAL BAN ON PLEA BARGAINS”, Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009, Art. 59 [2005], https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=law_econ_archive
Whether charge bargaining would be totally prohibited or only restricted and subjected to courts’ review, the concern that prosecutors would find ways to continue to charge bargain on the sly always exists. But these concerns should not be overstated. Most prosecutors would not be willing to violate a clear cut rule that prohibits charge bargaining or prohibits concealing it from courts, even when they believe the rule restricts them too much. Prosecutors are bound by many rules that cannot be easily enforced, from disclosure rules to the prohibition on bribery; yet few are willing to act in clear violation of these rules.157 The main problem facing weak case defendants today is that prosecutors can induce them to plead guilty while being totally in conformity with the existing legal rules. Even if a ban on charge bargaining would be circumvented from time to time, only an incurable cynic will argue that it would have no impact whatsoever. In fact, when plea bargaining was banned in different jurisdictions, prosecutors usually complied with the ban, as far as it went. For example, when Alaska introduced a total ban on plea bargaining, plea bargaining as an institution was substantially curtailed as long as policy makers were committed to the ban. 158 Similarly, a study of the plea bargaining ban in felony cases in El Paso, Texas also concluded that charge bargaining was practically abolished, with few authorized exceptions.159 Moreover, the availability of sentence bargaining would ease most of the pressure to circumvent a ban on charge bargaining. While the experience of Alaska and El Paso shows that even a total ban on plea bargaining can be enforced, it is commonly agreed that a more selective ban is even more likely to succeed.160 In the partial ban system, most of the pressure to bargain could be shifted to the permitted sentence bargaining. To the extent that the risk of illegal charge bargaining is still substantial, one can consider additional measures to reduce it. A sentencing policy that relies more on the real offense rather then the charged one can discourage charge bargaining by limiting its effect on the sentence.161 Internal prosecutorial guidelines and ethical rules can assist in preventing charge bargains, too.162 Courts can be instructed to ask the parties whether they reached any understanding about the charges, either after every guilty plea or whenever there are signals that a charge bargain might have been reached, like a guilty plea that followed charge reduction. Prosecutors and defense attorneys are unlikely to engage in an illegal practice knowing that later they would have to lie about it to the court.163
The plan is key to creating liability – forces police officers to be accountable for the lives they ruin.
Abel 17 [Jonathan, Professor of Criminal Law at Penn State University, "Cops and Pleas: Police Officers' Influence on Plea Bargaining", Published by the Yale Law Journal, April 1, 2017. https://www.yalelawjournal.org/essay/cops-and-pleas-police-officers-influence-on-plea-bargaining] SJ MC
Police officers have a variety of institutional interests that might lead them to seek a guilty plea—and a particular kind of guilty plea, at that—in cases where a prosecutor would not otherwise be inclined to do so. The typical take on the police view of plea bargaining is that officers always oppose pleas, while prosecutors embrace the pleas as a necessary part of the administration of the justice system. No doubt, police involvement in plea bargaining could play out along these lines, with police doing their utmost to block plea deals or, in what amounts to the same thing, to demand the most severe terms possible from every defendant. But there may also be times when the police are more inclined than the prosecutor to settle a case. Where going to trial would lead police misconduct to be disclosed through discovery, pretrial motions practice, Brady and Giglio disclosures, or cross-examination, police officers may want to settle the criminal case to prevent embarrassing information about the police agency from coming out.163 If an officer does not have to testify at a trial, there is no need to provide information that would impeach his credibility, such as information about his history of misconduct. Likewise, if an arrest was effected through an illegal surveillance program or with excessive force, settling the case by guilty plea would spare the police agency from having its practices publicly exposed at trial.164 Were the prosecutor the only one whose interests mattered, the threat of police embarrassment might not register. But if police have more influence over the negotiations, there would be a greater potential for pleas that help the police department to save face, even if the pleas otherwise do little for the prosecutor. A variation on this face-saving interest can be found in the conditions the prosecutors set for the guilty plea. Where there is potential that the criminal defendant will sue the police department later on for civil rights violations, the police might have a particular interest in obtaining a guilty plea—even to reduced charges—if the plea contains a promise that the defendant will not bring any future lawsuit resulting from the case. The U.S. Supreme Court has signed off on the constitutionality of incorporating an agreement not to sue into the guilty plea.165 This civil litigation context is another example where the police would have an interest in settling the case that the prosecutor would not otherwise have had on his own. Similarly, the police may want a guilty plea because the conviction itself protects against some civil rights litigation.166 Bill Amato, an attorney for the Tempe Police Department in Arizona, referred to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Heck v. Humphrey for the rule that a federal civil rights claim for damages cannot prevail if the suit’s success would imply that a criminal conviction is invalid.167 “[T]hat’s not something that prosecutors necessarily know,” Amato said, so “ I went to my city prosecutor’s office one day without any case pending” and told the prosecutor about this doctrine: “‘Don’t plead it to the trespass, plead it out to the aggravated assault.”168 In this way, the decision about what charge to plead a defendant to has implications for the police department’s civil liability—implications that the prosecutor likely would not know, or care, about if the police were not involved in the negotiation process. Another example where police may push for a particular plea offer is in cases involving officers as defendants. As noted earlier, certain guilty pleas will strip officers of their law enforcement credentials and pensions, while others will not.169 The takeaway from this discussion is that the police may have their own interests in settling cases without trial, distinct from prosecutors’ interests. If the police have greater influence in the plea-bargaining process, these self-interested reasons are more likely to affect the plea negotiations than if prosecutors retain complete control.
1AC – Framing
The role of the ballot is to vote for the policy that best reduces oppression.
Curry 14, Tommy, The Cost of a Thing: A Kingian Reformulation of a Living Wage Argument in the 21st Century, Victory Briefs, 2014, *brackets in original text
Despite the pronouncement of debate as an activity and intellectual exercise pointing to the real world consequences of dialogue, thinking, and (personal) politics when addressing issues of racism, sexism, economic disparity, global conflicts, and death, many of the discussions concerning these ongoing challenges to humanity are fixed to a paradigm which sees the adjudication of material disparities and sociological realities as the conquest of one ideal theory “Ideal Theory as Ideology,” Charles Mills outlines the problem contemporary theoretical-performance styles in policy debate and value-weighing in Lincoln-Douglass are confronted with in their attempts to get at the concrete problems in our societies. At the outset, Mills concedes that “ideal theory applies to moral theory as a whole (at least to normative ethics as against metaethics); since ethics deals by definitiocan with normative/prescriptive/evaluative issues, against factual/descriptive issues.” At the most general level, the conceptual chasm between what emerges as actual problems in the world (e.g.: racism, sexism, poverty, disease, etc.) and how we frame such problems theoretically—the assumptions and shared ideologies we depend upon for our problems to be heard and accepted as a worthy “problem” by an audience—is the most obvious call for an anti-ethical paradigm, since such a paradigm insists on the actual as the basis of what can be considered normatively. Mills, however, describes this chasm as a problem of an ideal-as-descriptive model which argues that for any actual-empirical-observable social phenomenon (P), an ideal of (P) is necessarily a representation of that phenomenon. In the idealization of a social phenomenon (P), one “necessarily has to abstract away from certain features” of (P) that is observed before abstraction occurs. ¶ This gap between what is actual (in the world), and what is represented by theories and politics of debaters proposed in rounds threatens any real discussions about the concrete nature of oppression and the racist economic structures which necessitate tangible policies and reorienting changes in our value orientations. As Mills states: “What distinguishes ideal theory is the reliance on idealization to the exclusion, or at least marginalization, of the actual,” so what we are seeking to resolve on the basis of “thought” is in fact incomplete, incorrect, or ultimately irrelevant to the actual problems which our “theories” seek to address. Our attempts to situate social disparity cannot simply appeal to the ontologization of social phenomenon—meaning we cannot suggest that the various complexities of social problems (which are constantly emerging and undisclosed beyond the effects we observe) are totalizable by any one set of theories within an ideological frame be it our most cherished notions of Afro-pessimism, feminism, Marxism, or the like. At best, theoretical endorsements make us aware of sets of actions to address ever developing problems in our empirical world, but even this awareness does not command us to only do X, but rather do X and the other ideas which compliment the material conditions addressed by the action X. As a whole, debate (policy and LD) neglects the need to do X in order to remedy our cast-away-ness among our ideological tendencies and politics. How then do we pull ourselves from this seeming ir-recoverability of thought in general and in our endorsement of socially actualizable values like that of the living wage? It is my position that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s thinking about the need for a living wage was a unique, and remains an underappreciated, resource in our attempts to impose value reorientation (be it through critique or normative gestures) upon the actual world. In other words, King aims to [we must] reformulate the values which deny the legitimacy of the living wage, and those values predicated on the flawed views of the [oppressed] worker, Blacks, and the colonized (dignity, justice, fairness, rights, etc.) used to currently justify the living wages in under our contemporary moral parameters.
Predictions of high magnitude, low probability impacts are futile --- we can’t think outside of our own cognitive settings, overcome cultural biases, and low probability is no probability
Kessler and Daase 8 Oliver Kessler and Christopher Daase. Kessler is a Sociology Professor at Bielefeld, and Daase is a Political Science professor at Munich “From Insecurity to Uncertainty: Risk and the Paradox of Security Politics Alternatives 33 (2008), 211-232).
The objective is to develop means and methods to deal with uncertainty and reduce it to risk.46 Uncertainty is subsequently redefined in terms of contingency: One may not know what the next state of the world exactly is going to be but one can have a good guess and possibly find some insurance. To calculate risks does not mean that they can be measured objectively. Not all uncer- tainties are of quantitative nature and thus understandable within the common definition of rationality.47 In particular, the evaluation of risks may vary according to the political interests or cultural context.48 If this is acknowledged, the traditional concept of determin- istic causality loses its validity. Uncertain political results and uncer- tain strategies do not follow predetermined laws, but, if anything, probabilistic laws. Thus, what political scientists can achieve at best is probabilistic knowledge - that is, knowledge about necessary and sufficient reasons and causes that may not be able to predict single events but that do identify the conditions under which the realiza- tion of specific events is more or less likely. If this is accepted, the question of how big the threat of interna- tional terrorism currently is can no longer be answered by pointing to the next terrorist act that will surely happen at some point in the future. For the fact that the current calm is just the calm before the next storm is as true as it is trivial. However, exactly such triv- ial insights that the next terrorist "attack" will happen determine current security policy discourses. There are two reasons for this. First, there are two equally inadequate standard models to examine the risk of terrorism.49 The one inquires into the motivational structure of terrorist groups and individual terrorists and tries to extrapolate future attacks from past terrorist activities. The other attempts to calculate the risk by multiplying expected losses by their probability of occurrence. The former is preferred by terror- ism experts and regional specialists, the latter by decision makers and security analysts. The problem of the first method, however, is that it cannot account for new developments and spontaneous changes in terror- ist practices. There is always a first time when new strategies are used or new targets are selected. Even using planes as cruise mis- siles in order to destroy skyscrapers was an innovation not clearly foreseen by specialists, because such behavior was nearly unimagin- able at the time. Extrapolation methods to determine terrorism risks are thus inherently conservative and tend to underestimate the danger. The problem of the second method is that it is very difficult to "calculate" politically unacceptable losses. If the risk of terrorism is defined in traditional terms by probability and potential loss, then the focus on dramatic terror attacks leads to the marginalization of probabilities. The reason is that even the highest degree of improb- ability becomes irrelevant as the measure of loss goes to infinity.50 The mathematical calculation of the risk of terrorism thus tends to overestimate and to dramatize the danger. This has consequences beyond the actual risk assessment for the formulation and execution of "risk policies": If one factor of the risk calculation approaches infinity (e.g., if a case of nuclear terrorism is envisaged), then there is no balanced measure for antiterrorist efforts, and risk manage- ment as a rational endeavor breaks down. Under the historical con- dition of bipolari ty, the "ultimate" threat with nuclear weapons could be balanced by a similar counterthreat, and new equilibria could be achieved, albeit on higher levels of nuclear overkill. Under the new condition of uncertainty, no such rational balancing is possible since knowledge about actors, their motives and capabilities, is largely absent. The second form of security policy that emerges when the deter- rence model collapses mirrors the "social probability" approach. It represents a logic of catastrophe. In contrast to risk management framed in line with logical probability theory, the logic of catastro- phe does not attempt to provide means of absorbing uncertainty. Rather, it takes uncertainty as constitutive for the logic itself; uncer- tainty is a crucial precondition for catastrophies. In particular, cata- strophes happen at once, without a warning, but with major impli- cations for the world polity. In this category, we find the impact of meteorites, Mars attacks, the tsunami in South East Asia, and 9/11. To conceive of terrorism as catastrophe has consequences for the formulation of an adequate security policy. Since catastrophes hap- pen irrespectively of human activity or inactivity, no political action could possibly prevent them. Of course, there are precautions that can be taken, but the framing of terrorist attack as a catastrophe points to spatial and temporal characteristics that are beyond "ratio- nality." Thus, political decision makers are exempted from the responsibility to provide security - as long as they at least try to pre- empt an attack. Interestingly enough, 9/11 was framed as catastro- phe in various commissions dealing with the question of who was responsible and whether it could have been prevented. This makes clear that under the condition of uncertainty, there are no objective criteria that could serve as an anchor for measur- ing dangers and assessing the quality of political responses. For ex- ample, as much as one might object to certain measures by the US administration, it is almost impossible to "measure" the success of countermeasures. Of course, there might be a subjective assessment of specific shortcomings or failures, but there is no "common" cur- rency to evaluate them. As a consequence, the framework of the security dilemma fails to capture the basic uncertainties. Pushing the door open for the security paradox, the main prob- lem of security analysis then becomes the question how to integrate dangers in risk assessments and security policies about which simply nothing is known. In the mid 1990s, a Rand study entitled "New Challenges for Defense Planning" addressed this issue arguing that "most striking is the fact that we do not even know who or what will constitute the most serious future threat."51 In order to cope with this challenge it would be essential, another Rand researcher wrote, to break free from the "tyranny" of plausible scenario planning. The decisive step would be to create "discontinuous scenarios ... in which there is no plausible audit trail or storyline from current events"52 These nonstandard scenarios were later called "wild cards" and became important in the current US strategic discourse. They justified the transformation from a threat-based toward a capability- based defense planning strategy.53 The problem with this kind of risk assessment is, however, that even the most absurd scenarios can gain plausibility. By construct- ing a chain of potentialities, improbable events are linked and brought into the realm of the possible, if not even the probable. "Although the likelihood of the scenario dwindles with each step, the residual impression is one of plausibility."54 This so-called Oth- ello effect has been effective in the dawn of the recent war in Iraq. The connection between Saddam Hussein and AI Qaeda that the US government tried to prove was disputed from the very begin- ning. False evidence was again and again presented and refuted, but this did not prevent the administration from presenting as the main rationale for war the improbable yet possible connection between Iraq and the terrorist network and the improbable yet possible proliferation of an improbable yet possible nuclear weapon into the hands of Bin Laden. As Donald Rumsfeld famously said: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." This sentence indicates that under the condition of genuine uncer- tainty, different evidence criteria prevail than in situations where security problems can be assessed with relative certainty. Contemporary dynamics in the fight against terrorism seem to result from a clash of different logics of probability. As Ulrich Beck has shown, terrorism has altered the meaning of space and time for the analysis of risk. Spatially, terrorist networks escape the logic of the nation-state and "diplomacy." Networks are neither private nor public in the sovereign sense; they represent neither a domestic nor an international "actor." Temporally, attacks always have a cata- strophic element. They are simply faster than military "threats" in the traditional sense because they happen without a contextual warning. In other words, uncertainties associated with terrorism escape the logic of risk as terrorism alters the very contours of world politics: It represents a qualitative change that redefines the very game and reality that states face.55 However, by focusing pri- marily on "sponsor states" and an "axis of evil," the current fight against terrorism attempts to reduce the interplay of those various logics to the imperative of deterrence. It is the attempt to ignore categorical shifts and its associated uncertainties and replace it by "traditional security policy." In this sense, the readdressing of ter- rorism to states that harbor terrorists is then an attempt to invoke the traditional vocabulary of deterrence and the logic of the secu- rity dilemma. So when we look at terrorism as an issue of "systemic" impor- tance, the fight represents an expansion of "uncertainty to risk" reasoning to a phenomenon that, from its qualities, belongs to the realm of epistemic probability theory. Neither the assumption of well-defined problem settings and repeatable events nor the fixa- tion of the political vocabulary or the mutual formation of expec- tations based on "known" adversaries applies. When read from the context of probability theory, the current endeavors are subject to a conflict between intersubjective epistemology and individualist ontology that manifests itself as a conflict between universal validity of statements and the particularity of contexts. While the universal- ity argument points to the laws associated with the balance of power, of deterrence and pursuit of national interests, the contextual dimen- sion points to (self-)reflexivity and contingency of one's own position. What might be true here might not be true there. Accepting uncer- tainty would make it imperative to understand the other's position and engage in a dialogue. However, in a sense, the current fight uses a universal method to fight a contextual problem. (223-6)
Only active cultivation of joyous institutional engagement can unsettle entrenched relations of power and knowledge.
-no over-arching theories, world has general state of fragility; Everything changeable and in flux, micro-level interactions of different agents, ways those interactions trickle up and percolate outwards in ways we can’t necessarily understand; To make final metaphysical determination is failed project b/c no way to make that determination b/c systems of power don’t exist at underlying ontological level, what we understand as ontology is ongoing production of little becomings; Constant recomposition; Civil rights, tianamen square, arab spring, micro-level interactions towards broader political goals coalesced into society transforming movements; Defense of debating about the aff; Role experimentation; Counter ongoing rise of Trumpism and fascism, fascist forces maintaining control at visceral, affective level; Negativity and totalizing assumptions, uncompromising negativity leads to trump, openness to strategic political compromise that make interim gains and spill over b/c can’t predict ways it spills over but know it can’t happen if don’t take steps; Don’t need to make ethical commitment about the state, all things that we should consider and have for debate, defense of debating about the aff, better to assess aff good or bad based on opportunity costs rather than picking out links based on underlying theory of the world; Don’t have to win wrong in every instance just that totalizing negative frame isn’t mutually exclusive with affs politics action, doesn’t make world worse under their frame, substantive net benefit to the perm; Don’t accelerate contradictions
Connolly 17. William Connolly, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming, Duke University Press, 2017, 125-129
Perhaps in the contemporary situation too a politics of swarming provides the most promising pursuit out of a bad lot. You multiply sites and scales of political action through swarming movements, moving back and forth between creative role experimentations in churches, worksites, consumption localities, investment, universities, research, teaching; you organize worker collectives and university enclaves where possible; you participate in new social movements, some of which are inspired and informed by earlier scouting activities; you return to electoral engagements once the movements have crystallized; and you accumulate these disparate energies and creative insights until a citizen movement becomes possible across world regions. Not all scouts engage in all these things all the time—just as no honeybee visits all possible hive sites—but resonances between them nonetheless begin to crystallize. The politics of swarming, then, is composed of multiple constituencies, regions, levels, processes of communication, and modes of action, each carrying some potential to augment and intensify the others with I know best and work out from there. Since the United States has long been a top offender, that may not be too bad a starting place. Take role experimentations that stretch out creatively to other connections and movements as they also work on the visceral register of cultural life. Such practices operate between individual behavior and collective assemblages as they activate role shifts within institutional settings. Foucault inaugurated a series of thoughts and experimental actions in this domain with his exploration of the “specific intellectual.” The specific intellectual is not a philosopher who advances a universal image of truth and presents it to a waiting state or populace. The specific intellectual is one whose technical skills and specific capacities form a niche that have become strategic during this era. The specific intellectual secedes from a quest for universal acclaim to incite attention to hidden violences and injuries and to excite modes of response to them. You may be a physicist during an era of nuclear peril or the meltdown of a nuclear facility, or a prison official during a prison strike, or an African American anthropologist during an urban crisis between the police and urban youth in the States, or a psychiatrist during a time of gay protest against the medicalization of sexuality, or a political theory professor during a strike of nonacademic employees, or a gay worker in a corporation that is reviewing its benefit policies. 4 The task of specific intellectuals is to draw upon their specific expertise, citizenship capacities, and strategic location during a key period to call into question ingrained responses to that occasion. Specific intellectuals seek ways to reconsider the habits that have governed them as they also use their expertise and strategic position to call into question rules of normalization governing prison life, sexuality, psychiatric illness, nuclear stalemate, family life, extractionist practices, or racial definitions. Specific intellectuals are scouts who periodically find themselves pressed—by their location in a bureaucracy, the protests they encounter, their skills as writer-activists, or cracks in the logic of the sciences in which they participate. The situation and niche encourage them to become activists on behalf of a cause that is crystallizing. Antinuclear activism, the reconstitution of sexual norms, the revamping of gender practices, prison reform, challenges to the death penalty, the rebirth of racialized urban zones—all of these can and have been mobilized, propelled, or augmented by specific intellectuals who work on themselves as they also help to mobilize a larger populace and to represent the situation to the media. A series of territorially dispersed writer-activists such as Rachel Carson, Wangari Maathai, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Arundhati Roy, Indra Sinha, Anna Tsing, Naomi Klein, and Bhrigu Singh creatively dramatize eco-events of slow violence outside the old capitalist centers that are too often shielded from people living in the areas in which predatory corporations thrive. 5 Such activists support the spread of specific intellectuals well beyond zones Foucault had in mind. The movement back and forth between these types and larger constituencies can become bracing. Such to-and-fro movements change specific intellectuals as they also help to mobilize larger, heretofore dispersed to working, not in the modality of the ‘universal,’ the ‘exemplary,’ ‘the just and true for all’ but within specific sectors, at the precise points where their own conditions of life or work situate them (housing, the hospital, the asylum, the laboratory, the university, family and sexual relations).” The point today is that the Anthropocene broadens and extends the ways that people in multiple subject positions can operate, not only as specific intellectuals but more generally as specific citizens drawing upon subjugated knowledges and strategic locations to work on the institutions in which they are set and the habits governing those institutions. If you are a student in the inner city, you might join protests to relieve urban blight, rework the infrastructure, and bring jobs to your neighborhood. If religious, you might bring new visitors, issues, and themes to your church, mosque, or temple. If a scientist or writer in India, Bangladesh, Tuvalu, Miami, or Brazil, you might publicize actively the effects the Anthropocene has on your area because of the CO 2 deposits left first by Western, extractive, capitalist states and now by a wide range of capitalist societies. If a dissident writer in Nigeria or the Arabian Peninsula you might dramatize the depredations imposed upon indigenous people directly and the rest of the world indirectly by the organization of corporate-extractionist-state complexes in those regions. If a dissident economist in America you might dramatize both the severe effects of eco-neglect in urban areas and the positive effects that a series of ecofriendly collectives could have in rural and urban areas. If a middle-class consumer you might participate in the farm-to-table movement, join urban farming collectives, buy a hybrid, or join a zipcar collective and tell others why; you might join campaigns to create bike lanes and rapid-transit systems and subsidize solar panels in your region, put up solar panels if you can afford to do so, or install more ecofriendly yards and gardens. If a teacher, you might change the content of the courses you teach or the issues you publicize, shift a portion of your retirement funds to sustainable investments, or write for a blog like The Contemporary Condition. If a skilled mechanic in a small town you might join a repair club in which volunteers rebuild and recirculate old appliances and furniture. If a Catholic priest you might publicize the encyclical on climate of Pope Francis to your parish; if a Catholic nun you might bring Nuns on Wheels to urban areas where the effects of climate change and urban poverty congeal together. If a climatologist, oceanographer, geologist, or paleontologist you might increase the intensity of publicity about the effects of the Anthropocene in different regions. If a tech geek you might form or join a company to perfect solar power, increase the power and recyclability of batteries for electric cars, redesign mass-transit systems, publicize new possibilities on Facebook, or build ecofriendly houses. If the logging company comes to take away your forest you might join with others in hugging those trees until the publicity presses the company to withdraw. And so on, endlessly. Each role experiment—and all in aggregate—is radically insufficient to the scope of the problems, as every day. They make you feel good but do not resolve the worldwide issue, couch objectivists love to say. You may have shifted a few role performances, but your authenticity is suspect until the system is transformed, some revolutionaries and right-wingers may chant across their lines of division. Or, later, Now that you have dropped out to gain purity you have lost any ability to make a difference anywhere, all these parties might sing in chorus. Bypass such attempts to place you in a double bind, the first bind of which is to neutralize the desire to take any action and the second of which is to demoralize you so that you do not expose publicly how the first bind works. The effect of such a double bind, when not identified and resisted, is to render specific citizens zombies who obediently play their assigned roles even when they know that those roles project a future that cannot be. 7 So one task of the scouts is to pursue micropractices of creative experimentations, as you invite potential allies in multiple subject positions to do so with you. You might soon become part of a rhizomatic complex with considerable growth potential, as constituencies in multiple places find that the issues and problems they pursue connect them to people in other places, with other creedal propensities and with other subject positions. As you proceed, avoid joining too intensely in those all-too-familiar games of mutual accusation within the Left. Those are the games in which a few seek a singular reputation at the expense of all others; they work against formation of the militant pluralist assemblage needed today. In a critical pluralist assemblage constituencies will vary not only in the social positions and creeds from which they come but also in their degrees and modes of activism. That is an indispensable feature of such an assemblage, even at times when you seek to inspire yourself and others to more intense modes of activism. Whenever possible in such an assemblage it is wise to look for inspirations to draw from others as well as points in need of criticism. If neither is available, pass them by if and when possible, to allow the focal points of positive intersection to sing more richly. A pluralist assemblage of multiple actions. The power of such preliminary modes of action is in part anchored in the cumulative effects they generate. But—as suggested in the discussions in chapters 3 and 4 on how daily activities help to organize the visceral registers of habit, belief, assumption, and mood— an accumulation of such role experiments also works on the molecular or visceral registers of cultural life. They thus may prepare us to embrace more adventurous collective activities when opportunities arise. They foster a spirituality of freedom through experimentation. You may now join a more active social movement, drawing upon connections to others and augmenting the visceral energies that have already been mobilized. A movement in one region may find itself borrowing tactics from those in others, joining with them where and when it is feasible. To and fro, back and forth. As relays between different scales of action accumulate and accelerate, a new event will surely erupt, such as radical protests in third world countries by privileged states to resist pressure on their borders by refugees trying to escape the very conditions these states have helped to create; or protests in racialized urban areas against the pollutants, degradation, contaminated water, underfunded schools, and unemployment imposed upon them; or a rapid acceleration of glacier flows; or vigilante violence by the Right against nonviolent protesters; or a dangerous deceleration of the ocean conveyor system; or a marvelous new invention that enables the rapid advance of sustainable energy to more rapidly replace the extractionist cultures that plague us. Indeed several of these events could coalesce in a perfect storm. Now to the extent movements back and forth between actions across regions and scales have already been put into play, the stage may be set to mobilize cross-regional general strikes. However, if such preliminary movements have not yet crystallized, the same events could well generate neofascist responses in several countries seeking to guard their old senses of self-entitlement. For we live in a dangerous time, when this or that crisis could erupt and powerful forces firmly committed to the old ways could intensify right-wing demands to return things to the old days through an intensification of violences already in place. The problem is that the old days are gone forever, so efforts to reinstate an old order can only intensify modes of discipline, repression, and scapegoating. The stakes of a swarming approach are high.
Our method is the opposite of reformism – it doesn’t buy into sweeping narratives that conflate change with progress nor expand or validate legal institutions – rather, it’s a contingent intervention that materially reduces violence, while exposing that the alleged facial neutrality of law is a key vector for racialized violence!
Spade 13
Dean Spade, associate professor of law @ Seattle University, “Intersectional Resistance and Law Reform” Signs Vol. 38, No. 4, Summer 2013
These critical perspectives suggest a very different method for analyzing American law, one that departs from the questions that lawyers and legal scholars, who are often engaged in single-axis thinking about systems of subjection, might ask. Those inquiries often identify the realm of “equality law” as centered in antidiscrimination and hate crime laws. They often look for places in law where particular groups are named for exclusion or could be named as protected and assume that achieving justice means focusing on reforming those laws. The critical scholars and movements I have been describing instead examine not what the law says about itself but how its operations distribute life chances. They are suspicious of formal declarations of equality and of the idea that legal governmental protections are remedies for violence rather than sources of it. They are vigilant about co-optation, asking whether such declarations have had the material impact promised. Administrative operations occurring in welfare departments, immigration agencies, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, bodies overseeing environmental regulations, departments of corrections, child protective services, and education and taxation systems have been the focus of those who refuse to accept formal legal equality or facial neutrality as the resolution of their claims. Their interventions have asked how these systems are experienced from the perspective of marginalized populations rather than from the perspective of white lawmakers who declare legal systems to be neutral or natural while in reality they center a white propertied male subject. Narrow interventions that purportedly deliver equality have not passed the test when measured against the experiences of people living on the losing end of the distribution of life chances administered by these systems. These critics reject the focus on declarations of equality that often turn out to be mere window dressing for perpetual violence.¶ Genealogies of violence¶ In analyzing purportedly neutral systems to reveal their targeted violence, critics often expose continuities of violence where dominant narratives have declared key historical breaks. National narratives of US history articulate that prior egregious state violences have been resolved, often by civil rights law or other legal reforms. The implicationn is that any existing differences in living conditions among subpopulations in the United States must be a result of merit or lack thereof. Critics contest this story, arguing that while the operations of systems of meaning and control have changed, and while certain technologies of violence have been altered or replaced, the declared breaks are fictions. For example, reproductive justice activists and others have analyzed the child welfare system’s targeting of Black families as an extension of chattel slavery, a system under which family ties between enslaved Black people were violently broken and Black motherhood was constituted as fundamentally different from the valorized white motherhood seen as central to reproducing the nation (Roberts 1993b). Prison abolitionists have argued that the US criminal punishment system is an extension of the racial control of slavery (Hartman 1997; Davis 2003). Their refutation of the purported historical break between slavery and freedom for Black people allows antiprison scholars to analyze criminal punishment very differently than if they saw the problems of the system as utterly separate from the foundational violences of chattel slavery. This viewpoint has fostered recognition that efforts to reform prisons have consistently resulted in the expansion of imprisonment. Often carried out in the name of making prisons more humane, reform results in more and more people—especially Black people, as well as other people of color and poor people—spending more time in prisons overall. The demand for prison abolition is seen as an extension of the unfinished project of abolishing slavery, and the racialized-gendered operations of policing and criminalization are analyzed in relation to their predecessors under slavery.¶ Tracing genealogies of racialized-gendered control and exploitation allows critics to look at purportedly neutral administrative governance in ways that foster very different demands than any single-axis analysis would produce. Such critiques reject the narrative that the US immigration system shed its racism when it abolished Asian-exclusion laws and racial quotas. Instead, immigration enforcement remains racially targeted, is justified through the mobilization of racist images, and perpetuates racialized-gendered nation-making goals: cultivating the life of a white European settler population and maintaining people of color as maximally exploitable and disposable by casting them as threats to that life. Indigenous scholars’ and activists’ refusal to adopt the narrative of the settler state, which seeks to portray the process of genocide and displacement as over or complete, and their constant resistance to ongoing land theft, occupation, attempts at forced assimilation, and erasure all expose the continuity between the supposed bad old days and today. Rejection of civil rights strategies, which seek recognition from and protection of US law, is a necessary element of this analysis, since indigenous scholars and activists have shown that the US government and its legal system are the most significant sources of violence and harm against indigenous people, not forces of protection (Smith 2005; Sharma and Wright 2008–9).¶ These critical inquiries and demands, and their rejection of legal-equality strategies, bring up significant questions about the US nation-state and the role of legal reform in remedying the violences of white supremacy, settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and ableism. The methodologies used by the critical traditions I have cited lead to a focus on the targeted violences of purportedly neutral administrative systems and an analysis of how those violences are contiguous with the racialized-gendered property relations that are foundational to the United States (Harris 1996). By invoking the term “population control,” these critical traditions allow us to recognize that the conditions they resist stem from a variety of administrative practices and governing logics that are often mistakenly analyzed separately when single-axis thinking dominates. When those logics and practices are viewed through the genealogies of foundational violences, formal legal change that is primarily symbolic, removing only explicit exclusions or targeting individuals acting with bad intentions, appears severely limited, and deeper questions and demands about fundamental structures of governance emerge.¶ Critical race studies scholarship has described the United States as a racial project (Omi and Winant 1986). The creation of the nation was accomplished through racialization, and racial categories and the United States are mutually constitutive (Harris 1996; Gómez 2007; Willse 2011). The governing capacity of the United States was established through racializing legal mechanisms, including the legal enforcement of a system of chattel slavery; the theft of land and the imposition of legal regimes that established the possibility of ownership for settlers while targeting indigenous people for death and forced assimilation; the establishment of an immigration enforcement system that used racial categories to determine who could become part of the nation; and the establishment of a broad range of social welfare programs that aimed to cultivate white life and distribute education, land, home ownership, and health care in racially targeted ways.9 While immigration, property, social welfare, education, and other programs are no longer allowed to include codified, explicit racial exclusions, their operations are still racialized and racializing.10 Women-of-color feminism, queer-of-color critique, and other critical work on gender and sexuality has helped us understand that the racialization processes that formed the United States and continue to operate under new guises are also always processes that produce, manage, and deploy gender categories and sexuality and family norms.11 The nation-state form itself is produced by the project of gendered-racialized population management.¶ Michel Foucault described this way of thinking about governance by suggesting that what he called “state racism” (2003, 61) is inherent to the project of cultivating the life of the national population. Foucault argued that the most prevalent form of power operating today is power that takes the population as its target, that endeavors, through a variety of means, to cultivate the life of the population and to identify and eliminate threats to and drains on that population. These threats and drains are the subpopulations that must be banished, killed, caged, or abandoned in order to promote the life of the national population (Foucault 2003; Valverde 2007). Perhaps this framework of saving or promoting the life of the national population through the exploitation or death of others is particularly visible in the example of racialized-gendered medical experimentation. Whether we look at the work of the Nazi doctors, the Tuskegee experiment, the intentional spread of infectious diseases to indigenous populations in North America, the widespread practices of medical experimentation on US prisoners, or the long history of forced sterilization of people of color and people with disabilities in the United States, we see the logic that aims to protect and improve the lives of some through exploiting, controlling, or extinguishing the lives of others (Durazo Rojas 2006). This kind of power is operating when state capacities are mobilized to ensure that borders are closed, prisons are locked down, identity documents are checked, and countless other security operations are enforced.¶ In the United States, recent decades have seen internal enemies cast as racialized-gendered figures—drug dealers, criminals, terrorists, illegals, gang members, and welfare queens. The white, propertied settler population must be protected from whatever racialized others are being targeted at the time, and images related to racial classifications, to ideas of foreignness, and to body, ability, gender, and sexuality norms are mobilized to produce these targets. Considering subjection intersectionally, examining purportedly neutral administrative systems to see their targeted violences, and tracing genealogies of racialized population control forces critical scholars and activists dedicated to transforming violent conditions to think broadly about the US legal system and the nation-state form.¶ What intersectional politics demands¶ Social movements using critical intersectional tools are making demands that are often difficult for legal scholars to comprehend because of the ways that they throw US law and the nation-state form into crisis. Because they recognize the fact that legal equality contains and neutralizes resistance and perpetuates intersectional violence and because they identify purportedly neutral administrative systems as key vectors of that violence, critical scholars and activists are making demands that include ending immigration enforcement and abolishing policing and prisons. These demands suggest that the technologies of gendered racialization that form the nation cannot be reformed into fair and neutral systems. These systems are technologies of racialized-gendered population control that cannot operate otherwise—they are built to extinguish perceived threats and drains in order to protect and enhance the livelihood of the national population. These kinds of demands and the analysis they represent produce a different relation to law reform strategies than the national narrative about law reform suggests, and different than what is often assumed by legal scholars interested in the field of “equality law.” Because legal equality “victories” are being exposed as primarily symbolic declarations that stabilize the status quo of violence, declarations from courts or legislatures become undesirable goals. Instead, law reform, in this view, might be used as a tactic of transformation focused on interventions that materially reduce violence or maldistribution without inadvertently expanding harmful systems in the name of reform. One recent example is the campaign against gang injunctions in Oakland, California. A broad coalition—comprising organizations focused on police violence, economic justice, imprisonment, youth development, immigration, gentrification, and violence against queer and trans people—succeeded in recent years in bringing significant attention to the efforts of John Russo, Oakland’s city attorney, to introduce gang injunctions (Critical Resistance 2011). The organizations in this coalition are prioritizing anticriminalization work that might usually be cast as irrelevant or marginal to organizations focused on the single axis of women’s or LGBT equality. The campaign has a law reform target in that it seeks to prevent the enactment of certain law enforcement mechanisms that are harmful to vulnerable communities. However, it is not a legal-equality campaign. Rather than aiming to change a law or policy that explicitly excludes a category of people, it aims to expose the fact that a facially neutral policy is administered in a racially targeted manner (Davis 2011; Stop the Injunctions 2011).¶ Furthermore, the coalition frames its campaign within a larger set of demands not limited to what can be won within the current structure of American law but focused on population-level conditions of maldistribution. The demands of the coalition include stopping all gang injunctions and police violence; putting resources toward reentry support and services for people returning from prison, including fully funded and immediate access to identity documents, housing, job training, drug and alcohol treatment, and education; banning employers from asking about prior convictions on job applications; ending curfews for people on parole and probation; repealing California’s three-strikes law; reallocating funds from prison construction to education; ending all collaborations between Oakland’s government and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); providing affordable and low-income housing; making Oakland’s Planning Commission accountable regarding environmental impacts of development; ending gentrification; and increasing the accountability of Oakland’s city government while augmenting decision-making power for Oakland residents (Stop the Injunctions 2011). These demands evince an analysis of conditions facing vulnerable communities in Oakland (and beyond) that cannot be resolved solely through legal reform since they include the significant harm inflicted when administrative bodies like ICE and the Planning Commission implement violent programs under the guise of neutral rationales. These demands also demonstrate an intersectional analysis of harm and refuse logics of deservingness that have pushed many social movements to distance themselves from criminalized populations. Instead, people caught up in criminal and immigration systems are portrayed as those in need of resources and support, and the national fervor for law and order that has gripped the country for decades, emptying public coffers and expanding imprisonment, is criticized.¶ Another example of intersectional activism utilizing law reform without falling into the traps of legal equality is activism against the immigration enforcement program Secure Communities. Secure Communities is a federal program in which participating jurisdictions submit the fingerprints of arrestees to federal databases for an immigration check. As of October 2010, 686 jurisdictions in thirty-three states were participating.12 Diverse coalitions of activists and organizations around the United States launched organizing campaigns to push their jurisdictions to refuse to participate. Organizations focused on domestic violence, trans and queer issues, racial and economic justice, and police accountability, along with many others, have joined this effort and committed resources to stopping the devolution of criminal and immigration enforcement. Their advocacy has rejected deservingness narratives that push the conversation toward reform for “good, noncriminal” immigrants. These advocates have won significant victories, convincing certain jurisdictions to refuse to participate and increasing understanding of the intersecting violences of criminal punishment and immigration enforcement.13 This work also avoids the danger of expanding and legitimizing harmful systems that other legal reform work can present. It is focused on reducing, dismantling, and preventing the expansion of harmful systems.14¶ I offer these examples not because they are perfect—certainly a significant range of tactics and strategies are part of each of these campaigns, and, with detailed analysis, we might find instances of co-optation, deservingness divides, and other dangers of legal reform work occurring even as some are avoided and rejected. However, these examples are indicative of resistance to limitations of legal equality or rights strategies. These demands exceed what the law recognizes as viable claims. These campaigns suggest that those who argue that a politics based on intersectional analysis is too broad, idealistic, complex, or impossible—or that it eliminates effective immediate avenues for resistance—are mistaken. Critical political engagements are resisting the pitfalls of rights discourse and seeking to build broad-based resistance formations made up of constituencies that come from a variety of vulnerable subpopulations but find common cause in concerns about criminalization, immigration, poverty, colonialism, militarism, and other urgent conditions. Their targets are administrative systems and law enforcement mechanisms that are nodes of distribution for racialized-gendered harm and violence, and their tactics seek material change in the lives of vulnerable populations rather than recognition and formal inclusion. Their organizing methods mobilize directly affected communities and value horizontal structures, leadership development, mutual aid, democratic participation, and community solutions rather than top-down, elite-imposed approaches to political transformation. These analytical and practical methods owe a great deal to women-of-color feminist formations that have innovated and continue to lead inquiry and experimentation into transformative social justice theory and practice.15
Singular political strategies are doomed to failure – methodological pluralism is necessary to any sustainable critique, which justifies permutations to any negative K- we impact turn your notion of “severance” or “exclusivity”.
Bleiker 14 – (6/17, Roland, Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland, “International Theory Between Reification and Self-Reflective Critique,” International Studies Review, Volume 16, Issue 2, pages 325–327)
Methodological pluralism lies at the heart of Levine's sustainable critique. He borrows from what Adorno calls a “constellation”: an attempt to juxtapose, rather than integrate, different perspectives. It is in this spirit that Levine advocates multiple methods to understand the same event or phenomena. He writes of the need to validate “multiple and mutually incompatible ways of seeing” (p. 63, see also pp. 101–102). In this model, a scholar oscillates back and forth between different methods and paradigms, trying to understand the event in question from multiple perspectives. No single method can ever adequately represent the event or should gain the upper hand. But each should, in a way, recognize and capture details or perspectives that the others cannot (p. 102). In practical terms, this means combining a range of methods even when—or, rather, precisely when—they are deemed incompatible. They can range from poststructual deconstruction to the tools pioneered and championed by positivist social sciences. The benefit of such a methodological polyphony is not just the opportunity to bring out nuances and new perspectives. Once the false hope of a smooth synthesis has been abandoned, the very incompatibility of the respective perspectives can then be used to identify the reifying tendencies in each of them. For Levine, this is how reification may be “checked at the source” and this is how a “critically reflexive moment might thus be rendered sustainable” (p. 103). It is in this sense that Levine's approach is not really post-foundational but, rather, an attempt to “balance foundationalisms against one another” (p. 14). There are strong parallels here with arguments advanced by assemblage thinking and complexity theory—links that could have been explored in more detail.
1AC – Theory:
1] Spec good: literally no scholarly literature advocates for universal abolition, which reduces the debate to crash affs versus court clog. -- NANCY AMOURY COMBS 2, Legal Advisor, Iran-United States Claims Tribunal, “COPPING A PLEA TO GENOCIDE: THE PLEA BARGAINING OF INTERNATIONAL CRIMES”, UNIVERSITY OF PENNS YL VANIA LA W REVIEW [Vol. 151: 1, 2002]
Indeed, American criminal trials have become so expensive and time-consuming that they can only be provided to a small percentage of criminal defendants. As noted above, approximately 90% of all American criminal cases are disposed of by a guilty plea secured through plea bargaining. Stated differently, "[e]very two seconds during a typical workday, a criminal case is disposed of in an American courtroom by way of a guilty or nolo contendere plea. Such high guilty plea rates are commonly believed necessary in order for the system to function. Indeed, even the harshest critics of plea bargaining have limited their abolition proposals to cases involving the more serious crimes and have acknowledged that reducing or eliminating plea bargaining will require the expenditure of additional resources and the simplification of procedures.
Force the neg to provide scholarly evidence that proves the contrary—the 1NC will be very theoretical. Few impacts:
A] aff ground—no spec kills both quality and quantity of aff ground—I am limited to system crash good and phil positions while the neg can read literally anything. This is especially bad given that TOC is 5 months into the topic so pigeonholing the aff into limited ground allows negs to exacerbate their reactivity advantage and gives neg an irreciprocal monopoly on frontlining and strategy. Aff ground outweighs limits because neg can still use generics to engage with affs but the 1ar will always be skewed when the aff is whole res. Turns limits because they get access to monumentally more ground than us while we’re pinholed to the one aff they can easily predict, giving them an irreciprocal prep advantage
B] education— no spec results in stale repetitive debates that don’t allow for nuanced exploration of the literature. Kills clash and research incentives which is critical education since it’s the in round and out of round method by which we learn.
2] Don’t vote on plan flaw: k2 real world education- real bills are hundreds of pages long. This is just a first draft - someone else will edit to fix grammatical errors, just like they do with real policymaking.
K
The only ethical demand available to modern politics is that of the Slave, the demand for the end of America itself. This cry, born out of the belly of slave ships and the churning vertigo of constitutive genocide, exposes the grammar of the 1AC’s calls for larger institutional access as a fundamental fortification of White Settler and Slave Master civil society by its diversionary focus on the ethicality of the policies of the United States as opposed to the a priori question of civil society’s very existence. The black body is the site of social death par excellence, having become dead by a 700-year injunction of the Middle Passage barring its subjectivity.
Wilderson 02, Frank Wilderson- The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal-Presented a t #Imprisoned Intellectuals # Conference Brown University, April 13th 2002
Civil society is not a terrain intended for the Black subject. It is coded as waged and wages are White. Civil society is the terrain where hegemony is produced, contested, mapped. And th e invitat ion to p articipate in hegemony's gestures of influence, leadership, and consent is not ext ended to t he unwaged. We live in the world , but ex ist out side of civil s ociety. This structurally impossible position is a paradox, because the Black subject, the slave, is vital to political economy: s/he kick-starts capital at its genesis and rescues it from its over-accumulation crisis at its end. But Marxism has no account of this phenomenal birth and life-saving role played by the Black subject: from Marx and Gr amsci we have con sistent s ilence. In taking Foucau lt to ta sk for a ssum ing a univ ersal s ubject in r evolt ag ainst d iscipline, in the same s pirit in which I have t aken Gr amsci to ta sk for as suming a u niversal sub ject, the subject of civil societ y in revolt a gainst capita l, Joy Jam es writes : The U.S. carceral network kills, however, and in its prisons, it kills more blacks than any other ethnic group. American prisons constitute an "outside" in U.S. political life. In fact, our society displays waves of concentric outside circles with increasing distances from bourgeois self-policing. The state routinely polices the14 unassim ilable in the hell of lockdow n, deprivat ion tanks , control units , and holes for political prisoners (Resisting State Violence 1996: 34 ) But this peculiar preoccupation is not Gramsci's bailiwick. His concern is with White folks; or with folks in a White (ned) enough subject position that they are confronted by, or threat ened by th e remova l of, a wag e -- be it monetary or social. But Black subjectivity itself disarticulates the Gramscian dream as a ubiquitous emancipatory strategy, because Gramsci, like most White activists, and radical American movements like the prison abolition movement, has no theory of the unwaged, no solidarity with the slave. If we are to take Fanon at his word when he writes, #Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder # (37) then we must accept the fact 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 other 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, 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 &a phobogenic object &a past without a heritage &the map of gratuitous violence &a program of complete disorder. But 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 a bolition. 15 If a social movement is to be neither social democratic, nor Marxist, in terms of the structure of its political desire then it should grasp the invitation to assume the positionality of subjects of social death that present themselves; and, if we are to be honest with ourselves we must admit that the “Negro “ has been inviting Whites, and 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 to say that it is almost always “anti-Black” which is to say it will not dance with death. Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the U.S. Not because it raises the specter of some alternative polity (like socialism, or community control of existing resources) but because its condition of possibility as well as its gesture of resistance functions as a negative dialectic: a politics of refusal and a refusal to affirm , a program of complete disorder. One must embrace its disorder, its in coherence and allow oneself to be elaborated by it, if indeed one's politics are to be underwritten by a desire to take this country down. If this is not the desire which underwrites one #s politics then through what strategy of legitimation is the word #prison # being linked t o the wo rd #abolition #? Wh at ar e this movem ent #s lines of po litical a ccount abilit y? There is nothing foreign, frightening, or even unpracticed about the embrace of disorder and incoherence. The desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by dis¬order 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 em-braced, and elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of blackness—and the state of political movements in the United States 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, the work will fail, for it is always work from a position of coherence (i.e., the worker) on behalf of a position of incoherence of the black subject, or prison slave. In this way, social formations on the left remain blind to the contradictions of coalitions between workers and slaves. They remain coalitions opera ting with in the logic of civil society; and function less as revolutionary promises and more as crowding out scenarios of Black antagonisms # they simply feed our frustration. Whereas the positionality of the worker # be s/he a factory worker demanding a monetary wage or an immigrant or White woman demanding a social wage # gestures toward the reconfiguration of civil society, the positionality of the Black subject # be s/he 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 civil war which reclaims Blackness not as a positive value, but as a politically enabling site, to quote Fanon, of “absolute dereliction“: a scandal which rends civil society asunder. Civil war, then, becomes that unthought, but never forgotten understudy of hegemony. 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.
Within this anti-black structure you have to ask a larger claim of liberation than that of agency—a description of the ability to make mundane and limited choices on the plantation – the affirmatives version of freedom is a predictable move that even black scholars and film theorists make in affirmation of the structures of death that reduce black performances of agency to empty speech
Wilderson 10
Frank Wilderson III red, white, and black: cinema and the structures of u.s. antagonisms 2010
We can say that White film theory is hobbled in much the same style as Black film theory, but it is burdened by a completely different set of stakes, or more precisely with nothing at all at stake onto logically. In chapter 2 I will show how dependent the explanatory power of White film theory is on the Lacanian insistence that the Subject (Lacans analy-sand) is a universal entity who exists, a priori, within a community of what Lacan calls "contemporaries" (what I dub civil society) and does not reside on what Hortense Spillers calls "the slave estate."24 Bound up in the notion of prior existing contemporaries is the assumption that relationality itself is not in question (which is always the question for the Slave). What is in question instead is the status of those prior existing relations—whether, in Lacans vernacular, the relation is sutured by "empty speech," the monumentalization of the ego, or "full speech," an encounter between beings who live either under the neurotic yoke of the moi (ego) or in a liberated or deconstructive relation to the ego. Other touchstones of cohesion that bound and elaborate these theoretical analyses of film include a sense of the universality of a domestic scene (again, I would note, slaves have quarters but not homes), and of subjective positioning by way of the symbolic order, an understanding of positioning in which violence plays a contingent as opposed to originary or gratuitous role, in the ontological schema of the subject. Due to the presence of prior existing relations in a world of contemporaries, no "fear of the fear of the world" is at stake when White theorists meditate ontologically (whether through a cultural object such as film or on a set of intellectual protocols) and find—as do their Black colleagues—capacity everywhere. It would be more accurate to say not that they find capacity everywhere, since they do not look everywhere, but that they find it where they are, among their "contemporaries," and assume its ubiquity. Unlike the Negro, there is nothing homeostatic about the White (or other Humans). If the Black is death personified, the White is the personification of diversity, of life itself. As Richard Dyer reminds us, "The invisibility of whiteness as a racial position in white ... discourse is of a piece with its ubiquity. When I said above that this book wasn't merely seeking to fill a gap in the analysis of racial imagery, I reproduced the idea that there is no discussion of white people. In fact for most of the time white people speak about nothing but white people, it's just that we couch it in terms of 'people' in general. . . . Yet precisely because of this and their placing as norm [Whites] seem not to be represented to themselves as whites but as people who are variously gendered, classed, sexua-lised and abled."25 Thus the threat of discovering oneself in one's own scholarly or artistic endeavors as "comparison" is not a fate that awaits White academics. White academics' disavowal of Black death as modernity's condition of possibility (their inability to imagine their productive subjectivity as an effect of the Negro)26 stems not from the unbearable terror of that (non)self-discovery always already awaiting the Black, but from the fact that, save brief and infrequent conjunctures of large-scale Black violence (eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave revolts and twentieth-century "urban unrest"), the socius provides no catalyst for White avowal. In short, thought—essential, ontological thought—is all but impossible in White cultural and political theory—but it is not (as we will see with Monsters Ball in part 4) impossible in the unconscious of the White film itself. This state of affairs, the unbearable hydraulics of Black disavowal and the sweetness and light of White disavowal, is best encapsulated in the shorthand expression "social stability," for it guarantees the civility of civil society. Put anecdotally, but nonetheless to the point, when pulled individually by the button, both inmate and guard might be in favor of "criminal rehabilitation," both might even believe that the warden is a "swell guy,"27 and in their enthusiasm they both might even take for granted that by "criminal" they are speaking of the inmates and not the guards, or for that matter the warden. However, while the shared experiences in the political economy of the prison—a common policy agenda, that is, rehabilitation—or the shared identifications in the libidinal economy of prison—the unconscious captation of both inmate and guard by the image of the warden—may certainly be important to any meditation on either prison economy, they are certainly not essential to such reflection. This means that they cannot break in on the mutually exclusive constituent elements that make the positions of inmate and guard irreconcilable, at least, not with such a force as to rupture that positional exclusivity and bring about the end of the (prison) world. This holds true regardless of the fact that the mobility of symbolic material, that is, the idea of "criminal rehabilitation" and the agreement on who constitutes a criminal, and the mobility of imaginary captation, that is, the image of the warden, are both without limit in their capacity for transgression. The libidinal economy of modernity and its attendant cartography (the Western Hemisphere, the United States, or civil society as a construct) achieves its structure of unconscious exchange by way of a "thanatology" in which Blackness overdetermines the embodiment of impossibility, incoherence, and incapacity. Furthermore, political economy achieves its symbolic (political or economic) capacity and structure of preconscious exchange by way of a similar thanatology. Judy goes so far as to say tha at the crux of modernity's crisis is the dilemma "how to represent the Negro as being demonstrably human within the terms of the law."28 Here, of course, he does not mean "law" in a juridical sense but rather "law" as a portal of intelligibility through which one can be said to have the capacity to access "Reason" and thus be recognized and incorporated as a bona fide subject. Through Judy's analysis of the Negro (the slave) as modernity's necessity (the Other that Humanity is not: "Simple enough one has only not to be a nigger"), that which kick-starts and sustains the production of the Western Hemisphere, we can begin to make the transition from the parasitic necessity of Whiteness in libidinal economy to its parasitic necessity in political economy. Whiteness is parasitic because it monumentalizes its subjective capacity, its lush cartography, in direct proportion to the wasteland of Black incapacity. By "capacity" I have meant something more comprehensive than "the event" and its causal elements and something more indeterminate than "agency." We should think of it as a kind of facility or matrix through which possibility itself—whether tragic or triumphant—can be elaborated: the ebb and flow between, on the one hand, "empty speech," racist actions, repressive laws, and institutional coherence and, on the other hand, "full speech," armed insurrection, and the institutional ennui. This is what I mean by capacity. It is a far cry from Spillers's state of "being for the captor" and Judy's "muted African body," a far cry from pure abject- or objectness: without thought, without agency, "with no capacity to move."29 In short, White (Human) capacity, in advance of the event of discrimination or oppression, is parasitic on Black incapacity:30 Without the Negro, capacity itself is incoherent, uncertain at best.
Civil society is parasitic on Savage suffering—it forces the Savage to enable the very violence that makes the Settler coherent in the first place.
Wilderson 10
Wilderson, Frank B. 2010. Red, white & black: cinema and the structure of U.S. antagonisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
All of the metacommentators on "Savage" ontology attribute the destabilization of energy (power) in the universe to the coming of the haole, the destroyer or predator: the White, the Settler.8 The harmonic balance of waken, orenda, manitou, or mana has yet to be restored in the universe, but Silko, Churchill , and Trask point to a moment in recent Native American history when Indigenous people in Canada and the United States began to reconnect with the power o f the universe on a grand, THE ETHICS O F SOVEREIGNTY 16 5 communal scale. They all agree that this period of rearticulated spiritual power commences in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and extends for some (especially the Hawaiians) into the 1980s. Trask suggests that, as a result of a groundswell of political activism, coupled with the reinvigoration of tribal customs—in othe r words , wit h th e revitalizatio n o f Indigenous demands for decolonization—mana was reasserted as a defining element of cultural and political leadership in the sovereignty movement.9 Trask and Deloria emphatically seek to distinguish power as it occurs in the schema of "Savage" sovereignty from power as it occurs in the schema of Settler sovereignty. They suggest that, where Settler sovereignty is concerned, power can be vested as spiritual, as in the hegemony of Christian deities and ecclesiastics, or secular, as in the power of money, civil rights, or force of arms. But the manifestation of Settler/Sovereign power differs from that of mana in that Settler power is either completely secular or, in the case of Christianity, asserts supreme dominance over the elements of the universe rather than balance within the elements of the universe. The implications of this difference for the ontological modality of sovereignty, though nuanced, are profound. Trask point s out that a high chiefly line (whos e opposit e number would manifes t itsel f a s som e sor t o f sanctioned leadershi p i n civi l society—that is, as a member of the clergy or a public official) "may bequeath the potentia l for mana, bu t the actualization or achievement of mana ... require s mor e than genealogy , i t requires specific identification by the leader with the people . . . [and ] presupposes that the people acknowledge mana as an attribute of political leadership."10 It would be all too easy to suggest that Trask's description of Native power (mana) and its legitimation is but a reconfiguration of the hegemony in Settler civil society (i.e., the communicability of Christian faith, the power of the press, the interpellation o f advertising and media , the plebiscite' s pro duction of consensus). But this is not the case. Taiaiake Alfred lays such misreading to rest by reminding us that the constituent subjects of Native sovereignty consist not only of the Human (the sole subject position of Western metaphysics) but of all the animate and inanimate creature s in the universe : "I n indigenou s philosophies , power flows from respect for Nature. In dominant Western philosophy, power derives from coercion and artifice—in effect, alienation from nature."11 This is a significant difference between the manifest content of 166 CHAPTE R SIX tribal society and civil society, but more important, it is an effect of the latent difference between "Savage" and Settler ontologies. Trask hints at this difference when she writes, "Both the people and their leaders understand the link between mana andpono, the traditional Hawaiian value of balance between people, land , and the cosmos." Although pono, balance in the universe, and mana, the power of the universe, are two distinct concepts, they are in fact inextricably bound. The combined restoration of the articulation of mana and pono in the people of the tribal community, and the articulations subsequent restoration in the leadership—by way of the people—are both necessary if Native governance is to be not only legitimate but coherent. Without both of these the idea of the tribe is not possible. These interwoven necessities index a glaring irreconcilability between the structure o f Settler sovereignty (whether spiritual or secular hegemony) and that of "Savage" sovereignty: "Only a leader who understands [the] familial genealogical link between Hawaiians and their land s can hope to re-establish pono, the balance that has been lacking in the Hawaiian universe since the coming of the haole. The assertion of the value of pono then , await s the leader with mana?12 Trask goes on to state in no uncertain terms that reclamation of mana, Native power, is achieved through a process of decolonization which directly "opposes the American system of electoral power": "Mana . . . [is] a tremendous challenge to the colonial system which defines political leadership in terms of democratic liberalism. . . . [Indigenous ] leaders embody sovereignty only if they are pono, that is , only if they believe in and work for the well being of the land and the people . In this way Hawaiian leaders exhibit mana and increase it if they speak and represent the needs of Hawaiians not the needs of all citizens of Hawai'i, or of legislative districts, or of bureaucratic institutions." 13 In other words, mana and pono not only make tribal society irreconcilable with civil society, but they make tribal society and civil society disarticulate one another; furthermore, mana and pono, as foundational to both the conceptualization and functioning of tribal society, bar the subject of civil society— ontologically—from the Indigenous world: the Settler would have to lose hegemony as the element constituent to his or her ontology in order to gain access to a world whose foundation is the interweaving of mana and pono. In short, the Settler would have to die. THE ETHIC S O F SOVEREIGNTY 16 7 Deloria, much like Trask, makes an important intervention when he splits the hair of the Settler/"Savage" conflict between the level of existence ("We have been taught to look at American history as a series of land transactions involving some three hundred Indian tribes and a growing United States government. This conception is certainly the picture that emerges when tribal officials [on the reservation] are forced to deal with [state ] officials , clams commissioners , state highway departments, game wardens, county sheriffs and private corporations") and the level of ontology ("Yet [this is] hardly the whole picture. Perhaps nearly accurate would be the picture of settlement phrased as a continuous conflict of two mutually exclusive worldviews"). Deloria goes on to explain how the mos t bana l and benevolen t impositions o f civil society made the "natural" reinscription of "Savage" ontology impossible. He begins by reminding the reader that tribal organization itself did not elaborate a collective imaginary of industrial-scale social relations characteristic of Settler civil society. Europeans looked on various tribal groups who had similar language patterns and customs in common and imagined they were encountering "nations." Deloria argues that instead of "nation" the more appropriate simile would have been "band." Although these bands sometimes came together for ceremonies, to share war parties, or to sign treaties, they would break apart whenever they became too large to support themselves and needed a large game source to feed everyone. "For political decisions, religious ceremonies, hunting and fishing activities, and general community life both the political and religious outlook of the tribe was designed for a small group of people. It was a very rare tribal group that was larger than a thousand people for any extended period of time."14 Clearly, Deloria draws here largely from the specificity of his own Lakota people in order to make comprehensive structural generalizations regarding the touchstones o f cohesion which position Indigenous subjectivity. But the specifics he gives should not distract us. He is speaking of a scale of sociability that internally disarticulates the scale of industry whenever the latter encroaches on it. Manageability and decentralized autonomy, rather than a nation-state ideology sutured by hegemony, is the primary organizing characteristic of Native life. The "banal" and "benevolent" introduction, as well as the violent and militarized introduction of hegemony as a social foundation, all but destroyed the conceptual 168 CHAPTE R SIX Religion If Ward Churchil l is the mos t prolific and profound metacommentator on the ontological modality of genocide, then Vine Deloria Jr. is the most prolific and profound metacommentator on Indigenous religion. My em framework of "Savage" sovereignty. Pono was replaced by constitutionality. Man a surrendered to Gramscia n hegemony . "Toda y triba l con stitutions defin e who shal l represen t the tribe in its relations with the outside world. No quality is needed to assume leadership, except the ability to win elections. Consequently, tribal elections have become one of the dirtiest forms of human activity in existence."15 The imposition of civil society on the Native body politic is both devastating and parasitic , devastating in tha t i t cripples the ability of Native people to think their bodies and their subjective relations through rubrics of their own cultural imaginary, and parasitic in that it requires Native people to perform a pageantry of social mimicry. Settler civil society feeds of f of this mimicry , bu t no t in obvious and straightforward ways. In other words, Settlers do not develop a sense that the content of the Settler/"Savage" conflict has been miraculously laid to rest. The affective intensity of White progressive and conservative ire catalyzed by the recent development of gambling casinos or land use disputes evinces civil society's awareness that "the Indian Wars" are ongoing. What Settler civil society is able to feed off of, however, is a condition in which Indians must now compose their imaginary of the centuries' old conflict between Settler and "Savage"—in other words, they must enunciate their Sovereign demands—through hegemony's ensemble o f questions and ethical dilemmas that ontologically enable the Settler and devastate the "Savage." The content of the conflict is of little importance when the modality of simply having the conflic t fortifies and extends the interlocutory life of only one combatant. Indian governance, then, not only functions as the corpse of tribal society in the ways described by Deloria and Trask, but lays its body down as a host on which White ethical aggrandizement can feed and through which the collective ego of Settler civil society can be monumentalized. As we saw in chapter 2, something similar transpires between the analysand (the Master) and the Black (the Slave) , though there are essential differences between the two rubrics.
The logic of the affirmative’s court reforms is both paradoxical and violent. It returns black people to the violence of the state via a civil right struggle against the civil codes of America while ignoring that it is the foundation of America that causes the violation of black bodies in the first place. The plan’s advantage area creates a spectacular exception to the violence that is made possible by the feigned legitimacy of the America empire.
Minkah Makalani 17, Black Lives Matter and the Limits of Formal Black Politics. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 July 2017; 116 (3): 529–552. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-3961472
Early responses to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement from black public figures, intellectuals, journalists, and elected officials ranged from thoughtful reflection on its emergence and core demands to romantic hopes for a new civil rights movement, criticisms of its decentralized organizational structure and lack of identifiable leadership, censure for its lack of clear policy proposals, and even a dismissiveness around a perceived lack of civility and unwillingness to engag e in meaningful dialogue. TV personality Oprah Winfrey, for example, lamented that BLM activists needed “some kind of leadership to come out of this to say, ‘This is what we want. . . . This is what has to change, and these are the steps that we need to take to make these changes, and this is what we’re willing to do to get it’” (quoted in Somashekhar 2015). While it would be easy to dismiss Winfrey as a marginal figure in black politics, she captured an increasingly popular view. Barbara Reynolds (2015) complained that, as a former civil rights activist, she found it difficult to support BLM activists given their indecorous dress and incivility. In contrast, the historian Peniel E. Joseph (2015) considers the BLM’s demands concerning police violence and the corresponding protests “one of the most profound social-justice movements” since the civil rights movement, yet he echoed Winfrey’s criticism when he suggested that the central flaw of BLM was its failure to rise to the challenge of our political present, by which he meant the failure to “craft specific and detailed policy goals, at the federal, state and local levels, that will connect creative protest and moral passion to game-changing legal and legislative changes.” Joseph (2016) would later cite the policy platform put forward by the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a united front of various BLM organizations, as seemingly emerging in response to such criticisms.1 Such criticisms suggest that black political movements, to be considered legitimate, must engage in reasoned, rationally ordered practices that are legible within the dominant political order. The focus on organizational bureaucracy, leadership, policy, and civility reflects an ethical understanding of black politics that remains preoccupied with recognition within the prevailing social order. If we take politics to mean not merely the nature of rule or simply efforts by groups to gain advantage within given fields of association (racial groups, communities or neighborhoods, cities, states, or nation-states) but also attempts to adjust or alter a group’s position within that field, we can see where the concern with the organizational and affective character of black politics assumes critical importance. A liberal black politics demands that any attempt to influence how black people are positioned within the political order structures its goals and practices so that they align with the operations of formal political rule. The emphasis here is not simply electoral politics or the mechanism by which groups might propose new laws or changes to existing laws or mount efforts to transform civil codes in the service of a desired outcome. Rather, it also entails delimiting the range of claims, proposals, and behaviors to those that are deemed acceptable to the prevailing political order; this is less a common sense than a set of protocols that guide the procedures and practices of governing. Liberal black political engagements can occur either through participation in those processes and institutions (voting in elections, holding public office, proposing policies, etc.) that are constitutive of the formal or through forms of popular protest and social activism that are designed to bring about adjustments to and transformations of those political institutions and practices. The central feature of either orientation (electoralism or social movements) is their mutual acceptance of the legitimacy of the prevailing order. Whether focused on electoral power or social transformations, much of black political discourse remains guided by a series of assumptions that include, but are not limited to, a notion of proper political action and behavior that has the potential to elicit broad-based public support and empathy, which is commonly, if somewhat mistakenly, understood as a politics of respectability. This entails, as well, the sense that altering dominant political structures can occur only through reasoned participation in its institutions. As such, theatrical confrontations that challenge those in power and are designed to disrupt public events and white social space (protests blocking thoroughfares and highways, black brunch demonstrations, die-ins) reject civil public debate. Whatever value there may be in those “creative protests” of police killings of black people would seem to reside in how well such anger translates into political participation, where candidates for elected office offer the possibility of pursuing practical reforms. Black politics seems capable of understanding BLM only in those terms that are on offer from dominant state apparatuses, whose protocols, procedures, and logics for redress are rooted in the same structures of liberal democratic governance that underpin the police’s claim of the state’s right to domestic sovereign violence. The broad-based response from black people to George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin, to the police killings of Eric Garner in Staten Island, Michael Brown in Ferguson, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, suggests something of the challenge confronting black politics. The acquittal of Zimmerman, and its illustration of the precarity of black life, prompted three queer black women, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, to launch #BlackLivesMatter, which they envisioned as “an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise” (Garza 2014). What is key in the declaration “Black lives matter” is that it refuses any simplistic call for increased electoral participation, policy proposals, and the expansion of democratic protections as an adequate response to “extrajudicial” killings. M4BL’s policy platform has drawn praise from some as a sign of the movement’s maturation, a compliment that simultaneously suggests that the BLM movement had heretofore acted rather childishly, that it can only be taken seriously to the extent that its demands assume a form generally intelligible to a political elite who might then operationalize its proposals within prevailing governing structures. Yet this platform hardly reflects a desire to incorporate BLM into the political mainstream. As M4BL signatories explain, their platform is strategic. Given the nature of their grouping, they openly admit that not all of their “collective needs and visions can be translated into policy,” which in itself stems from their belief that “policy change is one of the many tactics necessary” to move them toward the world they envision, “a world where freedom and justice is the reality.” Consisting of calls for reparations, an end to state killings of black people, social justice, and political power for black people, the M4BL policy proposals actually exceed the realm of possibility within established political norms. As such, those who would now recognize BLM as a legitimate movement on the basis of its policy platform do so by ignoring the signatories’ belief that, rather than reform, they are after “a complete transformation of the current systems,” which, they state, “place profit over people and make it impossible for many of us to breathe” (M4BL 2016). This is in line with what Garza (2014) had previously described as the central goal of BLM, which was to build a movement that affirms the lives of “Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, Black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum,” lives excluded from the civil rights discourse of access, opportunities, and inclusion that guides much of the thinking of the black political elite. Indeed, one might well say that such proposals, either as policy or as the political demands of a mass movement, are unreasonable given the unlikelihood that these will ever be adopted, though that should hardly be seen as a negative. How might we think about the declaration “Black lives matter,” if we view it as demanding something that might well prove impossible? I have in mind Richard Iton’s (2008: 13) observation that modernity “implies and requires antonymic and problematic others—[that] it, to put it bluntly, needs ‘the nigger.’” Iton acknowledges that it is reasonable for those deemed “other” to desire to be seen as normal. While such a vindicationist impulse is not unexpected, he questions whether a group excluded or marginalized as other can “viably challenge their circumstances without questioning the logic and language of their exclusion” (13). This observation anticipates the central demands of the BLM movement. “Black lives matter,” as a political language capturing the queer, the trans, the convicted, the disabled, the undocumented, and the gender nonconforming, actually insists on a radical transformation. Put differently, the statement “Black lives matter” operates through its acknowledgment of the racial reality that black lives do not matter. This is not to impugn or dismiss the claim as such but to underscore that its demand for black lives to matter involves an indictment of the sociopolitical order in which black people’s incorporation into white racial democracy occurs through their marginalization, exploitation, and exclusion. “Black lives matter,” then, against the backdrop of a liberal black political ethics, presents us with “the nigger” as the figure of a black radical politics—the paradigmatic noncitizen that suggests the impossibility of conjoining blackness and citizenship, a proposition that itself raises a foundational question for the US liberal democratic project: Can the United States survive if black lives, in fact, do matter? Western Political Thinking of the Exception A major current within the civil rights movement organized local communities and engaged in political education initiatives as part of a larger campaign to dismantle the institutional and cultural structures of white supremacy. A central belief of this movement, one might even say its guiding conviction, which has long since gained ascendency, is a view of racism as a singular flaw in an otherwise ethically sound liberal democracy. Still, efforts around housing, jobs, welfare rights, racial terror, and state violence often involved levels of community organizing and programs in political education that facilitated more radical formations, such as the Lowndes County Freedom Organization and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, two formations whose voter registration campaign and electoral strategies targeted white racial supremacy in county and state government. Indeed, it was in the 1966 March Against Fear, a march to the Mississippi state capital initiated by James Meredith to encourage people to register to vote, that Black Power emerged as a political project. Nevertheless, at its most basic, the civil rights movement sought to improve the daily lives and secure the basic citizenship rights of black people, goals that relied on compelling congressional actions, presidential executive orders, and federal intervention in local governance and winning key court decisions. A central paradox in civil rights struggles, however, is that a primary focus was to pursue forms of redress by the state for injuries incurred from the state. Jim Crow laws, voter suppression, and the actions of Southern legislators and police forces became, at best, symbols of Southern backwardness, and, at worst, the failure of certain legal institutions, local municipalities, or their representatives to live up to the promise and possibility of US democracy. One consequence of this was to narrow attention to racial injustices to the actions of liberal individuals, bad citizens, or, at best, rogue agents of the state, leaving virtually untouched the constitutive structural elements of the US democratic project that, one might argue, ensured that black life does not matter. That the civil rights movement was able to secure black people’s basic citizenship rights, that it was, in purely juridical terms, able to expand the range of liberal democratic privileges and protections to those foundationally excluded from its purview, has meant to some that its core moral claims, its organizational structures, its political methods, and its spectacular mobilizations and confrontations represent, not a baseline for how groups might seek redress, but the ethical claims, the manner of mobilization, the negotiation, and the compromise required of any engagement with formal political processes. What has come down from the 1960s, then, is less a tradition than a template, the final form of black politics. A core feature of this template involves what Juliet Hooker (2016: 454) describes as the transformation of black democratic suffering into democratic exemplarity, which has as its goal “making the entire political community more just and free.” This understanding of black politics renders any deviation from that template, or even the suggestion of an alternative to our liberal democratic present, as, at best, misguided, if not utopian (which is to say irresponsible), or, even worse, a sharp departure from a humanistic project. The dominant mode of black politics thus confines itself to a range of demands that depend on a delimited rhetorical field and field of action, which has the effect of leaving unexamined a more radically oriented black politics that has issued from the elaboration of black life within a state of exception. As political speech, the declaration “Black lives matter” focuses attention on the mechanisms by which black lives do not matter. To be sure, to assert that black lives matter is to assume a legitimated field wherein black life can be incorporated into the prevailing structures of political association and governance. Yet in its radical register, the declaration involves moving beyond registering a flaw in policing that body cameras or educational programs might easily address. To insist on a world where black lives do matter brings into view those mechanisms by which blackness continues to provide a baseline for a racialized US democracy, where blackness remains visible as the point below which whites must never fall. Giorgio Agamben’s (1998: 10–11) discussion of “bare life” as reflecting not so much basic biological life but the premise of political life that reveals a condition to which “we are all potentially exposed” helps in unraveling the intimacies between modern democratic governance and totalitarian rule, although his turn to the Nazi camp as the paradigmatic example of the moment of collapse elides the very modes of coloniality that remain unremarked in his thinking. I will return to this point of Agamben’s thinking later. What I want to highlight here is that the declaration “Black lives matter” echoes a longer-running commentary on, and a rejection of, the protocols of sovereign rule, where thinking about the exception presents colonialism, plantation slavery, and genocidal violence in Africa, the Americas, and India as long-standing features of the modern. From this tradition of black thought, we can see the state of exception not as something arrived at and thus not a state of exception at all. Rather, it appears as something akin to what Achille Mbembe (2001: 29–30) calls a régime d’exception, where there is not so much a departure from but an absence of common law, where political rule is designed merely to command subjects, rather than negotiate with citizens within a context of consensual governance. In such a setting, there is no regard for the means by which the modern, the rulers who command, upon encountering their constitutive other, generally in various “states of nature,” might bring about their civilization. For Mbembe, this involves a collapsing of the means and ends of rule as civilizing, which, as others have noted of modernity, may necessarily entail violence. We are therefore confronted with the question of what forms of black politics and political thought open up to us if we view an emergency as representing less the bringing about of an exception than that which illuminates an already operative exception. To draw on Walter Benjamin’s (1968: 257) observation that “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule,” what insights might we gain by viewing Ferguson, Baltimore, and Milwaukee as issuing from a tradition for which the paradigmatic emergency was a prior, longer-standing reality? What if these protests reflect a form of political discourse largely unintelligible to black elites and the larger political structures, for whom this is merely lawlessness and rioting, yet still one whose perspectives insist, if we can follow Benjamin a bit further, that we “attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight” (257)? It seems that it is primarily in thinking through black political thought that we find the conceptual tools for addressing these questions. Head, Apologies, and Apologia In discussing the problem of the human in contemporary critical thought, Anthony Bogues (2012: 34) observes that “it is a critical task of radical thought today to work with the speech of those who have been historically excluded from the history of thought,” a practice that requires “coming to grips with the speech and practices” of those peoples who are marginalized within or excluded from the social order as productive of thought. This involves taking seriously those claims, actions, and practices that seemingly depart from or stand outside of what is acceptable given prevailing social norms. I want to extend Bogues’s thinking, particularly his explicit departure from Agamben’s approach to the exception through a foregrounding of the colonial, wherein he focuses on those who exist in a Fanonian zone of nonbeing. While I am not suggesting that Ferguson and Baltimore are colonial contexts, the sovereign practices of those municipalities nonetheless operate within the matrix of coloniality, where the black residents of Ferguson and Baltimore are those on whom “practices of violence [are] conducted that ma[ke] them not sites of exception but rather sites in which regularized performances of violence as power [are] enacted” (Bogues 2012: 34). In other words, I am after how the actions and speech of those in Baltimore and Ferguson reveal the seeming exception as, in fact, the rule of rule. Within days of Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson’s shooting and killing of Brown, an eighteen-year-old unarmed black man who had recently graduated high school, local residents and activists from around the country descended on West Florissant Avenue in the St. Louis suburb. The response of the local police department was to have officers in military-grade riot gear and armored vehicles, using flash grenades and tear gas, confront protesters. One week after Brown’s body lay lifeless in the street for four and a half hours, after police repeatedly destroyed memorials that local residents had erected to Brown on the spot where he was killed, Missouri governor Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency in Ferguson. Although the state of emergency imposed a curfew that made it illegal to be out after midnight, protests continued, as did clashes with local and state police, even after Nixon called in the National Guard. Yet, in what many saw as an unprecedented move, on November 17, 2014, Nixon declared another state of emergency, this time in anticipation of the St. Louis County grand jury’s decision on whether to indict Wilson. Some might have considered Nixon’s second state of emergency prescient. Indeed, on November 25, when it was announced that the grand jury had decided against handing down an indictment of Wilson, Ferguson erupted. After witnessing their son’s body lying in the blistering August heat, handling his transition, burial, and an unimaginable level of grief, Brown’s mother, Lezley McSpadden, and stepfather, Louis Head, had to hear not only that there would be no indictment but, possibly more troubling, that St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch had purposefully undermined any possibility of an indictment. Their range of emotions came together in a moment of grief, anger, and rage when McSpadden, in tears and atop a car, addressed a crowd gathered outside the Ferguson courthouse. McSpadden made it clear that after having endured the loss of her son, she felt that the grand jury’s decision demonstrated a complete lack of care. “They ain’t never gonna care. I been here my whole life, I ain’t never had to go through nothing like this,” she told the crowd. As McSpadden began to break down in tears, cries of “fuck the police” were mixed in with a young woman yelling, “We love you, Ms. Lezley,” a uniquely Southern black form of address for an honored community member, especially a mother (McDonald 2014). McSpadden’s justifiable anger and indignation helps us bring into view the central paradox of turning to the state as the agent offering repair for the actions of the state. When CNN reporter Sunny Hostin asked McSpadden why she addressed the crowd, she explained, “We heard this and it was just like, like I had been shot. Like you shoot me now” (quoted in Ford and Levs 2014). McSpadden refused to consider police officer Wilson, county prosecutor McCulloch, and the grand jury as separate from one another or apart from the state. Police killings are not, in such a formulation, the action of individual police officers who represent the state but do not constitute the state as such. Rather, they are considered parts of a whole. When McSpadden says, “Like you shoot me now,” she brings McCulloch’s handling of the grand jury into the same frame as Wilson, where she identifies both as the “you” who shot her son and her. The “you” here works to capture the state as the party causing injury. To confront such a scenario, one has to ask how a private “citizen” might reconcile the incongruity of turning to the state to carry out repair of an injury that the state caused. It was in this vortex of emotion that Head climbed onto the car to comfort his wife and then screamed out, “Burn this bitch down,” delivering it at a pitch that many would all too easily explain away as an “excited utterance.” Yet Head repeated his incendiary plea eleven times, which, while unintentional, echoed Garner’s plea, also uttered eleven times, “I can’t breathe.” The resonance of Head’s “excited utterance” with Garner’s pleas is that it resists the disciplining impulse to render it as thoughtless anger. Indeed, Head acted somewhat deliberately. An Al Jazeera America camera recorded him saying moments before he climbed onto the car, “If I get up there, I’m gonna start a riot. Burn this bitch down” (quoted in America Tonight Digital Team 2014). As Head would later describe his “outburst,” “I screamed words that I shouldn’t have screamed in the heat of the moment” (quoted in Alcindor and Bacon 2014), an apparent apology born of the necessities of our political present, where the legitimacy of one’s grief and anger, one’s claim to injury, especially if one is black, depends on one’s expression of that grief on the terms sanctioned by the social order. Central to such a demand is that people design their expression of grief so as to cause minimal disruption to that order. Head, McSpadden, and their advisers certainly understood this in having Head issue an apology, particularly given the efforts to charge him with inciting a riot. The response from black political elites revealed the continued sway of a civil rights approach that seeks to maintain a moral ground by putting forth the unimpeachable citizen exemplar of sacrifice. Such an approach requires a disavowal of Head’s “outburst” as a mistake, mere thoughtless anger. Rather than attempt to explain away Head’s anger, I want to suggest that we can see in his shouting “burn this bitch down” an adequate response to his slain son and to Eric Garner’s pleas; his is an anger that, as if speaking to Frantz Fanon’s observation, “we revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe,” expressed a desire for the total destruction of the racial state. Doing so enables us to dwell on the possibilities that his defiant call holds for thinking through a mode of black politics that refuses the prevailing protocols and logics governing public demands for reparative justice. My interest is not to explain Head’s or any other seemingly “extreme” expression of anger as a departure from black politics. What we find in such expressions, which include the uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore, is a critique that exceeds the sensibilities of liberal black political discourse precisely in their suggestion of the incompatibility, or possibly the constitutive exclusion, of the black as noncitizen, the paradigmatic other. By taking Head as engaged in political discourse, I want to see in his apology more than an attempt to negotiate the protocols of legitimate or acceptable speech. Given the social function of apology—admission of a violation and an agreement or promise to avoid any such future violation— those apologizing recognize their transgression of a social or political norm and locate guilt for that violation in their own actions or words.2 This was certainly part of what Head intended when he said, “I humbly apologize to all of those who read my pain and anger as a true desire for what I want for our community.” Still, we might better view his statement as an apologia—a defense or justification of his “outburst.”3 Head went on: “But to place blame solely on me for the conditions of our community, and country, after the grand jury decision, goes way too far and is as wrong as the decision itself. To declare a state of emergency and send a message of war, and not peace, before a grand jury decision was announced is also wrong” (quoted in Alcindor and Bacon 2014). I want to consider Head’s apologia as centering on a critique of the racial state through his identification of Governor Nixon’s November 17, 2014, state of emergency order as the context in which he expressed his pain and anger. The fundamental injury in this instance becomes the actions of the state itself, though not simply because the grand jury refused to indict Wilson, or even because county prosecutor McCulloch worked to ensure that the grand jury would not return an indictment. Whereas Agamben might consider Nixon’s two state of emergency orders the moment an exception appeared, Head invites us to bring into view a longer-running exception already in place. As such, his original “outburst” brings to mind not so much a desire to destroy property or “our community” but the institutional orderings of the local municipality in which black people experienced a perpetual exception. Head’s invective thus reflects a knowledge born from experiencing Ferguson as a régime d’exception. Unlike in Mbembe’s (2001) framing, where the departure from common law occurs when privileged individuals and companies constitute for themselves a “form of sovereignty,” in Ferguson there was no departure as such, as the posture that the municipality of Ferguson assumed toward its black residents was that of a sovereign toward its subjects who existed outside the compact of consensual governance. The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) report on Ferguson offers insight into how the city’s revenue-generating strategy allowed local police and courts to elaborate an exception. As the report outlines, generating revenue through policing black residents “fostered practices in the two central parts of Ferguson’s law enforcement system—policing and the courts—that are themselves unconstitutional or that contribute to constitutional violations” (DOJ 2015: 27). Where for the police these policies led to practices that “resulted in a pattern and practice of constitutional violations” (27) of black residents’ First and Fourth Amendment rights, the local courts assumed as their primary goal maximizing revenue rather than “administering justice or protecting the rights of the accused” (68). The DOJ (2016: 24) investigation of the Baltimore police discovered a similar “pattern or practice of making stops, searches, and arrests in violation of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments” where they lacked “reasonable suspicion of people who [were] lawfully present on Baltimore streets,” which in turn “escalate[d] street encounters and contribute[d] to officers making arrests without probable D cause.” The DOJ’s (2015: 27) concern in both instances lay with the erosion of “police legitimacy and community trust” that made “policing in Ferguson less fair, less effective at promoting public safety, and less safe,” a concern the DOJ (2016: 29) repeated in its Baltimore report, where it identified the practice of unlawful stops and searches as working to “erode public confidence in law enforcement and escalate street encounters.”
Structural analysis is a better methodology than contingent analysis- better explanatory power anti-black violence cannot be evidenced through historical events, because blackness as a structural position is constituted outside humanity, creating an objective, non-contingent relation to violence
Wilderson-10- Frank Wilderson- Red , White, and Black- Cinema and the Strucutre of Us- antagonisms NN
The aim of this book is to embark on a paradigmatic analysis of how dispossession is imagined at the intersection of (a) the most unflinching meditations (metacommentaries) on political economy and libidinal economy, (e.g., marxism, ala Antonio Negri’s work, and psychoanalysis, such as the work of Kaja Silverman, respectively), (b) the discourse of political common sense, and (c) the narrative and formal strategies of socially/politically engaged films. In other words, a paradigmatic analysis asks, What are the constituent elements of, and the assumptive logic regarding, dispossession which underwrite theoretical claims about political and libidinal economy; and how are those elements and assumptions manifest in both political common sense and in political cinema? Charles S. Maier argues that a metacommentary on political economy can be thought of as an “interrogation of economic doctrines to disclose their sociological and political premises…in sum, [it] regards economic ideas and behavior not as frameworks for analysis, but as beliefs and actions that must themselves be explained.”vi Jared Sexton describes libidinal economy as “the economy, or distribution and arrangement, of desire and identification (their condensation and displacement), and the complex relationship between sexuality and the unconscious.” Needless to say, libidinal economy functions variously across scales and is as “objective” as political economy. Importantly, it is linked not only to forms of attraction, affection and alliance, but also to aggression, destruction, and the violence of lethal consumption. He emphasizes that it is “the whole structure of psychic and emotional life,” something more than, but inclusive of or traversed by, what Gramsci and other marxists call a “structure of feeling”; it is “a dispensation of energies, concerns, points of attention, anxieties, pleasures, appetites, revulsions, and phobias capable of both great mobility and tenacious fixation.”vii Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms interrogates the assumptive logic of metacommentaries on political and libidinal economy, and their articulations in film, through a subject whose structure of dispossession (the constituent elements of his/her loss and suffering) they cannot theorize: the Black; a subject who is always already positioned as Slave. The implications of my interrogation reach far beyond Film Studies, for these metacommentaries not only have the status of paradigmatic analyses, but their reasoning and assumptions permeate the private and quotidian of political common sense and buttress organizing and activism on the Left. In Leftist metacommentaries on ontology (and in the political common sense and the radical cinema in fee, however unintentionally, to such metacommentaries) the subject’s paradigmatic location, the structure of his/her relationality, is organized around his/her capacities: powers the subject has or lacks, the constituent elements of his/her structural position with which s/he is imbued or lacks prior to his/her performance. Just as prior to the commencement of a game of chess, the board and the pieces on it live in a caldron of antagonisms. The spatial and temporal capacities of the queen (where she is located and where she can move, as well as how she can move) articulate an irreconcilable asymmetry of power between her and a rook or a pawn for example. Vest the rook with the powers of the queen (before the game begins, of course) and it is not the outcome of the game that is jeopardy so much as the integrity of the paradigm itself—it is no longer chess but something else. And it goes without saying that no piece may leave the board if it is to stand in any relation whatsoever (asymmetry aside) to its contemporaries; this would be tantamount to leaving the world, to death. Power relations are extant in the sinews of capacity. For marxists, the revolutionary objective is not to play the game but to destroy it, to end exploitation and alienation. They see the capacity to accumulate surplus value embodied in one piece, the capitalist, and the embodiment of dispossession as being manifest in the worker. But the worker’s essential incapacity (powers which cannot accrue to the worker, suffering as exploitation and alienation) is the essence of capacity, life itself, when looked at through the eyes of the Slave.
The alternative is to reject the 1AC’s ethical distancing from the terror of anti-blackness and actively embrace the pathologized being of blackness – vote neg to choose blackness as the vessel for destroying civil society, rather than a problem framed by civil society
Jared Sexton 11 [University of California, Irvine (School of Humanities)], “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism,” InTensions Journal Copyright ©2011 by York University (Toronto, Canada), Issue 5 (Fall/Winter 2011), ISSN# 1913-5874, ghs//BZ
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 pathologies—they become them. In our antiblack world, blacks are pathology” (Gordon 2000: 87). This conception would seem to support Moten’s 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 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 imperative— “above all, don’t 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’” (Nyong’o 2002: 389).xiv In this we might create a transvaluation of pathology itself, something like an embrace of pathology without pathos. [24] To speak of black social life and black social death, black social life against black social death, black social life as black social death, black social life in black social death—all of this is to find oneself in the midst of an argument that is also a profound agreement, an agreement that takes shape in (between) meconnaissance and (dis)belief. Black optimism is not the negation of the negation that is afro-pessimism, just as black social life does not negate black social death by inhabiting it and vitalizing it. A living death is as much a death as it is a living. Nothing in afro-pessimism suggests that there is no black (social) life, only that black life is not social life in the universe formed by the codes of state and civil society, of citizen and subject, of nation and culture, of people and place, of history and heritage, of all the things that colonial society has in common with the colonized, of all that capital has in common with labor—the modern world system. Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but it is lived underground, in outer space. This is agreed. That is to say, what Moten asserts against afro- pessimism is a point already affirmed by afro-pessimism, is, in fact, one of the most polemical dimensions of afro-pessimism as a project: namely, that black life is not social, or rather that black life is lived in social death. Double emphasis, on lived and on death. That’s the whole point of the enterprise at some level. It is all about the implications of this agreed- upon point where arguments (should) begin, but they cannot (yet) proceed. III. Those of us writing in a critical vein in the human sciences often use the phrase “relations of power” and yet we just as often gloss over the complexity of the idea of relation itself, and especially so regarding the relation that relation has with power, or, rather, regarding the way in which power obtains in and as relation. We are not afraid to say, for instance, that relations of power are complex, but we have less to offer when faced with the stubborn fact that relation itself is complex, that is, does not simply suggest a linkage or interaction between one thing and another, between subjects, say, or between objects, or between subjects and objects, or persons and things. The attention to relation that Christina Sharpe (2010), for instance, sustains across her intellectual enterprise puts pressure on any static notion of each term. This is an interrogation of power in its most intimate dimension. We learn not just that power operates intimately (which it does) or that intimacy is inextricable from the question of power (which it is), but that the relation between the two—when it is brought into view, within earshot, when it enters language—deranges what we mean, or what we thought we understood, by the former and the latter. What is power? What is intimacy? How do we know this at all? How to communicate it? And where or when are these questions, and their relation, posed with greater force—political force, psychic force, historical force—than within the precincts of the New World slave estate, and within the time of New World slavery? We still must ask at this late stage, “What is slavery?” The answer, or the address, to this battery of questions, involves a strange and maddening itinerary that would circumnavigate the entire coastline or maritime borders of the Atlantic world, enabling the fabrication and conquest of every interior—bodily, territorial, and conceptual. To address all of this is to speak the name of race in the first place, to speak its first word. What is slavery? And what does it mean to us, and for us? What does slavery mean for the very conception of the objective pronoun “us”? [26] If the intimacy of power suggests the sheer difficulty of difference, the trouble endemic to determining where the white imagination ends and the black imagination begins, then the power of intimacy suggests, with no less tenacity and no less significance, that our grand involvement across the color line is structured like the figure of an envelope, folds folded within folds: a black letter law whose message is obscured, enveloped, turned about, reversed. Here a structure of violence is inscribed problematically in narrative, an inscription that can only struggle and fail to be something other than a writing-off, or a writing-over. The massive violence that founds and opens a structure of vulnerability, a world-making enjoyment of that violence of enjoyment disappears into the telos of resolution, the closure of family romance, the drive for kinship, where insistence replaces imposition. Black rage converts magically to black therapeutics, a white mythology that disavows its points of origin in the theft that creates the crime and its alibi at once. This illegible word, where affect drops away only to remain, is what Sharpe terms “monstrous intimacy,” “a memory for forgetting.”xv And what would we do without it? Indeed, what might we do? [27] What kind of politics might be possible across this gap, as wide as a river, as thin as a veil? It is a powerful misrecognition that enables an understanding of afro-pessimism as moving against black life, in other words, of pathologizing blackness. Blackness is not the pathogen in the afro- pessimist imagination and it is a wonder how one could read it so even as it is no wonder at all. No, blackness is not the pathogen in afro-pessimism, the world is. Not the earth, but the world, and maybe even the whole possibility of and desire for a world. This is not to say that blackness is the cure, either. It is and it isn’t. If, as Moten suggests, radicalism is the general critique of the proper and blackness is radicalism in the split difference between experience and fact; then afro-pessimism, in its general critique of the myriad recuperations of the proper at the singular expense of blackness (blackness in some ways as that expense of the proper) is, in fact, the celebration (of the experience) of blackness as (the) performance (of) study.
Thus, the role of the ballot is to interrogate the 1AC’s scholarship prior to the consequences of the plan – this means they do not get to weigh the case – we question their starting point.
Case
The foundation for modern policing practices are all rooted in colonial logics of anti-Blackness—surveillance, stop-and-frisk, lantern laws, and NYPD omnipresence prove.
Rojas and Browne 16, Claudia Garcia-Rojas and Simone Browne [Rojas is co-director of The Chicago Taskforce on Violence Against Girls & Young Women, and a doctoral candidate in the Department of African-American Studies at Northwestern University, UT prof, respectively], “The Surveillance of Blackness: From the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade to Contemporary Surveillance Technologies”, truthout, 3 Mar 2016
Mobilizations around Black Lives Matter have revived attention around surveillance of Black organizers and communities by the police and state institutions. The intensification of surveillance calls up comparisons to the civil rights era, when government surveillance programs, such as Cointelpro, were established to infiltrate, surveil and target leading movement organizers. Yet, as Simone Browne, a professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, demonstrates in her new book Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, we can trace the emergence of surveillance technologies and practices back much further, to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. By centering the archive of slavery and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, in addition to Black feminist theories, Browne demonstrates how surveillance practices are predicated on colonial logics of anti-Blackness, capital, governance, property and violence. In so doing, she prompts us to consider how Blackness functions "as a key site through which surveillance is practiced, narrated and enacted." From this perspective, she examines how race informs surveillance studies, technologies and techniques, revealing in the process a consistent absenting of Blackness from dominant discourses. Importantly, Browne exposes how this absenting is evident in the work of leading thinkers Jeremy Bentham and Michel Foucault, whose theories form the foundation of the study of surveillance. Browne builds on these scholars' theories, but also offers a corrective. In this exclusive interview for Truthout, Browne further complicates conventional notions of surveillance and information technologies. She also talks about the important role that Black expressive arts are playing in contesting policing and the commodification of Blackness, and introduces us to alternate surveillance histories that center Black feminist theories. In other words, Browne spotlights what happens "when Blackness enters the frame." Claudia Garcia-Rojas: In Dark Matters, you speak of "black luminosity" in relation to 17th-century "lantern laws": colonial practices that required that the black body remain illuminated at night. This is an early form of surveillance that made it possible for white people to identify, observe and control the black body in space, but also to create and maintain racial boundaries. What more can you tell us about lantern laws and do we see current manifestations of these laws today? Simone Browne: Lantern laws were 18th century laws in New York City that demanded that Black, mixed-race and Indigenous enslaved people carry candle lanterns with them if they walked about the city after sunset, and not in the company of a white person. The law prescribed various punishments for those that didn't carry this supervisory device. Any white person was deputized to stop those who walked without the lit candle after dark. So you can see the legal framework for stop-and-frisk policing practices was established long before our contemporary era. Recently, Josh Scannell, a graduate student at City University of New York, in his research around the New York Police Department, made the connection between these lantern laws and the NYPD's Omnipresence, which is the use of high-intensity artificial lights, flood lights or the flashing roof lights from the police cars throughout the night in certain housing projects - so, subjecting people to violent illumination by way of artificial light. And so, to make these connections 300-plus years earlier of the kind of regulation or disciplinary practices through light in the same city space - I am really happy that people are able to make those connections with, say, lantern laws - to say that that these surveillance practices have a history and are not necessarily new. What we see, then, is an erasure of how these colonial-era laws and practices connect to present times. How is this also the case with surveillance studies? And how do these erasures narrow our general understanding of what surveillance is? What I discuss is this kind of absenting of Blackness from surveillance studies. So something might end up in the index or as an add-on in that space. There is an absenting of the foundation work key Black scholars have done. I wanted to center these concerns as a new way within surveillance studies. For instance, I was recently looking at the work of Marie Van Brittan Brown. Brown was a nurse living in Queens, New York, often working the night shift, and her husband, Albert Brown, was an electronics technician. In 1966, they developed blueprints for the first home security system - closed-circuit televisions, remote-control entry, intercoms, recording devices that could be accessed within a home - and in 1969, they got the patent. So, this Black woman living in Queens and concerned with crime decided to do something about it. What does it mean for a Black woman to center her conditions at a time when the police response was quite lax? The Browns were granted the patent in 1969, and this patent is cited by numerous patents up until this day, like video doorbells, which people now use or you can use your smartphone app to see who's at your door and you can be someplace else. That's a kind of absented history, and Van Brittan Brown is not an academic but somebody who is an inventor, a creator and a maker. These kinds of histories are not honored in a way with how we think of surveillance in relation to policing.
Your authors disagree with the aff
Jonathan 17, Professor of Criminal Law at Penn State University, "Cops and Pleas: Police Officers' Influence on Plea Bargaining", Published by the Yale Law Journal, April 1, 2017. https://www.yalelawjournal.org/essay/cops-and-pleas-police-officers-influence-on-plea-bargaining]
Going forward, in thinking about what role police should play in plea bargaining, what is needed is some combination of honesty and optimism. The honesty part first: those who would attempt to build a wall between prosecutors and police officers on plea bargaining are setting themselves up for disappointment. Police officers have a deep, vested interest in being able to influence plea outcomes, even if they choose to invoke this power in a scattershot manner. Blanket rules preventing officers from getting involved in plea negotiations are doomed to fail, just as blanket bans on prosecutors’ ability to plea bargain were easily circumvented.202 If officers want to influence a case, they are too deeply enmeshed in the prosecution team to be kept from doing so. Now, for the optimistic part: Instead of fighting an unwinnable battle against police involvement in plea bargaining, society could embrace this involvement with the hope that bringing officers into the plea-bargaining fold will reorient them to the adjudicative process with all of its attendant procedural protections. This would take a cultural shift, to be sure; it would have to begin with the way departments evaluate their officers and then percolate down to promotions, training, and the police academy. Of course, this gamble might fail, and police and prosecutorial abuses could become even more pernicious if officers had more influence over plea bargaining. Some experimentation by the nation’s thousands of prosecutorial and police agencies would surely be welcome in answering these questions. Even without such a culture shift, however, there are some changes that can be put in place immediately. At a minimum, what is needed is transparency and intentionality about the police decision to get involved in some plea negotiations but not others. In some jurisdictions, there are formal guidelines dictating this involvement, but in the majority of jurisdictions, police involvement is entirely ad hoc. Wherever a decision is left completely to the unguided discretion of the officer or prosecutor, there is an opportunity for racism and other prejudices to affect the criminal justice system. Do crimes involving female victims particularly spur officers to care about case outcomes? Are crimes involving African-American victims less likely to motivate a police officer to push for a particular plea? It would be worrisome if this discriminatory pattern, seen in the charging decisions in death-penalty cases, were motivating police involvement in plea bargaining. Prosecutors, police agencies, and courts that see this pattern unfolding should be very concerned about the police influence on plea bargaining. Official department policies guiding officers’ decisions on when to contact prosecutors about pleas and what types of things to say would help limit the capriciousness that may exist. Likewise, data on how often these consultations occur would be helpful in understanding the dynamic.
Modern policing and carcerality stems from a system of antiblackness and chattel slavery – the 1AC’s discussion of the prison confines antiblackess to specific locations and attempts to make it coherent – this is akin to white liberals against bombing brown people abroad that don’t care about black death
Sexton 2006 [Jared, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and one third of The Trifecta of Tough, “Race, Nation, and Empire in a Blackened World,” Radical History Review Issue 95]
In the United States, homegrown white supremacists, and the lion’s share of their more moderate neighbors, have long considered black people to be weapons of mass destruction. Racial profiling, the hallmark of Homeland Security’s dreadful encroachments, cut its fearsome teeth several years prior to the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act. Prior, as well, to theAmerican Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) “Driving while Black” campaign in the late 1990s; prior to the launch of President Ronald Reagan’s infamous war on drugs in the early 1980s, and even to President Richard Nixon’s 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.
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 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 foar 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.
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. Racially 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 Ali’s famous 1966 statement, “I ain’t 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.
Unable to experience guilt, SELFISH, CALLOUS and having a TOTAL DISREGARD for the rights of others, the OVERWHELMING scientific evidence shows White Europeans as PSYCHOPATHS
DR. WRIGHT 84 Clinical Psychologist 1984 Bobby-Director of the Garfield Park Comprehensive Community Health Center in Chicago (a Mental Health Center); The Psychopathic Racial Personality: and other essays; p. 1-2
In a bullfight, after being brutalized while making innumerable charges at the movement of a cape, there comes a time when the bull finally turns and faces his adversary with the only movement being his heaving bloody sides. It is believed that for the first time he really sees the matador. This final confrontation is known as the “moment of truth.” For the bull, this moment comes too late.¶ The experience of Black people all over the world presents an analogous situation. For hundreds of years, Blacks have been charging at the banners that are held by the European (White) matadors. Those banners have been represented by concepts such as democracy, capitalism, Marxism, religion, and education. The banners remained constant as long as Blacks were assets. However, with technology and worldwide industrialization on the rampage resulting in a further exploitation of Africa’s resources which in turn produces an increase in Africa’s (Blacks’) national consciousness, Blacks are now a threat and a liability to the White race. Therefore, the banner held by the matador represents only one concept: genocide. As a consequence, the major research that White scientists are involved in today is genocidal in nature (nuclear warfare, population control, medication control, genetic engineering, psychosurgery, electrical stimulation of the brain, and the high complex science of behavioral technology). Indeed, it is Blacks’ moment of truth; it is time for Blacks to look at the matador.¶ This presentation is based upon the following very simple premise: in their relationship with the Black race, Europeans (Whites) are psychopaths and their behavior reflects an underlying biologically transmitted proclivity with roots deep in their evolutionary history. The psychopath is an individual who is constantly in conflict with other persons or groups. He is unable to experience guilt, is completely selfish and callous, and has a total disregard for the rights of others. This premise is supported by overwhelming scientific evidence (Delany, 1968; Du Bois, 1896; Fanon, 1963; Garvey, 1967; Welsing, 1991; Williams, 1971).
1ar:
Currently, police play a formal role in negotiations with defendants – they have influence over what plea deals are offered and the conditions in them. This is problematic for 2 reasons: a] brutality – police are incentivized to push deals onto defendants in which they mask their corrupt action by ensuring defendants don’t go to trial b] oversight – there’s zero regulation of what police can do or formal standards, which incentivizes law-breaking and corruption since police are untrained – that’s Horowitz. The plan solves – it sets legal regulation that abolishes prosecutorial plea deals – to clarify, under the plan, police cannot take part in the formation of the negotiation process. This means they are forced to be held liable since they can’t stiupate conditions to cover their asses – that’s Abel 17.
The role of the ballot is to determine whether the aff is a good idea – we should be able to weigh our impacts– that’s key to fair and predictable engagement – any other standard is self-serving, arbitrary, and destroys topic education and the ability to explore the nuances of how plea bargaining effects black people. Our epistemology is inherently tied to the consequences of the plan so it makes no sense to separate them.
Permutation do both --- abolish plea bargaining and also endorse ____. The perm shields the link – the aff doesn’t force engagement with the political – people can choose not to file lawsuits, and live the same as ever before --- there’s nothing about the Aff that’s complicit with the state
Empirics flow aff-- Strauder v. West Virginia, Dempsey v. Moore, Powell v. Alabama the civil rights act, the 14th Amendment, demographic shifts all prove progress is possible make them answer all of these examples—empirics o/w on verifiability: otherwise the judge just intervenes for whichever side they personally side with which destroys debate
Reject materialism bad – it’s ethically disastrous to let police brutality go unchecked when you have the opportunity to prevent specific manifestations of violence.
Extend Spade--the AFF’s nonreformist reform throws the law into crisis, and is a better approach than sticking one’s head in the sand and hoping it goes away --- that’s Spade --- the plan’s negative state action weakens the law, by limiting it’s scope. Examples of these antagonistic demands on the law that helped black life include expansion of Medicare and Medicaid, campaigns against gang injunctions in Oakland, repealing California’s Three Strikes law, ending collaboration with ICE, activism against the program Secure Communities
Afropess presumes a closed system which is an innacurate description of contingent social systems, conflates THE anti-black world with AN anti-black world, and ignores a history of resistance—vote aff if I win a risk of defense to ontology.
Gordon 15 --- Lewis, Afro-Jewish philosopher, political thinker, educator, and musician, Professor at the University of Connecticut in Philosophy and Africana Studies, European Union Visiting Chair in Philosophy; Nelson Mandela Visiting Professor of Politics and International Studies at Rhodes University, South Africa; and Chairman of the Frantz Fanon awards committees of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, transcribed from https://youtu.be/UABksVE5BTQ, presenting and discussing his book “What Fanon Said”
***Theonaturalism – religion based difference
-Gordon: debate about proof of pessimism is red herring b/c no way to know, even based on history, to project 10 years in the future what social systems will look like, no metaphysical basis to say that things will never change, functions as a tiebreaker
-Impact turn: no inherent trajectory or arc to how things happen, fact this debate is messy and examples on both sides proves shouldn’t invest mental energy in debating these theoretical endpoints, sort out contingent applications
-Answers ontology: ontological structures themselves are inherently paradoxes, to say that anti blackness is ontological imposes the condition itself, persons marked by political systems, justifications they’ve made for ontology rely on a flawed premise that ignores that systems of power can only be relational and contingently imposed
The first thing to bear in mind you may wonder why in the beginning of the talk I talked about philosophical anthropology. And many people when they are trying to talk about social change they never think about what a human being is and this is something Fanon pays attention to. Many people want to have closed conceptions of human beings because then human beings can be predicable. In fact, in fanons writing he gave an example. One of the problems is that when he would walk in reason seems to walk out. One problem we have to bear in mind when we try to look at the question of human beings in terms of rigid closed systems is that we often are trying to get as a model of how we work as theorists on issues of social change that are actually based on what we can call law like generalizations. Now what is a law like generalization? It is when you make sure that whatever you say has no contradiction down the line. So if you are to say this much [gestures with hand] the next stage must be consistent with that, and the next stage until you are maximally consistent. Do you get that? But here is the problem – and I can just put it in a nut shell- nobody, nobody in this room would like to date, be married to, or be a best friend with a maximally consistent person. You know what that is. Its hell. And this tells you something, because if somebody where maximally consistent, you know what you would say that person is not reasonable. And we have a person here who does work on Hegel that can point out this insight, that a human being has the ability to evaluate rationality. Now why is that important? Because you see the mistake many of us make is many of us want to push the human being into that maximized law like generalization model. So when we think about our philosophical anthropology, some people, our question about intersectionality for instance, what some people don’t understand is nowhere is there ever a human being who is one identity. People talk about race – do you ever really see a race walking? You see a racialized man or woman, or transman or transwoman. Do you ever see a class walking? Class is embodied in flesh and blood people. And we can go on and on. So if we enrich our philosophical anthropology we begin to notice certain other things. And one of the other things we begin to realize is that we commit a serious problem when we do political work. And the problem is this. The question about Wilderson for instance. There is this discussion going on (and allot of people build it out of my earlier books). I have a category I call, as a metaphor, an antiblack world. You notice an indefinite article – an anti-black world. The reason I say that is because the world is different from an anti-black world. The project of racism is to create a world that would be completely anti-black or anti-woman. Although that is a project, it is not a fait accompli. People don’t seem to understand how recent this phenomenon we are talking about is. A lot of people talk about race they don’t even know the history of how race is connected into theonaturalism. How, for instance, Andalucia and the pushing out of the Moors. The history of how race connected to Christianity was formed. A lot of people don’t understand – from the standpoint of a species whose history is 220,000 years old, what the hell is 500 years? But the one thing that we don’t understand to is we create a false model for how we study those last 500 years. We study the 500 years as if the people who have been dominated have not been fighting and resisting. Had they not been fighting and resisting we wouldn’t be here. And then we come into this next point because you see the problem in the formulation of pessimism and optimism is they are both based on forecasted knowledge, a prior knowledge. But human beings don’t have prior knowledge. And in fact – what in the world are we if we need to have guarantees for us to act. You know what you call such people? Cowards. The fact of the matter is our ancestors – let’s start with enslaved ancestors. The enslaved ancestors who were burning down those plantations, who were finding clever ways to poison their masters, who were organizing meetings for rebellions, none of them had any clue what the future would be 100 years later. Some had good reason to believe that it may take 1000 years. But you know why they fought? Because they knew it wasn’t for them. One of the problems we have in the way we think about political issues is we commit what Fanon and others in the existential tradition would call a form of political immaturity. Political immaturity is saying it is not worth it unless I, me, individually get the payoff. When you are thinking what it is to relate to other generations – remember Fanon said the problem with people in the transition, the pseudo postcolonial bourgeois – is that they miss the point, you fight for liberation for other generations. And that is why Fanon said other generations they must have their mission. But you see some people fought and said no I want my piece of the pie. And that means the biggest enemy becomes the other generations. And that is why the postcolonial pseudo-bourgeoisie they are not a bourgeoisie proper because they do not link to the infrastructural development of the future, it is about themselves. And that’s why, for instance, as they live higher up the hog, as they get their mediating, service oriented, racial mediated wealth, the rest of the populations are in misery. The very fact that in many African countries there are people whose futures have been mortgaged, the fact that in this country the very example of mortgaging the future of all of you is there. What happens to people when they have no future? It now collapses the concept of maturation and places people into perpetual childhood. So one of the political things – and this is where a psychiatrist philosopher is crucial – is to ask ourselves what does it mean to take on adult responsibility. And that means to understand that in all political action it’s not about you. It is what you are doing for a world you may not even be able to understand. Now that becomes tricky, because how do we know this? People have done it before. There were people, for instance, who fought anti-colonial struggles, there are people (and now I am not talking about like thirty or forty years ago, I am talking about the people from day one 17th 18th century all the way through) and we have no idea what we are doing for the 22nd century. And this is where developing political insight comes in. Because we commit the error of forgetting the systems we are talking about are human systems. They are not systems in the way we talk about the laws of physics. A human system can only exist by human actions maintaining them. Which means every human system is incomplete. Every human being is by definition incomplete. Which means you can go this way or you can go another way. The system isn’t actually closed.
View ontological claims through an epistemically modest lens --- their claims are totalizing and don’t create a basis of political contestation
Nyman 16
(Jonna Nyman is a Teaching Fellow in International Relations at the University of Leicester, UK, “Pragmatism, practice and the value of security,” in Ethical Security Studies: A new research agenda, Routledge, pg. 139-141)
A pragmatic, practice-centred approach can help us return to the original forces of critical security studies: the politics of security and life experiences of it. Existing approaches remain split over the value of security and the meaning or purpose of ‘critical’/’Critical’ research. Many reject the possibility for security to be ethically good, suggesting that it is too ‘tainted’ by its association with existing problematic national security practices and ontologies. Alongside this a concern with power has led poststructuralist authors to focus on deconstruction over reconstruction, in return for which they are critiqued for lacking ‘emancipatory impetus’ (Hnyek and Chandler 2013).
However, pragmatism can help us recognise core concerns and help us move forward through three contributions. First, it avoids foundational 'truth’; second it presents a different way to think about ethics though a 'weak foundationalism' allowing for contingent ethical claims; and third, it allows us to move forward with a practical research agenda. The rest of this chapter will expand on these contributions.
A pragmatic approach rejects the idea of foundational 'truth', and involves a recognition that nothing is ever definitively settled. Rather than being anti-foundationalist, Cochran suggests, a pragmatic approach can be seen as 'weak foundationalist', and leads to contingent ethical claims which are context-dependent, temporary and provisional' (Cochran 1999: 16). Based on this, Cochran has used pragmatism to build bridges in normative theorising within IR. She argues that for pragmatists, establishing 'truth' is not the same as for a positivist: it involves settling a controversial or complex issue for the time being, until something comes along to dislodge the comfort and reassurance that has thereby been achieved, forcing inquiry to begin again' (Cochran 2002: 527, 1999). So, while progress is always provisional, 'it is not empty' (Cochran 2002: 528).
Such a 'weak foundationalist' approach helps us to move beyond debates over whether or not security is 'positive* or 'negative', as nothing is ever definitively settled. Though she doesn't use the terminology of pragmatism, Mustapha makes a similar argument in proposing a 'modified’ poststructuralist approach to security based on weak foundationalism. As with an 'unsettled' pragmatic approach, this means that 'any ontological claims that are made must always be open to interrogation' (Mustapha 2013: 74-5). This allows us to engage with the (contingent) "realities" of actual "security" problems' (Mustapha 2013: 77), and makes reconstruction possible even for most poststructuralists. Here, '(contingent) foundational claims are not static and are open to interrogation, but are necessary for politics and ethics. Security is a practice/means as well as an end’ (Mustapha 2013: 82).
The weak foundationalism which underpins pragmatism emphasises the contingent nature of claims, and shows that security doesn't have to always be negative - but likewise, any 'ethical' or 'positive' notion of security should not be considered to be fixed or permanent. Instead, reflexivity is imperative, with continuous evaluation and re-evaluation of our claims. It also helps us to move past arguments by poststructuralist and Copenhagen School authors who suggest that the way in which security has traditionally been attached to problematic national security politics means it is 'tainted by association. Instead, the meaning and value of security is not fixed and can change, and will never be settled. It also helps to avoid some of the controversial baggage of emancipatory approaches (Barkawi and Laffey 2006: 350).
It also helps us to move beyond debates over deconstruction/reconstruction and the meaning and purpose of critique - most importantly because it is inherently pluralist, and therefore argues that there is no one 'truth’ and so no correct approach to critique or ethics. Poststructuralist discomfort with going beyond critique and related concerns with power become less significant once we recognise this. Anti-foundauonalists don't believe that there are secure foundations on which we can base ethics: a pragmatic approach helps us to recognise the lack of secure foundations and still move forward with reconstructive agendas. Ultimately, it allows for suggestions of alternatives based on experiences, while recognising that these alternatives will never be final. Consequently, although we can never reach emancipation' or 'security', we can instead focus on becoming more secure, given what we know about different conditions and contexts at any given time.
This moves us onto the second contribution a pragmatist approach can make: it provides us with a different way to think about ethics. As noted, Cochran makes a link between a pragmatic weak foundationalism and contingent ethical claims. Once we reject 'truth', it becomes clear that ethical claims, or the ‘good’, can never be settled but must rather be continually re-thought and unproved upon. Thus, while we can draw ethical conclusions, these conclusions are 'no more than temporary resting places for ethical critique' (Cochran 1999: 17). Drawing on Brassett's work on pragmatism, we can suggest 'possibilities, while remaining sensitive to their limitations' (Brassett 2009a: 226). Once we drop the obsession with 'truth' and finding 'truth' in scholarly enquiry, the task becomes one of engaging in the trial and error process of suggesting possibilities' (Brassett 2009a: 226). Drawing on Rorty, he argues that 'ethics is political - negotiated is a relational human construct - and politics is ethical: a process of contest that has direct ethical outcomes'; therefore, recognising that there is no foundation 'does not mean dropping values, or the notion of progress' (Brassett 2009b: 282).
This helps us move past debates over the value of security by showing that it depends on the context. Thus, both sides of the debate are right: security can be problematic, but it can also be 'good'. However, any notion of positive or good' security has to be continually interrogated. It also helps to reframe the debate over deconstruction/reconstruction by shifting it in favour of moving forward towards 'better' things rather than establishing abstract 'positive' alternatives. In the process, it emphasises the fact that all alternatives have limitations. The focus on experience. including alternative experiences, is central to pragmatism's contribution to debates over security ethics. Brassett makes a related argument drawing on Rortv. presenting a different view of ethics as grounded in experiences:
we need to overcome the second view that effective resistance requires us to somehow 'distance' ourselves from power. This view that we can somehow practice critique from a standpoint that transcends questions of power and domination in Truth, the ideal speech situation, or some other idea(l) suggests that there are correct 'spaces' or 'practices' of resistance, be it democracy, the revolutionary working class or a post-national constellation.
1ar: Framing issue: they need a libidinal economy argument to win ontology—otherwise there is nothing intrinsic to civil society or white ppl that necessitates anti-blackness.
Libidinal economy arguments are wrong – implicit bias is socially produced and materially mediated, not a pre-social phenomenon – that means it’s linked to particular social and political conditions – And therefore subject to change
Lester, Professor of Historical Geography, University of Sussex, ‘12
(Alan, “Humanism, race and the colonial frontier,” Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 37 132–148)
-even if antiblack violence is unique and gratuitous, that doesn’t speak to whether that’s a permanent condition or how it might be altered
The processes of racial objectification on colonial frontiers involved much more than language. As Saldanha argues, when race is understood as merely ‘an ideology, a narrative, a discourse’, it ‘refers to the cultural representation of people, not to people themselves’. Race needs, rather, to be approached ‘ontologically, as a real process demanding particular concepts and commitments. Not so much representations, but bodies and physical events’ are foregrounded in his analysis, with the phenotype of humans playing ‘an active part in the event called race’ (Saldanha 2006, 9). This is not to say that narrative and discourse can simply be set aside, however. As DeLanda writes,
words are simply one component entering into relations of exteriority with a variety of other material and expressive components, and the processes of coding and decoding based on these specialized lines of expression operate side by side with . . . non-linguistic processes of territorialisation and deterritorialisation. (2006, 26)
The problem of this decentring of language for the historian of racial thought is, however, that words are usually the only trace that we have of past human agency. We have to find ways of indicating the affective and the material, as well as the expressive, within the expressive itself. British settler communities were not uniformly involved in violent relations with phenotypically different people, even those located on the very frontiers of colonial expansion. But those who ‘pioneered’ the dispossession of indigenous peoples’ land during the period of mass emigration to frontiers in North America, southern Africa, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand from the 1820s to the 1840s were uniformly subject to immediate and continual fears of violent resistance. As Peter Wade points out,
bodily appearance is often taken to be the raw material on which concepts of race are built . . . But, as analysts such as Haraway . . . have argued . . . there can be no pre-discursive encounter with biology or nature. Thus the phenotype that is taken to underlie race is itself a social construction . . . After all, phenotype includes all aspects of appearance . . . so why do specific aspects come to signify race: particular variations in skin colour rather than height; particular types of hair rather than eye colour; specific facial features rather than muscularity? The answer is that only some aspects of phenotype are worked into racial signifiers and they are the aspects that were originally seen to be ways of distinguishing between Europeans and those they encountered in their colonial explorations (2002, 4)
and, above all, I would add, frontier wars. As
Wade concludes, ‘Phenotype is thus linked to a particular history’ (2002, 4) – one in which invading British settlers distinguished themselves from those likely to resist their very presence.
The role of colonial frontier violence in determining those aspects of phenotype that signify race was critical. I think that Rachel Standfield is right when she argues that we need to accompany Stoler’s call for a new attention to relations of intimacy between coloniser and colonised in the domains of ‘sex, sentiment, domestic arrangement and child rearing’ (Stoler 2001, 829) with an appreciation of ‘the brute realities of violence’ and an examination of ‘the cultural and intellectual consequences of conflict’ (Standfield 2009, 31–2). We need to recognise that besides hurting the body, the experience [and threat] of violence shapes thought-patterns (generating fears, anxieties, memories and fantasies), and affects the ability to form, or not to form, relationships – dynamics crucial in thinking about processes of ‘othering’, colonial or otherwise. (Cleall 2009, 215; see also Bourke 1999; Scarry 1985)
Locating the origins of innatism among settler communities engaged in relations of violence emphasises the point made by Saldanha that, Far from being an arbitrary classification system imposed upon bodies, race is a nonnecessary and irreducible effect of the ways those bodies themselves interact with each other. (2006, 10)
Even if they’re right about the libidinal economy, psychoanalysis is non falsifiable, pseudo-scientific garbage – none of their cards are peer reviewed or accepted within academia as legitimate explanations for behavior. Even if they’re right, this doesn’t scale up to analyzing societies or groups of individuals, just individual psyches.
Pessimism is a counterproductive response to anti-blackens – it only internalizes violence re-creating psychological violence – but political hope is good – and is distinct from certainty and optimism
Rogers, Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University, ‘17
(Melvin, “Keeping the Faith,” November 1, http://bostonreview.net/race/melvin-rogers-keeping-faith)
But when the United States selects its eloquent spokesperson on the “race issue”—as it always does—all other voices become mere noise, and the complexity of our political traditions and our lived experiences are flattened out. In Coates’s view, for instance, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, and Martin Luther King Jr. were all failures. They performed the same script, they failed to move their audience to action, and they never reshaped U.S. life and culture. “All of these heroes,” Coates insists, “had failed to cajole and coerce the masters of America.” In Coates’s telling, fine historical distinctions disappear, time stands still, and the past and future collapse into the political horrors of the present.
This is what happens when we listen only to a single voice; no conversation is possible. We are disabled from speaking thoughtfully and accurately about political and cultural transformation on racial matters.
But there is a sleight of hand in Coates’s “black atheism”; it conflates hope with certainty, and hope becomes our fatal flaw. Yet we don’t need to believe that progress is inevitable to think that, through our efforts, we may be able to move toward a more just society. We can, however, be sure that no good will come of the refusal to engage in this work.
There is much in this that should concern us. Coates describes the pain visited on black bodies and engenders white guilt. He erodes the idea that who we are need not determine who we may become. He obstructs rather than opens any attempt to reckon with our racial past and present in the service of an inclusive future. And he participates in a politics where words and actions can never aspire to change the political community in which we live, and for that reason they only fortify our indignation and deepen our suspicion—namely, that as black Americans, we are as alien to this polity as it is alien to us. The aspiration to defend a more exalted vision of this country’s ethical and political life is taken as the hallmark of being asleep, dreaming in religious illusions. To be alive to an unvarnished reality, to be woke, is to recognize that no such country is possible.
This runs roughshod over that thread in the grand tradition of U.S. struggles for justice—a tradition in which hope and faith are forged through political darkness. Hope involves attachment and commitment to the possibility of realizing the goods we seek. Faith is of a broader significance, providing hope with content. Faith, the black scholar Anna Julia Cooper suggested in 1892, is grounded in a vision of political and ethical life that is at odds with the community one inhabits. It is a vision that one believes ought to command allegiance, for which one is willing to fight, and in which one believes others can find a home. Faith looks on the present from the perspective of a future vision of society, and uses the vision as a resource to remake the present. And so faith, the philosopher and psychologist William James explained in 1897, is “the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance.” In other words, faith has never been exhausted by the political reality one happens to be living in.
Political faith has always rested on the idea that we are not finished, a thought that Coates rejects out of hand. In the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson called this capacity for human renewal “ascension, or the passage of the soul into higher forms.” In our political life this means, as James Baldwin well knew, that both our liberal democratic institutions and its culture “depends on choices one has got to make, for ever and ever and ever, every day.”
Faith has always been a loving but difficult commitment precisely because it makes politics about maybes rather than certainties. One of the greatest dangers of U.S. exceptionalism, for instance, is that it has habituated us to think about the structure of political life as necessarily progressing. Writing in the wake of the Montgomery bus boycott—a successful nonviolent campaign against racial segregation—King sought to chasten the obvious excitement: “Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Even a superficial look at history reveals that no social advance rolls in on the wheels of inevitability.”
Yet Coates appears simply to invert U.S. exceptionalism, replacing it with the equally fatalistic idea that the United States is fundamentally broken. In a world where the good or bad is fated to happen, faith and hope have no foothold. This ultimately weakens our resolve and undermines our ability to take seriously the idea of an “American experiment.”
Black activists have not forged their faith with the stone of U.S. exceptionalism. Rather, they have used their darkest hours to “make a way out of no way”—to address the triple crises of exclusion, domination, and violence. Abolitionists such as David Walker faced it in the form of the enslavement of black folks. Frederick Douglass encountered it with the rise and crash of reconstruction. Wells faced it as she confronted the horror of lynching and the disposability of black life. And in our own time, Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists are reminded of a similar disposability of black life that goes unpunished.
And yet, they are keepers of the faith, recognizing that its vitality is not exhausted by the reality they struggle against. In her recent New York Times article, “Black Lives Matter Is Democracy in Action,” Barbara Ransby narrates a powerful account of BLM activists creating contexts for collective leadership and using those opportunities to transform the power of voice into actions that meet the needs of ordinary people. This effort would be impossible for people who accept Coates’s perspective. Their efforts may not win the day, but they certainly won’t win the day without the faith that winning is a possibility.
Faith does not deny the present, but refuses to be defined by it and sink into it. We now face a president who seeks to colonize every waking moment of our lives with feelings of dread, thus arresting our ability to imagine a reality beyond television, social media feeds, and newspapers. The illusion of our present moment is not expressed in political faith, but in the belief that we can respond constructively without such faith. Political faith is fully realistic about the present disasters and rejects illusions about assured future progress, while also insisting that we are not certain to fail. It is hopeful without being optimistic.
We may falter, and the material, psychological, and political goods of white supremacy may deplete our desire to transform. We know the history—from the 1880s to the 1960s—of white backlash in response to a more expansive racial justice. In fact, we are living through one such backlash given the ascendancy of Trump. But our political community is what it is because we have made it this way. It is not fated to be. Believing otherwise makes white supremacy something more than a collection of choices, habits, and practices—it makes it part of human nature itself. Coates wants us to face the facts and embrace black atheism. But throughout the book he often slides from working in the historical register to speaking in the idiom of philosophical metaphysics—at one moment he stands in time and at another he stands outside of it, confidently telling us how history will end. For this reason, Coates doesn't dismantle white supremacy; he ironically provides it with support.
Please understand my concern. Coates is right: he doesn’t have a “responsibility to be hopeful or optimistic or make anyone feel better about the world.” We must, as he has often done, speak the truth. But we must not claim to know what we cannot possibly know. Humility creates space for hope.
CJS reform isn’t incommensurate with being opposed to civil society, which proves the perm
Wilderson 16 (Frank B. III, interviewed by Samira Spatzek and Paula von Gleich, “‘The Inside-Outside of Civil Society’: An Interview with Frank B. Wilderson, III.” Black Studies Papers, 2.1 (2016): 4–22, https://www.academia.edu/26032053/_The_Inside-
The question is, can Black political organizing in Ferguson and Balti-more and these places catch up with that, because unfortunately, we have a problem in that the country is so much more of a police state than it has ever been and you know that just by watching television. When I was in school, if you liked the American flag, if you liked the police, you didn’t have any friends. Now, I find young college students are very slow to say that they hate America, very slow to say that they hate the police. What we’re trying to do now is to infuse an antagonistic orientation in Black people who are white-collar people in college so that their intellectual skills can be enhanced by the orientation that is felt by Black people in the ghetto. If this doesn’t happen they run risk of being anointed and ap-pointed (by the power structure) to manage the anger of Black people in the street, rather than relate to that anger. So that’s a hurdle that we have to overcome. You know, I’ve been doing political education workshops for Black Lives Matter in New York and Los Angeles, and probably will do more in Chicago. And what I hope to have people do workshop exercises around is this concept that I have called “Two Trains Running (Side by Side).” By that I mean, you can do your political organizing that will help us get relief from police brutality right now. We need that. We need that. But that work that we do should be seen as puny in terms of its philosophical and theoretical orientation so that we can educate ourselves politically to be against the police as an institution and against the United States as a country, even while we are working to reform police practices, because we do not have the strength right now that we had in the 1960s and 1970s to act in the way the Black Liberation Army did, or Baader-Meinhof, we do not have the strength to act in the revolutionary mode, but that lack of strength, that lack of capacity, should not contaminate our orientation. We should not feel that we have to accept the existence of police even if we’re working in reformist measures politically. Hopefully this idea of two trains running will pick up. Black Lives Matter has done a great job in opening up a new Black political organizing space. That’s great. Now let’s use that space for an educational project that is soundly anti-American, and soundly anti-police even if tactically, we have to work for police reforms.
But the alternative doesn’t solve --- it offers no way to address material problems that exist in the status quo, change sentencing practices, or help a single person get out of prison which proves they link more to their false hope arguments
Even if we don’t win ontology is 100% true, you should still evaluate our conceptual framework and apply our theory as a STRATEGIC WAY OF READING HISTORY – any risk of a link means they engage in the logic of slavery and become independent voters
Nick Brady, PhD candidate at UC Irvine) 2015, “A Few Notes on the Intramural of Afropessimism,” https://outofnowhereblog.wordpress.com/2015/07/31/a-few-notes-to-the-intramural-on-afropessimism/, C.A., ghs//BZ
I once was told in a conversation, “I just don’t buy that black people are socially dead.” In another situation, a friend of mine was asked a similar question centered about belief. The bottom line seems to come down to whether or not you “buy” that social death is real, whether it has capital “T” truth behind it. Is the sky is blue? Can black people be socially dead? In certain people’s attitudes social death seems to have the intellectual weight of Dragons and Unicorns. Somewhere behind these conversations Jay Z raps “We don’t believe you, you need more people.” Such engagement, while understandable at a certain level, can be put in the same intellectual trash bin as “I’m black and I have seen reverse racism” or “Work is not exploitative, I like my work.” All can be true at the level of one’s perception, while one’s personal feelings do not necessarily translate into an accurate or even desirable political analysis. Theories of social death, political ontology, and libidinal economy are concepts produced in a political analysis of many different fields, such as race and psychoanalysis, the forever growing historical literature on slavery and capitalism, the black radical tradition, black feminist and black queer interventions into theory and politics, etc. This is to say, it is making an argument and one must engage the actual substance of the argument. As a writer, I employ concepts such as social death, political ontology, and libidinal economy as critical terms of study. These concepts enable me to do both political and intellectual work that speaks directly to the pervasive nature of black suffering across time and space. They are not the only concepts nor are they original, the novelty lies in how the concept allows certain work to be done. So when one says thinking of race as ontology destroys our agency and destroys the possibility of possibility itself, locking us into a self-defeating logic, I always wonder what they mean. Do they mean the theory of social death or political ontology has a material history that has locked us out of possibility? The obvious answer to this is, the theory did not do that, the world did that and the theory describes the violence of the world. Afropessimism does not posit a death sentence to what blackness could be, but recognizes the world’s death sentence as a structuring condition for black life. This theory embraces the umembraceable aspect of blackness as a mode of theorizing: the question of suffering and how to name the violence that causes it. This is not a reduction of black people to suffering, but a desire to speak to the unimaginable aspects of our suffering — to see black suffering as a profound site of interrogation. Race operates through ontology because race is a socially produced belief about the being of collectivities. This ontology may be what we call a fantasy, but fantasies obtain material force through the political acts of bodies. This ontology can also be said to never accomplish itself, so duration brings about mutation and perfection. Killing gets more efficient, forms of subjection become more sophisticated or stagnate, collapse, only to become fertile soil for another position. This is to say, this ontology is produced through fundamentally, perhaps tragically, political processes. The modern world is politically structured according to racist ontology via at least 500 years of slavery, genocide, colonization, racial capital, and white supremacist gender and sexual normativity. Therefore, race is the political ontology of the world not in spite of history, but through the force of actions accumulated across a span of time. This politically reproduced and inhabited fantasy is certainly not stable, but why would it have to be? Groundlessness would seem to be the obvious fact and precondition, not the logical antithesis that defeats the argument. Slaughtering black flesh produces ground, meaning, value, wealth, way-making, motivation, solidarity, “heritage” as Coates puts it. Lowering scales of abstraction one can see this violence operating in political processes and social dynamics. See how that is not saying blackness is metaphysical or that ontology is the truth behind all truths or that everything is unchanging or that history does not matter? Theory is not produced without a reading, it is a strategy of reading a body of literature. Therefore theory is one of the greatest tools we have in our arsenal. In the enemy territory of knowledge production in a plantation nation, one needs a strategy to maneuver through word mines. The world is a ghetto, I’m just trying not to inhale words that will choke my throat from the inside. To me, theory is different from a manifesto in that it does not demand us to pronounce a political program, movement, or moment. Theory is not a necessarily (anti-)positivist research method either. Theory is a tool, it is not the entire toolbox. Theory assumes an audience that either has already or is actively reading a certain body of literature. This is why “high theory” can seem elitist, it oftentimes is by its very definition. Given where theory is produced, oftentimes the audience assumed is one that can or is required to read a certain set of texts, aka academics. Yet, theory can be and is produced everywhere. Wherever you are making a reading of a body of texts — be they songs, gestures, slang, poems, academic articles, novels — one is producing theory. The terrible rap beef between Meek and Drake has produced much theorizing about the meaning of hip hop, rap, authenticity, and quality. Ultimately, the question of theory is still the same as the question of writing — who are you writing to/for/from and how much do you want to push? So a term like “political ontology” is produced from a reading of interdisciplinary texts and is given as a strategy for future reading, not a fact. The question is not “is ontology real,” instead it is “what does the concept of political ontology enable and what does it hinder us from seeing?” From there you add the tool to your tool box and keep it moving. Afropessimism may be useful depending on the question you are asking and what you need to explain. This is to say, in spite of what many people seem to whisper in hallways and bars, and increasingly are putting on paper and presentation: afropessimism deserves to be read. Not because it is right, not because it has truth, but because we cannot afford to throw any tool away. Our work, black work, has to be done by any means necessary. If it is dull, sharpen it. If it ain’t working, holster it and pull out something different. Or get creative. Interesting combinations are possible.
Overview 1 - can't win finals w/ backfiles - dropped kritik of redness - Wilderson on savage not abt blackness - also how civil society engages in genocidal logics against indigenous subjectrecreates genocide - engaging in civil society / politics replicates this genocide, no solvency for case + turns case bc don't acct for blackness / indigeneity, replicates violence.none of their answers answer this, independent voting issueOverview 2 - poverty, etc. conceded ontology warrant - slavery changed strxrl relationships, shift in grammar of sufferingalt conceded - pathology of being... we solve entirety of case
LINK DEBATE, 1- theorize agency, assume black capacity doesn't existno slave no TOC - gratuitous violence, court - legitimacy, paradox of alliancethis is specific and comparative - takes out your state good analysis - aff wil lbe circumvented3- strctural analysis - can never engage in them bc of your abstraction [???] must q civil society first
no topic education when conceded K is a prior question - conceded fiat illusoryperm is severance - they say reform, we say no civil society; voting issue bc fairness, no solutions
resorting to empirics bad - ext Wilderson - this political grammar constantly changes
AT civil rights - gutted by SCOTUS in 2k, Loving v Virginia - fetishizes blacknessyour other examples appeal to white grammar of civil societyyou say reformism and law is a crisis - state answers not contextualized to this debate - grammar of suffering is a prior question
GROUP - Wilderson agrees - prison industrial complex, don't allow blackness move outside position of slavery2- strategic reading of historyBrady15//
another link - doesn't matter if we win ontology wrong. can't be parasitic on indigeneity - win ontology debate win win
ROB - destroys education, arbitrary self serving, reps tied to consequneces so can't separate fiat out. We impact turn the K - even if don't grant fiat. pathologizing blackness bad
epstemically bad, 1- Gordon - sweeping claims about human existence - rich history, historical events, diff geographies, cultures, can't express. 2- don't know the future, black ppl have fought bc known not just about themhuman systems definitionally changeableAT BRADY 15saying a group that is human saying not human is racist - suffering is contingent and said turn them into something nonhuman, worse, saying you Devane and Iggy are slaves, probably badlink turn - away from binary... they're a totalizing depiction of blackness
[Ronak's timer went off and distracted me]they need libidinal economy arg to win ontology - based in natal alienation, doesn't prove not changeable - nothing intrinsic to white people's minds [bc not presocial]
aff solves specific forms of violence- obscures misconduct, coercing into pb and avoid violence.alt pathology doesn't change current law doesn't change thiscall for their circumvention card - says police involvement is bad. that's the aff!unwarranted, mitigatory defenseinvolvement in pb is not a good ideawe'll win FW debate which will be sufficient
Decision time
The answer in certitude goes in as the following structure:
WINNER;AFF/NEG;KRITIKAUTHOR;REASONFORDECISION
You can validate your puzzle solution with certitude.