1NC

T
Interpretation and violation - the affirmative should defend the hypothetical
implementation of a topical plan – they don’t.

“Resolved” before a colon reflects a legislative forum

Army Officer School 2005 (“# 12, Punctuation – The Colon and Semicolon”, 5-12,
http://usawocc.army.mil/IMI/wg12.htm)

The colon introduces the following: a. A list, but only after "as follows," "the following," or a noun for which the list is an appositive: Each scout will carry
the following: (colon) meals for three days, a survival knife, and his sleeping bag. The company had four new officers: (colon) Bill Smith, Frank Tucker, Peter Fillmore,
and Oliver Lewis. b. A long quotation (one or more paragraphs): In The Killer Angels Michael Shaara wrote: (colon) You may find it a different story from the one you
learned in school. There have been many versions of that battle [Gettysburg] and that war [the Civil War]. (The quote continues for two more paragraphs.) c. A
formal quotation or question: The President declared: (colon) "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." The question is: (colon) what can we do about it? d. A
second independent clause which explains the first: Potter's motive is clear: (colon) he wants the assignment. e. After the introduction of a business letter: Dear
Sirs: (colon) Dear Madam: (colon) f. The details following an announcement For sale: (colon) large lakeside cabin with dock g. A formal resolution,
after the word "resolved:" Resolved: (colon) That this council petition the mayor.

USFG is the federal government of the USA, based in DC

Dictionary of Government and Politics ’98 (Ed. P.H. Collin, p. 292)
United States of America (USA) [ju:’naitid ‘steits av e’merike] noun independent country, a federation of states (originally
thirteen, now fifty in North America; the United States Code = book containing all the permanent laws of the USA, arranged in sections
according to subject and revised from time to time COMMENT: the federal government (based in Washington D.C.) is
formed of a legislature (the Congress) with two chambers (the Senate and House of Representatives), an executive (the President)
and a judiciary (the Supreme Court). Each of the fifty states making up the USA has its own legislature and executive (the Governor) as
well as its own legal system and constitution

The text of the resolution calls for debate on hypothetical government action
Ericson 3 (Jon M., Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts – California Polytechnic U., et al., The
Debater’s Guide, Third Edition, p. 4)

The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each

topic contains certain key elements, although they have slightly
different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented propositions.
1. An agent doing the acting ---“The United States” in
“The United States should adopt a policy of free trade.” Like the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the agent is the
subject of the sentence. 2. The verb should—the first part of a verb phrase that urges action. 3. An action verb to follow should in
the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a program or policy into action though

governmental means. 4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits
to the topic, which would, for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce.
Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred. The
entire debate is about whether something ought to
occur. What you agree to do, then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an audience to
perform the future action that you propose.
Reducing DCS and/or FMS requires governmental action
Sorenson, 9 - Professor of International Security Studies at the United States Air Force War College
(David, The Process and Politics of Defense Acquisition: A Reference Handbook, p. 133-134

The Arms Export Control Act and the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 created the
FMS program, which involves government-to-
government weapons and systems sales. The Defense Department operates the program on a no-loss, no-profit basis (this
means that sales are not conducted at below U.S. prices, and the Defense Department does not make a profit on them but instead charges a
3.8 percent fee). The program starts with an official request from the purchasing country, which the Defense Department coordinates through
the Department of State's Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. Once approved, the U.S. government actually contracts for the goods or services
that the recipient country requested. Usually, to facilitate standardization with U.S. equipment (so that recipient countries can have
interoperability with U.S. equipment in exercises or in allied combat), the FMS specifies that the particular foreign sales items are or will be in
service with the U.S. military. Direct
commercial sales, unlike FMS, are coordinated through the Office of Trade
Controls at the State Department's Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. In contrast to FMS, once the State Department
has approved, DCS allows for direct negotiations between the international customer and the manufacturer,
which allows both to avoid the surcharges involved with FMS and allows for specialized equipment that the international customer requires
without the need for U.S.- equivalent equipment. It is difficult to compare the value of arms transferred under each program because
contractors participating in DCS are not required to reveal the value of those items. Arms transfers under FMS
are coordinated
between the contractor and the buyer by the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA). The DSCA
operates on a no-profit, no-loss basis for the government, which charges a fee ($15,000 or 3.8 percent of item and service cost, whichever is
greater) to cover administration costs. There is some advantage to selling items through FMS rather than DCS, as FMS transfers items already in
use with the U.S. military, thus offering the potential for lower per-unit costs for the U.S. operating service, as well as standardization of
weapons between the United States and an allied country. Unlike
FMS, DCS is managed by the State Department. Direct
commercial sales do not require the coordination of the Defense Department, as contract negotiations occur
directly between the contractor and the recipient country, requiring nothing more than an export license, which is issued by the Office of
Defense Trade Controls at the State Department's Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. Thus, the costs of DCS are often lower than for FMS.

Vote neg—
1. Prep and clash—post facto topic change alters balance of prep, which structurally
favors the aff because they speak last and use perms—key to engage a prepared
adversary and a target of mutual contestation.
2. Limits—specific topics are key to reasonable expectations for 2Ns—open subjects
create incentives for avoidance and monopolization of moral high ground—that
denies a role for the neg and turns accessibility.
3. Continual Change -- unlimited topics makes assessing the validity of the 1ac’s truth
claims impossible AND cause concessionary ground which creates incentives for
avoidance
Racialization is an exercise of power that exists contingently. Changing it depends on
interest group competition
Naomi Zack 16. professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon. She is author and editor of a dozen
books, including White Privilege and Black Rights: The Injustice of U.S. Police Racial Profiling and
Homicide (2015); The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality after the History of Philosophy (2011); Ethics
for Disaster (2009). Applicative Justice: A Pragmatic Empirical Approach to Racial Injustice. Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated. Pages 154-174.
Fortunately, to the extent that the present global capitalistic system is the ultimate structure supporting regress in internal US progress toward social justice for
African Americans, resignation
is not the only realistic or prudent response. A global system works on many
institutional levels of governmental and economic structure, including its injustice as experienced by real
people who suffer from it in their concrete daily existence. And it is that kind of individually experienced
injustice, which can be addressed, on the ground. It may not be (as Alexander and West have, respectively, called for and proclaimed to have
begun) that even a movement is necessary or sufficient in order to address specific contemporary experiences of injustice. It may be that tangible practical first
steps can be taken on the level of local activism and it may be that in societies with democratic structures, such activism is more effective than the promulgation of
liberatory global system theory'. If local problems are corrected without at the same time calling for a new national or global movement, there may be less political
opposition on local levels. We will return to this question of “scope of activism” in the next section, after more theoretical ground has been reclaimed for “what to
do.” NEW CONSTRUCTIONS OF RACE Global understanding is important—we are all required to be informed about the world—but it is not
the only worthwhile theoretical goal. Theory and analysis are also important for developing ideas for
how to correct injustice on concrete, specific levels. Under-examined in the construction of revisionist
history, as well as in the idea of regress, is a circular theory of human history. We seem to go ahead,
and then we go back. But what could it mean to “go back”? No one has claimed that the present or
recent past duplicates the more distant past or literally replays it. Although, some scholars have claimed that
some structures of status are remarkably resilient, even though the principles defending them have
been rejected. For example, the idea that nonwhites are inferior to whites and need to be kept separate from them for the benefit of both groups has been
abandoned as an explicit, official justification for racial segregation, but racial segregation—in US housing, education, and social life—has not been abandoned.
(Residential segre- gation continues without legal requirement as the result of real estate prices, sedimented social practices, poverty, and mortgage lenders who
redline.) Rival Siegel argues that status arrangements may persist with complete legality after their original justificatory principles are struck down, so long as
different justifications are concocted: The wavs in which the legal system enforces social stratification are various and evolve over time, Efforts to reform a status
regime bring about changes in its rule structure and justificatory rhetoric—a dynamic I have elsewhere called ’preservation-through-transforma-tion,“ In short,
status-enforcing state action evolves in form as it is contested.22 Siegel's thesis raises the question of what kind of thing or relation the original social stratification
is, so that it can persist from generation to generation under different names, with different justifications. The social metaphysics could involve “memes,” or
intergenerational habits, or outright lies and conspiracies. Perhaps there
are power relationships between blacks and whites that
members of each group inherit and whites are loathe to give up, because they have more power. To
relate the present to the past in such ways is a complex interdisciplinary work consisting at least of
sociology, history, and legal and political history, before philosophers and other theorists could
formulate their own disciplinary interpretations. It may be simpler and more conclusive to approach this
issue of permanent-status-through-change by starting fresh with present power and status differences.
When Alexander calls the present racially biased prison system “the new Jim Crow,” she adds that she does not mean to draw a literal comparison, but to write
metaphorically.23 This raises the question of why we need a metaphor that invokes the past to describe present conditions that are well studied by contemporary
social scientists, with events reported by journalists and recorded on video, as they occur. What would happen if we simply stayed with our current best
descriptions and attempted to theorize them? One
result might be to shift the discourse from a somewhat rigid idea of types
of events, a kind of essentializing of history, to the use of more recent tools involving the idea of social
construction. It’s already well accepted within the academy that biological human racial divisions, as well as their
social meanings, were constructed in the past.24 We also know that biological foundations for human
races are now repudiated in the same scientific fields that invented them. That knowledge supports recognition of racial construction within society
which was explicitly based on assumed biological determinism in the past. Indeed, one indication of a lack of biological foundation for racial taxonomies in society is
the historical and geographic variation of the epistemology of social race. Thus, for example, before they were assimilated into the middle class, Europeans who
were Irish, Italian, Jewish, Finnish, Polish, and even German, were not considered white; the ethnic category of Hispanic/Latino was created by the US census and
has since been regarded as a race or at least an object of racism; Middle Eastern Americans came to be identified as a nonwhite racial group after 9/11; mixed black
and white people are conventionally identified as black. Such social construction of race has always been closely associated
with citizenship rights and social status and it has been maintained and changed for changing political
and economic purposes. Race and racial divisions should be viewed as constantly “under construction.”
Dominant groups may reiterate some general ideas based on their knowledge of history, but their present
focus is always on their present goals for dominance. Race as it has been known, and as we continue to know it, is
a dynamic process. Consider, for example, Richard Nixon’s reported intentions to appeal to white racists, with language that
would not explicitly mention blacks or other nonwhites. The social construction of black men as criminals that has accompanied broad public acceptance of police
racial profiling, as well as the racial imbalance in incarceration, has its origins in this early 1970s political rhetoric and policy. That is, our present form of the social
construction of black men started as a relatively new, post-civil rights movement strategy for getting votes. This is not to say that the strategy had not been
successfully used before then, for instance, as Alexander notes, in extinguishing the late nineteenth-century populist movement.26 But it was
a new
political strategy for the 1970s. And all that was required to sustain it from then on was a steady increase in
the funding and construction of the infrastructure supporting it, and occasional ideological
revitalization. For example, in the 1988 presidential campaign, George H. W. Bush used against Michael Dukakis, his Democratic opponent, the example of
William "Willie" Horton, a convicted first-degree murderer, Horton committed rape and assault when released on furlough during Dukakis's second term as
governor of Massachusetts. In his first term as governor, Dukakis had vetoed a hill that would have stopped furloughs for first-degree murderers. Ergo, Dukakis was
portrayed as “soft on crime," and Bush won the election. 27 If
we view the social construction of race as an ongoing dynamic
process, we need to understand that Nixon and H. W. Bush were not merely manipulating existing public fears
about black men, but fanning them, exacerbating them, and giving them new faces—faces from their time, not faces from the late

nineteenth century—and in that process reconstructing race. They were not turning the clock back to the beginning of a

new era of Jim Crow (no matter how metaphorically that may be understood) but moving forward with new ideas about

black male identity. Of course, these ideas were not difficult to “sell” because the paradigm case of
black manhood they held up was genuinely scary and the mass of economically insecure white voters
was already predisposed to accept a racist ideology. But “predisposed” does not mean
“predetermined.” The construction of the idea of the late twentieth-century black male ghetto dweller as an inherently dangerous and later crack-crazed
maniac was a newly constructed stereotype. It prompted a whole new generation of nonblack women to clutch their purses when a black man stepped onto
elevators with them, and signaled everyone else to click their car doors into “locked” when they saw a black man advancing down the street.28 In turn, these
attitudes can be viewed as antecedents to acceptance of the legality of recent high profile cases of police homicide following attempted stops and frisks of unarmed
young African American men. Overall, such stereotypes support the criminalization of black male bodies in the public imaginary because those bodies have become
icons—they both symbolize criminals and are perceived as physically dangerous. That Willie Horton, who was a violent black male criminal, became the face of black
male crime and not any one of hundreds of thousands other black men, who had already been incarcerated for possession of small amounts of marijuana or
cocaine, meant and continues to mean, that the preoccupation with crime in America is a locus on physical crime. There is now a prevailing impression that “crime"
means “physi- cal violence," so that “white-collar crime" (a term now out of date sarto-rially) is not viewed as truly dangerous. And physical crime is imagined to be
mainly perpetrated by black men, an association so strong that being a criminal has become part of the casual identity of being a black male. The quotidian
phenomenology of that new construction of race for all black men, especially poor black youth, is nothing less than the pheno menology of traumatic encounters
with bullies against whom the victim cannot win—if the victim tries to win, he can be killed by police officers, with impunity.29 I suggest that we view the post—civil
rights movement association of crime with African American men and boys as a new construction of race. Alexander names this construction “criminalblackman, 30
but does not sufficiently treat it as a new racial construction. She is aware that something new has occurred, but she views it as an attribute of crime, rather than a
reconstruction of black maleness: “For black men, the stigma of being; a ‘criminal’ in the era of mass incarceration is funda- mentally a racial stigma. . . . Whiteness
mitigates crime, whereas blackness defines the criminal.”31 Alexander does not tell us what she means by the preexisting “blackness” that defines the criminal.
There is no preexisting blackness, except for dark skin and poverty. In this case, “criminal” defines and constructs blackness. And that is why the almost 70 percent
of African Americans who are black, but not poor, also suffer from this new construction of “criminal black man.” Such
slanderous
characterizations of an entire group as dangerously criminal do not directly result from the financial and
economic structures of a system of global capitalism, descending like the forefinger of God to shape the minds of
the white populace. They are opportunistically discovered by politicians seeking votes, based on their assumptions that
their highest good is getting elected, instead of getting elected for the right reasons. (It should go without saying that such politicians cannot be presumed to
believe what they say in order to get people to vote for them.) If the politicians get elected, they try out a few new programs. If those on
whom the programs are inflicted (e.g., the victims of Reagan’s War on Drugs that followed a general valorization of “law and order”) are already vulnerable to
government power and the rest of the population is not vigilant about everyone’s rights, the programs succeed and their growth accelerates in new times of crisis.
Such programs will only work if they are able to intersect with existing or bur- geoning corporate
interests, in this case, private prison contractors. If the intersection “takes," then soon enough, a criminal justice
system such as the one in place is the historical result. It is a historical result because it developed over
time and at many different stages its present state could not have been predicted with a high degree of
probability. It may therefore be an unduly Manichean use of history to view such a system as a
deliberate design by the ultimate architects of global corporate capitalism. That is not to say that individuals, especially poor
and nonwhite people, do not encounter the present criminal justice system as both real and unyielding.
And it is not to overlook the jobs provided to law enforcement officers, prison personnel, and civilians who prosper from the economic stimulus of prisons in their
locales,32 In addition, we should be concerned about Alexander's account of the dire consequences for eligibility for government aid and prospective employment,
as well as loss of personal and familial regard, suffered by contemporary felons. Once convicted, or sometimes, even only arrested for minor drug offenses, the poor
and especially black victims of this system become branded as lifelong criminals. They are usually barred from both jury duty and voting and are precluded from
ever fully rejoining respectable society. Their inability to vote in geographical areas with large poor black populations can tip the results of key elections. Most of the
victims and fearful observers are now accustomed to this system, their habits settled within and outside it, as though it were completely natural, “just the way
things are.”33 These are terrible conditions of existence for millions of poor black people. However,
the question is not whether or not
they are related to larger historical trends, which they without question are, but whether the most
effective way to address them via activist discourse is to take on the big global picture or focus on comparative ways in which American blacks and
whites, poor and middle class, are treated by their—everyone’s—government. The prison-poverty system became an entrenched institution by the mid-1990s.
Alexander notes that during the Clinton administration, the prison budget, after increasing by 171 percent, became twice what was allocated to Aid to Families with
Dependent Children (AFDC) and that funding for public housing was reduced by 61 percent. At the same time, those who had been convicted for drug offenses were
barred from public housing and faced homelessness.34 Described in these terms, the prison-poverty system exceeds the institution of Jim Crow because of its
dedicated federal funding. In studying this structure, everything that happens can be described as though it were designed to oppress poor black people, for the
benefit of others. But even that description, in addition to its transcendental excess, may rely too much on the net results of contingent, uncertain, incremental
components. Moreover, although poor black ghetto dwellers are the main human resources for this system and the rate of poverty among American blacks is twice
that among whites, most American blacks, about 75 percent, are not at this time poor ghetto dwellers.35 The majority of American blacks, who are neither poor nor
incarcerated are stigmatized and thereby endangered by stereotypes that connect the prison to the ghetto, but they are not directly part of that connection. This
does not mean life is not unjust for all African Americans, but it does mean that the majority retains its civic ability to educate the next generation, vote, protest,
and cultivate optimism about the future. (A visitor from another planet might wonder if that majority is doing enough to fulfill its civic obligations in the early
twenty-first century.) HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL BOUNDARIES Unlike Jim Crow, which had mainly excluded blacks from mainstream economic and social life, the
post—civil rights criminal justice system initiated positive federal programs that were intended to directly and punitively address African Americans, partly because
key people in government believed that was what white Americans wanted. While it seemed at first that affirmative action for middle-class African Americans was a
helpful positive program—and it did in fact help many—white backlash attacking it as "reverse discrimination" has curtailed explicit affirmative action policies,
under the direction of the US Supreme Court, Antidiscrimination laws remain on the books, but there is little evidence that antidiscrimination lawsuits, since 1980
have been effective. In place of affirmative action there has been a perceived need for racial diversity in organizations and some observers conclude that
compliance reviews are more effective than lawsuits tor organizational change, especially in the diversification of management positions. Overall, the twenty years
following the success of the civil rights move- ment was a period of regress, which many observers in 2015 consider to remain in full swing. But, what is
happening during this period is exactly a competition among interest groups, and as Bentley might have predicted,
with no clear-cut resolution yet. It therefore makes sense to consider appropriate time frames with which to think about the current situation of
racial injustice. Raymond Williams was a twentieth-century English cultural critic who seems to be largely unknown to US philosophers of race who write about
social justice. He was one of the founders of the British New Left Review, but his ideas were a site of contention for more orthodox Marxists, because he was
skeptical of economic analyses that did not take lived cultural experience into account. Williams believed that masses, and also perhaps classes, did not literally
exist, except for how theorists defined and viewed them. He also anticipated later feminist emphases on "nutritive and generative” aspects of lived experience as a
major social institution on a par with the economy and politics. Williams has been considered most influential for his ideas that all members and groups in society
contribute to its structured feelings at any given time and for his idea of the long revolution that recurred throughout his writing, after he introduced it in a 1961
book of the same title.37 The Long Revolution named by Williams was a process of social change toward democracy, which began in modernity in the late
eighteenth century with the French Revolution, “the mould in which experience was cast."38 By “experience” in this context, Williams meant the experience of
writers and poets, and he believed that what was expressed in literature both reflected feelings in society and influenced them. The structured feeling of the

Long Revolution is centered on goals of universal human recognition, for all members of society, as
whole human beings. Everyone is to be accepted for what they are in the system to come after capitalism: “There can be no acceptable human order
while the full humanity of any class of men is in practice denied.”39 In disagreement with contemporary Marxists, Williams was skeptical of the ability of socialism
or state control that would entail complex bureaucracy to realize the goal of universal humanity: “We seem reduced to a choice between speculator and bureaucrat
and while we do not like the speculator, the bureaucrat is not exactly inviting either.”40 His proposed solution was a form of self-rule based on open discussion and
voting, with representatives to larger governing bodies responsible to their constituents. Williams has been interpreted as advocating that “the people” rule
themselves, but he is not usually associated with an archism.41 It
is very difficult for a theorist to decide how big a picture to consider,
how long a period of history to take as a unit for long-term trends. Since we cannot successfully intervene in a global system,

and the same facts can usually be explained by more than one theory, there is little that can or should interfere

with a long-term view that is tilted toward optimism. The temporal perspective introduced by Williams, although he probably would
not have described it in these terms, permits us to think about history as extending into the future, as well as the past.42 Suppose that there is a Long Revolution
and there are Wide Humanistic Values to match it, which preclude racism, because the full humanity of all human beings will be recognized, eventually. It might be
useful, as a matter of sanity, as well as hope, to see the present conditions of American antiblack
punitive racism as a relatively short span of events
within those lengths. Such events need to be endured and the hope is that they will pass into the past at some stage

in the future of the Long Revolution. About hope, Williams wrote the following at the end of Towards 2000: It is only in a shared
belief and insistence that there are practical alternatives that the balance of forces and chances begins
to alter.... Once the inevitabilities are challenged, we begin gathering our resources for a journey of
hope. If there are no easy answers there are still available and discoverable hard answers and it is these
that we can now learn to make and share. This has been, from the beginning, the sense and impulse of the Long Revolution.43 The Elasticity
and Inclusiveness of Identities Since the US civil rights movement, African American theorists, academics especially, have emphasized the importance of black
identity, in the tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon. There has been a shift toward prophecy in Cornel West’s sense of speaking the truth about oppression
in the present, but overall, the methodological consensus is that improvement in the conditions of African Americans needs to be demanded by and for African
Americans, as a racial group. This discourse displays little confidence in human rights or a humani-tarianism such as Williams emphasized, because there is a
longstanding belief that many whites have in the Long Oppression failed to recognize the humanity of blacks. Moreover, the language of “color blindness,” which
does not mention race, is strongly associated with the regress of post-civil rights movement black poverty and deep experience of injustice in the criminal justice
system. However, this view may be too concrete, too focused on short-term historical contingencies, to get us from here to where and how we want the future to
be. American politicians have been able for a while to manipulate and implement racism in racially neutral language, which leaves little opportunity for either
nonwhite racial affirmation or successful race-based litigation—that is, judges do not accept wholly race-based affirmative action or complaints about antiblack
racism in situations that have been already described in race-neutral language, such as the War on Drugs. Nevertheless, it does not follow from any of this that
neutrality about race is not a humanistic ideal or that humanistic ideals are not valid general ideals. It may be a self-defeating long-term error, albeit expedient in
the short term, to insist that all efforts toward improving the present conditions of poor African Americans be described in terms of their racial identities, rather
than their human identities. There are more poor whites than poor blacks or Hispanics in the United States, even though black poverty is twice as common as white
poverty and the residential segregation of the black poor creates additional race-associated vulnerabilities.44 African American poor people are more vulnerable to
the exploitation of being inducted into the US criminal justice system, as well as more vulnerable in lacking adequate housing, food, a living wage, and public
education that provides real opportunities for their children. All of these ills and comparative disadvantages create distinct circumstances of the “blackpoor.” But
the condition of poverty itself, where the poor have less income and wealth than those who are not poor, is a measurable condition that includes people of all
races, including whites and especially whites who are homeless or unemployed. There has been much debate about whether race or class is more important to
consider for understanding the situation of poor African Americans: Does black racial identity in an antiblack racist society predetermine a high likelihood of
poverty, which persists over generations as antiblack racism continues? Or, is poverty sufficiently oppressive to account for its own persitence, regardless of race?
Does race and racism change the nature of poverty? Or, is pover-ty, like criminality, part of a new black identity? Much can be said in answer to such questions
about the theoretical aspects of race or class as a lens for studying the oppression of the blackpoor. Lucius Outlaw has developed a now paradigmatic perspective
that historical and contemporary studies of race support a critical theory of race that is more relevant to African American experience than traditional critical
theories based on class.45 Still, the question in terms of activism and the correction of concrete social injustice is not how poverty has been caused, but how it can
be corrected. (It may have causes mainly in racism but mainly economic corrections.) To correct poverty and attendant issues such as food insecurity and
homelessness among children, it neither makes sense, nor is it morally principled, to focus on the poverty of only African Americans. The discourse of social class
may not be adequate to account for institutional racism and specifically racist institutions, because there is usually an added element of ignorance, neglect, or
malice, concerning blacks. But addressing poverty needs to be an inclusive project. It would not only become another contentious form of “affirmative action” if
only the blackpoor were considered, but it would be cruel insofar as the poor of all racial groups suffer. In 1961, at the age of ninety-three, W. E. B. Du Bois joined
the Communist Party and then said the following to the New York Times'. “Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness
can bring social good to all. . . . Communism—the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute—this is the only way of
human life.”46 Black spokespeo-ple have for many decades emphasized poverty as a primary human problem and not a problem for only black Americans. Martin
Luther King Jr. expressed that humanitarian emphasis, as has Cornel West, in our own era. Following his award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, King announced a
shift from civil rights to human rights, through his organization of the multiracial Poor People's Campaign. Before he was assassinated in 1968, King envisioned a
Poor People's March on Washington, D.C.47 West and Tavis Smiley, in their Poverty Tours, have emphasized the importance of "jobs with a living wage," as a goal
for millions of Americans of all races.48 Poverty is also a world concern. In a way similar to this racially inclusive view of poverty, US govern-ment action toward
peoples of nonwhite races outside of our borders has been an African American concern, in black liberatory discourse. As early as 1919, nine years after he founded
the NAACP, Du Bois organized a second Pan-African Congress in Paris, presenting a petition to the Versailles Peace Conference (or recognition of worldwide peoples’
rights to anticolonialist self-determination. The petition was rejected. Du Bois continued to connect the situation of American blacks with that of global people of
color, until the NAACP expelled him in 1948, for reasons of political prudence involving the Cold War.49 King carried on Du Bois's insights that the treatment of
African Americans was related to America's international policies, especially after he was awarded the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. His protests of the Vietnam War and
beyond that his call for land reform (in his 1967 Riverside Church speech), against US policy in Latin America, resulted in harsh assessments and dissention within
the civil rights movement he had come to symbolize. He was also disinvited from the Johnson White House.50 We have already noted, in chapter 5, West's
emphasis on US foreign policy, as part of the black prophetic tradition, as well as his harsh remarks about President Obama. West is also not welcome in Obama’s
White House.51 These projects of making African American concerns more broad by extending the area of complaint and protest to nonblack American poor people
and non-American people of color have not met with great success. They have neither strengthened the movements of their time, nor reduced or ended poverty
(and American foreign policy has been impervious to their demands). Bitter reactions from the African American community to the US presidency reverberate when
black liberatory spokespeople voice strong opinions on foreign policy. It is unimaginable at this time that such issues can be related to African American activism in
official or public understandings, but it is also unimaginable that the issues are not related in reality. This is a situation of stasis. However, there is now another
dimension to global aspects of US social justice activism media. The pleas in a number of local demonstrations and protests about police homicide' of unarmed
African Americans, such as “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,’* "I Can’t Breathe,” "Black Lives Matter" and “No Justice, No Peace," have been highly publicized by the
mainstream media, as have successive police homicides after the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012,52 The New York Times brought all of this to a head on April 6,
2015, by posting a video of Walter Scott being shot in the back while fleeing a police officer in South Carolina. With prose befitting the cool temperature of The New
Yorker magazine, Philip Gourivitch posted the following about that video: There it was, front and center, on the home page of my local paper, the Times, and on the
BBC, and the Guardian, and the Wall Street Journal, and thousands of other news sites, as well as hundreds of thousands of Facebook pages and Twitter feeds: a
freeze-frame showing a white policeman in the process of shooting a black man to death, with a play button you could click to watch the whole killing from start to
finish,54 Gourevitch went on to discuss the ethics of journalistic displays of people getting killed and raised a question of respect for death on the part of viewers.
What Gourevitch neglected to point out was the power of this video to provide conclusive evidence of contemporary injustice concerning the contemporary issue of
police officer killings of unarmed black men, for which there have customarily been acquittals or failures to indict. The usual justification that an officer has acted
out of fear for his own life is not supported by this video. What Gourevitch does succeed in pointing out is the global publicity that now attends such incidents. This
international dimension of US race relations is different from the connection between US domestic and foreign policy on a theoretical level because it has the
potential to spark vast external moral pressure on American government entities, perhaps similar to the Cold War pressures that were influential in Brown v. Board
of Education and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, as discussed in chapter 4. Issues of poverty, including global poverty, expand theoretical concerns about the carceral and
other existential vulnerabilities of poor African Americans, to include people of other races, notably whites domestically and other peoples of color abroad. By the
same token US foreign policy raises issues of global white nonwhite racial divides Still in terms of activism, these have largely remained theoretical issues that
support broader understanding. They may describe issues for move ments lost, past, or yet to be developed, but in terms of contemporary social justice activism,
concrete change is a matter of US domestic issues concerning race relations and the practical tradition of the undra-matic, obscure aspects of the Long Revolution is
very important. The vagueness of Williams s idea of the Long Revolution promises an ordinary, day-to-day
methodology for addressing racial injustice. Ordinariness is required given the time span of the Long
Revolution that according to Williams began in 1789. The ability to sustain continual low key and undramatic liberatory
efforts may require the kind of faith found in activists within the black prophetic tradition, who were not as
charismatic as Martin Luther King Jr., but attended to specific issues over decades. For instance, West contrasts the contributions of Ella
Baker to those of King, describing her as “an unassuming person who helps the suppressed to help themselves.” Baker’s organizing work included her service as
secretary of the NAACP, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Council, and cofounder of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee. Baker
knew both Du Bois and King and was skilled at grassroots organizing, but she did not write essays or books or produce mesmerizing speeches. She talked about
humility and service alongside everyday people and insisted that members of a movement motivate themselves.55 “Think Globally, Act Locally” In light of the
insight that amounts to “Think globally, act locally,” borrowed from environmentalist planning discourse,56 let’s return now to Wacquant’s general model of the
contemporary carceral system as a form of social control that extends beyond punishment for crimes. Wacquant’s analysis suggests that at least three different
social situations would be more accessible to activist-sparked change than the overall global capitalist system: race-based residential segregation; impoverishment
of the educational system as it serves the poor; assumptions about the traditional family that have had a slanderous effect on black family images. Residential
segregation enables the architectural and geographic formation of ghettos as areas targeted for intrusive law enforcement surveillance, because poor and
powerless blaeks are physically clustered in one place.57 Also, insofar as schools are financed by taxes based on property values, residential segregation results in
impoverished resources for K-12 education. Both segregated substandard housing and inadequate schools are issues that can be addressed through local activism
and support for the development of employable skills and jobs. While the "feminization of poverty" has been well-documented, ad ditional attention could be paid
to the assumption that women the primary caretakers for children, which explains why welfare and workfare programs have been concentrated on them, with the
state replacing the function of a male provider in a nuclear family. However, ever since reactions to the 1965 Moynihan Report, and earlier in the work of E. Franklin
Frazier, it has been known that many African Americans do not grow up in, or themselves form, traditional nuclear families with stay-at-home mothers and male
breadwinner fathers. Positing poverty as the cause of this unconventional family structure had been the standing practice in sociology until Patrick Moynihan,
writing for the US Department of Labor, claimed that the cause of black single mothers, illegitimacy, and extended family structures, was cultural pathology with
roots in social arrangements that had been necessary under slavery and Jim Crow.59 Despite the obsessive morbid interest in Moynihan's characterization of family
organization among the black poor, it has been outpaced by more broad historical changes. Not only have women of color, especially African American wo men,
always worked outside of their homes, but most white women and women in other racial and ethnic groups, on all socioeconomic levels, now work outside of their
homes. For poor women, their employment hinges both on skills and available and accessible jobs. The surrogate traditional-family aspects of welfare and workfare
can therefore be viewed as so outdated as not to be worth theoretical consideration. This means that the need for welfare and workfare programs reduces to a
need for more jobs for poor black women—and a need for transportation to and from those jobs, as well as affordable childcare.60 As of April 2015, adult African
American women had the highest rate of unemployment at 9.2 percent, compared to 6.5 for Latinas and 4.2 for white women, (The website of the National
Womens Law Center has portals for instructions on how those concerned about this issue can email their congressmen and senators.) Finally, a contemporary
example of spoken and active discourse about an immediate problem has been provided by activists in Ferguson, Missouri, who met with President Obama in
December 2014 to discuss their attempts to influences changes in local police practices. Said Ashley Yates, cofounder of the group Millennial Activists United,
"We’re definitely going to keep doing the work on the ground, but meeting with the president, for me—well, I’ll say for everybody—is just an affirmation that this
movement is working.”63 In February 2015, Ferguson activist groups called for 250 students to join them during spring break to provide community service such as
clearing wreckage from earlier demonstrations and helping plant gardens. Said Patricia Barnes, a Democratic committeewoman for Ferguson, “The protests

have got us here. The next step is to target the ballot box, to get people elected and to change policy.
Students should take that back to their college campuses and build an infrastructure. . . . There is plenty
to do.”64 Yes, there is plenty to do, but what needs to be done are fairly straightforward, day-to-day, community-
based actions. Global systems are overreaching causal factors of local vulnerabilities, but there is no
reason to believe that their local effects cannot be addressed on their local levels. LIBERTY, FREEDOM, AND
INJUSTICE From a more abstract philosophical perspective, the foregoing discussion of revisionist history and active discourse, proceeding as they have from the
concrete contemporary issue of racial injustice in the US criminal justice system, is a matter of liberty and freedom. Imprisonment is, after all, the classic, concrete
example of not having liberty. And if we follow John Locke in saying that it is the whole person, and not the will, that can be free,65 then a person in prison is not
free. But philosophically, being in prison or not does not capture the abstract nature of liberty and freedom as political ideas and ideals. by influential political
philosophers, for instance Isiah Berlin in his canonical 1958 lecture, "Two Concepts of Liberty."66 Berlin distinguished between negative liberty, or what others
including government officials are not permitted to do to a person, and positive liberty, an area of personal autonomy allowing for individual choice and
development. He was wary of the abuses by paternalism or quietism to which the idea of positive liberty could be subject. On the one hand, paternalistic or
despotic leaders could take it upon themselves to determine what was The terms “liberty” and "freedom” have been used interchangeably good for others (for the
good of a harmonious social whole, as well the individual freedom of rational beings)* And, on the other hand, stoic quietists might seek to shrink individual choice
to what was not prohib ited bv law or punishable by government force: For this doctrine, as it applies to individuals, it is no very great distance to the conceptions of
those who, like Kant, identify freedom not indeed with the elimination of desires, but with resistance to them and control over them ... a sublime but, it seems to
me, unmistakable, form of the doctrine of sour grapes. Insofar as Berlin championed the idea of negative liberty, in the tradition of J. S. Mill, three important
qualifications tempered his libertarianism in ways that make it still relevant for active oppositional discourse. First, following Mill in equating incursions on core or
essential negative liberty with coercion or slavery, Berlin acknowledged that freedom is only of value to those who can make use of it: “It is only because I believe
that my inability to get a given thing is due to the fact that other human beings have made arrangements whereby I am, whereas others are not, prevented from
having enough money with which to pay for it, that I think myself a victim of coercion or slaverv. 68 Second, Berlin understood that people who are not free may
take action against those who are limiting their freedom(s): "Those who are wedded to the ‘negative’ concept of freedom may perhaps be forgiven if they think that
self-abnegation is not the only method of overcoming obstacles; that it is also possible to do so by removing them ... in the case of human resistance, by force or
persuasion.” Third, Berlin recognized the importance of status or recognition, which in some cases might outweigh the value of negative liberty, to members of
groups with a history of oppressive rule by others. However, in rethinking Berlin (as well as Locke), a focus on active discourse against injustice may require a
distinction between liberty and freedom. What that distinction amounts to is that freedom can be used to expand the possibilities for resistance against unjust
curtailments of liberty. The term "liberty" (or negative liberty in Berlin's sense) can be used to refer to lack of external constraint and "freedom" to refer to
decisions, choices, and interests of a subject, apart from their expression. For example, racially biased stops and frisks infringe on the US constitutional liberty of
black subjects to be free from arbitrary searches and seizures, according to the Fourth Amendment. Poverty, viewed as a cross-racial or multiracial condition, may
also be a limitation on freedom. Liberty is an external political matter, usually pertaining to rights under positive law and compliance or noncompliance with such
rights. Freedom is a contested, psychic issue. If constraints on liberty are persistent and systematic, they may limit a people’s freedom, because individual decisions,
choices, and interests are influenced and inspired by what individuals are practically able to do—that is, by their liberties. We can say that a people with a history of
poverty accompanied by restrictions in economic liberty will not be as economically advantaged as a people whose history did not contain such restrictions because
the accumulation of wealth is passed on from generation to generation. The disparity in family wealth between American blacks and whites is a strong example of
this kind of ongoing constraint.70 However, when economic disadvantage is combined with racist attitudes and undereducation, the distinction between liberty and
freedom may be eroded. Children growing up in constrained circumstances may not develop freedom in the psychic sense, in addition to restrictions on their
liberty. An important part of the choices enabled by psychic freedom requires imagination, as well as self-esteem and knowledge of the broader world beyond one’s
immediate family and neighborhood. Jean-Paul Sartre emphasized that the ability to realistically project oneself into a future set of circumstances that are different
from undesirable present ones requires some knowledge of those future circumstances to cultivate a motivational dissatisfaction with present conditions.
Progressive activists have shown how Sartre’s hypothesis can become a politicizing method: Organizers during early stages of Second Wave feminism conducted
“consciousness raising” exercises to make women aware of their oppression;71 practical leaders of ethnic and racial liberatory movements from Ella Baker to Paolo
Friere have proceeded with education of members of oppressed groups,72 exactly to activate their freedom, so that they can choose greater liberty as a goal. The
Distribution of Liberty To speak of rights violations is to speak of unjust curtailments of liberty. It is presumed here that liberty consists of all the things that people
are able to do, that they are in some sense entitled to do, as human beings and which government is not supposed to obstruct them from doing. The reduction of
procedural justice to distributive justice in chapter 4 is now useful for considering liberty and freedom as relevant to opposi tional active discourse. The view of
liberty and freedom, but especially liberty, as a matter of procedural justice is more nebulous than a view of liberty as a good that is distributed. Procedures tend to
be imagined as methods that need only be justified by those who administer them and their superiors. But distributions give goods out and they have end
recipients. If procedures are not always followed in the same way for blacks and whites, this can be defended by saying that something unusual happened in a
particular case or that there was an innocent error. It may be claimed as an excuse that the client/citizen/resident/plaintiff/ defendant did not correctly perform her
role in the procedure, interfered with the procedure delivered by officials, or failed to act in a way that expressed reasonable understanding of the procedure, for
example, there was a “language barrier.” Procedures can be legally designed in ways that have different effects on members of different groups. Police racial
profiling as part of a general procedure for maintaining law and order, photo ID requirements for voter registration, and English instructions to residents who do not
speak English are all examples of legal procedures that have been justified without mention of race or ethnicity, but have different effects on members of different
populations. However, if justice is viewed as a matter of distribution, the relevant test that it has been carried out, given all other things equal, is whether the social
good that the procedure is supposed to be a fair or neutral means for distributing, does get fairly and neutrally distributed. The view of just procedures as
distributed goods, bypasses color-blind policies that do not have race-neutral effects. When the distribution of negative liberty or procedural justice is unfair, the
result is distributional injustice. Judith Shklar, known mainly for her claim that cruelty should be a primary or foundational concern of secular, liberal political
philosophy,73 addresses injustice as a subject in its own right. Although Shklar does not refer to Berlin, her focus on the distinction between an external judgment
that another who is disadvantaged is suffering from misfortune and the sufferer's perception that she has been treated unjustly does echo Berlin’s qualification that
there may be minimal material and cultural requirements for a person’s nega-tive liberty to be of value to her. A poor, uneducated person, who does not
understand the broader institutional causes of her poverty, may not be able to use the negative liberty legally afforded her to do anything she chooses with her life.
She might not have the freedom to take advantage of her liberty. It may not occur to her to resist micro-oppres-sions or try to move into a better neighborhood
because she has not been educated in ways that stimulate imagination. Externally, she may be viewed as having made poor choices or lacking the virtue of a work
ethic, but subjectively she may experience her situation as unjust. And if her freedom has been impaired by restrictions on her liberty, her situa-tion is objectively
unjust. In The Faces of Injustice, Shklar expresses an overall dissatisfaction with philosophical theories of justice, which is parallel to the project undertaken in this
book. However, although she begins by defining injustice as “an act that goes against some known legal or ethical rule,”74 her approach to defining injustice in this
short text continually wrestles with the distinction between injustice and misfortune. On the way, Shklar is very mindful of the overwhelming odds against victims of
injustice in societies considered just: they are not heard; their resignation is taken for granted; they do not have remedies for redress or timely access to
rectification in the form of punishment against those who have been unjust to them; they lack the means to change social practices that cause their injustice. Shklar
is particularly sensitive to the plight of those who suffer injustice in concrete ways on account of their “ascriptive” identities, such as women until very recently and
US racial minorities more or less permanently.75 Nevertheless, and this is where Shklar’s otherwise pessimistic combination of history and political philosophy
makes an invigorating contribution to the subject of activist political discourse, she posits the recognition of injustice as both an eons-long and fundamental human
moral intuition and a general civic right and obligation in democratic societies. Shklar writes: A black American may well expect that she will not get a fair hearing
from certain public agencies, but as a citizen she knows this is not what is expected of our public servants, and she can certainly feel and communicate her sense of
injustice when her claims are ignored. There is, however, a bond between these two kinds of expectation, Unpredicted, sudden injustices are resented far more
intensely than those one has learned to endure as a member of a group. They tear away the emotional protection created by resignation and allow dis-tress to burst
from its confines. Furthermore, in a way that just happens to capture the spirit of this chapter and complete the book, Shklar provides this statement of legitimation
for political activism: Democratic principles oblige us to treat each expression of a sense of injustice not just fairly according to the actual rules but also with a view
to better and potentially more equal ones. To be sure, democracy does not fulfill its immanent promises quickly, but at least it does not silence the voice of protest,
which it knows to be the herald of change.77 Shklar here proclaims the democratic legitimacy of expression of a sense of injustice. When
we add that
idea to the known existence of injustice as part of a Bentleyan process of government, active political
discourse in the form of real life action can be recognized as part of the whole process of government.
There is sound reason to undertake it and support its undertaking with confidence, both for change
now and in view of the Long Revolution.

The AFF’s a performance of defeatist radicalism. Instead of strategic focus on gaining

political power the AFF devolves into exaggerating the importance of their project
Adolph Reed 01, Pennsylvania political science professor, Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other
Thoughts on the American Scene, ix-xi.
 activists who found themselves cut off from ready access to any broader audience or dialogue were
One strain of those

left talking to no one but one another. Their isolation was reinforced by a largely honorable rejection of
pressures to abjure radicalism. Practical expressions of that rejection, however, were often naively
catechistic and misguided strategically. Radicalism’s proceeding marginalization heightened fears that
attempts to compensate would slide into an opportunistic betrayal of fundamental radical commitments. Those fears set in
motion a dynamic of intensifying ideological vigilance and purification. As a consequence, many who took that
route succumbed to the temptation to retreat into arcane debates, ever further removed from issues and
concerns that resonate with the lives of people outside the self-conscious left. They produced a pattern
of left discourse that centers on fitting aspects of contemporary social relations into one or another
pre-scripted narrative of global revolution or noble resistance. Thus a current of activist radicalism dribbled off into scholastic, albeit
bizarrely intense (and often intensely bizarre), debates over what “ stage” of capitalism or imperialism the current moment represented, to what extent which populations in the United States
or elsewhere enacted generic assigned to them in a given potted narrative, or which mundane political actions or events indicated impending revolutionary ferment or proper revolutionary

consciousness. The more isolated this radicalism became, the more insular and idiosyncratic became its
language and critiques. The more it was removed from connection to palpable constituencies or
membership outside the ranks of the already faithful, the less constrained it was by pragmatic or
strategic thinking. The more solipsistic it became, the less capable it was of distnguishing matters of principle, strategy and tactics, and the less dependent theoretical arguments
were on any test of practical efficacy. And throughout this spiral a flamboyant and self-righteous rhetoric combined with

interpretations of current events and popular behavior— without regard to the expressed
understandings and objectives of those who enact such events and behaviors— as proxy evidence for
radicals’ pet theories, a combination that has worked to paper over the reality of marginalization.
Characterizing a rent strike, say, or a group of neighbors’ challenge to an eviction as, in effect, a rejection of capitalist imperatives in the provision of housing, or representing a

protest against an instance of police brutality as the equivalent of a demand for self determination camouflages radicals’
inability to win adherents for their programs. Such representations accommodate marginalization
through a form of denial. Redefining such political expressions as deeply, intrinsically, substantively, or implicitly radical enables
a sleight-of-hand that imputes support for the radicals’ broader programs by association, without the
test of persuasion. This is what underlies sectarian newspapers’ penchant for running photographs of members displaying signs with radical slogans at union picket lines or
other sorts of more broadly based demonstrations and rallies. Moreover, because this politics is propelled by illusion and a Humpty

Dumpty-like use of language, it can wildly inflate the meaning of the most modest or conventional
actions or events without reservation. It also has built-in mechanisms for avoiding critical self-reflection
on practice and acknowledgement of failure. I recall from my graduate school years a particularly outrageous illustration of the lengths to which this kind
of reasoning can go to invert reality. In the immediate aftermath of Pinochet’s brutal coup against Salvador Allende’s government in Chile, a colleague of mine pronounced the coup
“progressive” because it had taught the Chilean left the futility of the electoral option. To the objections that the left was being liquidated even as he spoke, he responded that it was possible
to “kill the individuals but not the tendency.” Substituting fanciful taxonomy for strategic analysis and assessment (for example, portraying the Million Man March as a general strike) also

Worse, precisely because its operative logic (“

made it possible to tag along with whatever motion appears to have some visibility or popular support.

has a similar effect as = might as well be = is” ) generates protean capacities for projecting its illusions
onto the behavior of others, this politics can rationalize quite disreputable and opportunistic
associations, simply by defining them formalistically as something loftier. After all, anything can mean
anything if you get to stipulate the conditions of meaning without constraint by the mundane facts of
an external world, such as the perceptions and objectives of others. In recent years one of the clearest instances of this tendency on
the national stage has been so many leftists’ persistence in tailing after Jesse Jackson’s political charade and minimizing or justifying his dubious, often obviously and crudely self-serving,
programmatic twists and turns. For many this commitment has extended even to accepting the preposterous formula that defines the character of media and official attention to Jackson’s
person— the rhetoric, resonant with the presumptions of an absolutist Sovereign, centered on whether he has been treated with “ respect” — as identical with recognition of progressive
interests. In some cases, to be sure, this will to believe stems from political romanticism and naivete, racial patriotism or guilty racial liberalism. In many others, however, it rests on doomed
hope that association with Jackson will confer popular legitimacy or otherwise provide access to a popular constituency. That association and the desperate hope undergirding it are poignant
evidence of the legacy of defeat.
The Aff essentializes black experience via ideological projection which creates false
consciousness
Adolph Reed 18, September 2018. Professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. “The
Trouble With Uplift.” No. 41. https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-trouble-with-uplift-reed.

The notion that black Americans are political agents just like other Americans, and can forge their own
tactical alliances and coalitions to advance their interests in a pluralist political order is ruled out here on
principle. Instead, blacks are imagined as so abject that only extraordinary intervention by committed
black leaders has a prayer of producing real change. This pernicious assumption continually
subordinates actually existing history to imaginary cultural narratives of individual black heroism and
helps drive the intense – and myopic – opposition that many antiracist activists and commentators
express to Bernie Sanders, social democracy, and a politics centered on economic inequality and working-
class concerns. Class Is Dismissed The striking hostility to such a politics within the higher reaches of
antiracist activism illustrates the extent to which what bills itself as black politics today is in fact a class
politics: it is not interested in the concerns of working people of whatever race or gender. Indeed, a spate of recent
media reports have retailed evidence that upper-class black Americans may be experiencing stagnant-to-declining social mobility – which is
taken as prima facie evidence of the stubbornly racist cast of the American social order: Even rich professionals like us, elite commentators
suggest, are denied the right to secure our own class standing. It is also telling that the study that provoked the media reports – Raj Chetty, et
al., “Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective” – rehearses the hoary recommendation that
“reducing the intergenerational persistence of the black-white income gap will require policies whose impacts cross neighborhood and class
lines and increase upward mobility specifically for black men.” These include “mentoring programs for black boys, efforts to reduce racial bias
among whites, or efforts to facilitate social interaction across racial groups within a given area.” That’s
pretty thin gruel, warmed
over bromides and all too familiar paternalism and no actually redistributive policies at all. In this context the
pronounced animus trained on the figure of the “white savior” emerges as litmus test for the critical role of racial gatekeeper in respectable
political discourse. The gatekeeping question has, for more than a century, focused on who speaks for black Americans and determines the
“black agenda.” And the status of black leader, spokesperson, or “voice” has always been a direct function of contested class prerogative,
dating back a century and more to Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Anna Julia Cooper. Specifically, the gatekeeping
function is the obsession of the professional-managerial strata who pursue what Warren has described as “managerial authority over the
nation’s Negro problem.” How do “black leaders” become recognized? The answer is the same now as for Washington in the 1890s; recognition
as a legitimate black leader, or “voice,” requires ratification by elite opinion-shaping institutions and individuals. Gatekeeping hasn’t been the
exclusive preoccupation of Bookerite conservatives or liberals like Du Bois. Even militant black nationalists and racial separatists like Marcus
Garvey and the leaders of the Nation of Islam have pursued validation as black leaders from dominant white elites to support programs of racial
“self-help” or uplift. From
Black Power to Black Lives Matter, claimants to speak on behalf of the race have
courted recognition from the Ford Foundation and other white-dominated nonprofit philanthropies and
NGOs. And the emergence of cable news networks and the blogosphere have exponentially expanded the number and types of entities that
can anoint race leaders and representative voices. This new welter of platforms and voices seeking to promulgate and validate the acceptable
terms of black leadership has made the category seem all the more beyond question, as black racial voices pop up all over the place all the
time. So, for example, the self-proclaimed black voice Tia Oso was brought front and center in the 2015 Netroots Presidential Town Hall
featuring Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders, where she proclaimed that “black leadership must be foregrounded and central to progressive
strategies.” Likewise, the presumed moral authority of race leadership enabled Marissa Johnson and Mara Jacqueline Willaford to prevent
Sanders from speaking at a Social Security rally in Seattle – as though the long-term viability of Social Security were not a black issue. The
instant recourse to a posture of leadership is how random Black Lives Matter activists and a vast corps of
pundits and bloggers are able to issue ex cathedra declarations about which issues are and are not
pertinent to black Americans. Voices in a Political Vacuum The freelance black leader – and its more recent, superficially more
pluralist incarnation, the black “voice” – is a legacy harking back to the era of massive black disfranchisement at the end of the nineteenth
century. It also has drawn considerable staying power from the amorphous concept of “race relations,” according to which, in the judgment of
historian Michael R. West in his 2006 study The Education of Booker T. Washington, “blacks and whites – or ‘black America’ and ‘white America’
– are basic, indivisible units of political interest. . . . The race relations framework appealed to white elites because it sidestepped the
troublesome fact of blacks’ constitutional claims to full and equal citizenship by proposing a focus on the evanescent issue of how the ‘races’
relate as an alternative to matters like denial of rights and equal protection under the law.” West also notes that “interests and aspirations of
politicians and ministers, workers and businessmen, parents and teachers would no longer be expressed by way of the normal, if potentially
messy, institutional channels through which Americans settled their conflicts and competition. Instead, they would be mediated through the
good offices of ‘Negro leaders,’ ever mindful of where their mandate comes from and the requirement placed on them as a first principle ‘to
cement the friendship of the two races.’” The warrant to cement the friendship of the races, of course, meant framing racial comity on terms
acceptable to the dominant white elites who ratified claims to black leadership and decided which of those claims were “responsible” or “right-
thinking.” The race-relations mindset also shaped the ideological outlook of racial advocacy and uplift groups like the National Urban League
and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Both groups, for example, were hesitant to support labor organization for
black workers during the Great Depression since they relied on donations from liberal funders steeped in anti-union sentiments; also, apostles
of racial uplift tended to come from a professional-managerial background themselves, again highlighting the extent to which there has always
been a class dimension to black politics. None
of this is to suggest that claimants to race leadership even in the Bookerite
era were dupes or supplicants who were not sincerely committed “race men” and “race women” in the parlance of the time.
Rather, as Warren, West, and others have argued, the stratum of the black population that tended to incubate aspiring race
leaders also cohered around views of proper racial agendas – what the “race” needed and how its position
in the world could be advanced, i.e., what constituted “uplift” – that also reflected the priorities of philanthropic
elites. These mutually dependent groups were likely to share a baseline sense of how American society should be structured – and specifically
of how to manage existing class hierarchies so as to better navigate blacks’ place within them. That said, most racial advocates were doubtless
more committed than their patrons to the pursuit of full equality of opportunity. The Revolution Will Be Televised The terms of this tacit social
contract shifted with the victories of the civil rights movement and the cultural insurgencies of the 1960s and 1970s; suddenly, raw racial
subordination no longer commanded uncritical assent from the liberal wing of the American power elite. At the same time,
though, this civil rights revolution and its aftermath worked to obscure the striking continuity in the underlying
socioeconomic dynamics that continue to validate race leaders, spokespersons, or representative voices.
The open – or at least public – performance of supplication before powerful elites is no longer necessary or desirable for validation. Indeed,
Black Power “militancy” and various cultural-separatist projects aligned with black nationalism
supported new claimants’ discourse of authenticity – one that gained wider credence via assertive demands for equal power
instead of humble requests for recognition. On the surface, at least, it now appeared that the essentially dependent relation
between white liberal arbiters or power and their black counterparts had morphed into something more radical. And this new
assertive liturgy of dependence works to the benefit of both grantors and grantees of political legitimacy and economic largess – players who all
shared a stake in projecting an appearance of the anointed’s racial authenticity. Today,
this liturgy is everywhere on display –
along with the same power dynamics that sustain it. In academic institutions and programs, op-ed pages,
magazines and blogs, and of course cable television newschat programs, we see a steady stream of racial voices
and leaders plotting out the permissible boundaries of black authenticity and black leadership values. This
surface accord within the charmed circle of soi-disant black leaders reinforces the illusion, just as was the
case in the aftermath of the civil rights era, that they have all emerged from the grassroots. The increasing significance of the corporate
newsfotainment industry means that things could scarcely seem otherwise to most casual viewers and audiences. The leading
platforms of respectable black discourse – including the various internet platforms that encourage freelance chatter – reinforce the sense that
those purportingto express the black point of view arise naturally from within the quasi-mythic “black
community.” But of course the immediacy of all these venues, despite their many claims to have vanquished old-guard
“gatekeepers” and “legacy media” forums, has rendered the selection processes behind the elevation of this or
that leadership “voice” almost completely opaque. Not all points of view can gain a hearing, after all. Terms
like “responsible” and “right-thinking” seldom slip into public discussion anymore because they evoke explicit subordination; nevertheless,
sporadic calls for recognized black voices to distance themselves from “extremist” or otherwise unacceptable views expressed by other black
“voices” – most recently via another predictably vile anti-Semitic utterance from Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan – reveal that such
criteria are critical in setting the boundaries of public legitimacy for aspiring black leaders. Another telling instance of the same dynamic
ocurred when Keith Ellison, the African American Muslim congressman from Minnesota, sought to chair the Democratic National Committee as
a Sanders supporter; here again, the sensible centrist consensus counteroffensive depicted Ellison as simply too fringe and divisive a figure to
command authority in the sacred political mainstream. Alongside the close vetting of respectable black voices in the media mainstream
there’s been a prolonged atrophy of popular political mobilization behind issues of economic equity for
black Americans. Taken together, these trends have opened a shortcut path to broader public recognition for
self-styled race leaders. For more than a decade, it has been common to encounter young people who enter graduate
programs in order to prepare for careers as racial voices or “public intellectuals,” hoping to obtain a credential
that can procure valuable space on the Huffington Post, the root.com, or MSNBC. In the quest for mediagenic
legitimacy, some eager race pundits have launched organizations that are barely more than letterhead or
résumé entries; these feints are likewise often accompanied by Potemkin-style protest activism, including many of
the donor-driven groups aligned with Black Lives Matter, or glorified photo-ops intended to evoke mass agitation. Among
this cohort of racial voices, the essential qualification for recognition seems to be inclination to declaim on the
intractability of an undifferentiated, ahistorical racism as a fetter on all black Americans’ life chances
across the sweep of the nation’s history. As a corollary, they’re required to insist that objection to generic
racial disparities constitutes the totality of black political concerns. Reduced and Abandoned The politics thus
advanced is profoundly race-reductionist, discounting the value of both political agency and the broad
pursuit of political alliances within a polity held to be intractably and irredeemably devoted to white
supremacy. This fatalistic outlook works seamlessly to reinforce the status of racial voices who
emphasize the interests and concerns of a singular racial collectivity. Central to these pundits’ message is the
assertion that blacks have it worse, in every socio-cultural context that might be adduced. This refrain is also consistent in
two important ways with the reigning ideology of neoliberal equality. First, the insistence that disparities of
racial access to power are the most meaningful forms of inequality strongly reinforces the neoliberal
view that inequalities generated by capitalist market forces are natural and lie beyond the scope of
intervention. And second, if American racism is an intractable, transhistorical force – indeed, an
ontological one, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has characterized it – then it lies beyond structural political intervention.
In other words, Coates and other race-firsters diminish the significance of the legislative and other
institutional victories won since Emancipation, leaving us with only exhortations to individual
conversion and repentance as a program. This is why, for example, Coates and other proponents of reparations seem
unconcerned with the strategic problem of piecing together the kind of interracial popular support
necessary to actually prevail on the issue. Such problems do not exist for them because the role of the
representative black leader or voice is precisely to function as an alternative to political action. Instead,
the order of the day is typically to perform racial authenticity in a way that doubles as an appeal for
moral recognition from those with the power to bestow it. Winning anything politically – policies or
changes in power relations – is not the point. That is why the jeremiads offered by contemporary racial voices so
commonly boil down to calls for “conversations about race” or equally vapid abstractions like “racial
reckoning” or “coming to terms with” a history defined by racism. The black leadership role was always
at best an accommodation to disfranchisement, going back to its first modern incarnation with Booker T. Washington and his
cohort of racial advocates. It is a politics of elite transaction. That is not in itself necessarily a bad thing – President Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s “black cabinet,” or Federal Council of Negro Affairs, advised him on matters related to black Americans. But unlike today’s freelance
racial voices, they were administration functionaries, and most had standing in racial advocacy, education, labor, and government institutions
prior to joining the “cabinet.” The backdoor dealings between King and Johnson during the Selma campaign that DuVernay found too messy to
include in her portrait of King’s heroic persona were also part of mundane political maneuvering, the inside-outside game of institutional
politics. King and the SCLC, like FDR’s black cabinet, had constituencies that underwrote their standing as representatives of racial interest –
which in turn gave them leverage to make political demands and pursue policy agendas. A. Philip Randolph used the March on Washington
Movement to pressure President Roosevelt in 1941 to issue “Executive Order 8802,” prohibiting racial discrimination in the national defense
industry. Randolph, Bayard Rustin, the Negro American Labor Council, and others organized the 1963 March on Washington as part of an
inside-outside strategy to build support for a jobs program and passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. All this painstaking
political effort
could not be farther from the careerist pursuits of contemporary racial voices, whose standing depends
entirely on the favor of powerful opinion-shaping elites in corporate media and elsewhere. Thus, for example,
Touré Neblett and others in MSNBC’s stable were unceremoniously expunged from the lineup of talking heads when the network reconfigured
its marketing priorities. More dramatically, Melissa Harris-Perry, apparently believing that her viewing audience gave her leverage, openly
rebuffed the network’s demand to reorient her program to fit in with its election coverage. In short order, she and her program vanished
without a trace from its schedule. Such incidents, and scores of others like them, make it indelibly clear where the lines of authority run when it
comes to winning elite-media recognition as a black voice. For Their Own Good The race voices I’ve discussed express a
particular class
perspective among black Americans, one that harmonizes with left-neoliberal notions of justice and
equality. That harmony may help explain why those racial voices – like the black political class in general – are so intent
on disparaging the social-democratic politics associated with Bernie Sanders, even though a 2017 Harvard-Harris survey found
that Sanders was far more popular with African Americans than with any other demographic category except declared Democrats. He boasted a
73 percent favorable rating among black voters – higher than his approval numbers among Hispanics, Asian-Americans, and considerably higher
than those for whites or even 18-34 year-olds. This disjunction between popular opinion and the priorities of the black chattering class
underscores the extent to which the racial programs and priorities advanced by those recognized black voices remain much as they were in the
Age of Washington. Now as then, we have a leadership stratum dedicated to the class-skewed pursuit of “managerial authority over the
nation’s Negro problem.” And the
net effect of this top-down model of black discourse is to tether a politics of
racial representation to the ruling-class agendas that generate and intensify inequality and insecurity for
working people across American society, including among the ranks of black Americans. Black Clintonites, like
Congressmen John Lewis (D-GA), James Clyburn (D-SC) and Cedric Richmond (D-LA), all clearly displayed this commitment during the 2016
Democratic primaries when they attacked Sanders as “irresponsible” in calling for non-commodified public goods in education, health care, and
other areas. Richmond’s rebuke was especially telling in that he couched it in terms of his role as chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and
the group’s “responsibility to make sure to know that young people know that” a social-democratic agenda is “too good to be true.”
Richmond’s invocation of civic instruction for the young may be revealing in another way. Lurking beneath that piety is the deeply sedimented
common sense of underclass ideology, which posits a population mired in pathologies and hemmed in by an overwhelming racism, and the
corollary of interventions aiming to enhance capabilities for individual mobility. (It is, indeed, this same tacit rhetoric of permanent crisis that
fuels the notion that black young people must be raised on a diet of inspirational movies.) This
vision of unyielding black
pathology is yet another testament to the harmony of antiracist and neoliberal ideologies – and it, too, harks
directly back to the origins of the black leadership caste at the dawn of the last century. Washington and Du Bois, together with Garvey and
other prominent racial nationalists, envisioned their core constituency as a politically mute black population in need of tutelage from their
ruling-class-backed leaders. Touré F. Reed persuasively argues that the mildly updated version of this vision now serves as an essential
cornerstone of the new black professional-managerial class politics. Underclass mythology
grounds professional-class
claims to race leadership, while providing the normative foundation of uplift programs directed toward
enhancing self-esteem rather than the material redistribution of wealth and income. Exhortations to
celebrate and demand accolades, career opportunities, and material accumulation for black celebrities and rich people – e.g., box office
receipts for black filmmakers or contracts and prestigious appointments for other well-positioned black people – as a racial politics are
consistent with the sporadic eruptions of “Buy Black” campaigns since the 1920s and 1930s. Such efforts stood out in stark contrast to more
working-class based “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns that demanded employment opportunities in establishments serving black
neighborhoods. Like “Buy Black” campaigns, which seem to have risen again from the tomb of petit-bourgeois wishful thinking, projections of
successes for the rich and famous as generic racial victories depend on a sleight-of-hand that treats benefits for any black person as benefits for
all black people. This brings to mind comedian Chris Rock’s quip that he went to his mailbox every day for two weeks after the not guilty verdict
in the O.J. Simpson murder trial looking for his “O. J. prize,” only to be disappointed. Pain and Proprietorship At times, this
tendency to
absorb the plural into the singular can be strikingly crude and transparently self-interested. The torrent of
hostility directed at Rachel Dolezal for having represented herself as black rested on groundless – sometimes entirely made up – claims that she
had appropriated jobs, awards, and other honorifics intended for blacks. In addition to the annual contretemps over whether blacks win
enough of the most prestigious Oscars, recent racial controversies in the art world illustrate how easily the narrowest guild concerns can
masquerade as burning matters of racial justice. The Brooklyn Museum’s hiring of a white person as consulting curator of African art sparked
objections that the hire perpetuated “pervasive structures of white supremacy in the art field.” The 2017 furor over
the Whitney
Biennial’s display of Dana Schutz’s “Open Casket” – inspired by the infamous 1955 photograph of Emmett Till’s brutalized body
– reduced to a question of ownership of “black suffering,” or more accurately, of the right to represent
and materially benefit from the representation of black suffering. The protesters’ objection, as Walter Benn
Michaels put it succinctly, was that “black pain belongs to black artists.” It’s worth noting that one of the leading critics of the
painting and its display was Hannah Black, who contended that “non-black people must accept that they will
never embody and cannot understand” the gesture Till’s mother, Mamie, made in insisting on an open-casket
funeral. Black, who not only called for the painting to be removed from display, but also offered an “urgent recommendation” that it be
destroyed, is a Briton who lives in Berlin. From a different standard of cultural proprietorship, one might argue that Schutz, as an American, has
a stronger claim than Black to interpret the Till story. After all, the segregationist Southern order and the struggle against that order, which
gave Till’s fate its broader social and political significance, were historically specific moments of a distinctively American experience. In fact,
most claims of cultural ownership and charges of appropriation are bogus. While sometimes they
provide an instrumental basis for tortious claims, as in pursuit of restitution for Nazi and other imperialists’ looting of
artifacts, more often they posit a dead-end conflation of fixed and impermeable racial identity with
cultural expression. As Michaels has argued for more than twenty-five years, the discourse of cultural ownership stems
from the pluralist mindset that treats “culture” as a key marker of social groups and thereby inscribes it
as racial essentialism. In order to legitimate what Michaels describes as “racial rent-seeking,” a curiously
inflexible brand of race-first neoliberalism has taken root in American political discourse, proposing a
trickle-down model of racial progress, anchored in the mysticism of organic black community. Against
this exoticized backdrop, neoliberal race leaders stage the beguiling fantasy that individual
“entrepreneurialism” is the key path to rising above one’s circumstances – i.e., the standard American
social myth that obscures the deeper need to combat systemic inequalities. The most tragic, and
pathetic, expressions of this faith are the versions of the “gospel of prosperity,” which fuse pop self-
realization psychology and a barely recognizable Christianity to exploit desperation and the desire for
life with dignity and respect among their black-majority congregations. The false hopes of the prosperity
gospel encourage already vulnerable people to fall prey to all sorts of destructive get-rich-quick
schemes; they are the “sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless
conditions” channeled through a market-idolatrous Protestant psychobabble. Black ministers and other
proponents of entrepreneurialist ideology as racial uplift also played a largely unrecognized role in
pushing subprime mortgages, and even payday loans, in black communities. The racial trickle-down
success myth is partly a vestige of an earlier era, during which individual black attainments could be seen as testaments to the
race’s capacities – and a refutation of the white-sanctioned view of black people as generally inferior. Even then, however, this model of black
uplift was enmeshed in the race theory of the time – notably the belief that a race’s capacities were indicated by the accomplishments of its
“best” individuals – and it was always inflected with the class perspectives of those who saw themselves as such individuals. The
class
legacies of this foundational moment in modern black politics may well contribute to the firm insistence
among today’s “black voices” that slavery and Jim Crow mark the transcendent truth of black Americans’
experience in the United States – and that an irreducible racism is the source of all manifest racial
inequality. That diagnosis certainly masks class asymmetries among black Americans’ circumstances as well
as in the remedies proposed to improve them. Nevertheless, we continue to indulge the politically wrong-headed,
counterproductive, and even reactionary features of the “representative black voice” industry in
whatever remains of our contemporary public sphere. And we never reckon with the truly disturbing
presumption that any black person who can gain access to the public microphone and performs familiar
rituals of “blackness” should be recognized as expressing significant racial truths and deserves our
attention. This presumption rests on the unexamined premise that blacks share a common, singular
mind that is at once radically unknowable to non-blacks and readily downloaded by any random
individual setting up shop as a racial voice. And despite what all of our age’s many heroic narratives of
individualist race-first triumph may suggest to the casual viewer, that premise is the essence of racism.
 K
The aff’s investment in ethnic-racialized identity leads to color-checking and a new
standard of “recognizable ethnicity” according to the race war – that turns the whole
aff
Gaztambide 14 Daniel, doctoral candidate at the Graduate School of Applied and Professional
Psychology, Rutgers University. He currently serves as an adjunct lecturer at Hunter College Silberman
School of Social Work, where he teaches courses on race, gender, class, and sexuality and
psychoanalytic developmental theory. He is an APA Division 39 (Psychoanalysis) liaison to the APA
Committee on Ethnic Minority Affairs and a fellow in APA's Minority Fellowship Program. “I’m not black,
I’m not white, what am I? The illusion of the color line.” Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society Vol. 19, 1, 89–97 97.

Part of what I am talking about here is what the Lacanian Latino Studies scholar Antonio Viego (2007)
refers to as “coercive mimeticism,” an institutional and social practice whereby there are certain ways
in which ethnic minorities must act, believe, dress, and be in order to present themselves as
“recognizably ethnic,” as Latino-enough, as Black-enough, as Asian-enough, and so forth. It is mimetic
insofar as one has to look into the mirror of ethnic identity and adapt oneself to that image, reproducing
a very particular ego-identity, one that is often a poor fit to one’s more immediate subjective
experience. It is also coercive in that there are institutional, cultural, and societal pressures to conform
to that notion of identity in order to find one’s place in the coordinates of race and ethnicity –
essentially, to be allotted a place on the color line. We are to take up our respective place on the
chessboard as Black or White, pawns in a much bigger and deadlier game. Here we can glean both the
imaginary and symbolic functions of racial object maps. These object maps provide coherence and
integration in the imaginary to an otherwise chaotic collection of signifiers – the racialized bodies in
which we exist. At the same time, racial object maps yield symbolic categories of me and not-me,
Black and White, and a language with which to organize and regulate closeness, distance, and racial
desire. Conversely, what is contained, or to be more precise, excluded, through the symbolic and
imaginary operations of the object map is the Real dimension of race – the ever shifting, anxiety-
producing, formless nature of the color line. When ambiguously ethnic subjects fail to see their image
in the mirror, when they are unable to play the language games of race and racial signification, there is a
noticeable discomfort and anxiety that sets in among those who partake in the production of coercive
mimeticism. The illusion of the color line comes into focus, disrupting how we see and define racialized
bodies, evoking the fragmented and uncoordinated nature of the child’s body prior to Lacan’s (2005a, b)
mirror stage. The illusion of wholeness, of being a whole body-ego – whether White, Black, or Brown –
falters, revealing the destitute, undifferentiated, and broken nature of race and racial identity. To
survive the encounter with the Real of race, I argue, paves the way for a unique kind of freedom. To give
one example, a Puerto Rican-ness is more malleable, flexible, and non-linear than one bound into one
static form and yields a fluidity that fosters experimental and novel ways of responding to oppression.
This fluidity at the same time can validate the ghosts of one’s ancestors while integrating their
wisdom into new, emancipatory potentialities. To be clear, I am not denying the importance of
addressing colorism, racism, and the privileging of white skin that exists in the Latino community and
other ethnic minorities (not to mention society as a whole). It is important for us to have that
conversation, and point out how notions of mestizaje, of hybridity in the Latino experience, may mask
underlying tensions around race and skin color, and render the relative privilege of light-skinned Latinos
such as myself invisible. At the same time, I am proposing that we also have a conversation that is
perpendicular to a critique of racism and colorism, intersecting with it but going towards a different
vector. How we exclude one another based on not meeting certain expectations about what it means
to be Latino, Asian, Black, etc., threatens to disempower us further, limiting our political power by
carving out a “minority of a minority” as opposed to sustaining often difficult conversations about our
sameness and difference. Similarly, as Baratunde Thurston (2011) points out in his recent book, How to
be Black, often this kind of black-checking or color-checking narrows our vision of what it means to be
Black (or Latino, or Asian, etc.). Reflecting on his own sense of his Blackness, he writes, “One of the
most consistent themes in my own experience… is this notion of discovering your own Blackness by
embracing the new, the different, the uncommon, and, simply, yourself” (p. 218). Color-checking
prevents us from experimenting with different forms of dis-identification which enrich, challenge, and
nourish us, and which hold the promise of new forms of resistance, emancipation, and psychosocial
revolt. As I argue, these perpendicular conversations push and pull toward different trajectories, but
have as their intersection the most crucial nexus of political, cultural, and social justice. So what am I, in
the end? I am whatever you want me to be: oppressor, oppressed, cracker, spic, enemy, friend, White,
Black, lover, fighter, masculine, effeminate, strong, weak, dead or alive. Just know that with each turn,
each attempt to define me, to mark me, to confine and bind me, you free me. Like the hysteric who
produces ever shifting configurations of symptoms in order to throw the obsessive physician off guard
(see Gherovici, 2003), I will keep producing knowledge of something else, something other, something
that is incalculable and undefinable. Something Real. For you I’ll become a Hispanic hysteric, screeching
Foucault (1972) with each symptom, with each episode of acting out, “Do not ask me who I am and do
not ask me to remain the same” (p. 17). Because in the end this is not really about me, or where I
stand on the color line. It is about your illusion about where you stand and where you place yourself
in the coordinates of race and ethnicity, of self and other, of Black and White. In that sense I function
as your blank screen, receiving your projections and identifications, hopefully returning them to you
as knowledge productions that question, destabilize, and decenter your ego, paving the way for the
subject that slides in the link between signifier and signified, that does not know if it is caused by the
signifier or the signified of race, but is instead, its own cause.

The 1ac’s revolutionary politics leads to the homogenization of difference as the role
that the 1ac comes to play is the vanguard of a revolutionary politics, a form of petty
sovereignty that legitimizes the university’s multicultural homogenization tendencies
Viego 7 – professor of ethnic studies @ Duke
(Antonio, Dead Subjects, pp. 70-1)

When Chow writes, ‘‘the level at which the ethnic person is expected to come to resemble what is
recognizably ethnic . . . to resemble and replicate the very banal preconceptions that have been appended
to them, a process in which they are expected to objectify themselves in accordance with the already
seen and thus to authenticate the familiar imaginings of them as ethnics’’ to diagnose a contemporary dilemma for
ethnic-racialized subjects in the United States, how can we not hear in it the same charge and diagnosis in Lacan’s
critique above: ‘‘But to reduce one’s function to one’s difference is to give in to a mirage that is internal to the
function itself, a mirage that grounds the function in this difference’’? If the culture of assimilation in North America has changed somewhat in
the time between Lacan’s remarks and Chow’s, it is with respect to what is to be assimilated. Instead of the 1950s edict ‘‘turn
white or disappear,’’ it’s more like ‘‘turn mottled or disappear’’ at the beginning of the twenty-first century in the
United States. According to both Lacan’s and Chow’s diagnoses, these coercive assimilatory imperatives
operate on the condition that the subject be confused with the ego and that whatever conflicts present
themselves are to be remedied with the strengthening of the ego. If Lacan can be said to link the confusion of the
subject with the ego in ego-psychological theory—the sine qua non, according to him, of the distortion of Freudian theory—to certain North
American assimilatory imperatives with which the ego psychologists had to contend, then we can say that Chow illustrates the
outcome of this confusion—of the subject with the ego—in a contemporary situation as the price to be
paid for ethnic-racialized subjects to be legible subjects in the United States. In the passage from ‘‘The Freudian
Thing,’’ we also have what qualifies as a commentary on the ‘‘privileged marginal,’’ to use John Champagne’s resonant term: ‘‘privileged
members of cultural minorities whose disciplinary role is to contain the threat of a much more radical
deployment of difference that might destabilize homogeneous intellectual culture.” The “privileged
marginal” I have in mind, depending on the particular vicissitudes of his experience in an institution
where he has been entrusted with the task of disseminating the knowledge of cultural differences—for
example, as a representative of Latino studies—will have, no doubt, been coerced or compelled to reduce his
function to his difference. He sells out. He needs the job. He is a diversity manager of souls? A manager of
diversified souls? A diversifier of managed souls? Prior to his involvement in the university’s elaboration of the
discourses on multi- culturalism and diversity, what will be defined as ‘‘diversity’’ will have already
been subjected to a kind of management, so that diversity, now inoculated, can be dispersed and
dispensed safely. The concern with safety comes from the desire to safeguard the university from any
real transformation in the politics of knowledge production that a more infectious, more generatively noxious, unsafe
notion of diversity might compel. How might the ‘‘privileged marginal’’ subject craft more transgressive uses of
her difference, to which her function has been reduced, given that the dictates of ‘‘coercive
mimeticism’’ have already worked her over in lending her pedagogical authority to begin with? Lacan might
be said to have at least once referred to something like multiculturalism: ‘‘With our jouissance going off the track, only the Other is able to
mark its position, but only insofar as we are separated from this Other. Whence certain fantasies—unheard of before the melting pot.
Leaving the Other to his own mode of jouissance, that would only be possible by not imposing our own
on him, by not thinking of him as underdeveloped.” Dylan Evans’s gloss on this passage is revealing: “But
as soon as we are forced to have recourse to the Other in order to mark the position of our own
jouissance . . . a curious paradox results. On the one hand, we need to preserve the jouissance of the
Other in order to be able to define our own; but on the other hand, we seek to destroy that Other
enjoyment because we suspect it may be more superabundant than our own.’’ We are left with a
vicious Imaginary a-dynamic: on the one hand, a ruthless refusal to grant psychical complexity to
ethnic-racialized subjects, which is to say, the refusal of the lack that generates desire and the
subject’s incalculability that springs from the human subject’s inscription in language, coupled with
the weird generosity— the compensatory psychical act of those in power—that offers a pure, riotous
Beingness followed by a kind of disgust and shame for the ethnic-racialized subject’s perceived
unbounded pleasure, which, in turn, necessitates strategies to circumscribe and destroy those very
lives.

Specifically, their analytic of a race war is bad and fixes identities around rubrics of
antagonisms
Saul Newman and Michael P. Levine 2006 -- Saul Newman is a British political theorist and central post-
anarchist thinker. Michael P. Levine is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Western Australia.
(https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/41802327.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A0bd0f7c0469462ca09e95562d8
9cde14 “War, Politics and Race: Reflections on Violence in the 'War on Terror'”) mba-alb
One of the advantages of Foucault's account is that it shows the way that the sovereign state of exception, rather than simply being a formal, conceptual relationship, intersects with different

social and cultural forces. Indeed, as Foucault shows, the historico-political dis- course of war is also a discourse of race: the idea that war
is at the basis of society, and that there is no neutral ground or universal epistemological position, springs from the idea that history is simply the recording of conflict between warring social
groups or 'races’.27 According to Foucault, this metaphorical struggle is articulated in different forms: from warring Germanic tribes, to the resentments of the Saxons against their Norman

Moreover, as the principles of war become increasingly

conquerors, to the opposition of the French nobility to the monarchy.

incorporated into the structures of sovereignty and the state, the idea of 'race war' starts to crop up in
the discourse of nineteenth century nationalist movements, in the socialist idea of class struggle, eventually finding its
ultimate and most perverse form in Nazi State racism: It will become the discourse of a battle that has
to be waged not between races, but by a race that is portrayed as the one true race, the race that
holds the power and is entitled to define the norm, against those who deviate from that norm . 28 Nazi
Racism is an extreme example of what happens when the notion of race combines with the discourse of
war and becomes inte- grated into the mechanisms of sovereign power. Thus, as Agamben also shows, the Nazi State was able to
decide on the exception by exercising an unmitigated power over the lives of millions confined in the camps and exterminated on the basis of perceived racial differ- ences. Indeed,

Foucault argues that it was precisely the discourse of war that enabled Nazism to mark out divisions in
the social field between Aryan and Jew, Slav or Gypsy. In other words, the Nazi State saw itself as being
engaged in a permanent state of war against the internal contaminants which threatened the purity
and integrity of the German nation. However, as Foucault also shows, the idea of the race war also permeates other
forms of nationalism, in which a particular group or 'nation' lays claim to a certain territory or even to a
certain set of values and principles. Indeed, as Andrew Neal suggests, the importance of Foucault's seminars on war lies in showing the way that
modern racism itself is closely bound up with and indeed has its ori- gins in, the union between
sovereignty and a collective subjectivity defined through the nation state.29 What allows nationalist
discourse to function is the designation of an enemy which threatens the integrity of the nation or
offends its ideals, an enemy with which soci- ety is at war and from which society must be defended.
Can we not see this nationalist and ultimately racist discourse in operation today? Increasingly 'the
Muslim' is constructed as the enemy, the outsider to whom our culture and 'democratic values' are entirely alien and from which we must defend ourselves. As
Neal points out, nationalism can appear in the form of the particular, nar- row identity and also as a 'universal'

set of ideals and aspirations: 'The "enemy" does not simply pose a threat to " our way of life" but frequently comes to offend the liberal universalistic ideas that
come to be expressed within national cultural and political space.'30 We can see these two articulations of nationalism operating in the

'war on terror': the desire to defend the integrity of our nation, our 'way of life'; but also universalistic claims to liberal and democratic values which
we in the West see as our gift (or to use Bush's language, God's gift) to the rest of the world. What ultimately underpins and unites these two

faces of nationalism is the need for the figure of the enemy, occupied in this case by the Muslim. In other words, despite the protestations
and reassurances of those who fight the 'war on terror' that it has nothing to do with racism, that it is not a war against Mus- lims but simply a 'war against fundamentalism, extremism and

we have to realize that this a veiled form of racism, one that is made possible by a historical
intol- erance etc',

conjuncture of war, sovereignty and politics. Foucault has charted the transformations from what was
once an anti-State discourse of race war into a form of state racism and nation- alism: 'At this point, the racist
thematic is no longer a moment in the struggle between one social group and another; it will promote
the global strategy of social conservatisms.'31 This enigmatic phrase - the promotion of a global strategy
of social conservatisms - seems to speak directly to our contemporary situation. Does it not evoke the strange resurgence of
(neo)conservative ideologies around the world today in the wake of September 1 1, the disturbing climate of preju- dice, intolerance, violence, paranoia and virulent nationalism and racism

? One of the symp- toms of the convergence of politics with war, and the eclipse
that has been unleashed at a global level

of poli- tics as an autonomous domain, has been modes of identification that seem to be emerging once
again around antagonistic social groups or 'nations': we are seeing a kind of communitarianisation of
the polit- ical and social space, in which people are once again identifying themselves according to
their community, cultural/ethnic background or religion, an identity that they see as increasingly threatened by those
who are different. The rise of anti-immigrant racism, particu- larly in Europe, might be seen in these terms: here, racist discourses have moved from extremist groups on the
margins of politics to the centre of mainstream public opinion, focussing on those immigrants and outsiders who have 'come to our country yet do not share our values and remain intolerant

So the point here is that the discourse of race war, that which posits a violent and constant
of our ways'.

antag- onism between social groups, has become fully incorporated into the mechanisms of the state,
and is rearticulated in different forms of racism and intolerance: that which is now directed towards
society's 'enemies' in whichever form they may appear. So it is not only that warfare reflects, to a great
extent, racial prejudices, but also that racism itself is animated, intensified - indeed, made possible - by
the logic and discourse of war.

Everytime they say BUT “the race war is happening,” that IS the link and a double turn
with moten
Moten, 14
(Fred, “Blackness and Nothingness”, South Atlantic Quarterly Fall 2013, p.738-740 TAT)

Over the course of this essay, we’ll have occasion to consider what that means, by way of a discussion of my preference for the terms life and
optimism over death and pessimism and in the light of Wilderson’s and Sexton’s brilliant insistence not only upon the preferential option for
blackness but also upon the requirement of the most painstaking and painful attention to our damnation, a term I prefer to wretchedness, after
the example of Miguel Mellino, not simply because it is a more literal translation of Fanon (though often, with regard to Fanon, I prefer the
particular kinds of precision that follow from what some might dismiss as mistranslation) but also because wretchedness emerges from a
standpoint that is not only not ours, that is not only one we cannot have and ought not want, but that is, in general, held within the logic of
im/possibility that delineates what subjects and citizens call the real world (Mellino 2013). But this is to say, from
the outset, not that I
will advocate the construction of a necessarily fictive standpoint of our own but that I will seek to begin to explore not just the
absence but the refusal of standpoint, to actually explore and to inhabit and to think what Bryan Wagner (2009: 1)
calls “existence without standing” from no standpoint because this is what it would truly mean to remain in the
hold of the ship (when the hold is thought with properly critical, and improperly celebratory, clarity). What would it be, deeper
still, what is it, to think from no standpoint; to think outside the desire for a standpoint? What emerges in the desire that
constitutes a certain proximity to that thought is not (just) that blackness is ontologically prior to the logistic and regulative power that is
supposed to have brought it into existence but that blackness is prior to ontology; or, in a slight variation of what Chandler would say, blackness
is the anoriginal displacement of ontology, that it is ontology’s anti- and ante-foundation, ontology’s underground, the irreparable disturbance
of ontology’s time and space. This is to say that what I do assert, not against, I think, but certainly in apposition to Afro-pessimism, as it is, at
least at one point, distilled in Sexton’s work, is not what he calls one of that project’s most polemical dimensions, “namely, that black life is not
social, or rather that black life is lived in social death” (Sexton 2011b: 28). What I assert is this: that black life—which is as surely to say life as
black thought is to say thought—is irreducibly social; that, moreover, black life is lived in political death or that it is lived, if you
will, in the burial ground of the subject by those who, insofar as they are not subjects, are also not, in the interminable (as
opposed to the last) analysis, “death-bound,” as Abdul JanMohamed (2005) would say. In this, however, I also agree with Sexton insofar as I am
inclined to call this burial ground “the world” and to conceive of it and the desire for it as pathogenic. At stake, now, will be what the difference
is between the pathogenic and the pathological, a difference that will have been instantiated by what we might think of as the view, as well as
the point of view, of the pathologist. I don’t think I ever claimed, or meant to claim, that Afro-pessimism sees blackness as a kind of pathogen. I
think I probably do, or at least hope that it is, insofar as I bear the hope that blackness bears or is the potential to end the world. The question
concerning the point of view, or standpoint, of the pathologist is crucial but so is the question of what it is that the pathologist examines. What,
precisely, is the morbid body upon which Fanon, the pathologist, trains his eye? What is the object of his “complete lysis” (Fanon 2008: xiv)?
And if it is more proper, because more literal, to speak of a lysis of universe, rather than body, how do we think the relation between
transcendental frame and the body, or nobody, that occupies, or is banished from, its confines and powers of orientation? What I offer
here as a clarification of Sexton’s understanding of my relation to Afro-pessimism emerges
from my sense of a kind of
terminological dehiscence in Orlando Patterson’s (1982) work that emerges in what I take to be his deep but
unacknowledged affinity with and indebtedness to the work of Hannah Arendt, namely, with a distinction crucial to her
work between the social and the political. The “secular excommunication” that describes slavery for Patterson (1982:
5) is more precisely understood as the radical exclusion from a political order, which is tantamount, in Arendt’s
formulation, with something on the order of a radical relegation to the social. The problem with slavery, for Patterson, is that it is political
death, not social death; the problem is that slavery confers the paradoxically stateless status of the merely, barely living; it delineates the
inhuman as unaccommodated bios. At stake is the transvaluation or, better yet, the invaluation or antivaluation, the
extraction from the sciences of value (and from the very possibility of that necessarily fictional, but materially brutal, standpoint
that Wagner [2009: 1] calls “being a party to exchange”). Such extraction will, in turn, be the very mark and inscription
(rather than absence or eradication) of the sociality of a life, given in common, instantiated in exchange. What I am trying to
get to, by way of this terminological slide in Patterson, is the consideration of a radical disjunction between sociality
and the state-sanctioned, state-sponsored terror of power-laden intersubjectivity, which is, or would be, the
structural foundation of Patterson’s epiphenomenology of spirit. To have honor, which is, of necessity, to be a man of honor, for
Patterson, is to become a combatant in transcendental subjectivity’s perpetual civil war. To refuse the
induction that Patterson desires is to enact or perform the recognition of the constitution of civil society as
enmity, hostility, and civil butchery. It is, moreover, to consider that the unspoken violence of political
friendship constitutes a capacity for alignment and coalition that is enhanced by the unspeakable
violence that is done to what and whom the political excludes. This is to say that, yes, I am in total agreement with the
Afro-pessimistic understanding of blackness as exterior to civil society and, moreover, as unmappable within the cosmological grid of the
transcendental subject. However,
I understand civil society and the coordinates of the transcendental
aesthetic—cognate as they are not with the failed but rather with the successful state and its abstract, equivalent citizens—to be the
fundamentally and essentially antisocial nursery for a necessarily necropolitical imitation of life. So that
if Afro-pessimists say that social life is not the condition of black life but is, rather, the political field that would surround it, then that’s a
formulation with which I would agree. Social
death is not imposed upon blackness by or from the standpoint or
positionality of the political; rather, it is the field of the political, from which blackness is relegated to
the supposedly undifferentiated mass or blob of the social, which is, in any case, where and what
blackness chooses to stay.

The alternative is to un-enlist – true undercommons requires absolute vulnerability

and unconditionality as opposed to the aff’s line-drawing and embrace of antagonism
– this is what the 1AC’s authors actually advocate for
Moten and Harney, 13
(Fred and Stefano, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, p.38 TAT)

The critical academic questions the university, questions the state, questions art, politics, culture. But in
the undercommons it is “no questions asked.” It is unconditional – the door swings open for refuge
even though it may let in police agents and destruction. The questions are superfluous in the
undercommons. If you don’t know, why ask? The only question left on the surface is what can it mean
to be critical when the professional defines himself or herself as one who is critical of negligence, while
negligence defines professionalization? Would it not mean that to be critical of the university would
make one the professional par excellence, more negligent than any other? To distance oneself
professionally through critique, is this not the most active consent to privatize the social individual?
The undercommons might by contrast be understood as wary of critique, weary of it, and at the same
time dedicated to the collectivity of its future, the collectivity that may come to be its future. The
undercommons in some ways tries to escape from critique and its degradation as university-
consciousness and self-consciousness about university-consciousness, retreating, as Adrian Piper says,
into the external world.

This maroon community, if it exists, therefore also seeks to escape the fiat of the ends of man. The
sovereign’s army of academic antihumanism will pursue this negative community into the
Undercommons, seeking to conscript it, needing to conscript it. But as seductive as this critique may
be, as provoked as it may be, in the Undercommons they know it is not love. Between the fiat of the
ends and the ethics of new beginnings, the Undercommons abides, and some find comfort in this.
Comfort for the emigrants from conscription, not to be ready for humanity and who must endure the
return of humanity nonetheless, as it may be endured by those who will or must endure it, as certainly
those of the Undercommons endure it, always in the break, always the supplement of the General
Intellect and its source. When the critical academic who lives by fiat (of others) gets no answer, no
commitment, from the Undercommons, well then certainly the conclusion will come: they are not
practical, not serious about change, not rigorous, not productive.

Meanwhile, that critical academic in the university, in the circle of the American state, questions the
university. He claims to be critical of the negligence of the university. But is he not the most
accomplished professional in his studied negligence? If the labor upon labor, the labor among labor of
the unprofessionals in the university sparks revolt, retreat, release, does the labor of the critical
academic not involve a mockery of this first labor, a performance that is finally in its lack of concern for
what it parodies, negligent? Does the questioning of the critical academic not become a pacification? Or,
to put it plainly, does the critical academic not teach how to deny precisely what one produces with
others, and is this not the lesson the professions return to the university to learn again and again? Is the
critical academic then not dedicated to what Michael E. Brown phrased the impoverishment, the
immiseration, of society’s cooperative prospects? This is the professional course of action. This
enlightenment-type charade is utterly negligent in its critique, a negligence that disavows the
possibility of a thought of outside, a nonplace called the Undercommons—the nonplace that must be
thought outside to be sensed inside, from whom the enlightenment-type charade has stolen everything
for its game.
 Case
political hope is not intrinsic to being topical -- disenchanted view of the law
recognizes the law’s futility while still using it as a rallying point for social organization
and community empowerment
Harris 94 -- Angela P Harris, self described race and feminist scholar who teaches law at UC Davis in 1994 (Angela P. Harris (born c. 1959) is a legal
scholar at UC Davis School of Law, in the fields of critical race theory, feminist legal scholarship, and criminal law. She held the position of Professor of Law at UC
Berkeley School of Law, joining the faculty in 1988. In 2009, Professor Harris joined the faculty of the State University of New York at Buffalo Law School as a Visiting
Professor. In 2010, she also assumed the role of Acting Vice Dean for Research & Faculty Development.[1] In 2011, she accepted an offer to join the faculty at
the UC Davis School of Law, and began teaching as a Professor of Law in the 2011-2012 academic year.[2]California Law Review¶ July, 1994¶ 82 Calif. L. Rev. 741¶
LENGTH: 21949 words Foreword: The Jurisprudence of Reconstruction NAME: Angela P. Harris BIO: Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall
School of Law. My thanks to Sheila Foster, Ed Rubin, Marjorie Shultz, and Jan Vetter for their helpful comments on previous versions of this essay. Thanks also to the
editors at the California Law Review for their patience and persistence. Last, but not least, thanks to Jorge Sanchez for exemplary research assistance and
thoughtful, searching commentary. All mistakes, misunderstandings, and misjudgments, of course, are mine. A picture of her can be found here
http://law.scu.edu/socialjustice/women-law-stories-book-chapter-one/)

B. Jurisprudence and Disenchantment ¶ In the previous Section, I identified the development of a theory of the racialized subject as one way in
which a jurisprudence of reconstruction might aspire toward a more sophisticated modernism. Another message of the clash between
modernism and its discontents, however, is that a jurisprudence of reconstruction should aspire to disenchantment. Both the postmodern
critique and the history of "race relations" cast doubt on the ability of newer and more enlightening theories to vanquish racism. In their
commitment to anti-subordination, race-crits should not abandon rationalist reason; but rationalism may come
to represent just one among many tools of social change.¶ Disenchantment also entails giving up a certain romanticism
about the rhetorical apparatus of modernism: the belief in liberation, in the efficacy of "revolution," n184 and in racial communities as
unproblematic, harmonious "homes." A disenchanted jurisprudence of reconstruction focuses instead on the
moment to moment struggles to alleviate suffering and alienation.¶ 1. The Disenchanted Intellectual ¶ One response to
the postmodernist reduction of knowledge to power is a new - and disenchanted - attention to the function of professional intel [*779] lectuals
as a class. The post-colonialist theorist Gayatri Spivak, for example, is careful to examine the double effects of her own intellectual practices.
Writing about a conference of humanist scholars that she attended, Spivak comments, "I thought the desire to explain might be a symptom of
the desire to have a self that can control knowledge and a world that can be known." n185 The scholar's zeal for providing explanations is itself a
modernist symptom: "the possibility of explanation carries the presupposition of an explainable (even if not fully) universe and an explaining
(even if imperfectly) subject. These presuppositions assure our being." n186 In this way, Spivak calls attention to the conflict between
postmodernist intellectual theories and modernist intellectual practices.¶ Spivak goes on to argue that theacademic humanist
project of providing explanations for everything serves a particular function in contemporary capitalist
society: "Our role is to produce and be produced by the official explanations in terms of the powers that police the entire society,
emphasizing a continuity or a discontinuity with past explanations, depending on a seemingly judicious choice permitted by the play of this
power." n187 Spivak's response is to propose that the pedagogy of the humanities become self-critical and enter "the arena of cultural
explanations that questions the explanations of culture." n188¶ This awareness of the role of universities and professional academics in keeping a
particular set of political and economic relations in place is one effect of postmodernist disenchantment, and it brings us back to the critique of
normativity. As Gerald Wetlaufer has noted, the pressure of legal normativity - the demand that legal academics propose solutions that can be
implemented within the existing legal system - impels legal scholars to take the law as their client. n189 A
disenchanted jurisprudence
of reconstruction would not conclude that providing legal answers to legal questions is therefore futile or
"counterrevolutionary"; but as Spivak suggests, it would put on the agenda the need to keep in mind the larger
political and economic context of law professing as race-crits continue their theory-building.¶ One
consequence might be a reconsideration of the "race for theory" itself. If the price for admission to the academy (say, the admission by Richard
Posner that CRT really does have an idea or two to offer, after all) n190 is a hyperabstract theorizing that makes a public debate about race and
racism impossible, race-crits may want to hold assimilation into the [*780] bureaucracy of the university at arm's length. Here CRT's
engagement in the politics of difference may help keep it suspended in creative balance. A jurisprudence of reconstruction cannot afford to
become enchanted with either "theory" or "practice"; its work instead is to refuse that dichotomy.¶ 2. The Politics of Joy ¶ Another symptom of
disenchantment might be a healthy recognition of rationalism's limitations in anti-racist struggle. One consequence of this recognition is an
appreciation of scholarship as an aesthetic practice, and the positive role that emotion, joined with reason, can play in intellectual work. A
second consequence of recognizing rationalism's limitations is a greater focus on empowerment as a goal in itself, rather than simply a step
toward emancipation. The third and broadest consequence of greater attention to the limitations of rationalism might be a greater
acknowledgement of the importance of spirituality in human life generally and in racial struggle in particular. Cornel West has argued that
despite the conflicts between modernism and postmodernism, both the "bourgeois" and the "Foucaultian" models of intellectual life keep
intellectuals safely away from insurgent change. n191 West urges black intellectuals to reject this self-image, and instead to
articulate "a new "regime of truth' linked to, yet not confined by, indigenous institutional practices permeated by the kinetic
orality and emotional physicality, the rhythmic syncopation, the protean improvisation and the religious, rhetorical and
antiphonal repetition of African American life." n192¶ One way to unpack this statement is to read West as blurring the
traditional line between mind and body: between intellectuals, who work only "in the head," and artists, who are sensitive to the needs of
emotions, the body, and the spirit. n193 A
serious disenchantment with rationalism might mean an expansion of
what it means to be an "intellectual," to embrace music, art, dance, and preaching as equally honorable
as traditional "theorizing."¶ Legal storytelling contains possibilities for this kind of expansion. Part of the
power of storytelling lies in its capacity to create pleasure and other emotions. Stories can be told that do more than inform the reader of
"what really happened," or challenge the reader's assumptions about truth [*781] and objectivity. As Martha Nussbaum has argued, literature
is prized not only because of the rational information it imparts, but because it speaks to the emotions and to the soul. n194 Legal storytelling
thus has the capacity not just to engage the rational faculty, but other faculties as well. n195¶ The concept of empowerment is a second avenue
to disenchantment with reason. A key word within the politics of difference has been "empowerment": a shift of focus away from conceptions
of "power" as power over someone toward power as ability or capacity, the power to do something. n196 Barbara Christian argues that "one
must distinguish the desire for power from the need to become empowered - that is, seeing oneself as capable of and having the right to
determine one's life." n197 Empowerment is crucial within the politics of difference because of its function in resisting what
Cornel West calls nihilism: "the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important)
lovelessness." n198 Legal
concepts such as rights "empower" at least in part by creating and reinforcing a collective subject,
an action through which subordinated groups resist their subordination. n199 Through collective action in
the name of the law and through literature, individuals who are members of subordinated groups can come to
understand that they are not crazy, that they are not alone, that they have the capacity to act in the world. Empowerment
in this context is an end in itself, not a way station on the path to modernist emancipation. The search [*782] for empowerment thus draws not
only on the capacity for reason, but also on the capacity for joy. n200¶ A third possible outcome of a disenchanted jurisprudence of
reconstruction is an acknowledgement of the role of spirituality in human life. Anthony Cook argues that CRT can avoid "the charybdis of
postmodern nihilism and the scylla of modern universalism" by drawing on the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. n201 Cook calls for theory that
is inspired by "prophetic vision" and that in particular draws on humility and love, arguing that these qualities enable intellectuals to draw on
postmodernist critique without being overwhelmed by it, and to draw on modernist conceptions while still being aware of their flaws. n202¶
Cook argues that humility is a postmodernist value: "The arrogance and potential dominance associated with knowing the right answer and
knowing what is best for the oppressed must be tempered with the postmodern contingency, relativity and potential deconstruction of our
own foundations of knowledge." n203 Love, however, is a value that transcends both modernism and postmodernism. Love in the sense of the
Greek term agape, "the responsibility that accompanies being our brother's keeper," n204 is the necessary ingredient for reconstructive
transformation.¶ CRT for Cook, and for West, is part of a larger movement toward spiritual wholeness for the self and for the beloved
community, a movement that cannot be ultimately achieved by human effort and struggle alone. This movement toward wholeness, however,
is not a conventionally religious one reserved for Christians. Rather, as Cook explains:¶ Spirituality is the sincere striving for unalienated and
unfractured human connection. Spirituality is understanding the limits of our knowledge and allowing the humility fostered by such
understanding to open us to the possibilities of knowledge once impeded by the arrogance of our self-contained worlds. The spirituality that
flows from a critical and open engagement with the hyphenated space is one that focuses our attention and concern on those less fortunate -
[*783] the least of these, the wretched of the earth, the despised, dejected, and downtrodden. In understanding our own marginality, we are
prompted to understand the marginality of others who, because they are not forgotten in our critiques, are not forgotten in our visions of a
better tomorrow. n205 ¶ Here both the promise and the peril of "disenchantment" are stark. The history of religious intolerance reminds us that
the arrogance of modernism in presuming that rationalist reason is superior to every other human faculty can easily reappear in an arrogance
that presumes one's actions to be sanctified by one's spirituality. Mindful of this danger, Cook insists that King's humility and willingness to
revise his own beliefs demonstrates that spirituality need not entail demagoguery or tyranny. n206 It remains to be seen, however, whether race-
crits will adopt Dr. King's particular Christian spirituality along with his concern for social justice.¶ 3. The End of the Innocence? ¶ Finally, one
aspect of a disenchanted jurisprudence of reconstruction is a disenchantment with the romance of "race" itself. One of the comforts of
belonging to a racially subordinated community has often been the sense of being "home," the sense that everyone in the community shares a
unified perspective on the world. Modernist narratives that speak of "people of color" or subgroups thereof as a unified force draw on this
powerful yearning for home. In a postmodern world, however, it is clear that no such unity exists. How, then, can race-crits and others speak of
racial communities in ways that acknowledge this disunity?¶ Regina Austin's disenchanted vision of the black community provides one glimpse.
Austin consistently places the phrase "the black community" in quotes, in a postmodernist acknowledgement that to speak of one unified
community is problematic. As she points out, "though the ubiquitous experience of racism provides the basis for group solidarity, differences of
gender, class, geography, and political affiliations keep blacks apart." n207¶ Nevertheless, Austin does not reject the concept of the black
community altogether. Rather, she asserts that though there may not be one black community, there are black communities, consisting of
"blacks who are bound by shared economic, social, and political constraints, and who pursue their freedom through affective engagement with
each other." n208 Even these bonds do not create an automatic utopia of racial harmony. Rather, the members of black communities must
practice a "politics of identification." Quoting Stuart Hall, Austin describes the politics of identification as [*784] ¶ [a] politics ... which works
with and through difference, which is able to build those forms of solidarity and identification which make common struggle and resistance
possible but without suppressing the real heterogeneity of interests and identities, and which can effectively draw the political boundary lines
without which political contestation is impossible, without fixing those boundaries for eternity. n209 ¶ Practicing a politics of identification
recognizes that the dream of perfect unity is only a dream. It also emphasizes that racial communities, like other human communities, are the
products of invention, not discovery. There are no "people of color" waiting to be found; we must give up our romance with racial community.
n210 Abandoning romance, however, does not mean ending commitment. If any lesson of the politics of difference can yet be identified, it is that

solidarity is the product of struggle, not wishful thinking; and struggle means not only political struggle, but moral and ethical struggle as well. ¶
Conclusion ¶ In Derrick Bell's book, Faces at the Bottom of the Well, Bell adopts the position that "racism is a permanent component of
American life." n211 Surprisingly, however, Bell does not intend to counsel despair to anti-racist activists. Rather, he looks to African American
slavery as a model for the attitude he wishes us to adopt. "Knowing there was no escape, no way out, the slaves nonetheless continued to
engage themselves. To carve out a humanity. To defy the murder of selfhood. Their lives were brutally shackled, certainly - but not without
meaning despite being imprisoned." n212¶ Similarly, Bell urges contemporary anti-racists to struggle against racism in order to make their lives
meaningful rather than in the hope of someday magically sweeping racism away. The logic Bell uses in this argument is not the familiar
"either/or" logic, but a "both and" logic:¶ It
is not a matter of choosing between the pragmatic recognition that
racism is permanent no matter what we do, or an idealism based on the long-held dream of attaining a
society free of racism. Rather, it is a question of both, and. Both the recognition of the futility of action -
where action is more civil rights strategies destined to fail - and the unalterable conviction that
something must be done, that action must be taken. n213 [*785] ¶ Bell's urgings fit with the religious orientation of Anthony
Cook and Cornel West. They also fit with the reconstruction jurisprudence I have been imagining in this Foreword. Reconstructing modernism
requires both sophistication and disenchantment - both a commitment to building intellectual structures that are strong, complex, capacious,
and sound, and a knowledge that reason and logic alone will never end racism, that words alone can never break down the
barrier between ourselves and those we set out to persuade. n214 The jurisprudence of reconstruction, like the world the
slaves made, is only one of meaning - neither magic nor the abyss.

The aff overemphasizes the micro -- Ethical projects of self-creation must be tethered
from the outset to advocacy for institutional change—they demolish collective
political action
Ella Myers 13, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Gender Studies at the University of Utah,
2013, Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World, p. 44-45

Unfortunately,Connolly is inconsistent in this regard, for he also positions Foucauldian self- artistry as an “essential preliminary to,” and
even the necessary “condition of,” change at the macropolitical level.104 That is, although Connolly claims
that micropolitics and political movements work “in tandem,” each producing effects on the other,105 he sometimes privileges
“action by the self on itself” as a starting point and necessary prelude to macropolitical change. This
approach not only avoids the question of the genesis of such reflexive action and its possible harmful
effects but also indicates that collective efforts to alter social conditions actually await proper
techniques of the self . For example, in a rich discussion of criminal punishment in the United States, Connolly contends that “today the
micropolitics of desire in the domain of criminal violence has become a condition for a macropolitics
that reconfigures existing relations between class, race, crime and punishment.”106 Here and elsewhere in Connolly’s writing
the sequencing renders these activities primary and secondary rather than mutually inspiring and
reinforcing.107 It is a mistake to grant chronological primacy to ethical self-intervention , however. How, after all, is
such intervention, credited with producing salient effects at the macropolitical level, going to get off the
ground , so to speak, or assuredly move in the direction of democratic engagement (rather than withdrawal , for
example) if it is not tethered, from the beginning, to public claims that direct attention to a specific problem,

defined as publicly significant and changeable? How and why would an individual take up reflexive work
on the desire to punish if she were not already attuned, at least partially, to problems afflicting current criminal
punishment practices? And that attunement is fostered, crucially, by the macropolitical efforts of
democratic actors who define a public matter of concern and elicit the attention of other citizens.108 For reflexive self- care to be
democratically significant, it must be inspired by and continually connected to larger political
mobilizations . Connolly sometimes acknowledges that the arts of the self he celebrates are not themselves
the starting point of collaborative action but instead exist in a dynamic, reciprocal relation with
cooperative and antagonistic efforts to shape collective arrangements. Yet the self’s relation with itself
is also treated as a privileged site , the very source of democratic spirit and action. This tendency to prioritize the self’s
reflexive relationship over other modes of relation defines the therapeutic ethics that ultimately emerges out of Foucault’s and,
to a lesser degree, Connolly’s work. This ethics not only elides differences between caring for oneself and caring for

conditions but also celebrates the former as primary or, as Foucault says, “ ontologically prior .” An ethics centered on
the self’s engagement with itself may have value, but it is not an ethics fit for democracy.

Learning to seize power through debating institutional dynamics is a more effective

political strategy. Empirics prove black radical activism is effectively solving now, but
only because it targets governments strategically and pragmatically.
Lester Spence 15. Poli Sci Prof @ John Hopkins. 2015. “Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn
in Black Politics.” pp. 140-147.

All four examples have a few things in common. First all occurred at a moment where all seemed lost. While
I wouldn’t go as far as to suggest that these events suggest that neoliberalism is “naturally” contested—just as there is no “good teaching gene”
there is no “contest neoliberalism gene”—I would say that while the neoliberal turn has signifcantly altered our ability to
argue for public goods, it hasn’t killed that ability. It still exists. It exists in institutions we have written of
thinking they are no longer relevant—like teachers unions. It exists in populations we’ve written of because
we believe they are incapable of radical political action— black youth. It exists in cities that we don’t
think of as having a long history of radical political struggle —like Jackson, Mississippi. Second all three
recognized the fundamental role politics played in their struggles. The black youth organizers recognized that they had to
pressure Maryland state legislators to kill the prison. The black radicals in the Malcolm X Grassroots
Movement made electing Chokwe Lumumba a component of their organizing. The CTU chose to take the
city head on and to hold a series of town hall meetings designed to inform people of the ways political
officials, philanthropists, and corporations are working together to neoliberalize and kill public
education. The #blacklivesmatter movement recognized that politics was at the center of their struggle
in Ferguson, Baltimore, and elsewhere. All campaigns used moral language in making their arguments. In Jackson they argued
that the current way power was allocated in Jackson was immoral because it largely concentrated all of the benefits into a few (predominantly
white) hands. In Baltimore they argued that putting $104 million to the goal of incarcerating youth was immoral given the lack of money being
spent on youth in other areas, and later that Freddie Gray’s (and before him Tyrone West’s) murder was immoral. In Chicago they argued that
closing 50 schools was immoral because it severely impacted the ability of poor black parents and black students to get the same degree of
learning their white counterparts had. However, they didn’t rely on those arguments. They understood that seizing
power (rather than speaking truth to it), that proposing new alternatives, would at some level have to
involve political struggle. Morality wasn’t enough. Even if we had a common defnition of morality, a Christian-infuenced morality for
example, that sense of morality could still be interpreted in diferent ways based on material interest. Relying on morality can make
it hard to move against the wealthy charter school proponent who sincerely believes that privatizing
public schools represent the best hope for increasing positive outcomes among black children. Relying on morality can make it
very difficult to argue against the political bureaucrat who says — as they did in the case of Baltimore —that the conditions of youth currently
held in adult prisons is so bad that the moral choice would be to give them their own facility where they won’t have to face the risks associated
with being housed with adults. In
deciding how we go about making our arguments and how we go about
choosing our strategies and tactics we should act morally—I do believe our politics have to be rooted in a certain sense of
ethics. We should never, however, ignore the fundamental role politics plays and should play i

n our struggle. Not only did they focus on politics, they

all relied on political organizing. Organizing that included long
discussions about political issues that mattered, but also parties and other events designed to get people
working with each other and trusting one another. In general, people do not come to a common
understanding of the structural dynamics of the problem they face, and to a common understanding of
what the solution should be, through being exposed to a charismatic speaker, or through “loving black people”,
without having the space to talk about the issues in depth over a long period of time. The CTU organized for
several years to be able to get a 90% vote. The infrastructure black youth in Baltimore relied upon was by definition designed to inculcate
critical thinking skills as well as a sense of the way racism worked at structuring black life chances. The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement
worked for years to build the critical capacity required to elect Chokwe, first to the City Council, then Mayor, and to put the political platform
into action. There is no way to get around the fact that the type of work we have to do to rebuild a sense of the public interest is going to take a
long time and has to start by building connections between people who may not think of themselves as political, who may not think of the
various issues they struggle with as being the product of the neoliberal turn, who may not know what neoliberalism is. What I am referring to
here is not the same as getting people to attend a rally or a march. I’m
referring to political organizing— building the capacity of
people to govern and make important political decisions for themselves —not political “mobilizing”.
Mobilizing people for a protest act of one kind or another may get people out to engage in a specific act,
but unless combined with organizing work, will not cause those people to organize for themselves. Tird in
each case they were not only reactive, they were not only being critical of the turn and its efects, they proposed a positive alternative.
Protest is not enough. Just as the neoliberal turn did not simply occur when the welfare state was
removed, rather it occurred when the welfare state was removed and then replaced with a new
program, we will not be able to build a sustainable constituency for a new world without articulating as
clearly as possible what that new world will look like, what type of policies would result, what the benefits
of those policies would be. Fourth while each of these instances represent responses against the neoliberal turn broadly considered,
they each began locally. Te Malcolm X Grassroots Movement has several chapters throughout the country and has already held one conference
(planned before Lumumba’s untimely passing) about the Jackson model (which itself is partially based on ideas developed in Spain) and how to
export it to other cities. Te movement against the proposed youth jail in Baltimore relied in part on data accumulated by the ACLU on the
schoolto-prison pipeline. And as I noted above the Chicago Teachers Union have begun organizing events all across the country to get people to
understand how the privatization movement in education afects them. And each of the #blacklivesmatter campaigns began with a specifc local
act of police brutality and used that act to organize locally. With this said though each case represents a local struggle people could experience
directly. Mark Purcell (2006) argues that academics and activists alike run the risk of falling into the “local trap” by arguing that there is
something inherently better and anti-neoliberal about organizing locally. I agree with him a little. Te Civil Rights Movement represented in large
part a fght against white supremacy as embedded in local and state politics —the local was not the site of empowerment but rather the site of
profound disempowerment for black people throughout the North and the South. However at the same time I argue that sustainable organizing
is more likely to occur in response to a local issue (a local school closing, a rise in foreclosures in a local neighborhood, a jail built up the road, a
local referendum) that can then be connected to other local issues and made national rather than the other way around. And again the Civil
Rights Movement represents the best example of this —people weren’t interested in ending Jim Crow as much as they were interested in
desegregating the buses they took to work everyday, desegregating the restaurants they passed on the way to school, desegregating the
schools themselves. Fifth they used a variety of black institutions in their struggles. Te Baltimore youth all attended black public schools in
Baltimore. Tey used the public schools to garner support for their work and to build relationships with black adults and black children. While a
number of Baltimore area churches do promote the prosperity gospel, not all do. A few black churches in Baltimore became critical spaces for
organizing against the jail—in fact I ended up fnding out about the movement against the jail in the frst place through hearing a young
progressive black nationalist Baltimore pastor speak about the movement. And they used popular culture. Tey used poetry, they used rap and
hip-hop, they used parties, understanding that while again the national terrain for hip-hop may move with rather than against the neoliberal
turn, they themselves could use it to speak to their local condition. And later they used these same institutions and spaces for their fght against
police brutality. Similarly in Jackson the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement did not operate from a clean slate. Tey relied on professors from
nearby Jackson State University, they used connections with local churches to gain support for their activities. And the CTU was itself located in
one of the most important institutions in black communities, schools. Lastly, they all relied on the fundamental premise that black people had
the capacity to be the change they wanted to see in the world. Tey neither believed that black people’s fundamental condition was bruised and
broken, nor did they believe that black people because of the contemporary condition didn’t love each other. At the same time though they
understood explicitly and implicitly that love was not enough. And while each organization does have a number of leaders they have largely
(though not fully) stayed away from the type of prophetic politics that have often created problematic internal hierarchies. Again there are
signifcant diferences between these instances. And even though each of these instances were victorious ones that helped to change the terrain
of political struggle, there is still much more to be done. In the case of Baltimore they stopped the youth jail but were not able to stop the
privatization of Baltimore youth recreation centers, nor have they been able to (as of yet) redirect the $104 million to more progressive ends.
Jackson elected Lumumba mayor but after his untimely passing his son ended up coming in second. Chicago teachers made substantial gains as
a result of the strike but they were not able to prevent the 50 schools from being closed. Te #blacklivesmatter movement as it stands has not
gone without critique. Te most notable one is that even though the project has increased the range of black lives that people are willing to fght
for, it still hasn’t gone far enough. Although it’s reasonable to assume, based on the limited data we have, that black boys and young men are
victimized by police more than other populations (and to the extent the zero-tolerance technology itself generates broader forms of policing in
places like schools), black boys and young men are not the sole target. Black women have been victimized both directly and indirectly by police,
as have black transgender populations. These acts have in many instances been as violent as those perpetrated against their male counterparts,
and they have been videotaped as well. But they haven’t garnered the same degree of support and/or outrage. Extending the #blacklivesmatter
movement to include the lives of black women and transgender populations that are also the victims of police violence would be more than
simply a good thing. However there’s a more systemic problem at work. Te idea behind “black lives matters” represents an opportunity to
organize around and against a certain type of sufering, a uniquely black sufering, made possible by the neoliberal turn. (It bears repeating, this
is not simply the “new Jim Crow” at work. Te odds that someone like me would sufer the type of horrifc death someone like Freddie Gray did is
very slim.) However the politics of the #blacklivesmatter movement do not quite match the phrase. Every single time the #blacklivesmatters
movement appears it does so in the presence of either a horrifc instance of black death or a startling instance of police brutality. One could
argue given this that the real politics of the movement refect the concept that (graphic) black death matters rather than black life. Tis move
makes a great deal of sense — one way to think about this move is to think about the way civil rights movement activists used non-violence.
Particularly when news cameras were present, non-violent tactics of protest tended to really highlight how violent and terroristic white
supremacy in the South and other places was. However, by privileging the graphic black death, the victim shot in his back while running away,
the victim who had his back violently broken by police, it ends up ignoring the many forms of non-graphic black death that occurs not because
of police violence per se, but because of economic violence. If Freddie Gray weren’t murdered by the police but rather experienced a slow
death due to lead poisoning it’s unlikely we’d be talking about him right now. It’d be unlikely that Baltimore would’ve had anything like an
uprising. Following up, by privileging black death, graphic black death, we privilege certain types of tactics, strategies, and institutions. We
counter the spectacle of the murder with the spectacle of the mass assembly, in the form of the protest march, or the spectacle of the mass
disruption, in the form of the highway stoppage, or even in the form of the type of violent actvity the uprising hinted at. Actions in other words
that are not only designed to transform the event into a black-and-white catalytic moment where people and the institutions around them feel
forced to make a choice for the status quo or against it. And the organizations and institutions we call into being end up being those designed
to generate these types of activities and to generate support for these activities (in order to grow the organizations and institutions
themselves). As far as solutions go, we also privilege anti-police legislation, and perhaps more broadly, legislation designed to counter the
school to prison pipeline. Te political solution for black life matters is to reduce the likelihood of a graphic singular black death— a kid shot on
the way to the corner store, a young man shot while holding a BB gun he may have planned on purchasing, a black couple driving a car with a
tendency to backfre. Te types of politics that generate change when the deaths come slow, painfully, and in aggregates, or when the issue is an
entire legal framework (like the Maryland Law Enforcement Ofcers Bill of Rights) is a diferent politics. It is not solely or primarily a politics of the
spectacle. Spectacle can work here in instances. It can be used to mobilize support. It can be used to increase awareness and general
participation. And sometimes in combination with other tactics it can be used to disrupt. To generate and prolong crises. Te types of crises that
engendered the same type of problems that caused the neoliberal turn. Certainly in the case of Baltimore a range of institutions and elites had
no ready-to-roll-out solutions to the issues that the uprising called up. But these aren’t enough. It requires a politics attuned to the type of long
term institution building that builds the capacity of individuals to govern and devise alternatives themselves. It also requires a solution set that
is more about combating the type of long term institutional violence that doesn’t necessarily have a Trayvon Martin or a Freddie Gray at the
center. Te types of violence that, instead might have Freddie Gray at the center, but not at the moment of his murder but at the moment he
was found to have lead poisoning. I use these examples in order to argue that we aren’t starting from scratch necessarily— some of the work is
already being done on the ground. I
use these examples in order to show that we already have the seeds for a
new institutional framework that re-roots the economy in politics and in the public interest. To show
that we aren’t alone, and that a number of people recognize another way of life is possible. There aren’t
as many of us as we’d like, but there are far more of us than we think.