Tournament: Pitt RR | Round: 4 | Opponent: Kentucky GR | Judge: Bruce Najor
1AC
For example, my body, my people have been targeted for killings and torture because the color of our skin justifies gratuitous violence under the logic of white supremacy.Deviation from whiteness has situated us as black. And thus disposable.
Sakai in 1989 explained that…
Influential Contemporary Liberationist Thinker
(J. Sakai, “Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat”, Published by the Morningstar Press. Third Addition 1989)
In the Philippines the liberation struggle had ¶ alreadv reached the formation of a new Filipino Govern- ¶ ment.-s¶ purred on by the Katipunan, the secret armed ¶ organization of workers and peasants, the revolutionaries ¶ had created a large peoples' army. By the time the first ¶ U.S. troops landed on June 30, 1898, the Filipino revolu- ¶ tionaries had already swept the Spanish Colonial Army ¶ and administration out of virtually the whole of the Philip- ¶ pines, besieging the last isolated holdouts in the old walled ¶ city of Manila. Under the pretext of being "allies" of the ¶ Filipinos, U.S. troops landed and joined the siege of the ¶ Spanish remnants. It is a fact that in the siege the Filipino ¶ patriots held 15 miles of the lines facing the Spanish destroying all organized social and economic life in guer- ¶ rilla areas. Villages would be burned down, crops and ¶ livestock destroyed, diseases spread, the People killed or ¶ forced to evacuate as refugees. Large areas were declared ¶ as "free fire zones" in which all Filipinos were to be killed ¶ on sight. (12) ¶ Of course, evenEuro-Amerikan settlers needed ¶ some indoctrination in order to daily carry out such ¶ crimes. Indiscriminate killing, looting and torture were ¶ publicly encouraged by the U.S. Army command.¶ Amerikanreporters were invited to witness the daily tor- ¶ ture sessions, in which Filpinos would be subjected to the ¶ "watercure" (having salt water pumped into their ¶ stomachs under pressure). The Boston Herald said: ¶ "Our troops in the Philippines ... look upon all ¶ Filipinos as of one race and condition, and being dark¶ men, they are therefore 'niggers', and entitled to all the ¶ contempt and harsh treatment administered by white ¶ overlords to the most inferior races." (13) ¶ U.S. Imperialism took the Philippines by literally ¶ turning whole regions intosmolderinggraveyards. U.S. ¶ Brig. Gen. JamesBell, upon returning to the U.S. in 1901, ¶ said thathis men hadkilled one out of every six Filipinos ¶ on the main island of Luzon (that would be some one ¶ million deaths just there). It is certain that at least 200,000 ¶ Filipinos died in the genocidal conquest. In Samar pro- ¶ vince, where the patriotic resistance to the U.S. invaders ¶ wasextremelypersistent, U.S. Gen. JacobSmith ordered ¶ his troops to shoot every Filipino man, woman or child ¶ they could find "over ten" (years of age). (14)
Thus, We advocate black liberation as strategic resistance to the regime of targeted killing.
THIRD, The Filipino tradition of resistance – Countless groups across the Philipines have mounted resistance struggles against the intervention of white powers – the people power movement that my family experienced in the 80s was not only accessible it created activist networks for generations to continue the struggle against white supremacist state-building
Deats 11 (Richard, Super Consciousness, "The People Power Revolution in the Philippines," http://www.superconsciousness.com/topics/society/people-power-revolution-philippines)
In l986 millions of unarmed Filipinos surprised the world by nonviolently overthrowing the brutal dictator Ferdinand Marcos, known at the time as “the Hitler of Southeast Asia.” They called their movement “people power,” demonstrating in an amazing way the power of active nonviolence, the power of truth and love, similar to what was seen in the Gandhian freedom struggle in India and the civil rights movement in the United States. Beginning with the assassination in l983 of the popular opposition leader Senator Benigno (Ninoy) Aquino, the movement against Marcos grew rapidly. Imprisoned for seven years by Marcos, Aquino had experienced a deep conversion in his concentrated study of the Bible and Gandhi. This led him to begin advocating a nonviolent revolution against dictatorship. His subsequent martyrdom fueled the determination of many Filipinos to continue in his radical nonviolent path. I felt a strong affinity with this emerging movement. I had taught social ethics at Union Theological Seminary in the Philippines for thirteen years. Coming from the southern US where I was part of the civil rights struggle, the parallels with the Philippine situation were strong: Martin Luther King, Jr., the leading spokesman of the nonviolent movement against entrenched injustice had also been killed but his message and approach lived on. In 1984, the Little Sisters of Jesus, a community of nuns who worked among the poorest of the poor in metropolitan Manila, took it upon themselves to contact Jean and Hildegard Goss-Mayr, nonviolence lecturers and trainers in Europe who had worked for many years for the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR) in situations of revolution and war. The nuns asked the Goss-Mayrs, a French-Austrian couple, to come to the Philippines to help assess the situation. Having lived under Nazism in World War II, they were acquainted with struggling against tyranny. They came and met with church leaders (the country is over ninety percent Christian), peasants, labor and student leaders and community organizers. Out of these meetings came the decision to build a nonviolent movement that would oppose the dictatorship. Also a part of the IFOR and having lived and worked in the Philippines, I joined in this campaign. Long active in anti-war efforts and the civil rights movement, I returned to the Philippines and joined in the nonviolence trainings, accompanied by Stefan Merken, Jewish pacifist, photographer and writer also active in the IFOR. Our training team consisted of myself, Merken and Professor Hilario Gomez and six students from Union Seminary who were part of an activist group, FOJ— Friends of Jesus. Our efforts spread over a wide swath of Luzon, the main island of the Philippines. We traveled by public bus from place to place where our workshops were held: in local churches, a rural life center, a college, a labor center and at the headquarters of the National Council of Churches. Due to dictatorial rule in the country, we tried to keep “under the radar” so as not to be arrested should the content of our workshops become known to the government. The trainings were for invited persons only and were not publicly announced or noticed. After an opening worship, with hymns and prayers, at each workshop Gomez presented a socio/political analysis of the country-the Filipinos called such a lecture a “situationer.” Then Gomez and I talked about the nonviolent understanding of biblical faith that pursues justice, that stands with the oppressed and that challenges cruel authority as was seen in the biblical prophets, in Jesus, in the Asian Gandhi and the African-American King. We did role plays, where participants would take assigned parts, such as a tenant farmer dealing with an oppressive landlord, or a worker stopped by an armed soldier for questioning. We talked about “the pillars of oppression”, e.g., the army, the government, the upper class. Participants shared their opinions and experiences and began to feel strength that came from verbalizing and acting out internal struggles that often had been held in silence. Learning of what had happened in India, in the US and other places was a powerful incentive for action. Ordinary people had done extraordinary things creating a contagion out of which movements had been born. Merken fascinated the participants with his Jewish perspective on biblical nonviolence. Most of them in this Asian nation had never even met a Jew, much less heard a Jewish pacifist discuss the first recorded act of civil disobedience when a midwife disobeyed the king’s edict to kill Hebrew male babies by hiding the infant Moses in the bulrushes, thereby saving his life. So nonviolent resistance wasn’t just a Gandhian idea! We had lively discussions. There was universal disgust with dictatorship but some thought one just had to passively endure it. “Bahala na” they would say, a Filipino expression that means “That’s just the way things are, the way they will be.” Others thought only violence could be effective against evil oppressors. As a bishop said to me, “I used to believe in nonviolence but Marcos is too cruel; only a bloody revolution will work against him.” When I asked him how long such a revolution would take, he said, “Ten years.” (Neither of us had any idea, of course, that less than a year later Marcos would have fled the country when faced with nonviolent masses of Filipinos). Others refused to sanction violence even in a just struggle. Some had heard I worked for the CIA; others had heard I was really a communist! But some had heard that I was part of monthly vigils against the Vietnam War; others had been my students in seminary and had seen me at student demonstrations favoring democracy. The workshop became a safe place where these contradictory ideas and accusations were aired. Along with vigorous discussion were also moments of humor that joined us together in shared laughter. Through it all, the examination of Gandhi, King and Aquino led to an emerging understanding that, as Dr. King had said, “The arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice.” Perhaps the time of reckoning was at hand. The martyrdom of Senator Aquino heightened the determination of the people to end their long tyranny. Maybe his death was a signpost, not another dead end. The seeds planted in the workshops among Catholics, Protestants, Muslims and others of no particular faith; clergy and laity, intellectuals, students, peasant and labor leaders began to give birth to intensive efforts around the country to build a resistance community. Little by little, but also in unexpected leaps and bounds, there emerged a solid core of activists - including many key leaders - ready for a showdown with the Marcos dictatorship. The workshops of 1984 and 1985 were catalysts that awakened new possibilities into being. Age old habits of fatalism gave way to a determination for a better future. From cardinals and bishops to local priests and nuns, ministers and women deacons, brave students and farmers, a chorus rang out calling for change - dangerous and daring but absolutely necessary. Activists sprang into action, breathing new life into communities, forming new organizations, boldly speaking out about this “third way” - active nonviolence, the path between violence and passivity. I watched in awe at the creativity and boldness of “the unarmed forces” of the Philippines.
He writes…
(YasinBey, aka Mos Def. Rapper, Actor, Political Activist, “The government’s terrorist is our community’s heroine by YasiinBey(MosDef)”, May 5, 2013
http://freedomhallblog.wordpress.com/2013/05/05/the-governments-terrorist-is-our-communitys-heroine-by-yasiin-beymos-def/)
Early in May, the federal government issued a statement in which they labeledJoanne Chesimard, known to most in the Black community asAssata Shakur, as a domestic terrorist. In so doing,theyalsoincreased the bounty on her head from $150,000 to an unprecedented $1,000,000.¶Viewed through the lens of U.S. law enforcement, Shakur is an escaped cop-killer. Viewed through the lens of many Black people, including me, she is a wrongly convicted womananda hero of epic proportions.¶My first memory of Assata Shakur was the “Wanted” posters all over my Brooklynneighborhood. They said her name was Joanne Chesimard, that she was a killer, an escaped convict, and armed and dangerous.¶They made her sound like a super-villain, like something out of a comic book. But even then, as a child, I couldn’t believe what I was being told.¶When I looked at those posters and the mug shotof a slight, brown, high-cheekboned woman with a full afro, I saw someone who looked like she was in my family, an aunt, a mother.¶ She looked like she had soul.Later, as a junior high school student, when I read her autobiography, “Assata,” I would discover that not only did she have soul, she also had immeasurableheart, courage and love.¶And I would come to believe that that very heart and soul she possessed was exactly why Assata Shakur was shot, arrested, framed and convicted of the murder of a New Jersey State Trooper.¶ There are some undisputed facts about the case. On May 2, 1973, Assata Shakur, a Black Panther, was driving down the New Jersey State Turnpike with two companions, Zayd Shakur and SundiataAcoli.¶ The three were pulled over, ostensibly for a broken tail light. A gun battle ensued; why and how it started is unclear. But the aftermath is not. Trooper Werner Forester and Zayd Shakur lay dead.¶SundiataAcodrli escaped (he was captured two days later). And Assata was shot and arrested. At trial, three neurologists would testify that the first gunshot shattered her clavicle and the second shattered the median nerve in her right hand. That testimony proved that she was sitting with her hands raised when she was fired on by police.¶ Further testimony proved that no gun residue was found on either of her hands, nor were her fingerprints found on any of the weapons located at the scene. Nevertheless, Shakur was convicted by an all-White jury and sentenced to life in prison.¶ Six years and six months to the day that she was arrested, and aided by friends, Shakur escaped from Clinton Women’s Prison in New Jersey. As a high school student, I remember seeing posters all around the Brooklyn community I lived in that read: “Assata Shakur is Welcome Here.” In 1984, she surfaced in Cuba and was granted political asylum by Fidel Castro.¶ There are those who believe that being convicted of a crime makes you guilty. But that imposes an assumption of infallibility upon our criminal justice system.¶ When Assata Shakur was convicted of killing Werner Foerster, not only had the Black Panther Party been labeled by then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover as “the greatest internal threat” to American security, but Assata herself had been thoroughly criminalized in the minds of the American public.¶ She’d been charged in six different crimes, ranging from attempted murder to bank robbery, and her acquittal or dismissal of the charges outright notwithstanding, to the average citizen, it seemed she must be guilty of something. And she was.She was guilty of calling for a shift in power in America and for racial and economic justice.¶Included on a short list of the many people who have made that call and were either criminalized, terrorized, killed or blacklisted are Paul Robeson, Martin Luther King, Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, Medgar Evers and Ida B. Wells.¶ Perhaps what is most insulting about the government’s latest attack on Assata is that while they vigorously pursue her extradition, a few years ago using it as a bargaining chip for lifting the embargo itself, they have been decidedly lackadaisical in pursuing the extradition to Venezuela of an admitted terrorist, Florida resident Luis Posada Carriles. Carriles is likely responsible for blowing up a Cuban airline in 1976, an act which claimed the lives of some 73 innocent civilians.¶ For those of us who either remember the state of the union in the 1960s and 1970s or have studied it, when we consider Assata Shakur living under political asylum in Cuba, we believe that nation is exercising its political sovereignty and in no way harboring a terrorist.¶Cubans sees Assata as I and many others in my community do: as a woman who was and is persecuted for her political beliefs.¶ When the federal government raised the bounty on her head this May 2, one official declared that Assata was merely “120 pounds of money.” For many of us in the Black community, she could never be so reduced. For many of usin the Black community,she was and remains,to use her own words,an “escaped slave,” a heroine, not unlike Harriet Tubman.
2AC
Birt 9
(Robert, “Transcendence in the Thought of bell hooks: Some Reflections on Resistance and Self-Creation” Volume 08, Number 2 Spring 2009 NEWSLETTER ON PHILOSOPHY AND THE BLACK EXPERIENCE, http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.apaonline.org/resource/collection/950518C1-3421-484C-8153-CDA6ED737182/v08n2Black.pdf)
Human being is transcendence. We are characterized more by a dynamic of becoming than the fixity of being; or rather our being is becoming. We are never wholly what we are— never merely teacher or student, worker or boss, colonizer, native, or “Negro.”1 We are always more and other than what we are. We are as perpetual surpassing, an unending going beyond. Ultimately we are human insofar as we make ourselves subject—self-creation being perhaps the most unique manifestation of human freedom. But when transcendence is thwarted by social oppression, it must assert itself as resistance if it is to thrive as self-creation. Transcendence as resistance and self-creation (sometimes politically termed “self-determination”) is an enduring theme in African-American thought. This essay offers brief reflections on this theme in bell hooks, though only in a thin slice of her copious works. bell hooks does not philosophically thematize transcendence, but it is central to her conception of subjectivity—especially “radical black subjectivity.”2 Whether she is discoursing on “postmodern blackness,” making critiques of racial essentialism, challenging “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” or promoting the “decolonization” of black consciousness, hooks’ essential concern is the enabling of self- creation and a liberated identity. In her own words her concern is with “how the dominated, the oppressed, the exploited make ourselves subject.”3 Now this emphasis on “making” ourselves subject clearly indicates the primary importance of praxis, and even perhaps the philosophical premise that the human being is primarily action.4 We could not meaningfully speak of making ourselves subject if free, creative action were not intrinsic to our existence, or if we were bound by a fixed and given nature. In a sense the human being is always subject. Human being is transcendence even when loaded with chains. But what becomes of transcendence when loaded with chains? Is it not blocked, cut off, thrown back upon itself, denied? The subject is made object. Black philosopher Frantz Fanon attests to this when he writes that he had come “into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things” only to discover himself (under racist French colonialism) to be an “object in the midst of other objects.”5 Similar experiences are attested to throughout the history of African-American literature and popular culture. bell hooks, who has studied Fanon and resembles him in her emphasis on a politics of decolonization, also notes how the imperial white gaze and a culture of white supremacy works to reduce blacks to the status of objects. “A culture of domination,” she writes, “demands of all its citizens self-negation. The more marginalized, the more intense the demand.”6 For American Blacks, as a domestically colonized people, this “demand” has often meant being compelled to “assume the mantle of invisibility, to erase all traces of their subjectivity...”7 Oppression is a dam which blocks the free flow of transcendence. It can be breached only with the weapons of resistance. Transcendence must become insurgent, consciousness oppositional. Without resistance self-creation is impossible. It is evident throughout hooks’ numerous works that resistance, opposition even within spaces of marginality, is indispensable to the freedom of self-creation. This is so especially insofar as oppressed peoples tend to internalize their oppression—the crippling internalizing of white supremacist and patriarchal values by African-Americans being of special concern for her. But is resistance only a necessary condition of self-creation, or is it an active and positive part of self-creation? bell hooks’ own words suggest a clear distinction:¶ How do we create an oppositional worldview, a consciousness, an identity, a standpoint that exists not only as that struggle which also opposes dehumanization but as that movement which enables creative, expansive self-actualization? Opposition is not enough. In that vacant space after one has resisted there is still the necessity to become—to make oneself anew. Resistance is that struggle we can most easily grasp. ...That space within oneself where resistance is possible remains. It is different then to talk about becoming subjects.8¶ Professor hooks’ language seems to reveal a certain tension. Is resistance or opposition merely negative, merely negation of oppression and dehumanization? Or can it also be at least the beginning of the process of “becoming subjects”? In short, is opposition or resistance already the beginning of self-creation, of “creative, expansive self-actualization? bell hooks seems to stop short of making the latter claim, emphasizing only the power of at least some forms of resistance to “enable” creative self-actualization. But enabling creative self-actualization is not the same as constituting or bringing it about. And Professor hooks’ talk of a “vacant space” after resistance wherein it is still necessary to “become” and “make oneself anew” certainly implies a great distinction between resistance and self-creation. Of course, her description of a vacant space after resistance may be read metaphorically.9 Yet the very force of that metaphor suggests that there is in hooks’ understanding of subjectivity a transcending movement of resistance which aims to liberate us from what Fanon calls a “crushing objecthood,” and a quite different and distinctive transcending movement of self-creation.¶ But is there necessarily a blank space after resistance? Could it be that at least the beginning of self-creation, of making oneself anew is part of the very movement of resistance itself? We can agree with Professor hooks that resistance is not enough insofar as it is mere negation. Any human identity is likely to be impoverished if it exhausts itself in mere resistance. But what if resistance cannot be genuine if it is not also creative? What if it is an affirmation as well as a negation? Perhaps there is something to Fanon’s claim that decolonization, itself a movement of resistance, is also a veritable creation of “new men” with “a new language and a new humanity.”10¶ Now, I do not allude to Fanon gratuitously or as mere coincidence. bell hooks has frequently mentioned in her writings the intellectual influence of Frantz Fanon. And we can find between them a common emphasis on the need for decolonization and for radically making oneself anew—in Fanon’s language trying to “set afoot the new man.”11 For both of them this entails a radical transformation of the social structure and human consciousness. This transformation is seen by both of them as being as much moral, spiritual, and cultural as it is political and economic. For both thinkers this transformation must be radical if it is not to be deflected and thwarted.12¶ But for Fanon this radical transformation of person and society must at least begin during the phase of resistance, perhaps as part of the resistance, or it is unlikely to be realized at all. The transformation which begins to “set afoot the new man” must certainly continue after revolutionary resistance to the colonial system has triumphed, and most profoundly after that triumph. For if the process of personal and social transformation does not continue, colonialism may be replaced by neocolonialism; and the formerly colonized native may then learn from painful experience that “exploitation can wear a black face” as well as a white one.13 But the process of self- transformation, self-creation, does not seem to begin in a blank space after resistance. Resistance and self-creation seems at least coterminous in Fanon, with perhaps more of a continuum than a blank space.¶ bell hooks, who is no less desirous of radical change than Fanon, and who, as a revolutionary feminist black woman, goes further than Fanon in radically criticizing patriarchy and rethinking gender relations, puts more emphasis on the difference between resistance and self-creation. In her essay “Love as the Practice of Freedom,” she mentions how her reading of one of Dr. King’s essays reminded her of where “true liberation leads us.” And she finds that it “leads us beyond resistance to transformation.”14 Of course, genuine¶ transformation of self cannot simply reduce itself to resistance. Yet I wonder if it isn’t possible from within bell hooks’ own conceptual framework to understand resistance and self- creation as at least partially coinciding in one movement of transcendence.¶ In her essay on love hooks recalls Dr. King’s statement that the aim of the freedom movement is “the creation of the beloved community.” Yet Dr. King believed he saw at least the beginnings of the beloved community in the Selma movement— in the struggle against disfranchisement of blacks. In Black Looks, bell hooks notes that the “oppositional black culture that emerged in the context of apartheid and segregation has been one of the few locations that have provided a space for the kind of decolonization” which makes “loving blackness possible.”15 Yet in Yearning, bell hooks recalls within that very space of resistance a vital experience of community, of deep relational love that she thinks so essential to self-transformation.16 And in the “Politics of Radical Black Subjectivity” she quotes with obvious approval Toni Cade Bambara’s comment that “it perhaps takes less heart to pick up the gun than to face the risk of creating a new identity...via commitment to the struggle.”17 But isn’t creating a new identity via commitment to struggle self- creation through resistance? And when bell hooks calls upon her black brothers to “reconstruct black masculinity,” and to radically challenge limiting “phallocentric” and “conventional construction of patriarchal masculinity,”18 isn’t she advocating a transformation of self and consciousness so radical as to be already a praxis of resistance? To what extent is a liberating self- creation itself a form of resistance? Perhaps what is called for is a more thoroughgoing inquiry into the meaning(s) of resistance itself. At least some forms of resistance are movements of self- creation. At least some efforts at self-creation are inexorably praxes of resistance.19¶ In short, while we may agree with hooks that “opposition is not enough,” we may still wonder if there may not be creative moments within resistance rather than a “vacant space” preceding the making of ourselves anew. A transcending movement of “expansive self-actualization” may coincide with, and partly emerge from, the transcending movement of resistance. Self-creation may prove to be coterminous with resistance. Instead of a blank space, we have a continuum. Human transcendence always involves becoming, but for oppressed people whose transcendence is denied self-creation often finds its founding moments in resistance. For people who are radically oppressed it may be otherwise impossible to reclaim their transcendence at all.
- .
Dillon 12
Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at the University of Minnesota.
(“State of White Supremacy: Racism, Governance, and the United States” (Book Review) August 28, 2012, http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2012/08/28/book-review-state-of-white-supremacy-darkmatter-journal/)
Here, the first two essays discuss racial discrimination in education. George Lipsitz provides a masterful reading of U.S. court cases (including a powerful rereading of Brown v. Board of Education) concerning racial discrimination in education to highlight how racism continues under the names equality, desegregation, and protection. As Lipsitz observes, the wording of Brown allows school districts to declare non-discriminatory intentions without taking reparative action. In this way, the state uses laws intended to end white supremacy in order to preserve it. Thus, the law (like the citizen and the human) is a not a vehicle of liberation but a tool of subjection. Lipsitz’s analysis of legal white supremacy authorized by Civil Rights legislation is complemented by the work of Sanford Schram, Richard Fording, and Joe Soss on what they term “neoliberal-paternalism.” Neoliberal paternalism apprehends the ways contemporary forms of poverty governance resurrect older modes of population management in order to connect them to more recent neoliberal modes of governance. Past forms of racialized state violence become sutured to newer forms of control and punishment. As more and more poor people of color abandoned by neoliberal restructuring are captured by an unprecedented regime of incarceration, welfare has increasingly mimicked the penal sphere. We might add the education system to the massive network of racialized state power outlined by Schram, Fording, and Soss. This almost unimaginable regime of racialized management and control produces a system where, as Joy James writes, “Whites are to be protected, and Black life is to be contained in order to protect whites and their property (both personal and public or institutional)” (169). These critiques of the state are powerfully extended by the work of Andrea Smith and João H. Costa Vargas in the book’s final section. Smith continues the collection’s critique of the law by observing that “genocide has never been against the law in the United States” because “Native Genocide has been expressly sanctioned as the law” (231). Like Rodríguez, Smith argues for a politics of abolition and undoing rather than reform and inclusion. In her analysis of hate crimes legislation, Smith argues that instead of making racialized and gendered violence illegal (given that racialized and gendered violence is already executed through the law in the prison, reservation, and the ghetto), we must make our organizing, theorizing, and teaching against the law. If the state is foundational to racialized, gendered, and heterosexist violence, then the state should not be the mediator of pain and grievance because “the state is now going to be the solution to the problem it created in the first place” (232). The work of João H. Costa Vargas complements this analysis by making clear the ways the law produces anti-black genocide. For Vargas, the black diaspora is a “geography of death” where the premature and preventable deaths of black people are authorized by a “cognitive matrix” that systematically renders black life devalued. Vargas would surely understand the preventable deaths produced by the medical industry as a form of genocide, namely because intent is not central to his theorization of the concept. Instead, creating or tolerating conditions that produce mass-based uneven vulnerability to premature death is genocidal, making white supremacy itself a genocidal project. Accordingly, genocide is at the core of our ethical standards, is foundational to modern politics, and is central to our cognitive apparatuses (269). To challenge genocide we must undo the epistemologies that support systems of value and disposability and make possible the slow deaths that are the “condition of possibility for our present subjectivities and modern politics” (269).
Ross 2k
Marlon B., Professor, Department of English and Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, “Commentary: Pleasuring Identity, or the Delicious Politics of Belonging,” New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 4, pages 840-841
Although in his contribution Eric Lott targets Professor Michaels's comments and his own recent feud with Timothy Brennan (who unfortunately is not included in this volume) rather than Ken's argument, what Eric says about “left and liberal fundamentalists” who “simply and somewhat penitently” urge us to “‘go back to class’” could also be directed at Ken's conclusion. Ken writes, “Crafting a political left that does not merely reflect existing racial divisions starts with the relatively mundane proposition that it is possible to make a persuasive appeal to the given interests of working and unemployed women and men, regardless of race, in support of a program for economic justice.” On this one, I side with Eric, rather than Tim and Ken. Standing on the left depends on whose left side we're talking about. My left might be your right and vice versa, because it depends on what direction we're facing, and what direction depends on which identities we're assuming and affirming. Eric adds, "Even in less dismissive than Tim's accounts of new social movements based not on class but on identities formed by histories of injustice, there is a striking a priori sense of voluntarism about the investment in this cause or that movement or the other issue—as though determining the most fundamental issue were a matter of the writer's strength of feeling rather than a studied or analytical sense of the ever-unstable balance of forces in a hegemonic bloc at a given moment." I agree, but I'll risk mangling what Eric says by putting it more crassly. Touting class or "economic justice" as the fundamental stance for left identity is just another way of telling everybody else to shut up so I can be heard above the fray. Because of the force of "identity politics," a leftist white person would be leery of claiming to lead Blacks toward the promised land, a leftist straight man leery of claiming to lead women or queers, but, for a number of complex rationalizations, we in the middle class (where all of us writing here currently reside) still have few qualms about volunteering to lead, at least theoretically, the working class toward "economic justice." What Eric calls here "left fundamentalism," I'd call, at the risk of sounding harsh, left paternalism. Of the big identity groups articulated through "identity politics," economic class remains the only identity where a straight white middle-class man can still feel comfortable claiming himself a leading political voice, and thus he may sometimes overcompensate by screaming that this is the only identity that really matters—which is the same as claiming that class is beyond identity. Partly this is because Marxist theory and Marx himself (a bourgeois intellectual creating the theoretical practice for the workers' revolution) stage the model for working-class identity as a sort of trans-identification, a magical identity that is transferable to those outside the group who commit themselves to it wholeheartedly enough. If we look back, we realize even this magical quality is not special to a history of class struggle, as whites during the New Negro movements of the early twentieth century felt that they were vanguard race leaders because they had putatively imbibed some essential qualities of Negroness by cross-identifying with the folk and their culture.
Andrews and Maher 11
George, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Drexel University and Jeff Jeff St. Andrews is a freelance photographer
(“Prison Rebellions as a Window to the New World: Every Crook Can Govern”, July 2011, http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/07/22/every-crook-can-govern/)
A century later, this picture had changed, and Black Panther founder Huey Newton took the seemingly contradictory position that Blacks were both central to and increasingly unnecessary for economic production in the United States. In 1967, he had written of Black Americans as both the oil without which the U.S. war machine cannot function and as the driving shaft of that same machinery: we are in such a strategic position in this machinery that, once we become dislocated, the functioning of the remainder of the machinery breaks down, he insisted. Black Americans, in short, can, because of their intimacy with the mechanism, destroy the engine that is enslaving the world. But just four years later, Newton would document a growing distance between these former slaves and the machinery? of the U.S. economy: blacks and third world people, he argued, had become displaced from their central economic function, and were increasingly rendered what he called the unemployables.¶ But for Newton, this declining economic position of the Black population did not correspond to a declining political importance. Instead, these unemployables–which he used as synonymous with the controversial concept of the lumpen–would become, by virtue of sheer numbers, a new revolutionary agent capable of overthrowing U.S. capitalism:¶ The revolutionary thrust will come from the growing number of what we call the unemployables in this society The proletarian will become the lumpen proletariat. It is this future change–the increase of the lumpen proletariat and the decrease of the proletariat–which makes us say that the lumpen proletariat is the majority and carries the revolutionary banner (?Intercommunalism?).¶ Were these two arguments in contradiction with one another, or was this shift simply a reflection of momentous economic transformation and the increasing unemployability of many poor Americans, specifically people of color and even more specifically the Black population? Have communities of color been increasingly lumpenized as Huey predicted?
- Without this they can’t account for the way white supremacy will pervade their “multiracial” movement.
Kelley 99
Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA.12 From 2006 to 2011, he was Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California (USC),3 and from 2003 to 2006 he was the William B. Ransford Professor of Cultural and Historical Studies at Columbia University. From 1994 to 2003, he was a professor of history andAfricana Studies at New York University as well the chairman of NYU's history department
(Robin, “BUILDING BRIDGES: THE CHALLENGE OF ORGANIZED LABOR IN COMMUNITIES OF COLOR”, New Labor Forum #5, Fall-Winter 1999. Pg 42-58)
The failure to build a strong multiracial labor movement, in other words, had more to do with ¶ white racism than reluctance or distrust on the part of workers of color. Ironically, one could argue that the ¶ (white) labor movement in this period was partly forged because of racism, which in the long run ¶ substantially weakened the movement while providing a basis for solidarity. Throughout this period we ¶ witness tremendous nativism and anti-immigration sentiment rooted in white workers' fears of competition ¶ from Chinese immigrants for jobs. Labor organizations, including the American Federation of Labor under ¶ Samuel Gompers' leadership, actively lobbied for extending the Chinese Exclusion Act, originally passed in ¶ 1882, when it came up for congressional renewal in 1892.19 In general, however, sentiment for ¶ immigration restriction was at least as widespread among employers as in labor unions in these years. ¶ Though industrialists sought a cheap and steady labor supply, their desires were more than counterbalanced ¶ by their belief that immigrants were a source of labor strife, violence, and radicalism.¶ In the face of racism, nativism, and an increase in lynching and various terrorist activities directed ¶ at African Americans, Chinese, and Mexican workers in the Southwest, opportunities for interracial labor ¶ organizing were few and far between. Workers of color tended to participate in race and ethnic based ¶ institutions, often turning to self-help strategies to survive and build community. While most labor unions ¶ limited their membership to whites only, there were a few exceptions. The Knights of Labor, founded in ¶ 1869, vowed not to discriminate on the basis of race (though they did exclude Chinese workers). At its ¶ height in 1886, it claimed nearly one million members, of which 60,000 were black. Black members of the ¶ Knights, particularly in the South, focused more of their energies on community building and economic ¶ independence than on improving workplace conditions. For example, they took the lead in establishing ¶ cooperative stores and cooperative cotton gins, and some chapters of the Knights (particularly in ¶ Richmond) organized massive resistance to segregation and disfranchisement. 20¶ The American Federation of Labor, founded in 1881 under the leadership of Samuel Gompers, ¶ initially planned to organize industrial workers. Knowing that any serious effort to organize unskilled and semi-skilled labor depended on bringing in black and immigrant workers, the AFL initially refused to ¶ charter discriminatory locals. However, by 1893 the AFL backtracked on the "race" question, choosing to ¶ charter racist locals and focus its energies on skilled craft unions which tended to be primarily if not ¶ exclusively white. Indeed, the AFL’s brand of "bread and butter" unionism not only discriminated against ¶ black workers but narrowed its field of vision to workplace concerns to the detriment of community ¶ struggles. The AFL’s tolerance for whites-only locals and segregated unions further pushed black, Latino, ¶ and Asian workers out of the house of labor and into the role as strike breakers and “scabs”.21 This ¶ position (one many workers of color resisted) contributed to the increased scapegoating of black and brown ¶ laborers, who were often represented in the mainstream labor press as inherently anti-labor. Meanwhile, the ¶ Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), founded in 1905, was not buying the idea that unskilled, nonwhite workers were unorganizable. On the contrary, they emerged out of the radical Western Federation of ¶ Miners, whose members included Native American and Mexican mine workers, to challenge the ¶ increasingly conservative leadership of Samuel L. Gompers and the AFL. The "Wobblies," as they were ¶ called, sought to organize the lowly worker of every kind and location, into a movement which set out to ¶ build a new, egalitarian society within the shell of the old one. Despite the attraction the Wobblies held for ¶ African-Americans and immigrants, the IWW had little luck organizing African Americans, and when¶ they succeeded their efforts were concentrated in Southern agriculture, primarily the lumber and sugar cane ¶ industry, and along the docks of Philadelphia.22 The IWW affiliated Marine Transport Workers Union was ¶ a predominantly black union led by one of the most talented African-American labor leaders of the 20th ¶ century, Benjamin Fletcher. Although 5,000 members of the 8,700 member union were black, it is ¶ significant that the bulk of his white support came from Jewish and Polish workers. Nevertheless, by 1923 ¶ Fletcher's experience with racist white workers overwhelmed his enthusiasm for "One Big Union." Even ¶ his own beloved Wobblies never paid special attention to the specific situation of African-Americans and ¶ they sought, too simply, to rise above the racism and ethnocentricity of the working class and its capitalist ¶ masters. To solve the class question, they argued, was to solve the race question. They also failed to ¶ recognize that the most downtrodden European immigrants had opportunities, over generations if not in ¶ their own lives, to become "white"-opportunities neither African-Americans, Asians, and in some cases, ¶ Latinos did not enjoy. Anti-Semitism certainly didn't die, but assimilated Jews, Italians and Slavs had a much better chance than assimilated Negroes. Indeed, over a decade before DuBois published his magnum ¶ opus, Black Reconstruction Fletcher clearly understood the tragedy of white identity politics: “Organized ¶ labor, for the most part be it radical or conservative, thinks and acts, in the terms of the White Race.”23¶ Black workers, then, were also compelled to think in terms of "the race," but that did not mean ¶ supporting the status quo. Nor did defending "the race" necessarily mean excluding others or organizing ¶ exclusively around black causes, for as Benjamin Fletcher and many others like him demonstrated, building ¶ interracial movements to protect working-class interests is a way of defending black people from racism ¶ and class exploitation. Moreover, the concern about protecting black interests reflected the dialectic of ¶ work and community. While scholars have established in no uncertain terms the degree to which ¶ occupations and, in some cases, work spaces were segregated by race,24 only recently has scholarship ¶ begun to move beyond staid discussions of labor market segmentation and racial (and more recently, ¶ gender) inequality to an analysis of what these distinctions at work and home mean for black (not to ¶ mention, Latino, Asian-American, Native American) working-class politics and for collective action. 25¶ All-black trade unions, like the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, constitute the most obvious ¶ examples of labor organizing in defense of "the race." The BSCP, under the leadership of A. Philip ¶ Randolph, had a presence on the railways as well as in black communities. BSCP organizers like Randolph, ¶ Milton P. Webster, E.D. Nixon, to name a few, emerged as black community leaders well beyond their ¶ union activities. Members of the union earned a level of respect within black communities that enabled ¶ them to claim middle class status and respectability. And the formation of a strong and active women's ¶ auxiliary meant that the political and social activities of the Brotherhood would extend far¶ beyond the workplace. Melinda Chatuvert's important new book, Marching Together: Women of the ¶ Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters portrays a community-oriented union that not only maintained a ¶ powerful political presence in the black world but served as a platform for African American women's ¶ struggles for equality and democracy for themselves and their communities. Moreover, she demonstrates ¶ that the success of the union depended on community support, and that was obtained primarily through the ¶ organizing work of women. On the other hand, the BSCP was never an exclusionary organization. They ¶ were formed as a result of the Jim Crow policies of both the employers (who only hired black workers as ¶ sleeping car porters) and the railway unions. In fact, Randolph, a leading Socialist and magazine editor when he took over as head of the BSCP, spent a good deal of his life lobbying the AFL to recognize the¶ union. 26¶ A lesser known and more local example of independent black trade unionism can be found in Earl ¶ Lewis's In Their Own Interests: Race, Class and Power in Twentieth Century Norfolk. During World War I, ¶ the all-black Transport Workers Association of Norfolk began organizing African-American waterfront ¶ workers irrespective of skill. Soon thereafter, its leaders turned their attention to the ambitious task of ¶ organizing all black workers, most notably cigar stemmers, oyster shuckers, and domestics. The TWA's ¶ Wobbly sensibility and racial politics combined to create One Big Negro Union. What is important about ¶ the Norfolk story is the startling success of the TWA's efforts, particularly among workers that had been ¶ dismissed as unorganizable. Lewis is not satisfied with simplistic explanations like the power of ¶ charismatic leadership or the primacy of race over class to account for the mass support for the TWA; ¶ rather, he makes it quite clear that the labor process, work spaces, intra-class power relations, communities ¶ and neighborhoods--indeed, class struggle itself--are all racialized. The result, therefore, is a "racialized" ¶ class consciousness shaped by the social locations of work and home. Lewis writes, ¶ In the world in which these workers lived nearly everyone was black, except for a supervisor or ¶ employer. Even white workers who may have shared a similar class position enjoyed a superior ¶ social position because of their race. Thus, although it appears that some black workers manifested ¶ a semblance of worker consciousness, that consciousness was so imbedded in the perspective of ¶ race that neither blacks nor whites saw themselves as equal partners in the same labor movement.
1AR
They perpetuate targeted killing: Our method of black liberation as strategic resistance takes into account the gratuitous violence in the most mundane processes of the system. Various forms of racialized violence fall through the cracks of their class reductionism because black bodies are targeted external to cap.
Wise 10
American anti-racism activist and writer.
(“With Friends Like These, Who Needs Glenn Beck? Racism and White Privilege on the Liberal-Left” August 17th, http://www.timwise.org/2010/08/with-friends-like-these-who-needs-glenn-beck-racism-and-white-privilege-on-the-liberal-left/)
Class-Based Reductionism on the LeftPerhaps the most common way in which folks on the left sometimes perpetuate racism is by a vulgar form of class reductionism, in which they advance the notion that racism is a secondary issue to the class system, and that what leftists and radicals should be doing is spending more time focusing on the fight for dramatic and transformative economic change (whether reformist or revolutionary), rather than engaging in what they derisively term “identity politics.” The problem, say these voices, are corporations, the rich, the elite, etc., and to get sidetracked into a discussion of white supremacy is to ignore this fact and weaken the movement for radical change.But in fact, racism affects the lives of people of color quite apart from the class system. Black and brown folks who are not poor or working class — indeed those who are upper middle class and affluent — are still subjected to discrimination regularly, whether in the housing market, on the part of police, in schools, in the health care delivery system and on the job. True enough, these better-off folks of color may be more economically stable that their poor white counterparts, but in the class system they compete for stuff against whites in the same economic strata: a competition in which they operate at a decided and unfair disadvantage. So too, poor and working class whites, though they suffer the indignities of the class system, still have decided advantages over poor and working class people of color: their spells of unemployment are typically far shorter, their ability to find affordable and decent housing is far greater, and they are less likely to find themselves in resource-poor schools than even blacks and Latinos in middle class families. In fact, lower income whites are more likely to own their own home than middle class blacks, and most poor whites in the U.S. do not live in poor neighborhoods — rather they are mostly to be found in middle class communities where opportunities are far greater — whereas most poor people of color are surrounded by concentrated poverty. And black folks with college degrees, professional occupational status and health insurance coverage actually have worse health outcomes than white dropouts, with low income and low-level if any medical care, thanks to racism in health care delivery and black experiences with racism, which have uniquely debilitating health affects at all income levels. To ignore the unique deprivations of racism (as with sexism, heterosexism, ableism, etc) so as to forward a white-friendly class analysis is inherently marginalizing to the lived experience of black and brown folks in the United States. And what’s more, to ignore racism is to actually weaken the struggle for class unity and economic transformation. Research on this matter is crystal clear: it is in large measure due to racism — and the desire of working class whites to maintain a sense of superiority over workers of color, as a “psychological wage” when real wages and benefits have proven inadequate — that has divided the working class. It is this holding onto the status conferred by whiteness, as a form of “alternate property” (to paraphrase UCLA Law Professor, Cheryl Harris), which has undermined the ability of white and of-color working people to engage in solidarity across racial lines. Unless we discuss the way in which racism and racial inequity weakens our bonds of attachment, we will never be able to forward a truly progressive, let alone radical politics.In other words, unless all of our organizing becomes antiracist in terms of outreach, messaging, strategizing, and implementation, whatever work we’re doing, around whatever important issue, will be for naught. Only by building coalitions that look inward at the way racism and white privilege may be operating within those formations, and that also look outward, at the way racism and privilege affect the issue around which we’re organizing (be that schools, health care, jobs, tax equity, the environment, LGBT rights, reproductive freedom, militarism or anything else), can we hope to beat back the forces of reaction against which we find ourselves arrayed. The other side has proven itself ready and willing to use racism to divide us. In response, we must commit to using antiracism as a force to unite.
