1nc

I grew up in the south, specifically, Cabot, Arkansas. This not

only shaped but distorted my sociocultural understanding of
the world, as my hometown has and will continue to exude
whiteness, its historical foundation were constituted from a
white-flight suburb formulated from the fleet of whites
attempting to distance themselves from the impending
segregation in the Little Rock School District. The population
of 27,000 people is comprised of 96.56% Caucasian people,
and has the 3rd highest median income in Arkansas. My town
continues to be one of racial and gender plight, wherein
people who deviate from normalcy are lost in the cracks of the
social order. I believe that I am privileged to not be condemned
by civil society, to be interpellated as part and parcel with the
majority. I am privileged to have been brought up in such a
rich county, one that can afford to subsidize my extracurricular
endeavors, even when I go 3-3 at a finals bid tournament. I am
privileged to be able to debate, to not have to work 30 hours a
week to provide for my family while simultaneously attempting
to pass high school. I am privileged. This is a realization that
has come to my attention, that my understanding of this world
and its surrounding counterparts are distorted and formulated
through a lens of white settler privilege made possible by an
insidious concoction of settler colonialism and whiteness. Its
something that I have to remain cognizant of, that when my
parents exclaim that the political left makes up the sissies of
the population that people need to just toughen up, that their
oppression isnt real, that we live in a post-racial society, that
#AllLivesMatter. I have to remember that racism and privilege
permeate every aspect of my existence, that just for being
born a straight white male that I will never experience
atrocities that red, black, brown, trans, queer or feminine
bodies have to experience on a daily basis. That not only am I
privileged over people but that I experience the world
differently. That I will never know what it is like to be looked at
like your body is intimately a concealed weapon, to know what
it feels like to be racially profiled, because all I know is
whiteness. Collin and I believe that confrontation of privilege
is crucial to dismantling structures of oppression because
institutions are informed by the people, our daily complicity to

contingencies that reproduce privilege makes us not only

complicit but willingfully able to subjugate entire populations
in order to taste the wonders of privilege. Its why affirm a
more localized politics call it body politics. We think that
debate should be motivated by a questioning of your social
location and how your individual positioning within society
gives way to larger structures that make life so miserable for
so many. We also believe that
Their Externalization of violence onto an alternate actor
abdicates our culpability with manifestations of violence.
KAPPELER IN 95 [Susanne Kappeler, The Will To Violence: The Politics of
Personal Behavior, pg 1-4]
violence which is talked about is always the violence committed by
someone else: women talk about the violence of men, adults about the violence of young people; the left,
What is striking is that the

liberals and the centre about the violence of right extremists; the right, centre and liberals about the violence of

political activists talk about structural violence , police and politicians about
violence in the `street', and all together about the violence in our society. Similarly, Westerners
leftist extremists;

talk about violence in the Balkans, Western citizens together with their generals about the violence of the Serbian

Violence is recognized and measured by its visible effects, the spectacular

blood of wounded bodies, the material destruction of objects, the visible damage
left in the world of `objects'. In its measurable damage we see the proof that
violence has taken place, the violence being reduced to this damage. The violation
as such, or invisible forms of violence - the non-physical violence of threat and terror, of insult and
humiliation, the violation of human dignity - are hardly ever the issue except to some extent in feminist
army.

and anti-racist analyses, or under the name of psychological violence. Here violence is recognized by the victims
and defined from their perspective - an important step away from the catalogue of violent acts and the exclusive
evidence of material traces in the object. Yet even here the focus tends to be on the effects and experience of
violence, either the objective and scientific measure of psychological damage, or the increasingly subjective

Violence is perceived as a phenomenon for science to

research and for politics to get a grip on. But violence is not a phenomenon: it is the
behaviour of people, human action which may be analysed. What is missing is an
analysis of violence as action - not just as acts of violence, or the cause of its
effects, but as the actions of people in relation to other people and beings or things.
definition of violence as experience.

Feminist critique, as well as other political critiques, has analysed the preconditions of violence, the unequal power
relations which enable it to take place. However, under the pressure of mainstream science and a sociological
perspective which increasingly dominates our thinking, it is becoming standard to argue as if it were these power

Underlying is a behaviourist model which prefers to see

human action as the exclusive product of circumstances, ignoring the personal
decision of the agent to act, implying in turn that circumstances virtually dictate
certain forms of behaviour. Even though we would probably not underwrite these
propositions in their crass form, there is nevertheless a growing tendency, not just
in social science, to explain violent behaviour by its circumstances. (Compare the
relations which cause the violence.

question, `Does pornography cause violence?') The circumstances identified may differ according to the politics of
the explainers, but the method of explanation remains the same. While consideration of mitigating circumstances
has its rightful place in a court of law trying (and defending) an offender, this does not automatically make it an
adequate or sufficient practice for political analysis. It begs the question, in particular, `What is considered to be

part of the circumstances (and by whom)?' Thus in the case of sexual offenders, there is a routine search - on the
part of the tabloid press or professionals of violence - for experiences of violence in the offender's own past, an
understanding which is rapidly solidifying in scientific model of a `cycle of violence'. That is, the relevant factors are
sought in the distant past and in other contexts of action, e a crucial factor in the present context is ignored,
namely the agent's decision to act as he did. Even politically oppositional groups are not immune to this
mainstream sociologizing. Some left groups have tried to explain men's sexual violence as the result of class
oppression, while some Black theoreticians have explained the violence of Black men as the result of racist

The ostensible aim of these arguments may be to draw attention to the

pervasive and structural violence of classism and racism, yet they not only fail to
combat such inequality, they actively contribute to it. Although such oppression is a
very real part of an agent's life context, these `explanations' ignore the fact that not everyone
experiencing the same oppression uses violence, that is, that these circumstances
do not `cause' violent behaviour. They overlook, in other words, that the perpetrator
has decided to violate, even if this decision was made in circumstances of limited
choice. To overlook this decision, however, is itself a political decision , serving particular
interests. In the first instance it serves to exonerate the perpetrators, whose responsibility is
thus transferred to circumstances and a history for which other people (who remain
beyond reach) are responsible.
oppression.

Whiteness is a social location of privilege that maintains its

regime by controlling means of resistance positing racism as
structural neglects that it was made structural by the people
resistance that begins without questioning ones social location
ensures perpetual failure and entrenches whiteness.
Flagg 6 (Barbara prof. of Law Emerita at Washington University School of Law , 2/4/6, Whiteness as Metaprivilege,
http://racism.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=398:whiteness16a&catid=69&Itemid=165)//kbuck

Whiteness is a social location of power, privilege, and prestige . It is a "an invisible package of
unearned assets." As an epistemological stance, it sometimes is an exercise in denial. Whiteness is an identity, a culture, and an
often colonizing way of life that is largely invisible to Whites, though rarely to people of color. Whiteness also carries the authority

Whiteness
thus is many-faceted and pervasive. I believe it lies at the center of the problem of race in this
society. The papers that make up this symposium reflect the diversity of the topic. One finds here discussions of subjects
within the larger culture it dominates to set the terms on which every aspect of race is discussed and understood.

ranging from the disposition of human remains to dreaming to standardized testing in schools; from patterns of informal affiliation in
Senegal to self-presentation practices of individuals and of universities to September 11. Nevertheless, these seemingly dissimilar
topics are linked by the strands of Whiteness as metaprivilege that run throughout. By "metaprivilege" I mean the ability of
Whiteness to define the conceptual terrain on which race is constructed, deployed, and interrogated. Whiteness sets the terms on

Whiteness generates a distinct cultural narrative, controls

the racial distribution of opportunities and resources, and frames the ways in which
that distribution is interpreted. Finally, Whiteness holds sway over the very terms in
which its own ascendancy is understood and might be challenged . This essay takes as given a
which racial identity is constructed.

proposition now well-established by geneticists: there is no such thing as biological race. Race is wholly socially constructed; the
precise contours of racial differentiation and meaning vary from culture to culture and within a given culture over time. In the United

The
metaprivileges of Whiteness are those aspects of this construction that function as
stabilizing agents; they ensure the maintenance of White supremacy . Whiteness and Racial
Identity/ubr /> The first metaprivilege of Whiteness is the ability to control the social
construction of racial identity. Whiteness has the authority not only to define who is
and is not White, but also to delineate the boundaries of non-White racial identities.
The long reach of Whiteness' privilege even extends to the performance of nonStates, Whiteness is a largely transparent construction that constitutes the dominant site of power and privilege.

White identities within non-White racial groups.

Whiteness constructs itself. john powell explores the

resilient, adaptively persistent character of Whiteness. Beginning with the observation that racial boundaries are so firmly
constructed that we rarely go beyond them even in our dreams, he traces the history of the delineation of Whiteness and the "racial
other," emphasizing the ways in which Whiteness continually realigns and sustains itself. powell concludes with the suggestion that
"It is clear that the solution to whiteness will not arise within a worldview or a self view based on separation." Judy Scales-Trent also
explores the boundaries that Whiteness erects around itself. She describes the practice of "cousinage" in Senegal, which, by
constructing fictive blood relationships, creates communities and defuses potential conflict among otherwise distinct ethnic groups.
This practice treats as related those who "really" are not. Scales-Trent compares it to the situation in America. When White America
had to decide how to define children with both Black and White parents, it decided that they would be Black . . . not White, and not
both. Thus, as she notes hauntingly, "white America . . . made a very different political decision: the decision to create warfare
between the black and white groups by making believe that real families do not exist." Whiteness also determines who is Black,
Latino, Asian, or Native. Rebecca Tsosie asks "who owns Native identity?" and explores the role the concept of indigeneity plays in
contestations over Native ownership of political and cultural rights, land, ancestral human remains, and genetic resources. Her
analyses reveal that "indigeneity" itself frequently is co-opted by those with discursive authority, a group that rarely if ever includes
Native people themselves. Thus, Tsosie remarks, "The term 'indigenous' has become a trope to argue for a broader entitlement to
rights among various groups in society.""What is missing in all of this is an ethic of respect for Native values, identities and
narratives, and the core concepts within Native epistemologies." Beyond racial categories themselves, Whiteness deeply impacts
the content of non-White racial identities. John Calmore describes the demands Whiteness makes on him, a Black man.
Understanding Black identity as performance, Calmore notes that "white

performance was [and is] the quid

pro quo for white privilege." Though "few people of color can insulate themselves from
[the] influence [of dominant Whiteness ]," Calmore advocates a transgressive performance: "people of
color must not reinforce white privilege through our attachment to it." Gerald Torres explores
the ways in which Chicana feminists challenge Chicano machismo as a reinscription of racism. In this analysis, resistance to male
supremacy within the Chicana community is theorized, as a strategic matter, as the same as resistance to White supremacy. From
this perspective, Whiteness infiltrates the construction of the Chicano male within the Chicano community; it therefore must be
interrogated. Whiteness and Resources/ubr /> A second metaprivilege of Whiteness enables it to set the terms on which valuable
resources are allocated. Helen Moore explores the problem of "testing while Black": Whiteness controls "who tests, what is tested,
and how tests are administered and interpreted." Standardized tests are well known to be flawed: they produce mutable scores,
reflect cultural biases, and are invalid markers of learning; moreover, test taking itself is a culturally specific process. The "invalid
science of assessment" currently in wide use inscribes Whiteness as the standard of educational success; it is embedded in and

Whiteness generates
uniquely White narratives that become definitive cultural stories. David Roediger examines
reinforced by and through the No Child Left Behind legislation. Whiteness and Cultural Narrative

self-representation practices of "historically white" colleges and universities that appropriate images of persons of color to advance
White objectives. At the University of Wisconsin, for example, an image of a Black student was superimposed on an otherwise allWhite scene, in an attempt to portray racial diversity. Here the authoritative narrative of self-representation obscures "the
exclusionary past and present of such institutions." Thus "diversity" itself serves the hidden interests of Whiteness. Tom Ross
explores the Whiteness of the cultural narrative concerning September 11, 2001, as it has developed in the presence of a declining
White population and against the backdrop of racially-laden nationalist narratives associated with John Harlan and Theodore
Roosevelt. He observes that "the essential face of the victims was White," and notes that in consequence "the suffering of those
outside the narrative of 9/11 has receded even further from the public consciousness." The story of September 11--the attack on
"us"--is one that reflects "quintessentially White" anxieties and uncertainties. Whiteness and Privilege/ubr /> Stephanie Wildman
interrogates the persistence and resilience of White privilege. In addition to material forces that both constitute and shore up White

sociocultural factors that help account for the continued

existence of White privilege. They include the ability of Whites to control the cultural discourse of racial equality-privilege, Wildman identifies four

colorblindness rhetoric and "individual-group sleight of hand"--as well as Whites' socialization to, and insistence upon, social

operate within a "comfort zone" that renders Whiteness "normal." And

when displaced, Whites often employ strategies that reinstate Whiteness at the center. Here the metaprivilege of
Whiteness resides in the "absence of awareness of White privilege" that Wildman notes.
Whiteness does not acknowledge either its own privilege or the material and
sociocultural mechanisms by which that privilege is protected . White privilege itself
becomes invisible. Whiteness as Metaprivilege/bbr /> Whiteness is not only an identity, but the power to name and shape
preeminence. Whites

identities. Whiteness not only has control of valuable resources, but has the ability to limit access to those resources to those who
reflect its own image. Whiteness not only constitutes a distinct perspective on events, but has the authority to generate definitive
cultural narratives. And Whiteness not only is a set of unearned privileges, but the capacity to disguise those privileges behind
structures of silence, obsfucation, and denial. Whiteness creates, and exists within, a conceptual framework in which human agency
is presented as absolute, the individual is the constitutive unit of agency, and White antiracist work is understood to be optional.
Seemingly creating a space for meaningful transformation of White race consciousness, these axioms of Whiteness constitute core
metaprivileges of Whiteness, and they provide a final layer of defense in the maintenance of White supremacy. Whiteness Presents
Human Agency as Absolute/ubr /> In one sense, this is so. Human action is not fully determined by conditions external to the actor.
However, agency effectuates itself within sets of conditions that constrain, often severely, even if they do not entirely control. Thus
agency is a complex amalgam of possibilities and constraints, material and ideological conditions and consequences. Agency is a
fluid phenomenon, conforming like hot glass to forms impressed upon it by societal structures. In its congealed form, agency is at

Whiteness Posits the Individual as the

Unit of Human Agency/ubr /> So understood, the individual is not responsible for what he or
once determined by and determinative of dominance and subordination.

she has not brought into being, and thus systemic dominance and subordination are
beyond the scope of (individual) moral obligation . However, the notion of responsibility envisioned by
White privilege is quite a shallow one. As Joyce Trebilcot has explained, one can adopt a larger notion of responsibility, exemplified
by the phrase "to take responsibility for": Notice first that to take responsibility for a state of affairs is not to claim responsibility for
having caused it. So, for example, if I take responsibility for cleaning up the kitchen I am not thereby admitting to any role in
creating the mess; the state of the kitchen may be the consequence of actions quite independent of me. . . . In taking responsibility
a woman chooses to make a commitment about a specific state of affairs. Similarly, Whites can take responsibility for the systemic
maintenance of White supremacy. Whiteness Sees White Antiracist Work as Optional/ubr /> If the individual human agent is
absolutely free to act or not, and to choose the forms of action that are to be undertaken, no particular act is inevitable. In this
sense, White people can elect whether or not to engage in action that contributes to the dismantling of White supremacy. However,
because choice is socially structured, meanings attributed to action by any particular actor are not dispositive, nor are
interpretations ascribed by White privilege. The social significance of choices made by Whites is socially given, so that neither the
material or ideological consequences of chosen acts are fully determined by Whiteness. Whites do not absolutely control the
character of antiracist work. The Axioms of Whiteness Contribute to the Maintenance of White Supremacy/ubr /> The
conception of individualized responsibility adopted by Whiteness enables Whites to evade engagement with systemic structures of

can claim not to be responsible for systemic oppression . For example,

presupposes that
there is no individual responsibility for the societal conditions and normative choices
that exclude all but a disproportionately small number of people of color from
institutions such as contracting and higher education .
racial injustice. First, Whites

the rhetoric of "White innocence" that is featured prominently in the debate over affirmative action

This process of upholding particular subjects manifests itself in

debate this activity is constituted on the basis of the liberal
effacing of particular subjects, its historical success is
founded on the exclusion of minorities and the sacralization of
the privileged.
Reid-Brinkley 12 (Dr. Shanara first black woman director of debate, smarter than u, professor of
communications at Pittsburg University, interview conducted by Scott Odekirk, 2/13/12,
http://puttingthekindebate.wordpress.com/2012/04/02/the-dr-shanara-reid-brinkley)//kbuck
Cause I had a bunch of white friends in debate. So, all these white people were like coming at me: Shanara, I dont
like it, Im sure you arent gonna like it they were just indignant. And, so, I was like: what then? why all these white
people indignant? That was my reaction. My reaction was not they cant say that about black debaters my
reaction was like why are all these white people tripping ? So I came to a tournament, and watched
a little bit of the after Liz and Tanya Louisville show, and Deven was really young at this point, but at Towson. And I

its very
obvious of whats happening here. Black people are talking about race, white people
are uncomfortable. And what was very interesting to me, is that the liberal white people were
the most uncomfortable. These are people that I considered allies, right? And for them to be having this
started looking at it, and went back and looked at some of the Loiusville footage, and I was like, oh

reaction to these students, I was like something is going on here. And so, as I looked at the situation what I began
to realize was how,

in terms of whiteness, and masculinity, and class privilege functions

in debate, is that we have an ideal. Right, an ideal debater that has to do with speed,
and ability to argue, and very fast and efficient line-by-line debating. But, its more than that.
Because all of those technologies that we identify as success in our community are
attached to certain bodies. Right? So if our history of success looks like white men with money, right?
Then the very ideal of what successful debate looks like is white men with money .

We begin with a questioning of the topica criticism of how we

formulate and filter in relations of power through externalized
surveillancethis gaze neglects the fact that surveillance is no
longer institutional because power is exerted via cultural
empowermentthe internalization of powers gaze and the
adherence to normative interpretations of the acceptable
western lay the groundwork for a process of self-surveillance,
the policing of your deviations from powers notion of the white
subject.
Vaz and Bruno 3 (Paulo Vaz siting Scholar at the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at
Chicago and Fernanda Bruno Institute of Psychology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, (2003) Types of Self-Surveillance:
from abnormality to individuals at risk pgs. 272-281)//kbuck

In the vast literature on new techniques and practices of surveillance, the panoptic tower looms large. It emerges as
a central point of comparison from which the singularities and social effects of techniques as diverse as databases,
virtual reality and Closed Circuit Television are evaluated (Bogard, 1996; Gandy, 1993; Lyon, 1994, 2001, 2003;
Norris and Armstrong, 1999). We believe, however, that, besides the description of the Panopticon, other theoretical
propositions of Foucaults are helpful in the study of new practices and technologies of surveillance. The snew
surveillance literatures focus on the Panopticon may overestimate technological features in the explanation of
historical changes and excessively emphasize the surveillance of them upon us. One central tenet of Foucaults

power is that it cannot be located; it is everywhere and therefore also inside us (Foucault,
Power relations produce the subject or, to be more precise, they instill in the individuals a
historically determined relation with themselves (Rose, 1999: 243). In fact, any practice of
surveillance entails self-surveillance as its historical counterpart and it is this simultaneity that
accounts for the acceptance and legitimization of power relations. This article proposes an
enlargement of the concept of self-surveillance. Self-surveillance is usually understood as the attention one
conception of
1997b: 108).

pays to ones behavior when facing the actuality or virtuality of an immediate or mediated observation by others
whose opinion he or she [they] deems as relevant usually, observers of the same or superior social position. But

we propose to open the concept to include individuals attention to their actions and
thoughts when constituting themselves as subjects of their conduct. The enlargement of
the concept of self-surveillance implies associating it with practices of the care of
the self. These practices require the stipulation of the part of the individuals that must be cared for and worked
upon, a movement which corresponds to the production of an ethical substance (Foucault, 1985). In other words,

self-surveillance is also based on the cultural postulation that certain

thoughts and actions are dangerous or unwholesome to the constitution of
the individual as a subject. From the point of view of the practices of the self, a
menace is innocuous unless accompanied by cultural recommendations about the
means through which individuals are to confront and subject the problematic part of
themselves. The delimitation of an ethical substance comprises both constituting an internal danger and
defining the practices for containing it. Historically, different ethical substances are also related to distinct
expectations of what one could be if one acts as one should. As we shall see, an individual could hope to be a
normal citizen in modernity or aim at a long and pleasurable life in our contemporary society. Enlarging the concept
of self-surveillance also entails assuming that there is no neat line distinguishing power from care. The crucial point

individuals usually problematize their thoughts and behaviors through beliefs held as true in
those who exercise power attain legitimacy by presenting
themselves as helping us in caring for this part of ourselves that threatens
our constitution as subjects. After all, they only intend to prevent us from
straying away from the correct path (Foucault, 1997d). Moreover, as the part of the self that
demands care is problematic, ones constitution as a subject entails an adversarial relation.
Individuals must struggle against themselves in order to act according to truth
is that

their historical context. Hence,

if beliefs depend upon the context in which they are

generated, struggling against the problematic portion of the self in order to act
according to truth can be viewed as behaving as a given culture expects one to
behave. This assumption of the historicity of the subject explains the choice of health-related contemporary
(Nietzsche, 1968: 480-482). Once again,

practices of surveillance as our object of investigation. Our major concern is inquiring into the kind of subjectivity
produced today by new practices of surveillance. We will focus on the widespread practices of self-surveillance
induced by the concept of risk factor, a concept constitutive of contemporary medicine. Our argumentation begins
by highlighting a theoretical difficulty found in the usual reading of Foucaults description of the Panopticon. The
difficulty lies in how to conceive the nature of self-surveillance induced by the panoptic tower. We contend that selfsurveillance does not depend only on an invisible but unverifiable power (Foucault, 1979: p. 201), but also on
normalizing judgment. In the second section of this article, centered on a discussion of normalizing power, we will
stress a sparsely discussed element of Foucaults conception of a productive power: that of the production in

These
dividing practices (Foucault, 1997e: 326) define the part of modern individuals that must
be cared for. Our historical framework is the passage from norm to risk as the basic concept with which
reality of an impersonated ethical negativity such as the delinquent, the madman or the sexual pervert.

western human beings problematize what they are and what they might be. The third section of this article,
lifestyle and self-control, provides evidence to sustain our diagnosis of this historical change. It also situates our
perspective on the relevance of risk in contemporary society in relation to the works of Beck, Douglas and
Foucauldian scholars discussing new practices of government. In the fourth section, Epidemiological risk, we
suggest some historical lines of development that account for the relevance and subjective effects of the concept of
risk factors in contemporary medicine. This section focuses on the creation of a temporal gap between the
diagnostic of an illness/disease and its subjective symptoms. This gap opens up a space for individuals action in the
shaping of their futures. The modern experience of health-care implied that individuals started to care for their
health only once they felt sick. As this feeling was the subjective aspect of an impairment of vital norms, individuals
became patients and readily accepted restrictions in their behaviors in order to recover. Today, on the contrary,
individuals accept restricting their behavior in order to care for their health even and principally when they
experience well-being. Contemporary medicine is producing the strange status of individuals at risk (Lupton, 1995;
Ogden, 1995, Novas and Rose, 2000; Petersen and Bunton, 2002), who can be viewed in fact as patients before
their time (Jacob, 1998: 102). We will thus argue that the alleged amplification of individual capacity to determine
the shape of their future constitutes, in fact, a limitation to our freedom. In the concluding section, we will briefly
address the problem of adopting a critical stance in which care and power are inseparable. Assuming the historicity
of care, we contend that a critical stance is made possible by acknowledging, first, that there are numerous ways in
which human beings inhabit time and, second, that the future as risk undermines the futures status as an alterity
to the present, as a reserve for imagination and hope. The Panopticon and self-surveillance In order to argue for the
inextricability of power relations and care, it is useful to begin by questioning a dystopic reading of Foucaults
depiction of the Panopticon. In this dystopic reading, it is possible to locate a separation between surveillance and
individual identity, a separation that is responsible both for the emphasis on surveillance of others and for the
radical separation between care and power. This dystopian reading suggests, for instance, a proximity between the
panoptic tower and George Orwells Big Brother (Lyon, 2001; Norris and Armstrong, 1999). Both would supposedly
be watching over us all the time. But what is the reason for this persecutory apprehension of the Panopticon? Let
us, once again, present the architectural principles of the Panopticon. Through an arrangement of light and shadow,
Bentham conceived a semi-circular prison in which each inmate was placed in an individual lit cell visible from a
tower located at the center of the semicircle. The high tower had windows from which a possible surveillant could
watch every cell. Thanks to an ingenious design of these windows, no prisoner was able to ascertain if he or she
was actually being observed or even if there was anyone in the tower (Foucault, 1979: 200). The prisoners in the
cells knew that they were always subjected to virtual observation without ever being able to confirm its actuality.
The majority of authors that deploys the panopticon as a historical background for new surveillance techniques
quotes or rephrases passages in which Foucault defines the major effect of the panoptic tower. One often cited
passage refers to the major effect of the Panopticon: () to induce in the inmates a state of conscious and
permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power (Foucault, 1979: 201). In another passage,
Foucault wrote: He [sic] who [whoever]

is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it,

assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play
spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he
simultaneously plays both roles; he [they] becomes the principle of his [their]
own subjection (Foucault, 1979: 202). The Panopticon can be conceived as technology, first, because as an
architectural arrangement, it substitutes human surveillance by an opaque but visible tower; and, secondly,

The decisive question lies in how

to conceive this self-surveillance. The nature of the compliance with power rules and values is what is
because it renders power automatic by promoting self-surveillance.

the strange proximity between the Panopticon and the BigBrother is rooted in the understanding of self-surveillance not as care of the self, but as
self-monitoring (Lyon, 2001: 114) or, as Norris and Armstrong ingeniously put it, as habituated anticipatory
at stake here. We believe that

conformity (Norris and Armstrong, 1999: 6). Putting ourselves in the prisoners situation may be the best way to
shed light on the theoretical problems posed by these readings. What would it mean to comply with power through
anticipatory conformity? We would certainly try to act according to what power expects from us, but we would
only do so because we would be aware of the possibility of being observed. We would act differently if given the
opportunity to escape powers eye. We would resemble docile bodies, but our docility would only be apparent, a
mask that we carried as long as we thought we were being observed. To put it differently, we would internalize
powers eye but we would not identify with its values. In reality, instead of an unfolding of ourselves in
consciousness and its object, our conduct, we would experience a threefold partition of our interiority. We would
distance ourselves from our behaviors and look at them with powers internalized eyes. However, there would be an

a part of ourselves constituted by our consciousness and desire

would be sheltered from powers eyes. Concretely, we would act considering the
possibility of observation and posterior punishment and objectify our conduct
accordingly, but we would not believe that by acting thus we would be doing what is best for us. Selfsurveillance would be, in fact, experienced as surveillance of an internalized, but
identified, other upon us. The root of the dystopic apprehension of the panopticon is, then, the
additional detachment:

understanding of self-surveillance as internalization without identification. If this is what Foucault meant in

We would wish
to live differently but we would be unable to do so because society would be a
prison at large. Worse, if contemporary practices of surveillance are to be seen as an extension and
Discipline and Punish, we would have reason to experience disciplinary society as totalitarian.

intensification of the panopticon principles, we would be running the risk of living in a totalitarian age today. This
interpretation of Foucault is not totally absent of grounds. There are moments in Discipline and punish in which
Foucault appears to assert that modern individuals were constantly under powers surveillance. For example, he
rhetorically asks his readers, Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all
resemble prisons? (Foucault, 1979: 228) Foucault also wrote that the Panopticon was a diagram polyvalent in its
applications, a pure function detached from any specific use and, thus, capable of spreading throughout numerous
institutions (Foucault, 1979: 205). However, reading these passages as implying that anticipatory conformity is
diffused through society is an easy but huge leap that collides frontally with two main arguments put forth by

power is not repressive, but productive; and that the

subject is historically produced. As Ian Hacking would have it, these critiques of
surveillance practices through the lens of the panopticon as anticipatory conformity () leave
out the inner monologue, what I say to myself. They leave out self-discipline, what I
do to myself. Thus, they omit the permanent heartland of the subjectivity . It is seldom
Foucault in his books and articles: that

force that keeps us on the straight and narrow; it is conscience (Hacking, 1986: 236). Perceiving that the thesis that
the individual is the bearer of power relations requires more than self-monitoring, some authors have pointed that

internalizing powers eye also entails identifying with its values (Bogard, 1996; Gandy, 1993;
Gilliom, 2001). Gandy, for example, indicates that there are () more subjective forms through
which the individual actively participates in transforming himself or herself into a
disciplinary subject (Gandy, 1993: 10). Nonetheless, when explaining how this participation is induced, he
recurs to Mary Douglas suggestion that human beings have an extraordinary readiness to fall
into socially produced slots (Gandy, 1993: 10). It is clear that this recourse to a tendency to occupy slots
does not go very far in explaining how techniques of surveillance may concur to the production of subjectivity. The
connection between internalization and identification hinges on the functioning of
the normalizing judgment. The reason for this dependency may be contemplated through a religious
analogy. As it is widely known, the principles of the Panopticon allow it to be framed in terms of the topic of
secularization. The panoptic tower can be viewed as a technological transposition of the belief in an omniscient and
omnipotent God: the inmates knew they could be observed any time and that power would be deployed in the
occurrence of a transgression. But if the individuals belief is limited to this kind of devious and secularized
omniscience and omnipotence, the relation between the technological parody of God and its believers is
conflicting. God must be also a God of love, assuring the faithful both that there is a reward for their good
behavior and that His path entails an intimate and subjective struggle. People have to believe that there is a
disorienting force within them that could turn them into sinners unless they made an effort to confront it.

Individuals holding this belief would be internally torn between God and the devil, between good and evil
throughout their lives (Nietzsche, 1968: 528). Normalizing power Although normalizing judgment can be understood
as an infra-penalty that partitioned an area that the law had left empty the vast domain of gestures, attitudes,
quotidian activities, tasks, discourses, uses of time, habits, etc. its real novelty resides in the fact that these

Besides
constructing the dangerous bridge between fact and value and thus associating
knowledge with power, the normalizing judgment also operates the passage from
action to being, extracting from individuals behavior the identity of each and
everyone. The norm is an immanent law an observed regularity and a proposed
regulation (Foucault, 1979: 179). In schools, for instance, the average time spent by students to conclude a task
micro-penalties are not addressed so much at what one does, but at who one is (Foucault, 1979: 178).

is first observed and later becomes a rule: those who are too slow fail. This failure does not concern only the
inobservance of a rule; it also concerns the value of individuals, conferring upon those who have failed an identity

the disciplinary apparatuses

hierarchized the good and bad subjects in relation to one another (Foucault, 1979:
181). This dividing practice must not be understood as only something that is
imposed from the exterior upon individuals . On the contrary, the classification of each
individual along the polarity ranging from normal to abnormal achieves its goal if
it is active in the interior of individuals, if it makes them judge and conceive
themselves according to this polarity. The passage from an immanent but external
classification to an internalized normalizing judgment requires bringing into
existence an impersonated ethical negativity the delinquent and the shameful
class of the military school described in Discipline and Punish or the sexual pervert presented in The History of
that can vary from the bad student to the abnormal. As Foucault put it, (...)

Sexuality I. The production in reality of an impersonated ethical negativity is a major tenet of Foucaults conception
of power because it directly contradicts its traditional, repressive conceptions. If power were repressive, the actions
it tried to suppress as it spread throughout society would asymptotically tend to disappear from sight. However, as
Foucault asserted while describing the modern concern with the sexuality of children: The childs vice was not so
much an enemy as a support; it may have been designated as the evil to be eliminated, but the extraordinary effort
that went into the task that was bound to fail leads one to suspect that what was demanded of it was to persevere,

Always relying on
this support, power advanced, multiplied its relay and its effects, while its target
expanded, subdivided, and branched out, penetrating furthe r into reality at the
same pace (Foucault, 1980: 42). This paradoxical relation between modern power and its object is
to proliferate to the limits of the visible and the invisible, rather than to disappear for good.

foregrounded in Discipline and punish when Foucault argues that the supposed failure of the prison the fact that it
increases recidivism and forges the delinquent was part of the general strategy of disciplinary power. The
production of delinquents by prisons legitimized an increasing intervention of the police in society: instead of a
failure, it supported the propagation of power. In addition, the existence of delinquents in reality was a means to
differentiate illegalities,

to promote the perception of some as wrong and typical of bad

people. Thus, some forms of contestations of capitalism, exactly those that had a potential of rapid and
dangerous spread (Foucault, 1979: 278), were deemed as delinquency and, consequently, popular movements of
contestation refrained from adopting them: () The exemplar effect once expected of the spectacle of the scaffold
was now sought not so much in the rigor of the punishments, as in the visible, branded existence of delinquency
itself: while differentiating itself from other popular illegalities, delinquency serves to keep them in check (Foucault,

These peripheral beings, these marginal and exterior existences produced by power
relations constituted the interiority of the normal individuals. As they tried to ascertain
their nature and value, they compared themselves to the incarnated abnormal. The norm
possessed a feedback mechanism: if a norm of behavior comes to exist in reality, it
is reinforced by the fact that no one desires to be outside it (Hacking, 1990: 5).
Individuals, then, fear potential abnormality not only in others but also within
themselves, and thus refrain from doing what would characterize them, in their own
eyes, as abnormal. The norm becomes the object of individuals desire instead of being
1979: 279).

only externally imposed. After all, where can the norm extract its value if not from that which it tries to negate? For
instance, where would the merits of a sexuality confined to the limits of genitality reside if the pervert, as a sick

Through the creation of an impersonated

ethical negativity and the subsequent internalization of potential abnormality by
every normal individual, normalizing power attains two major effects. On one hand, the subjection
to powers gaze and scrutiny is consented insofar as figures of power embody the
functions of caring and ensuring the normality of those they watch over. On the
other hand, self-surveillance is part of the necessary care of the self, with this care
assuming the form of an effort to constitute oneself as a normal citizen. To make
the soul suffer, rather than the body (Foucault, 1979: 179, 181) this is
the logic of a power that, instead of repressing an a-historical subject,
constitutes a subject that judges and condemns his or her own acts,
intentions, desires and pleasures according to truths that are historically
produced. The suffering of the soul is not that of a repressed consciousness, but
one of guilt, bad consciousness (Nietzsche, 1968: 505): its pain is experienced when moral failure
soul with repulsive passions, did not exist in reality?

resides in its deeds and sensations. Risk, Lifestyle and self-control While presenting the perverse implantation in
History of Sexuality I, Foucault offers a clue on how to diagnose a major historical change through transformations
in specific social practices. In a regime of power centered on legitimate alliances, the focus of social disquiet fell
upon the sexuality of the couple: the sex of husband and wife was beset by rules and recommendations
(Foucault, 1980: 37).

Undoing privilege is about process-over-product we must be

self-reflexive as a means of destabilizing our privileged modes
of viewing the world this internally link turns their form of
debate because privilege warps and distorts our interactions
with others
Yancy 8 (George, Prof of Philosophy at Duquesne University, Black bodies, white
gazes : the continuing significance of race, p. 246-247)
I conceptualize existential conversion in relation to whiteness as a constant
affirmation of new forms of responsiveness, new forms of challenging unearned privileges, and assiduous
attempts at founding antiwhiteness values. After all, one has to live in the everyday world in which whiteness-despite one's commitment to live one's body in freedom, that is, contrary to the expectations and ready-made
meanings that always already exist in the serious world of whiteness-continues to be seductive. To "live one's body
in freedom" therefore does not mean that one lives one's body outside various situational constraints and historical

those self- reflexive moments that attempt to

destabilize various habituated white normative practices. Hence existential
conversion, at least with respect to whiteness, must involve a self-reflexive way of beingin-the-world where the newcomer continually takes up the project of
disaffiliation from whitely ways of being, even as she undergoes processes of
forces, but that one continues to achieve

interpellation. My point here is that as she lives her body in freedom, as she challenges the white racialized and
racist world, its discourses and power relations, as she attempts to forge new habits and new forms of selfknowledge, she does not live her body outside of history. There is no nonracial Archimedean point from which she
can unsettle racism. Hence, while a process of constant destabilization that cracks away at whiteness is
indispensable as a value and a form of praxis, there is the realization that "a cartography of race would better
describe a white race traitor as 'off center,' that is, as destabilizing the center while still remaining in it.,,67 So, even
as the newcomer conceivably extends her hand across the color-line, reaching out to the young W. E. B. Du Bois,
thus throwing her whiteness off center and situates herself in that space of liminality, she will, at some point, leave
the classroom and be thrown back into the serious world of whiteness where the rich possibilities of ambush are

Bailey's distinction
between privilege-cognizant and privilege-evasive white scripts proves
helpful. Within the framework of this discourse, the newcomer must constantly reaffirm her
commitment to enacting a privilege-cognizant white script , that is, she must remain
covered over. Concerning the insidious forms of whitely modes of being,

cognizant of the ways in which she is privileged

(or privileges herself) because of her phenotypic

whiteness. According to Bailey, privilege- cognizant whites are race traitors "who refuse to animate the scripts
whites are expected to perform, and who are unfaithful to worldviews whites are expected to hold. ,.68 In this way,

If "race is constituted
through the repetition of acts, verbal and nonverbal, that continue to communicate
difference," then whites must engage in counterstylized iterative anti-whitely
acts. 7o It is not easy to discern the subtle and yet pervasive ways in which the
privilege-cognizant whites are committed to "doing whiteness differently. ,.69

ideology of whiteness profoundly distorts

mutually flourishing forms of

human

relationality. Contesting the normative status of whiteness "means living in constant

struggle, always working with self and those around you. . . . It is a process that . . . [builds on]
the notion that all benefit when whiteness inflicts less violence [on] others in the world.~,7I But it is important to
note, in Beauvoirian terms~ that whiteness is like an "inhuman [idol] to which one will not hesitate to sacrifice" all
that is of value~ even the white body itself. Therefore~ the serious world of whiteness is a very dangerous world.

Whiteness makes tyrants out of human beings. The white elides "the subjectivity of his [her]
choice" through the constitution of whiteness as an absolute value that "is being asserted through him [her]."

This

is done at the expense of

white accountability. In this way, one is able to deny "the subjectivity

and the freedom of others~ to such an extent that, sacrificing them to the [idol of whiteness]" means absolutely
nothing. On this score, it is accurate to describe whiteness as a form of fanaticism that is "as formidable as the

Whiteness as fanaticism occludes other voices from speaking~ and

other bodies from being, and other ways of revealing and performing the
depths of~ and the promises inherent in~ human reality as homo possibilities. So, don't be
fooled. Whiteness is not the best that history has to offer. This conclusion signals the historical bankruptcy of
whiteness as an ethical exemplar, the problematic self- certainty and narcissism of
whiteness, the historical contingency of whiteness~ and the possibility for new and nonhegemonic
fanaticism of passion.,,72

hermeneutic horizons.

In response to this, Collin and I affirm a process of intralocality

a questioning of the topological formation that gives way to
structures of oppression. The question the 1NC is begs is how
are we complicit with structures of power that produce
insidious forms of oppression like whiteness?
Moore 11 (Darnell L., writer and activist whose work is informed by anti-racist,
feminist, queer of color, and anti-colonial thought and advocacy. Darnell's essays,
social commentary, poetry, and interviews have appeared in various national and
international media venues, including the Feminist Wire, Ebony magazine, and The
Huffington Post, "On Location: The I in the Intersection,"
http://thefeministwire.com/2011/12/on-location-the-i-in-the-intersection/)
we are actively committed
the
development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems
of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As
The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that

to

struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as our particular ask

black women we see black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous
oppressions that all women of color face. -The Combahee River Collective in A Black Feminist Statement Many
radical movement builders are well-versed in the theory of intersectionality. Feminists, queer theorists and activists,
critical race scholars, progressive activists, and the like owe much to our Black feminist sisters, like The Combahee

River Collective, who introduced us to the reality of simultaneityas a framework for assessing the multitude of
interlocking oppressions that impact the lives of women of colorin A Black Feminist Statement (1978). Their voices
and politics presaged Kimberl Crenshaws very useful theoretical contribution of intersectionality to the
feminist toolkit of political interventions in 1989. Since its inception, many have referenced the termsometimes
without attribution to the black feminist intellectual genealogy from which it emergedas a form of en vogue

it is often referenced in progressive

circles as a counterfeit license (as in, I understand the ways that race, sexuality, class, and gender
coalesce. I get it. I really do.) to enter resistance work even if the person who declares to
have a deep understanding of the connectedness of systemic matrices of
oppression, themselves, have yet to discern and address their own complicity in
the maintenance of the very oppressions they seek to name and demolish. I
progressive parlance. In fact, it seems to be the case that

am certain that I am not the only person who has heard a person use language embedded with race, class, gender,

My concern, then, has everything

to do with the way that the fashioning of intersectionality as a political
framework can lead toward the good work of analyzing ideological and material
systems of oppressionas they function out thereand away from the great work of
critical analyses of the ways in which we, ourselves, can function as actants in the
narratives of counter-resistance that we rehearse. In other words, we might be
missing the opportunity to read our complicities, our privileges, our
accesses, our excesses, our excuses, our modes of oppressinglocated
in hereas they occupy each of us. Crenshaws theorization has provided us with a useful
or ability privilege follow-up with a reference to intersectionality.

lens to assess the problematics of the interrelated, interlocking apparatuses of power and privilege and their

Many have focused on the external

dimensions of oppression and their material results manifested in the lives of the
marginalized, but might our times be asking of us to deeply consider our own
stuff that might instigate such oppressions? What if we extended
Crenshaws theory of intersectionality by invoking what we might name intralocality?
Borrowing from sociologists, the term social location, which broadly speaks to ones context,
highlights ones standpoint(s)the social spaces where s/he is positioned (i.e. race,
class, gender, geographical, etc.). Intralocality, then, is concerned with the social
locations that foreground our knowing and experiencing of our world and
our relationships to the systems and people within our world. Intralocality
is a call to theorize the self in relation to power and privilege,
powerlessness and subjugation. It is work that requires the locating of the
I in the intersection. And while it could be argued that such work is highly
individualistic, I contend that it is at the very level of self-in-relation-tocommunity where communal transformation is made possible. Might it be
time to travel into the deep of our contexts? Might it be time for us theorists/activiststo
do the work of intersectionality (macro/system-analysis) in concert with the intralocal (micro/self-focused analysis)? Intersectionality as an analysis, rightly, asks of us to examine
systemic oppressions, but in these times of radical and spontaneous insurgencies
times when we should reflect on our need to unoccupy those sites of privilege
(where they exist) in our own lives even as we occupy some other sites of
dominationwork must be done at the level of the self-in-community. We
cannotas a progressive communityrally around notions of progression and, yet, be complicit
in the very homo/transphobias, racisms, sexisms, ableisms, etc. that violently terrorize
the lives of so many others. If a more loving and just community is to be
resulting epiphenomena of powerlessness and subjugation.

imagined and advanced, it seems to me that we would need to start at a

different location than we mightve expected: self.

Whiteness maintains its coherence by naturalizing internalized

domination in order to combat oppression we must begin
with self-reflexitity
Kray 15 (Kel - works out of a LGBTQIA+ youth center in Philly, 1-12-15, Your
internalized dominance is showing: a call-in to white feminists who believe that
#alllivesmatter, http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/01/your-internalizeddominance-is-showing/)//kbuck
For the girls at camp, their race was a source of pride and their experiences with racism a source of fight built into
their every breath. As my mom had taught me about being a girl, their moms had taught them about being black
girls. I began to tremble a bit as it came to my turn. I cant say Im proud to be black because Im not black. But Im
white? What does that mean? Im not proud of thatI dont think? Hi, Im Kelly, Im proud Im a girl, and Im proud I

Part of my white privilege was not seeing my

whiteness. One of the most pervasive tools of oppression is the insistence that
power and privilege do not exist. From birth, those of us with privileged identities are
socialized to internalize dominance. We come to believe that our privilege, or even
superiority, is natural, and that all opportunities are granted based on individual merit. I never had a hard time
finding a job. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps! Internalized dominance is the fuel with which
the oppression monster feeds itself. If men dont acknowledge that they benefit from sexism, gender
have a guinea pig. Well, that was that.

inequity remains status quo. And if white people dont acknowledge that they benefit from racism, they are

Many of us carry internalized dominance in some form or

another as white folks, as cismen, as straight folks, as able-bodied folks, as United States citizens. And
because of the often-subconscious nature of internalized dominance, our social
justice learning curve typically entails unlearning. For example: For a gay man to
stand in solidarity with a lesbian woman with whom he shares a marginalized
sexuality, but carries a dominant gender he must unlearn his internalized sexism.
Otherwise, his male privilege will inevitably show up despite his efforts to combat
homophobia alongside her. If it so happens he is white (carrying a dominant race), and she is black (a
cosigning onto white supremacy.

marginalized race), he must also unlearn his internalized white supremacy. Otherwise, his internalized sexism and
racism begin to layer in how he moves through the world. Make sense? Mainstream feminist and anti-racist
organizing emerged in the 20th century as responses to the systematic denial of male and white supremacy: Hey,

oppression isnt coincidental its a product of

your power and privilege. But it gets tangled. As systems of oppression are. To stand firmly in antiracism, white feminists must unlearn internalized white supremacy. The unlearning of white supremacy
isnt exactly encouraged by the existing powers that be. Unfortunately, its not an integral rite
wait a sec. Thanks for the vote and all, but my

of feminist passage. Dismantling white supremacy isnt a core element of high school social studies, nor a given in

Again the oppression monster feeds itself. This is all natural.

Because of this, internalized white supremacy among feminism carries a long and painful
history that continues to create fierce divisions today. In 1982, a group of black lesbian
womens studies curricula.

feminists by the name of the Combahee River Collectiveissued a statement that would become a core canon of
black feminist thought and a required text within intersectional feminism. Their statement expressed that the
major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our
lives. In a lesser-cited excerpt, however, the Collective stated, We realize that the only people who care enough
about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. We repeatedly hear the voices of feminists of color calling
out a persistent whitewashed feminism that erases their experiences as people of color. This is not new. This has

Because of internalized
dominance, being marginalized in one way doesnt necessarily translate to honoring
the marginalized experience of those who are different from you. More simply: Identifying
been going on for over a century. So where are the white anti-racist feminists?

with feminism doesnt mean that I dont perpetuate white supremacy and the same goes for you. Consider this:
As a feminist, how many times have you heard the following? Maybe if women didnt dress like that, they wouldnt
get sexually assaulted. Thats reverse sexism. Youre just a man hater. Its not all about gender, you know. Women
are sexist toward each other, too. Why dont you ever talk about mens issues? Men are victims to violence, too. I
cant be sexist. Im a [marginalized identity]. Youre just dividing people. Why are you so angry? #NotAllMen I
imagine youve heard at least one of those things before, if not all. How did you respond? How did you feel? As an
anti-racist feminist, how many times have you heard the following? Maybe if people of color didnt commit crimes,
they wouldnt get arrested. Thats reverse racism. It sounds like you just hate white people. Its not all about race,
you know. People of color are racist toward each other, too. Why dont you ever talk about the struggles white
people face? White people are arrested, too. I cant be racist. Im a woman. Youre just dividing feminists. Why are
you so angry? #AllLivesMatter Similarly, I imagine youve heard at least one of those things before, if not all. How

One marginalized identity does not

immunize us from internalizing the dominance of another. Without unlearning internalized
did you respond? How did you feel? See what happened there?

dominance, white feminists can silence the experiences of people of color just as men can silence the experiences
of women. Shifting Toward a Self-Aware Accountability Many anti-racist feminists rightfully mistrust an anti-racism
that is outward looking the type that believes that as a white feminist, I should learn about the experiences of
people of color in order to help them. I should promote diversity and inclusion. Instead, as a white feminist,

I
need to first study my white privilege, unlearn my internalized white supremacy,
and emotionally connect to the ways in which I perpetuate oppression . In sum: I had
those eight free years of color-ignorance, but its time I learned about my whiteness. When I commit to selfawareness, its not very hard to identify the ways in which my whiteness shows up in the world. For example, I can
emotionally connect to many times when men have spoken over me. Examining my whiteness, I can also map that
emotional experience onto times when I have spoken over people of color. I can emotionally connect to reading
disparaging statistics about communities I belong to and wishing our strengths were publicized instead. Examining
my whiteness, I can also map that emotional experience onto a time when I read disparaging statistics about a
community of color and attributed those statistics to the community itself. I can emotionally connect to being called
angry and polarizing for speaking up around gender and cissexism. Examining my whiteness, I can also map that
emotional experience onto a time where I felt a person of color was being oppositional around race and racism. I
dont feel proud of my whiteness, no. But I have to acknowledge my oppression and my capacity to oppress if I want
to inhabit a feminism that truly dismantles not just my oppression, but also the whole thorny system of oppression.
What this means is that my accountability to anti-racism as a white person is as integral to my feminism as gender
itself is. Sometimes more so given the work of unlearning I must continue to do. Moving Forward Mindfully If you
have come here to help me, you are wasting our time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up

Only when we unlearn

our internalized power and privilege do we emotionally connect to the shapeshifting web of oppression and find our unique role in dismantling it. For white feminists,
with mine, then let us work together. Aboriginal activist group, Queensland, 1970s

we are well overdue to place a collective emphasis on noticing andlearning about our whiteness as it relates to our
desire to be anti-racist. This isnt just a call to learn about the unique struggles encountered by women of color in a
white supremacist society, but to really study your whiteness. This is the only way to genuinely address white
privilege in a way that lends itself to a humble and focused anti-racism. Study your words, your thoughts, your
feels. Find what is yours and what you have been taught. Examine the things that you feel entitled to, or situations
in which you do not experience barriers. And when you find your privilege is checked, or witness another
responding to their privilege being checked, notice the response. Specifically, have an honest conversation with
your heart and witness whether you experience the silencing tools of oppression not only the ones that erase the
lives of women, but also the lives of people of color.

The ballot is a detachment from modernity a shift in

pedagogical interpretations of violence via performative
politics that questions daily complicity in power structures like
debate.
Fassett and Warren 4 (Deanna L. - prof. @ San Jose State, John T. - prof @ Bowling Green ,
Subverting Whiteness: Pedagogy at the Crossroads of Performance, Culture, and Politics
http://works.bepress.com/deanna_fassett/11/)//kbuck
Students in our classes, which focus on communication and cultural/sexual difference, performance studies, and
communication and the classroom, often ask about the end of political critiquethat is, to what future do we do this

critical work? For instance, when we talk to our students about current events in class (i.e., the lynching-style
murder of James Byrd, Jr., the beating-execution of Matthew Shepard, or the shooting death of Amadou Diallo on the

we try to understand not only the effects of these instances

of cultural violence (how it shapes and produces a public), but to also ask questions about the contexts
that breed these tragedies. Thus, our effort is to locate the specific events within larger, more
systemic social systems. For instance, can we understand the Matthew Shepard incident as a result of a
streets of New York by police),

social system of heterosexism, homophobia, and straight supremacy? Can we see the death of Diallo not as an
isolated instance of racial violence, but as part of a larger social system that has produced deaths in places like

we look outward from these spectacular instances

of violence and examine the minute and mundane processes that make these acts
possible. In our courses, we examine how instances of racism, homophobia, and other forms
of oppression are generated through everyday communicative/ performative acts
Cincinnati and Los Angeles? To do this work,

that is, both aesthetic and reiterative. Thus, we seek to understand difference (specifically race) as a performative
construct that is always already aesthetic (that is, constructed for an audience or public) and reiterative (that is,
repeated and ongoing). By focusing on race as one form of oppression, we examine whiteness as a systematic
production of poweras a normative social process based upon a history of domination, recreating itself through

we address
whiteness, in particular, as a system of power and privilege, such an exploration helps mark the
naturalized everyday actsmuch like heteronormativity or misogyny. Though in this writing

unmarked (Phelan)making visible the workings of a number of oppressive social relationships. To render whiteness
visible requires careful analysis and constant critique of our takenfor-granted norms. But, as our students question,

asking how
systems of power are reiterated and reaffirmed through our collective
communicative, performative, and aesthetic interactions. The foundation of critical race
to what end do we do what we do? We both base our courses, at least in part, in critical race theory,

theory and cultural studies means that we infuse all course content with issues of power, refusing to allow matters
of race and difference to be marginalized. These courses look at education, theatre, and everyday communication,
as well as other sites such as popular culture or identity. The seemingly simple question we are often asked stands
now as the premise of this essayif these theories and critiques are useful, then where does that leave us in terms
of sketching out visions of hope and change? As one student said, if you just tear down social norms, then where do
we all stand? This essay is our standit is a documenting of how we are making a particular, ongoing research
project matter in our lives (and we hope, as a result, in the lives of others). It is a documenting of performancebased researcha mode of research that asks students and other participants to enter into the space of
performance and seek possibility as they are engaging in critical theory. What we document here is a problemposing performance workshop, based in the critical work of Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal, that seeks to intervene in
the reiterative process of whiteness. It is a response to bell hooks and others who have asked for a critical
examination of whiteness not only through the bodies and voices of people of color, but through white experiences
as well. It is, in the end, a search for new ways of engaging in a politics of hope.
Blind(ing) Privilege: Whiteness as Performative In the last ten years, a variety of cross-disciplinary scholars have

by examining
whiteness as a cultural, political locationas an identity created and maintained
through our everyday communication.1 In some of these studies, whiteness is revealed as a
strategic rhetoric, a means by which people, working in concert and often
unreflectively, levy power and cultural influence. For example, communication and film scholars
illuminated (and, in that effort, sought to deconstruct) racial privilege and disadvantage

examine rhetorical constructions of whiteness (see Crenshaw; Dyer; Nakayama and Krizek; Shome). While this
perspective may help us understand the role of language (and how social systems and individuals work in concert
to create racial oppression) recent efforts by scholars to maintain a focus on the white subject have underscored

challenging white subjectivity in order to promote a more

socially just society. Research here has taken many forms. Critical scholars in theatre
have led the way, creating critical performances of whiteness (see Jackson; OBrien; Warren and
Kilgard) that function to mirror, particularly to white audiences, the mechanisms and machinations
of their oppressive actions, however unreflective. Ethnographic portraits of whiteness have given
depth and immediacy to our understandings of people in lived context (Hartigan; hooks;
the importance of deconstructing and
equitable and

Warren, Performing). Autoethnographers, because they plumb their lived experience for particular details and
contradictions about how they create and are created by culture, have constituted a rich repository for the study of
how each of us works to understand his or her own ethnic identity (Clark and ODonnell; Pelias; Warren, Absence).
Studies in education have also created a critical context for understanding how whiteness permeates our

classrooms (see Giroux; Hytten and Adkins; McIntyre); such work functions to remind us of the power of pedagogy
to help us see and re-see the actions we take, challenge, or leave unquestioned. In an earlier essay, one of us
organized, from across the variety of disciplinary perspectives, four key scholarly approaches to the study of
whiteness to help create a nuanced understanding of this seemingly inescapable and overwhelming political and
cultural thicket (Warren, Whiteness). First, scholars have analyzed whiteness in order to promote antiracism. For
example, Ruth Frankenberg, in her classic book White Women, Race Matters, deconstructs white womens talk in
order to uncover (and to help them discover) how racism and whiteness saturate their talk. Second, many
researchers have investigated how whiteness is embedded in literature, film, and scholarship. Such works explore
how taken-for-granted sites, including popular cultural texts or scholarly research, are never politically neutral. For
instance, in Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison uncovers how writers of American literature almost always assume a
white reader to the exclusion of other ways of seeing or interpreting a text or series of events. Third, scholars who
advocate an understanding of whiteness as a rhetorical construct have shifted researchers attention from
whiteness as a stable identity (i.e., this person is or is not white) to whiteness as a discursive way of levying power
(i.e., whiteness as a discursive space, existing in our communicative interactions). For instance, communication
scholar Christina W. Stage explores how a small-town celebration discursively invokes and rewards whiteness
through a series of powerful communication strategiesthat is, through the re-historicizing of the community,
members recreate the past and locate that past within the discursive space of white power (e.g., settlement
narratives that locate the beginnings of the town within a white subject). The fourth and final research trend
involves reading whiteness as a performative construct. Judith Butlers analysis of Nella Larsens Passing provides a
thought-provoking example of how whiteness as an identity is communicatively reproduced through our everyday
actions. In her analysis, white identity is considered a discursive construct that is made and remade through our
reiterative patterned communication choices. We draw strength from each of these modes of analysis as they
function to call out whiteness as a political and social force. However, what is often absent from the extant
literature are strategies for actively and publicly deconstructing and undermining whiteness as the cultural center.
That is, these microanalyses provide hope and incisive critique, but lack sufficient theorizing to change our
behavior. In this way, all the approaches here are ways of seeing and critiquing, but few are actively documenting
progressive action with others. Alice McIntyre, an education scholar, perhaps comes closest with her actionresearch-oriented teacher groups in which she debates and teaches about whiteness as she draws her dissertation
research data from them; however, the members of the research team have long disbanded by the time the book is

an action-oriented research project that holds

accountable ourselves and the members of the community we want to inform. How do
you make meaningful the critiques above in a way that experientially demands that
participants put their bodies on the line? Is there a research process that could make
the invisible and naturalized processes of whiteness more visible, more visceral,
more present? We begin this essay with this political and ethical claim: as
researchers concerned with whiteness as a means of levying power and privilege
over others, we must articulate a process for combating whiteness as a political
force in our schools, in our homes, and in our communities. In this writing, we offer our own attempt to call
written. Thus, what we see missing is

out and combat whiteness: a series of workshops for white students (although nonwhite students were not
excluded) that asked them to move past apologia and guilt for their ethnic identity, toward the development of

For us, such a process must be both

an exercise of the mind and a rethinking through the bodyit must hold both our
everyday talk and our everyday actions accountable for the ways we each
reproduce whiteness as a socially powerful, culturally centered location. We grounded
actions that have the potential to challenge cultural oppression.

the frame and method for our workshops in Freires Pedagogy of the Oppressed, employing his methodology for

This participatory, ethnographic method is ideally suited for

engaging and incorporating the body into theories of liberation, thus helping us to
maintain our focus on the process, the performances, by which individuals come to
enact and constitute oppressive social systems. In addition to articulating our use of
this method for enfleshing, engaging, and challenging whiteness, our essay explores
how such a mode of engagement allows for participants to see whiteness as a
performative process. Performative Pedagogy: A Pedagogy of Subversion Recent work in
performative pedagogy has created a rich context for (re)considering whiteness
literature. Performative pedagogy is an approach to education that moves meaning
to the body, asking students to engage in meaning-making through their own living
critical literacy groups.

and experiencing bodies: A critical, performative pedagogy asks students and

teachers to be embodied researchersto take learning to the body in order to come
to know in a more full and powerful way. It is to liberate the body from the shackles of a dualism that privileges the
mind over the visceral. It is to ask students to be more fully present, to be more fully engaged, to take more

Performative
pedagogy demands that students think about identity as performative to place the
question of identity in the space of performance . Performative pedagogy, while still an
responsibility and agency in their own learning. (Warren, Performative Pedagogy 95)

undertheorized site of investigation (and pedagogical practice), has groundings in various fields ranging from dance
and theatre to English and communication studies. Our commitm ent

to performative pedagogy
emerges from traditions of oral interpretationa field of study where researchers
and teachers feel one can develop a thoughtful and complex understanding of a
literary or popular text, such as a poem, by performing that text, by reading that
text through the body. Wallace A. Bacons work on the potential of performance is indeed persuasive: The
performing act comes as close, perhaps, as we shall ever get to the transcendence of self into other. It is a form of
knowingnot just a skill for knowing, but a knowing. [. . .] If the engagement is real, not simply pretended, the self
grows (73). While Bacon here discusses the transcendence of self into the other, his work is a possible way of
thinking through whitenesswhere whiteness is so invisible to the perceiving white subject that his own racial
identity is effectively othered. Thus, the engagement with whiteness is an engagement with the other,

reconceptualization of the self as other.

Certainly the work of Boal is key in this process of

engagement. His work on forum theatre alone can be imagined as a productive and engaging site of understanding
how power is situated in our lives, in our bodies. His work has been framed by several scholars as performative
most clearly by Elyse Lamm 415Subverting Whiteness Pineau, who, aligning her work with Boals, argues that
performative pedagogy is a trickster (that is, subversive) pedagogy. Pineau offers four ways of framing and defining

through this pedagogical method one might assist in

challenging and subverting systems of power such as whiteness. She frames this
performative pedagogy, noting that

redefinition as educational poetics, play, process, and power (15). In Educational Poetics, the banking mode of
education characterized by traditional information dispensing into waiting students is reframed into an educational
enterprise [that is] a mutable and ongoing ensemble of narratives and performances (10). Educational Play
resituates pedagogy in the body, asking students and teachers to engage in corporeal playa mode of
experimentation, innovation, critique, and subversion (15). Educational Process, on the other hand,
acknowledges that identities are always multiple, overlapping, ensembles of real and possible selves who enact
themselves in direct relation to the context and communities in which they perform. (15) Here, Pineau locates
identity as a performative process, noting how selves are accomplishments of reiterative performative practices.
Educational Power, the last of Pineaus definitional categories, solidly situates performances as always politically
and historically situated, such that they may be viewed as ongoing ideological enactments (18).

Performative pedagogy, as a method and theory of the body, can ask

questions in a way that points to the structure and machinery of
whiteness. It can put flesh to the concept of whiteness. It can point to
whitenesss perceived absence. It can name the norm. Performative pedagogy, in this
way, can serve as a pedagogy of the oppressorit can ask those in positions of
power (via sex, race, class, or sexuality) to question their own embodied
experiences by demanding that they encounter the other through the mode of performance. For if
whiteness functions in dominant discourse as the unmarked center of cultural
power, then a performative pedagogy can and must ask how we can create a
ground for subversion. Performative pedagogy, as a method of enfleshment that brings theory
to the body, can question the normal, stable, inevitable actualization of race, nurturing subversive possibility.
Thus, in order to foreground and engage such constitutive performances, we designed a series of workshops that
serve to create space for students to take up and take apart whiteness in their bodies, to make discernable what is
already physical by adding heightened critical reflection to that embodiment. These workshops are a means for

to consider the role they play in the making and unmaking

of cultural oppression, and to begin subverting the invisibility of whiteness. But
participants to consider whiteness,

subversion is not as simple as it seems. One might easily misread subverting, imagining we endorse a view of
whiteness research that suggests one can simply undo racism by undermining whiteness to such an extent that it
ceases to be the cultural center (see Ignatiev and Garvey; McLaren). While such a vision of the world is well

intentioned, it is an enabling fiction at best and a dangerous myth at worst; in effect, such a rhetorical move allows
white identified/appearing people an easy out, an easy dismissal of the power of whiteness in our lives and in our
actions. Rather than embrace this easy sense of subversion, we take subverting as an active verb, in which we
grapple with whiteness in an attempt to unmask it. This is to say, these workshops are a way for participants to see
and think about whiteness in ways they have not done before. By pointing out whitenesss power and discursive
machinery, we hope to subvert its naturalness, or rather, participate in the process of racial subversion. While we
do not think a single two-hour workshop will transform these participants into antiracists, we hope to create spaces
for us all to re-envision how race matters (as well as how race comes to matter) in our lives. Workshopping
Whiteness A young, white, male student in an introductory level communication course has been struggling with
the question of whether racism existstrying to advocate that racism was a thing of the past, an Affirmative Action
trick to get more money and jobs for people of color who havent earned them. This argument is not new, not
surprising in any way. However, Matt is a good studentyoung, thoughtful, and highly skeptical. We include him
in the workshop, asking him to set aside his struggles, his disbelief and engage the ideas as if the theories we had
been reading were true. To be open, even if just for today. He agrees, but has suspicion in his eyes. In Pedagogy of

Freire outlines a method for challenging oppressive systems of power. In this method, he
works from the voices and stories of those oppressed to build an effective pedagogy
with his participants. It was in Freires participatory, ethnographic method that we found an engaging way of
incorporating the body into theories of liberation, enfleshing whiteness. Freire argues that any effort
to effect social change must be an engaged action with (not to or for) the
people. Freires method emerged from his work with illiterate farm laborers in Brazil. He wanted to investigate
the Oppressed, Paulo

and identify their needs, their interests; then, he worked with them to create an effective pedagogy from those
findings, to construct an action plan that aimed to help them undermine the power structures that were keeping
them from fulfilling their goals. In our workshops, we sought to build upon Freires method, adapting and making it
meaningful it to the context of US higher education. Workshops are a particularly appropriate means for engaging
Freires method, as they are not bound by the conventional requirements of the classroom (e.g., syllabi, state
standards for student learning outcomes, etc.). We scheduled each workshop to last approximately two hours,
which allowed for plenty of discussion and activity. Workshop participants differed depending on the context; that is,
sometimes we were invited into undergraduate or graduate courses in communication, theatre, or education
classrooms. When the workshop was part of a class, we often asked students to do reading prior to our meeting.
However, we presented other workshops at theatre and education conferences, including an annual meeting of
Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed. In each of these sessions, participants entered with varying knowledges of
the content we were offering, creating a need for us to begin by introducing the members to the literature on
whiteness and racism. The workshop structure itself, drawn from Freires method, consisted of four parts. First, we
asked participants to investigate whiteness as a cultural phenomenon. Here, participants would work from
introductory texts such as their previous reading and/or our opening presentations. Depending on the audience, one
of us might open with a performance designed to draw out a discussion of whiteness. From these texts, workshop
members formed small groups, creating generative themes, or a list of basic assumptions behind whiteness. For
example, one group might note the seeming invisibility of whiteness, of the ways the power and privilege stemming
from white ethnic identity appear unearned, and so on. Second, participants chose one theme and engaged in a
codification of the theme, in effect breaking it down into its fundamental parts.2 At this stage, a group that has
chosen to work with the notion of whiteness as invisible or natural might begin to think about the mechanisms that
make it invisible (i.e., historical, social, economic conditions that regulate the production of racial power). Third, we
all engaged in a decoding dialogue, raising and entertaining ideas and critical insights. For instance, other groups
might challenge the notion of whiteness as invisible, or they might articulate a sense of whiteness as a stable
natural identity. These sessions were important in order to collectively reveal misunderstandings about ethnic
identity (e.g., the misconception that racism is an individual trait rather than the result of a social system that
privileges some at the expense of others), as well as to come to new ways of seeing how whiteness works. Finally,
each group created and presented recodifications or reconstructions of their theme for the larger group. That
group would then create an image (often a static image of their bodies carefully positioned) to illustrate that theme
to the rest of the participants. For example, students might represent ideological struggle with a frozen embodied
illustration of two people arm wrestling, demonstrating two figures locked in tension. Then the groups presented
performances in which participants illustrated how they worked to interrupt the ways whiteness harms themselves
and others. In these performances, each group shared, via their own lived bodies, the basic or fundamental element
of each theme as a problem or question for the general group. We used the remaining time after each performance
to describe and process each groups work. Ethnographic Investigations: Theme Generation Matt interacts with his
group, but does so leaning back in his desk chair, arms crossed, with an expression that says, I dont buy this. We
want to pull Matt out of the room, tell him to open his eyes, to see the world he lives in with critical eyes. He can
see if he just lets go of the doubt, the suspicion bred from growing up in this culture of color-blindness that still
spreads the myth of meritocracy. Freire argues, the starting point for organizing the program content of education
or political action must be the present, existential, concrete situation, reflecting the aspirations of the people (76).
For him, we must begin with the peoplethat any effort to undermine power structures through a pedagogy of the
oppressed must begin with the life situations of the people that are implicated in the power struggle. He argues for

a dialogical method, one that works from the thematic universe of people in an effort to allow education to be a
practice of freedom. With this beginning in Freire, we decided to begin our workshops from the life situations of
peoplepeoples stories about or experiences with racism and violence. Thus, a workshop in whiteness had to
begin with collected narratives of struggle, narratives of people in real-life contexts and their engagements with
whiteness. To begin with stories of whiteness meant that our effort would ask the participants in the workshops to
take seriously the life experiences of others in an effort to search out possibility within their life circumstances. In
this way, we begin our workshops by asking the participants to conduct a micro-ethnographic investigation of their
encounters with whiteness. By ethnographic investigation, we mean that we ask the participants to explore
whiteness in order to find common themes and patterns. Common themes or struggles participants often articulate
are: their inability to discern their own deployment of whiteness, the need to explore research trendsfor instance,
whiteness as terror (that is, bell hookss metaphor of whiteness that captures the effect of a legacy of racism on the
black imagination), or how whiteness is critiqued through performance texts like Anna Deavere Smiths Twilight: Los
Angeles, 1992. We do this in several ways, each an attempt to provide texts or sites from which participants can
begin to draw together material in order to generate meaningful themes. We often begin the workshops with brief,
aesthetic (i.e., stylized or heightened) performances. There are two central texts that we have found particularly
useful as a way to set the tone, for drawing the participants into the conversation surrounding white privilege. Many
times we begin by performing our own autoethnographic work, foregrounding our own struggles with coming to see
whiteness (e.g., Warren, Absence; Warren and Fassett). In this sort of performance, we try to unfold and explore
an everyday event in order to see how whiteness plays out and protects our own social position or privilege. A
second work we frequently draw from is a small piece from Leslie Marmon Silkos Ceremony, in which Silkos
speaker narrates how white people came to be. The piece is rather violent, describing whiteness as dominating and
disconnected from the earth, and particularly useful for the workshop because it demands that we consider
whiteness from the view of the Other (i.e., decentering a white perspective). Though we have pointed to two sorts
of texts here, there are no doubt countless other texts that would serve to illuminate whiteness; for instance, works
by Gloria Anzalda, Toni Cade Bambara, bell hooks, Maxine Hong Kingston, Richard Rodriguez, Amy Tan, and Alice

Beginning the workshops with performance is important

because it foregrounds a central idea. This move highlights performance as a way of knowing. That
is, participants come to know part of the literature by the performance itself,
serving as an entrance into the workshop and the performative themes. Furthermore,
such a move establishes performance as an academic method of inquiry. This is to
say, performance shifts learning to a meaning-making process in which the
participants in the workshop must assemble and construct meaning through the life
experiences of others.
Walker would be ripe for such exploration.