1nc

1NC Ableism
Right to die movements empirically justify larger use of ableist eugenics
Wright 2000 - Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Clark University (Walter,
Historical Analogies, Slippery Slopes, and the Question of Euthanasia foumal of Law,
Medicine &Ethics, 28 (2000): 176-186, Wiley)
The gathering threads of the eugenics and right-to- die movements converged in the influential
1920 publica- tion Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens: I hr Mass und Form
(Permitting the Destruction of Lives not Worth Living: Its Extent and Form) by Karl Binding and
Alfred Hoche.37 Binding was perhaps the most distinguished legal scholar of his time and
Hoche was a physician and Professor at Freiburg. Their independent essays on the com- mon
question appeared together. Most importantly, this little volume became a crucial avenue for
disseminating the idea that some lives are not worth living. I will briefly review Binding's
historically influential arguments leaving Hoches less germane discussion to the side. Binding
provides a careful legal analysis of a range of related cases, including suicide, assisting someone to
com- mit suicide, responding to a request from a terminally ill, hopeless, and suffering patient,
killing a mentally ill person at the request of family members, and so on. He is very careful to
make important distinctions, and he attempts to maintain clear boundaries around the specific
cases of kill- ing he proposes to categorize as not legally forbidden. Thus, while he finds
suicide not legally forbidden, assist- ing in a suicide is actually the killing of a third party and
the consent of the victim does not remove legal liability from the assistant. However, not all lives
are equal. Binding introduces the idea that terminally ill or fatally wounded people are in a new
category. Here there clearly appears the idea that such a life no longer merits strict legal

protection. These are, he thinks, lives not worth living. He distinguishes three cases. In the
first group are those irretrievably lost as a result of illness or injury, who, fully understanding
their situation, possess and have somehow expressed their urgent wish for release.M For
Binding, killing such patients is a duty of legal mercy. Among other examples, he includes the
fatally injured comrade on a battlefield or a mountain- eering expedition. The second group
consists of incur- able idiots."1 These people have the will neither to live nor to die. In this case
too Binding finds no grounds legally, socially, ethically, or religiouslyfor not permitting the
killing of these people who are the fearsome counter image of true humanity, and who arouse
horror in nearly everyone who meets them.40 His restriction in this case is that the right of
application should be limited to the family who have been caring for the handicapped patient, or
to the guardian. The third group consists of mentally sound people who through some event like
a very severe, doubt- less fatal wound, have become comatose. He docs not think that any
blanket rule can cover this last group of cases, but then goes on to conclude with a general
guideline: [OJnly those persons arc candidates for having their deaths permitted who are
terminally ill and who, in addition to being beyond help, have either requested death or
consented to dying, or else would have re- quested or consented, had they not fallen into unconsciousness at the critical time or if they had been able to achieve awareness of the situation.41
(Emphasis added.) All of this, Binding views within the constraint that Every unforbidden
killing of a third person must be expe- rienced as a release, at least by the victim; otherwise
allow- ing it is self-evidently ruled out.42 Having established his basic principle, Binding then
goes on to propose a formal procedure with careful safeguards as a way to implement it without
abuses.4* Bindings arguments incorporate elements of the right to die movement as well as the
eugenicists appeals to the preservation of social well-being. If one abstracts from this works

historical results, ignores the occasionally crude cal- culations of social utility, and considers the
rather careful protections that he includes against possible abuses, one could perhaps take these
arguments as sensible, compas- sionate and progressive. They are surprisingly modern in tone ,
suggesting both Singers careful defense of permitting a limited practice of euthanasia, and
recent guidelines in the Netherlands. But can one abstract from the works historical effects? This
is the core of the slippery slope argument. Bindings and Hoches views were extensively
discussed by their con- temporaries and, although never officially accepted in the ^Xfeimar
period, became widely influential among physicians. Participants in the T444 program used them
explicitly to justify their actions.41 This connection is an instance of both a precedent based
and a causal slippery slope. First, by providing support for a limited practicc of medical killing,
Binding and Hoche made such things discussible. In doing so, they provided intellectual cover for
people who wished later to abuse the opportunity . Second, their work brought about a climate
among German medical profes- sionals that permitted doctors to accept the idea of killing their
patients. This climate could be claimed to have been a contributing cause for the vigorous advocacy
by some German physicians of a policy of killing mentally retarded, physically handicapped,
elderly people: the useless eat- ers. In that respect, Singers opponents might say, the German
experience confirms the claim that even discuss- ing the idea that some lives might not be worth
living helps to create the unmitigated disaster. Their argument also connects to the peg
protecting our wagon from rolling down the hill. Their influence in Germany effectively pulled
the peg in the slope (provided by the Hippocratic ethic), so that, when external social forces
pushed the medi- cal cart, physicians were no longer able to arrest its slide .46

Ableism must be rejected, it makes ongoing eugenics and extermination inevitable

Brown 11

, Artist Initiative Grantee at Minnesota State Arts Board Senior Academic Adviser for the College of Education and Human Development at University of Minnesota Steering Committee at Education Abroad
Network at University of Minnesota Volunteer Coordinator for Social Inclusion and Bullying Prevention at Marcy Open School see less Past 2012-2013 Buckman Fellow at Buckman Fellowship Travel and Study Grantee at Jerome
Foundation Loft Mentor Series Award Winner for Poetry at The Loft Literary Center Institute on Community Integration Post-graduate Certificate Graduate Student at University of Minnesota University of Minnesota College of
Education and Human Development/University Honors Program Liaison at University of Minnesota University Honors Program Academic Advisor at University of Minnesota University of Minnesota Learning Abroad
Center/University Honors Program Liaison at University of Minnesota Foreign Lecturer--English Studies, Cultural Awareness, Humanities at Hokkaido University of Education Educational Technologies post-grad certificate program
at University of British Columbia, Vancouver Adjunct Lecturer--Japanese Language at Wayne County Community College Adjunct Lecturer--English Composition at Wayne State University Foriegn Lecturer--English Studies,
Creative Writing, English Literature at Sophia University--Tokyo, Japan Screw normal: Resisting the myth of normal by questioning medias depiction of people with autism and their families,
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/gara0030/iggds/Screw%20Normal_FINAL_Dosch%20Brown.pdf

The one societal need in our society that is often unacknowledged, silenced, and left unexamined is
that humans have, as Michalko quoted Cornel West, the deep, visceral need to belong

(Michalko, 2002, p. 81) all of us struggle with full acceptance of ourselves and our desire to
be seen as acceptable or welcome in a society that loves to label people. The media creates walls
between its ideals and the people it views as Others , such as when the media views people with
autism as abnormal mysteries. We are being taught that differences occurring from autism are
wrong, and sadly too many families depicted in the media perpetuate this negative view of their
own children. When thinking of normal henceforth, lets consider what Michalko wrote about

society and his blindness. He explained that, although society might have found ways
technologically for him to participate (he is a professor), he is still seen as strange because he
is blind. He said the difference in his blindness must be grappled with inside his being in a space
between nature and culture and normal and abnormal (2002, p. 83), and it is within this
confusing, unmarked space where he has had to build his own identity. By moving through the
world with his body of blindness, Michalko has projected himself into the social space , just as

my son must project his own self, by moving through the social space with his mind of
difference; thus, society reacts to people who have disabilities who cannot live up to the mythical
norms with help, pity, ridicule, unease, and curiosity (2002, p. 88), and it results in an
unequal power structure that creates treacherous terrain for all of us who have been Othered.
Michalko (2002) noted that mainstream Western society views all disabilities as abnormal, and it

thus approaches people with disability as tragic people who live lives not worth living; they are
seen as the Other, as objects of pity, both vulnerable and fragile (p.68). The complexity,
diversity, and range of differences of all human beings in this world are erased, denied, and
ignored under a banner of sameness or normalcyand those who cannot or will not conform
are silenced and lumped into the category of Other, and dealt with suspicion for not conforming to
social construction of what is acceptable in appearance, behavior, and experience. Eugenics, the
academic Phil Smith (2008) has concluded, is still very much present in societal attitudes toward
disability. Eugenics formalized the Normal, a cultural landscape outlined in order to support
the hegemony of its inhabitants, a liberalist bourgeois class of white, able-bodied men (P. Smith,

p. 419). By silencing those with perceived disabilities (or those with a particular perceived race,
ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation , etc.) and deeming them as lesser than normal humans
society is able to continue to deny that being normal is actually a socially constructed myth
(Michalko, 2002, p. 69). Phil Smith further pointed out that not so long ago those who
committed the war crimes by killing or sterilizing people they had deemed of inferior intelligence
in the Nazis T-4 project were consistently given less severe convictions and higher acquittal rates

(P. Smith, 2008, p. 421)revealing, indeed, that as a society we devalue the lost lives of those
considered too different from the mythical norm, which we will demonstrate later is a devaluation
of human life very much alive in media depiction of autism. Society rarely has ears for the voices
or rooms reserved for those with differences who think otherwise , and it rarely realizes that indeed
people with differences also have value and critical roles to play in society. The media maintains
this gaping silence as well. Society, Michalko has argued, either expects those deemed
abnormal will get through their differences by adapting to the dominant rules, so as to be
less noticed, or it expects them to get out by removing themselves from view, by being silent
and isolated (Michalko, 2002, p. 75); and some experts, doctors, educators, and therapists make

a sizable income from attempting to enforce these societal expectations on families.

Decrim CP
Text: The United States should decriminalize physician assisted suicide in the United
States.
Decriminalization is merely the government rescinding its authority over death
while legalization of physician assisted suicide is an escalation of governmental
power through responsibilizing the subject this reentrenches neoliberalism and
turns the aff
Ryan et al. 2011 school of psychology, Massey University (Anne, Mandy Morgan, and
Antonia Lyons, The Problem with Death: Towards a Genealogy of Euthanasia Refereed
Proceedings of Doing Psychology: Manawatu Doctoral Research Symposium 2011 4348,
http://mro.massey.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10179/3387/8%20Ryan%2c%20Morgan%20%2b
%20Lyons.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y)
Euthanasia is ostensibly a humane response to the incalculable pain and suffering associated with
chronic and terminal illness and the loss of quality of life. It can be viewed as a noble aspiration,
laying claim as it does to individual rights, freedom of choice and personal autonomy. However,
this genealogy is able to open up that discursive space surrounding euthanasia to at least a
modicum of suspicion. In tracing the historical development of moral arguments, we are able to
gain some insight into Foucaults suggestions about the formation of the self through
selfsubjection within these ancient ethical frameworks. The ethic of self-killing was firstly
identified in order for it to become moulded by moral actions. This required the subjection of the
self to a recognised moral order. For example, the ancient Greeks and Romans subjected
themselves to the gods or the state and the early Chri stians to their Creator. As a result this moral
obligation became objectified into ethical discourses and rules of behaviour. Turner (1997) argues
that these discourses of subjectivity have the effect of producing identities , for example the

chronic sufferer and the terminally ill. As this genealogy further unfolded it became apparent that
in Turners words, it is these identities which then become the object and focus of medicalisation
and normalization (p. xii). Foucault argued that medicine was at the center of the quest for
normalization and by its infiltration of the law had created a juridico -medical web that
represented a major structure of power (Foucault, 1996). The increasing demands for the
legalization of the right-to-die are unlikely to deliver the promised freedom of choice or control
of our own dying. Rather it will result in an escalation of governmental power. Euthanasia can be
viewed as emblematic of neo-liberalism that is intrinsically linked to an art of government that
develops the ways and means in which to shape and guide the conduct of each and every one of its
citizens. It requires the population to be acted upon to ensure its own welfare and for its own
economic good through techniques that need to appear reasonable and acceptable to both the
practitioners and the people (Foucault, 1991). Hegemonic discourses of medicalisation and
personal autonomy that prevail in our society today and are accepted as common sense seek to
represent euthanasia as the obvious response of a humane society to terminal illness. They endorse
a practice that is widely viewed as the logical extension of a fundamental human right . However, it
should be recognised that these discourses also allow for the exercising of power while
simultaneously masking that power .

Wilderson
The 1ACs demand for legal relief is the perfection of the slave as a slavewhen the
slave bows down to its master ie when the affirmative calls for federal equality it ties
its freedom to hopeless legal reliefafter emancipation and legal equality, the slave
is truly perfect, shackled by the chains of its dependence for the master to be its
liberator.
Farley 5 [Boston College (Anthony, Perfecting Slavery,
http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1028&context=lsfp)]
Slavery is with us still . We are haunted by slavery. We are animated by slavery. White-over-black
is slavery and segregation and neosegregation and every situation in which the distribution of
material or spiritual goods follows the colorline. The movement from slavery to segregation to

neosegregation to whatever form of white-over-black it is that may come with post-modernity or

after is not toward freedom. The movement from slavery to segregation to neosegregation is the
movement of slavery perfecting itself . White-over-black is neosegregation. White-over-black is
segregation. White-over-black is slavery. All of it is white-over-black , only white-over-black, and
that continually. The story of progress up from slavery is a lie, the longest lie. The story of
progress up from slavery is told juridically in the form of the rule of law. Slavery is the rule of law.
And slavery is death. The slave perfects itself as a slave when it bows down before its master of its
own free will. That is the moment in which the slave accomplishes the impossible reconciliation of
its freedom with its unfreedom by willing itself unfree .3 When exactly does this perfection of

slavery take place? The slave bows down before its master when it prays for legal relief, when it
prays for equal rights, and while it cultivates the field of law hoping for an answer . The slaves free
choice, the slaves leap of faith, can only be taken under conditions of legal equality. Only after
emancipation and legal equality, only after rights, can the slave perfect itself as a slave . Bourgeois
legality is the condition wherein equals are said to enter the commons of reason4 or the kingdom of
ends5 or the New England town meeting of the soul to discuss universalizable principles, to
discuss equality and freedom. Much is made of these meetings, these struggles for law, these

festivals of the universal. Commons, kingdom, town meeting, there are many mansions in the
house of law, but the law does not forget its father, as Maria Grahn-Farley observes: The law of
slavery has not been forgotten by the law of segregation; the law of segregation has not been
forgotten by the law of neosegregation. The law guarding the gates of slavery, segregation, and
neosegregation has not forgotten its origin; it remembers its father and its grandfather before that.
It knows what master it serves; it knows what color to count.6 To wake from slavery is to see that
everything must go, every law room,7 every great house, every plantation, all of it, everything .
Requests for equality and freedom will always fail. Why? Because the fact of need itself means
that the request will fail . The request for equality and freedom, for rights, will fail whether the
request is granted or denied. The request is produced through an injury .8 The initial injury is the
marking of bodies for lessless respect, less land, less freedom, less education, less . The mark must

be made on the flesh because that is where we start from. Childhood is where we begin and,
under conditions of hierarchy, that childhood is already marked. The mark organizes, orients, and

differentiates our otherwise common flesh. The mark is race, the mark is gender, the mark is
class, the mark is. The mark is all there is to the reality of those essencesrace, gender, class,
and so onthat are said to precede existence. The mark is a system.9 Property and law follow
the mark. And so it goes. There is a pleasure in hierarchy. We begin with an education in our
hierarchies. We begin with childhood and childhood begins with education. To be exact,
education begins our childhood. We are called by race, by gender, by class, and so on. Our
education cultivates our desire in the direction of our hierarchies . If we are successful, we acquire
an orientation that enables us to locate ourselves and our bodies vis--vis all the other bodies that
inhabit our institutional spaces. We follow the call and move in the generally expected way.
White-overblack is an orientation, a pleasure, a desire that enables us to find our place, and
therefore our way, in our institutional spaces. This is why no one ever need ask for equality and

freedom. This is why the fact of need means that the request will fail. The request for rightsfor
equalitywill always fail because there are always ambiguities. To be marked for less, to be
marked as less han zero, to be marked as a negative attractor, is to be in the situation of the slave.
The slave is not called. The slave is not free. The slave is called to follow the calling that is not a
calling. The slave is trained to be an object; the slave is trained, in other words, to not be. The
slave is death. Death is the end of ambiguity. To be in the situation of the slave is to have all the
ambiguities organized against you. But there are always ambiguities, one is always free. How,
then, are the ambiguities organized? How is freedom ended? The slave must choose the end of
ambiguity, the end of freedom, objecthood. The slave must freely choose death. This the slave can
only do under conditions of freedom that present it with a choice. The perfect slave gives up the
ghost and commends its everlasting spirit to its master. The slaves final and perfect prayer is a
legal prayer for equal rights. The texts of law, like the manifest content of a dream, perhaps of
wolves, may tell a certain story or an uncertain story. The certainty or uncertainty of the story is
of absolutely no consequence. The story, the law, the wolves table manners, do not matter. The
story, the law, the story of law, the dream of wolves,10 however, represents a disguised or latent
wish that does matter. The wish is a matter of life or death. We are strangers to ourselves. The
dream of equality, of rights, is the disguised wish for hierarchy . The prayer for equal rights is the
disguised desire for slavery. Slavery is death. The prayer for equal rights, then, is the disguise of the
deathwish. The prayer for equal rights is the slaves perfect moment . The slaves perfect prayer,
the prayer of the perfect slave, is always answered. The slave, however, knows not what it does
when it prays for rights, for the slave is estranged from itself. Of its own inner strivings it knows

not. The slave strives to be property, but since property cannot own property the slave cannot
own its inner strivings. The slave strives to produce the final commodity law. In other words,
the slave produces itself as a slave through law. The slave produces itself as a slave (as a
commodity) through its own prayer for equal rights . And that prayer is all there is to law. The
slave bows down before the law and prays for equal rights. The slave bows down before the law
and then there is law. There is no law before the slave bows down. The slaves fidelity becomes the
law, and the law is perfected through the slaves struggle for the universal, through the slaves
struggle for equality of right . The slave prays for equality of right. Rights cannot be equal. Its

perfect prayer is answered; the laws ambiguities open, like the gates of heaven, just above its
head. And all of the white-over-black accumulated within the endless ambiguities of law rains
down. White over-black is slavery and slavery is death. Death is the end of forever. The end of
forever is perfection and perfection, for us, seems divine, beyond the veil, beyond death; hence,
the end of forever.

Reformism fails and your educational model justifies the continued permeance of the
state
Dylan Rodriguez, 2010 (Professor at UCR of Latin American Studies, The Terms of Engagement: Warfare, White Locality, and Abolition,
http://crs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/36/1/151 :)

Thus, behind the din of progressive and liberal reformist struggles over public policy, civil liberties,
and law, and beneath the infrequent mobilizations of activity to defend against the next onslaught
of racist, classist, ageist, and misogynist criminalization, there is an unspoken politics of assumption
that takes for granted the mystified permanence of domestic warfare as a constant production of
targeted and massive suffering, guided by the logic of normalized and mundane black, brown, and
indigenous subjection to the expediencies and essential violence of the American (global) nationbuilding project. To put it differently: despite the unprecedented forms of imprisonment, social and
political repression, and violent policing that compose the mosaic of our historical time, the
establishment left (within and perhaps beyond the USA) really does not care to envision, much less
politically prioritize, the abolition of US domestic warfare and its structuring white supremacist
social logic as its most urgent task of the present and future. The non-profit and NGO left, in
particular, seems content to engage in desperate (and usually well-intentioned) attempts to manage
the casualties of domestic warfare, foregoing the urgency of an abolitionist praxis that openly,
critically, and radically addresses the moral, cultural, and political premises of these wars . In so
many ways, the US progressive/left establishment is filling the void created by what Ruth Wilson
Gilmore has called the violent 'abandonments' of the state, which forfeits and implodes its own
social welfare capacities (which were already insufficient at best) while transforming and

(productively) exploding its domestic warmaking functionalities which Gilmore (2007b: 44

5) says are guided by a 'frightening willingness to engage in human sacrifice'. Yet, at the same
time that the state has been openly galvanizing itself to declare and wage violent struggle against
strategically targeted local populations, the establishment left remains relatively unwilling and
therefore institutionally unable to address the questions of social survival, grass roots mobilization,
radical social justice, and social transformation on the concrete and everyday terms of the very
domestic war(s) that the state has so openly and repeatedly declared as the premises of its own
coherence. Given that domestic warfare composes both the common narrative language and
concrete material production of the state, the question remains as to why the establishment left has
not understood this statecraft as the state of emergency that the condition so openly, institutionally
encompasses (war!). Perhaps it is because critical intellectuals , scholar activists, and progressive

organizers are underestimating the skill and reach of the state as a pedagogical (teaching)
apparatus , that they have generally undertheorized how the state so skillfully generates (and often
politically accommodates) sanctioned spaces of political contradiction that engulf 'dissent' and
counter-state, antiracist, and antiviolence organizing. Italian political prisoner Antonio Gramscis
thoughts on the formation of contemporary pedagogical state are instructive here: The State does
have and request consent, but it also 'educates' this consent, by means of the political and syndical
associations; these, however, are private organisms, left to the private initiative of the ruling class .

(Gramsci 1995: 259).

The 1ac is part and parcel to White humanism and continues a trajectory of failed
reforms that reifies violence against the black body
Wilderson-2010- Frank B Wilderson III- Professor at UC irvine- Red, White and Blackp. 8-10
I have little interest in assailing political conservatives. Nor is my ar- gument wedded to the

disciplinary needs of political science, or even sociology, where injury must be established, first,
as White supremacist event, from which one then embarks on a demonstration of intent, or
racism; and, if one is lucky, or foolish, enough, a solution is proposed. If the position of the Black
is, as I argue, a paradigmatic impossibility in the Western Hemisphere, indeed, in the world, in
other words, if a Black is the very antithesis of a Human subject, as imagined by Marxism and
psy- choanalysis, then his or her paradigmatic exile is not simply a function of repressive practices
on the part of institutions (as political science and sociology would have it). This banishment
from the Human fold is to be found most profoundly in the emancipatory meditations of Black
people's staunchest "allies," and in some of the most "radical" films. Herenot in restrictive
policy, unjust legislation, police brutality, or conservative scholarshipis where the
Settler/Master's sinews are most resilient. The polemic animating this research stems from (1) my

reading of Native and Black American meta-commentaries on Indian and Black subject positions
written over the past twenty-three years and ( 2 ) a sense of how much that work appears out of
joint with intellectual protocols and political ethics which underwrite political praxis and socially
engaged popular cinema in this epoch of multiculturalism and globalization. The sense of
abandonment I experience when I read the meta-commentaries on Red positionality (by theorists
such as Leslie Silko, Ward Churchill, Taiaiake Alfred, Vine Deloria Jr., and Haunani-Kay Trask)
and the meta-commentaries on Black positionality (by theorists such as David Marriott, Saidiya
Hartman, Ronald Judy, Hortense Spillers, Orlando Patterson, and Achille Mbembe) against the
deluge of multicultural positivity is overwhelming. One suddenly realizes that, though the
semantic field on which subjec- tivity is imagined has expanded phenomenally through the
protocols of multiculturalism and globalization theory, Blackness and an unflinching articulation
of Redness are more unimaginable and illegible within this expanded semantic field than they
were during the height of the F B I ' S repressive Counterintelligence Program ( C O I N T E L P
R O ) . On the seman- tic field on which the new protocols are possible, Indigenism can indeed
lO become partially legible through a programmatics of structural adjust- ment (as fits our
globalized era). In other words, for the Indians' subject position to be legible, their positive
registers of lost or threatened cultural identity must be foregrounded, when in point of fact the
antagonistic register of dispossession that Indians "possess" is a position in relation to a socius
structured by genocide. As Churchill points out, everyone from Armenians to Jews have been
subjected to genocide, but the Indigenous position is one for which genocide is a constitutive
element, not merely an historical event, without which Indians would not, paradoxically, "exist."
9 Regarding the Black position, some might ask why, after claims suc- cessfully made on the state
by the Civil Rights Movement, do I insist on positing an operational analytic for cinema, film
studies, and political theory that appears to be a dichotomous and essentialist pairing of Masters
and Slaves? In other words, why should we think of today's Blacks in the United States as Slaves
and everyone else (with the exception of Indians) as Masters? One could answer these questions
by demonstrat- ing how nothing remotely approaching claims successfully made on the state has
come to pass. In other words, the election of a Black president aside, police brutality, mass
incarceration, segregated and substandard schools and housing, astronomical rates of H I V
infection, and the threat of being turned away en masse at the polls still constitute the lived experience of Black life. But such empirically based rejoinders would lead us in the wrong direction; we
would find ourselves on "solid" ground, which would only mystify, rather than clarify, the question.
We would be forced to appeal to "facts," the "historical record," and empirical markers of stasis
and change, all of which could be turned on their head with more of the same. Underlying such a
downward spiral into sociology, political sci- ence, history, and public policy debates would be the
very rubric that I am calling into question: the grammar of suffering known as exploitation and

alienation, the assumptive logic whereby subjective dispossession is arrived at in the calculations

between those who sell labor power and those who acquire it. The Black qua the worker. Orlando
Patterson has already dispelled this faulty ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death,
where he demonstrates how and why work, or forced labor, is not a constituent element of
slavery. Once the "solid" plank of "work" is removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent
notion of "claims against the state"the proposition that the state and civil society are elastic
enough to even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black position
disintegrates into thin air. The imaginary of the state and civil society is parasitic on the Middle

Passage. Put an- other way, No slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is
in the world. If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slave is not a
laborer but an anti-Human, a position against which Hu- manity establishes, maintains, and
renews its coherence, its corporeal in- tegrity; if the Slave is, to borrow from Patterson, generally
dishonored, perpetually open to gratuitous violence, and void of kinship structure, that is, having
no relations that need be recognized, a being outside of re- lationality, then our analysis cannot be
approached through the rubric of gains or reversals in struggles with the state and civil society, not
unless and until the interlocutor first explains how the Slave is of the world. The onus is not on one
who posits the Master/Slave dichotomy but on the one who argues there is a distinction between
Slaveness and Blackness. How, when, and where did such a split occur? The woman at the gates

of Columbia University awaits an answer.

The only ethical demand is one that calls for the end of the world itselfthe affirmative
represents a conflict within the paradigm of America but refuses to challenge the
foundational antagonism that produces the violence that undergirds the that same
paradigm
Wilderson, 10 [2010, Frank B. Wilderson is an Associate Professor of African-American
Studies at UC Irvine and has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the
Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,]
Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, it would seem that the structure, that is to say
the rebar, or better still the grammar of their demandsand, by extension, the grammar of their
sufferingwas indeed an ethical grammar. Perhaps their grammars are the only ethical
grammars available to modern politics and modernity writ large, for they draw our attention not
to the way in which space and time are used and abused by enfranchised and violently powerful
interests, but to the violence that underwrites the modern worlds capacity to think, act, and exist
spatially and temporally . The violence that robbed her of her body and him of his land provided
the stage upon which other violent and consensual dramas could be enacted. Thus, they would
have to be crazy, crazy enough to call not merely the actions of the world to account but to call
the world itself to account , and to account for them no less! The woman at Columbia was not
demanding to be a participant in an unethical network of distribution: she was not demanding a
place within capital, a piece of the pie (the demand for her sofa notwithstanding). Rather, she was

articulating a triangulation between, on the one hand, the loss of her body, the very dereliction of
her corporeal integrity, what Hortense Spillers charts as the transition from being a being to
becoming a being for the captor (206), the drama of value (the stage upon which surplus value
is extracted from labor power through commodity production and sale); and on the other, the
corporeal integrity that, once ripped from her body, fortified and extended the corporeal integrity

of everyone else on the street. She gave birth to the commodity and to the Human, yet she had
neither subjectivity nor a sofa to show for it. In her eyes, the worldand not its myriad
discriminatory practices, but the world itself was unethical. And yet, the world passes by her
without the slightest inclination to stop and disabuse her of her claim. Instead, it calls her crazy.
And to what does the world attribute the Native American mans insanity? Hes crazy if he
thinks hes getting any money out of us? Surely, that doesnt make him crazy. Rather it is simply
an indication that he does not have a big enough gun. What are we to make of a world that
responds to the most lucid enunciation of ethics with violence ? What are the foundational

questions of the ethico-political? Why are these questions so scandalous that they are rarely
posed politically, intellectually, and cinematicallyunless they are posed obliquely and
unconsciously, as if by accident? Return Turtle Island to the Savage. Repair the demolished
subjectivity of the Slave. Two simple sentences, thirteen simple words, and the structure of U.S.
(and perhaps global) antagonisms would be dismantled. An ethical modernity would no longer
sound like an oxymoron. From there we could busy ourselves with important conflicts that have
been promoted to the level of antagonisms: class struggle, gender conflict, immigrants rights.
When pared down to thirteen words and two sentences, one cannot but wonder why questions that
go to the heart of the ethico-political, questions of political ontology, are so unspeakable in
intellectual meditations, political broadsides, and even socially and politically engaged feature

films. Clearly they can be spoken, even a child could speak those lines, so they would pose no
problem for a scholar, an activist, or a filmmaker. And yet, what is also clearif the
filmographies of socially and politically engaged directors, the archive of progressive scholars,
and the plethora of Left-wing broadsides are anything to go byis that what can so easily be
spoken is now (five hundred years and two hundred fifty million Settlers/Masters on) so
ubiquitously unspoken that these two simple sentences, these thirteen words not only render their
speaker crazy but become themselves impossible to imagine . Soon it will be forty years since

radical politics, Left-leaning scholarship, and socially engaged feature films began to speak the
unspeakable. In the 1960s and early 1970s the questions asked by radical politics and scholarship
were not Should the U.S. be overthrown? or even Would it be overthrown? but rather when
and howand, for some, whatwould come in its wake. Those steadfast in their conviction that
there remained a discernable quantum of ethics in the U.S. writ large (and here I am speaking of

everyone from Martin Luther King, Jr., prior to his 1968 shift, to the Tom Hayden wing of SDS,
to the Julian Bond and Marion Barry faction of SNCC, to Bobbie Kennedy Democrats) were
accountable, in their rhetorical machinations, to the paradigmatic zeitgeist of the Black Panthers,
the American Indian Movement, and the Weather Underground. Radicals and progressives could
deride, reject, or chastise armed struggle mercilessly and cavalierly with respect to tactics and the
possibility of success, but they could not dismiss revolution-as-ethic because they could not
make a convincing case by way of a paradigmatic analysisthat the U.S. was an ethical
formation and still hope to maintain credibility as radicals and progressives. Even Bobby Kennedy
(a U.S. attorney general and presidential candidate) mused that the law and its enforcers had no
ethical standing in the presence of Blacks.i One could (and many did) acknowledge Americas
strength and power. This seldom, however, rose to the level of an ethical assessment, but rather
remained an assessment of the so-called balance of forces. The political discourse of Blacks, and

to a lesser extent Indians, circulated too widely to credibly wed the U.S. and ethics. The raw
force of COINTELPRO put an end to this trajectory toward a possible hegemony of ethical

accountability. Consequently, the power of Blackness and Redness to pose the questionand the
power to pose the question is the greatest power of all retreated as did White radicals and
progressives who retired from struggle. The questions echo lies buried in the graves of young
Black Panthers, AIM Warriors, and Black Liberation Army soldiers, or in prison cells where so
many of them have been rotting (some in solitary confinement) for ten, twenty, thirty years, and at
the gates of the academy where the crazies shout at passers-by . Gone are not only the young and
vibrant voices that affected a seismic shift on the political landscape , but also the intellectual
protocols of inquiry, and with them a spate of feature films that became authorized, if not by an
unabashed revolutionary polemic, then certainly by a revolutionary zeitgeist . Is it still possible for
a dream of unfettered ethics, a dream of the Settlement and the Slave estatesii destruction , to
manifest itself at the ethical core of cinematic discourse, when this dream is no longer a
constituent element of political discourse in the streets nor of intellectual discourse in the

academy? The answer is no in the sense that, as history has shown, what cannot be articulated
as political discourse in the streets is doubly foreclosed upon in screenplays and in scholarly
prose; but yes in the sense that in even the most taciturn historical moments such as ours, the
grammar of Black and Red suffering breaks in on this foreclosure, albeit like the somatic
compliance of hysterical symptomsit registers in both cinema and scholarship as symptoms of
awareness of the structural antagonisms. Between 1967 and 1980, we could think cinematically
and intellectually of Blackness and Redness as having the coherence of full-blown discourses.
But from 1980 to the present, Blackness and Redness manifests only in the rebar of cinematic and
intellectual (political) discourse, that is, as unspoken grammars. This grammar can be discerned in
the cinematic strategies (lighting, camera angles, image composition, and acoustic
strategies/design), even when the script labors for the spectator to imagine social turmoil through
the rubric of conflict (that is, a rubric of problems that can be posed and conceptually solved) as
opposed to the rubric of antagonism ( an irreconcilable struggle between entities , or positionalities,
the resolution of which is not dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the positions ). In

other words, even when films narrate a story in which Blacks or Indians are beleaguered with
problems that the script insists are conceptually coherent (usually having to do with poverty or
the absence of family values), the non-narrative, or cinematic, strategies of the film often
disrupt this coherence by posing the irreconcilable questions of Red and Black political ontology
or non-ontology. The grammar of antagonism breaks in on the mendacity of conflict . Semiotics
and linguistics teach us that when we speak, our grammar goes unspoken. Our grammar is
assumed. It is the structure through which the labor of speech is possible.iii Likewise, the
grammar of political ethicsthe grammar of assumptions regarding the ontology of suffering
which underwrite Film Theory and political discourse (in this book, discourse elaborated in direct
relation to radical action), and which underwrite cinematic speech (in this book, Red, White, and
Black films from the mid-1960s to the present) is also unspoken. This notwithstanding, film
theory, political discourse, and cinema assume an ontological grammar, a structure of suffering.
And the structure of suffering which film theory, political discourse, and cinema assume crowds
out other structures of suffering, regardless of the sentiment of the film or the spirit of unity
mobilized by the political discourse in question . To put a finer point on it, structures of ontological
suffering stand in antagonistic, rather then conflictual, relation to one another (despite the fact that

antagonists themselves may not be aware of the ontological positionality from which they

speak). Though this is perhaps the most controversial and out-of-step claim of this book, it is,
nonetheless, the foundation of the close reading of feature films and political theory that follows.

As debaters, we arent policymakers or political activists but simply pedagogues in

intellectual discussionthe act of an unflinching paradigmatic analysis allows us to
deny intellectual legitimacy to the compromises that radical elements have made
because of an unwillingness to hold moderates feet to the fire predicated on an
unflinching paradigmatic analysis
Wilderson, 10 [2010, Frank B. Wilderson is an Associate Professor of African-American
Studies at UC Irvine and has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the
Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,]
STRANGE AS it might seem, this book project began in South Africa. During
the last years of apartheid I worked for revolutionary change in both an
underground and above-ground capacity, for the Charterist Movement in
general and the ANC in particular. During this period, I began to see how essential
an unflinching paradigmatic analysis is to a movement dedicated to the complete overthrow of an
existing order . The neoliberal compromises that the radical elements of the

Chartist Movement made with the moderate elements were due, in large
part, to our inability or unwillingness to hold the moderates' feet to the fire
of a political agenda predicated on an unflinching paradigmatic analysis .
Instead, we allowed our energies and points of attention to be displaced by
and onto pragmatic considerations. Simply put, we abdicated the power to pose the
question and the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all .
Elsewhere, I have written about this unfortunate turn of events
(Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid), so I'll not rehearse the
details here. Suffice it to say, this book germinated in the many political and
academic discussions and debates that I was fortunate enough to be a part
of at a historic moment and in a place where the word revolution was spoken
in earnest, free of qualifiers and irony. For their past and ongoing ideas and
interventions, I extend solidarity and appreciation to comrades Amanda
Alexander, Franco Barchiesi, Teresa Barnes, Patrick Bond, Ashwin Desai,
Nigel Gibson, Steven Greenberg, Allan Horowitz, Bushy Kelebonye
(deceased), Tefu Kelebonye, Ulrike Kistner, Kamogelo Lekubu, Andile
Mngxitama, Prishani Naidoo, John Shai, and S'bu Zulu.

Isolation of racially oppressed groups culminates in extinction

Marable Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies 1984 ManningProfessor of History @ Columbia University; Speaking Truth to Power: Essays on Race,
Resistance and Radicalism; p. 198-199
Black Americans also comprehend that peace is not the absence of conflict. As long as institutional
racism, apartheid, and social class inequality exist, social tensions will erupt into confrontations.
Most blacks recognize that peace is the realization of social justice and human dignity for al l

nations and historically oppressed peoples. Peace more than anything else is the recognition of
the oneness of humanity. As Paul Robeson, the great black artist and activist, observed in his
autobiographical work Here I Stand, I learned that the essential character of a nation is
determined not by the tipper classes, but by the common people, and that the Common people of
all nations are truly brothers in the great family of mankind. Any people who experience
generations of oppression gain an awareness of the innate commonalty of all human beings,
despite their religions, ethnic, and political differences. In order to reverse the logic of the Cold
War, white Americans must begin to view themselves as a distinct minority in a world dominated
by people of color. Peace between the superpowers is directly linked to the evolution of
democratic rights, economic development, and social justice in the third world periphery . Black
intellectuals, front W.E.B. DuBois to the present, have also comprehended their unique role in
the struggle for peace arid social justice. Cultural and intellectual activity for it is inseparable
from politics. All art and aesthetics, scientific inquiry, and social studies are directly or indirectly
linked to the material conditions of human beings, and the existing set of power relationships
which dictates the policies of the modern state. When intellectual artists fail to combat racial or
gender inequality, or the virus of anti-Semitism, their creative energies may indirectly contribute
to the ideological justification for prejudice and social oppression. This is equally the case for the
problem of war and peace. Through the bifurcation of our moral and social consciences against
the cold abstractions of research and value-free social science, we may console ourselves by
suggesting that we play 110 role in the escalation of the Cold War political culture. By hesitating
to dedicate ourselves and our work to the pursuit of peace and social justice, we inevitably
contribute to the dynamics of national chauvinism, Militarism, and perhaps set the ideological basis
necessary for World War III. Paul Robeson, during the Spanish Civil War, expressed the

perspective of the black Peace tradition as a passionate belie in humanity: Every artist, every
scientist must decide, now, where he stands, life has no alternative. There are no impartial
observers. The commitment to contest public dogmas, the recognition that we share with the
Soviet people a Community of social, economic, and cultural interests, force the intellectual into
the terrain of ideological debate. If we fail to do so, and if the peace consensus of black America
remains isolated from the electoral mainstream, the results may be the termination of humanity
itself .

2nc
Colonialism underpins all expressions of state violence addressing it is key to
avoiding endless war
SINGH Prof of Sociology @ York University in Toronto ,07
Hira- Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at York University, Toronto, Canada.
He has a Ph.D. from the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, and another Ph.D.
from the University of Toronto; Confronting Colonialism and Racism: Fanon and Ghandi;
HUMAN ARCHITECTURE: Journal of the Sociology of Human Knowledge, Special Double
Issue, Summer 2007, p. 341-342; http://www.okcir.com/Articles%20V
%20Special/HiraSingh.pdf
Today, we are living in a system that is based on counting, and accounting for, every single pin in
a factory. The same system, however, boasts of killing human beings who it, as a rule, doesnt
count. It counts the pins, because each pin, as a commodity, has market value. It is integral part
of a system of production for value, whereas, the people it kills in wars precisely in order to
perpetuate and expand the same marketbased system of social production, have no value,
albeit market value. So they dont count. Who are these people, even less valuable than a pin?
These are the colonial otherde-humanized and de-valued? They are being otherized in the
process of being colonized. And colonialism today, like the colonialism of the past (not a very
distant pastremember Fanon was writing in the 1950s), is integral part of the system of
commodity production. It has wrapped itself in the lofty ideal of spreading freedom,
democracy, and civil society. The old form of colonialism was wrapped in the ideal of the
civilizing mission, and the civilizing mission was barbaric to the core. The new one,
notwithstanding its new wrapping, is no different. As William Faulkner said, past is not past: past
is present with us. The colonial past is unfolding itself in the present. And that is what makes
Fanon and Gandhi so relevant today.

Our links alone are sufficient reason to vote negative scholarship failing to
recognize the white position actively produces a system where knowledge production
acts to maintain colonial structures because neutrality is inherently white
Grosfoguel, Professor Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, 7 (Ramon, The Epistemic Decolonial
Turn Cultural Studies, Vol 21 Issue 2-3, p 211-223, T&F Online)
Epistemological Critique The first point to discuss is the contribution of racial/ethnic and
feminist subaltern perspectives to epistemological questions. The hegemonic Eurocentric
paradigms that have informed western philosophy and sciences in the modern/colonial
capitalist/patriarchal world-system for the last 500 hundred years assume a universalistic,
neutral, objective point of view . Chicana and black feminist scholars (Moraga & Anzaldua 1983,
Collins 1990) as well as thirdworld scholars inside and outside the United States (Dussel 1977,
Mignolo 2000) reminded us that we always speak from a particular location in the power
structures. Nobody escapes the class, sexual, gender, spiritual, linguistic, geographical, and
racial hierarchies of the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system. As feminist
scholar Donna Haraway (1988) states, our knowledges are always situated. Black feminist

scholars called this perspective afro-centric epistemology (Collins 1990) (which is not
equivalent to the afrocentrist perspective) while Latin American Philosopher of Liberation
Enrique Dussel called it geopolitics of knowledge (Dussel 1977) and following Fanon (1967)
and Anzalda (1987) I will use the term body-politics of knowledge. This is not only a question
about social values in knowledge production or the fact that our knowledge is always partial. The
main point here is the locus of enunciation, that is, the geo-political and body-political location
of the subject that speaks. In Western philosophy and sciences the subject that speaks is
always hidden, concealed, erased from the analysis. The ego-politics of knowledge of Western
philosophy has always privilege the myth of a non-situated Ego. Ethnic/racial/gender/sexual
epistemic location and the subject that speaks are always decoupled. By delinking
ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location from the subject that speaks, Western
philosophy and sciences are able to produce a myth about a Truthful universal knowledge
that covers up , that is, conceals who is speaking as well as the geo-political and bodypolitical epistemic location in the structures of colonial power/knowledge from which the
subject speak s. It is important here to distinguish the epistemic location from the social
location. The fact that one is socially located in the oppressed side of power relations, does
not automatically mean that he/she is epistemically thinking from a subaltern epistemic
location. Precisely, the success of the modern/colonial world-system consist in making
subjects that are socially located in the oppressed side of the colonial difference, to think
epistemicaly like the ones on the dominant positions . Subaltern epistemic perspectives are
knowledge coming from below that produces a critical perspective of hegemonic knowledge
in the power relations involved. I am not claiming an epistemic populism where knowledge
produced from below is automatically an epistemic subaltern knowledge. What I am claiming is
that all knowledges are epistemically located in the dominant or the subaltern side of the
power relations and that this is related to the geo- and body-politics of knowledge. The
disembodied and unlocated neutrality and objectivity of the ego-politics of knowledge is a
Western myth. Rene Descartes, the founder of Modern Western Philosophy, inaugurates a new
moment in the history of Western thought. He replaces God, as the foundation of knowledge in
the Theo-politics of knowledge of the European Middle Ages, with (Western) Man as the
foundation of knowledge in European Modern times. All the attributes of God are now
extrapolated to (Western) Man. Universal Truth beyond time and space, privilege access to the
laws of the Universe, and the capacity to produce scientific knowledge and theory is now placed
in the mind of Western Man . The Cartesian ego-cogito (I think, therefore I am) is the
foundation of modern Western sciences. By producing a dualism between mind and body and
between mind and nature, Descartes was able to claim non-situated, universal, God-eyed view
knowledge. This is what the Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gomez called the point
zero perspective of Eurocentric philosophies (Castro-Gomez 2003). The point zero is the
point of view that hides and conceals itself as being beyond a particular point of view, that
is, the point of view that represents itself as being without a point of view. It is this god-eye
view that always hides its local and particular perspective under an abstract universalism.
Western philosophy privileges ego politics of knowledge over the geopolitics of knowledge
and the body-politics of knowledge. Historically, this has allowed Western man (the gendered
term is intentionally used here) to represent his knowledge as the only one capable of achieving a
universal consciousness, and to dismiss non-Western knowledge as particularistic and, thus,

unable to achieve universality . This epistemic strategy has been crucial for Western global

designs. By hiding the location of the subject of enunciation, European/Euro-American

colonial expansion and domination was able to construct a hierarchy of superior and
inferior knowledge and, thus, of superior and inferior people around the world. We went from
the sixteenth century characterization of people without writing to the eighteenth and
nineteenth century characterization of people without history, to the twentieth century
characterization of people without development and more recently, to the early twenty-first
century of people without democracy. We went from the sixteenth century rights of people
(Sepulveda versus de las Casas debate in the school of Salamanca in the mid-sixteenth century),
to the eighteenth century rights of man (Enlightment philosophers), and to the late twentieth
century human rights. All of these are part of global designs articulated to the simultaneous
production and reproduction of an international division of labor of core/periphery that overlaps
with the global racial/ethnic hierarchy of Europeans/non-Europeans. However, as Enrique
Dussel (1994) has reminded us, the Cartesian ego cogito (I think, therefore I am) was
preceded by 150 years (since the beginnings of the European colonial expansion in 1492) of the
European ego conquistus (I conquer, therefore I am). The social, economic, political and
historical conditions of possibility for a subject to assume the arrogance of becoming God-like
and put himself as the foundation of all Truthful knowledge was the Imperial Being, that is, the
subjectivity of those who are at the center of the world because they have already conquered it.
What are the decolonial implications of this epistemological critique to our knowledge
production and to our concept of world-system?

Talking about race is necessary in white spaces if you think diversity in debate is
important you have to vote neg
Mills 97 [1997, Charles-; Associate Prof of Philosophy @ U Illinois, Chicago The Racial
Contract; p. 1-3]
White Supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world
what it is today. You will not find this term in introductory, or even advanced, texts in
political theory. A standard undergraduate philosophy course will start off with Plato and
Aristotle, perhaps say something about Augustine, Aquinas, and Machiavelli, move on to
Hobbes, Locke, Mill and Marx, and then wind up with Rawls and Nozick. It will
introduce you to notions of aristocracy, democracy, absolutism, liberalism,
representative government, socialism, welfare capitalism, and libertarianism. But
though it covers more than two thousand years of Western political thought and runs
the ostensible gamut of political systems, there will be no mention of the basic
political system that has shaped the world for the past several hundred years. And
this omission is not accidental. Rather, it reflects the fact that standard textbooks and
courses have for the most part been written and designed by whites who take their racial
privilege so much for granted that they do not even see it as political, as a form of
domination. Ironically, the most important political system of recent global historythe system of domination by which white people have historically ruled over and, in
certain important ways, continue to rule over nonwhite people-is not seen as a
political system at all. It is just taken for granted, it is the background against which
other systems, which we are to see as political are highlighted. This book is an attempt
to redirect your vision, to make you see what, in a sense, has been there all along.
Philosophy has remained remarkably untouched by the debates over

multiculturalism, cannon reform, and ethnic diversity racking the academy; both
demographically and conceptually, it is one of the whitest of the humanities. Blacks,
for example, constitute only about 1 percent of philosophers in North American
universities-a hundred or so people out of more than ten thousand-and there are even fewer
Latino, Asian American, and Native American philosophers. Surely this
underrepresentation itself stands in need of an explanation, and in my opinion it can be
traced in part to a conceptual array and a standard repertoire of concerns whose
abstractness typically elides, rather than genuinely includes, the experience of racial
minorities. Since (white) women have the demographic advantage of numbers, there are of
course far more female philosophers in the profession than nonwhite philosophers (though
still not proportionate to womens percentage of the population), and they have made far
greater progress in developing alternative conceptualizations. Those African American
philosophers who do work in moral and political theory tend either to produce
general work indistinguishable from that of their white peers or to focus on local
issues (affirmative action, the black underclass) or historical figures (W.E.B Du Bois,
Alain Locke) in a way that does not aggressively engage the broader debate. What is
needed is a global theoretical framework for situating discussions of race and white
racism, and thereby challenging the assumptions of white political philosophy, which
would correspond to feminist theorists articulation of the centrality of gender, patriarchy,
and sexism to traditional moral and political theory. What is needed, in other words, is a
recognition that racism (or, as I will argue, global white supremacy) is itself a political
system, a particular power structure of formal or informal rule, socioeconomic
privilege, and norms for the differential distribution of material wealth and
opportunities, benefits and burdens , rights and duties. The notion of the Racial
Contract is, I suggest, one possible way of making this connection with mainstream
theory, since it uses the vocabulary and apparatus already developed for
contractarianism to map this unacknowledged system. Contract talk is, after all, the
political lingua franca of our times.

a. Sequencing Tacking on the subaltern perspective is insufficient they still

privilege Western thinkers by ascribing Truth to their theories only a
position that begins with marginalized voices can result in effective
decolonialism
Grosfoguel, Professor Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, 7 (Ramon, The Epistemic Decolonial
Turn Cultural Studies, Vol 21 Issue 2-3, p 211-223, T&F Online)
In October 1998, there was a conference/dialogue at Duke University between the South Asian
Subaltern Studies Group and the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. The dialogue initiated
in this conference eventually resulted in the publication of several issues of the journal
NEPANTLA. However, this conference was the last time the Latin American Subaltern Studies
Group met before their split. Among the many reasons and debates that produced this split, there
are two that I would like to stress. The Latin American Subaltern Studies Group composed
primarily by Latinamericanist scholars in the USA. Despite their attempt at producing a radical
and alternative knowledge, they reproduced the epistemic schema of Area Studies in the United
States. With a few exceptions, they produced studies about the subaltern rather than studies

with and from a subaltern perspective. Like the imperial epistemology of Area Studies,
theory was still located in the North while the subjects to be studied are located in the South . This

colonial epistemology was crucial to my dissatisfaction with the project. As a Puerto Rican in the
United States, I was dissatisfied with the epistemic consequences of the knowledge produced by
this Latinamericanist group. They underestimated in their work ethnic/racial perspectives
coming from the region, while giving privilege to Western thinkers . This is related to my
second point: they gave epistemic privilege to what they called the four horses of the
apocalypse,2 that is, Foucault, Derrida, Gramsci and Guha. Among the four main thinkers they
privilege, three are Eurocentric thinkers while two of them (Derrida and Foucault) form part of
the poststructuralist/postmodern Western canon. By privileging Western thinkers as their
central theoretical apparatus, they betrayed their goal to produce subaltern studies. This is
not an essentialist, fundamentalist, anti-European critique. It a perspective that is critical of both
Eurocentric and Third World fundamentalisms, colonialism and nationalism. What all
fundamentalisms share (including the Eurocentric one) is the premise that there is only one
sole epistemic tradition from which to achieve Truth and Universality. However, my main
points here are three: (1) that a decolonial epistemic perspective requires a broader canon of
thought than simply the Western canon (including the Left Western canon); (2) that a truly
universal decolonial perspective cannot be based on an abstract universal (one particular
that raises itself as universal global design), but would have to be the result of the critical
dialogue between diverse critical epistemic/ethical/political projects towards a pluriversal
as oppose to a universal world; (3) that decolonization of knowledge would require to take
seriously the epistemic perspective/cosmologies/insights of critical thinkers from the Global
South thinking from and with subalternized racial/ethnic/sexual spaces and bodies.
Postmodernism and postructuralism as epistemological projects are caught within the
Western canon reproducing within its domains of thought and practice a coloniality of
power/knowledge.

b. Cooption Racism mutates and changes its manifestations to adapt to white

interests even major achievements like Brown vs. Board are warped and
shifted by white institutional control over the means of legal enforcement and
interpretation
Delgado 98
(Richard, Jean N. Lindsley Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School, Is
American Law Inherently Racist, Debate w/ Prof. Farber, Berkeley Law Scholarship
Repository, http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1211&context=facpubs)
One. Consider how racism takes different forms at different times, like one of those
characters in a science fiction novel or movie. In one era, it is blatant, open, and in your face.
In another, it is subtle, institutional, embedded in seemingly neutral rules like a University of
Colorado at Boulder requirement that all first-year students live in a campus-residence hall: that
is a neutral rule. However, many students of color from Denver, thirty-five miles away, would
prefer to live at home and commute saving the money, avoiding some of the Animal House
features of dorm life that go against Latino culture, and looking after their younger brothers or
sisters who may be flirting with drugs or gangs. In another era, racism takes the form of

gentlemanly learned tracts with hundreds of footnotes debating whether folks of color are
genetically inferior. The players, the arguments, and the rationalizations may vary over
time, but the gap in brown/white earnings, life expectancy, and social well being remains
about the same as though obeying some unseen law. Two. Notice how when courts and other
official policy makers relax, or even decide to help minorities, this happens more to advance
white self-interest than to help the supposed beneficiaries. For example, Brown v. Board of
Education, the case that Professor Farber held up as the crown jewel of American jurisprudence,
decided in 1954, came down just as many U.S. servicemen and women of color were
returning to civilian life from military service, where many of them for the first time had
experienced a relatively racism free environment. Many of them probably would not have
returned meekly to shining shoes and regimes of Yes sir and No sir. For the first time in a
while, the possibility of real racial unrest loomed in the United States. At the same time, we
were in the early stages of a cold war against the forces of godless, ruthless communism. It
scarcely would have served U.S. purposes well had the front pages of world newspapers
continued to show pictures of Emmett Till lynchings and southern sheriffs with cattle prods.
Brown and other breakthrough cases occur not so much out of generosity or moral *383
imperative, but out of a need to advance white self-interest. Later, when the celebrations
died down, the great law reform case was inevitably cut back quietly by lower courts or
impeded by administrative foot-dragging or delay. Today, more black school children attend
segregated schools than when Brown v. Board of Education was decided .

c. Corrupts the alts epistemological perspective Their universalizing

scholarship is inseparable from their affirmative location within the
academy maintains colonial hierarchies of power
Mignolo, Professor Romance Studies and Cultural Anthropology at Duke, 99 (Walter, I Am
Where I Think: Epistemology and the Colonial Difference Journal of Latin American Cultural
Studies, Vol 8 No 2, p 235-245)
By definition, loci of enunciation are not marginal. Yet making them visible also makes it
possible to underline that epistemology is not just a happy universal spaces which everybody can
join. As with any thing else, joining something that is hegemonic means to accept the rule of the
game . If you play the game, but not exactly according to the rules, chances are that you will be
somewhat on the margins. However, I am not interested in either playing the role of the
'Hispanic' victim or of the successful marginal who publishes in English in American university
presses and works at Duke. I am interested in making the (epistemic) colonial difference
visible. I did not word it like that in The Darker Side of the Renaissance. It is, however, a keyword in the sequel to The Darker Side of the Renaissance, entitled Local Histories/Global
Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (1999). In this book, I try to
clarify the notion of 'colonial difference' by thinking through it. (Hulme is right, by the way, that
I do not make an effort to define theoretical concepts in The Darker Side of the Renaissance; I
just use them.) Let us go back to Bourdieu for a moment and pursue the equation texts-national
languages-coloniality of power and cultures of scholarship. In an effort to elucidate the
theoretical frame of his own thinking, Bourdieu honestly pursues a comparison with the German
philosophical tradition. The comparison is necessary in order to justify the transferability of

scientific thinking from the sciences of nature to the human sciences, a step which is more
difficult to take in the German philosophical legacy because, according to Bourdieu, the
distinction 'erklaren-Verstehen (explanation-understanding)' builds a wall between the natural
and the human sciences. French legacies, he concludes, 'propose, then, a reflection which is
much more general, from which I have drawn an epistemological program that can be summed
up in one statement: "The scientific fact is conquered, constructed, confirmed. The conquest of
the given is a central concept in Bachelard's thought, and he sums it up in the term
epistemological break. Why is this phase of scientific research important, and why does it
separate, as seems to me to be the case, the tradition I represent from the dominant Anglo-Saxon
tradition? It is because to say that the scientific fact has to be fought for is radically to defy, in
this regard, all of the givens that social scientific researchers find before them"' (Bourdieu, 1992,
p. 43) This brief description of Bourdieu's self-location (e.g. framing his own locus of
enunciation in the social sciences and in the European tradition) makes clear the inseparability
between epistemology and politics of location. What should I do, identify and assume the
tradition Bourdieu represents or the dominant Anglo- Saxon tradition he differentiates from?
Obviously neither of them, unless I decide to think from categories, frames and problems that
were put in place to deal with the issues of coloniality and the colonial difference in which I am
interested. If I follow the first route, I have two choices. Either to become a social scientist
according to the rules of the game that were defined in 'a tradition (to which) I do not belong',
and therefore to be marginal, or to 'apply' Bourdieu's (or any other) 'model' to deal with and
analyse coloniality of power and the colonial difference. In either case, I will be
epistemologically marginal, that is, epistemologically subaltern. This was precisely
'Chakrabarty's dilemma' in the domain of historiography: as long as you are a historian, you
cannot be a "Third World' historian because history is an activity, institution, and way of thinking
that was instrumental in the colonization of memory . The basis of 'Chakrabarty dilemma' is that

writing subaltern 'histories' means to remain in an epistemically subaltern position in the

domain of cultures of scholarship. This is because one of the invisible places in which the
coloniality of power operates is the domain of epistemology. Consequently, if you 'study'
colonialism or the subaltern but you maintain the rules of the social sciences and humanities
game, you maintain the coloniality of power that reproduces the epistemic colonial difference .
Epistemic loci of enunciation are stubborn and, as in the case of Garcia Canclini (1989), you
can describe and 'study' the hybridy of society and culture in a specific place like Tijuana, while
maintaining a pure, non-contaminated, non-hybrid loci of enunciation. This is why I attempted to
think from models and theories provided by Chicano/a thinkers and Latin American
philosophers, such as Enrique Dussel and Rodolfo Kusch. Yet, I also used the models provided
by 'complementary dichotomies' in Amerindian thoughts (Mignolo, 1995). I believe that Hulme
intuitively understood this when he says, on page 223, T had the strange impression that Mignolo
actually wanted to be doing something rather different and even more ambitious'. 'Pluritopic
hermeneutics' was a necessary step to avoid the 'non-complementary dichotomy' between the
knowing subject and the known, the disciplines and the object of study. Their thoughts and works
were and are in a constant struggle with the epistemic colonial difference, not as an object of
study but as loci of enunciation defined by the coloniality of powerthat is, with thinking from
a subaltern epistemic perspective (or Voices from the margins' as Hulme's title states). Dussel's
latest work confronts the issue openly (Dussel, 1994, 1996, 1998; Mignolo, forthcoming). My
not so kind remarks on Gordon Brotherston's article, though not on his magnificent book

(Brotherston, 1992), were prompted by epistemic, not nationalist, considerations. National

histories are local histories, certainly, but they cannot be confused with them. Thus, Brotherston's
discussion of Amerindian knowledge of a system of writing, taking position on a dispute
between Derrida and Levi-Strauss (that Hulme rightly critiques on page 225), reminded me of
Las Casas and Sepulveda discussing the 'Amerindian Question'. Amerindians themselves having
nothing to say, as they have not been invited to participate in a debate in which they themselves
are objects of consideration. That is the epistemic colonial difference from whence emerged
Amerindians in the sixteenth century, Chicano/as in the US today, and white, mestizo, and
immigrant crole intellectuals like Kusch, Dussel, and myself. 'Voices from the margins' are
voices from and dealing with the colonial epistemic difference. This explains the connection
between 'darker' and 'hybrid' (a concept I truly do not use very often in the book) that Hulme
notices on page 222 of his review. Today, this relationship would be recast in terms of the
making of colonial (epistemic) differences. This is what the humanists and men of letters did in
the sixteenth century, and this process continues, through 'Orientalism' and 'Area Studies', to
today.

Their assertion that biopolitics is the organizing logic of contemporary violence is

based off of a Eurocentric Foucaultian analysis that masks the racialized torture of
incarceration.
Rodriguez 2006 [Dylan, Professor and Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC
Riverside, Forced Passages pages 170-171]
The prison regimes twinned technologies of immobilization and bodily disintegration depart
drastically from the virtual and technically disembodied disciplinary technologies of Benthams
Panopticon or Foucaults biopolitical carceral, whose Eurocentric regimes pivot on the relative
absence or infrequent physical application of direct bodily coercion and punishment. The
technology of the current punitive carceral entails a constant, state-structured application of
physical and psychological violence, a vectoring of coercion that generally exceeds conventional
notions of torture, encompassing a profoundly sophisticated form of subjection that constantly
reshapes the imprisoned bodys form, content, and context. Political prisoner Janet Hollaway
Africa, imprisoned since 1978 as one of the MOVE Nine, elaborates how the bodily passage into
this relation of direct violence melts away the juridical formality of the prison, establishing the
political premises for an abolitionist or antisystemic practice.

Even if identity is a fiction, it is a necessary fiction for waging a war of social truths
that disrupt colonial oppression and subvert the hegemonic epistemology of violent
peace. This refigures truth into something that is necessarily contingent and
oppositional rather than totalizing and oppressive. [This avoids the teleology of
ultimate liberation for the sake of an ethics and politics of struggle.]
Rodriguez 2006 [Dylan, Professor and Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC
Riverside, Forced Passages pages 7-8]
Imprisoned radical intellectuals densely articulate, through multiple voices and vernaculars, the
proliferation and extension of the prisons regimented technologies of domination into the
everyday systems of social formation. The allegedly excessive, exceptional, or abnormal
violence of the prison regimes violence is, within this political-intellectual lineage,

reconceptualized as a fundamental organizing logic of the United States in its local, translocal,
and global enactments: as such, this is a body of radical praxis in the etymological sense of the
term, as a political labor that emanates from and is directed toward transforming or destroying
the roots of a particular social formation, engaged in critical opposition to its constitutive
logics of organization and historical possibility. Truly, this is a lineage that exposes the symbiosis
of love and hate, revolution and creative destruction, in the process of envisioning the end of
oppressive violence and programmatic human domination. To appropriate Frantz Fanons
meditation in a different time and place, a war of social truths rages beneath the normalized
violence of any such condition of domination. It is the Manichaean relation between colonized
and colonizer, native and settler, or here, free and unfree that conditions the subaltern truths
of both imminent and manifest insurgencies. Speaking to the anticolonialist nationalism of the
Algerian Revolution, Fanon writes: The problem of truth ought also to be considered. In every
age, among the people truth is the property of the national cause. No absolute verity, no
discourse on the purity of the soul, can shake this position. The native replies to the living lie of
the colonial situation by an equal falsehood. His dealings with his fellow-nationals are open; they
are strained and incomprehensible with regard to the settlers. Truth is that which hurries on the
break-up of the colonialist regime; it is that which promotes the emergence of the nation; it is all
that protects the natives, and ruins the foreigners. In this colonialist context there is no truthful
behavior: and the good is quite simply that which is evil for them.8 Truth, for Fanon, is
precisely that which generates and multiplies the historical possibility of disruptive, subversive
movement against colonial oppression. The evident rhetoric of oppositionality, of the subaltern
good that necessarily materializes evil in the eyes of domination, offers a stunning departure
from the language of negotiation, dialogue, progress, moderation, and peace that has become
hegemonic in discourses of social change and social justice, in and outside the United States. The
natives equal falsehood is, in fact, a necessary and ethical response to a regime that renders a
hegemonic truth through the regulated death and deterioration of the natives body and society.
Perhaps most important, the political language of opposition is premised on its open-endedness
and contingency, a particular refusal to soothe the anxiety generated in the attempt to displace a
condition of violent peace for the sake of something else, a world beyond agendas, platforms,
and practical proposals. There are no guarantees, or arrogant expectations, of an ultimate state of
liberation waiting on the other side of the politically immediate struggle against the settler
colony.

Anti-anthropocentric discourse fosters a problematic race neutral mentality

liberal white activists refuse to interrogate the cultural characteristics of our
relationship to the environment because doing so would force them to confront their
privilege
JMB, 12 [02/29/12, JMB is his pen name, he is a PhD student in Environmental Studies in
Oregon, Hes citing numerous peer reviewed studies in his article. Colorblind Racism and
Environmentalism, http://ecesisfactor.blogspot.com/2012/02/colorblind-racism-andenvironmentalism.html]
In their analysis of food justice, Teresa M. Mares and Devon C. Pea (2011) point to a pervasive
lack of deep cultural-ecological understanding, particularly among white food activists . They
begin with an anecdote involving a vegan Slow Food activist who, despite professed commitment
to local foods, knows nothing of the indigenous culture where she lives. She is unable to name

whose land she lives on, or even any of the foods they rely upon. When asked about these
matters, the woman responds, in Skagit, you know, there are a lot of multigenerational farmers
who are not Native American. They have been here a long time and have as much stake in this
watershed as anyone else. This assertion displaces focus from the question of Native foodways
and attempts simultaneously to legitimate the land tenure of white farmers , an issue which she was
not asked to defend. The woman goes on to describe conflict between Indians and farmers, an
issue which she concedes she knows little about, though her earlier comment regarding the
Skagit farmers suggests where she might stand on the issue (2011). It seems unlikely that this
activist would think of herself as racist, even though her responses suggest unexamined privilege
and white racial allegiances . Additionally, this implied allegiance with farming families over the
concerns of indigenous fishing rights complicates not only this persons claims of colorblindness
but also her professed relationship to food systems that support environmental and human health

(Norgaard 2011). Julie Guthman (2011) examines more overt colorblind discourse. In her
analysis of farmers markets, CSAs, and community gardens, she notes the many discourses of
alternative food hail a white subject and thereby code the practices and spaces of alternative food as
white. Focusing on two sets of data, Guthman looks at pervasive rhetorical tendencies that
contribute to the white racializing of alternative foods. One particularly important tendency is the
universalizing white values . In doing this, white values become coded as the norm, and when those
values do not resonate, it is assumed that those for whom they do not resonate must be educated
or be forever marked as different (2011). This universalizing problematically reenscribes
racial/cultural difference , while also prohibiting discourses of race by proposing that such
discourses are not needed. For example, in her interviews of CSA managers, several respondents
were openly hostile to questions that directly asked about race. Managers responded with
comments that reaffirmed their belief in the universal value of their project, writing [w]e always
hope for more people and do not focus on ethnicwhat we present attracts all! (Guthman 2011).

This manager seems oblivious to the whiteness of the space he and his colleagues have
developed and is affronted by the suggestion that it would be right to seek out more customers of
color. Other respondents suggested that the research itself was racist for asking questions about
inclusion. One wrote Difference is wrong; it is better to try to become color blind in how we do
things your question has a slant of political correctness. This manager explicitly deploys the
rhetoric of colorblindness while simultaneously dismissing efforts at inclusion as political
correctness. Another CSA manager also balked at the pressure to be perfectly politically
correct (2011). While Guthmans surveys indicate white internalization and deployment of
colorblind racism, work by vegan scholar Breeze Harper (2011) considers ways in which animal
rights activism and vegan praxis are coded as white , and how vegans of color respond to such
coding. Harpers work, like Guthmans asserts, practices, institutions, and spaces are coded as
whiteor at least not blacknot only through the bodies that tend to inhabit and participate
in them but also the discourses that circulate through them (Guthman 2011). Harper indicates

that veganism and animal rights activism are generally associated with radically leftist and
progressive whites, incapable of participating in the overt racism one can normally find within
radical rightorganizations (Harper 2011). Although their political positioning may incline
white vegans to avoid traditional forms of racism, Harper notes that collectively, good whites
tend to shy away from antiracism and reflections on white and class privilege (2011). Through a

quick exploration of popular vegan books and websites, Harper illustrates this tendency to omit
discussions of race, class, and sexuality. Then, drawing on comments taken from the popular
blog Vegans of Color, Harper illuminates the effects of colorblind discourses on activists of color
and how some whites respond to the experiences of fellow vegans (2011). Centrally, Harpers
analysis focuses on how words like exotic presume "a white audience, marginalizing the
subjectivities of vegans of color (2011). The white blogger responses to VOC posts regarding this

issue highlight colorblind racism. Harper analyzes the response of a blogger, Kram, who
conflates geographic food sources with the concept of foreign or exotic. Kram goes on to
write, if I were ever to be called out on terms of white guilt or colonialist or other terms for
trying to go to events that are more inclusive of POC [people of color], or run/by or sponsored by
POC, then I will not be inclined to participate in those events. Her tone denies responsibility for
any possible wrongdoing, and furthermore places responsibility for her inclusion on people of
color. This type of response seems strongly indicative of colorblind racism. Kram asserts her
white privilege, declaring her opinions on a blog for vegans of color, while simultaneously
undermining her fellow vegans experiences. Another series of experiences recorded in the
Vegans of Color blog highlight how colorblind racism has a chilling effect (Guthman 2011) on
people of color and shapes the responses of white vegans. Bloggers Nassim and Supernovadiva,
relate the discomforts experienced by vegans of color in white spaces. Nassim writes of a
conference that leaves her feeling so frustrated with the population, the cause and like I could
not call myself a vegan. As if vegan was a white word (Harper 2011). Supernovadiva
describes the tendency of white animal rights activists to single her out because of her race . She
writes, the colorblind thing comes up and how that person dont see color BUT you bee lined
straight to me to tell me youre colorblind, seriously (Harper 2011). These expressions of how
colorblind racism effects vegans of color is met on the blog with further examples of the very same
discourse. Although overt racism tends to be scarce in environmental and animal rights
movements, colorblind racism and other liberal forms of racist praxis are pervasive. Discourses
that ignore or dispute any critical analysis of race are likely to reaffirm racism despite good
intentions . Furthermore, contemporary uses of words such as exotic or foreign effectively

reinforce white as the norm, and in some cases affirm colonial legacies that equate dark skinned
people and racialized others with dirt, filth, and uncleanliness placing them outside of
civilized society (Park and Pello 2011). These concepts, even when unvoiced, shape policy
decisions and the codification of environmental activism, and environmental benefits as white.

The animal rights movement is premised on an ignorance of the racialized epistemology

that structures social relations in general and specifically, the history of anti-anthro
movementstheir ignorance is not benign and is instead a move by elites to control the
anti-anthro agenda
Harper 10, Amie Breeze, PhD Candidate in Critical Food Geographies, studying how race,
class, gender, and region affect relationship to food, UC-Davis (Race as a Feeble Matter in
Veganism: Interrogating whiteness, geopolitical privilege, and consumption philosophy of
cruelty-free products, Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Volume VIII, Issue 3,
http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/journal-for-critical-animal-studies/archives/) Note: AR
stands for animal rights
Practitioners of veganism abstain from animal consumption (dietary and non-dietary). However,
the culture of veganism itself is not a monolith and is composed of many different subcultures

and philosophies throughout the world, ranging from punk strict vegans for animal rights, to
people who are dietary vegans for personal health reasons, to people who practice veganism for
religious and spiritual reasons (Cherry, 2006; Iacobbo, 2006). Veganism is not just about the
abstinence of animal consumption; it is about the ongoing struggle to produce socio-spatial
epistemologies of consumption that lead to cultural and spatial change; it is about contesting the
dominance of animal-product consumption narrative that is central to, and dominant in, the
socio-historical as well as present nation-building rhetoric of the United States. Within the
context of my interests in feminist geography, racial politics, and consumption studies, I have
observed that mainstream vegan outreach models and top selling vegan-oriented books rarely, if
ever, acknowledge such differing socio-historically racialized epistemologies amongst the white
middle class status quo and the collectivity of other racial groups, such as African Americans,
Chinese-Americans, or Native Americans. There is an underlying assumption amongst
mainstream vegan media that racialization and the production of vegan spaces are disconnected.
However, space, vegan or not, is raced (Dwyer and Jones, 2000; McKittrick, 2006; McKittrick
and Woods, 2007; Price, 2009) and simultaneously sexualized and gendered (Massey, 1994;
Moss, 2008) directly affecting individuals and place identities. How human beings develop their
knowledge base is directly connected to the embodied experiences of the places and spaces we
navigate through. Scholars engaged in critical geographies of race claim that the world is

entirely racialized. David Delaney, a geographer employing critical race theory asks, "What does
it mean for geographers to take this claim of a wholly racialized world seriously?" (Price, 2009).
As a black feminist geographer and critical race theorist, I take seriously that racialized places
and spaces are at the foundation of how we develop our socio-spatial epistemologies; hence,
these epistemologies are racialized. The collective white middle class USAmerican way of
knowing and relating to space, and all the objects and life-forms that occupy it, are connected to
this demographics' physical and social placement within a racialized hierarchy in which they are
naturalized as normal, un-raced, universal, and the status quo; whiteness as the norm is at center
stage of USA's production of knowledge, space, and power. Furthermore, to people of color, who
are the victims of racism/white supremacy, race is a filter through which they see the world.
Whites do not look at the world through this filter of racial awareness, even though they also
comprise a race. This privilege to ignore their race gives whites a societal advantage distinct
from any received from the existence of discriminatory racism. [Grillo and Wildman] use the
term racism/white supremacy to emphasize the link between the privilege held by whites to
ignore their own race and discriminatory racism. (Grillo and Wildman 1995, 565) In this essay, I
prefer to use the terms whiteness and white privilege as synonyms for Grillo and Wildman's
above explication of 'racism/white supremacy.' For critical race geographers, how do we
understand how whiteness functions as an epistemology within the power and production of
space? In what ways do racialized geographies of exclusion/inclusion influence nuanced and
covert acts of whiteness and white privilege amongst the racial status quo? How do these acts of
covert whiteness and white privilege manifest albeit- innocently and subconsciously- within
spaces of veganism? Having lived in a racialized nation in which this demographic's
epistemologies and ontologies are primarily in center stage, white USAmericans are collectively
unaware of how this center stage does not reflect the reality of those who do not exist in such white
privileged spaces of inclusion. Racialized spaces create racialized psychic spaces . Arnold Farr refers
to this as racialized consciousness, and it is a term that is much more useful to use within the
context of those people who do not fully understand that they are engaging in covert acts of
whiteness/white privilege racism, all while they simultaneously engage in AR/VEG based social
activism. Defined by African American philosopher Dr. Arnold Farr, racialized consciousness

replace[s] racism as the traditional operative term in discourses on race. The concept of
racialized consciousness will help us examine the ways in which consciousness is shaped in
terms of racist social structures... Racialized consciousness is a term that will help us understand
why even the well-intentioned white liberal who has participated in the struggle against racism may
perpetuate a form of racism unintentionally (Farr, 2004). Popular vegan-oriented literature in the

USA such as Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating (Marcus, 2001), Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan
World (Torres and Torres, 2005), The Vegan Sourcebook (Stepaniak and Messina, 2000), and
Becoming Vegan (Davis and Vesanto, 2000), which are considered vegan bibles for the vegan
status quo, do not deeply engage in critical analysis of how race (racialization, whiteness, racism,
anti-racisms) influence how and why one writes about, teaches, and engages in vegan praxis and
ultimately produces vegan spaces to affect cultural change. But what does it mean to be
conscious of race when embarking on writing projects such as vegan-oriented research? This is
part of a larger conversation on how racialization, race, and whiteness functions/manifest within
vegan spaces in white dominated nations. [L]ike the peace and environmental movements, the AR
movement is predominantly white and middle class. Andrew Rowan, a VP at the Humane Society
of the U.S., said surveys indicate the AR movement is "less than three percent" people of color. In
April, 316 people from over 20 states attended the first Grassroots AR Conference in NYC, but
the people of color caucus numbered only eight. If no one is racist, why is the movement largely
segregated? (Hamanaka, 2005)
Similarly to second wave USA feminism that falsely
universalized the white middle class heterosexual female experience as how all females
experience social space, power, and struggle, mainstream vegan rhetoric assumes the same.
While veganism itself does create oppositional spaces of consumption that challenge the standard
spaces of American carnicentric diet, this essay will explore how mainstream vegan praxis
simultaneously creates socio-spatial epistemologies of whiteness that remain invisible to most
white identified people. Interestingly, it can be argued that the white racial demographic in the
USA are collectively unaware of racism and white domination as an ongoing covert, institutional,
and systemic process (Tuana and Sullivan, 2007; Yancy, 2004). Furthermore, this ignorance
commonly manifests as a "post-racial" or "raceless" approach to dealing with the world. It can
manifest into believing that an event about animal rights, with 308 white people and 8 people of
color, has nothing to do with USAs history (and current state) of institutionalized and
environmental racism, as well as whiteness as the norm. In a "post-racial" or "raceless" society, it
is believed that racism no longer exists because skin tone no longer determines equality.
Throughout this text, "raceless," and "post-racial" will be written in quotations to reflect that
such terms are coded language for "expected whiteness" (Kang, 2000) and "raceless" equaling
"default whiteness" (Nakamura, 2002). The consequences of an individuals "post-racial"
approach, in AR/VEG , ignore the socio-historical context of skin color and the accouterments of
white privilege that affect access to, and production of, local and global resources; this includes
the resources for vegan products purchased by AR/VEG people in the USA. Even within the
most radical activism, such as anti-Globalization, animal rights, food activism through farmers
markets, veganism, and anti-Prison Industrial Complex movements, this collective unawareness to
white socio-spatial epistemologies proliferates and is replicated as a form of ignorance (Appel,
2003; Clark, 2004; Nagra, 2003; Poldervaart, 2001; Slocum, 2006; Yancy, 2004). The
epistemology of ignorance is an examination of the complex phenomena of ignorance, which has
as its aim identifying different forms of ignorance, examining how they are produced and
sustained, and what role they play in knowledge practices....At times [epistemologies of
ignorance] takes the form of those in the center refusing to allow the marginalized to know:
witness the 19th century prohibition against black slaves' literacy. Other times it can take the

form of the center's own ignorance of injustice, cruelty, and suffering, such as contemporary
white people's obliviousness to racism and white domination (Sullivan and Tuana, 2007).
However, it is important to note that not all people of color in the USA acknowledge the
consequences or even the existence of racialized or ethnocentric epistemologies of ignorance.
However, Dr. Charles Mills, author of The Racial Contract, theorizes that most black identified
people in the USA, are fully aware that their consciousness is "raced" and that the
epistemological norm in the USA is derived from whiteness (Mills, 2007). This is what intrigues
me about white ignorance: due to embodied experiences of white racialization and socialization,
which strategically orients this demographic towards collective ignorance about race, a majority
of white identified people in the USA deny that their epistemologies and sense of ethics are
"raced" (Sullivan and Tuana, 2007). Dr. Mills has described this epistemological norm as a type
of white ignorance a form of ignorance, what could be called white ignorance, linked to white
supremacy. The idea of group-based cognitive handicap is not an alien one to the radical
traditional, if not normally couched in terms of "ignorance." Indeed, it is, on the contrary, a
straightforward corollary of standpoint theory: if one group is privileged, after all, it must be by
comparison with another group that is handicapped. In addition, the term has for me the virtue of
signaling my theoretical sympathies with what I know will seem to many a deplorably oldfashioned, "conservative," realist, intellectual framework, one in which truth, falsity, facts,
reality, and so forth are not enclosed with ironic scare quotes. The phrase "white ignorance"
implies the possibility of a contrasting "knowledge" (Mills, 2007). How does such ignorance
manifest into vegan praxis? I will explore this in the next section. Race and Ethnicity in Vegan
and Animal Rights Analysis...is it really a "feeble" matter? From: Clara ==== Date: November
8, 2007 7:58:54 AM PST To: sistahvegan98@mac.com Subject: from one vegan to another...
hello, my name is Clara. i am a freshman in high school and while researching animal cruelty, i
came across your website about your book. i am very excited about the fact that you wish to
reach out to the african american female vegan femi[ni]sts, but i was taken aback when i realized
how MUCH you related race and ethnicity to everything. I would just like to say that i honestly
don't believe that the race of a vegan should have anything to do with the cause of saving animals
and making others aware of animal cruelty. You put out a lot of topics that make me feel as if at
one point in your life, you were not proud to be an african american female AND a vegan
because of the depictions of most vegans and that is rather disappointing because race, to me, is
such a feeble matter and there are more things important in life than just recognizing race and
constantly putting out that racial matters are more important than what you believe in seems
ignorant to me. well, thank you for your time: clara :) The above message was delivered to
my email inbox in early November 2007. As a cultural geographer, scholar, and activist involved
in analyzing how race, class, racism, whiteness and geopolitical location shape ones philosophy
of AR/VEG, this email fascinated me. This young woman was writing about my website,
www.breezeharper.com and my anthology of black female vegans, Sistah Vegan. One does not
have to search too far in the past year or two, within the U.S.A., to see that race is no "feeble
matter": The Jena 6, Don Imus "nappy-headed hos" comment about the Rutgers University
Womens Basketball team, and Megan Williams torturers who had called her a "nigger" every
time they would stab her (Tone, 2007), are several examples of racially based verbal and/or
physical violence. Though race is a social construction, there have been obvious consequences of
this construction, most notably white privilege, white ignorance, and white racism that negatively
affect all facets of life in the USA and globally (Bell, 1992; Bell, 2005; Sullivan and Tuana, 2007;

Wing, 2003). Not exempt from these consequences is the geopolitically racialized consumption
and production of vegan products (this includes food as well as knowledge as a product) for the

vegan and animal rights consumer in the USA. Claras email suggests that she is unaware of how
a geopolitically racialized labor force and consumption system makes it possible for AR/VEG
people in the USA to have access to vegan products. The phrase geopolitically racialized is a
phrase I created for this paper. It is a fusion of critical geopolitical theory and the word racialized
or raced. Critical geopolitical theory takes a "critical perspective on the force of fusions of
geographical knowledge and systems of power" (Dalby and Tuathail, 1996). To this fusion, I
also add systems of production and systems of consumption of not only knowledge, but material
resources, such as food, clothing, and spices. Racialized/raced added to geopolitical or
geopolitically,' simply means that human producers and consumers within this system of power,
exist in "raced" bodies that are socially and geographically located in a globalized capitalist
economic system. Such "raced" placement contributes to their relationships to, and
understanding of, knowledge and materials production, power, and ignorance. Dr. Radhika
Mohanram, scholar in womens studies, English, and geopolitics of racial identity, notes that
"[it] is a commonplace to point out that the concept of race has always been articulated according
to the geographical distributions of people. Racial difference is also spatial difference, the
inequitable power relationships between various spaces and place are rearticulated as the
inequitable power relations between races" (Mohanram, 1999). For example, an indentured
black Haitian sugar cane worker in the Dominican Republic will have a different relationship and
perception of sugar, than a "free" white USAmerican vegan that is consuming a vegan product with
sugar harvested by the enslaved Dominican. Furthermore, ones sense of "ethical consumption" is
contingent upon geopolitical social and physical position (Barnett et al., 2005). Vegan chocolate,

sugar, and cotton (a vegan alternative to wool and silk) products are examples of how globalized
racism sustains geopolitically racialized hierarchies of food and animal-free textile production
(Harper, 2010). I will explicate the above further, to those who may not fully understand why
they should be concerned with the impact unacknowledged geopolitically racialized
consciousness has on their animal rights epistemologies and engagement of those epistemologies
through vegan consumerism and consumption. There are people outside of the USA that harvest
chocolate under the worse conditions, simply for the production of chocolate treats, including
chocolate ingredients found in certain vegan foods and beverages. There are thousands of people
on cocoa farms who work as slaves to harvest USAs chocolate. The Ivory Coast exports fifty
percent of the cocoa beans that are used in global chocolate production (Hawksley, 2001). There
is a surprising association between chocolate and child labor in the Cote d'Ivoire...from which
chocolate is made, under inhumane conditions and extreme abuse. This West African country is
the leading exporter of cocoa beans to the world market. Thus, the existence of slave labor is
relevant to the entire international economic community. Through trade relations, many actors
are inevitably implicated in this problem, whether it is the Ivorian government, the farmers, the
American or European chocolate manufacturers, or consumers who unknowingly buy chocolate
[emphasis added] (Chanthavong, 2002). Furthermore, as of 2001, thousands of children from the
country of Mali have been declared "missing". Authorities believe that "at least 15,000 children
are thought to be over in the neighbouring Ivory Coast, producing cocoa...Many are imprisoned
on farms and beaten if they try to escape. Some are under 11 years old" (Hawksley, 2001).
Although many vegans in the USA believe they are practicing "cruelty free" consumption by
saving the life of a non-human animal by eating vegan chocolate products, those who purchase
non-fair trade cocoa products may be causing cruelty to thousands of human beings. If a product
is not marked in a way that indicates it was harvested through fair and sweatshop-free practices,
then how can one know that it is human-cruelty free? Who are the non-white racialized
populations who are harvesting chocolate, under conditions of cruelty that help certain USA

vegans practice modern ethics through vegan chocolate food consumption? Heres a hint: they
are not white socio-economic class privileged people living in the suburbs of the USA. Since the
beginning of European colonialism and the European (and now USAmerican) pursuit of
"civilizing" and "modernizing" the globe, those who have harvested chocolate, coffee, cane sugar
and tea, have been overwhelmingly non-white racialized groups of people (Mintz, 1986; Harper,
2010). This pattern continues into 2010 (Gautier, 2007; Hunt, 2007). In my book, Sistah Vegan, I
wrote about the harm produced by USAs addictions to foodstuffs that are sourced from the
global South: In addition, our unmindful consumption of [un]foodstuffs are not only harming and
killing our own health in the United States of America; we are supporting the pain, suffering and
cultural genocide of those whose land and people we have enslaved and/or exploited
for...sucrose, coffee, black tea, and chocolate too. Unless your addictive substances read "Fair
Trade" and "Certified Organic" on it, it is most likely supporting a company that pays people less
than they can live off of while they work on plantations that use toxic pesticides and or prohibit
the right to organize for their own human rights...Is your addiction causing suffering and
exploitation thousands of miles a way on a sugar cane plantation, near a town that suffers from
high rates of poverty and undernourishment, simply because that land grows our "dope" instead
of local grains and produce for them? We have confused our addictive consumption habits with
being "civilized" (Jensen, 2006). The British who sipped their sugary teas considered themselves
"civilized", despite the torture and slavery it took to get that white sugar into their tea cups
(Harper, 2010). I would also like to suggest that one cannot overlook the critical concept of
modernity (a.k.a. being "civilized") when analyzing how white racialized consciousness and white
epistemologies of ignorance remain invisible to "post-racial" vegans and animal rights proponents
in the USA. Philosophically , people in AR/VEG activism can be best described as being engaged
in a form of "ethical consumption." However, within "ethical consumption," there are unspoken
political assumptions associated with the practice. As Tams Dombos described, in Hungary,
where ethical consumption is only beginning to appear, it is not simply about consuming ethically:
it is also about becoming modern [emphasis added]. Early campaigners for... [ethical
consumption] come from Western Europe and the United States, or are closely associated with
such people, and a recurring theme in talk about ethical consumption is its association with an
Occidentalized, imagined West that Eastern Europeans ought to be emulating. It seems, then, that

some ethical consumption cannot be understood without seeing it as an embrace of a certain kind
of modernity associated particularly with the EU (Carrier, 2007). Though Carrier is referring to
the EU, I cannot help but see the same philosophies underlying ethical consumption practices of
many USA AR/VEG organizations, such as Vegan Outreach, who talk of ending non-human
animal cruelty by purchasing Silk chocolate milk or Soy Delicious chocolate ice cream instead of
cow dairy products (Vegan Outreach, 2007). I believe that Vegan Outreach has done amazing
work in educating human beings about the suffering humans cause to non-human animals.
However, my two critiques are that a) animal rights activists pictured on Vegan Outreachs Guide
to Cruelty-Free Eating appear to be all white and b) Vegan Outreach is advocating Silk and Soy
Delicious chocolate products for beginner vegans in their guide (Vegan Outreach, 2007); both
products cocoa sources are not certified human cruelty free. On the Vegetarian Baby & Child
website, Turtle Mountains Soy Delicious frozen vegan desserts are described as the following:
While theyre not a company big enough to purchase fair trade chocolate, Turtle Mountain
doesnt use bone char-refined sugar, and they are certified organic. The company is also a
supporter of the Sea Turtle Restoration Project, an organization helping [to] prevent sea turtles
extinction. What better reason do I need to buy soy ice cream but to help sea turtles?
(Veggies123.com) One has to wonder why the Turtle Mountain Company simply does not stop

purchasing chocolate all together, if they cannot afford to buy fairly traded chocolate.
Furthermore, there is mention that the sugar is vegan, but one also does not know if it was or was
not produced through human cruelty practices. It can be assumed that profit is the motivator to
continue purchasing cocoa from a non fair trade resource. It can also be assumed that saving sea
turtles and using sugar, free from bone char refinement, is what makes this vegan treat "ethical"
and "cruelty-free," appealing to many modern day AR/VEG people in the USA. It cannot be
overlooked that the "ethics" of geopolitically racialized production of non fair trade cocoa and
sugar for Turtle Mountain (and its consumers), is not as equally important as ensuring that the
sugar is "bone free" and sea turtles are given the right to self-determination and survival. If it
were, I surmise that Turtle Mountain would have received enough complaints from consumers
(or boycotts) to start buying fair trade ingredients. In regard to the pamphlets images of solely
white people engaged in animal rights activism, one also has to wonder why Vegan Outreach did
not provide images of racially diverse people distributing flyers or being engaged in animal
rights activism. Page two has a white woman with a white baby, sharing food with a turkey
(Vegan Outreach, 2007). On page twenty-two, there is a white child holding up an apple who is
described as being a "young vegan" (Vegan Outreach, 2007). Page twenty-six has a young white
man reading about advocating for animals (Vegan Outreach, 2007). Page twenty-seven has a
picture of a white man handing a Vegan Outreach pamphlet to a black man (Vegan Outreach,
2007). On page twenty-eight, there is a young white girl handing out Vegan Outreach brochures
(Vegan Outreach, 2007). The combination of images of white people being the animal rights
activists coupled with images that advocate vegan products with sugar and chocolate that are
unfairly harvested by the labor of non-white racialized people embodies, for me, a contradictory
ethos of who practices veganism and how. What is odd to me is that this is the praxis behind
"cruelty-free eating" (hence, the name of the Vegan Outreach starter guide). Throughout the
entire starter guide, there is not one mention of the avoidance of vegan products not designated
as fair trade, sweatshop-free, or free of current day human slavery practices. Therefore, what
type of geopolitically racialized "ethics" are being produced and disseminated? In a 2005
interview with Satya Magazine, Sheila Hamanaka and Tracy Basile write: Its one thing for a
white person to pass out vegan flyers. But attempts by white AR activists to set the agenda for
other cultures bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the historical pattern of suppression by
dominant nations. Instead of exporting "democracy," AR activists are exporting their cultural
concepts of the proper relationship between human and nonhuman animals (Hamanaka 2005). In

the case of the Vegan Outreach guide, is a white racialized, middle-classed neoliberal USA
concept of proper vegan products being exported? Is this a consequence of white epistemologies
of ignorance, "post-racialness," and modernity? Of practicing AR/VEG activism without fully
realizing how all oppressions are interlocking (Harper, 2010; Smith, 2007), and that it may be
just as "cruel" to eat animals as it is to eat food and textiles produced by enslaved humans on a
cocoa, sugar, or cotton plantations?

1nr
Additionally, the 1acs plan text maintains a faith in modernism
Campbell 5 (Fiona Kumari Senior Lecturer in Disability Studies at the School of Human
Services & Social Work Griffith University (Brisbane) and Adjunct Professor in Disability
Studies, Faculty of Medicine, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, Legislating Disability Negative
Ontologies and the Government of Legal Identities, Foucault and the Government of Disability,
108-133) *gender modified
In order for the notion of ableness to exist and to transmogrify into the sovereign subject of
liberalism it must have a constitutive outsidethat is, it must participate in a logic of
supplementarity. Although we can speak in ontological terms of the history of disability as a history of
that which is unthought, this figuring should not be confused with erasure that occurs due to total absence
or complete exclusion. On the contrary, disability is always present (despite its seeming absence) in the
ableist talk of normalcy, normalization, and humanness. Indeed, the truth claims that surround disability
are dependent upon discourses of ableism for their very legitimation. The logic of supplementarity, which
is infused within modernisms unitary subject and which produces the Other in a liminal space, deploys
what we might call a compulsion toward terror: a terror, ontological and actual, of falling away and
crossing over into an uncertain void of disease. Such effects of terror may produce instances of
disability hate crimes, disability vilification, and disability panic. The manifestations of this terror rarely
enter judicial domains, but rather are excluded from laws permissible inquiry and codification . In short,
this erasure forecloses the possibility of pursuing legal remedies through the refusal of laws power
to name and countenance oppositional disability discourses. Disability harms and injuries are only
deemed bona fide within a framework of scaled-down disability definitions (read: ctions) elevated to
indisputable truth-claims and rendered viable in law.

The Netherlands demonstrates this isnt unique to Germany over time right to die
laws broaden to include people who didnt consent
Wright 2000 - Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Clark University (Walter,
Historical Analogies, Slippery Slopes, and the Question of Euthanasia foumal of Law,
Medicine &Ethics, 28 (2000): 176-186, Wiley)
In Practical Ethics, Singer responds to this sort of chal- lenge by citing the example of Holland.
Euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide have been illegal in that country since 1886 under
articles 293 and 294 of the Penal Code.56 The issue entered public discussion there in 1973
when a criminal court at Leeuwarden convicted a physician of ad- ministering a fatal injection to
her mother, but imposed a suspended sentence. The court found it permissible to ad- minister
drugs that shorten a patients life so long as the goal was relief of pain. In that same year, the
KNMG (Koninklijke Nederlandse Maatschappij tot bevordering der Geneeskunstthe Royal
Dutch Medical Association) issued a statement that paralleled the court decision. In the next
twenty-seven years, case law and KNMG policy statements have evolved in tandem, setting
guidelines protecting phy- sicians who conduct euthanasia, so long as the physician carries out
the act according to rules of careful medical practice.17 The only statute law bearing on the
matter has been an act adopted by the Dutch Parliament (November 30,1993) amending the
Burial Act and giving formal legal status to the notification procedure in cases of euthanasia (and
physician-assisted suicide). In 1981, the court at Rotterdam convicted a layperson of assisting in
the suicide of a terminally ill patient. In its decision, the court set the basic criteria that, with

modifications, have governed Hollands active euthanasia practice since. These guidelines
included several factors. For an act of euthanasia to be permissible for such a terminally ill
patient, the patient must be conscious and experiencing unbearable pain. There must be no other
reasonable solutions. The patient must make a well-informed, entirely voluntary, and durable
request for death. The attending doctor must consult with an inde- pendent professional, who
concurs. Finally, only a doctor may administer the means of death. After listing the guidelines
developed by the KNMG and the Dutch courts, Singer asserts: Euthanasia in these circumstances
is strongly sup- ported by the Royal Dutch Medical Association, and by the general public in the
Netherlands. The guide- lines make murder in the guise of euthanasia rather far-fetched, and there
is no evidence of an increase in the murder rate in the Netherlands. 5 Thus, for Singer, the Dutch
experience of permitting euthanasia, without (in his account) the arising of atten- dant abuses and
extensions of the practice, supports the claim that the German experience was a unique, one-time
occurrence, and not a precedent for the future.59 Singer is correct that the KNMG60 and public
opinion generally sup- port the current practices, but he is too optimistic in his reading of the
other facts. In particular, he is simply too optimistic about the ability of procedural safeguards to
pre- vent abuses. When we examine the details, the Dutch example that he cites to support his
view presents a much more ambigu- ous picture.61 During the last two decades in Holland,
physician practice and case law have extended the catego- ries of patients for whom physicianassisted dying was not legally forbidden well beyond the guidelines posited in the 1981 decision.
Recent court cases have acquitted doc- tors who killed patients in cases of transient psychological as
well as persistent physical distress, cases of chronic as well as terminal illness, and involuntary as
well as volun- tary euthanasia.62 The prevailing argument for these ex- tensions has been the
claim that it would be discriminatory and unfair to allow euthanasia for some and to deny it to
other closely similar cases. This is the archetypal engine for a slippery slope. 6* The Dutch
government has conducted two studies (1990 and 1995) supported by the Royal Dutch Medical

Association with the promise that participating physicians would be immune from prosecution
for anything they re- vealed. The authors of the 1995 study claim that, sub- stantial progress in
the oversight of physician assisted death has been achieved in the Netherlands.64 The tenor of
both these reports, as well as Marcia Angells 1996 editorial in the New England Journal of
Medicine*- about them, is largely favorable for Dutch euthanasia. However, this con- clusion
requires overlooking significant contrary evidence. According to the 1990 Remmelink Report,
doctors killed 2,300 people who requested it. However, doctors also killed 1,040 people who did not
know or consent to what was happening. They did this despite the fact that 14% of these patients
were fully competent, and 72% had never given any indication that they would want their lives
terminated. In the 1995 reports, physicians indicated that they con- sulted another physician in
only 11% of cases not reported to the government. Almost 20% of these unreported cases in that
report involved ending a life without the patients explicit request . Both in 1990 and 1995,
approximately 25% of physicians reported that they had terminated the lives of patients without
an explicit request from the pa- tient to do so.66 In their analysis of the data, Dutch investigators
claimed that cases terminated without an explicit request had decreased between 1990 and
1995,67 but they reached this result by citing only the cases without explicit request. They
ignored another listed categorycases in which phy- sicians gave pain medication with the explicit
intent of end- ing a patients life. These increased from 1350 to nearly 1900. In more than 80% of
these cases the patient had made no request for death. If we count these deaths, too, as nonvoluntary, then there has been an increase (and not a decrease) in the number of patients killed
without having requested it/8 Even today, a large number of euthanasia cases in Holland go
unreported. In these cases, doctors falsify death certificates to show death by natural causes, thus

making regulation of euthanasia impossible. The guideline calling for a persistent and repeated request by patients before they can be killed is obviously be- ing ignored in practice. As indicated,
practice continues to stretch the other guidelines as well. While Dutch have not produced a Nazi
holocaust, their experience does indeed provide reasons to think that once allowed under strict
lim- its, killing will expand beyond them. This independent contemporary example supports the
argument that what happened in Germany may not be a unique and excep- tional circumstance,
and that the euthanasia slope may be slippery indeed . Certainly, the Dutch experience provides
little support for Singers claim that it is not one.

Falsely assumes fear of death rather than fear of weakness ableism exists in a far
broader and pervasive sense
Knoll 12, Kristine Knoll studies Gender and Womens studies at the University of Washington,
Feminist Disability Studies: Theoretical Debates, Activism, Identity Politics, & Coalition
Building,
https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/bitstream/handle/1773/20505/Knoll_washington
_0250E_10341.pdf.txt?sequence=2
Regarding symbolic systems of oppression in relation to disability, disability images often invoke
pity. What symbols or stereotypes come to mind when one thinks of disability, or particular
disabilities? Some common stereotypes of disability, aside from pity , are weakness/helplessness ,
evilness/possession , non-sexual , not parents (or should not be), less intelligent and/or child-like ,
and as having qualities we want to cure or eradicate. As Hill- Collins explains, Central to this
process is the use of stereotypical or controlling images of diverse race, class and gender
groups (pp. 59-60). Unfortunately, she neglects to recognize disability. There are many
disability stereotypes that contribute to the pervasive system that prevents people with disabilities
from climbing institutional and social ladders (such as finding a partner and having children).
Finally, oppression can also occur on an individual level. Negative images and symbols of
disability (stereotypes, or lack of representation) are everywhere , and we all encounter the
institutions that subordinate certain groups of people, while privileging others. This impacts us on
the individual level, regardless of whether they are conscious or subconscious beliefs and actions.
We externalize these beliefs onto Others , and also turn it inward on ourselves (e.g. internalized

oppression). The pervasiveness of discrimination alerts us to where and how oppression is

occurring, and this highlights where we need to break down barriers . Feminist theories challenge
us to look at disability from a minority group model, rather than always using the
masters tools to try to understand and deconstruct disability oppression. Another
feminist theorist, Peggy McIntosh, provides great tools for understanding the ways in which
privilege and oppression operate on individual levels; although, of course, these are still linked to
symbolic and institutional forces of oppression. Although McIntosh does not address disability
within her work, the tools she provides in her article, White Privilege and Male Feminist
Disability Studies 23 Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See the Correspondences
through Work in Women Studies (2001), are easily transferable to disability issues.

Even if theyre factually correct on the root cause debate the 1ac failed to name the
oppressor of ableism, failure to emphasize the importance of this allows oppression
to go unchecked
Lunsford 5 (Scott, Scott Lunsford has his M.A. in writing and began his PhD in Rhetoric and
Writing studies in 2005, January 1st 2005, Seeking a Rhetoric of the Rhetoric of Dis/abilities,
Rhetoric and Composition PhD Papers, Department of English,
http://digitalcommons.utep.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=rhet_comp&seiredir=1&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Furl%3Fsa%3Dt%26rct%3Dj%26q
%3Ddisability%2520and%2520rehtoric%26source%3Dweb%26cd%3D10%26ved
%3D0CHsQFjAJ%26url%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fdigitalcommons.utep.edu%252Fcgi
%252Fviewcontent.cgi%253Farticle%253D1000%2526context%253Drhet_comp%26ei
%3DOaTsT_2lJIuY8gSI-6y-BQ%26usg%3DAFQjCNGi67PqtbUndsIS7f6HPkueRkRJ8A
%26sig2%3DsO_68H9jX3Eo8B09DxEAPg#search=%22disability%20rehtoric%22As an
advocate for including dis/ability studies alongside the critical and traditional triumvirate of race,
class, and gender, I was excited to see the disability symposium in a recent issue of Rhetoric Review
(22.2). I use the form dis/abilities to emphasize the importance of its inclusion as an issue of
difference which we approach as critically as we do race, class, and gender: Just as we cannot
discuss race without arguing how whiteness at least in this countryperforms hegemonic
control over other racial identities, we cannot ignore how ability realizes its constituent
disability. But how do we go about discussing dis/ability? How do we move out of this silence and
unawareness which strengthen stigma about various forms of disability? I imagine a
metadiscussion to realize a more complicated discourse of disabilities, a discourse which must
confront its own disability. First, we must understand the hegemony which makes dis/ability
invisible through silence.

To put this notion into a context of race, some members of white society remain color-blind and
resist talking about race, rendering race invisible . As such, some members of an ableistic society
sometimes choose to be silent about disability; thus, disability remains invisible. Ability, too, can be
invisible. Those of us who are able-bodied might not see it because we are it. Plus, we often do
not see that our ability constructs disability. Second, once weve made dis/ability visible, we can
then expand our awareness through language by becoming sensitive to various terminologies
assigned to various disabilities.

After the Watts Rebellion, RFK observed: There is no point in telling Negroes
to observe the lawIt has almost always been used against themAll these
placesHarlem, Watts, South Side [of Chicago]are riots wating to happen.
Quote in: Clark, Kenneth B. The Wonder is There Have Been So Few Riots.
New York Times Magazine, September 5, 1965.
i

ii

Slave estate is a term borrowed from Hortense Spillers.

See Emile Benveniste. Problems in General Linguistics. Trans. Mary Elizabeth

Meek. Coral Gables: Univ. of Miami Press, 1971.
iii