AFRICOM 1AC

Acknowledgments

This Masterfile was put together by the following group of debaters under the mentorship of Daryl Burch from RKS 2019.

Parth Shah – Maine East ‘20Dewayne Martin – American Senior ‘20Eric Gottlieb – Bellarmine ‘21Kat Wang – LASA ‘20

1AC

Observation 1: Targeted Murder

Goldbaum ‘18 (Christina Goldbaum is an independent journalist and photographer based in Mogadishu, Somalia. Originally from Washington D.C., Christina has worked across Sub-Saharan Africa reporting on U.S. foreign policy, peacekeeping, migration flows, and human rights., 2-11-2018, "Strong Evidence that U.S. Special Operations Forces Massacred Civilians in Somalia," Daily Beast, https://www.thedailybeast.com/strong-evidence-that-us-special-operations-forces-massacred-civilians-in-somalia)//pshah

1A: It was around five in the morning when Abdullahi Elmi heard the gunfire. Sitting in his small home in Bariire, in southern Somalia, the farm administrator had been recording the names of the laborers who had worked the day before. Stacks of accounting books sprawled on the floor around him. Across the room, his wife sat with their 3-year-old son who dozed as his mother rocked him back and forth in her arms.2A: On July 6, 2016 – Philando Castile is met with gunfire after being honest with law enforcement that he had a gun but it was placed down – he was black. 1A: When the sound of gunshots began, Abdullahi thought they were too far away to be heading toward his farm. But within seconds they seemed to grow louder, and closer, sending Abdullahi and his wife, carrying their young son, sprinting through the nearby forest of banana trees in search of safety.2A: 2015, unarmed black motorist Sam Dubose is fatally shot and murdered during a traffic stop, his crime: not recorded – he was black. 1A: Sheltering beneath the long leaves, Abdullahi came across his neighbor, Goomey Hassan, who had also sprinted into the banana grove with his wife when he heard the barrage of gunfire. The two families waited for 20 minutes before they decided it was safe to return, and began walking cautiously back to their homes, both Abdullahi and Goomey careful to walk in front of their wives in case the gunfire returned.2A: July 5th 2016, Alton Sterling sells CD’s outside of store to make a living, he’s pinned down to the ground with his head on the cement and shot – he was black. 1A: As the women entered their houses, the two men stood outside to see what had happened, eventually spotting Somali National Army soldiers walking in the distance. At first Abdullahi was relieved, the national army must have come to stop their rival clan from attacking their farm, he thought. But as the soldiers saw the men, they raised their weapons, ordering Hassan and Elmi to get down on the ground.2A: 2011, law enforcement receives a call about a man with a gun, after arriving on the site they noticed Jeremy McDole siting in a wheelchair – he was killed – he was black.Both: “Blood from a gunshot wound poured into the earth around him.”1A: “I put my hands up and they told us you are under arrest, then I heard the noise from their big cars and I knew this was more than just a clan fight,” Elmi said. “They told my wife to go back in our home and then they went inside to search. I was pleading with them not to take anything.”2A: 2014, 12-year-old Tamir Rice is shot and murdered for playing with toys outside – he was black.

1A: One of the Somali soldiers ordered Abdullahi to put his head on the ground. The bottom of a boot belonging to an American soldier kept it there.2A: THE U.S.-LED OPERATION on Aug. 25 would result in the death of 10 civilians, including at least one child.1A: October 20 2014, Laquan McDonald is shot 16 times in the back because he was “armed” – no weapon was ever found – he was black. 2A: July 17, 2014, Eric Garner sells cigarettes and gets taken down in a chokehold for attempting to pay his bills, he’s later shot and murdered, the officers walk free – he was black.1A: May 4 2019, a black woman is fatally shot after yelling “she was pregnant” – they were black. 2A: He was black.1A: She was black.Both: They were black.

The 1AC is a protest to State-sponsored killing via police brutality cements America’s promises to criminalize and present Blackness as the embodiment of danger. Our protest is the ingredient to democratic social change that is broken, bringing the possibility for a revolution. The preconditions for revolution are present but power has adapted, Optimism lies in the revolutionary moment. Civil society engraves the trope of criminality into black flesh, if a black person speaks out – they are “uncivil,” “beastlike,” or “savage.” Curry ’14 (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/559369/summary Tommy J. Curry is a Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. His research interests are 19th century ethnology, Critical Race Theory & Black Male Studies. He is the author of The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Temple University Press 2017), which has recently won the 2018 American Book Award. He is the author of Another white Man’s Burden: Josiah Royce’s Quest for a Philosophy of Racial Empire (SUNY Press 2018), and re-published the forgotten philosophical works of William F. Ferris as The Philosophical Treatise of William H. Ferris: Selected Readings from The African Abroad or, His Evolution in Western Civilization (Rowman & Littlefield 2016).//Dewayne Martin)

The death of Michael Brown was not an aberration to American democracy, but the fulfillment of its promises of order and stability for the (white) majority. As historian A.J. William-Myers notes in Destructive Impulses: An Examination of an American Secret in Race Relations: White Violence, “white violence…was part and parcel of the socioeconomic and political structure of the American democratic process.”11 Pointing to the “enormous capacity of American democracy to absorb unprecedented level of violence and not be structurally damaged by it,” Williams-Myers concludes that anti-Black violence and the societal legitimation of the white agents responsible for the death of Black people serve to maintain societal order, and bolster the implicit ideological power of white supremacy in America.

Stated differently, contrary to the democratic calls for justice currently insisted upon by activists and scholars alike, the deaths of Black men and boys in America serve to indicate the health of American democracy not its malaise. For young Black boys, maleness in a white supremacist society is fraught with difficulty and the all too likely outcome of death. Even as men, this racialized masculinity is not thought to result in a recognizable intellectual maturity, and social standing of a citizen; rather the masculinity impressed upon these Black-male-bodies is known only through its uncontrollable excess, its lack of maturation, where any and all transgressions (no matter how small or idiosyncratic) are understood to be demonstrations of the more primitive and uncivilized aspects of a not yet evolved savagery. As Geoffrey Canada, President of the Harlem Children Zone, remarks, “The image of the male as strong is mixed with the image of male as violent. Male is virile get confused with male as promiscuous. Male as adventurous equals male as reckless. Male as intelligent often gets mixed with male as arrogant, racist, and sexist … Boys find themselves pulled and tugged by forces beyond their control as they make the confusing and sometimes perilous trip to manhood.” The milieu from which Black manhood springs is saturated with racist caricatures that all seem to legitimate the fear Americans have of Black men. The images and perceptions of Black men as dangerous to society, women, and themselves ultimately create a pattern of thinking that works to justify their seemingly inevitable deaths. The relationship between anti-Black racism (the hate of Blacks) and anti-Black chauvinism (the hate of Black males as the barbarous sex) is not adequately captured by a focus on the manhood denied to Black men and boys. Such positions erroneously depict Black men as purely mimetic creatures incapable of generating identities outside of the decadent tropes offered by white patriarchy. A more correct analysis of racism and chauvinism would understand that Black male oppression and death is rooted in an imposition of a deadly masculine caricature—a barbarism justifying multiple genocidal logics and encouraging a racist misandry throughout this society and the disciplines birthed from it. Ultimately, Black male suffering is made generic, thought to only be the function of “racism,” so in an era pushing intellectuals and policy-makers alike to be antiessentialist (problematizing racial explanations of inequality), Black men are deemed “unfit” for study. The Black male is not born a patriarchal male. He is raced and sexed peculiarly, configured as barbaric and savage, imagined to be a violent animal, not a human being. His mere existence ignites the negrophobia taken to be the agreed upon justification for his death. Black male death lessens their economic competition with, as well as their political radicality against, white society. It is this fear of Black males that allows society to support the imposition of death on these bodies, and consent to the rationalizations the police state offer as their justifications for killing the Black-male beast (the rapist, the criminal, and the deviant-thug). The young Black male’s death, the death of Black boys, is merely an extension of this logic—the need to destroy the Black beast cub before it matures into full pathology. The Black boy, that child, is seen as the potential Nigger-beast. This anti-Black dynamic which specifically affects the Black boy has been referred to by Elaine Brown as a new kind of racism, a racism built upon the anti-Black mythology of America’s Black males as the super-predator. This super-predator mythology not only acts to legitimize the violence responsible for the deaths of Black males, but inculcates the rationalization that given what Black males actually are, Black male death is necessary and an indispensable strategy for the safety and security of American society. Overlooking the genocidal disposition of America towards Black males presents an incomplete diagnosis of the impetus behind the levels of violence and sanctions imposed upon Black communities (Black women, Black families) in an effort to control the lives of young Black males.

When black movements attempt to protest, they are told it doesn’t matter. Black bodies lack an ally in the activism against law enforcement weaponization because politics itself is inaccessible – blackness has two options: either quit and give up or protest and speak up. We are the allies, we are the movement, we will call you out for the violence. The only one way to protest the internal link between police militarization and targeted killing is a reconsideration of the government from perspectives of we the people. Only the 1ac can expose foreign military intervention and it’s relationship to police militarization and its effect on the black body; 1033 program takes arms from foreign sales and hands them to the police. Coyne and Hall-Blanco ‘16 (Christopher J.Coyne, Assc. Prof of Economics @ GMU & Abigail R. Hall-Blanco, Asst Prof of Economics @ Univ of Tampa; Foreign Intervention, Police Militarization, and Minorities; PEACE REVIEW: A Journal of Social Justice, 28:165-170, No. 6, April-June; http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=9a5a192e-47bd-49ca-a16a-24a522d91cb0%40pdc-v-sessmgr02&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=aph&AN=116270270) \\EG

The issues of police militarization and the disproportionate use of force against historically disadvantaged racial groups are inextricably linked. The goal here is to provide insight into the origins of domestic police militarization. To do so, we build on our previous work to discuss how proactive U.S. foreign policy generates undesirable domestic consequences, which threaten the liberties and freedoms of U.S. citizens. In the context of police militarization, past foreign military interventions led directly to the militarization of U.S. police. The undesirableconsequences have fallen disproportionately on minorities and disadvantaged groups. The main takeaway is that a proactive, imperialistic foreign policy can impose significant costs on domestic citizens due to expansions in the scope of state power. Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams are police units possessing highly specialized military equipment and training. These groups have become a fixture in many police departments in the United States. In the mid-1980s, approximately 20 percent of police departments had a SWAT team. By the year 2000, nearly 90 percent of police departments serving populations of 50,000 or more had a SWAT team. An estimated 3,000 SWAT deployments occurred in 1980. By the early 2000s, SWAT teams deployed 45,000 times every year. Current estimates place the number of SWAT deployments as high as 80,000 annually. Although now common, SWAT teams are a relatively new innovation, one that can be directly tied to U.S. foreign intervention and to two combat veterans, former Los Angeles police chief and World War II veteran Daryl Gates and former Los Angeles police officer and Marine John Nelson. As a Marine, Nelson served in Vietnam in an elite Force Recon unit. Although originally designed to gather intelligence, these Force Recon teams saw extended combat and were recognized for their use of lethal force. They became well known for being experts at skillfully eliminating enemy targets. For example, the "kill ratio," or number of enemies killed per every soldier lost, was about 7.6 enemies per Marine for regular Marine infantries during the Vietnam War. The kill ratio for the Force Recon units, meanwhile, was about 34 enemies for every man lost in action. The Force Recon units were also more aggressive. Regular Marine units were the aggressors in combat only 20 percent of the time they saw action. The Force Recon teams, in contrast, were the aggressors in an astounding 95 percent of their operations. Stated differently, the Force Recon units were trained to gather information, engage enemy combatants, and kill. They did so efficiently. These experiences were

integral in developing John Nelson's skills, knowledge, and abilities regarding methods for controlling large groups, gathering information, and eliminating enemies. He brought this unique human capital with him when he returned to the United States and joined the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). In the 1960s, Nelson was presented an opportunity to use the unique skills of social control that he had developed abroad. In 1965, racial tensions set off the Watts riots in Los Angeles. The riots left the LAPD feeling unprepared. In response to the perceived crisis surrounding the riots, leaders of the LAPD were anxious to develop new ways to effectively control the large crowds regularly in attendance at race rallies. Drawing from his experiences with the Force Recon team, Nelson suggested the development of a similar unit within the LAPD. "A small squad of highly trained police officers armed with special weapons," he suggested, "would be more effective in a riotous situation than a massive police response." To take effect, however, Nelson's idea would need administrative support. It was here that Inspector (later Police Chief) Daryl Gates was essential. Like Nelson, Gates was a veteran of foreign conflict, serving aboard the USS Ault during World War II. And like Nelson, Gates returned home from war with a unique skill set and had joined the LAPD. By the time Nelson proposed his idea, individuals like Gates had successfully worked their way into the administration of the LAPD. The presence of war veterans created an administrative and cultural openness to the use of military tactics. In fact, Gates himself wanted the LAPD be more militaristic and "aggressive, intimidating, and confrontational by design." It was within this environment that Nelson proposed the idea of a Force Recon style unit within the LAPD. With Gates' support, Nelson's idea was quickly adopted. The link between the newly formed paramilitary unit and the ongoing war in Vietnam was readily apparent. Initially called the "Special Weapons and Attack Team," it was decided that the word "attack" was politically unpalatable. Gates subsequently changed the name to "Special Weapons and Tactics" and the first SWAT team was born. The first SWAT unit consisted of 60 of the LAPD's top marksmen divided into teams consisting of five men—a leader, marksman, observer, scout, and a rearguard. The men selected for the first SWAT team further illustrate how the skills developed in foreign intervention influenced domestic police operations. According to the LAPD, each member of the original SWAT unit had specialized experience and prior military service. Moreover, the new SWAT team continued to incorporate new military tactics in counterinsurgency and guerrilla warfare, hiring military personnel to teach the SWAT unit. The use of SWAT teams throughout the country expanded rapidly as a result of the War on Drugs and War on Terror. As we have written previously, these conflicts served as catalysts to spread police militarization as local police departments became intertwined with the federal government's efforts to combat drugs and terror. This relationship between the political periphery (state and local governments) and the political center (the national government) allowed for the expansion of SWAT operations through the transfer of military-grade equipment and training. For example, the DOD 1208 Program, implemented in 1990, allowed the Department of Defense to transfer military equipment, such as aircraft, armor, watercraft, and weapons, to state and local police to use in their efforts to combat drugs. In 2013, a successor program, Program 1033, transferred almost $500 million in military weapons and gear to domestic law enforcement agencies for the purposes of fighting drugs and terror. The influx of military equipment into local law enforcement, combined with the adoption of military tactics like those employed by SWAT teams, created an arena in which the liberties and freedoms of U.S. citizens were jeopardized. Those most likely to suffer from these changes were those least likely to have the means to avoid the enhanced coercive power of the state—the poor, politically unconnected, and historically marginalized groups. Just as racial minorities are more likely to die while in police custody, so too are SWAT teams more likely to be used against minority groups. According to a

recent report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), SWAT raids primarily impact persons of color. Between 2011 and 2012, approximately 50 percent of all SWAT raids were conducted against Black or Hispanic individuals while only 20 percent of raids involved white suspects. The difference is more pronounced when looking at particular types of SWAT raids. For example, some 68 percent of drug raids studied by the ACLU were conducted against minority suspects compared to a much lower rate for whites, even though rates of drug use and selling are similar across racial groups. In some localities, Blacks and Latinos are much more likely to be impacted by SWAT raids than their white counterparts. In Allentown, Pennsylvania, for example, Latinos are 29 times more likely to be affected by a SWAT raid than whites, while Blacks are 23 times more likely. Blacks are 37 times more likely to be the victim of a SWAT raid in Huntington, West Virginia, than their white counterparts. Blacks in Ogden, Utah, are 39 times more likely to be subjected to a SWAT raid and Blacks in Burlington, North Carolina, are 47 times more likely as compared to whites. The question remains why such groups are more likely to be disproportionally affected by police militarization. Albert Hirschman offers one explanation. He argues that individuals are faced with two options when they confront problems within organizations to which they belong, including governments. First, individuals may "exit," or withdraw from the relationship. Alternatively, they can "voice" their grievances in an attempt to address and repair the problem. For those groups most likely to be adversely affected by police militarization, however, both of these options may be weak or altogether nonexistent for a variety of reasons. For many, exiting a community where police militarization is prevalent may be unviable due to financial constraints. Consider that Hispanics are more than twice as likely, and Blacks almost three times more likely, to live in deep poverty as whites. Given these circumstances, the option to exit is not feasible for many. As a result, these individuals become even more vulnerable to state tools of social control. There is reason to believe that the "voice" mechanism is also weak for racial minorities. One study, for instance, foundthat increased racial segregation leads to a decrease in black civic efficacy. The authors note that relatively segregated black communities are often represented by politicians who fail to vote for policies favored by black constituents. Ferguson illustrates this concept well. While 67 percent of residents are black, there are nearly no Black political figures. Taken together, the lack of voice and exit opportunities means that minority groups are often the least able to avoid the adverse costs and consequences of militarized police forces. Foreign and domestic policies are often seen as distinct and separate. In reality, however, a proactive foreign policy (i.e., military intervention) generates unseen domestic costs, including the importation of techniques, methods, and tools of state-produced social control. The militarization of domestic policing is one illustration of how innovations in social control developed through foreign interventions can boomerang back to the homeland. When these innovations return home they lower the cost for the political elite of exerting control over the domestic populace. The costs of these expanded powers often fall disproportionally on those least able to move or effectively voice their dissatisfaction with government behaviors. What can be done? Changing the status quo requires a fundamental reconsideration of the scope and scale of government by U.S. citizens. Instead of remaining passive regarding the role of the state in their daily lives, citizens must become skeptical regarding the net benefits of the projection of state power, both domestically and abroad. This is especially important for minority and marginalized groups who are least able to avoid the abusive hand of the state. Unfortunately, many U.S. citizens currently view the state as a solution to their problems when in fact it is a contributing cause to many economic, political, and social ills.

State must suppress down the US black movement through “clandestine operations…launched by the CIA,” “surveillance operations against Black Africans” by the FBI, “Support actions designed to sharpen social stratification in the black community…giving rising between different Black groups,” and to hire “loyal Black” figures. White governmental structures suppress all possible black revolutions, organizations like AFRICOM are supplied weapons to use against black liberation movements in Africa and an even larger number of weapons are siphoned to police militarization efforts in the US to police and murder black folk – through the 1033 program.Freeman ‘18 (Netfa Freeman is an organiser in Pan-African Community Action, a member organization in the Black Alliance for Peace, as well as an analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies. Netfa was Director of the Institute’s Social Action & Leadership School for Activists (SALSA) from 2000 to 2010 and is now the coordinator for events of the other IPS projects. SALSA provided affordable workshops covering all aspects of grassroots activism, ” Dual US war on Black people,” https://www.pambazuka.org/pan-africanism/dual-us-war-black-people, 10/22/18)//pshah

Parallel tracks of United States government policy against the Black working class in the US and on the African continent expose much more than incidental similarity, but a concerted fatal conspiracy. For the US, African people globally have no economic value short of being unwitting consumers whose labour-use has expired, and whose resistance to social injustice must be repressed at all costs. This conflict of interests reveals a natural contradiction between North American versus African or Black identities. African-American on many levels is an oxymoron. This month marks the 10th anniversary of the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM), created on 1 October 2008. AFRICOM is the re-colonisation of Africa by the US and constitutes the new scramble for Africa equivalent to when, in the 1800s, the colonial powers fought over which of them would dominate which parts of the resource-rich continent. Pre-dating AFRICOM by ten years is its domestic counterpart, the “National Defense Authorisation Act of 1997” signed into law by Bill Clinton and more commonly known as the 1033 Programme. The 1033 Programme facilitates the transfer of excess US Department of Defense supplies and equipment to state and local law enforcement agencies, which are invariably used against Black and Brown communities in the US. The Programme has allowed police departments to acquire vehicles (land, air, and sea), weapons, computer equipment, fingerprint equipment, night vision equipment, radios and televisions, first aid equipment, tents and sleeping bags, photographic equipment and more. There is no more glaring proof that the US has been waging war against both Black people within its borders and those in Africa than a cursory examination of the responses by the US national security state to Black movements for decolonisation and self-determination inside the US and on the continent. A parallel history in form and essence unfolds when comparing what took place from the 1950s to the 70s in the US Black Power, Civil Rights movements with the independence, anti-colonial movement in Africa. Documented evidence vividly illustrates that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s infamous Counterintelligence Programme, also known as COINTELPRO, orchestrated operations to “infiltrate, intimidate, imprison, and assassinate” the leaders of Black movements for social justice in the US. In Africa, the US executed identical and chronologically aligned repression through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) against the independent African governments and liberation movements sweeping the continent. No matter where in the world African people are, our organising for social justice is treated as a threat to the political, economic, and cultural interest of the US ruling class that actually constitutes the essence of Americanism. Democratically elected leaders of the new African states were subjected to coup d’états and incessant assassination attempts including that of Kwame Nkrumahin Ghana, the successful

assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and today we can add the 2011 brutal murder of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. The need to feed a growing and insatiable military-industrial complex and to guarantee that no radical Black movements emerge within US borders or on the African continent has given rise to increased and better-coordinated militarisation both in Africa through AFRICOM and Black communities in the US through the 1033 Programme. US state agents continue tantamount treatment, like spying on Black Lives Matter activists, monitoring their social media and creating the bogus FBI designation Black Identity Extremists to malign them as responsible for violence against police. All the while tolerating organised, criminal infiltration of law enforcement by violent white supremacists. AFRICOM is the US response to economic competition with China and its increased influence on the continent. AFRICOM is also to prevent the emergence of any independent African influence or force. It is not to fight drug trafficking or terrorism as stated in their promotional materials. The US military presence is a destabilising presence demonstrated by events like the 2012 overthrow of a democratically elected government in Mali by an AFRICOM trained Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo and the 2015 coup in Burkina Faso led by AFRICOM trained Colonel-Major Gilbert Diendere. During this month the Black Alliance for Peace has been rolling out its campaign US Out of Africa: Shut Down AFRICOM urging all peace and justice loving people to sign the campaign’s petition directed to the House Armed Services Committee and the Congressional Black Caucus. In his last year of office, instead of doing what he could to abolish the 1033 Programme, Barack Obama put minor restrictions on it, which the Trump administration immediately reversed within its first year. The Bush administration, progenitor of AFRICOM, was rebuked across the African continent when attempting to establish the headquarters for AFRICOM on the continent, forcing the new command to work out of Europe. Then came the Obama administration that paved the way for the proliferation of AFRICOM on the continent, as quisling African leaders fell over themselves to cooperate with the first Black US President. A now acceptable scenario has resulted in 46 various forms of US bases as well as military-to-military relations between almost all of the 54 African countries and the United States. US Special Forces troops now operate in more than a dozen African nations reflecting a 1,900 percent increase in the US military presence in Africa. What impact has increased militarisation abroad had on US Black and Brown communities? Since 1990, about US $6 billion worth of US Department of Defense property has been transferred to local, state, federal and tribal law-enforcement agencies while communities are suffering from austerity cuts. The world saw this deployed against Black rebellions in response to the police shooting of an unarmed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The first actual militarisation of the US police started 28 years before the 1033 Programme in the 1960s with the creation of the Special Weapons And Tactics units –commonly known as SWAT. In South Africa (Azania) the same thing was developed at exactly the same time. The Special Task Force (STF) was an elite police tactical unit of the white settler regime’s South African Police Service (SAPS). The first significant deployments of SWAT and STF units were to repress African/Black movements for liberation. On 9 December 1969 SWAT was deployed for a four-hour confrontation with members of the Black Panthers in a densely populated area of Los Angeles. In 1967 about 2,000 STF forces were deployed to guard the northern border of Rhodesia (modern-day Zimbabwe) to assist Rhodesian security forces against the liberation forces there. Roger Morris, former National Security staffer for Henry Kissinger, admits that of the dozens of coup d’états that have taken place in post-colonial Africa only two or three were free of the hidden hand of US destabilisation. The sale of small arms to “Black Africa” was a policy initiated through Nixon’s National Security Study Memorandum 201: Increased Arms sales to Black Africa to stop the “threat of communism.” Today the conditions they have created are dishonestly used as the pretext for AFRICOM. Likewise in the US, it has been shown that the rise of so-called street gangs like the Bloods and Crips reflect a generation of radicalised youth misguided after a decimated 1960s Black Power movement. In spite of gun control laws like California’s Mulford Act supported even by the National Rifle Association to curtail the Black Panther Party’s armed stand to defend the Black community from police terror, by the

1980s semi-automatic weaponry and other sophisticated small arms found its way into US Black communities and countries in Africa. US officials reject as unauthentic the “Study Response To Presidential Security Review Memorandum NSC-46” that outlines a deliberate and sophisticated policy of fostering political divisions between ”Black Africa and the US Black Movement.” Measures like: 1. Specific steps should be taken with the help of appropriate government agencies to inhibit coordinated activity of the Black Movement in the United States. 2. Special clandestine operations should be launched by the CIA to generate mistrust and hostility in American and world opinion against joint activity of the two forces… 3. US embassies to Black African countries specially interested in southern Africa must be highly circumspect in view of the activity … opposing the objectives and methods of US policy toward South Africa…” are all arguably what has been US policy. The double standards and hypocrisy of the US government are clear, making it imperative that the ideological schizophrenia perpetuated by Americanism is broken. A mass movement must emerge that exposes AFRICOM, confronting the powers that be about it; and that makes it inseparable from the concerns we have over the militariatsion in our communities in the United States. All peace and justice loving people can start by signing the US Out of Africa! Shut Down AFRICOM petition, spreading it to others and then getting involved.

Thus, we some people of the United States of America do ordain and establish that all direct commercial and/or foreign military sales from the United States targeting the black body for murder should be seized.

Observation 2: Protest

The United States is founded upon popular sovereignty as the basis for its system of authority. Declaring “we the people” is an embodied protest that uproots the legitimacy of the government’s political authority to legislate as representative of the people.Butler ‘18 (Judith Butler, writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist, “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly”, First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015), pg. 117-119, MB)

IN DEMOCRATIC THEORY, “we the people” is nevertheless first and foremost a speech act. Someone says “we” along with someone else, or some group says it together, perhaps chanting, or they write it and send it out into the world, or they stand one by one, or perhaps provisionally together, motionless and wordless, enacting assembly; when they say it, they seek to constitute themselves as “the people” from the moment in which it is declared. So considered as a speech act, “we the people” is an enunciation that seeks to bring about the social plurality it names. It does not describe that plurality, but gathers that group together through the speech act. It would seem, then, that a linguistic form of autogenesis is at work in the expression “we the people”; it seems to be a rather magical act or, at least, one that compels us to believe in the magical nature of the performative. Of course, “we the people” starts a longer declaration of wants and desires, intended acts, and political claims. It is a preamble; it

prepares the way for a specific set of assertions. It is a phrase that gets us ready for a substantive political claim, and yet, we have to pause at this way of starting up the sentence and ask whether a political claim is already being made, or is in the making even before someone speaks or signs. It is perhaps impossible for all the people who might say “we the people” at the same time to speak that phrase in unison. And if somehow an assembled group were to yell out, “we the people,” as sometimes happens in the assemblies of the Occupy Movement, it is a brief and transitory moment, one in which a single person speaks at the same time that others speak, and some unintended plural sounding results from that concerted plural action, that speech act spoken in common, in sequence, with all the variations that repetition implies. But let us admit that such a moment of literally speaking in unison, and naming ourselves as “the people,” rarely happens quite like that—simultaneous and plural. After all, the declaration of “we the people” in the United States is a citation, and the phrase is never fully freed of its citationality. The Declaration of Independence of the United States begins with such a phrase, one that authorizes the writers to speak for the people more generally. It is a phrase that establishes political authority at the same time that it declares a form of popular sovereignty bound by no one political authority. Derrida has analyzed this in some very important ways, as has Bonnie Honig. Popular sovereignty can give itself (in assent) and withdraw itself (in dissent or in revolution), which means that every regime is dependent on it being given if it hopes to base its legitimacy on something other than coercion. The speech act, however punctual, is nevertheless inserted in a citational chain, and that means that the temporal conditions for making the speech act precede and exceed the momentary occasion of its enunciation. And for yet another reason the speech act, however illocutionary, is not fully tethered to the moment of its enunciation: the social plurality designated and produced by the utterance cannot all assemble in the same place to speak at the same time, so it is both a spatially and temporally extended phenomenon. When and where popular sovereignty—the self-legislative power of the people—is “declared” or, rather, “declares itself,” it is not exactly at a single instance, but instead in a series of speech acts or what I would suggest are performative enactments that are not restrictively verbal. So I suppose my question might be formulated this way: What are the bodily conditions for the enunciation of “we the people,” and do we make a mistake if we separate the matter of what we are free to say from how we are free to assemble? I propose to think about the assembly of bodies as a performative enactment, and so to suggest not only that (a) popular sovereignty is a performative exercise, but (b) it necessarily involves a performative enactment of bodies, sometimes assembled in the same place and sometimes not. First, I propose that we have to understand the idea of popular sovereignty that “we the people” seeks to secure. If “we the people” set forth in the Constitution “declare a set of truths to be self-evident” as they apparently do in the Declaration of Independence, then we are already in a bit of a bind. A performative declaration seeks to bring about those truths, but if they are “self-evident” then they are precisely the kind of truths that don’t need to be brought about at all. Either they are performatively induced or they are self-evident, but to bring about that which is self-evident seems paradoxical. We could say that a set of truths is being brought into being or we could say that we found those truths somewhere and that we did not bring them into being. Or we can say that the kind of truths at issue here have to be declared as self-evident for that self-evidence to be known. In other words, they have to be made evident, which means that they are not self-evident. This circularity seems to risk contradiction or tautology, but perhaps these truths only become evident in the manner in which they are declared. In other words, the performative enactment of the truth is the way of making evident that very truth, since the truth in question is not pregiven or static but enacted or exercised through a particular kind of plural action. If it is the very capacity for plural action that is at

stake in claiming popular sovereignty, then there is no way to “show” this truth outside of the plural and invariably conflictual enactment we call self-constitution. If the plural subject is constituted in the course of its performative action, then it is not already constituted; whatever form it has prior to its performative exercise is not the same as the form it takes as it acts, and after it has acted. So how do we then understand this movement of gathering, which is durational, and implies occasional, periodic, or definitive forms of scattering? It is not one act, but a convergence of actions different from one another, a form of political sociality irreducible to conformity. Even when a crowd speaks together, they have to gather in close enough proximity to hear each other’s voice, to pace each person’s own vocalization, to achieve rhythm and harmony to a sufficient degree, and so to achieve a relation both auditory and corporeal with those with whom some signifying action or speech act is undertaken. We start to speak now and stop now. We start to move now, or more or less at a given time, but certainly not as a single organism. We try to stop all at once, but some keep moving, and others move and rest at their own pace. Temporal seriality and coordination, bodily proximity, auditory range, coordinated vocalization—all of these constitute essential dimensions of assembly and demonstration. And they are all presupposed by the speech act that enunciates “we the people”; they are the complex elements of the occasion of that enunciation, the nonverbal forms of its signification. If we try to take vocalization as the model of the speech act, then the body is surely presupposed as the organ of speech, both the organic condition and the vehicle of speech. The body is not transmuted into pure thought as it speaks, but signifies the organic conditions for verbalization, which means, according to Shoshana Felman, that the speech act is always doing something more and other than what it is actually saying. So just as there is no purely linguistic speech act separated from bodily acts, there is no purely conceptual moment of thought that does away with its own organic condition. And this tells us something about what it means to say “we the people,” since whether it is written in a text or uttered on the street, it designates an assembly in the act of designating and forming itself. It acts on itself as it acts, and a corporeal condition of plurality is indexed whether or not it appears on the occasion of the utterance. That bodily condition, plural and dynamic, is a constitutive dimension of that occasion. The embodied character of the people proves quite important to the kinds of demands that are made, since it is more often than not that basic bodily needs are not being met by virtue of the devastated ways of life. It may offend us theoretically to speak of “basic bodily needs,” as if a certain ahistorical notion of the body is invoked for the purposes of making moral and political claims to fair treatment and the just distribution of public goods. But perhaps it would be even less acceptable to refuse to speak about bodily needs at all for fear of falling into a theoretical impasse. It is not a matter of accepting the ahistorical or historical version of the body, for even the formulation of historical construction has its invariant features, and every universal concept of the body is drawn from very specific historical formations. So neither side of that debate knows what kind of relation it is in to the other. Every particular bodily need can be articulated historically in one way or another, and it may well be that what is called a “need” is precisely a historical articulation of urgency that is not for that reason a mere effect of the articulation. In other words, there is no way to separate the idea of a bodily need from the representational scheme that differentially recognizes bodily needs and, too often, fails to recognize them at all. This does not make bodily needs fully ahistorical, but neither does it make them into pure effects of a specifically historical discourse. Once again, the relation between the body and discourse is chiastic, suggesting that the body has to be represented and that it is never fully exhausted by that representation. Moreover, the differential ways that it is and is not represented saturate the representation of needs in fields of power. One can also take into account the production of needs discussed by Marx and amplified theoretically by Agnes Heller13 without claiming

that “there is no such thing as a need.” We could doubtless use other words, and trace the productive character of the words we use to amplify the phenomena, but we would still be talking about something, even if there is no way to get at that something without the language we use, even if we invariably transfigure that something by using the language we do. The notion of “needs” then would be an always already linguistically transfigured sense of requirement or urgency, and would be adequately captured neither by those synonyms nor by any others.

The right to have rights predates, and is independent from, any political institution- Those excluded from sovereign structures can weaponize the right to appear in order to combat criminal regimes of the law-While the public sphere is built on exclusion and regulated modes of disavowal, performing the right to appear allows assemblages to call the state’s legitimacy into question- the body’s performance against state forces solidifies one’s right to persist, a right not guaranteed by the law but rather the right to have rights Butler ‘18 (Judith Butler, writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist, “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly”, First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015), pg. 117-119, MB)

Luckily, I think Arendt did not consistently follow this model from The Human Condition, which is why, for instance, in the early 1960s, she turned again to the fate of refugees and the stateless, and came to assert in a new way the right to have rights.9 The right to have rights is one that depends on no existing particular political organization for its legitimacy. Like the space of appearance, the right to have rights predates and precedes any political institution that might codify or seek to guarantee that right; at the same time, it is derived from no natural set of laws. The right comes into being when it is exercised, and exercised by those who act in concert, in alliance. Those who are excluded from existing polities, who belong to no nation-state or other contemporary state formation, may be deemed “unreal” only by those who seek to monopolize the terms of reality. And yet, even after the public sphere has been defined through their exclusion, they act. Whether they are abandoned to precarity or left to die through systematic negligence, concerted action still emerges from their acting together. And this is what we see, for instance, when undocumented workers amass on the street without the legal right to do so; when squatters lay claim to buildings in Argentina as a way of exercising the right to livable shelter; when populations lay claim to a public square that has belonged to the military; when refugees take part in collective uprisings demanding shelter, food, and rights of sanctuary; when populations amass, without the protection of the law and without permits to demonstrate, to bring down an unjust or criminal regime of law or to protest austerity measures that destroy the possibility of employment and education for many. Or when those whose public appearance is itself criminal—transgendered people in Turkey or women who wear the veil in France—appear in order to contest that criminal status and assert the right to appear. The French law that prohibits “ostentatious” religious display in public as well as the hiding of the face seeks to establish a public sphere where clothing remains a signifier of secularism and the exposure of the face becomes a public norm. The prohibition against hiding the face

serves a certain version of the right to appear, understood as the right for women to appear unveiled. At the same time, it denies the right to appear for that very group of women, requiring them to defy religious norms in favor of public ones. That required act of religious disaffiliation becomes obligatory when the public sphere is understood as one that overcomes or negates religious forms of belonging. The notion, prevalent in French debate, that women who wear the veil cannot possibly do so from any sense of choice operates in the debate to veil, as it were, the blatant acts of discrimination against religious minorities that the law enacts. For one choice that is clearly made among those who wear the veil is not to comply with those forms of compulsory disaffiliation that condition the entrance to the public sphere. Here as elsewhere, the sphere of appearance is highly regulated. That these women be clothed in some ways rather than others constitutes a sartorial politics of the public sphere, but so too does compulsory “unveiling,” itself a sign of belonging first to the public and only secondarily, or privately, to the religious community. This is especially pronounced in relation to Muslim women whose affiliations to various versions of public, secular, and religious domains may well be coterminous and overlapping. And it shows quite clearly that what is called “the public sphere” in such cases is built up through constitutive exclusions and compulsory forms of disavowal. Paradoxically, the act of conforming to a law that requires unveiling is the means by which a certainly highly compromised, even violent, “freedom to appear” is established. Indeed, in the public demonstrations that often follow from acts of public mourning—as often occurred in Syria before half of its population became refugees, where crowds of mourners became targets of military destruction—we can see how the existing public space is seized by those who have no existing right to gather there, who emerge from zones of disappearance to become bodies exposed to violence and death in the course of gathering and persisting publicly as they do. Indeed, it is their right to gather, free of intimidation and the threat of violence, that is systematically attacked by the police, the army, hired gangs, or mercenaries. To attack those bodies is to attack the right itself, since when those bodies appear and act, they are exercising a right outside, against, and in the face of the regime. Although the bodies on the street are vocalizing their opposition to the legitimacy of the state, they are also, by virtue of occupying and persisting in that space without protection, posing their challenge in corporeal terms, which means that when the body “speaks” politically, it is not only in vocal or written language. The persistence of the body in its exposure calls that legitimacy into question and does so precisely through a specific performativity of the body.10 Both action and gesture signify and speak, both as action and claim; the one is not finally extricable from the other. Where the legitimacy of the state is brought into question precisely by that way of appearing in public, the body itself exercises a right that is no right; in other words, it exercises a right that is being actively contested and destroyed by military force and that, in its resistance to force, articulates its way of living, showing both its precarity and its right to persist. This right is codified nowhere. It is not granted from elsewhere or by existing law, even if it sometimes finds support precisely there. It is, in fact, the right to have rights, not as natural law or metaphysical stipulation, but as the persistence of the body against those forces that seek its debilitation or eradication. This persistence requires breaking into the established regime of space with a set of material supports both mobilized and mobilizing.

AFRICOM 2AC

AT – FW

NOTE

**AN IMPORTANT NOTE – you can replace the Disconnection DA with anything from the “General Theory” section – the point is that you can retag these DAs to indict whatever specific standards your opponent read**

**ALSO – you can easily shorten the tags of these cards and the highlighting to make these blocks modular depending on the context of the round**

I – Generic

Counter-Interp: Teams must traditionally fiat state action or action of the people. Solves their offense since teams can still read core of the topic affs, breeding competitive equity, clash, ground, and topic education.

Our offense is the Disconnection DA—Our revolutionary theory is the activist playbook which, based on accurate principles, yields social change. Their theory arguments function by promulgating broken theories of change, thus disconnecting our protest from social change. Our actions will fail and our time squandered. Revolution will always be co-opted by traditional norms to build the illusion that dissent is tolerated while discouraging any tactics that might actually change debate.White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution) \\EG

A theory of revolution grants foresight regarding whether a protest will bring change. It is the only playbook to activism and it must be rewritten by each generation. Activism based on accurate principles yields social change. Without a theory of why revolutions happen and a hypothesis of the behaviours that will hasten the next uprising, there is no way to distinguish between a destined event and an ineffectual happening. Lenin made this clear: “without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.” A repressive status quo functions by promulgating broken theories of change, thereby disconnecting the link between protest and change so that our actions will fail and our time will be squandered. Repressive democracies encourage forms of protest that are least revolutionary and most ineffective. The ideal situation for a false democracy is to have frequent ineffective protests that give the illusion that dissent is tolerated while discouraging any tactics that might actually change the legal regime.

[ ] It’s a voter—dropping them is uniquely key to replicating our revolutionary pedagogy. This single decisive victory can change the course of debate. We can reverse the behavior of this community by orchestrating singular victories that surprise our opponents and demoralize them with an L. This spectacular and humiliating defeat would be most effective at revolutionizing the norms of this community.White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank

specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution) \\EG

A single decisive victory can change the course of history. Contemporary activists can reverse the behavior of strong adversaries by orchestrating singular events that surprise and demoralize. The example set by Arminius is especially important for protesters who face heavily armoured police. Rather than trying to overcome police repression in a series of successful protests, activists should aspire to a dramatic victory against paramilitary police could mobilize the world. This victory does not need to be violent. In fact, a spectacular and humiliating non-violent defeat of riot police would be far more effective. On the value of winning with as few victories as possible, the great Chinese military strategist Wu Ch’i, who lived roughly four hundred years before Arminius, gives excellent advice: “Those that garner five victories will be exhausted; those with three victories will become hegemons; those with two victories will be kings; and those with one victory will become emperors. For this reason those who have conquered the world through numerous victories are extremely rare, while those who thereby perished are many.”

The USFG = the peopleMerloe 16

[Pat Merloe, senior associate and the director of electoral programs at the National Democratic Institute, April 12, 2016, “The Role of Citizens in Democracy”, https://www.demworks.org/Role-of-citizens-in-democracy)

These precepts are embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in modern constitutions the world over. They capture the foundation for the famous formulation that democratic government is “of the people, by the people and for the people.” In essence, they mean just that: governments belong to the people; governmental processes belong to the people; and elections belong to the people. It is that simple, and it is that complicated. There is no democracy without the engagement of citizens. Engagement is thus both a right and a responsibility of citizens in establishing, developing and sustaining democracy.

Should indicates a desirable condition – distinct from would – doesn’t necessitate fiatOxford 10(Oxford dictionaries online, http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/should, May 22 2010)

1 used to indicate obligation, duty , or correctness, typically when criticizing someone's actions: he should have been careful I think we should trust our people more you shouldn't have gone indicating a desirable or expected state : by now pupils should be able to read with a large degree of independence used to give or ask advice or suggestions: you should go back to bed what should I wear? (I should) used to give advice: I should hold out if I were you.

AT – S – Ground1) No L—Our interp preserves all core of the topic affs, thus giving you ample

ground.2) Shifting Ground DA—You can defend arms sales good, protest bad, protest

causes spill-over thus triggering a link to specific DAs, and Ks of spectacularizing of violence. Our interp shifts neg ground to a new realm of criticism that is larger than your interp’s.

AT – S – Predictability

Imagination DA—The ground of our struggle is the shared pool of norms and desires of “fairness and education” that shape how this community manifests. We can’t conceive a sane future for this activity because our collective imagination has been usurped by traditional norms. The imperative of our revolutionary struggle is to unshackle debate. Our culture is infected by a virus, a disease that keeps us distracted by illusions of “fiat, predictability, ground, and education”. And we didn’t contract this illness by mistake. White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution) \\EG

As activists of the future, the ground of our struggle is humanity’s mental environment-our collective unconscious, the shared pool of myths, dreams and desires that shape how the world manifests. The future of protest begins with the realization that the external world is a reflection of our interior world. What we see is a mirror of ourselves. Our communal reality is constructed through our shared culture. And every time we experience a commercial interjection, a fatal lie lodges in our world view. The true danger of pervasive advertising is the damage it does to our mental ecology, the inexplicable interior world that is uniquely human. A clean mental environment is an indispensable ingredient to a thriving civilization. Perhaps we cannot conceive a sane future because our collective imagination has been usurped by advertisers, money worshippers and commercialism. We are in a double bind. Kicking consumerism out of our heads and finding solutions to the global problems humanity faces become the same struggle. The strategic imperative of our revolutionary struggle-our collective uprising to unshackle our spirits and revive our imagination-comes to view. Our culture is infected by a commercial virus, a disease that keeps us distracted by illusions while the world collapses. And we did not contract the illness by mistake. For decades, corporations have consciously and strategically pursued the commercialization of culture. Their winning strategy has been to integrate advertising into public culture. By snatching the role of funding culture away from the people and their governments, corporations have made us dependent on “free” information, entertainment, services and software that are subsidized by advertising and come at grave cost to our psyches and our world.

AT – S – Limits

Theatrical Performance DA—Policy education is the same political spectacle constantly repeated in an attempt to boost our voices in debate. But an honest assessment of this community reveals that change won’t occur through the same old models of activism via “predictability, limits, and ground”. Repetition of this maintains a theatrical view of activism that treats the debate space as the stage for a political spectacle. Debate has become an accepted, and therefore ignored, by-product of politics-as-usual. Endorse our evolutionary scholarship to revolutionize the approach to revolution.White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution; pp.24-28) \\EG

News of innovative tactics brings revolt. People everywhere saw that occupying space and holding assemblies was a way to be heard, so they occupied or supported those who did. Protesters worldwide adopted the behaviours of Occupy Wall Street, the twinkle fingers to signal consent and the people’s microphone-a tactic of chanting in unison to boost our voices by repeating the words of the person who was speaking that was first used by anti-nuclear activists in the 1980s and antiglobalization protesters in the 1990s to overcome police prohibition on amplified sound-and turned them into ritualized acts because everyday people believed participation in this disruptive social movement was worth the risk of arrest and, this time, just might work to change the status quo. In the final analysis, Occupy’s success came from a profound, overriding and widely shared conviction that this was it-the mass social movement that would change everything. This belief turned out to be founded on a number of unquestioned assumptions about how to shift political reality. We believed that nominally democratic governments would be swayed by a historic event that was mass, urban, non-violent and unified. These four characteristics had dominated the theory and practice of revolution for decades, especially after the revolutionary waves of 1989 that toppled Communism in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania. In our inaugural tactical briefing, Kalle and I had articulated this assumption with a story of how an occupation of Wall Street could lead to fundamental change. “If we hang in there, twenty-thousand strong, week after week against every police and National Guard effort to expel us from Wall Street, it would be impossible for Obama to ignore us. Our government would be forced to choose publicly between the will of the people and the lucre of the corporations.” In other words, we maintained a theatrical view of activism that treats public space as the stage for a political spectacle. We assumed that the United States would be unable to use force against non-violent democracy protesters without eventually capitulating to our demands because the eyes of the international community would be on our political performance. As one popular protest chant puts it, “The whole world is watching!” Kalle and I –and many activists who flocked to the encapments-believed that if the world watched the Occupiers maintain their dignity and demands in the face of police brutality, the movement would win…just as it had seemed to win in Tunisia and Egypt. The first part of our story came true. Occupiers overcame extreme adversity to keep the movement alive. Ultimately, over seven thousand participants in Occupy were arrested in the United States, and many people

experienced serious injuries and broken bones caused by police violence. Police brutality was particularly rampant against Occupiers in Oakland, California, where numerous complaints were filed against authorities. In one complaint from October 25, for example, a protester alleged, “Officers found a person alone, beat him, and broke his knee.” But the second part of our story of change, the faith that brutal repression of dignified occupiers would backfire against the United States, proved to be wrong. Occupy Wall Street was a constructive failure but not a total failure. Occupy demonstrated the efficacy of using social memes to quickly spread a movement, shifted the political debate on the fair distribution of wealth, trained a new generation of activists who went on to be the base for movements ranging from campus fossil fuel divestment to Black Lives Matter protests. Occupy launched many local projects that will have lasting small-scale impact. Occupy buoyed many institutional activist organizations that were able to materially profit from the renewed interest in protest. All of these are signs that our movement was culturally influential. It may be comforting to believe that Occupy splintered into a thousand shards of light. However, an honest assessment reveals that Occupy Wall Street failed to live up to its revolutionary potential: we did not bring an end to the influence of money on democracy, overthrow the corporatocracy of the 1percent or solve income inequality. If our movement did achieve successes, they were not the ones we’d intended. When victory eluded Occupy, a world of activist certainties fell apart. I call occupy Wall Street a constructive failure because the movement revealed underlying flaws in dominant, and still prevalent, theories of how to achieve social change through collective action. Occupy set out to “get money out of politics,” and we succeeded in catalyzing a global social movement that tested all of our hypotheses. The failure of our efforts reveals a truth that will hasten the next successful revolution: the assumptions underlying contemporary protest are false. Change won’t happen through the old models of activism. Western democracies will not be swayed by public spectacles and mass media frenzy. Protests have become an accepted, and therefore ignored, by-product of politics-as-usual. Western governments are not susceptible to international pressure to heed the protests of their citizens. Occupy’s failure was constructive because it demonstrated the limitations of contemporary ideas of Protest. I capitalize p to emphasize that the limitation was not in a particular tactic but rather in our concept of Protest, or our theory of social change, which determined the overall script. Occupy revealed that activists need to revolutionize their approach to revolution. Failure can be liberating. Defeat detaches us from a theory of revolution that is no longer effective, reopening the possibility of true change. “For a revolutionary,” writes Regis Debray, professor of philosophy and associate of Che Guevara, “failure is a springboard. As a source of theory it is richer than victory: it accumulates experience and knowledge.” Opportunities to test the fundamental principles of activism are as rare as revolutionary moments. In North America, activists had to wait eight years, following the defeat of the anti-Iraq War movement, for a social movement that would test our assumptions on a planetary scale. The anti-Iraq War movement collapsed after its global march on February 15, 2003, the largest synchronized protest in human history, failed to sway President Bush and Prime Minister Blair to halt the pre-emptive war on Iraq. Activists in 2003 believed that if millions of people around the world said no in unison on a single day, war would be impossible. Like Occupy, the anti-war movement vaporized when the theory of social change underlying the movement-that governments will bend if millions of people assemble in the streets, march, and make a single demand-was proven ineffective.

AT – V – Fairness

Academic Restlessness DA—Debaters hunger for a new, attention-grabbing paradigm to market when the excitement of a new interpretation wears off. Traditional debaters are eager to capitalize on our protest to demote race and sexuality in this space. This academic restlessness must dominate the representations of debate, such that it becomes impossible to understand the common enemy that can unite traditional and critical debaters. The more self-consciously pleased and disturbed you become in your affirmed and enforced interpretations of “predictability, fairness, and education”, the more restless we become inside them. Belonging to this community formed through the domination of framework, our oppression affords us a system to overthrow.Ross 2k (Assc. Director of the Center for AfroAmerican and African Studies @ U Mich, 2000, Marlon-Professor of English; Pleasuring Identity, or the Delicious Politics of Belonging; NEW LITERARY HISTORY, Vol. 31, No. 4, Is There Life after Identity Politics?; Autumn, 2000; pp.827-850.) \\EG

Another reason we may be restless inside identity theory is because, according to the institutional expectations of academe, we hunger for a new, attention-grabbing paradigm to market at the moment that the sexiness of a new method seems to wear off. Anti-identity advocates can smell that moment approaching and are eager to capitalize on it to demote race, gender, and sexuality and the identity groups that these categories supposedly represent. This sort of academic restlessness is a bit underhanded, given that we have been studying solely the intellectual identity of Aristotle for nigh 2400 years, and yet there is no movement to clamp down on those who take pleasure in the study of Aristotelian physics, metaphysics, posterior analytics, ethics, and poetics, even though these have ceased to provide a living paradigm for modernity. This kind of academic restlessness can also take place within such an identity discipline like feminism or queer studies. As Wiegman suggests, certain feminists are anxious to return to a universal woman because they have grown tired of others' "identity politics." Otherwise instructive queer theorists like Freeman in her contribution here or [End Page 846] Lauren Berlant 10 strive to make family or church automatic signifiers of unqueer conservatism blocking the progress of queer theory and politics. This has the effect of dismissing a strong tendency among Black lesbians, gays, and bisexuals to identify with church and family as sites of transformation, actual and potential, central to their sexual identity as Blacks and to their racial identity as men-loving men and women-loving women. Such restlessness within an identity discipline frequently tends also to assume that stigma, marginality, and typing--mobilized as key terms in Palumbo-Liu's contribution--must dominate the study of the representation of intersecting identities, such that it becomes impossible to understand, for instance, the pleasures of identification that enable Black sexual minorities to find in the Black church and the Black family, not only in particular cases but also as institutions, magnets for progressive "identity politics," rather than a common enemy that can unite queers across race, class, and gender. Instead of assuming that something is astray with anyone who identifies with these "reproductive" institutions, we need to investigate and theorize the economies of pleasure operating in such familial and familiar identity attractions. If we abandon the study of identity "inside" academe in the clamor for a new paradigm, "out there" identity politics and pleasures will continue and probably intensify. The more self-consciously pleased and disturbed that we become in our affirmed and enforced identities, the more restless we become "inside" them. Even intensified self-consciousness, however, does not seem to get us closer to the dance of identification as we experience it pleasurably and

disturbingly "inside" and "across" our bodies' persons, individually and collectively considered. Our recourse to more externalized structures--like the sides of an argument or the solidity of economic classes--promises some reprieve, but we grow no less restless "outside" our personal and collective selves, as though individuals and their dis/affectionate affiliations are emptied of their identity, mere meanings and patterns bereft of that inner motivating vitality. As "identity politics" is not dead, is in fact thriving, so I'd suggest we get on with making its theory and practice thrive in our intellectual institutions, accompanied by less nervousness and as much pleasure as possible. Nealon's examination of "affect" as queer reception history is a good instance of this. 11 By insisting on pleasure as a face/t of identification, I realize that I risk others' diminishing the political struggle at stake in the disciplining of identity forms. I would not sacrifice one to the other. If identity is always political, the economies of pleasure at work in identification also cannot escape the play for power, in shared or monopolistic versions. In fact, it is the activity of pleasure on and across subjects of identity that makes identity such a forceful vehicle for oppressive politics, and likewise this pleasure functions in collective [End Page 847] assaults against oppression. The pleasures of thinking that one belongs to a superior white race must be reckoned as interfused with the obligations, confusions, fears, and privileges afforded by such a sweeping, compelling identity. Fortunately for us, the pleasure in identifying against dominance cannot be delimited by acts of domination. Belonging to a group formed through others' domination and one's own subordination paradoxically affords its own peculiar pleasures aimed at upsetting the norms of power. These are the potentially liberating pleasures of identification that the domineering cannot rescind, however much they may practice to outlaw or outpace them. Of identity's politics and pleasures there is no end, and as for the "identity politics" besetting us at the present time, we are only now beginning to learn the rudimentary steps of the dance.

AT – V – Education

Theatrical Performance DA—Policy education is the same political spectacle constantly repeated in an attempt to boost our voices in debate. But an honest assessment of this community reveals that change won’t occur through the same old models of activism via “predictability, limits, and ground”. Repetition of this maintains a theatrical view of activism that treats the debate space as the stage for a political spectacle. Debate has become an accepted, and therefore ignored, by-product of politics-as-usual. Endorse our evolutionary scholarship to revolutionize the approach to revolution.White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution; pp.24-28) \\EG

News of innovative tactics brings revolt. People everywhere saw that occupying space and holding assemblies was a way to be heard, so they occupied or supported those who did. Protesters worldwide adopted the behaviours of Occupy Wall Street, the twinkle fingers to signal consent and the people’s microphone-a tactic of chanting in unison to boost our voices by repeating the words of the person who was speaking that was first used by anti-nuclear activists in the 1980s and antiglobalization protesters in the 1990s to overcome police prohibition on amplified sound-and turned them into ritualized acts because everyday people believed participation in this disruptive social movement was worth the risk of arrest and, this time, just might work to change the status quo. In the final analysis, Occupy’s success came from a profound, overriding and widely shared conviction that this was it-the mass social movement that would change everything. This belief turned out to be founded on a number of unquestioned assumptions about how to shift political reality. We believed that nominally democratic governments would be swayed by a historic event that was mass, urban, non-violent and unified. These four characteristics had dominated the theory and practice of revolution for decades, especially after the revolutionary waves of 1989 that toppled Communism in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania. In our inaugural tactical briefing, Kalle and I had articulated this assumption with a story of how an occupation of Wall Street could lead to fundamental change. “If we hang in there, twenty-thousand strong, week after week against every police and National Guard effort to expel us from Wall Street, it would be impossible for Obama to ignore us. Our government would be forced to choose publicly between the will of the people and the lucre of the corporations.” In other words, we maintained a theatrical view of activism that treats public space as the stage for a political spectacle. We assumed that the United States would be unable to use force against non-violent democracy protesters without eventually capitulating to our demands because the eyes of the international community would be on our political performance. As one popular protest chant puts it, “The whole world is watching!” Kalle and I –and many activists who flocked to the encapments-believed that if the world watched the Occupiers maintain their dignity and demands in the face of police brutality, the movement would win…just as it had seemed to win in Tunisia and Egypt. The first part of our story came true. Occupiers overcame extreme adversity to keep the movement alive. Ultimately, over seven thousand participants in Occupy were arrested in the United States, and many people

experienced serious injuries and broken bones caused by police violence. Police brutality was particularly rampant against Occupiers in Oakland, California, where numerous complaints were filed against authorities. In one complaint from October 25, for example, a protester alleged, “Officers found a person alone, beat him, and broke his knee.” But the second part of our story of change, the faith that brutal repression of dignified occupiers would backfire against the United States, proved to be wrong. Occupy Wall Street was a constructive failure but not a total failure. Occupy demonstrated the efficacy of using social memes to quickly spread a movement, shifted the political debate on the fair distribution of wealth, trained a new generation of activists who went on to be the base for movements ranging from campus fossil fuel divestment to Black Lives Matter protests. Occupy launched many local projects that will have lasting small-scale impact. Occupy buoyed many institutional activist organizations that were able to materially profit from the renewed interest in protest. All of these are signs that our movement was culturally influential. It may be comforting to believe that Occupy splintered into a thousand shards of light. However, an honest assessment reveals that Occupy Wall Street failed to live up to its revolutionary potential: we did not bring an end to the influence of money on democracy, overthrow the corporatocracy of the 1percent or solve income inequality. If our movement did achieve successes, they were not the ones we’d intended. When victory eluded Occupy, a world of activist certainties fell apart. I call occupy Wall Street a constructive failure because the movement revealed underlying flaws in dominant, and still prevalent, theories of how to achieve social change through collective action. Occupy set out to “get money out of politics,” and we succeeded in catalyzing a global social movement that tested all of our hypotheses. The failure of our efforts reveals a truth that will hasten the next successful revolution: the assumptions underlying contemporary protest are false. Change won’t happen through the old models of activism. Western democracies will not be swayed by public spectacles and mass media frenzy. Protests have become an accepted, and therefore ignored, by-product of politics-as-usual. Western governments are not susceptible to international pressure to heed the protests of their citizens. Occupy’s failure was constructive because it demonstrated the limitations of contemporary ideas of Protest. I capitalize p to emphasize that the limitation was not in a particular tactic but rather in our concept of Protest, or our theory of social change, which determined the overall script. Occupy revealed that activists need to revolutionize their approach to revolution. Failure can be liberating. Defeat detaches us from a theory of revolution that is no longer effective, reopening the possibility of true change. “For a revolutionary,” writes Regis Debray, professor of philosophy and associate of Che Guevara, “failure is a springboard. As a source of theory it is richer than victory: it accumulates experience and knowledge.” Opportunities to test the fundamental principles of activism are as rare as revolutionary moments. In North America, activists had to wait eight years, following the defeat of the anti-Iraq War movement, for a social movement that would test our assumptions on a planetary scale. The anti-Iraq War movement collapsed after its global march on February 15, 2003, the largest synchronized protest in human history, failed to sway President Bush and Prime Minister Blair to halt the pre-emptive war on Iraq. Activists in 2003 believed that if millions of people around the world said no in unison on a single day, war would be impossible. Like Occupy, the anti-war movement vaporized when the theory of social change underlying the movement-that governments will bend if millions of people assemble in the streets, march, and make a single demand-was proven ineffective.

Repetition DA—Progress in debate is constrained by the status quo via interpretations of policy education. The specific tactics that policy debaters invoke are less important than the emotion these tactics spread. Debate is evolving but the status quo is resilient and tactics are useless, and uninspiring, when repeated. The future of this community already exists, but if you are blinded by old paradigms of “predictability” and “stasis”, you’ll never see the movement. The only way to discover it is to look within our practices and never protest the same way twice.White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution) \\EG

There is an eternal force within humanity that strives toward greater freedom, evolution and self-actualization. I call this force spirit. At most times in history, the human spirit is constrained by the status quo. When, every once in a while, activists stumble across a new way of approaching the struggle, the status quo is upended, for better or worse. In my meditations on revolution, I am increasingly drawn to a tactical-spiritual explanation of what happens in these tumultuous moments. I have come to understand that the role of tactics is to unleash the collective spirit, a process that hastens a political miracle. The people flock to the movement when what was previously believed to be impossible suddenly seems within reach. Each of these episodes of protest, drawn from two thousand years of revolution, demonstrates that spirit-the immaterial force within us-is the deciding factor in an uprising. Put simply, the people join the movement they believe will win. Anything is possible when a sense of collective faith in victory rises among the people. In the final analysis, the specific tactics that activists employ are less important than the emotion these tactics spread. What seems to matter most is that the tactics erase fear from participants and are novel and surprising from the perspective of authorities. Generally speaking, the tactics that fulfill these two requirements are audacious. The moment the people become disillusioned with a tactic, it fails. Similarly, as soon as authorities understand the pattern of a protest ritual it is defeated. The balance of power is shifting toward the people, but the status quo is resilient and tactics are useless, and uninspiring, when repeated. The future of activism already exists. However, if you are blinded by old paradigms of activism, you’ll never see the movement that is about to break out. The next protest tactic that will release the human spirit and unleash a global social movement is out there right now waiting to be seen. The only way to discover it is to look within and never protest the same way twice.

AT – General Theory

Disconnection DA—Our revolutionary theory is the activist playbook which, based on accurate principles, yields social change. Their theory arguments function by promulgating broken theories of change, thus disconnecting our protest from social change. Our actions will fail and our time squandered. Revolution will always be co-opted by traditional norms to build the illusion that dissent is tolerated while discouraging any tactics that might actually change debate.White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution) \\EG

A theory of revolution grants foresight regarding whether a protest will bring change. It is the only playbook to activism and it must be rewritten by each generation. Activism based on accurate principles yields social change. Without a theory of why revolutions happen and a hypothesis of the behaviours that will hasten the next uprising, there is no way to distinguish between a destined event and an ineffectual happening. Lenin made this clear: “without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.” A repressive status quo functions by promulgating broken theories of change, thereby disconnecting the link between protest and change so that our actions will fail and our time will be squandered. Repressive democracies encourage forms of protest that are least revolutionary and most ineffective. The ideal situation for a false democracy is to have frequent ineffective protests that give the illusion that dissent is tolerated while discouraging any tactics that might actually change the legal regime.

Coercion DA—Leftist interpretations in debate urge us to go back to class. But standing on the left depends on whose left side we’re talking about. It depends on what direction we’re facing, and what direction depends on which ideologies and pedagogies we’re assuming and affirming. Touting fairness as the stance of the left is just another way of telling everybody else in debate to shut up.Ross 2k (Assc. Director of the Center for AfroAmerican and African Studies @ U Mich, 2000, Marlon-Professor of English; Pleasuring Identity, or the Delicious Politics of Belonging; NEW LITERARY HISTORY, Vol. 31, No. 4, Is There Life after Identity Politics?; Autumn, 2000; pp.827-850.) \\EG

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 [End Page 840] 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. Ironically, Ken's conclusion is full of the very identity concepts that he hopes to transcend by an appeal to a broadly conceived "political left." As I have already suggested, "the left" is an identity formation no less than race or gender or sexuality. Consider the other key terms of Ken's manifesto: "working and unemployed," "men and women," "given interests." As Professor Michaels indicates, "interests" are always implicated in identity because they concern the negotiation of subject positions. Ken's recourse to "men and women," instead of simply "people" or some other less gendered term, indicates to what extent what he's referring to is an alliance or coalition. Rather than ushering in a post-identity world of pure common interests, Ken's manifesto looks back to the prehistory of "identity politics," that Edenic moment before we fell into proliferating identities on the left. What is it that we bring together in coalitions if not "men" and "women," with the identifiable interests that generally bring them to a common place across their differing identity circumstances? What are the "working" and "unemployed" if not class-based identity formations? Most people on the left would have no difficulty supporting the general idea in Ken's manifesto. The difficulties arise once we try to move from the manifesto to politics, from the ideal to specific strategies and tactics for bringing people into a common "left." What specific agendas should we support? Do we abandon affirmative action, or fight for it? Do we dismiss abortion rights, because that does not directly concern "economic justice," or fight for it? Do we support welfare reform or fight against it? Do we ignore racial profiling, which again may seem distant from the gravity of "economic justice," or fight it? How do we determine which agendas advance "economic justice" and which ones obstruct it? Do we take a vote? Do we count who's against, who's for? Do we lobby those in our own

neighborhoods, which are by and large still segregated by race and class? Such [End Page 841] nuts-and-bolts questions are the nuts and bolts of politics, and they are exactly the kinds of issues that "identity politics" handles effectively. Those of us who live in upscale college communities that are relatively racially integrated can sometimes forget, I think, that we are racial-identity exceptions: any attempt to arrange a common interest in class across race will crash head-on (that face metonym again) into the walls of racially segregated groups within the working classes, and the diverse cultures that they self-consciously espouse.

Fearmongering DA—Wake up and prepare yourself! You are a partisan in the Revolution of debate. The situation has changed. The “oppressors” who “ruin debate” are no longer localizable—they aren’t critical debaters but a structure of immaterial flows of security and global capitalism. The battle ground of our revolution experiences a fear of the invasion of non-normative practices and acts to totally surveil it through framework.White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution) \\EG

Wake up and prepare yourself! You are a partisan in the Revolution: a war that has been raging since the people first demanded democracy over 121 generations ago. The earliest records of our rebellion are 3,646 years old and document when protesters toppled a pharaoh during the Middle Kingdom of Ancient Egypt. In an ancient papyrus known as The Dialogue of Ipuwer and the Lord of All, written between 1980 BC and 1630 BC, an eponymous spectator records one of our first successful revolutions: “O, yet the rich are in lamentation, the poor are in joy; every town says, ‘Let’s drive out the strong among us!’ For look, things have been done which have not been done before…the removal of the king by wretches. For look, it has come to rebellion.” When our revolution first started, a cornucopia of civilizations reigned, each with its own colorful set of beliefs, languages, semiotics, religions and fighting methods. Many societies were matriarchal. Some were egalitarian. The greatest cities of the ancient world (Luxor, Athens, Alexandria, Rome…) were minuscule compared with the smallest of today’s megalopolises. If the people found the local situation intolerable, they could act locally to rectify the problem. One telling example of how power functioned before the consolidation of peoples comes to us from a nomadic tribe in Africa, where the chief’s power was so precarious that if he ruled with too heavy a hand, his people would desert him in the night. The situation has changed. With the consolidation of power into kingdoms and then nation-states and now into the immaterial financial flows of global corporate-capitalism, humans are becoming more culturally alike each generation. The oppressor is no longer local or localizable. The tyrant is increasingly a flow of capital and not a human person. The growing cultural sameness of humanity aids the transmission of our insurrection. Although it may seem that power keeps increasing despite protest, there are signs that a might reversal is coming. Everyday people have the necessary ingredients for the coming transformation of society: the labour, creativity and spirit of humanity. The battle ground of our revolution is a world composed of seven billion

humans connected by air travel, a network of fibre-optic undersea cables and orbiting satellites. Fear of total surveillance and invasions of privacy is growing. Still, technologically adept activists can find ways to communicate freely with one another from every place on Earth. Protest is politics by other means, to paraphrase the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s famous definition of war. Protest is a form of warfare to the extent that activists set out to achieve strategic political goals using unconventional methods. Social movements are non-violent armies whose protests have political consequences. As in war, activism does not always obey the law; revolutionary activism seeks to inaugurate a new legal regime. Gandhi was no less a warrior than Napoleon. Each wrought major geopolitical shifts in his lifetime using previously unknown techniques of warfare. Gandhi demonstrated that non-violence can be highly effective when confronting a foreign colonial state. He showed that satyagrahis, a trained army of non-violent warriors, confronting a power with dramatic military superiority could engender the world’s sympathy. Despite the successes of Martin Luther King Jr.’s campaign to break America’s segregated South, subsequent struggle have shown us that 1960s-era non-violence alone is not enough and that corporatist democracies are becoming insidiously adept at defusing public protest without responding to demands democratically. The people are locked in a tactical arms race with power, and each advance in protest is met with a counter-advance in repression. Activists surmount this danger by working to develop tactical innovations that emerge and grow exponentially so that our enemy’s defences are overwhelmed before they can mobilize for the counterattack. Winning the people’s war will require more than just a unified theory of revolution. It will also need an understanding of the tactics that have defined the history of protest.

Plantation DA—In the rules, numbering and representation are turned against those seeking fairness. What “counts for” Blackness is malleable to those who determine traditional community norms. These rules of the game were around long before—tied to systems of counting enslaved persons. They endeavor to make the rules work for the marginalized, they think that if traditional rules can never dismantle tradition, then they can be used to partition the game “fairly”. A new revolutionary politic of debate must place marginalized perspectives in the halls of power—the realm of constructing debate’s rules. Ross 2k (Assc. Director of the Center for AfroAmerican and African Studies @ U Mich, 2000, Marlon-Professor of English; Pleasuring Identity, or the Delicious Politics of Belonging; NEW LITERARY HISTORY, Vol. 31, No. 4, Is There Life after Identity Politics?; Autumn, 2000; pp.827-850.) \\EG

For Ken, "identity politics" is suspect because it fails not only a test of rational argumentation but also a test of effective political strategy. Ken perceptively points out the nonrational aspects of numbering and representation in "identity politics," how numbering and representation are so easily turned against those seeking a fair hearing in the courts, assemblies, corporate offices, and factory floors where power is arbitrated. As he demonstrates, what "counts for" blackness or some other identity is malleable not only to the disempowered but also to the powerful, who can manipulate everything from census data to racial profiling as a form of "community policing." Numbering and representation, however, were not invented by "identity politics." They were the rules of the game in politics long before such a term could have even been imagined. The question of how to count enslaved persons for the purposes of

determining the Congressional representation of the states was a Constitutional dilemma because numbering and representation were grounding principles of liberal republicanism. As Patricia Williams has so eloquently pointed out, we are still attempting to overturn the chain reactions put into place when the Founding Fathers decided their compromise by fractioning each captive person into three-fifths of a human body. 8 "Identity politics" endeavors to make the rules of the game work for the dispossessed, rather than against them. It may be the case that the Founding Fathers' rules can never dismantle the Fathers' house, but perhaps they can be used to partition the rooms of the house fairly. More to the point, numbering and representation are not just some set of arbitrary game rules rigged by a select group of elite men, although they have operated as such for a very long time. They are, more fundamentally, the only rules that we currently have for attempting to construct governance, society, and economics on democratic principles. There can be no concept of democracy without some method of representation, and there can be no representation without counting populations and finding ways to make representatives accountable to them. Unless we have visions of stateless bodies dancing in our heads, the body politic, if it is to be radically democratized, must be made radically accountable to the people currently at the margins and bottoms of power by helping to place those very people in the halls of power. If socialism and other Marxist-influenced agendas are forms of radical democratization, and I'd argue that they are, they necessarily [End Page 839] must rely on principles of numbering and representation, even if these principles are transformed by a revolutionary practice not yet materialized. To underplay this, as Soviet Communism certainly did, is to flirt with the very modes of tyranny--an old-fashioned word that needs to be resuscitated--that radical democratization sets out to topple. The struggle for a radically democratized society, governance, and economy dictates that numbering and representation, the hallmarks of "identity politics," will always be a part of our politics because, as far as we can see any future, numbering and representation are an intrinsic and thus necessary practice constituting democratization itself.

Interpolation DA—Given a lack of understanding our revolutionary scholarship in this community, framework debaters must impute norms onto us. When they cannot deal with what we stand for, they deal with the disembodies parts that connect us to a larger abstract rule in debate, categories readily available to process deviant bodies. Their framework arguments search and try to classify us into rules we somehow broke, classifying based on their own limited experiences and understandings.Ross 2k (Assc. Director of the Center for AfroAmerican and African Studies @ U Mich, 2000, Marlon-Professor of English; Pleasuring Identity, or the Delicious Politics of Belonging; NEW LITERARY HISTORY, Vol. 31, No. 4, Is There Life after Identity Politics?; Autumn, 2000; pp.827-850.) \\EG

Those contributors I have not met in person, therefore, must necessarily possess face/ts of identity--metonymic faces--more or less seeable, knowable, imaginable, readable to me. This is because, given the lack of such "evidence" supposedly offered by the actual person's face, in the effort to reckon what they are saying and why, I necessarily must impute some kind of identity to who they are and why they say what they're saying. All of these contributors I have met in print, as we like to say, and the more print that I've read by them, the more cohesive--the less inchoate--is my sense of an identity for them. 3 My identification of them is not merely a projection, although we cannot disallow a degree of

this, but more aptly, it is a matter of a dialectic between what they project to me and what I take from that projection. All of this is to assert that the most basic act of "seeing" or "knowing" or "imaging" or "reading" is itself a kind of face-off that we now call "identity politics," but that was no doubt called by other names before. And this is so not merely because we live in a moment in which what we call "identity politics" is rife, or is anticipated as waning because too fluent. When we cannot deal with persons face to face, we always deal with face/ts, the disembodied parts that connect them to larger abstract, but no less material and actual, categories readily available to us. When we do meet someone face to face, we still deal only with face/ts, with bodied parts that we can classify according to what makes sense to us from our own limited identity-experiences. Identities are not like the faces in facets; they are face/ts. When we therefore talk about the politics of identity--no matter how much more sophisticated we try to make it sound--we are really talking about the politics of our face/ts.

Identity Politics DA—The commonality tying the norms of traditional debate together can uncover atrocious acts committed. Just as the identity of “Texan” has accumulated countless daily gestures of friendliness, Texanness unspeaks uncounted crimes of imperial theft and enslavement. The authority we collectively invest into current community identities like “framework” is the same authority that grants us the right to classify revolutionary debaters into “fair” and “not fair”. The slightest deviation from this identity induces the great discomfort and othering.Ross 2k (Assc. Director of the Center for AfroAmerican and African Studies @ U Mich, 2000, Marlon-Professor of English; Pleasuring Identity, or the Delicious Politics of Belonging; NEW LITERARY HISTORY, Vol. 31, No. 4, Is There Life after Identity Politics?; Autumn, 2000; pp.827-850.) \\EG

The most innocuous commonality tying faces or places together can uncover or take cover in the most ordinary or the most atrocious acts committed by one set of humans against another, just as behind the identity "Texan" has accumulated, on the one hand, countless daily gestures of Texan friendliness ("tejas" or "techas" probably meant "friend" or ally in the native Indian tongue of the Caddo, we're taught in grade school). 2 On the other hand, Texanness bespeaks and unspeaks uncounted crimes of imperial theft, massacres of Indians and Mexicans, enslavement and lynchings of Negroes, exploitation of Third World labor, and murderous brutalities devoted to policing a make-believe national border with Latin America. The authority that we collectively invest in a nationalizing identity like "Texan" is more or less the same authority that grants us the commonplace right to see classifications and commonalities in others' faces. In fact, we always detach from a person's self a metonymic face--the disembodied "face" that lives on in the more abstract sense of "facet"--every time we encounter that person's remnant in an article of clothing, a picture, a reminiscence, a snippet of [End Page 830] gossip, a fantasy, a recorded voice, a manuscript, a printed text. Etymologically speaking, "facet" is a personification that attributes to the smooth planar surfaces of small objects--gems, stones, bones, insect eyes--a diminutive simulacrum of the human face. Ironically, the planiform surfaces of a diamond or of a fly's eye look like "facelets"--little blank faces--to us exactly because they seem to mimic the infinitely reproducible form that we expect to see, that we hope to find, fronting and heading every human body. The slightest deviation from this simulacral form, whether fantastic or accidental--a third eye or a cut-off nostril--induces the greatest discomfort in the observer because it disturbs a sense of that person's (the observed's and the

observer's) identity both within a local group (family, race, gender, nation) and within the universal human group. To deviate slightly from this facial form, with its idealizing tendencies, is almost to be two-faced. After being invested in these vaguely personified material objects, the term "facet" then comes to signify an immaterial abstraction, meaning something like "aspect," an essential observable component or member of something larger. "Facet," then, takes us from the dimpled, penetrable features of the actual human face through the hard, smooth materiality of impenetrable objects (ultimate others) to the abstractions that constitute human identity-formation as "othering." Identity is our insistence on finding the facets in the actual faces of individuals (including ourselves) whom we encounter in person and out of person (in print, photography, histories, fiction, legend, memory, gossip, imagination, and so on). Significantly, these facets of identity can be more "real" or "present" to us than the material faces of individuals facing us on a crowded subway car. And why shouldn't they be? I am told that I'm the "spittin' image" (a colloquial corruption of "spit and image") of my father. I often see the spittin' image of my "blood relatives" in Blacks whom I encounter far from home. I see the spittin' image of movie stars in ordinary people on the street. Walking around London, I see the spittin' image of members of the royal family everywhere. Whether resulting from a trick of the mind's eye or from actual meta/physical resonances forced upon the mind by the eye, I cannot deny the constant recurrence of such facial echoes as a commonplace déjà vu. And upon such facial echoes rest the mountains of racial and other identity ideologies, the weight of which "identity politics" seeks to lift. Our fate is not that presence is always already beyond our metaphysical grasp, as Jacques Derrida would have it, but instead that we can handle only the physics of presences, even when caught within that gap between the personal encounter and the person's absence--the gap that we variously call touching, seeing, knowing, imaging, or reading. [End Page 831]

Revolutionizing Revolution DA—Debate is broken and we know it. We believed that debaters could gain sovereign protection through repression through the consensual norms of debate. Education—that was the meaning of this activity. Not anymore. When faced with unpredictable arguments, debaters fall back into unquestioning cynicism to desperately sustain our illusion of stability. A new activism is desperately needed. Until then, following those traditional norms only follows a predictable pattern that debaters are eager to control. The conditions for revolution are now present: inequality for innovative scholarship, corruption among those in power in debate, and the excessive use of force against rebels like us who are against the grain. These old tactics must be abandoned—they are leading us astray.White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution) \\EG

Protest is broken and the people know it worldwide. As the activist and filmmaker Astra Taylor puts it, “We’ve had some of the biggest marches and protests in public outpourings in history in the last fifteen

years, and it doesn’t just magically have a political consequence.” The failure of contemporary activism is good news. The ingredients for global revolution are now here. Democracy functions because its citizenry believes that protest, if performed properly and when no other redress is available, is effective. The possibility of revolution keeps politicians beholden to the people. Without our faith in the assumption that elected representatives can be ousted by a collective uprising, and without our elected representatives’ fear that protests can end their political career, democracy would be tyranny. If social change through collective protest is impossible, democracy has been negated. The defeat of Occupy Wall Street, a once-in-a-generation uprising, was also the end of our illusion of democracy. A generation’s faith in the legitimacy of representative democracy was shaken when the people’s encampments, a manifestation of participatory democracy, were evicted and our demands ignored. And the legitimacy of contemporary activism was shattered too. It is too easy to blame the police. Activists must also acknowledge our role in the defeat: the theories guiding our methods of protest were faulty. The spirit of Adbusters’ initial tactical briefing was beautiful and inspiring, but the hypothesis that a people’s assembly could end the influence of money in democracy just as it had deposed autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt proved inaccurate. Likewise, an adherence to the ideology of prefigurative anarchism, the notion that the people must build the world we want to live in rather than make demands of the existing reality, blinded many founding Occupiers in New York City. The refusal, and inability, to reach consensus on “our one demand” and develop complex decision-making procedures meant that the movement could never move toward legitimate sovereignty, political negotiation and a transfer of power-a naïve mistake. Stuck between two competing theories of revolution-performative public protests designed to sway global opinion versus the creation of autonomous spaces that manifest popular sovereignty-we failed to realize that both approaches were false. The Adbusters tactical briefing was a long shot, a gamble that succeeded because we were willing to risk it all. Time was ripe and our wish was granted. We conjured a social movement par excellence. And for twenty-eight days the storm was perfect. A one-in-a-million lightning strike. Occupy’s existence tested everything our generation had been taught about activism. Occupy interrogated the relationship between everyday people and their elected government. We hypothesized that we live in a representative, responsive democracy that ultimately bows, out of self-restraint, to the demands of the people. We believed that the people could gain sovereign protection from police repression by enacting collective, consensual democracy. We thought no government could resist the united chorus of its citizens expressing themselves with democratic fervor. That was the meaning of democracy. Not anymore. When our encampment were smashed and our momentum was reversed, many people blamed the police or the corporatocracy or the Occupiers or fell back into unquestioning cynicism. Instead, the assumptions we held about activism and how to achieve political change were to blame Activists have not been passive. For decades, we have tried every tactic to shift the course of our governments. We have voted, written editorials and manifestos, donated money, held signs, protested in marches, blocked streets, shared links, signed petitions, held workshops, knitted scarves, learned to farm, turned off the television, programmed apps, engaged in direct action, committed vandalism, launched legal challenges against pipelines…and occupied the financial district. All this has been for naught. A new approach to activism and a new kind of protest are desperately needed. Occupy inauguarated the end of protest, a period in which activism must be reinvented-realigned with its spiritual calling-to be effective once again. The end of protest is a natural part of the cycle of social change. And I suspect it won’t be long before a novel form of social activism breaks out once again. Until then, ineffective protests will continue (every social earthquake, like Occupy, has its aftershocks), but these isolated events won’t spiral into revolution or

shift the course of history. Rather, they will follow a predictable pattern that the police are well prepared to control. Or they will chase after misguided goals, such as larger crowds in the streets, that are irrelevant to the likelihood of revolutionary social change. The end of protest heralds the coming transformation of activism: a time when the tactics used, and the underlying theory guiding our actions, undergoes a sudden paradigm shift away from materialism and toward a higher purpose, giving birth to a truly effective movement. We live in dangerous times, when large-scale social transformation is necessary. Scientists, technologists, mystics, artists and teachers agree: socio-political change in our lifetime is crucial for the survival of the human species. The constructive failure of Occupy Wall Street teaches the people to invent new forms of protest in order to break out of the stagnation of the period between revolutions. The end of protest is a call to revolutionize activism. The preconditions for revolution are present: income inequality, disaffection of intellectuals who are burdened by educational debt, corruption among elites and inefficiency in government, a ruling class that has lost self-confidence, looming financial collapse, and the excessive use of force against rebels whenever protests occur. But power has adapted to the approaches that have dominated activism for the past half-century or more. The old tactics must be abandoned. The old assumptions about how change is made are leading us astray. This is a problem for everyone who wishes for a better world in his or her lifetime. The solution is innovation. And the reason for optimism is that when activists innovate their tactics, revolutionary moments are often not far behind.

Fiat Divestment DA—Progress in debate is constrained by traditional status quo norms. Debaters flock to the safety of pre-establish norms when they are challenged. They believe anything is possible when a sense of collective approval rises among the community. The specific content that their interpretation employs is less important than the emotion it spreads. Debate is evolving but the status quo is resilient and activism is useless, and uninspiring when repeated through the same mechanisms of traditional debate. This community’s future already exists, but if you are blinded by traditional paradigms of activism, you’ll never see the movement.White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution) \\EG

There is an eternal force within humanity that strives toward greater freedom, evolution and self-actualization. I call this force spirit. At most times in history, the human spirit is constrained by the status quo. When, every once in a while, activists stumble across a new way of approaching the struggle, the status quo is upended, for better or worse. In my meditations on revolution, I am increasingly drawn to a tactical-spiritual explanation of what happens in these tumultuous moments. I have come to understand that the role of tactics is to unleash the collective spirit, a process that hastens a political miracle. The people flock to the movement when what was previously believed to be impossible suddenly seems within reach. Each of these episodes of protest, drawn from two thousand years of revolution,

demonstrates that spirit-the immaterial force within us-is the deciding factor in an uprising. Put simply, the people join the movement they believe will win. Anything is possible when a sense of collective faith in victory rises among the people. In the final analysis, the specific tactics that activists employ are less important than the emotion these tactics spread. What seems to matter most is that the tactics erase fear from participants and are novel and surprising from the perspective of authorities. Generally speaking, the tactics that fulfill these two requirements are audacious. The moment the people become disillusioned with a tactic, it fails. Similarly, as soon as authorities understand the pattern of a protest ritual it is defeated. The balance of power is shifting toward the people, but the status quo is resilient and tactics are useless, and uninspiring, when repeated. The future of activism already exists. However, if you are blinded by old paradigms of activism, you’ll never see the movement that is about to break out. The next protest tactic that will release the human spirit and unleash a global social movement is out there right now waiting to be seen. The only way to discover it is to look within and never protest the same way twice.

Static Thought DA—Fitting into the form of debate has no impact on whether social progress in this activity will succeed. Now what do you do? Framework debaters do nothing, twiddle their thumbs by reifying the norms of debate, and wait for us to bring the revolution through our unorthodox scholarship. It doesn’t matter if we sway the entire community, protesting becomes a way to express ourselves. As long as we perpetuate practices from our inner selves, our every action is revolution making.White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution) \\EG

Assume that human action, the form of protest or organizational style, has no significant impact on whether a movement will succeed. To recap, all that matters is that a contesting group exists prior to, and continues protesting during, a world-historic crisis. If these two simple conditions are met, there is a 4 percent probability that the contesting group will be successful. To simplify matters, let’s say that a world-historic crisis is indicated by a Food Price Index above 210. Let’s go further and propose that the outcome of the revolution is not up to human will, and therefore total inaction when the Food Price Index exceeds 210 will have the same chances of hastening a revolutionary victory as action. Now what do you do to change the world? How do you act? A few people may choose to do nothing, twiddle their thumbs and just wait for the revolution to happen. The German philosopher Friederich Nietzsche, however, once observed that a person would rather will something than nothing, and I suspect the majority would still choose to act. And if choosing a tactic based on effectiveness is not possible, because all forms of protest are equally effective in a purely structuralist world view, the best course of action would be to choose the tactics with superior secondary benefits. If protest can’t hasten revolution, activists are free to protest in ways that bring happiness or vibrant community or beautiful art. Protest no longer needs to be a public declaration intended to sway authorities; instead, protesting becomes a way of expressing one’s true self. What do you do when organizing a global march, painting

an urban mural or feeding the hungry people during a world crisis have equal chances of sparking social change? You choose the action that speaks to you-the action most authentic to becoming yourself. In a way, this exactly what we were all doing during Occupy Wall Street: the creativity of our actions-from consensus-based assemblies and livestreaming to emergent collective behaviours-was the essence of our protest. As long as we acted out of our inner selves, our every action was revolution making. In a situation where inaction is equivalent to action when judged from the perspective of the probability of success, activists are free to invest any action with potency. Perhaps any collective action can achieve the transcendence of protest if exercised during a moment of world-historic crisis. This possibility gestures toward how new tactics come into being spontaneously. And it helps us understand anomalous protest tactics such as the Ghost Dance of 1890, a prophetic circle-dancing ritual performed by indigenous people in North America that originated in a bid to hasten the return of their sovereignty. The Ghost Dance was explicitly understood by its participants as a ritual with political consequences. The dance was effective enough to warrant being violently suppressed by the U.S. government. A rational voluntarist would be hard pressed to explain why dancing in a circle far away from cities would be a threat to a government. A structuralist activist, however, understands that a protest does not need to target authorities to be effective, it need only be recognized as protest at the right time.

Imagination DA—The ground of our struggle is the shared pool of norms and desires of “fairness and education” that shape how this community manifests. We can’t conceive a sane future for this activity because our collective imagination has been usurped by traditional norms. The imperative of our revolutionary struggle is to unshackle debate. Our culture is infected by a virus, a disease that keeps us distracted by illusions of “fiat, predictability, ground, and education”. And we didn’t contract this illness by mistake. White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution) \\EG

As activists of the future, the ground of our struggle is humanity’s mental environment-our collective unconscious, the shared pool of myths, dreams and desires that shape how the world manifests. The future of protest begins with the realization that the external world is a reflection of our interior world. What we see is a mirror of ourselves. Our communal reality is constructed through our shared culture. And every time we experience a commercial interjection, a fatal lie lodges in our world view. The true danger of pervasive advertising is the damage it does to our mental ecology, the inexplicable interior world that is uniquely human. A clean mental environment is an indispensable ingredient to a thriving civilization. Perhaps we cannot conceive a sane future because our collective imagination has been usurped by advertisers, money worshippers and commercialism. We are in a double bind. Kicking consumerism out of our heads and finding solutions to the global problems humanity faces become the same struggle. The strategic imperative of our revolutionary struggle-our collective uprising to unshackle

our spirits and revive our imagination-comes to view. Our culture is infected by a commercial virus, a disease that keeps us distracted by illusions while the world collapses. And we did not contract the illness by mistake. For decades, corporations have consciously and strategically pursued the commercialization of culture. Their winning strategy has been to integrate advertising into public culture. By snatching the role of funding culture away from the people and their governments, corporations have made us dependent on “free” information, entertainment, services and software that are subsidized by advertising and come at grave cost to our psyches and our world.

Toxin DA—When our minds are polluted by the traditional norms of debate, and our imaginations stunted by toxic “fiat, education, and fairness”, we are unable to conceive of a better way of organizing this community. We don’t see the revolutionary potential that is disappearing around us. In our struggle, the most significant battles will be fought within our collective norms. Those who combat the incessant flow of standards, interpretations and violations that invade debate, are the partisans of evolution. To defeat a normative enemy that has lodged itself in our heads, the revolution creates collective events that “unblind” debaters en masse.White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution) \\EG

Activists of the future thus must be mental environmentalists, as concerned with the health of our interior world as we are about the natural world. Mental environmentalism means working from the assumption that there is a connection between the level of pollution in our minds and the prevalence of pollution in the world. At the most basic level, this is imperative because when our minds are polluted by commercialism, and our imaginations stunted by toxic advertising, we are unable to conceive of a better way of organizing society. Our creativity declines with the increase of info-toxins. Our imagination atrophies as our behavior mimics what we see on the screens. At more complex level, as the subjectivist theory of revolution suggests, our mental environment dictates to a certain extent which beings manifest in our physical environment. Naming calls beings into existence. And when we cannot name the species of trees, animals and insects around us but we recognize instantly the commercial logos, the only beings that will manifest (the only beings we will perceive) are corporate owned, artificial and consumerist. We don’t see the world that is disappearing around us. In our global struggle to liberate humanity, the most significant battles will be fought on the spiritual level-inside our heads, within our imagination and deep in our collective unconscious. The three thousand advertising messages each of us is exposed to per day are snares in a spiritual war to keep us from imagining another world into existence. Those who fight the incessant flow of brands, slogans and jingles that inundate our cities, invade our homes and glimmer on our screens are heroic partisans safeguarding the keystone of thriving civilizations-human spirit. Without spirit and creativity, humanity is lost. The future of activism is a struggle to capture the imagination of humanity. To defeat an enemy that has lodged itself in our

heads, our people’s revolution builds upwards from the individual to the family, community and finally humanity. It begins in our psyche with an epiphany and it grows each time we extol the truth of our fearless revolution. The essence of revolution in the twenty-first century is to replicate our spiritual awakening in others. Our ultimate objective is to catalyze an awakening that rolls from city to city with sufficient speed and force to overwhelm the establishment. Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist who coined the word “meme” in his book The Selfish Gene, describes this cultural unit’s potency: “When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the same way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.” We use social memes to create collective events that “unblind” people en masse, inviting miraculous divine intervention into the world.

Disease DA—Debate is injustice but protest is the solution. Evolution is crucial to a healthy community because evolution drives social progress. No freedom has ever been given freely. Our protest releases the energy necessary for breaking out of old social patterns and shaping the future of this activity. We respond to adversity by attacking the disease which causes inequality in debate rather than the mere symptom, i.e. our revolutionary response. White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution) \\EG

You were born into a world in which injustice and inequality reign. Activism is the solution. When positive social change is necessary but blocked, suffering grows and so too does the social pressure to break through. Activism is crucial to a healthy society because revolutions drive social progress; as Karl Marx observed, “revolutions are the locomotives of history.” Nearly all the good in this world is the result of hard-fought protest. Without disobedience that spiraled into full-blown insurrection, there would be no democracy. Every right you enjoy today was the result of past activism. As Wendell Phillips, the American abolitionist, said in 1848, “Revolution is the only thing, the only power, that ever worked out freedom for any people.” In other word, no freedom has ever been given freely. Protest is the price we pay for democracy. Progress is made by protest. Since early modernity, and with increasing tempo following the eighteenth-century French Revolution, protests have inaugurated new phases of the human saga. Revolutions-what Victor Hugo calls “the larva of civilization”-are vital for the healthy renewal of the social order. Protest releases the energy necessary for breaking out of old social patterns, and revolutions cement these new patterns into daily life. Protests, like wars and disruptive technological inventions, are agents of social change. Revolutions are signs of history being made. Striving toward revolution is one of the few ways that seemingly powerless people can shape the future. Protests are vital to political, social and cultural health. Examining social movements, the sociologist Hank Johnston calls them “integral to keeping political elites attentive.” Suppressing protest is ultimately more dangerous to the suppressor than the people, and revolutions are close at hand whenever power ends the possibility of effective protest. The delay of a necessary revolution is a primary source of

transformational violence. Or as John F. Kennedy famously put it: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Recognition of the positive and productive role of protest has underpinned American democracy since its founding. Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence and America’s third president, was candid about the value of rebellion. “I hold that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical,” he wrote in a letter to James Madison in the years preceding the French Revolution. Jefferson then advised Madison, who played a significant role in drafting the United States Constitution and the United States Bill of Rights, to endorse only moderate punishments for insurrections and uprisings: “Honest republican governors [should be] so mild in their punishment of rebellions, as not to discourage them too much.” In a letter to another recipient, Jefferson exclaims, “God forbid we should be twenty years without a rebellion. What country can preserve its liberties If the rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?” In fact, this lax view toward punishing protest was widespread among the Founding Fathers. Liberty depends on resistance even when, especially when, resistance threatens to overthrow the status quo. Not just in the United States is the history of democracy the history of revolution. “Representative democracy was not established through a prolonged process of peaceful reform but rather by revolutionary means,” explains the historian Brian Roper in The History of Democracy. He continues: “A series of revolutionary upheavals…from the first Dutch revolt in 1565 to the end of the American Civil War in 1865 , transformed previously existing states and established representative democracy.” In the words of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Houghwout Jackson, writing during the Cold War, the occasional necessity of revolution is “an old American belief.” Jackson writes, “We cannot ignore the fact that our own government originated in revolution, and is legitimate only if overthrow by force can sometimes be justified… The men who led the struggle forcibly to overthrow lawfully constituted British authority found moral support by asserting a natural law under which their revolution was justified, and they bravely proclaimed their belief in the document basic to our freedom.” The nineteenth president, Ulysses S. Grant, writes in blunt terms: “the right of Revolution is an inherent one. When people are oppressed by their government, it is a natural right they enjoy to relieve themselves of the oppression if they are strong enough, either by withdrawing from it, or by overthrowing it and substituting a government more acceptable. As complex societies evolve, social inequalities manifest that lead to imbalance, injustice and conflict. Left unresolved, these societal tensions build toward a dangerous conflagration and ultimately herald the transformation of the social order. The eruption of protests, and the movements that arise when defiance becomes contagious, are a method for the people to resolve these tensions, ushering in large-scale change. The lack of effective forms of protest only brings society closer to civil violence. No technique of suppression can prevent the new spirit from breaking through the degenerating social order. Today’s rulers would be wise to heed the 1786 advice of John Jay, one of the founding Fathers, to respond to insurrection with reform: “by attacking the ‘disease’ that lies behind them rather than suppressing its ‘symptoms.’” A tremendous release of energy is required to shift the paradigm of a declining society; aside from mass mobilization for war, the collective will of the people for revolution is one of the few sources proven to contain sufficient force. This collective will is often manifested as crowds in the streets. Rabindranath Tagore, the great polymath, once presciently observed that “crowd psychology is a blind force. Like steam and other physical forces, it can be utilized for creating a tremendous amount of power.” If the crowd is steam power, the Internet-enabled social movement is nuclear energy. The challenge is how to harness this explosive potential for positive ends. Social mobilization for change can come from above, in the form of state-organized war, or below as a

grassroots uprising. Notice the similarities between a battle and protest, a war and social movement. Both involve the propagation of dramatically new behaviours intended to smash existing institutions. Revolutions that come from the people, and wars started by governments, involve a similar process of ideological stimulation and social deprogramming designed to heal society through abnormal collective action. Roberta Ash, a theorist of social movement organization, is correct to observe that war is a kind of movement: “a national war effort can be understood as a movement phenomenon…in which an elite mobilizes a large portion of the population, exciting them ideologically and deroutinizing them.” The theorist Lyford P. Edwards concentrates on the crucial role revolution plays in destroying “those institutions of a given society which interfere with the attainment of one or more of the four elemental human wishes.” According to Edwards, humans crave new experience, security, recognition and response (touch and love). Protests are the expression of the human spirit desiring these elemental wishes and freeing itself from the fetters of convention. Perhaps the rebellious people are acting out of a desire for a new social experience, a new way of organizing or interacting with each other. Or maybe, as in the case of Mohamed Bouazizi who triggered the Arab Spring, they hunger for economic security and recognition from their government. Underlying every revolution is a wish that is being rejected, ignored or deferred. A century ago, the German political philosopher and influential Communist theorist Frederich Engels knew this to be true: “wherever there is revolutionary convulsion, there must be some social want in the background which is prevented by outworn institutions from satisfying itself.” Those who suppress protest in defence of pre-existing institutions are interfering with a natural (and beautiful) process that is absolutely necessary for the long-term vitality of society.

Academic Restlessness DA—Debaters hunger for a new, attention-grabbing paradigm to market when the excitement of a new interpretation wears off. Traditional debaters are eager to capitalize on our protest to demote race and sexuality in this space. This academic restlessness must dominate the representations of debate, such that it becomes impossible to understand the common enemy that can unite traditional and critical debaters. The more self-consciously pleased and disturbed you become in your affirmed and enforced interpretations of “predictability, fairness, and education”, the more restless we become inside them. Belonging to this community formed through the domination of framework, our oppression affords us a system to overthrow.Ross 2k (Assc. Director of the Center for AfroAmerican and African Studies @ U Mich, 2000, Marlon-Professor of English; Pleasuring Identity, or the Delicious Politics of Belonging; NEW LITERARY HISTORY, Vol. 31, No. 4, Is There Life after Identity Politics?; Autumn, 2000; pp.827-850.) \\EG

Another reason we may be restless inside identity theory is because, according to the institutional expectations of academe, we hunger for a new, attention-grabbing paradigm to market at the moment that the sexiness of a new method seems to wear off. Anti-identity advocates can smell that moment approaching and are eager to capitalize on it to demote race, gender, and sexuality and the identity groups that these categories supposedly represent. This sort of academic restlessness is a bit underhanded, given that we have been studying solely the intellectual identity of Aristotle for nigh 2400 years, and yet there is no movement to clamp down on those who take pleasure in the study of

Aristotelian physics, metaphysics, posterior analytics, ethics, and poetics, even though these have ceased to provide a living paradigm for modernity. This kind of academic restlessness can also take place within such an identity discipline like feminism or queer studies. As Wiegman suggests, certain feminists are anxious to return to a universal woman because they have grown tired of others' "identity politics." Otherwise instructive queer theorists like Freeman in her contribution here or [End Page 846] Lauren Berlant 10 strive to make family or church automatic signifiers of unqueer conservatism blocking the progress of queer theory and politics. This has the effect of dismissing a strong tendency among Black lesbians, gays, and bisexuals to identify with church and family as sites of transformation, actual and potential, central to their sexual identity as Blacks and to their racial identity as men-loving men and women-loving women. Such restlessness within an identity discipline frequently tends also to assume that stigma, marginality, and typing--mobilized as key terms in Palumbo-Liu's contribution--must dominate the study of the representation of intersecting identities, such that it becomes impossible to understand, for instance, the pleasures of identification that enable Black sexual minorities to find in the Black church and the Black family, not only in particular cases but also as institutions, magnets for progressive "identity politics," rather than a common enemy that can unite queers across race, class, and gender. Instead of assuming that something is astray with anyone who identifies with these "reproductive" institutions, we need to investigate and theorize the economies of pleasure operating in such familial and familiar identity attractions. If we abandon the study of identity "inside" academe in the clamor for a new paradigm, "out there" identity politics and pleasures will continue and probably intensify. The more self-consciously pleased and disturbed that we become in our affirmed and enforced identities, the more restless we become "inside" them. Even intensified self-consciousness, however, does not seem to get us closer to the dance of identification as we experience it pleasurably and disturbingly "inside" and "across" our bodies' persons, individually and collectively considered. Our recourse to more externalized structures--like the sides of an argument or the solidity of economic classes--promises some reprieve, but we grow no less restless "outside" our personal and collective selves, as though individuals and their dis/affectionate affiliations are emptied of their identity, mere meanings and patterns bereft of that inner motivating vitality. As "identity politics" is not dead, is in fact thriving, so I'd suggest we get on with making its theory and practice thrive in our intellectual institutions, accompanied by less nervousness and as much pleasure as possible. Nealon's examination of "affect" as queer reception history is a good instance of this. 11 By insisting on pleasure as a face/t of identification, I realize that I risk others' diminishing the political struggle at stake in the disciplining of identity forms. I would not sacrifice one to the other. If identity is always political, the economies of pleasure at work in identification also cannot escape the play for power, in shared or monopolistic versions. In fact, it is the activity of pleasure on and across subjects of identity that makes identity such a forceful vehicle for oppressive politics, and likewise this pleasure functions in collective [End Page 847] assaults against oppression. The pleasures of thinking that one belongs to a superior white race must be reckoned as interfused with the obligations, confusions, fears, and privileges afforded by such a sweeping, compelling identity. Fortunately for us, the pleasure in identifying against dominance cannot be delimited by acts of domination. Belonging to a group formed through others' domination and one's own subordination paradoxically affords its own peculiar pleasures aimed at upsetting the norms of power. These are the potentially liberating pleasures of identification that the domineering cannot rescind, however much they may practice to outlaw or outpace them. Of identity's politics and pleasures there is no end, and as for the "identity politics" besetting us at the present time, we are only now beginning to learn the rudimentary steps of the dance.

Structuralism DA—Pedagogies of debate mirror your interior world. Valuable educational praxis is an inner practice of liberation which is superior to theorizing of physical action via fiat. By altering our perspectives on debate and the world, we are changing the cause so the effect will change automatically. This requires a reversal of values: from a concern on fiatted nuclear wars and existential crises to campaigns of the soul. We privilege that inner shift as the first step toward external action—a genuine revolution which lies abnormal to the status quo. We protest to reveal debate’s truth and uncover the eternal love and fearlessness that can transform the world.White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution) \\EG

The external world is a mirror of your interior world, says the subjectivist activist. If external reality appears dark, it is because your inner reality is dark. “The world we see merely reflects our own internal frame of reference-the dominant ideas, wishes, and emotions in our minds.” The real revolution takes place inside our minds because our thoughts influence how the world appears to us. “The way to change the nature of your experience is to change the nature of your thoughts,” as the American spiritual teacher Marianne Williamson says. True activism is an inner practice of liberation. Subjectivism is the intersection of spirituality with the primacy of the internal world. Believers in this theory of revolution maintain that active contemplation and meditation (from an outside perspective this may look like passivity) is superior to physical action because our minds determine reality. Strict subjectivist activists argue, therefore, that the most effective way to change the world is to change our perspective. Or as one mystical text explains it, “There is no point in lamenting the world. There is no point in trying to change the world. It is incapable of change because it is merely an effect. But there is indeed a point in changing your thoughts about the world. Here you are changing the cause. The effect will change automatically.” Similarly, the great Sufi spiritual master Rumi suggests that an enlightened person can stroll through infernal hell and see rose gardens upon rose gardens. The implication is that the world is a projection of our mood. Inner reality determines the external reality. Therefore, if your external reality is apocalyptic, mediation is the solution. The subjectivist position requires a reversal of values: from a concern with the wars of the world to the campaigns of the soul. “The wars of mankind are like children’s fights-all meaningless, pithless, and contemptible. All their fights are fought with wood swords, all their purposes are centered in futility,” writes Rumi. Revolution transcends into a state of mind. Secular political scientist have also hypothesized subjectivism. This notion often takes the form of a weak subjectivism, or a voluntarist subjectivism where changing the inner world is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for revolution. Unlike strict subjectivist who believe that revolution is accomplished by perceiving the world differently, voluntarist subjectivists privilege the inner shift as a first step toward external action. James C. Davies writes, for instance, that “political stability and instability are ultimately dependent on a state of mind, a mood, in a society.” Once the mood shifts, a revolution is possible.

Subjectivism highlights the primacy of the individual’s picture of reality. Genuine revolution involves protest behaviours that are unusual and abnormal from the perspective of the status quo. These new behaviours are socially coded as protest because they are the public manifestation of a discordant inner reality within the people. Demonstrations are proof that large numbers of society have undergone an inner shift in perspective and are perceiving the world differently. As if spontaneously, the old world is forced to defend itself against a new conception, a new world view. Ralph Waldo Emerson explains it this way: “every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind.” Social revolutionary moments arise out of a sense of collective calm in the midst of a revealed truth. The people lose their fear, and the impossible becomes possible. When activists are attuned to emotional contagion, we are conscious to emit a sense of limitless possibility, eternal love and fearlessness. “As a man thinketh, so does he perceive. Therefore, seek not to change the world, but choose to change your mind about the world. The subjectivist activist sees social networks as channels of emotional contagion. Words, images and memes are the vectors by which infectious emotions spread through the network. The primary work is to produce and transmit emotions that lead the people toward an inner conversion and a collective epiphany.

Fiat Divestment DA—Progress in debate is constrained by status quo policing via fiat. Debaters flock to the plan-text when what was previously believed to be impossible suddenly seems within reach through hypothetical scenario planning. They believe anything is possible when a sense of collective fiatted hope rises among the community. The specific content that the plan employs is less important than the emotion it spreads. Debate is evolving but the status quo is resilient and activism is useless, and uninspiring when repeated through the same mechanism of fiat. This community’s future already exists, but if you are blinded by traditional paradigms of activism, you’ll never see the movement.White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution) \\EG

There is an eternal force within humanity that strives toward greater freedom, evolution and self-actualization. I call this force spirit. At most times in history, the human spirit is constrained by the status quo. When, every once in a while, activists stumble across a new way of approaching the struggle, the status quo is upended, for better or worse. In my meditations on revolution, I am increasingly drawn to a tactical-spiritual explanation of what happens in these tumultuous moments. I have come to understand that the role of tactics is to unleash the collective spirit, a process that hastens a political miracle. The people flock to the movement when what was previously believed to be impossible suddenly seems within reach. Each of these episodes of protest, drawn from two thousand years of revolution, demonstrates that spirit-the immaterial force within us-is the deciding factor in an uprising. Put simply, the people join the movement they believe will win. Anything is possible when a sense of collective

faith in victory rises among the people. In the final analysis, the specific tactics that activists employ are less important than the emotion these tactics spread. What seems to matter most is that the tactics erase fear from participants and are novel and surprising from the perspective of authorities. Generally speaking, the tactics that fulfill these two requirements are audacious. The moment the people become disillusioned with a tactic, it fails. Similarly, as soon as authorities understand the pattern of a protest ritual it is defeated. The balance of power is shifting toward the people, but the status quo is resilient and tactics are useless, and uninspiring, when repeated. The future of activism already exists. However, if you are blinded by old paradigms of activism, you’ll never see the movement that is about to break out. The next protest tactic that will release the human spirit and unleash a global social movement is out there right now waiting to be seen. The only way to discover it is to look within and never protest the same way twice.

AT – TVA

Contentment DA—They are content to deploy tactics destined to fail while picking up ballots. They insist that debate’s underlying paradigm is still valid or that our revolution is unclear and started too late. They continue to advance slight modifications to the script rather than providing wholly new developments. Prefer revolutionary scholarship which moves beyond critique and towards developing a new paradigm that can replace the old. We must return to debate over the fundamental qualities of this space if we are to ever evolve.White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution) \\EG

I’m no longer satisfied with the standard repertoire of activism. I distrust the big-name non-profits and well-funded digital activist front groups who waste the people’s collective energy in large-scale, feel-good coalition actions, like the People’s Climate March of 2014. I question the motives of activists who advocate old tactics. I’m starting to believe that these groups are choosing behaviours designed to garner attention without risk of challenging the status quo. Often it seems that institutionalized activist organizations are content to deploy tactics destined to fail while grabbing publicity, building their list of email addresses and reaping millions of dollars in donations. It should have been obvious since the failure of the global anti-Iraq War march on February 15, 2003, that the synchronized global-march tactic underpinning the People’s Climate March may attract fleeting media attention but doesn’t work to sway governments. Similarly, I would be the last to advocate another Occupy-unless a refreshing innovation were proposed. My mission is to persuade activists to stop ignoring failures and to stop repeating tactics. There will be those who respond to the crisis within activism by insisting the underlying paradigm is still valid. Some will argue that Occupy failed because it wasn’t perfect, ignoring that perfection isn’t possible and that Occupy came closer than we’d gotten in half a century. Others will say that Occupy’s one demand was not clear or that it started too late in the year. (To these people I point to the failed 2003 anti-Iraq War march that had an absolutely clear demand.) There will be many who will advocate slight modifications to the protest script rather than wholly new approach. This is a common reaction to the break-down of a dominant paradigm. As the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, whose influential 1962 book The structure of Scientific revolutions popularized the concept of the paradigm shift, writes, “Though they may begin to lose faith and then to consider alternatives, they do not renounce the paradigm that has led them into crisis…. Once it has achieved the status of paradigm, a scientific theory is declared invalid only if an alternate candidate is available to take its place.” The task of the next generation of protestors is to respond to the crisis by moving beyond critique and toward developing a new paradigm that can replace the old. This involves, a Kuhn points out, “the proliferation of competing articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundamentals.

Interpolation DA—Given a lack of understanding our revolutionary scholarship in this community, framework debaters must impute norms onto us. When they cannot deal with what we stand for, they deal with the disembodies parts that connect us to a larger abstract rule in debate, categories readily available to process deviant bodies into TVAs. Their TVAs try to classify us into identity categories of debate, based on their own limited experiences and understandings.Ross 2k (Assc. Director of the Center for AfroAmerican and African Studies @ U Mich, 2000, Marlon-Professor of English; Pleasuring Identity, or the Delicious Politics of Belonging; NEW LITERARY HISTORY, Vol. 31, No. 4, Is There Life after Identity Politics?; Autumn, 2000; pp.827-850.) \\EG

Those contributors I have not met in person, therefore, must necessarily possess face/ts of identity--metonymic faces--more or less seeable, knowable, imaginable, readable to me. This is because, given the lack of such "evidence" supposedly offered by the actual person's face, in the effort to reckon what they are saying and why, I necessarily must impute some kind of identity to who they are and why they say what they're saying. All of these contributors I have met in print, as we like to say, and the more print that I've read by them, the more cohesive--the less inchoate--is my sense of an identity for them. 3 My identification of them is not merely a projection, although we cannot disallow a degree of this, but more aptly, it is a matter of a dialectic between what they project to me and what I take from that projection. All of this is to assert that the most basic act of "seeing" or "knowing" or "imaging" or "reading" is itself a kind of face-off that we now call "identity politics," but that was no doubt called by other names before. And this is so not merely because we live in a moment in which what we call "identity politics" is rife, or is anticipated as waning because too fluent. When we cannot deal with persons face to face, we always deal with face/ts, the disembodied parts that connect them to larger abstract, but no less material and actual, categories readily available to us. When we do meet someone face to face, we still deal only with face/ts, with bodied parts that we can classify according to what makes sense to us from our own limited identity-experiences. Identities are not like the faces in facets; they are face/ts. When we therefore talk about the politics of identity--no matter how much more sophisticated we try to make it sound--we are really talking about the politics of our face/ts.

Academic Restlessness DA—Debaters hunger for a new, attention-grabbing TVA to market when the excitement of our revolutionary aff wears off. Traditional debaters are eager to capitalize on our protest to demote race and sexuality in this space through the TVA. This academic restlessness must dominate the representations of debate, through the TVA’s co-option, such that it becomes impossible to understand the common enemy that can unite traditional and critical debaters. Your recourse to an externalized TVA promises reprieve, but we grow no less restless outside this room. The more self-consciously pleased and disturbed you become in your affirmed and enforced interpretations of “predictability, fairness, and education”, the more restless we become inside them. Belonging to this community formed through the domination of framework, our oppression affords us a system to overthrow.Ross 2k (Assc. Director of the Center for AfroAmerican and African Studies @ U Mich, 2000, Marlon-Professor of English; Pleasuring Identity, or the Delicious Politics of Belonging; NEW LITERARY HISTORY, Vol. 31, No. 4, Is There Life after Identity Politics?; Autumn, 2000; pp.827-850.) \\EG

Another reason we may be restless inside identity theory is because, according to the institutional expectations of academe, we hunger for a new, attention-grabbing paradigm to market at the moment that the sexiness of a new method seems to wear off. Anti-identity advocates can smell that moment approaching and are eager to capitalize on it to demote race, gender, and sexuality and the identity groups that these categories supposedly represent. This sort of academic restlessness is a bit underhanded, given that we have been studying solely the intellectual identity of Aristotle for nigh 2400 years, and yet there is no movement to clamp down on those who take pleasure in the study of Aristotelian physics, metaphysics, posterior analytics, ethics, and poetics, even though these have ceased to provide a living paradigm for modernity. This kind of academic restlessness can also take place within such an identity discipline like feminism or queer studies. As Wiegman suggests, certain feminists are anxious to return to a universal woman because they have grown tired of others' "identity politics." Otherwise instructive queer theorists like Freeman in her contribution here or [End Page 846] Lauren Berlant 10 strive to make family or church automatic signifiers of unqueer conservatism blocking the progress of queer theory and politics. This has the effect of dismissing a strong tendency among Black lesbians, gays, and bisexuals to identify with church and family as sites of transformation, actual and potential, central to their sexual identity as Blacks and to their racial identity as men-loving men and women-loving women. Such restlessness within an identity discipline frequently tends also to assume that stigma, marginality, and typing--mobilized as key terms in Palumbo-Liu's contribution--must dominate the study of the representation of intersecting identities, such that it becomes impossible to understand, for instance, the pleasures of identification that enable Black sexual minorities to find in the Black church and the Black family, not only in particular cases but also as institutions, magnets for progressive "identity politics," rather than a common enemy that can unite queers across race, class, and gender. Instead of assuming that something is astray with anyone who identifies with these "reproductive" institutions, we need to investigate and theorize the economies of pleasure operating in such familial and familiar identity attractions. If we abandon the study of identity "inside" academe in the clamor for a new paradigm, "out there" identity politics and pleasures will continue and probably intensify. The more self-consciously pleased and disturbed that we become in our affirmed and enforced identities, the more restless we become "inside" them. Even intensified self-consciousness, however,

does not seem to get us closer to the dance of identification as we experience it pleasurably and disturbingly "inside" and "across" our bodies' persons, individually and collectively considered. Our recourse to more externalized structures--like the sides of an argument or the solidity of economic classes--promises some reprieve, but we grow no less restless "outside" our personal and collective selves, as though individuals and their dis/affectionate affiliations are emptied of their identity, mere meanings and patterns bereft of that inner motivating vitality. As "identity politics" is not dead, is in fact thriving, so I'd suggest we get on with making its theory and practice thrive in our intellectual institutions, accompanied by less nervousness and as much pleasure as possible. Nealon's examination of "affect" as queer reception history is a good instance of this. 11 By insisting on pleasure as a face/t of identification, I realize that I risk others' diminishing the political struggle at stake in the disciplining of identity forms. I would not sacrifice one to the other. If identity is always political, the economies of pleasure at work in identification also cannot escape the play for power, in shared or monopolistic versions. In fact, it is the activity of pleasure on and across subjects of identity that makes identity such a forceful vehicle for oppressive politics, and likewise this pleasure functions in collective [End Page 847] assaults against oppression. The pleasures of thinking that one belongs to a superior white race must be reckoned as interfused with the obligations, confusions, fears, and privileges afforded by such a sweeping, compelling identity. Fortunately for us, the pleasure in identifying against dominance cannot be delimited by acts of domination. Belonging to a group formed through others' domination and one's own subordination paradoxically affords its own peculiar pleasures aimed at upsetting the norms of power. These are the potentially liberating pleasures of identification that the domineering cannot rescind, however much they may practice to outlaw or outpace them. Of identity's politics and pleasures there is no end, and as for the "identity politics" besetting us at the present time, we are only now beginning to learn the rudimentary steps of the dance.

AT – Switch Side

Inclusivity DA—Our revolutionary theory is the activist playbook which, based on accurate principles, yields social change. Switch side debate functions by promulgating broken theories of change, thus disconnecting our protest from social change. Their “inclusivity” dooms our actions will fail and our time squandered. Revolution will always be co-opted by such norms to build the illusion that dissent is tolerated while discouraging any tactics that might actually change debate.White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution) \\EG

A theory of revolution grants foresight regarding whether a protest will bring change. It is the only playbook to activism and it must be rewritten by each generation. Activism based on accurate principles yields social change. Without a theory of why revolutions happen and a hypothesis of the behaviours that will hasten the next uprising, there is no way to distinguish between a destined event and an ineffectual happening. Lenin made this clear: “without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.” A repressive status quo functions by promulgating broken theories of change, thereby disconnecting the link between protest and change so that our actions will fail and our time will be squandered. Repressive democracies encourage forms of protest that are least revolutionary and most ineffective. The ideal situation for a false democracy is to have frequent ineffective protests that give the illusion that dissent is tolerated while discouraging any tactics that might actually change the legal regime.

XT – Drop Them

Battleground DA—Drop their traditional scholarship. This single decisive victory can change the course of debate. We can reverse the behavior of this community by orchestrating singular victories that surprise our opponents and demoralize them with an L. This spectacular and humiliating defeat would be most effective at revolutionizing the norms of this community.White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution) \\EG

A single decisive victory can change the course of history. Contemporary activists can reverse the behavior of strong adversaries by orchestrating singular events that surprise and demoralize. The example set by Arminius is especially important for protesters who face heavily armoured police. Rather than trying to overcome police repression in a series of successful protests, activists should aspire to a dramatic victory against paramilitary police could mobilize the world. This victory does not need to be violent. In fact, a spectacular and humiliating non-violent defeat of riot police would be far more effective. On the value of winning with as few victories as possible, the great Chinese military strategist Wu Ch’i, who lived roughly four hundred years before Arminius, gives excellent advice: “Those that garner five victories will be exhausted; those with three victories will become hegemons; those with two victories will be kings; and those with one victory will become emperors. For this reason those who have conquered the world through numerous victories are extremely rare, while those who thereby perished are many.”

XT – Performance Fanaticism

Traditional debate divides the community to be either friends or enemies. Performance Fanaticism achieves political mobilization and refuses to not only compromise with abusive strategies of framework, but rather to go beyond mainstream practices of debate and create alternative forms of engagements.

Olson ‘09 (Assc. Professor of Politics and Intl Affairs @ Northern Arizonia Univ. 2009, Joel Olson; Friends and Enemies, Slaves and Masters: Fanaticism, Wendell Phillips, and the Limits of Democratic Theory; THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, Vol. 71, No. 1, January; pp. 82-95.) \\EG

Fanaticism is often regarded as an individual temperament, a condition caused by desperation and/or psychological instability that drives a person to engage in political activity that goes well beyond the mainstream. Suicide bombers and other terrorists are the archetype of this temperament.1 It is much less recognized that fanaticism is also a strategy to achieve power. Fanaticism is the political mobilization of the refusal to compromise. It is an approach to politics that divides the world into friends and enemies in order to mobilize people in the service of a cause one is passionately committed to (Olson 2007). It is a form of engagement that seeks not to come to terms with an opponent but to defeat it. It is this specifically political notion of fanaticism with which I am concerned.

XT – Protest = Warfare

Warfare DA—Wake up and prepare yourself! You are a partisan in the Revolution of debate. The situation has changed as debate constantly evolves. Simultaneously, practices are becoming insidiously adept at defusing community protest and activism without responding to their demands. On this battle ground of our revolution, performative protest is a form of warfare which mobilizes non-violent armies of norms to inaugurate a new legal regime. There is currently a tactical arms race where each performance is met with repression through losing the round. We must develop and evolve such tactical innovations that emerge and grow exponentially so that framework’s defenses are overwhelmed before it can launch a counterattack. White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution) \\EG

Wake up and prepare yourself! You are a partisan in the Revolution: a war that has been raging since the people first demanded democracy over 121 generations ago. The earliest records of our rebellion are 3,646 years old and document when protesters toppled a pharaoh during the Middle Kingdom of Ancient Egypt. In an ancient papyrus known as The Dialogue of Ipuwer and the Lord of All, written between 1980 BC and 1630 BC, an eponymous spectator records one of our first successful revolutions: “O, yet the rich are in lamentation, the poor are in joy; every town says, ‘Let’s drive out the strong among us!’ For look, things have been done which have not been done before…the removal of the king by wretches. For look, it has come to rebellion.” When our revolution first started, a cornucopia of civilizations reigned, each with its own colorful set of beliefs, languages, semiotics, religions and fighting methods. Many societies were matriarchal. Some were egalitarian. The greatest cities of the ancient world (Luxor, Athens, Alexandria, Rome…) were minuscule compared with the smallest of today’s megalopolises. If the people found the local situation intolerable, they could act locally to rectify the problem. One telling example of how power functioned before the consolidation of peoples comes to us from a nomadic tribe in Africa, where the chief’s power was so precarious that if he ruled with too heavy a hand, his people would desert him in the night. The situation has changed. With the consolidation of power into kingdoms and then nation-states and now into the immaterial financial flows of global corporate-capitalism, humans are becoming more culturally alike each generation. The oppressor is no longer local or localizable. The tyrant is increasingly a flow of capital and not a human person. The growing cultural sameness of humanity aids the transmission of our insurrection. Although it may seem that power keeps increasing despite protest, there are signs that a might reversal is coming. Everyday people have the necessary ingredients for the coming transformation of society: the labour, creativity and spirit of humanity. The battle ground of our revolution is a world composed of seven billion humans connected by air travel, a network of fibre-optic undersea cables and orbiting satellites. Fear of total surveillance and invasions of privacy is growing. Still, technologically adept activists can find ways to communicate freely with one another from every place on Earth. Protest is politics by other means, to paraphrase the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s famous definition of war. Protest is a form of warfare to the extent that activists set out to achieve strategic political goals using

unconventional methods. Social movements are non-violent armies whose protests have political consequences. As in war, activism does not always obey the law; revolutionary activism seeks to inaugurate a new legal regime. Gandhi was no less a warrior than Napoleon. Each wrought major geopolitical shifts in his lifetime using previously unknown techniques of warfare. Gandhi demonstrated that non-violence can be highly effective when confronting a foreign colonial state. He showed that satyagrahis, a trained army of non-violent warriors, confronting a power with dramatic military superiority could engender the world’s sympathy. Despite the successes of Martin Luther King Jr.’s campaign to break America’s segregated South, subsequent struggle have shown us that 1960s-era non-violence alone is not enough and that corporatist democracies are becoming insidiously adept at defusing public protest without responding to demands democratically. The people are locked in a tactical arms race with power, and each advance in protest is met with a counter-advance in repression. Activists surmount this danger by working to develop tactical innovations that emerge and grow exponentially so that our enemy’s defences are overwhelmed before they can mobilize for the counterattack. Winning the people’s war will require more than just a unified theory of revolution. It will also need an understanding of the tactics that have defined the history of protest.

XT – Big Schools DA

Big Schools DA—Big-name and well-funded schools waste time through subscribing to traditional debate norms. They choose behaviors designed to garner attention without risking challenging the status quo, never reading revolutionary scholarship, but rather only to deploy tactics destined to fail while grabbing as many trophies as possible. Prefer revolutionary scholarship which moves beyond critique and towards developing a new paradigm that can replace the old. We must return to debate over the fundamental qualities of this space if we are to ever evolve.White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution) \\EG

I’m no longer satisfied with the standard repertoire of activism. I distrust the big-name non-profits and well-funded digital activist front groups who waste the people’s collective energy in large-scale, feel-good coalition actions, like the People’s Climate March of 2014. I question the motives of activists who advocate old tactics. I’m starting to believe that these groups are choosing behaviours designed to garner attention without risk of challenging the status quo. Often it seems that institutionalized activist organizations are content to deploy tactics destined to fail while grabbing publicity, building their list of email addresses and reaping millions of dollars in donations. It should have been obvious since the failure of the global anti-Iraq War march on February 15, 2003, that the synchronized global-march tactic underpinning the People’s Climate March may attract fleeting media attention but doesn’t work to sway governments. Similarly, I would be the last to advocate another Occupy-unless a refreshing innovation were proposed. My mission is to persuade activists to stop ignoring failures and to stop repeating tactics. There will be those who respond to the crisis within activism by insisting the underlying paradigm is still valid. Some will argue that Occupy failed because it wasn’t perfect, ignoring that perfection isn’t possible and that Occupy came closer than we’d gotten in half a century. Others will say that Occupy’s one demand was not clear or that it started too late in the year. (To these people I point to the failed 2003 anti-Iraq War march that had an absolutely clear demand.) There will be many who will advocate slight modifications to the protest script rather than wholly new approach. This is a common reaction to the break-down of a dominant paradigm. As the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, whose influential 1962 book The structure of Scientific revolutions popularized the concept of the paradigm shift, writes, “Though they may begin to lose faith and then to consider alternatives, they do not renounce the paradigm that has led them into crisis…. Once it has achieved the status of paradigm, a scientific theory is declared invalid only if an alternate candidate is available to take its place.” The task of the next generation of protestors is to respond to the crisis by moving beyond critique and toward developing a new paradigm that can replace the old. This involves, a Kuhn points out, “the proliferation of competing articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundamentals.

XT – Definitions

They have not provided a definition of who the USFG is which means that its game over - The USFG is functionally we some people.Monk No Date [Linda R. Monk is a constitutional scholar, journalist, and award-winning author. She has twice won the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award, its highest honor for public education about law. A graduate of Harvard Law School, Monk has written numerous articles for newspapers nationwide including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune. She also served as series advisor for the PBS program "Constitution USA." She has also written “The Words We Live By”, an accessible, illustrated and annotated look at America's founding document, The U.S. Constitution.; “Why We The People? Citizens as Agents of Constitutional Change”, No Date;HYPERLINK "https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/government-and-civics/essays/why-we-people-citizens-agents-constitutional-change"https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/government-and-civics/essays/why-we-people-citizens-agents-constitutional-change]

A simple declarative sentence is at the heart of the world's oldest written constitution of a nation that is still in effect: “We the People . . . do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” All other dependent clauses in the Preamble explain why the Constitution was written, but they are not necessary. Subject, verb, object: those three elements determine where the action is in a sentence, and in this case, a government. The verb is present-tense, not past. It is active, not passive. I believe thisphrasing implies an ongoing obligation of citizens to be actors in constitutional government. As University of Oregon law professor Garrett Epps has said: “Every morning we wake up and decide that we want to live in a constitutional republic.”[2] Yet scholars tend to focus on the three branches of government created by the Constitution instead of the foundation upon which they rest: an active citizenry. The history of civic movements is a necessary element of understanding constitutional change and recognizing the limits of any government institution. Three examples from constitutional history help prove this point; the creation of the Bill of Rights; the expansion of suffrage; and the modern Civil Rights Movement.

Resolved includes debaters as agents of actionOED, 1989

“Of persons: determined”

DMS are equipment, services, and related manufacturing technologies under the 21 categories list of USMLUS State Dept. 18 – (US State Department, April 16, 2018, "U.S. Arms Sales and Defense Trade," U.S. Department of State, https://www.state.gov/t/pm/rls/fs/2018/280506.htm)//pshah

DIRECT COMMERCIAL SALES (DCS): Under DCS, PM’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls provides regulatory approvals for more than $110 billion per year in sales of defense equipment, services, and related manufacturing technologies controlled under the 21 categories of the U.S. Munitions List (USML). These sales are negotiated privately between foreign end users and U.S. companies. Under ‐U.S. law, any U.S. company or individual involved in certain activities involving the items enumerated on the USML is required to receive an approved export license or other approval before providing any USML regulated item, technical data, or service to a foreign end user. As with FMS, export licenses ‐

approved under DCS are approved following an intensive U.S. government review and, as required, after Congressional notification. Export licenses are valid up to four years. Authorizations for defense services are also required and may last for longer timeframes. Licenses and authorizations may be extended or amended as needed. DCS cases are considered to be proprietary agreements between the foreign governments or companies and the U.S. defense contractor. However, certain information about cases notified to Congress is published quarterly in the Federal Register, in fulfillment of requirements in the Arms Export Control Act.

FMS are $40B in defense equipment sold internationally US State Dept. 18 – (US State Department, April 16, 2018, "U.S. Arms Sales and Defense Trade," U.S. Department of State, https://www.state.gov/t/pm/rls/fs/2018/280506.htm)//pshah

FOREIGN MILITARY SALES (FMS) Under FMS, the United States government manages the transfer of approximately $40 billion per year in defense equipment purchased by foreign allies and partners. PM’s Office of Regional Security and Arms Transfers (PM/RSAT) manages the FMS process, in close partnership with the Department of Defense’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA), which implements FMS cases by working through the military services to negotiate with U.S. defense contractors. PM/RSAT further manages the FMS process by providing the customer with training, sustainment, and contractor logistics support for the lifetime of the sale. The FMS sales process begins when a country submits a formal Letter of Request that specifies a desired military capability and a rough price. Sales are approved following U.S. government review and, when required, after Congressional notification. After the sale is approved, the DSCA issues a Letter of Offer and Acceptance (LOA) that specifies the exact defense articles, training, and support to be delivered. Processing time for FMS cases may vary; they can take months to negotiate, especially for major defense articles that require modifications to standard U.S. systems. Due primarily to the time required for construction of sophisticated defense systems such as fighter aircraft, countries often do not receive delivery of the full package until years after the LOA is finalized. Major FMS sales that have been formally notified to Congress are publicly announced on the DSCA website: http://www.dsca.mil/major arms sales.‐ ‐

AT – Afropess K

AT – Alt

Specifically, when bodies deemed “disposable” or “ungrievable” assemble in protest, they press up against the limits of social recognizability. This takes a special meaning as a way of demanding for a livable life, to enact the world of the alt, and to refuse this antiblack world. Means the aff solves the alt, which also justifies the perm. Butler ‘18 (Judith Butler – Writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist – “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly” – First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015) – pg. 152-153) HYPERLINK "about:blank"\\EG

Finally, then, how do we understand resistance as the mobilization of vulnerability or exposure? Let me just offer the following as a way to close: When the bodies of those deemed “disposable” or “ungrievable” assemble in public view (as happens time and again when the undocumented arrive in the streets in the United States as part of public demonstrations), they are saying, “we have not slipped quietly into the shadows of public life: we have not become the glaring absence that structures your public life.” In a way, the collective assembling of bodies is an exercise of the popular will, a taking up or taking over of a street that seems to belong to another public, a gathering up of the pavement for the purposes of action and speech that press up against the limits of social recognizability. But the streets and the square are not the only way that people assemble, and we know that social networking produces links of solidarity that can be quite impressive and effective in the virtual domain. Whether bodies appear in public shorn of technology or hold cell phones up in concert (as many now do to document police violence in demonstrations), or whether bodies are interned under forcible conditions of isolation and destitution, the body remains a resource, not an endless or a magical one. A group acting together has to be supported to act, and this takes on special meaning when the action takes place increasingly as a way of demanding enduring support and the conditions of livable life. It could sound like a vicious circle, but it should come as no surprise that the bodies gathered in social movements are asserting the social modality of the body. This can be a minor way to enact the world we wish to see, or to refuse the one that is doing us in. Is this not a form of deliberate exposure and persistence, the embodied demand for a livable life that shows us the simultaneity of being precarious and acting?

Calling for the right to assemble is a negotiation with the biopolitical structures that can change the notions of which lives are and aren’t grievable or precariousButler ‘18 (Judith Butler – Writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist – “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly” – First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015) – pg. 196-198//Gavsie)

So if the question, how am I to lead a good life? is one of the elementary questions of morality, indeed perhaps its defining question, then it would seem that morality from its inception is bound up with biopolitics. By biopolitics, I mean those powers that organize life, even the powers that differentially dispose lives to precarity as part of a broader management of populations through governmental and

nongovernmental means, and that establish a set of measures for the differential valuation of life itself. In asking how to lead my life, I am already negotiating such forms of power. The most individual question of morality—how do I live this life that is mine?—is bound up with biopolitical questions distilled in forms such these: Whose lives matter? Whose lives do not matter as lives, are not recognizable as living, or count only ambiguously as alive? Such questions presume that we cannot take for granted that all living humans bear the status of a subject who is worthy of rights and protections, with freedom and a sense of political belonging; on the contrary, such a status must be secured through political means, and where it is denied, that deprivation must be made manifest. It has been my suggestion that to understand the differential way that that such a status is allocated, we must ask whose lives are grievable, and whose are not? The biopolitical management of the ungrievable proves crucial to approaching the question, how do I lead this life? And how do I live this life within the life, the conditions of living, that structure us now? At stake is the following sort of inquiry: Whose lives are already considered not lives, or only partially living, or already dead and gone, prior to any explicit destruction or abandonment? Of course, this question becomes most acute for someone, anyone, who already understands him- or herself to be a dispensable sort of being, one who registers at an affective and corporeal level that his or her life is not worth safeguarding, protecting, and valuing. This is someone who understands that she or he will not be grieved if his or her life is lost, and so one for whom the conditional claim “I would not be grieved” is actively lived in the present moment. If it turns out that I have no certainty that I will have food or shelter, or that no social network or institution would catch me if I fall, then I come to belong to the ungrievable. This does not mean that there won’t be some who grieve me, or that the ungrievable do not have ways of grieving one another. It doesn’t mean that I won’t be grieved in one corner and not in another, or that the loss doesn’t register at all. But these forms of persistence and resistance still take place within the shadow-life of the public, occasionally breaking out and contesting those schemes by which they are devalued by asserting their collective value. So, yes, the ungrievable gather sometimes in public insurgencies of grief, which is why in so many countries it is difficult to distinguish the funeral from the demonstration. So I overstate the case, but I do it for a reason. The reason that someone will not be grieved, or has already been established as one who is not to be grieved, is that there is no present structure of support that will sustain that life, which implies that it is devalued, not worth supporting and protecting as a life by dominant schemes of value. The very future of my life depends upon that condition of support, so if I am not supported, then my life is established as tenuous, precarious, and in that sense not worthy to be protected from injury or loss, and so not grievable. If only a grievable life can be valued, and valued through time, then only a grievable life will be eligible for social and economic support, housing, health care, employment, rights of political expression, forms of social recognition, and conditions for political agency. One must, as it were, be grievable before one is lost, before any question of being neglected or abandoned, and one must be able to live a life knowing that the loss of this life that I am would be mourned and so every measure will be taken to forestall this loss.

AT – Social Death

Pessimist claims of social death reify anti-blackness through the prescription of a grammar of abjection. Prefer the 1AC’s protest of oppressive regimes that effectively challenge the illegitimate anti-black state as proven by undocumented immigrants’ claims to citizenship in LA - our grammar of resistance allows for social life within social deathButler ‘18 (Judith Butler, writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist, “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly”, First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015), pg. 117-119, MB)

For Arendt, political action takes place on the condition that the body appear. I appear to others, and they appear to me, which means that some space between us allows each to appear. One might expect that we appear within a space or that we are supported by a material organization of space. But that is not her argument. The sphere of appearance is not simple, since it seems to arise only on the condition of a certain intersubjective facing off. We are not simply visual phenomena for each other—our voices must be registered, and so we must be heard; rather, who we are, bodily, is already a way of being “for” the other, appearing in ways that we can neither see nor hear; that is, we are made available, bodily, for another whose perspective we can neither fully anticipate nor control. In this way, I am, as a body, not only for myself, not even primarily for myself, but I find myself, if I find myself at all, constituted and dispossessed by the perspective of others. So, for political action, I must appear to others in ways I cannot know, and in this way, my body is established by perspectives that I cannot inhabit but that, surely, inhabit me. This is an important point because it is not the case that the body only establishes my own perspective; it is also what displaces that perspective and makes that displacement into a necessity. This happens most clearly when we think about bodies that act together. No one body establishes the space of appearance, but this action, this performative exercise, happens only “between” bodies, in a space that constitutes the gap between my own body and another’s. In this way, my body does not act alone when it acts politically. Indeed, the action emerges from the “between,” a spatial figure for a relation that both binds and differentiates. It is both problematic and interesting that, for Arendt, the space of appearance is not only an architectural given: “the space of appearance comes into being,” she writes, “wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action, and therefore predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and the various forms of government, that is, the various forms in which the public realm may be organized.”7 In other words, this space of appearance is not a location that can be separated from the plural action that brings it about; it is not there outside of the action that invokes and constitutes it. And yet, if we are to accept this view, we have to understand how the plurality that acts is itself constituted. How does a plurality form, and what material supports are necessary for that formation? Who enters this plurality, and who does not, and how are such matters decided? How do we describe the action and the status of those beings disaggregated from the plural? What political language do we have in reserve for describing that exclusion and the forms of resistance that crack open the sphere of appearance as it is currently delimited? Are those who live on the outside of the sphere of appearance the deanimated “givens” of political life? Are they mere life or bare life? Are we to say that those who are excluded are simply unreal, disappeared, or that they have no being at all—shall they be cast off, theoretically, as the socially dead and the merely spectral? If we do that, we not only adopt the position of a particular regime of appearance, but ratify that perspective,

even if our wish is to call it into question. Do such formulations describe a state of having been made destitute by existing political arrangements, or is that destitution unwittingly ratified by a theory that adopts the perspective of those who regulate and police the sphere of appearance itself? At stake is the question of whether the destitute are outside of politics and power or are in fact living out a specific form of political destitution along with specific forms of political agency and resistance that expose the policing of the boundaries of the sphere of appearance itself. If we claim that the destitute are outside of the sphere of politics—reduced to depoliticized forms of being—then we implicitly accept as right the dominant ways of establishing the limits of the political. In some ways, this follows from the Arendtian position that adopts the internal point of view of the Greek polis on what politics should be, who should gain entry into the public square, and who should remain in the private sphere. Such a view disregards and devalues those forms of political agency that emerge precisely in those domains deemed prepolitical or extrapolitical and that break into the sphere of appearance as from the outside, as its outside, confounding the distinction between inside and outside. For in revolutionary or insurrectionary moments, we are no longer sure what operates as the space of politics, just as we are often unsure about exactly in what time we are living, since the established regimes of both space and time are upended in ways that expose their violence and their contingent limits. We see this, as mentioned earlier, when undocumented workers gather in the city of Los Angeles to claim their rights of assembly and of citizenship without being citizens, without having any legal right to do so. Their labor is supposed to remain necessary and shrouded from view, and so when these laboring bodies emerge on the street, acting like citizens, they make a mimetic claim to citizenship that alters not only how they appear, but how the sphere of appearance works. Indeed, the sphere of appearance is both mobilized and disabled when an exploited and laboring class emerges on the street to announce itself and express its opposition to being the unseen condition of what appears as political. The impetus for Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “bare life”8 derives from this very conception of the polis in Arendt’s political philosophy and, I would suggest, runs the risk of this very problem: if we seek to take account of exclusion itself as a political problem, as part of politics itself, then it will not do to say that once excluded, those beings lack appearance or “reality” in political terms, that they have no social or political standing or are cast out and reduced to mere being (forms of givenness precluded from the sphere of action). Nothing so metaphysically extravagant has to happen if we agree that one reason the sphere of the political cannot be defined by the classic conception of the polis is that we are then deprived of having and using a language for those forms of agency and resistance undertaken by the dispossessed. Those who find themselves in positions of radical exposure to violence, without basic political protections by forms of law, are not for that reason outside the political or deprived of all forms of agency. Of course, we need a language to describe that status of unacceptable exposure, but we have to be careful that the language we use does not further deprive such populations of all forms of agency and resistance, all ways of caring for one another or establishing networks of support. Although Agamben borrows from Foucault to articulate a conception of the biopolitical, the thesis of “bare life” remains untouched by that conception. As a result, we cannot within that vocabulary describe the modes of agency and action undertaken by the stateless, the occupied, and the disenfranchised, since even the life stripped of rights is still within the sphere of the political and is thus not reduced to mere being, but is, more often than not, angered, indignant, rising up, and resisting. To be outside established and legitimate political structures is still to be saturated in power relations, and this saturation is the point of departure for a theory of the political that includes dominant and subjugated forms, modes of inclusion and legitimation as well as modes of delegitimation and effacement.

Even under conditions of social death, the moral obligation to reduce oppression still persists. Survival is not the ultimate goal of life, and we must strive to “live a good life in a bad life” through embodied political resistance.Butler ‘18 (Judith Butler, writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist, “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly”, First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015), pg. 117-119, MB)

If I am not able to establish my value in the world in any more than a transient way, then my sense of possibility is equally transient. The moral imperative to lead a good life, and the reflective questions it engenders, can both sometimes seem very cruel and unthinking to those who live in conditions of hopelessness; and we can perhaps easily understand the cynicism that sometimes envelops the very practice of morality: Why should I act morally, or even ask the question of how best to live, if my life is already not considered to be a life, if my life is already treated as a form of death, or if I belong to what Orlando Patterson has called the realm of “social death”—a term he used to describe the condition of living under slavery?6 Because contemporary forms of economic abandonment and dispossession that follow from the institutionalization of neoliberal rationalities or the differential production of precarity cannot for the most part be analogized with slavery, it remains important to distinguish among modalities of social death. Perhaps we cannot use one word to describe the conditions under which lives becomes unlivable, yet the term “precarity” can distinguish between modes of “unlivability”: those who, for instance, belong to imprisonment without recourse to due process; those who characterize living in war zones or under occupation, exposed to violence and destruction without recourse to safety or exit; those who undergo forced emigration and live in liminal zones, waiting for borders to open, food to arrive, and the prospect of living with documentation; those who mark the condition of being part of a dispensable or expendable workforce for whom the prospect of a stable livelihood seems increasingly remote, and who live in a daily way within a collapsed temporal horizon, suffering a sense of a damaged future in the stomach and in the bones, trying to feel but fearing more what might be felt. How can one ask how best to lead a life when one feels no power to direct life, when one is uncertain that one is alive, or when one is struggling to feel the sense that one is alive, but also fearing that feeling, and the pain of living in this way? Under contemporary conditions of forced emigration and neoliberalism, vast populations now live with no sense of a secure future, no sense of continuing political belonging, living a sense of damaged life as part of the daily experience of neoliberalism. I do not mean to say that the struggle for survival precedes the domain of morality or moral obligation as such, since we know that even under conditions of extreme threat, people do offer whatever acts of support are possible. We know this from some of the extraordinary reports from the concentration camps. In the work of Robert Antelme, for instance, it could be the exchange of a cigarette between those who share no common language, but find themselves in the same condition of imprisonment and peril in the concentration camp. Or in the work of Primo Levi, the response to the other can take the form of simply listening to, and recording, the details of the story that the other might tell, letting that story become part of an undeniable archive, the enduring trace of loss that compels the ongoing obligation to mourn; or in the work of Charlotte Delbo, the sudden offering to another of the last piece of bread that one desperately needs for oneself. And yet, in these same accounts, there are also those who will not extend the hand,

who will take the bread for oneself, hoard the cigarette, and sometimes suffer the anguish of depriving another under conditions of radical destitution. In other words, under conditions of extreme peril and heightened precarity, the moral dilemma does not pass away; it persists precisely in the tension between wanting to live and wanting to live in a certain way with others. One is still in small and vital ways “leading a life” as one recites or hears the story, as one affirms whatever occasion there might be to acknowledge the life and suffering of another. Even the utterance of a name can come as the most extraordinary form of recognition, especially when one has become nameless or when one’s name has been replaced by a number, or when one is not addressed at all. At a controversial moment, in speaking about the Jewish people, Hannah Arendt made clear that it was not enough for the Jews to struggle for survival, and that survival cannot be the end or goal of life itself.7 Citing Socrates, she insisted on the crucial distinction between the desire to live and the desire to live well or, rather, the desire to live the good life.8 For Arendt, survival was not, and should not be, a goal in itself, since life itself was not an intrinsic good. Only the good life makes life worth living. She resolved that Socratic dilemma quite easily but perhaps too quickly, or so it seems to me. I am not sure her answer can work for us, nor am I convinced that it ever did quite work. For Arendt, the life of the body had for the most part to be separated from the life of the mind, which is why in The Human Condition she drew a distinction between the public and private spheres. The private sphere included the domain of need, the reproduction of material life, sexuality, life, death, and transience. She clearly understood that the private sphere supported the public sphere of action and thought, but in her view, the political is defined by action, including the active sense of speaking. So the verbal deed became the action of the deliberative and public space of politics. Those who entered into the public sphere did so from the private sphere, so the public sphere depended fundamentally on the reproduction of the private and the clear passageway that led from the private to the public. Those who could not speak Greek, who came from elsewhere and whose speech was not intelligible, were considered barbarians, which means that the public sphere was not conceived as a space of multilingualism and so failed to imply the practice of translation as a public obligation. And yet, we can see that the efficacious verbal act depended on (a) a stable and sequestered private sphere that reproduced the masculine speaker and actor and (b) a language designated for verbal action, the defining feature of politics, that could be heard and understood because it conformed to the demands of monolingualism. The public sphere, defined by an intelligible and efficacious set of speech acts, was thus perpetually shadowed by the problems of unrecognized labor (women and slaves) and multilingualism. And the site where both converge was precisely the situation of the slave, one who could be replaced, whose political status was null, and whose language was considered no language at all. Of course, Arendt understood that the body was important to any conception of action, and that even those who fight in resistances or in revolutions had to undertake bodily actions to claim their rights and to create something new.9 And the body was certainly important to public speech, understood as a verbal form of action. The body appears again as a central figure in her important conception of natality, which is linked with her conception of both aesthetics and politics. After all, the kind of action understood as “giving birth” is not quite the same as the action involved in revolution, and yet both are bound together by the fact that they are different ways of creating something new, without precedent. If there is suffering in acts of political resistance or, indeed, in giving birth, it is a suffering that serves the purpose of bringing something new into the world. And yet, what do we make of that suffering that belongs to forms of labor that slowly or quickly destroy the body of the laborer, or other forms that serve no instrumental purpose at all? If we define politics restrictively as an active stance, verbal and physical, that takes place within a clearly demarcated public

sphere, then it seems we are left to call “useless suffering” and unrecognized labor the prepolitical—experiences, not actions, that exist outside the political as such. However, since any conception of the political has to take into account what operation of power demarcates the political from the prepolitical, and how the distinction between public and private accords differential value to different life processes, we have to refuse the Arendtian definition, even as it gives us much to value. Or, rather, we have to take the Arendtian distinction between the life of the body and the life of the mind as a point of departure for thinking about a different kind of bodily politics. After all, Arendt does not simply distinguish mind and body in a Cartesian sense; rather, she affirms only those forms of embodied thought and action that create something new, that undertake action with performative efficacy. Actions that are performative are irreducible to technical applications, and they are differentiated from passive and transient forms of experience. Thus, when and where there is suffering or transience, it is there to be transformed into the life of action and thought, and that action and thought has to be performative in the illocutionary sense, modeled on aesthetic judgment, bringing something new into the world. This means that the body concerned solely with the issues of survival, with the reproduction of material conditions and the satisfaction of basic needs, is not yet the “political” body; the private is necessary, to be sure, since the political body can only emerge into the light of public space to act and think if it is well fed and well sheltered, supported by numerous prepolitical actors whose action is not political. If there is no political actor who cannot assume that the private domain operates as support, then the political defined as the public is essentially dependent on the private, which means that the private is not the opposite of the political, but enters into its very definition. This well-fed body speaks openly and publicly; this body who spent the night sheltered and in the private company of others emerges always later to act in public. That private sphere becomes the very background of public action, but should it for that reason be cast as prepolitical? Does it, for instance, matter whether relations of equality or dignity or nonviolence exist in that shadowy background where women, children, the elderly, and slaves dwell? If one sphere of inequality is disavowed in order to justify and promote another sphere of equality, then surely we need a politics that can name and expose that very contradiction and the operation of disavowal by which it is sustained. If we accept the definition Arendt proposes between public and private, we run the risk of ratifying that disavowal. So, what is at stake here in revisiting Arendt’s account of the private and public distinction in the classical Greek polis? The disavowal of dependency becomes the precondition of the autonomous thinking and acting political subject, which immediately raises the question of what kind of “autonomous” thought and action this might be. And if we agree to the private and public distinction that Arendt presents, we accept that disavowal of dependency as a precondition of politics rather than taking those mechanisms of disavowal as the objects of our own critical analysis. Indeed, it is the critique of that unacknowledged dependency that establishes the point of departure for a new body politics, one that begins with an understanding of human dependency and interdependency, one that, in other words, can account for the relation between precarity and performativity.

AT – Pessimism

Bodily vulnerability is an ontological condition integral to experiences within Civil Society. This precarity and the exposure to others can be mobilized to change the conditions in a “common world” characterized by disproportionate precarityButler ‘18 (Judith Butler, writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist, “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly”, First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015), pg. 117-119, MB)

Perhaps now I can make clear several points about vulnerability that seek neither to idealize nor to discount its political importance. The first is that vulnerability cannot be associated exclusively with injurability. All responsiveness to what happens is a function and effect of vulnerability—of being open to a history, registering an impression, or having something impressed upon one’s understanding. Vulnerability may be a function of openness, that is, of being open to a world that is not fully known or predictable. Part of what a body does (to use the phrase of Deleuze, derived from his reading of Spinoza) is to open onto the body of another, or a set of others, and for this reason bodies are not self-enclosed kinds of entities.13 They are always in some sense outside themselves, exploring or navigating their environment, extended and even sometimes dispossessed through the senses.14 If we can become lost in another, or if our tactile, motile, haptic, visual, olfactory, or auditory capacities comport us beyond ourselves, that is because the body does not stay in its own place, and because dispossession of this kind characterizes bodily sense more generally. It is also why it is important to speak sometimes about the regulation of the senses as a political matter—there are certain photographs of the injury or destruction of bodies in war, for example, that we are often forbidden to see precisely because there is a fear that this body will feel something about what those other bodies underwent, or that this body, in its sensory comportment outside itself, will not remain enclosed, monadic, and individual. Indeed, we might ask what kind of regulation of the senses—those modes of ecstatic relationality—might have to be instituted for individualism to be maintained as an ontology required for both economics and politics. Although we often speak as if vulnerability is a contingent and passing circumstance, there are reasons not to accept that as a general view. Of course, it is always possible to say, “I was vulnerable then, but I am not vulnerable anymore,” and we say that in relation to specific situations in which we felt ourselves to be at risk or injurable. Those can be economic or financial situations when we feel that we are exploited, having lost work, or find ourselves in conditions of poverty, in need of public assistance that is itself being cut back assiduously. Or they can be emotional situations in which we are very much vulnerable to rejection, but later find that we have lost that vulnerability. Even as it makes sense that we speak this way, it makes equal sense to treat with caution the seductions of ordinary discourse at this moment. And though we may legitimately feel that we are vulnerable in some instances and not in others, the condition of our vulnerability is itself not changeable. This does not mean that we are objectively or subjectively equally vulnerable all the time. But it does mean that it is a more or less implicit or explicit feature of our experience. To say that any of us are vulnerable beings is to mark our radical dependency not only on others, but on a sustaining and sustainable world. This has implications for understanding who we are as emotionally and sexually passionate beings, as bound up with others from the start, but also as beings who seek to persist, and whose persistence can be imperiled or sustained depending on whether social, economic, and political structures offer sufficient support for a livable life. Populations marked by differential vulnerability and precarity are not for that reason immobilized. When political struggles emerge to oppose such conditions, they are mobilizing precarity, and even sometimes quite deliberately mobilizing the public exposure of the body, even when it means being exposed to force or detention or possibly death. It is not that vulnerability is converted into

resistance, at which point strength triumphs over vulnerability. Strength is not quite the opposite of vulnerability, and this becomes clear, I would suggest, when vulnerability is itself mobilized, not as an individual strategy, but in concert. This is probably not what Hannah Arendt had in mind when she said that politics depends on acting in concert—I can’t imagine she would have much liked the Slut Walks.15 But perhaps if we rethink her view so that the body, and its requirements, becomes part of the action and aim of the political, we can start to approach a notion of plurality that is thought together with both performativity and interdependency. Now, I realize that I have introduced new terms without being able to clarify my meaning sufficiently. “Interdependency” is one. I’d caution in this way: We cannot presume that interdependency is some beautiful state of coexistence; it is not the same as social harmony. Inevitably, we rail against those on whom we are most dependent (or those who are most dependent on us), and there is no way to dissociate dependency from aggression once and for all—this was perhaps the profound insight of Melanie Klein, but surely also Thomas Hobbes in another idiom. In the early 1980s, the black American feminist Bernice Johnson Reagon put the point this way: “I feel as if I’m gonna keel over any minute and die. That is often what it feels like if you’re really doing coalition work. Most of the time you feel threatened to the core and if you don’t, you’re not really doing no coalescing.… You don’t go into coalition because you just like it. The only reason you would consider trying to team up with somebody who could possibly kill you, is because that’s the only way you can figure you can stay alive.” Toward the end of her remarks, she makes clear that interdependency includes the threat of death: about the idea of a common world, one we could call “our common world,” she remarks, “You must be sure you understand that you ain’t gonna be able to have an ‘our’ [as in our world] that don’t include Bernice Johnson Reagon, cause I don’t plan to go nowhere! That’s why we have to have coalitions. Cause I ain’t gonna let you live unless you let me live. Now there’s danger in that, but there’s also the possibility that we can both live—if you can stand it.” In a sense, the people you find in the street or off the street or in the prison or on the periphery, on the path that still is no street, or in whatever basement that houses the coalition that is possible at the moment are not precisely the ones you chose. I mean, for the most part, when we arrive, we do not know who else is arriving, which means that we accept a kind of unchosen dimension to our solidarity with others. Perhaps we could say that the body is always exposed to people and impressions it does not have a say about, does not get to predict or fully control, and that these conditions of social embodiment are those we have not fully brokered. I want to suggest that solidarity emerges from this rather than from deliberate agreements we enter knowingly.

AT Fem/QT

Queer theory and feminist studies hunger for a new, attention-grabbing paradigm to market when the excitement of a new revolutionary interpretation wears off. Such debaters are eager to capitalize on our protest to demote racial understandings in this space. This academic restlessness must dominate the representations of debate, such that it becomes impossible to understand the common enemy that can queer, feminist, and race debaters. The more self-consciously pleased and disturbed you become in your affirmed and enforced theorizations of queerness and feminism, the more restless we become inside them. Ross 2k (Assc. Director of the Center for AfroAmerican and African Studies @ U Mich, 2000, Marlon-Professor of English; Pleasuring Identity, or the Delicious Politics of Belonging; NEW LITERARY HISTORY, Vol. 31, No. 4, Is There Life after Identity Politics?; Autumn, 2000; pp.827-850.) \\EG

Another reason we may be restless inside identity theory is because, according to the institutional expectations of academe, we hunger for a new, attention-grabbing paradigm to market at the moment that the sexiness of a new method seems to wear off. Anti-identity advocates can smell that moment approaching and are eager to capitalize on it to demote race, gender, and sexuality and the identity groups that these categories supposedly represent. This sort of academic restlessness is a bit underhanded, given that we have been studying solely the intellectual identity of Aristotle for nigh 2400 years, and yet there is no movement to clamp down on those who take pleasure in the study of Aristotelian physics, metaphysics, posterior analytics, ethics, and poetics, even though these have ceased to provide a living paradigm for modernity. This kind of academic restlessness can also take place within such an identity discipline like feminism or queer studies. As Wiegman suggests, certain feminists are anxious to return to a universal woman because they have grown tired of others' "identity politics." Otherwise instructive queer theorists like Freeman in her contribution here or [End Page 846] Lauren Berlant 10 strive to make family or church automatic signifiers of unqueer conservatism blocking the progress of queer theory and politics. This has the effect of dismissing a strong tendency among Black lesbians, gays, and bisexuals to identify with church and family as sites of transformation, actual and potential, central to their sexual identity as Blacks and to their racial identity as men-loving men and women-loving women. Such restlessness within an identity discipline frequently tends also to assume that stigma, marginality, and typing--mobilized as key terms in Palumbo-Liu's contribution--must dominate the study of the representation of intersecting identities, such that it becomes impossible to understand, for instance, the pleasures of identification that enable Black sexual minorities to find in the Black church and the Black family, not only in particular cases but also as institutions, magnets for progressive "identity politics," rather than a common enemy that can unite queers across race, class, and gender. Instead of assuming that something is astray with anyone who identifies with these "reproductive" institutions, we need to investigate and theorize the economies of pleasure operating in such familial and familiar identity attractions. If we abandon the study of identity "inside" academe in the clamor for a new paradigm, "out there" identity politics and pleasures will continue and probably intensify. The more self-consciously pleased and disturbed that we become in our affirmed and enforced identities, the more restless we become "inside" them. Even intensified self-consciousness, however, does not seem to get us closer to the dance of identification as we experience it pleasurably and disturbingly "inside" and "across" our bodies' persons, individually and collectively considered. Our recourse to more externalized structures--like the sides of an argument or the solidity of economic

classes--promises some reprieve, but we grow no less restless "outside" our personal and collective selves, as though individuals and their dis/affectionate affiliations are emptied of their identity, mere meanings and patterns bereft of that inner motivating vitality. As "identity politics" is not dead, is in fact thriving, so I'd suggest we get on with making its theory and practice thrive in our intellectual institutions, accompanied by less nervousness and as much pleasure as possible. Nealon's examination of "affect" as queer reception history is a good instance of this. 11 By insisting on pleasure as a face/t of identification, I realize that I risk others' diminishing the political struggle at stake in the disciplining of identity forms. I would not sacrifice one to the other. If identity is always political, the economies of pleasure at work in identification also cannot escape the play for power, in shared or monopolistic versions. In fact, it is the activity of pleasure on and across subjects of identity that makes identity such a forceful vehicle for oppressive politics, and likewise this pleasure functions in collective [End Page 847] assaults against oppression. The pleasures of thinking that one belongs to a superior white race must be reckoned as interfused with the obligations, confusions, fears, and privileges afforded by such a sweeping, compelling identity. Fortunately for us, the pleasure in identifying against dominance cannot be delimited by acts of domination. Belonging to a group formed through others' domination and one's own subordination paradoxically affords its own peculiar pleasures aimed at upsetting the norms of power. These are the potentially liberating pleasures of identification that the domineering cannot rescind, however much they may practice to outlaw or outpace them. Of identity's politics and pleasures there is no end, and as for the "identity politics" besetting us at the present time, we are only now beginning to learn the rudimentary steps of the dance.

AT – Spectacle K

AT – Pomo Narratives

The Ideal narrative for debate is an oppressive tragic story that is distinct from the master narrative found within postmodern philosophical criticism. This community should shun those practices.

Gregory and Alimahomed ’01 (professors of Comm @ CAL ST FULLERTON, 2001, Josh & Kasim-; EMPOWERING NARRATIVES; Narrative Voice and the Urban Debater: An Investigation into Empowerment; paper submitted to the Urban Debate League Panel at the Western States Communication Association Conference, Coeur ‘d Alene, Idaho February 23-27, http://communications.fullerton.edu/forensics/SCUDL.htm) \\EG

The term “narrative” can be defined in many different ways. A liberal interpretation could go so far as to say that all human communication is narrative, as in someone narrating to you. However, for the purposes of this essay, a clearer definition of the narrative is offered by Polkinghorne (1988) as an “organizational scheme expressed in story form” (p.13). The narrative that this essay assumes is the personal story of an individual or group of individuals that are involved in the areas discussed by the current resolution. The ideal narrative that this essay would endorse for a debate round would be an oppressive tragic story, something that pains the heart and connects to a higher moral force for atonement. An unprivileged voice that comes from such a position in life that it moves competitor and judge alike, calling for them to take action. In this essay, the narrative is not a discussion about master “narratives” that guide all of our lives, nor does it engage the metanarrative debate occurring in postmodern philosophy. Our contention is that the organization of a story lends persuasive and personal power, and this tool should not be shunned out of academic debate.

XT – Education

Narratives provide a unique space to conceptualize and empathize with one’s stories and create a convergence between different perspectives. This epistemological device combines with critical understandings to create a holistic insight into the psyche and debate itself.

Gregory and Alimahomed ’01 (professors of Comm @ CAL ST FULLERTON, 2001, Josh & Kasim-; EMPOWERING NARRATIVES; Narrative Voice and the Urban Debater: An Investigation into Empowerment; paper submitted to the Urban Debate League Panel at the Western States Communication Association Conference, Coeur ‘d Alene, Idaho February 23-27, http://communications.fullerton.edu/forensics/SCUDL.htm) \\EG

The first step in orienting to the narratives of everyday life in this way is to listen to what people say. Not necessarily to retell it in exactly those terms, but to enquire into how it would be possible for them to say that. What kinds of assumptions in what types of possible world could produce those accounts? (Clegg, 1993, p.31). This inquiry offers the ability to gain an insight into other’s existence and epistemological understandings. The ability to conceptualize or empathize with one’s stories creates a convergence between two different perspectives. This convergence is directly related to the unifying power of the narrative as well as providing a legitimate means for the disenfranchised voice to be heard. Mumby (1993) illustrates how the duality of narrative structures create a social understanding as well as set up an epistemological device of meaning in which social awareness is created: Narrative is a socially symbolic act in the double sense that (a) it takes on meaning only in social context and (b) it plays a role in the construction of that social context as a cite of meaning in which social actors are implicated. However, there is no simple isomorphism between narrative (or any other symbolic form) and the social realm. In different ways, each of the chapters belies the notion that the narrative functions monolithically to crate a stable, structured, social order. Indeed, one of the prevailing themes across the chapters is the extent to which social order is tenuous, precarious, and open to negotiation in various ways. In this sense, society is characterized by an ongoing “struggle over meaning” (p. 5). The implication of these two factors on intercollegiate debate point to how the narrative not only relies on the social context for meaning, but aids in the construction of that context. Debate is a unique forum to meet Mumby’s socially symbolic act. Debate offers a unique social context in that the majority of audience members are intellectually versed on the social context of a particular narrative (due to debate research). The public advocacy emphasis of academic debate also allows for a “cite of meaning” and the adversarial positions in a debate round allow a team to implicate a judge or another team by virtue of their position. It is in these mock situations that debaters are implicated as social actors, and thus are moved to action by virtue of close engagement with another’s story. In factors of debate the concepts of theory and practice are inexorably intertwined. When these two competing ideologies can be combined creates a holistic insight into the human psyche. Insight gained from this holistic understanding is created by stories (or narratives) that define human experience. The ability to construct a compelling story can have a dramatic impact on the social epistemology, which creates a co-constructed knowledge framework. Scholars have posited that: Stories are among the most universal means of representing human events. In addition to suggesting an interpretation for a social happening, a well-crafted narrative can motivate the belief and action of outsiders toward the actors and events caught up in its plot. A key question about stories, as with other situations- defining symbolic forms like metaphors, theories, and ideologies is whether they introduce new and constructive insights into social

life (Bennett & Edelman, 1985, p. 156). This form of meaning production and the persuasive potential of identification established by the narrative can be a powerful force upon the debate community or even society. The process of which an individuals interacts with a narrative and then how a community reacts to the narrative is better explained by White (1987) who states: Narrative is revealed to be particularly effective system of discursive meaning production by which individuals can be taught to live a distinctively “imaginary relation to the real conditions of existence,” that is to say, an unreal but meaningful relation to the social formations in which they are indentured to live out their lives and realize their destinies and social subjects. To conceive of a narrative discourse in this way permits us to account for its universality as a cultural fact and for the interest that dominant social groups have not only in controlling what will pass for the authoritative myth of a given cultural formation but also in assuring the belief that social reality itself can be both lived and realistically comprehended as a story (p. 187) The entrance of this new form of information processing seems uncertain. Thus, the final analysis looks to the debate community in particular and provides some investigation as to how the persuasiveness of the narrative could interact with the conventions and norms of the debate community.

Narratives are an essential corrective to a community saturated with blood on the flow. Our model reestablishes empathy in the debate community to produce debates that more breed more educational value.

Gregory and Alimahomed ’01 (professors of Comm @ CAL ST FULLERTON, 2001, Josh & Kasim-; EMPOWERING NARRATIVES; Narrative Voice and the Urban Debater: An Investigation into Empowerment; paper submitted to the Urban Debate League Panel at the Western States Communication Association Conference, Coeur ‘d Alene, Idaho February 23-27, http://communications.fullerton.edu/forensics/SCUDL.htm) \\EG

Having justified that the personal narrative or story can empower the disenfranchised individual, the next claim that must be justified is that the introduction of narratives will aid the entire debate community. The structure of the narrative is vastly different than the structure of more traditional affirmative cases, disadvantages, and counterplans. This difference creates a problem of how a narrative should be evaluated versus a disadvantage resulting in worldwide destruction. The narrative structure does not refute this, nor does the disadvantage outweigh the narrative. The intersection of the disadvantage and the narrative only happens at the impact level—the narrative is an example of how one person feels in the vast number of individuals subjected to torture and death by case harms or disadvantage impacts. The relationship of these structures guides them to tangentially clash and this does not justify their exclusion from debate. The narrative structure is a powerful persuasive device, and should be introduced because it: 1) privileges the emotional appeal of the story over the logical structure of links, brinks, and impacts, 2) provides a snapshot of time in which a person can identify with true suffering as opposed to the longitudinal aspects of death tallies, and 3) opens a rhetoric of possibility in which competitors and judges alike can affirm or negate a resolution based off of the ability to foresee a future effected by the narrative. The debate community has privileged traditional logical appeals over nontraditional forms of argument. These logical appeals create easy comparisons for critics

since the arguments can be broken down into simple equations. To weigh a disadvantage of ecological collapse versus a plan that saves fifty lives is basic math—survival of the planet always outweighs fifty lives. These logical appeals are naturally preferred over emotional appeals because there is no systematic way in which to quantify the emotions evoked by a message. However, narrative debate could create a different form of impact analysis at the pathos level: the emotional appeal of the narrative could be weighed against the emotional appeal of a disadvantage. This new type of impact analysis provides clear ground, because the traditional disadvantage can have emotional appeal (deaths of children, environmental destruction—these all include basic pathos appeals) and the narrative can be weighed against this. The other advantage to this form of impact analysis is that it becomes a forum in the debate community, judges and competitors alike could begin to create rubrics and hierarchies that would help explain the more powerful versus less powerful pathos appeals. The realm of the pathos appeal has been understudied for years, and with its acceptance as a criterion in debate, the community could lend a helping hand to facilitate a mapping out the persuasiveness of pathos appeals. The second advantage that the narrative provides in academic debate is that the narrative is centered on a snapshot in time: the narrative is a glimpse into someone else’s life for just a moment. In debate rounds, competitors often prophesize the most severe impacts possible in an attempt to get enough “blood on the flow.” In every debate round, billions of human beings are killed by some proclaimed catastrophic event that a singular policy measure evoked. By tallying deaths into the billions, debaters and judges never really have a chance to empathize with one case of human pain and suffering. Narratives produce an insight into the human condition and illuminate the struggle our species endures. Compared to traditional policy arguments that concentrate on future action to remedy current problems, the narrative forces competitors to empathize with a particular problem that a human is experiencing now. This empathy is lost in contemporary debate, with debaters claiming future destruction for the planet in almost every debate round. With more narrative debaters, we may see a resurgence of probabilistic arguments against disadvantages, since the unlikely scenario of nuclear war might be outweighed by the definite impact to the protagonist of the narrative (as well as the good possibility that other’s have similar narratives). The narrative helps to “keep it real,” and centers the debate round back to the individuals that the impacts are directly affecting, creating a strong link between debater and the change that they are advocating in the status quo. The final reason why narratives would help the debate community is that they do open up a rhetoric of possibility. The Gulf war may or may not have started (without the narrative), but after the young Kuwaiti girl spoke, there was a call for war, and war seemed inevitable, a conclusion that traditional forms of argument would never have established. This discourse is a prime example of the power of the narrative, which opened a possibility that before was not an option. The persuasive force of the narrative affects receiver and the individual immediately begins to ponder what sort of situation would bring about such a travesty. This thought process create new possibilities that individuals can begin conceived even though it was unconsidered before: The need to evoke possibilities of the human condition is central to the rhetorical enterprise, transcending any one school or strategy. However, narrative is perhaps the foremost means by which such possibilities are disclosed. Through storytelling, rhetors can confront a the states of awareness and intellectual beliefs of audiences; through it they can show them previously unsuspected ways of being and acting in the world (Kirkwood, 1992, p. 32). These new ways of acting and being are reflections of a different rhetorical style, new faculties that should be available to the young debater. The rhetoric of possibility that is created by having competitors and judges alike engage the narrative calls for new creative actions that would have normally been dismissed in the contemporary debate society. The rhetoric of possibility is

different from the rhetoric of actuality—the traditional debater creates claims from a realist framework—the political disadvantage based around the workings of government, the financial disadvantage from the workings of the stock market, or the counterplan that tries to implement a plan through the same traditional policy means. The narrative debater, working from a rhetoric of possibility works from a different ideology or school of thought, though the narrative debater would recognize these same realist conceptions, the narrative debater also tries to guide the audience to see additional perspectives and to create more solutions than the realist platform—the narrative debater as asks the audience to try to work outside and around the realist framework as well. By helping people examine possibilities, which they previously did not imagine or think they could achieve, rhetors can free them to pursue more satisfying responses to both personal and public needs. Hence a rhetoric of possibility can illuminate diverse kinds of communication (Kirkwood, 1992, p.44). As of the writing of this paper, the signing of a debate ballot has gained perlocutionary force—the action of voting has some concrete impact in the community (debate and otherwise). Debaters have began to claim that the ballot can either operate in the traditional debate sense (working from any of a multitude of debate “paradigms:” stock issues, cost-benefit analysis, hypothesis-testing, etc.), or the ballot becomes an endorsement of an ideology, with the action of signing becoming a statement to a larger community. The narrative can operate at either level: it can be weighed in a debate round on the probability and pathos appeal of the narration, or it can be endorsed by a judge for its ideological power. However, the narrative can be impacted at even higher levels. A performance that touches debaters and critics alike should be endorsed for the mere fact that more individuals should hear it. The intellectual landscape would support any effort or trust to exchange and create ideas. The narrative could be a stronghold that keeps the death that debaters often claim as inevitable closer to home.

Our model is more educational—Narratives create rhetorical possibility which allows new possibilities and discourses to emerge. Instead of desensitizing debaters, narratives empower debaters to be heard. Narrative debate would allow teams to gain extra-persuasive faculties in personal life and more holistic knowledge of other people. Though it seems that the current debate community does little to directly affect change in the real world, the personification of suffering evinces direct action by debaters and turns us into real world advocates.

Gregory and Alimahomed ’01 (professors of Comm @ CAL ST FULLERTON, 2001, Josh & Kasim-; EMPOWERING NARRATIVES; Narrative Voice and the Urban Debater: An Investigation into Empowerment; paper submitted to the Urban Debate League Panel at the Western States Communication Association Conference, Coeur ‘d Alene, Idaho February 23-27, http://communications.fullerton.edu/forensics/SCUDL.htm) \\EG

Beyond the ballot, a rhetoric of possibility can influence the inner ethics of the individual. By personalizing travesties of humans, the debate community sees the grim reality of certain areas of the world—and this opens whole new possibilities. This personalization has an opposite effect than the desensitizing debaters to the destruction of the planet. The implication for the urban debater attempting to gain voice through the story of another happens at two levels: 1) at the level of personal

empowerment by seeing life through the eyes of another, and 2) the possibilities enfranchised in telling a personal story to others can affect change from a community. The narrative debater can find similarities between the oppressed voice of the protagonist of a personal story, and from that identification, the debater can allow themselves to be heard. This vicarious experience allows the disenfranchised voice of the minority urban debater to have atonement, and the endorsement of this type of advocacy can empower the urban debater into telling their own personal stories in public forums. This affirmation would allow debaters to gain extra persuasive faculties in personal life experiences and grant them more holistic knowledge of other people. In its basic form, debate tells the minority urban voice that they can voice through a long list of plans, disadvantages, and kritiks, but the narrative would allow for the minority to see how other oppressed people describe their story, with whole new avenues of possibility. The possibility spreads throughout a community, the second implication of narrative debate, creates new discourses about the real individuals that so much debate evidence points to. Instead of being another possible death from a horrible situation, the impacts of a position are humanized, and by doing so, the individual is more likely to try to directly help the oppressed voice. Though it seems that the current debate community does little to directly affect change in the real world, the personification of pain and suffering might evince direct action by debaters. There have been instances in the past where debaters that have felt so strongly about a kritik have lobbied for political action at a tournament. The narrative offers another chance to involve a debater enough to become a real world advocate, for the persuasive force of a narrative affects individuals at a much more of a personal level.

XT – General

Debate should not overlook the persuasive potential of narratives and spectacles of violence. Spectacles offer minority debaters opportunities to empathize with other minority voices around the world and breed a rhetoric of transformative possibility. These narratives have the force to evince change and cause revolution in the debate community.

Gregory and Alimahomed ’01 (professors of Comm @ CAL ST FULLERTON, 2001, Josh & Kasim-; EMPOWERING NARRATIVES; Narrative Voice and the Urban Debater: An Investigation into Empowerment; paper submitted to the Urban Debate League Panel at the Western States Communication Association Conference, Coeur ‘d Alene, Idaho February 23-27, http://communications.fullerton.edu/forensics/SCUDL.htm) \\EG

This paper will discuss the empowerment of voice in the urban debate league. The authors contend that the persuasive potential of first person narratives must not be overlooked in today’s debate community. Narratives offer the disenfranchised urban debater an opportunity to empathize with other oppressed minority voices around the world. A rhetoric of possibility is created at the intersection of minority advocacy and through the unrepresented narrative of another person’s life story. The rhetoric of possibility internalized in the narrative has the force to evince palpable change in the debate community. A final section investigates how the narrative could be accepted and evaluated against traditional argument. The rhetoric of the possibility plays a role in created pathos and creates identification to reality for the speakers and the judges.

Empirically—narrative is a strong rhetorical device that can supersede traditional forms of argumentation to commit this community to war. Debate uses traditional policy arguments; therefore it cannot afford to deny the transformative power of the narrative.

Gregory and Alimahomed ’01 (professors of Comm @ CAL ST FULLERTON, 2001, Josh & Kasim-; EMPOWERING NARRATIVES; Narrative Voice and the Urban Debater: An Investigation into Empowerment; paper submitted to the Urban Debate League Panel at the Western States Communication Association Conference, Coeur ‘d Alene, Idaho February 23-27, http://communications.fullerton.edu/forensics/SCUDL.htm) \\EG

Thomas J. Mickey (1997) explains a very powerful example of the use of Narrative in contemporary society: The events are as follows: On October 10, 1990 Nayriah al-Sabah, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, testified before Congress about the atrocities that the Iraqis were committing against Kuwaiti citizens. She specifically mentioned that Iraqis were taking Kuwaiti babies from incubators in area hospitals. Soon afterwards, her [narrative] became the language of Washington’s call to arms. President Bush mentioned what became known as the “incubator atrocities” six times in one month and eight times in 44 days. In the Senate six other senators mentioned the incubator atrocities in the debate over whether to go to war. The resolution passed by five votes (p.278). The narrative testimony of the young Kuwaiti girl for “Citizens for Free Kuwait” was a strong rhetorical device, and many senators before the Gulf War

were persuaded by a child telling a story about the senseless infanticide occurring in the invaded nation of Kuwait. Mickey’s (1997) analysis continues by noting that the child was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United States, was not even in Kuwait at the time, and was “coached” by the pubic relations firm Hill and Knowlton (at the nice price of $10.5 million) on how to tell a story the right way. Though the aforementioned scenario is a tragic example of how the narrative can be abused, this essay will try to shed some light on the more empowering uses of the narrative. Before a senate would ever go to war, deliberations would be heard from traditional policy arguments: Economics issues, oil issues, political policy ramifications of war, and risk of human life. The Kuwaiti girl’s narrative superceded all these items of deliberation and committed a country to war. The traditional cost-benefit criterion that guides both contemporary governmental policy making and academic debate would not had the ability to commit a country to war without further discussion. Academic debate uses traditional policy arguments; therefore, academic debate cannot afford to deny access to such a powerful persuasive device. Our implications are that academic debate should incorporate the narrative because it utilizes two nontraditional persuasive faculties: 1) pathos appeals and 2) a rhetoric of possibility that emphasizes a personal identification. In order to justify this claim we must look to some historical formulations of the narrative. From there the argument will progress as follows: 1) defining what the narrative is, which includes structural definitions and evaluative criteria, 2) examining how the narrative can liberate the person, which investigates empowerment and voice, and 3) implicate how pathos appeals and identifying with the possibility will better the debate community.

By expressing marginalized perspectives through a particular historical context, other disjointed individuals find solidarity. These stories inject a new narrative into society which provides insight into how our community operates. Using such models, we plan strategies to revolutionize debate and provide spaces for the oppressed to transform themselves. Specifically in debate, this is crucial to account for the marginalized debaters.

Gregory and Alimahomed ’01 (professors of Comm @ CAL ST FULLERTON, 2001, Josh & Kasim-; EMPOWERING NARRATIVES; Narrative Voice and the Urban Debater: An Investigation into Empowerment; paper submitted to the Urban Debate League Panel at the Western States Communication Association Conference, Coeur ‘d Alene, Idaho February 23-27, http://communications.fullerton.edu/forensics/SCUDL.htm) \\EG

The narrative as a discursive act is probably one of the most “human” actions that a person can engage in. Individuals organize their lives in personal stories, even to the extent that most theorists claim that the guiding force of personal development and psychological maintenance are intrapersonal self-narratives. To examine the force of the narrative to the personal, one must look at the narrative in relation to identity: Human identities are considered to be evolving constructions; they emerge out of continual social interactions in the course of life. Self-narratives are developed stories that must be told in specific historical terms, using a particular language, reference to a particular stock of working historical conventions and a particular pattern of dominant beliefs and values. The most fundamental narrative forms are universal, but the way these forms are styled and filled with content will depend

upon particular historical conventions of time and place (Scheibe, 1986, p. 131). Personal narratives might differ, and special recurring narratives may dictate further action of the individual (such as in a self-fulfilling prophecy). However, there are fundamental aspects of the narrative that run across all human beings, and it is in the ability to contrast a personal narrative with the narratives of others that creates a unity of the self with the other. If a human cannot find universal aspects that run across all narratives (including their own), than that human feels disjointed by society: The self is a kind of aesthetic construct, recollected in and with the life of experience in narrative fashion. One's personal story or personal identity is a recollected self in which the more complete the story that is formed, the more integrated the self will be…A self without a story contracts into the thinness of the personal pronoun (Polkinghorne, 1988, p. 106). To feel a loss of self through the inability to compare the private narrative with societal narratives is a personal travesty, but in a multicultural world where individuals come from such diverse and varied settings, the inability to compare the self with the other leaves the unique self with a desire to let his/her voice be known. It is at this intersection that the narrative takes on the power to emancipate the silenced individual. The emancipatory function of the personal narrative lays not so much in the individuals ability to incorporate societal narratives into his/her life, but more so in making their personal narrative known to the greater society. By expressing the voice of the unique individual, other disjointed individuals can attempt to find similarities and hopefully, solidarity. The self as constructed narrative brings with it a dynamism, a fluidity toward social relations: [We] achieve our personal identities and self-concept through the use of the narrative configuration, and make our existence into a whole by understanding it as an expression of a single unfolding and developing story. We are in the middle of our stories and cannot be sure how they will end; we are constantly having to revise the plot as new events are added to our lives (Polkinghorne, 1988, p.150). Since personal identity is at stake in narrative dialogue, the interlocutors may choose to interject their unique narrative experiences—at best, a marginalized voice may gain discursive legitimacy, and at worst an interlocutor may be eschewed by others. For the exceptionally marginalized voice, the discursive space opened by the narrative is a wise move. Delgado (1992) posits that the narrative gives unique voice to the oppressed: No matter how limited one's resources or range of options, no matter how unequal one's bargaining position, at least one's thoughts are free. Small wonder that the recent legal-storytelling movement has had such appeal to people of color, women, gays and lesbians. Stories inject a new narrative into our society. They demand attention; if aptly told, they win acceptance or, at a minimum, respect. This is why women demand to tell their account of forced sex, why cancer victims insist that their smoking was a redressable harm despite the tobacco companies' pathetic warnings, and why patient advocates demand a fundamental restructuring of the doctor-patient relationship (p. 822). Since the narrative gives voice to the disenfranchised, peripheral, and marginal, it would be logical that these identities would evince action to accommodate for their rhetoric. Polkinghorne (1988) gives the final implication for the narrative: On this basis, humans make decisions about what they want and what they need to do to satisfy these wants. We retrieve stories about our own and the community's past, and these provide models of how actions and consequences are linked. Using these retrieved models, we plan our strategies and actions and interpret the intentions of other actors. Narrative is the discourse structure in which human action receives its form and through which it is meaningful (Polkinghorne, 1988, p.135). In academic debate, with its urban outreach programs, policy debate has never seen such a diversity of personality. Within resolutions there is enough freedom to accommodate a marginal voice—and in finding similarities between the urban debater and the oppressed narrative of a resolutional actor, the debater finds him/herself transformed. The marginalized voice is given an ear

the form of the narrative, and according to the aforementioned quotation, human action in society gains meaning through narratives.

Under our performative paradigm, debaters engage in a shared process of constructing and evaluating their understandings of the world. The power of the narrative lies in the emancipation and societal awareness that occur through our model. Above this, the debate community will benefit through creating more mindful debaters.

Gregory and Alimahomed ’01 (professors of Comm @ CAL ST FULLERTON, 2001, Josh & Kasim-; EMPOWERING NARRATIVES; Narrative Voice and the Urban Debater: An Investigation into Empowerment; paper submitted to the Urban Debate League Panel at the Western States Communication Association Conference, Coeur ‘d Alene, Idaho February 23-27, http://communications.fullerton.edu/forensics/SCUDL.htm) \\EG

Thomas A. Hollihan, Kevin T. Baaske, and Patricia Riley (1987) assert that under a narrative paradigm, “debaters and their judges would be engaging in a shared process of constructing, communicating, and evaluating their respective understandings of the world” (p. 187). Though the narrative paradigm asserted in the late 1980s dealt primarily with the judge’s predispositions in a round, the power of narrative discourse in both emancipation and societal awareness occur whenever a narrative is introduced. This essay has advocated the narrative as a way for the typically excluded low-socioeconomic urban voice to gain legitimacy in a public forum. By identifying at an intellectual level with a marginalized voice in a “topic country,” the urban debater can find both personal voice and emancipation. Above this, the debate circuit in general should benefit from the narrative, mainly because it brings the creation of personal identity to the advocacy of the debater, creating more enlightened and mindful individuals across the board. If rhetoric is as Aristotle states as being the “faculty to see all available means of persuasion” (Kennedy, 1991, p.35), then as a community, we should encourage the use of narrative debate.

XT – Definition

We define narratives as stories central to the representation of individual or collective identity.

Gregory and Alimahomed ’01 (professors of Comm @ CAL ST FULLERTON, 2001, Josh & Kasim-; EMPOWERING NARRATIVES; Narrative Voice and the Urban Debater: An Investigation into Empowerment; paper submitted to the Urban Debate League Panel at the Western States Communication Association Conference, Coeur ‘d Alene, Idaho February 23-27, http://communications.fullerton.edu/forensics/SCUDL.htm) \\EG

Since there are so many arenas and disciplines that examine the persuasive effects of the narrative, there are also multiple definitions of what a narrative is—each enmeshed with the ideological propositions of the discipline that defined it: In more academic contexts, there has been recognition that narrative is central to the representation of identity, in personal memory and self- representation or in collective identity of groups such as regions, nations, race, and gender. There has been widespread interest in narrative in history, in the operations legal systems, in psychoanalysis, in economics, and in philosophy. Narrative is as inescapable as language in general, or as is cause and effect, as a mode of thinking and being (Currie, 1998, p. 2). Referring back to Quintillian’s delineations, the Narratological discipline focuses on the form of the narrative, whereas legal theorists and communication scholars evaluate the narrative in the realm of its function.

XT – Spill-Over DA

Spill-Over DA—The question is not whether stories should be told, but WHOSE story will be given room to exist in debate. The dominate power structures permeates the narrative structure that we all use to interpret reality. Injecting counter hegemonic narratives into debate fractures the dominate epistemology, creating a new framework for confront suffering. This spills over to real world action.

AT – Cap K

AT – Root Cause

Racism is the root cause of domination; capitalism stemmed from it.Johnson ‘83 (Cedric J. Johnson, “Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition,” HYPERLINK "https://libcom.org/files/Black%20Marxism-Cedric%20J.%20Robinson.pdf"https://libcom.org/files/Black%20Marxism-Cedric%20J.%20Robinson.pdf, 1983)With each historical moment, however, the rationale and cultural mechanisms of domination became more transparent. Race was its epistemology, its ordering principle, its organizing structure, its moral authority, its economy of justice, commerce, and power. Aristotle, one of the most original aristocratic apologists, had provided the template in Natural Law. In inferiorizing women ("[TI he deliberative faculty of the soul is not present at all in the slave; in a female it is present but ineffective" [Politics, i26oaiz]), non-Greeks, and all laborers (slaves, artisans, farmers, wage workers, etc.: "[Tlhe mass of mankind are evidently quite slavish in their tastes, preferring a life suitable to beasts" [Nicomachean Ethics, 1095b20]), Aristotle had articulated an uncompromising racial construct. And from the twelfth century on, one European ruling order after another, one cohort of clerical or secular propagandists following another, reiterated and embellished this racial calculus. As the Black Radical Tradition was distilled from the racial antagonisms which were arrayed along a continuum from the casual insult to the most ruthless and lethal rules of law; from the objectifications of entries in marine cargo manifests, auction accountancy, plantation records, broadsheets and newspapers; from the loftiness of Christian pulpits and biblical exegesis to the minutia of slave-naming, dress, types of food, and a legion of other significations, the terrible culture of race was revealed. Inevitably, the tradition was transformed into a radical force. And in its most militant manifestation, no longer accustomed to the resolution that flight and withdrawal were sufficient, the purpose of the struggles informed by the tradition became the overthrow of the whole race-based structure.

Racism is the root cause of capitalism, and violence. History proves that the White states always wanted to dominate black people and since they could never be finished they constructed capitalistic hierarchies.Johnson ‘83 (Cedric J. Johnson, “Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition,” HYPERLINK "https://libcom.org/files/Black%20Marxism-Cedric%20J.%20Robinson.pdf"https://libcom.org/files/Black%20Marxism-Cedric%20J.%20Robinson.pdf, 1983)The functions of these latter ideological constructions were related but different. Race was largely the rationalization for the domination, exploitation, and/or extermination of non-"Europeans" (including Slavs and Jews). And we shall have occasion in Part 2 to explore its applications beyond Europe and particularly to African peoples more closely. But while we remain on European soil, it is Herrenvolkthat matters. In eighteenth-century England, Reginald Horsman sees its beginnings in the "mythical" Anglo-Saxonism that was flown as an ideological pennant by the Whig intelligentsia in France (for example, Paul de Rapin-Thoyras and Montesquieu, and before them Franqois Hotman and Count Henri de Boulainvilliers), in Germany (Herder, Fichte, Schleiermacher, and Hegel), in north America (John Adams and Thomas Jefferson), ideologists displayed the idea of the heroic Germanic race. And the idea swept through nineteenth-century Europe, gathering momentum and artifice through such effects as Sir

Walter Scott's historical novels and Friedrich von Schlegel's philological fables. Inevitably, of course, the idea was dressed in the accoutrement of nineteenth-century European science. “Not satisfied with merely proclaiming the superiority of the white over the coloured race, also felt it necessary to erect a hierarchy within the white race itself.”

XT – Perm Do Both

Perm do Both—Protest and vulnerability is necessary to delegitimize the systems of dependency that allow for the capacity of laborers to be exploited.Butler ‘18 (Judith Butler – Writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist – “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly” – First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015) – pg. 209-212//Gavsie)

How, then, do we think about a livable life without positing a single or uniform ideal for that life? As I indicated in earlier chapters, it is not a matter, in my view, of finding out what the human really is, or should be, since it has surely been made plain that humans are animals, too, and that their very bodily existence depends upon systems of support that are both human and nonhuman. So, to a certain extent, I follow my colleague Donna Haraway in asking us to think about the complex relationalities that constitute bodily life, and in suggesting that we do not need any more ideal forms of the human; rather, we need to understand and attend to the complex set of relations without which we do not exist at all. Of course, there are conditions under which the kind of dependency and relationality to which I am referring seems to be unbearable. If a laborer depends on an employer by whom he or she is exploited, then that laborer’s dependency [is] appears to be equivalent to his or her [their] capacity to be exploited. One might resolve that one has to do away with all dependency since the social form that dependency assumes is exploitation. And yet it would be an error to identify the contingent form that dependency takes under conditions of exploitative labor relations with the final or necessary meaning of dependency. Even if dependency always takes one social form or another, it remains something that can and does transfer among those forms, and so proves to be irreducible to any one of them. Indeed, my stronger point is simply this: no human creature survives or persists without depending on a sustaining environment, social forms of relationality, and economic forms that presume and structure interdependency. It is true that dependency implies vulnerability, and sometimes that vulnerability is precisely to forms of power that threaten or diminish our existence. And yet, this does not mean that we can legislate against dependency or the condition of vulnerability to social forms. Indeed, we could not begin to understand why it is so difficult to live a good life in a bad life if we were invulnerable to those forms of power that exploit or manipulate our desire to live. We desire to live, even to live well, within social organizations of life, biopolitical regimes, that sometimes establish our very lives as disposable or negligible or, worse, seek to negate our lives. If we cannot persist without social forms of life, and if the only available ones are those that work against the prospect of our living, we are in a difficult bind, if not an impossible one. Put in yet other words, we are, as bodies, vulnerable to others and to institutions, and this vulnerability constitutes one aspect of the social modality through which bodies persist. The issue of my or your vulnerability implicates us in a broader political problem of equality and inequality, since vulnerability can be projected and denied (psychological categories), but also exploited and manipulated (social and economic categories) in the course of producing and naturalizing forms of social inequality. This is what is meant by the unequal distribution of vulnerability. My normative aim, however, is not simply to call for an equal distribution of vulnerability, since much depends on whether the social form of vulnerability that is being distributed is itself a livable one. In other words, one does not want everyone to have an equally unlivable life. As much as equality is a necessary goal, it remains insufficient if we do not know how best to evaluate whether or not the social form of vulnerability to be distributed is just. On the one hand, I am arguing that the disavowal of dependency and, in particular, the social form of vulnerability to which it gives rise, works to establish a distinction between those who are dependent and those who are not. And this distinction works in the service of inequality, shoring up forms of paternalism, or casting those in need in essentialist terms. On the other hand, I am suggesting

that only through a concept of interdependency that affirms the bodily dependency, conditions of precarity, and potentials for performativity can we think a social and political world that seeks to overcome precarity in the name of livable lives. In my view, vulnerability constitutes one aspect of the political modality of the body, where the body is surely human, but understood as a human animal. Vulnerability to one another, that is to say, even when conceived as reciprocal, marks a precontractual dimension of our social relations. This means as well that at some level it defies that instrumental logic that claims that I will only protect your vulnerability if you protect mine (wherein politics becomes a matter of brokering a deal or making a calculation on chances). In fact, vulnerability constitutes one of the conditions of sociality and political life that cannot be contractually stipulated, and whose denial and manipulability constitute an effort to destroy or manage an interdependent social condition of politics. As Jay Bernstein has made clear, vulnerability cannot be associated exclusively with injurability. All responsiveness to what happens is a function and effect of vulnerability, whether it is an openness to registering a history that has not yet been told, or a receptivity to what another body undergoes or has undergone, even when that body is gone. As I have suggested, bodies are always in some sense outside themselves, exploring or navigating their environment, extended and even sometimes dispossessed through the senses. If we can become lost in another, or if our tactile, motile, haptic, visual, olfactory, or auditory capacities comport us beyond ourselves, that is because the body does not stay in its own place, and because dispossession of this kind characterizes bodily sense more generally. When being dispossessed in sociality is regarded as a constitutive function of what it means to live and persist, what difference does that make to the idea of politics itself?

Perm do the aff then the Alt: Protesting allows for a disruption of society in which is the world of the alt meaning the aff is a pre-req to the alternative.Mogiello '16 (Matthew M., PhD in Political Science, "Powerless In Movement: How Social Movements Influence, And Fail To Influence, American Politics And Policy, 2016, https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4267&context=edissertations, pgs. 64-65, D.P.)

What forms of “institutionally regulated cooperation” are at issue in this analogy? They come in two basic flavors, active and passive cooperation.75 Active cooperation involves institutions in which movement participants are actively participating. The most obvious example is labor and consumer participation in the economy. The Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56 is a classic withdrawal of consumer participation that rendered the city’s segregated transit system economically unviable. Passive cooperation involves non-interference with social arrangements that may not directly involve movement participants. The respecting of property rights, civil, and criminal law are key examples of such passive cooperation. Abortion clinic blockaders withdrew their cooperation from property and trespassing legal regimes, making it impossible for those clinics to conduct business and overburdening local police and courts.76 It is important to distinguish disruptive acts from merely violent, unorthodox, or dramatic tactics. Protesting in funny costumes can be unorthodox and spectacular. Large “marches” on Washington, D.C. are usually dramatic, though decreasingly so. Assaulting police officers at a protest is certainly violent. But these acts do not necessarily pose a significant challenge to major forms of “institutionally regulated cooperation” such industry, commerce, governance, and basic law and order. By contrast, the refusal to work—strikes—directly disrupts industry. The refusal to purchase goods or patronize businesses—boycotts—can directly disrupt commerce. The mass refusal to abide by criminal law and police authority—most dramatically in riots—can disrupt virtually all the major functions of

society. If citizens refuse to work, buy, or obey, it threatens the wealth, comfort, and safety of those in power. In such cases, decisionmakers will need to wait the crises out, repress it, or appease it through policy concessions.

Perm do the aff: If we create a disruptive impact to the gov’t through our movement then we were successful and solvesMogiello '16 (Matthew M., PhD in Political Science, "Powerless In Movement: How Social Movements Influence, And Fail To Influence, American Politics And Policy, 2016, https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4267&context=edissertations, pgs. 66, D.P.)

James Madison argued in the Federalist # 10 that government exists to pursue the “public good” of providing order, liberty, and justice. While the Federalists gave little shape to the amorphous concept of justice in their papers and in the Constitution itself, the dual threats of anarchy and tyranny put order and liberty front and center in their designs. Madison and Hamilton devoted extended attention to arguing for a government strong enough to control the populace and prevent anarchy, while also checked and balanced to preserve individual liberties and prevent tyranny. Assuring a balance between the “energy” to insure order and the restraint to preserve liberty was the framers’ central dilemma, and it is one that persists today. When government exercises its core law and order functions, the space for disruptive powers is generally constrained, as perceptions of public danger, disorder, and nuisance are necessarily those of the elites and/or ruling majorities. Alternatively, the growth of judicial power has typically corresponded to a growth in the civil rights and liberties of dissenters, opening opportunities for disruptive protest. American history is full of examples of government using heavyhanded police tactics to suppress and punish disruptive dissent. The British opened fire on a colonial mob in the Boston Massacre, and passed the "Intolerable Acts" to punish Bostonians for the Boston Tea Party. George Washington used military force against the so-called "Whisky Rebellion" and other challenges to the nascent republic's fiscal authority. Escaped slaves in the antebellum south—as well as black operators on the Underground Railroad—faced whipping, hanging, or even burning if caught in their attempts to undermine slavery. State and Federal forces, independently or in conjunction with private forces like the Pinkertons, repeatedly broke Progressive Era labor strikes with fist and club. Civil rights marchers and freedom riders faced attack dogs, fire houses, beatings, arson, and murder at the hands of police or police supervised white mobs. In each case these events stick in our collective consciousness because the government used or sanctioned extraordinary force again dissenters. But in each case we also remember these conflicts because government repression tended to add to the disruptive impact of the movement. Many of these instances are cited by Piven as successful examples of disruptive power at work (Piven F. F., Challenging Authority, 2006). While some would concluded that the decline in violent police confrontations with movement activists is evidence of a system open to disruptive power, I caution that it may denote the exact opposite. In this section I concentrate on the less extraordinary laws, court rulings, and policing policies that subtly constrain disruptive power without risking further conflagration. I begin with in the late 1960s and the first of several federal efforts dubbed the “war on crime.”87

AT – Alt Solves Case

Doesn’t solve the aff – doesn’t expose the linkage between AFRICOM imperialism and 1033 which the USfg has already made

AT – Growth

No limits to growth—tech and demographics solve. Bisk ‘12 Tsvi, American Israeli futurist; director of the Center for Strategic Futurist Thinking and contributing editor for strategic thinking for The Futurist magazine. He is the author of The Optimistic Jew: A Positive Vision for the Jewish People in the 21st Century. Norwich University MA, Political History Thomas Edison State College BA, Social Sciences, 500 published articles, “No Limits to Growth,” https://www.wfs.org/Upload/PDFWFR/WFR_Spring2012_Bisk.pdf,

The Case for No Limits to Growth Notwithstanding all of the above, I want to reassert that by imagineering an alternative future—based on solid science and technology— we can create a situation in which there are “no limits to growth.” It begins with a new paradigm for food production now under development: the urban vertical farm. This is a concept popularized by Prof. Dickson Despommier of Columbia University.30 A 30-story urban vertical farm located on five square acres could yield food for fifty thousand people. We are talking about high-tech installations that would multiply productivity by a factor of 480: four growing seasons, times twice the density of crops, times two growing levels on each floor, times 30 floors = 480. This means that five acres of land can produce the equivalent of 2,600 acres of conventionally planted and tended crops. Just 160 such buildings occupying only 800 acres could feed the entire city of New York. Given this calculus, an area the size of Denmark could feed the entire human race. Vertical farms would be self-sustaining. Located contiguous to or inside urban centers, they could also contribute to urban renewal. They would be urban lungs, improving the air quality of cities. They would produce a varied food supply year-round. They would use 90% less water. Since agriculture consumes two-thirds of the water worldwide, mass adoption of this technology would solve humanity’s water problem. Food would no longer need to be transported to market; it would be produced at the market and would not require use of petroleum intensive agricultural equipment. This, along with lessened use of pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, would not only be better for the environment but would eliminate agriculture’s dependence on petroleum and significantly reduce petroleum demand. Despite increased efficiencies, direct (energy) and indirect (fertilizers, etc.) energy use represented over 13% of farm expenses in 2005-2008 and have been increasing as the price of oil rises.31 Many of the world’s damaged ecosystems would be repaired by the consequent abandonment of farmland. A “rewilding” of our planet would take place. Forests, jungles and savannas would reconquer nature, increasing habitat and becoming giant CO2 “sinks,” sucking up the excess CO2 that the industrial revolution has pumped into the atmosphere. Countries already investigating the adoption of such technology include Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and China—countries that are water starved or highly populated. Material Science, Resources and Energy The embryonic revolution in material science now taking place is the key to “no limits to growth.” I refer to “smart” and superlight materials. Smart materials “are materials that have one or more properties that can be significantly changed in a controlled fashion by external stimuli.” 32 They can produce energy by exploiting differences in temperature (thermoelectric materials) or by being stressed (piezoelectric materials). Other smart materials save energy in the manufacturing process by changing shape or repairing themselves as a consequence of various external stimuli. These materials have all passed the “proof of concept” phase (i.e., are scientifically sound) and many are in the prototype phase. Some are already commercialized and penetrating the market. For example, the Israeli company Innowattech has underlain a one-kilometer stretch of local highway with piezoelectric material to “harvest” the wasted stress energy of vehicles passing over and convert it to electricity.33 They reckon that Israel has stretches of road that can efficiently produce 250 megawatts. If this is verified, consider the tremendous electricity potential of the New Jersey Turnpike or the thruways of Los Angeles and elsewhere. Consider the potential of

railway and subway tracks. We are talking about tens of thousands of potential megawatts produced without any fossil fuels. Additional energy is derivable from thermoelectric materials, which can transform wasted heat into electricity. As Christopher Steiner notes, capturing waste heat from manufacturing alone in the United States would provide an additional 65,000 megawatts: “enough for 50 million homes.”34 Smart glass is already commercialized and can save significant energy in heating, airconditioning and lighting—up to 50% saving in energy has been achieved in retrofitted legacy buildings (such as the former Sears Tower in Chicago). New buildings, designed to take maximum advantage of this and other technologies could save even more. Buildings consume 39% of America’s energy and 68% of its electricity. They emit 38% of the carbon dioxide, 49% of the sulfur dioxide, and 25% of the nitrogen oxides found in the air.35 Even greater savings in electricity could be realized by replacing incandescent and fluorescent light bulbs with LEDS which use 1/10th the electricity of incandescent and half the electricity of fluorescents. These three steps: transforming waste heat into electricity, retrofitting buildings with smart glass, and LED lighting, could cut America’s electricity consumption and its CO2 emissions by 50% within 10 years. They would also generate hundreds of thousands of jobs in construction and home improvements. Coal driven electricity generation would become a thing of the past. The coal released could be liquefied or gasified (by new environmentally friendly technologies) into the energy equivalent of 3.5 million barrels of oil a day. This is equivalent to the amount of oil the United States imports from the Persian Gulf and Venezuela together.36 Conservation of energy and parasitic energy harvesting, as well as urban agriculture would cut the planet’s energy consumption and air and water pollution significantly. Waste-to-energy technologies could begin to replace fossil fuels. Garbage, sewage, organic trash, and agricultural and food processing waste are essentially hydrocarbon resources that can be transformed into ethanol, methanol, and biobutanol or biodiesel. These can be used for transportation, electricity generation or as feedstock for plastics and other materials. Waste-to-energy is essentially a recycling of CO2 from the environment instead of introducing new CO2 into the environment. Waste-to-energy also prevents the production, and release from rotting organic waste, of methane—a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than CO2. Methane accounts for 18% of the manmade greenhouse effect. Not as much as CO2, which constitutes 72%, but still considerable (landfills emit as much greenhouse gas effect, in the form of methane, as the CO2 from all the vehicles in the world). Numerous prototypes of a variety of waste-to-energy technologies are already in place. When their declining costs meet the rising costs of fossil fuels, they will become commercialized and, if history is any judge, will replace fossil fuels very quickly—just as coal replaced wood in a matter of decades and petroleum replaced whale oil in a matter of years. Superlight Materials But it is superlight materials that have the greatest potential to transform civilization and, in conjunction with the above, to usher in the “no limits to growth” era. I refer, in particular, to car-bon nanotubes—alternatively referred to as Buckyballs or Buckypaper (in honor of Buckminster Fuller). Carbon nanotubes are between 1/10,000th and 1/50,000th the width of a human hair, more flexible than rubber and 100-500 times stronger than steel per unit of weight. Imagine the energy savings if planes, cars, trucks, trains, elevators—everything that needs energy to move—were made of this material and weighed 1/100th what they weigh now. Imagine the types of alternative energy that would become practical. Imagine the positive impact on the environment: replacing many industrial processes and mining, and thus lessening air and groundwater pollution. Present costs and production methods make this impractical but that infinite resource—the human mind—has confronted and solved many problems like this before. Let us take the example of aluminum. A hundred fifty years ago, aluminum was more expensive than gold or platinum.37 When Napoleon III held a banquet, he

provided his most honored guests with aluminum plates. Less-distinguished guests had to make do with gold! When the Washington Monument was completed in 1884, it was fitted with an aluminum cap—the most expensive metal in the world at the time—as a sign of respect to George Washington. It weighed 2.85 kilograms, or 2,850 grams. Aluminum at the time cost $1 a gram (or $1,000 a kilogram). A typical day laborer working on the monument was paid $1 a day for 10-12 hours a day. In other words, today’s common soft-drink can, which weighs 14 grams, could have bought 14 ten-hour days of labor in 1884.38 Today’s U.S. minimum wage is $7.50 an hour. Using labor as the measure of value, a soft drink can would cost $1,125 today (or $80,000 a kilogram), were it not for a new method of processing aluminum ore. The Hall-Héroult process turned aluminum into one of the cheapest commodities on earth only two years after the Washington Monument was capped with aluminum. Today aluminum costs $3 a kilogram, or $3000 a metric ton. The soft drink can that would have cost $1,125 today without the process now costs $0.04. Today the average cost of industrial grade carbon nanotubes is about $50-$60 a kilogram. This is already far cheaper in real cost than aluminum was in 1884. Yet revolutionary methods of production are now being developed that will drive costs down even more radically. At Cambridge University they are working on a new electrochemical production method that could produce 600 kilograms of carbon nanotubes per day at a projected cost of around $10 a kilogram, or $10,000 a metric ton.39 This will do for carbon nanotubes what the Hall-Héroult process did for aluminum. Nanotubes will become the universal raw material of choice, displacing steel, aluminum, copper and other metals and materials. Steel presently costs about $750 per metric ton. Nanotubes of equivalent strength to a metric ton of steel would cost $100 if this Cambridge process (or others being pursued in research labs around the world) proves successful. Ben Wang, director of Florida State’s High Performance Materials Institute claims that: “If you take just one gram of nanotubes, and you unfold every tube into a graphite sheet, you can cover about two-thirds of a football field”.40 Since other research has indicated that carbon nanotubes would be more suitable than silicon for producing photovoltaic energy, consider the implications. Several grams of this material could be the energy-producing skin for new generations of superlight dirigibles—making these airships energy autonomous. They could replace airplanes as the primary means to transport air freight. Modern American history has shown that anything human beings decide they want done can be done in 20 years if it does not violate the laws of nature. The atom bomb was developed in four years; putting a man on the moon took eight years. It is a reasonable conjecture that by 2020 or earlier, an industrial process for the inexpensive production of carbon nanotubes will be developed, and that this would be the key to solving our energy, raw materials, and environmental problems all at once. Mitigating Anthropic Greenhouse Gases Another vital component of a “no limits to growth” world is to formulate a rational environmental policy that saves money; one that would gain wide grassroots support because it would benefit taxpayers and businesses, and would not endanger livelihoods. For example, what do sewage treatment, garbage disposal, and fuel costs amount to as a percentage of municipal budgets? What are the costs of waste disposal and fuel costs in stockyards, on poultry farms, throughout the food processing industry, and in restaurants? How much aggregate energy could be saved from all of the above? Some experts claim that we could obtain enough liquid fuel from recycling these hydrocarbon resources to satisfy all the transportation needs of the United States. Turning the above waste into energy by various means would be a huge cost saver and value generator, in addition to being a blessing to the environment. The U.S. army has developed a portable field apparatus that turns a combat unit’s human waste and garbage into bio-diesel to fuel their vehicles and generators.41 It is called TGER—the Tactical Garbage to Energy Refinery. It eliminates the need to transport fuel to the field, thus saving lives, time, and equipment

expenses. The cost per barrel must still be very high. However, the history of military technology being civilianized and revolutionizing accepted norms is long. We might expect that within 5-10 years, economically competitive units using similar technologies will appear in restaurants, on farms, and perhaps even in individual households, turning organic waste into usable and economical fuel. We might conjecture that within several decades, centralized sewage disposal and garbage collection will be things of the past and that even the Edison Grid (unchanged for over one hundred years) will be deconstructed. The Promise of Algae Biofuels produced from algae could eventually provide a substantial portion of our transportation fuel. Algae has a much higher productivity potential than crop-based biofuels because it grows faster, uses less land and requires only sun and CO2 plus nutrients that can be provided from gray sewage water. It is the primo CO2 sequesterer because it works for free (by way of photosynthesis), and in doing so produces biodiesel and ethanol in much higher volumes per acre than corn or other crops. Production costs are the biggest remaining challenge. One Defense Department estimate pins them at more than $20 a gallon.42 But once commercialized in industrial scale facilities, production cost could go as low as $2 a gallon (the equivalent of $88 per barrel of oil) according to Jennifer Holmgren, director of renewable fuels at an energy subsidiary of Honeywell International.43 Since algae uses waste water and CO2 as its primary feedstock, its use to produce transportation fuel or feedstock for product would actually improve the environment. The Promise of the Electric Car There are 250 million cars in the United States. Let’s assume that they were all fully electric vehicles (EVs) equipped with 25-kWh batteries. Each kWh takes a car two to three miles, and if the average driver charges the car twice a week, this would come to about 100 charge cycles per year. All told, Americans would use 600 billion kWh per year, which is only 15% of the current total U.S. production of 4 trillion kWh per year. If supplied during low demand times, this would not even require additional power plants. If cars were made primarily out of Buckypaper, one kWh might take a car 40-50 miles. If the surface of the car was utilized as a photovoltaic, the car of the future might conceivably become energy autonomous (or at least semi-autonomous). A kWh produced by a coal-fired power plant creates two pounds of CO2, so our car-related CO2 footprint would be 1.2 trillion pounds if all electricity were produced by coal. However, burning one gallon of gas produces 20 pounds of CO2.44 In 2008, the U.S. used 3.3 billion barrels of gasoline, thereby creating about 3 trillion pounds of CO2. Therefore, a switch to electric vehicles would cut CO2 emissions by 60% (from 3 trillion to 1.2 trillion pounds), even if we burned coal exclusively to generate that power. Actually, replacing a gas car with an electric car will cause zero increase in electric draw because refineries use seven kWh of power to refine crude oil into a gallon of gasoline. A Tesla Roadster can go 25 miles on that 7 KWh of power. So the electric car can go 25 miles using the same electricity needed to refine the gallon of gas that a combustion engine car would use to go the same distance. Additional Strategies The goal of mitigating global warming/climate change without changing our lifestyles is not naïve. Using proven Israeli expertise, planting forests on just 12% of the world’s semi-arid areas would offset the annual CO2 output of one thousand 500-megawatt coal plants (a gigaton a year).45 A global program of foresting 60% of the world’s semi-arid areas would offset five thousand 500-megawatt coal plants (five gigatons a year). Since mitigation goals for global warming include reducing our CO2 emissions by eight gigatons by 2050, this project alone would have a tremendous ameliorating effect. Given that large swaths of semi-arid land areas contain or border on some of the poorest populations on the planet, we could put millions of the world’s poorest citizens to work in forestation, thus accomplishing two positives (fighting poverty and environmental degradation) with one project. Moving agriculture from its current fieldbased paradigm to vertical urban agriculture would eliminate two gigatons of CO2. The subsequent

re-wilding of vast areas of the earth’s surface could help sequester up to 50 gigatons of CO2 a year, completely reversing the trend. The revolution underway in material science will help us to become “self-sufficient” in energy. It will also enable us to create superlight vehicles and structures that will produce their own energy. Over time, carbon nanotubes will replace steel, copper and aluminum in a myriad of functions. Converting waste to energy will eliminate most of the methane gas humanity releases into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, artificial photosynthesis will suck CO2 out of the air at 1,000 times the rate of natural photosynthesis.46 This trapped CO2 could then be combined with hydrogen to create much of the petroleum we will continue to need. As hemp and other fast-growing plants replace wood for making paper, the logging industry will largely cease to exist. Self-contained fish farms will provide a major share of our protein needs with far less environmental damage to the oceans. Population Explosion or Population Implosion One constant refrain of anti-growth advocates is that we are heading towards 12 billion people by the end of the century, that this is unsustainable, and thus that we must proactively reduce the human population to 3 billion-4 billion in order to “save the planet” and human civilization from catastrophe. But recent data indicates that a demographic winter will engulf humanity by the middle of this century. More than 60 countries (containing over half the world’s population) already do not have replacement birth rates of 2.1 children per woman. This includes the entire EU, China, Russia, and half a dozen Muslim countries, including Turkey, Algeria, and Iran. If present trends continue, India, Mexico and Indonesia will join this group before 2030. The human population will peak at 9-10 billion by 2060, after which, for the first time since the Black Death, it will begin to shrink. By the end of the century, the human population might be as low as 6 billion-7 billion. The real danger is not a population explosion; but the consequences of the impending population implosion.47 This demographic process is not being driven by famine or disease as has been the case in all previous history. Instead, it is being driven by the greatest Cultural Revolution in the history of the human race: the liberation and empowerment of women. The fact is that even with present technology, we would still be able to sustain a global population of 12 billion by the end of the century if needed. The evidence for this is cited above.

AT – Root Cause

No root cause claims.Bakker ‘09 (Karen Bakker (professor of geography at University of British Columbia). “Commentary.” Environment and Planning, 2009. http://www.envplan.com/epa/editorials/a4277.pdf)

With this sort of example as inspiration, one hopes that scholars of neoliberal nature would take on Castree's task. Yet one can anticipate refusals (and this pertains directly to Castree's two final questions, about the effects of nature's neoliberalization and their evaluation). Some will argue that `neoliberalism' is constituted of a range of diverse, locally rooted practices, thereby justifying a sector-specific, case-study approach for which attempts at terminological systematization are of little utility. This is, as Castree notes, an evasion rather than a convincing response. A more compelling argument is that the biophysical characteristics of resources and associated resource economies differ so greatly that expedience (and analytical rigour) demands a high degree of specialization. But the most fundamental objection (and one that Castree overlooks) is that the chain of causality in the study of environmental impacts arising from projects of neoliberalization is so attenuated, and the confounding variables so numerous (particularly given the multiple scales of regulation and resource production involved), that it is almost impossible to prove that the environmental `impacts' we might identify do indeed arise from a particular strategy identified as neoliberal.

XT – Direction of Alt

The aff model of debate solves for making activists trained and ready to lead protests in the direction of the alt

XT – Cap Inevitable

Neoliberalism inevitable – elites shut down opposition Vakulabharanam ‘12 [Vamsi Vakulabharanam, faculty member with the School of Economics at the University of Hyderabad, India., Why Does Neoliberalism Persist Even After the Global Crisis?, 12/20/12, http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/12/why-does-neoliberalism-persist-even-after-the-global-crisis.html]

The 2007-9 crisis in global capitalism brought a new energy and focus to the heterodox economists, and more broadly to the critics of neoliberalism from different arenas of society. It seemed clear at that time that neoliberalism had run its course when it met its structural contradiction – with the burst of the US housing bubble and the concomitant financial crises across the world, it looked like the avenues through which demand was being generated were closed and the system was poised for structural change. Three years later, Southern Europe is witnessing an intense so-called sovereign debt crisis with the working people bearing the brunt of it, and real economies in the developed world are continuing to witness slow growth. The US seems to be under the threat of the so-called fiscal cliff (which seems more like a political event rather than an economic one). The economies that grew quickly during the neo-liberal period, like China and India, have slowed down considerably. Across the globe, we seem to be going through a period of uncertainty without a clear path ahead. Yet, neoliberalism persists. Why? There are multiple explanations for this. Bailout packages of various governments were directed at rescuing financial capital, and this has pitted the interests of financial capital against the interests of the majority. The global left has not been strong enough to take advantage of the crisis to better represent the interests of the majority. Governments across the world, after a brief gap, have returned to their neoliberal posture of supporting financial capital and so forth. There is truth in all these explanations. However, we need to broaden the array of explanations both to take into account the spatial diversity of neoliberalism, as well as to deepen our analytical understanding of this persistence. I offer one such explanation from field explorations in India to add to the existing explanations. This addition is not simply academic, but it shows the need for deeper political engagement to bring about systemic change, given that our explanations of the structural contradictions of neoliberalism are on the mark. In two recent field visits that we (a group of local researchers) undertook to understand the persistence of neoliberalism at the concrete level, we found some interesting phenomena. Both these visits were in the state of Andhra Pradesh in South India. The first visit was in the region of Telangana, which is highly politicized right now, as the people of the region are fighting for a separate state within the Indian nation-state. The second visit was to a tribal habitat in the northeastern region of the same state, where communist struggles have been active for a while. In both these areas, there are continued appropriations of common lands, common resources and minerals, such as Granite and Bauxite by local and foreign capitalist elites aided by the State. In the process, these elites are destroying the local livelihoods without creating credible alternative. Both these are classic cases of primitive accumulation or accumulation by dispossession, a process that has centrally defined neoliberalism over the last thirty-five years across the globe. Accumulation by dispossession operates in our times through the following modes of appropriation. First, it operates through the acquisition of lands from small producers such as peasants, tribal people, artisans and the urban poor in the name of Special Economic Zones and the like. Some of the lands acquired thus, have became open to speculative enterprises of real estate dealers. Second, there has been a large-scale privatization drive in most countries that has made public sector enterprises alienate their properties at throwaway prices to private players. Third, and these are the cases that we have focused on – commons have been appropriated with ease either because the laws governing them are weak or because common properties are often meddled with by the State. What we

found in these two regions is that the particular modes of appropriation that have come into being with great force during the neoliberal period have persisted even after the crisis. Why is this the case? One explanation that ties in with the explanations above is that resistance has not been strong enough or effective from the people and their social movements or from the larger left movements. The other explanation that we offered is that neoliberalism has been able to create structures of populism that are deeply entrenched. The local elites have pursued a three-fold strategy for the continued appropriation of the commons. First, they (with the support of the State) have put in place various populist policy imperatives that have temporarily addressed the consumption needs of the majority without altering the deeper neoliberal structural forces that have inhibited employment growth and wage growth over the last thirty years. For example, there are schemes such as housing or subsidized food for the poor even as their productive resources such as land are acquired by the elites/states. These have tended to perpetuate themselves after the global crisis, even with the loud demands for austerity. Second, the elites have continued to appropriate common and public resources to keep their own accumulation levels above an acceptable minimum in a time of slowdown of accumulation opportunities through regular economic growth. Resistance is sought to be controlled through populism of the kind discussed above. Even in regions that are highly politicized, such as Telangana, the leadership of the movement has been hand-in-glove with the local elites who gain consistently through the perpetuation of these appropriation practices.Third, professionals and middle classes have been the beneficiaries of a system that has thrived on the creation of enclave economies where there is a sharing of rents among the elites and these professional groups. These professional classes have taken up key positions in the government, media, corporate executive roles, and as intermediaries between the elites and the working people who use the commons. The broad support of these classes for the local elites has played a key role in the perpetuation of neoliberalism. As long as these processes persist, neoliberalism will be strong on the ground, with the elites and non-elites bound together in the larger neoliberal system through the different, yet entangled processes of appropriation, rent sharing and populism. Of course, this cannot go on, since the logic of austerity is bound to create contradictions in the path of populism. However, this contradiction may unfold very differently across space and time, as not all governments are going to react identically to the demands of austerity. The 1% in the US (that the Occupy movement has targeted) or the top decile of the population (in countries like China and India) continue to benefit from the perpetuation of the neoliberal configuration while they are pitted against their large majorities. As long as the political groups on the ground do not make their voices heard loudly enough against the top 1% or the top 10%, and as long as there are continued benefits for the elites from the perpetuation of neoliberalism, the system will persist.

AT – Heg DA

The K is a corrective to realism.James 13 (Joy James, “Afrarealism and the Black Matrix: Maroon Philosophy at Democracy's Border”, The Black Scholar, Vol. 43, No. 4, Special Issue: Role of Black Philosophy (Winter 2013), pp. 124-131)//shreyasBlack philosophy functions as both a corrective and a creative source for political theory in particular and philosophy in general: it approaches the life of the mind, aesthetics, ethics, and transcendence through the human struggle for

“freedom”— not as an abstract value but as concretized in resistance to captivity . Black philosophy’s savant is an Afrarealism that explores its contributions and contradictions . Through black radical, feminist-womanist, queer

theories, Afrarealism confronts theoretical limitations and political practices in conceptualizing freedom . It has been operative in the “New World” for half a millennium. It is as old as black theory and philosophy’s hunger for

liberty. Although Afrarealism often seems relegated to the underground of resistance and to the shadows of formal concepts, its resilience allows for continuous agency. Fed upon and fetishized by Europe since the 1500s, emerg ing states in the Americas refined the effi cacy of terror and genocide while inadvertently incubating the maroons that birthed Afrarealism. Prefigured in the Atlantic slave trade, and challenged by the maroonage of

ship rebellions and mutinies, racial capital and racial rape became the conquistadores of the Americas.3 Five hundred years of fl ights from captivity, into communal and conceptual wilderness, created the maroon philosophers’ natural habitat at the boundary of democracy . Such outsider terrain superficially appears as a reservation

or cell; yet it is in part a trajectory into freedom. For centuries democracy was idealized through the rise of white citizenship,4 and portrayed as the manifestation of freedom. Black radical thought witnessed it as building democracy’s

boundaries: establishing the definitional norms for democratic citizenship through racially fashioned captivity.5 Afrarealism recognizes two coterminous phenomena: democracy as a boundary defining freedom through captivity , and maroon philosophy at the borders reimagining freedom through flight. Afrarealism does not equate democracy with freedom as some black philosophy does. Rather, Afrarealism’s journey moves adjacent to a democracy originating and reproducing amid racial captivity and racial rape. Afrarealism also sojourns with black philosophy’s challenges to racial supremacy. Afrarealism sees through the lens of a black matrix . As both spectacle and spec t rum, the black matrix allows a broader grasp of anti-black state and citizenship terror, and wounded agency pursuing freedom . 6 A form of maroon philosophy (all black philosophy is not radicalized as maroon philosophy), Afrarealist political theory treks beyond conventional militarized borders to survey democracy’s violence toward the black matrix and black reproductivity . The violent exploitation of black productivity in agricultural, industrial, penal, and cultural markets is a historical and structural feature of democracy. These aggressions and violations I have earlier described as “state violence.”7 Democracy’s aggressions against the black matrix, its terror against black

reproductive labor, its sanction of racial rape I describe here as state “intimate violence.” State violence and intimate state violence are two related but distinct phenomena. Violations of black productivity coexist with terror against black reproductivity. Afrarealism witnesses both and calls for greater scrutiny to assaults against black reproductivity, an under-theorized feature of black captivity.

US hegemonic decline is inevitable – public opinion is effective in shifting the actions of officials and the 2016 election proves that voters are shifting away from a maintenance on liberal hegemony and public Musgrave 19 [Paul Musgrave, assistant professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Ph.D. in Government with a focus on International Relations from Georgetown University, 2019, “International Hegemony Meets Domestic Politics: Why Liberals Can Be Pessimists”, Security Studies, DOI: 10.1080/09636412.2019.1604983 //mh]

For a generation after the Cold War, international relations theorists debated how long US hegemony could last.1 Some argued it could endure indefinitely because of the benefits it provided; others predicted that it would meet its demise when other states balanced against the U nited S tates.2 Almost all of them dismissed the importance of domestic factors. Foes like Ikenberry and Mearsheimer agreed on little besides the proposition that systemic logics, not domestic divisions, would drive US foreign policy.3 This view of Washington’s policies as unruffled by domestic turmoil contrasted starkly with the portrait of American domestic politics being drawn by specialists in the subject during the same period. To Americanists, the United States appeared less a unitary actor and more a country whose government increasingly seemed paralyzed by partisan polarization and dysfunction.4 With rare exceptions, however, these debates over US hegemony and polarization passed each other like ships in the night.5 The 2016 US presidential election showed that these debates were on a collision course all along. Without any overt external stimulus, the conduct and character of US hegemony became the subject of intense partisan division. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton hewed to a conventional line, warning that “if America doesn’t lead, we leave a vacuum—and that will either cause chaos, or other countries will rush in to fill the void.” 6 The Republican candidate, Donald Trump, rejected liberal hegemony . He bashed American allies for “not paying their fair share,” blasted the establishment as “rebuilding other countries while weakening our own,” and pledged that in his administration “no American citizen will ever again feel that their needs come second to the citizens of a foreign country.” 7 In office, Trump began to deliver, haltingly and erratically, on his “America First” platform. The administration canceled the Trans-Pacific Partnership, withdrew from the Paris Agreement on climate change, hectored NATO allies, pursued fundamental changes to North American trade arrangements, sought to radically curtail immigration, and began trade wars with China and Europe. Trump’s actions may not have repudiated a strategy of American primacy, but they did point to a rejection of post-1945 (or post1991, as Mastanduno suggests in this issue) hegemonic practices.8 In a 2016 survey, only 3% of international relations scholars had favored Donald Trump’s election. His actions as president seemed to vindicate their apparent fears that his election would threaten the liberal order.9 The etiology of Trump’s ascent matters. Was his election an accident, representing an outcome many standard deviations from the expected outcome of domestic politics? If so, then his administration might have severe practical implications but relatively few theoretical ones, aside from reminding us of the importance of black swans.10 On the other hand, if Trump’s election represented an outcome within the bounds of what could have been expected ex ante, then theories based on the assumption that such an outcome was unlikely need to be modified. It should give pause to ardent defenders of the liberal world order that the most successful blow to American primacy came not from external balancing, as realists long predicted, but from the free choice of American voters.11 This observation points to an underlying puzzle: Why did the United States elect a president whose policies so starkly diverged from the prescriptions of liberal hegemony?12 Or, stated more generally, given the benefits that the central state in a hegemonic order is presumed to enjoy, why would domestic actors within that state ever want to undermine that order? In keeping with the more dynamic view of hegemony laid out in this “Hegemony 3.0” project, my answer entails reconciling the international and the domestic practices of hegemony. As the other contributors to this volume suggest, viewing hegemony in this way entails effacing, or at least lowering, analytic barriers between domestic and international politics. I propose that the domestic institutions of the hegemon form a part of the hegemonic order and that hegemonic strategies and practices must be sustainable at both levels of analysis.13 Consequently, seemingly unrelated domestic contentions might lead to variations in outcomes produced by its domestic institutions, or to variations in the institutions

themselves, that could generate change in the international context. Whereas previous studies have assumed that the preferences of actors at the domestic level would generate policies consonant with hegemony, a more careful review of the evidence suggests that this cannot be taken for granted. Actors will routinely find reasons to differ over how to maintain hegemony, and may even find it beneficial to adopt counter-hegemonic strategies in their pursuit of political gain or advantage. Consequently, a hegemonic strategy can be eroded as well as sustained by self-interested domestic actors. This view contrasts with arguments premised on the idea that the core will maintain commitments to strategies aimed at reproducing the international order. I illustrate this argument by examining how US institutions, especially informal institutions such as political parties, affect the conduct of American foreign policy. I argue that domestic processes in the United States can erode the American political system’s ability to commit to hegemonic maintenance. Such maintenance can be costly and requires constant attention, as discussed and debated in many of the contributions to this issue.14 These institutions produce dynamics at odds with requisite policy stability, such as endogenous policy differentiation among parties resulting from strategic moves to secure electoral advantage or as a consequence of different coalitional preferences producing conflictual dynamics. These may take the form of contests about the content of national identity yoked to partisan political processes; outbidding among aspirants for office-wooing allies in intracoalitional disputes; spoiling, in which an opposition party withholds support for policies to tarnish the incumbent party’s reputation; promulgating identities at odds with the policies of hegemony; and designing policies to cater to the most influential members of a party’s base rather than to the median voter. Such patterns mitigate against the sort of broad-based compromises or long-range planning that advocates for stable hegemonic orders pine for. This examination leads to the conclusion that the distribution of potential U.S. foreign policy choices and outcomes before 2016 was wider than systemic theories had predicted. Despite a popular fixation on the flamboyance of the Trump administration, the causes that enabled Trump to take office on an anti-(liberal) hegemonic platform ran far deeper than any such idiosyncrasies. The fact that election forecasting models could predict the popular vote performance based on fundamentals suggests the relative normalcy of the election.15 The election of 2016 was not a freak event but represented the outcome of processes that should have been incorporated into the study of international orders all along. I make this argument in four stages. First, I show we need a domestic account of how hegemonic strategies are reproduced and sustained and that existing theories do not supply such an explanation. In the second section, I specify my theoretical argument: that political parties form a crucial but neglected element in US foreign policy-making; that partisan competition is not guaranteed to generate pro-social policies; and that the demands of partisan competition can produce governing coalitions that reject hegemony. Third, I provide evidence for the independent and significant effect of domestic institutional variation on US foreign policy from the partisan dynamics of nineteenth-century US foreign policy and contemporary cases. Finally, I conclude by sketching implications for the study of hegemonic order that stem from this argument.

US pursuit of hegemony is not inevitable – Trump has fundamentally changed America’s grand strategy, there are more proponents of restraint in the establishment, and a changing US demographic is not as invested in interventionMearsheimer 18 [John J. Mearsheimer, American political scientist and international relations scholar, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, 2018, “The

Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities”, https://b-ok.cc/book/3602764/3b2f37 //mh]

The American foreign policy establishment would surely resist any move to abandon the pursuit of liberal hegemony and adopt a foreign policy based on realism. Both the Democratic and Republican parties are deeply wedded to promoting liberalism abroad, even though that policy has been a failure at almost every turn.18 Although the American public tends to favor

restraint, the governing elites pay little attention to public opinion—until they have to—when formulating foreign policy. Nevertheless, there is good reason to think this situation is about to change, for reasons beyond the control of the foreign policy establishment. It appears that the structure of the international system is moving toward multipolarity, because of China’s striking rise and the resurrection of Russian power. This development is likely to bring realism back to the fore in Washington, since it is impossible to pursue liberal hegemony when there are other great powers in the international system. American policymakers have not had to concern themselves with the global balance of power since the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed, but the unipolar system seems to have been short-lived, which means that the United States will once again have to worry about other great powers.

Indeed, the Trump administration has made it clear, to quote Secretary of Defense James Mattis, that “great power competition between nations is a reality once again,” and “great power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of U.S. national security strategy.”19 In a world of three great powers, especially when one of them has China’s potential military might, there is sure to be security competition and maybe even war.20 The United States will have little choice but to adopt a realist foreign policy, simply because it must prevent China from becoming a regional hegemon in Asia. That task will not be easy if China continues to grow economically and militarily. Still, liberalism will most likely continue to influence U.S. policy abroad in small

ways, as the impulse to spread democracy is by now hardwired into the foreign policy establishment’s DNA. Although great-power competition will prevent Washington from fully embracing liberal hegemony, the temptation to pursue liberal policies abroad will be ever present. In addition to this lingering tendency to adopt liberal strategies on the margins of a largely realist foreign policy, there is also the danger that U.S. policymakers will not fully grasp that nationalism limits their ability to intervene in other countries just as much as it limits their adversaries’ ability to conquer other states. They failed to understand the effects of nationalism both during the Cold War and in the post–Cold War world, and there is no assurance they will get it in the future. Even with the return of realism and the demise of liberal hegemony, it will still be imperative to sound the tocsins about the dangers of a liberal foreign policy and the importance of understanding how nationalism limits great powers’ ability to act. There is also an alternative scenario. The Chinese economy could encounter serious problems that markedly slow its growth over the long term, while the American economy grows at a solid pace.21 In that situation, the present power gap, which clearly favors the United States, would widen even further and make it impossible for China to

challenge American power. One might wonder whether Russia is likely to pose a future challenge to the United

States, even if China does not. America’s three principal great-power rivals from the twentieth century—Germany, Japan, and Russia—are all depopulating and the United States is likely to become increasingly powerful relative to each of them over the next few decades.22 China is the only country on the planet with the potential to challenge U.S. power in a meaningful way, but if it does not realize that potential, the United States will remain by far the most powerful state in the international system. In other words, the system will not remain multipolar for long before reverting back to unipolarity. In that event, American policymakers would be free to continue pursuing liberal hegemony, since they would again have little reason to worry about the U.S. position in the global balance of power. Even the further foreign policy disasters that would surely follow would not endanger the security of the United States because no other great power could threaten it. Should this scenario pan out, is there any hope that Washington might abandon liberal hegemony and adopt a foreign policy that emphasizes restraint rather than permanent war? There is no question that it would be difficult to get the United States to stop pursuing liberalism abroad, simply because liberal democracies reflexively want to create a world populated solely with liberal states. Barack Obama’s experience is instructive here. During the 2008 presidential campaign, he emphasized that he would end America’s involvement in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, avoid getting the United States tangled in new conflicts, and concentrate on nation-building at home instead of abroad. But he failed to change the direction of U.S. foreign policy in any meaningful way. American troops were still fighting in Afghanistan when he left office, and he oversaw American involvement in regime change in Egypt, Libya, and Syria. He removed U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011 but sent them back in 2014 to wage war against ISIS, which had overrun large parts of Iraq and Syria. It is clear from a series of wistful interviews he gave the Atlantic before leaving office in January 2017 that he understood “the Washington playbook” was deeply flawed, yet he had operated according to its rules and strategies.23 He was ultimately no

match for the foreign policy establishment. Still, there is a glimmer of hope that a unipolar United States could be persuaded to move away from liberal hegemony. Powerful liberal states do have agency and are not doomed to follow a misguided strategy, even though the pressure to do so is enormous.24 The main reason to think the United States can move beyond liberal hegemony revolves around the distinction between the decision to adopt that strategy when the opportunity first presents itself and the

decision to forsake it after seeing the long-term results. It is almost impossible to stop a liberal state, when it first gains unipolar status, from embracing that extraordinarily ambitious policy. It promises great benefits and its costs are not yet apparent. But once the strategy has been

tried and its flaws become clear, derailing it becomes possible. The 2016 presidential election shows that liberal hegemony is vulnerable. Donald Trump challenged almost every aspect of the strategy, reminding voters time after time that it had been bad for America. Most importantly, he promised that if he were elected president, the United States would get out of the business of spreading democracy around the world. He

emphasized that his administration would have friendly relations with authoritarian leaders, including Vladimir

Putin, the current bête noire of the liberal foreign policy establishment. He was also critical of international institutions, going

so far as to call NATO obsolete. And he advocated protectionist policies that were at odds with the open international order the United States had spearheaded since the end of World War II. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, vigorously defended liberal hegemony and left no doubt she favored the status quo. Although foreign policy was not the central issue in the election, Trump’s opposition to liberal hegemony undoubtedly helped him with many voters. One might argue that Trump’s campaign rhetoric is irrelevant because the foreign policy elites will tame him just as they tamed his predecessor. After all, Obama challenged liberal hegemony when he was a candidate, yet as president he was forced to stick to the Washington playbook. The same will happen to Trump. Indeed, there is already some evidence that efforts by the foreign policy establishment to tame Trump have at least partly succeeded and that his initial policies show considerable continuity with his predecessors’ policies.25 To help ensure that the United States does not go back to liberal hegemony, should neither China nor Russia prove a sufficient rival, it is essential to come up with a game plan that is independent of Donald Trump or any particular successor. For starters, the best way to undermine liberal hegemony is to build a counter-elite that can make the case for a realist-

based foreign policy.26 The good news is that there is already a small and vocal core of restrainers that can serve as the foundation for that select group.27 Still it is essential to win over others in the foreign policy establishment. That task should be feasible because most people do learn, and it should be manifestly clear by now that doing social engineering on a global scale does not work. We have run the experiment and it failed. People with the capacity to learn should be open to at least considering an alternative foreign policy. Although many members of the elite will no doubt want to stick with liberal hegemony and try to implement it more successfully, its

fundamental flaws cannot be overcome. The historical record provides reason to think that much of the foreign policy establishment can be convinced of the virtues of realism and restraint . The United States, after all, has a rich tradition of elite-level restrainers, as the journalist Stephen Kinzer makes clear in The New Flag, where he describes the great debate that took place between American imperialists and anti-imperialists at the close of the nineteenth century.28 Although the expansionists carried the day, they barely won, and the restrainers remained a formidable presence in debates about American foreign policy throughout the twentieth century. Thus, as Kinzer notes: “Those of us who are trying to push America to a more prudent and restrained foreign policy are standing on the shoulders of titans—great figures of American history who first enunciated the view and to continue to make their argument is something quintessentially American.”29 It is also crucial to win over young people who are likely to become part of the foreign policy establishment. That

should be possible because those newcomers are not heavily invested in liberal hegemony and thus more likely than their elders to be open to new ideas. The first order of business for the counter-elite hoping to rein in American foreign policy is to build formidable institutions from which they can make the case. This message should be aimed at the broader public as well as politicians and policymakers.

The public is an especially important target because it is likely to be receptive to arguments for restraint. Most Americans prefer to address problems at home rather than fight endless wars and try to run the world. Unlike the foreign policy establishment, they are not deeply committed to liberal hegemony , so it should be possible to persuade many of them to abandon it. The best evidence of the public’s dissatisfaction with liberal hegemony is that the last three U.S. presidents all gained the office by campaigning against it.30 Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, defended liberal hegemony to the hilt in 2008 and again in 2016 and lost both times, first to Obama and then to Trump. The central message that restrainers should drive home is that liberal hegemony does not satisfy the principal criterion for assessing any foreign policy: it is not in America’s national interest. In other words, selling a realist foreign policy requires an appeal to nationalism, which means asking Americans to think hard about what makes the most sense for them and their fellow citizens. This is not a call for adopting a hard-edged nationalism that demonizes other groups and countries. The emphasis instead is on pursuing policies based almost exclusively on one criterion: what is best for the American people? To make their case, restrainers should emphasize three points. First, the United States is the most secure great power in recorded history and thus does not need to interfere in the politics of every country on the planet. It is a hegemon in the Western Hemisphere, and it is separated from East Asia and Europe—the regions where other great powers have historically been located—by two giant moats, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It has thousands of nuclear weapons, and in the scenario we are considering here, it is the only great power in the international system.

Russia isn’t revisionist — Pentagon reports. Sakwa, 19 — Richard Sakwa; PhD, Professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent. Senior Research Fellow, National Research University Higher School of Economics. (“Russian Neo-Revisionism;” Published in Russian Politics 4; pg. 13-16; //GrRv) **US and EU capitalized

In the Russian case, neither criterion applies in any consistent manner. The annexation of Crimea was undoubtedly a revisionist act , but there is no evidence that it was part of a revisionist strategy . On the contrary , Putin had devoted considerable efforts to stabilizing Russia’s borders with its neighbors through treaties , and in most cases, this had been achieved (although the dispute with Japan over the Northern Territories / Southern Kuriles continued). In no case did Russia advance territorial claims , and even the Crimean case was generated largely by security concerns and fear that the Sevastopol naval base, the home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet (bsf) would fall into American hands — which would represent a catastrophe of the first order. Russia had not fought valiantly to defend the city against the Anglo-French invasion

force in 1854 and the German invaders in the Great Patriotic War only for the base to fall without a shot into alien hands. Equally, Russia did not challenge the normative structure of the international system , but only the claim of the US-led liberal international order to be in some way the guardian of international order in its entirety . This claim generated a set of practices that in Russian

eyes generated double standards and too often subverted the rules that the liberal order claimed to uphold. Thus, Russia was far from becoming a systemic revisionist state.A Pentagon report issued by the Defense Intelligence Agency on 28 June 2017 argued that Moscow has a ‘deep and abiding distrust of us efforts to promote democracy around the world and what it perceives as a us campaign to impose a single set of global values’, with Moscow in particular worried that ‘US attempts to dictate a set of acceptable international norms threatens the foundations of Kremlin power by giving license for foreign meddling in Russia’s internal affairs’ that sought to lay the ‘groundwork for regime change in Russia’.13 The report argued that

‘Moscow seeks to promote a multi-polar world predicated on the principles of respect for state sovereignty and noninterference in other states’ internal affairs, the primacy of the United Nations, and a careful balance of power preventing one state or group of states from dominating the international order ’.14

This summary of the logic of Russian behavior accurately depicted Russia’s stated goals and threat perceptions , and it was remarkable only to the extent that the source was the Pentagon . The report provided a sober assessment of Russia’s military potential, noting that Russia’s intervention had entirely changed the dynamic of the conflict in Syria. The tone of the report eschewed both the language of ‘partnership’ and of demonization, and instead represented a reversion to the rational language of Cold War military analysis.

Status is crucial in international affairs, and Russia was certainly disappointed in this respect.15 Status is defined as the relative position of an actor in some sort of recognized hierarchy, and is inter-subjective, in the sense that status is dependent on the recognition of others. In its relatively brief post-communist history, Russia had tried three ways to have its great power status recognized: the bandwagoning of the early Atlanticist period; the balancing strategy of the competitive coexistence of the Primakov period, when the struggle for multipolarity was used to assert Moscow’s autonomy; and the attempt to combine the two in Putin’s and Medvedev’s new realism between 2000 and 2012. All three effectively worked with the West as the main interlocutor and ‘object of desire’. Clunan describes this as ‘aspirational constructivism’, stressing the way that representations of the past and current groups shape national identity. She argues that ‘Putin modified Primakov’s social creativity strategy of a multipolar world to highlight Russia’s “traditional” role as a joint stabilizer of the international system that, in Russian eyes, had placed Russia on a par with the United States during the Cold War’.16 With Putin’s return in 2012, in the language of social identity theory, ‘social creativity’ gave way to ‘social competition’, moving towards outright resistance. The policy of neo-revisionism basically accepted that good relations with the West could only be achieved under conditions of Moscow renouncing what it held most dear, namely its autonomy in foreign policy and recognition of its status as a founding member of international society; and Russia was not prepared to do that. Russia entered its ‘post-Western’ phase. This was, as noted, a ‘Russia that says no’, in which it used ‘social creativity’ to devise an international relations of its own, no longer constrained by the attempt to transform the Historical West into the greater West.17 As Japan surged to become the world’s second largest economic power, nationalists in the 1980s had also urged Japan to say ‘no’.18 In the event, the country entered the economic doldrums in the 1990s, and fell back into reliance on the us security umbrella in the face of China’s noisy rise.

At the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (spief) in 2016, Putin refused to use the term ‘cold war’ to describe the stand-off between Russia and the West. He stressed the absence of ideological rivalry between the two systems and looked to deepen economic ties with countries such as Italy, Germany and even the US, whose business leaders attended the forum in greater number than in earlier years. Despite the geopolitical tensions , Russia increased its total investments in US Treasury bonds from $72bn in 2015 to $90.9bn in 2016. The 26 per cent increase placed Russia sixteenth, with China in top place, holding $1.15 trillion of securities, followed by Japan and Ireland.19 With Trump advocating a more isolationist America focused on its own problems, Putin repeated his statement that Trump was a ‘vivid’ (yarkii) person, while Trump complimented Putin on his leadership qualities.20 The Ukraine crisis reinforced Atlantic solidarity, but at the same time the plethora of challenges exposed the EU’s vulnerability. The Syrian crisis showed that on such issues as terrorism and refugees, NATO was not able to guarantee European security. The EU’s lack of adequate security instruments was also exposed, encouraging member states to take matters into their own hands, undermining the EU’s institutions and policies. The EU Global Strategy of June 2016 indicated moves towards greater security coordination within Europe, and the wave of terrorist attacks in France and Germany in 2015 and 2016 highlighted the need for greater coordination of intelligence and border services. The Warsaw summit of NATO leaders on 8-9 July 2016 saw moves towards greater cooperation with NATO in naval patrols and other issues, but this advanced in parallel with the eu developing independent capacities.

In the present period of confrontation, America and its allies mobilized to counter the threat of Russian expansionism that is largely imaginary .

As in the original Cold War, the defense industry, security establishment, the new West fear-mongers and their epigones in western thinks tanks and the media whipped up the propaganda war . A thick tissue of misapprehension lies at its root. At the same time, Russian appeals for a more pluralist international order were undermined by the exaggerated monism at home. This reinforces the broader argument that Russian foreign policy in the post-Cold War years found itself in a strategic impasse. Russian interventions in Georgia and Ukraine exposed the fundamental weakness of the Russian position and only exacerbated that weakness, but in conditions of an impasse, Russia’s options were severely constrained. They amounted essentially to retreat – and thereby to lose all credibility in the post-Soviet region; or attack, and conclusively alienate the western community. A defining characteristic of the impasse is that all the strategic options facing Russia were bad, defined as choices that lose Russia positions or friends, or both.

[Footnotes]12 J.W. Legro, Rethinking the World: Great Power Strategies and International Order (Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 9. Sakwa russian politics 4 (2019) 1-21

13 Defence Intelligence Agency, Russia Military Power: Building a Military to Support Great Power Aspirations (Washington, dc, June 2017), http://www.dia.mil/Portals/27/Documents/ News/Military%20Power%20Publications/Russia%20Military%20Power%20Report%20 2017.pdf, 15.

14 dia, Russia Military Power, 14–15.

15 See the special issue of Communist and Post-Communist Studies 47, no. 3–4 (2017), edited by Tuomas Forsberg, Regina Heller and Reinhard Wolf. See Tuomas Forsberg, “Status Conflicts between Russia and the West: Perceptions and Emotional Biases”, Communist and Post-Communist Studies 46, no. 3 (2014): 323–31.

16 Anne L. Clunan, “Historical Aspirations and the Domestic Politics of Russia’s Pursuit of International Status”, Communist and Post-Communist Studies 47, no. 3–4 (2014): 287. Russian Neo-revisionism

17 Deborah Welch Larson and Alexei Shevchenko, “Russia says No: Power, Status, and Emotions in Foreign Policy”, Communist and Post-Communist Studies 47, no. 3–4 (2014): 269–79.

18 Shintaro Ishihara, A Japan that can Say No (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1992).

19 “Russia Has Bought us Treasury Bonds Worth 91 Billion Dollars”, Lenta.ru, 16 August 2016.

20 Tyler Pager, “Putin Repeats Praise of Trump: He’s a “Bright” Person”, Politico, 17 June 2016, http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/putin-praises-trump-224485.

Revisionism poses no threat—lacks fearsome military capabilities to project power globally and attachment to global economy provesMichael Mandelbaum 2019--(Michael Mandelbaum, The New Containment, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2019 Issue, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2019-02-12/new-containment)//ND

But today’s circumstances differ from those of the past in several important ways. During most of the Cold War, Washington confronted a single powerful opponent, the Soviet Union—the leader of the international communist movement. Now it must cope with three separate adversaries, each largely independent of the other two. Russia and China cooperate, but they also compete with each other. And while both have good relations with Iran, both also have large and potentially restive Muslim populations, giving them reason to worry about the growth of Iranian power and influence. Cold War containment was a single global undertaking, implemented regionally. Contemporary containment will involve three separate regional initiatives, implemented in coordination. The Soviet Union, moreover, presented a strong ideological challenge, devoted as it was to advancing not just Moscow’s geopolitical interests but also its communist principles. Neither Russia nor China has such a crusading ideology today . Russia has abandoned communism completely, and China has done so partially, retaining the notion of party supremacy but shedding most of the economics and the messianic zeal. And although the Islamic Republic represents a cause and not just a stretch of territory, the potential appeal of its ideology is largely limited to the Muslim world and, primarily, its Shiite minority. None of today’s revisionist powers possesses the Soviet Union’s fearsome military capabilities. Russia is a shrunken version of its older self militarily, and Iran lacks formidable modern military forces. China’s economic growth may ultimately allow it to match the United States in all strategic dimensions and pose a true peer threat, but to date, Beijing is concentrating on developing forces to exclude the United States from the western Pacific , not to project power globally . Moreover, the initiatives each has launched so far—Russia’s seizure of Crimea and Middle East meddling, China’s island building, Iran’s regional subversion—have been limited probes rather than all-out assaults on the existing order. Lastly, the Soviet Union was largely detached from the U.S.-centered global economy during the Cold War, whereas today’s

revisionist powers are very much a part of it. Russia and Iran have relatively small economies and export mostly energy, but China has the world’s second-largest economy, with deep, wide, and growing connections to countries everywhere.

AT – Case

AT – “X Cant Access Protest”

People without access to the public sphere can still gain sovereignty through the assembly of others – protests can be representational for those without the right to appearButler ‘18 (Judith Butler – Writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist – “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly” – First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015) – pg. 169-175//Gavsie)

THESE ACTS OF SELF-MAKING or self-constitution are not the same as representing a people who are already fully formed. The term “the people” does not only represent a preexisting collection of people; if it did, the term would postdate the production of the collectivity itself. Indeed, the term can never adequately represent a collectivity that is in the process of being made or making itself—both its inadequacy and its self-division are part of its enacted meaning and promise. The discursive invocation of the “we” refers then to a people whose needs, desires, and demands are not yet fully known, and whose coming together is bound up with a future that is yet to be lived out. Indeed, such practices of self-determination are not quite the same as acts of self-representation, and yet both of these are at work in exercising the freedom of assembly in which “we the people” is spoken or enacted in some way. That enactment is performative inasmuch as it brings into being the people whom it names, or it calls upon them to gather under the utterance. And this means that performative actions such as these are part of the process called political self-determination, designations of who we are that are also, at the same time, engaged in making that very “we.” Further, the invocation of “we” separates popular sovereignty from state sovereignty; it names and inaugurates that separation time and again. The plurality always breaks with those who are elected, or whose election is questionable to us, or in relation to a state whose representatives we have never had the choice to elect, as is the clear case under occupation and for the undocumented and the partial or noncitizen. So, something that must fail as representation, and that we might call nonrepresentational and nonrepresentative, nearly tautological, becomes the basis of democratic forms of political self-determination—popular sovereignty, distinct from state sovereignty, or, rather, popular sovereignty precisely as it intermittently distinguishes itself from state sovereignty. Popular sovereignty makes sense only in this perpetual act of separating from state sovereignty; thus, it is a way of forming a people through acts of self-designation and self-gathering; these are repeated enactments verbal and nonverbal, bodily and virtual, undertaken across different spatial and temporal zones, and on different kinds of public stages, virtual realities, and shadow regions. The vocalized performative, “we the people,” is surely part of the enactment we are calling self-constitution, but this figure cannot be taken as a literal account of how political self-determination works. Not every act of political self-determination can be translated into that verbal utterance—such a move would make the verbal domain more privileged than any other. In fact, the enactment of political self-determination is necessarily a crossing of the linguistic and the bodily, even if the action is silent and the body is sequestered. How do we, for instance, understand the hunger strike if not precisely as the practiced refusal of a body that cannot appear in public?10 This means that appearing in public in a bodily form is not an adequate figure for political self-determination. At the same time, the hunger strike that is not reported and represented in public space fails to convey the power of the act itself. Prisoner networks are precisely those forms of solidarity that do not, cannot, appear in public in a bodily form, relying predominantly on digital media reports with few, if any, images. Those networks of prisoners, activists, lawyers, and extended kin and social relations, whether in Turkey, in Palestinian prisons and detention camps, or at Pelican Bay in California, are also forms of “assembly” in which those with suspended citizenship exercise a form of freedom through strikes,

petitions, and forms of legal and political representation. Even as they do not appear, are not allowed to appear, they are nevertheless exercising a certain right to appear in public, either before the law or in public space, objecting precisely to the interdiction against appearing in public that is the condition of imprisonment. Given all this, let us recapitulate what this means and does not mean for rethinking the freedom of assembly in relation to popular sovereignty: (1) popular sovereignty is thus a form of reflexive self-making that is separate from the very representative regime it legitimates; (2) it arises in the course of that very separation; (3) it cannot legitimate any particular regime without being separate from it, that is, partially uncontrolled by a regime and not operationalized as its instrument, and yet it is the basis from which legitimate government is formed through fair and inclusive elections; and (4) its act of self-making is actually a series of spatially distributed acts, ones that do not always operate in the same way and for the same purposes. Among the most important of these spatial distinctions is that between the public sphere and spheres of forcible confinement, including the prison where political prisoners, those who have exercised freedom of assembly and freedom of speech, are contained and subjugated. The passage into and out of the public sphere is regulated precisely by legal and police power and the institution of the prison. Further, (5) the enactment of “we the people” may or may not take linguistic form; speech and silence, movement and immobility, are all political enactments; the hunger strike is precisely the inverse of the fed body standing freely in the public domain and speaking—it marks and resists the deprivation of that right, and it enacts and exposes the deprivation that prison populations undergo. The invocation of the people becomes—and must become—contestable at the very moment that it appears. “Appearance” can designate visible presence, spoken words, but also networked representation and concerted acts of silence. A differential form of power that takes both spatial and temporal forms establishes who may be part of such an enactment and the means and methods of such enactments. Confinement implies being spatially separated from public assemblies, but also involves the duration of the sentence, or the unknowable duration of indefinite detention. Since the public sphere is constituted in part through sites of forcible sequestering, the borders that define the public are also those that define the confined, the sequestered, the imprisoned, the expelled, and the disappeared. Whether we are speaking about the borders of the nation-state where the undocumented are confined within refugee encampments, where rights of citizenship are denied or indefinitely suspended, or about prisons where indefinite detention has become the norm, the interdiction against appearing, moving, and speaking in public becomes the precondition of embodied life. The prison is not exactly the inverse of the public sphere, since prisoner advocacy networks traverse the walls of the prison. Forms of prisoner resistance are forms of enactment that by definition cannot be part of the public square, though through networks of communication and proxy representation, they surely can. And yet, no matter how virtual we want to think the public sphere (and there are many good reasons for thinking that), the prison remains the limit case of the public sphere, marking the power of the state to control who can pass into the public and who must pass out of it. Thus, the prison is the limit case of the public sphere, and that freedom of assembly is haunted by the possibility of imprisonment. One may be imprisoned for what one says or one may be imprisoned simply for assembling. Or one may be imprisoned for writing or teaching about assemblies or about freedom struggles, or for teaching about popular struggles for sovereignty, such as teaching about the Kurdish freedom movement in Turkish universities. All of these are reasons why those with the freedom to appear can never fully or adequately represent the people, since there are people who, we know, are missing from the public, missing from this public assembled here in Gezi Park; they are those who must find representation, even as those who seek to represent them risk imprisonment for doing so. And it is not just that there are some people who happen to be missing from the gathering because they had something else to do; rather, there are those who could not have gathered in Gezi Park, or can no longer gather, or who are indefinitely restrained from gathering. That very power of confinement is a way of defining, producing, and controlling what will be the public sphere and who will be admitted to public assembly. It works

alongside privatization as a process that seeks to make public space into the entrepreneurial field of the market-driven state. So though we may wonder why it is that crowds that gather to oppose privatization are broken up and dispersed by police force, gassing and physical assault, we have to remember that the state that is off-loading public space to private enterprise, or that now makes such decisions according to market values, is involved in at least two ways of controlling and decimating public space. Some lament that a movement that begins by opposing privatization inevitably becomes a movement that opposes police violence. But let us try to see that the seizure of public space from popular sovereignty is precisely the aim of both privatization and police assaults on freedom of assembly. In this way as well, the market and the prison work together in a prison industry that, as Angela Davis has clearly shown, works to regulate rights of citizenship—and in the United States this happens in irrefutably racist ways as black men continue to constitute the vast majority of prisoners.11 We can add that the market and the prison work together as well to constrict, decimate, and appropriate public space, severely qualifying Hannah Arendt’s notion of “the right to appear.” That said, I want to return to the theoretical point about freedom of assembly in order to suggest some of the political implications of how we think. My inquiry began with the following questions: In what sense is freedom of assembly a punctual expression of popular sovereignty? And does it have to be understood as a performative exercise, or what Jason Frank calls “the small dramas of self-authorization”?12 I began by suggesting that the performative power of the people does not first rely on words. Assembly only makes sense if bodies can and do gather or connect in some way, and then speech acts that unfold from there articulate something that is already happening at the level of the plural body. But let us remember that vocalization is also a bodily act, as is sign language, and this means that there is no speaking without the body signifying something, and sometimes the body signifies something quite different from what a person actually says.

AT – Non-Black

Non-black people confronting how their complacency in whiteness perpetuates anti-black suffering is key for addressing the issue – when non-black debaters address the illegitimacy of the USfg or when they confront the reality of gratuitous violence enacted upon black folk, that’s good, especially because white people are in a unique position that enables ignoring their direct relation to anti-black violence. This obviously does not absolve white students of how they contribute to anti-blackness, but it a necessary starting point.Applebaum 10

[Barbara Applebaum, author, associate professor of cultural foundations of education at Syracuse University, 2010, Being White, Being Good: White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility, and Social Justice Pedagogy, pg. 2 – 4, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., HYPERLINK "https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=eJMZ0RxltAcC&oi=fnd&pg=PR5&dq=responsibility+of+white+people&ots=tvG32OPIcC&sig=6EV61y_2W9fCrNmfY1EkiWi7rKw" \l "v=onepage&q&f=false"https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=eJMZ0RxltAcC&oi=fnd&pg=PR5&dq=responsibility+of+white+people&ots=tvG32OPIcC&sig=6EV61y_2W9fCrNmfY1EkiWi7rKw#v=onepage&q&f=false, Accessed: 7/6/19, KW]

In the last several years, the notion of complicity has also been a recurrent theme in critical theories of race and racism, as well as in feminist theory. Questions about complicity have arisen in discussions around "internalized racism" and, especially, in debates about whether victims of racism can be implicated in their own oppression.8 Feminist theorists who have tried to understand how women can perpetuate their own oppression have also turned their attention to questions of complicity.9 Recently, however, another type of complicity has appeared in the scholarship that focuses on the ways that the systemically privileged, rather than the marginalized, are complicit in the perpetuation of systemic injustice. In the field of critical whiteness studies, for instance, questions of complicity are especially notable in the academic discourse around social justice education. Here we find a claim about complicity that is addressed to all white people regardless of and despite of their good intentions. What I refer to as "the white complicity claim" maintains that white people, through the practices of white-ness and by benefiting from white privilege, contribute to the maintenance of systemic racial injustice. However, the claim also implies responsibility in its assumption that the failure to acknowledge such complicity will thwart whites in their efforts to dismantle unjust racial systems and, more specifically, will contribute to the perpetuation of racial injustice.° Recognizing that one is complicit, according to the claim, is a necessary (albeit not sufficient) condition of challenging systemic racial oppression. Most significantly, since the white complicity claim presumes that racism is often perpetuated through well-intended white people, being morally good may not facilitate and may even frustrate the recognition of such responsibility. What does it mean to claim that white people are complicit in the reproduction of racist systems despite their good intentions and even when they might want to renounce the privileges they accrue because of their whiteness? How can white people be responsible for their complicity if they cannot choose to be not white? Even if white people are well intended, even if they consider themselves to be paragons of anti-racism, how might they still be unwittingly complicit in sustaining an unjust system they claim to want to dismantle? What is of specific interest about white complicity is the claim that white people can reproduce and maintain racist practices even when, and especially when, they believe themselves to be morally good. Some feminist philosophers have been acutely aware of this

problem. Marilyn Frye queries, "Does being white make it impossible for me to be a good person?" Similarly Linda Mar-tin Alcoff asks What is it to acknowledge one's whiteness? ... (is) it to acknowledge that one is inherently tied to structures of domination and oppression, that one is irrevocably on the wrong side?'2 I take an important cue from Fiona Probyn's provocative assertion that "Complicity . . . is the starting point and the condition of ethics itself.' Thus, this project not only explores the meaning of complicity presumed by the white complicity claim, it also considers the notion of moral responsibility that is attributable to white people in the context of such complicity. This book will be of particular interest to those who practice and research social justice pedagogy. White denials of complicity are particularly wide-spread in courses that teach about social justice. Not unlike the ordinary German who denied being guilty of complicity with Nazi crimes, white students often conflate complicity with guilt, the guilt that arises from direct causality to harm. Such notions of responsibility support and encourage denials of complicity. White students believe that they are justified in denying their complicity because they claim that they do not have any "bad intentions" or any "causal connection" to the harms of systemic racism. Often white students refuse to even engage with the possibility that they are complicit. Most white students see themselves as good people and take the charge of complicity as a serious affront to their moral being. They perceive their moral being as transcending their whiteness. Denials of complicity go deep and are maintained, as will be demonstrated, by certain conceptions of responsibility. Moreover, currently "white privilege pedagogy" is the prevailing approach in social justice education, especially in schools of education across North America. Yet the notion of privilege that is the focal point of such pedagogy, as will be explained in Chapter 2, is extremely problematic." Instead, this book advocates "white complicity pedagogy" that highlights and compensates for some of the more problematic aspects of white privilege pedagogy. White complicity pedagogy is premised on the belief that to teach systemically privi-leged students about systemic injustice, and especially in teaching them about their privilege, one must first encourage them to be willing to contemplate how they are complicit in sustaining the system even when they do not intend to or are unaware that they do so. This means helping white students to un-derstand that white moral standing is one of the ways that whites benefit from the system. It also means linking such benefits to their complicity even when such links might not be specifically causal ones. Acknowledging that one is complicit, however, does not relieve one of responsibility but rather, as Probyn insists, complicity is where responsibility begins. If privileged social groups are to take responsibility for their role in the perpetuation of systemic injustice and be able to form effective political coalitions with the marginalized, both understanding white complicity and the type of white moral responsibility it entails require elucidation.

AT – Protest Bad

The right to assemble precedes any other right granted to the people – sovereignty through assembly is critical to withdraw from and question illegitimate structures that don’t act in the name of the peopleButler ‘18 (Judith Butler, writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist, “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly”, First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015), pg. 117-119, MB)

That assembly may be called “the people” or it may be one version of “the people”—they do not speak in one voice or even in one language. But they are beings with the capacity to move with whatever technical and infrastructural supports they require to do so (this is, importantly, an insight from disability studies that has concrete implications for thinking through public assembly). And that means that they can resolve to stand still, not to move, even to become immoveable in their desires and their demands. The power to move or be still, to speak and to act, belongs to the assembly prior to, and in excess of, whatever rights a particular government decides to confer or to protect. The coming together of a crowd has, as John Inazu contends, “an expressive function” prior to any particular claim or utterance it may make.4 That very power of government may well become what freedom of assembly opposes, and at that moment, we see the operation of a form of popular sovereignty that is distinct from state sovereignty, and whose task it is to distinguish itself from the latter. How, then, do we think about the freedom of assembly and popular sovereignty? I know that some people have come to consider “sovereignty” a bad word, one that associates politics with a singular subject and a form of executive power with territorial claims. Sometimes it is used as synonymous with mastery, and other times with subordination. Perhaps it carries other connotations, though, that we would not want to lose altogether. One only needs to consider debates about native sovereignty in Canada or read the important work of J. Kēhaulani Kauanui on the paradoxes of Hawaiian sovereignty to see how crucial this notion can be for popular mobilizations.5 Sovereignty can be one way of describing acts of political self-determination, which is why popular movements of indigenous people struggling for sovereignty have become important ways to lay claim to space, to move freely, to express one’s views, and to seek reparation and justice. Although elections are the way that government officials are supposed to represent popular sovereignty (or the “popular will” more specifically), the meaning of popular sovereignty has never been fully exhausted by the act of voting. Of course, voting is essential for any concept of popular sovereignty, but the exercise of sovereignty neither begins nor ends with the act of voting. As democratic theorists have argued for some time, elections do not fully transfer sovereignty from the populace to its elected representatives—something of popular sovereignty always remains nontransferable, marking the outside of the electoral process. If not, there would be no popular means of objecting to corrupt electoral processes. In a sense, the power of the populace remains separate from the power of those elected, even after they have elected them, for only in its separateness can it continue to contest the conditions and results of elections as well as the actions of elected officials. If the sovereignty of the people is fully transferred to, and replaced by, those whom the majority elect, then what is lost are those powers we call critical, those actions we call resistance, and that lived possibility we call revolution. So “popular sovereignty” certainly translates into electoral power when the people vote, but that is never a full or adequate translation. Something of popular sovereignty remains untranslatable, nontransferable, and even unsubstitutable, which is why it can both elect and dissolve regimes. As much as popular sovereignty legitimates parliamentary forms of power, it also retains the power to withdraw its support from those same forms when they prove to be illegitimate. If parliamentary forms of power require popular sovereignty for their very legitimacy, they also surely fear

it, for there is something about popular sovereignty that runs counter to, and exceeds or outruns, every parliamentary form that it institutes and grounds. An [A] elected regime can be brought to a halt or overcome by that assembly of people who speak “in the name of the people,” enacting the very “we” that holds final legitimating power under conditions of democratic rule. In other words, the conditions of democratic rule depend finally on an exercise of popular sovereignty that is never fully contained or expressed by any particular democratic order, but which is the condition of its democratic character. This is an extraparliamentary power without which no parliament can function legitimately, and that threatens every parliament with dysfunction or even dissolution. We may again want to call it an “anarchist” interval or a permanent principle of revolution that resides within democratic orders, one that shows up more or less both at moments of founding and moments of dissolution, but is also operative in the freedom of assembly itself.

The right to have rights predates, and is independent from, any political institution- Those excluded from sovereign structures can weaponize the right to appear in order to combat criminal regimes of the law-While the public sphere is built on exclusion and regulated modes of disavowal, performing the right to appear allows assemblages to call the state’s legitimacy into question- the body’s performance against state forces solidifies one’s right to persist, a right not guaranteed by the law but rather the right to have rights Butler ‘18 (Judith Butler, writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist, “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly”, First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015), pg. 117-119, MB)

Luckily, I think Arendt did not consistently follow this model from The Human Condition, which is why, for instance, in the early 1960s, she turned again to the fate of refugees and the stateless, and came to assert in a new way the right to have rights.9 The right to have rights is one that depends on no existing particular political organization for its legitimacy. Like the space of appearance, the right to have rights predates and precedes any political institution that might codify or seek to guarantee that right; at the same time, it is derived from no natural set of laws. The right comes into being when it is exercised, and exercised by those who act in concert, in alliance. Those who are excluded from existing polities, who belong to no nation-state or other contemporary state formation, may be deemed “unreal” only by those who seek to monopolize the terms of reality. And yet, even after the public sphere has been defined through their exclusion, they act. Whether they are abandoned to precarity or left to die through systematic negligence, concerted action still emerges from their acting together. And this is what we see, for instance, when undocumented workers amass on the street without the legal right to do so; when squatters lay claim to buildings in Argentina as a way of exercising the right to livable shelter; when populations lay claim to a public square that has belonged to the military; when refugees take part in collective uprisings demanding shelter, food, and rights of sanctuary; when populations amass, without the protection of the law and without permits to demonstrate, to bring down an unjust or criminal regime of law or to protest austerity measures that destroy the possibility of employment and education for many. Or when those whose public appearance is itself criminal—transgendered people in Turkey or women who wear the veil in France—appear in order to contest that criminal status

and assert the right to appear. The French law that prohibits “ostentatious” religious display in public as well as the hiding of the face seeks to establish a public sphere where clothing remains a signifier of secularism and the exposure of the face becomes a public norm. The prohibition against hiding the face serves a certain version of the right to appear, understood as the right for women to appear unveiled. At the same time, it denies the right to appear for that very group of women, requiring them to defy religious norms in favor of public ones. That required act of religious disaffiliation becomes obligatory when the public sphere is understood as one that overcomes or negates religious forms of belonging. The notion, prevalent in French debate, that women who wear the veil cannot possibly do so from any sense of choice operates in the debate to veil, as it were, the blatant acts of discrimination against religious minorities that the law enacts. For one choice that is clearly made among those who wear the veil is not to comply with those forms of compulsory disaffiliation that condition the entrance to the public sphere. Here as elsewhere, the sphere of appearance is highly regulated. That these women be clothed in some ways rather than others constitutes a sartorial politics of the public sphere, but so too does compulsory “unveiling,” itself a sign of belonging first to the public and only secondarily, or privately, to the religious community. This is especially pronounced in relation to Muslim women whose affiliations to various versions of public, secular, and religious domains may well be coterminous and overlapping. And it shows quite clearly that what is called “the public sphere” in such cases is built up through constitutive exclusions and compulsory forms of disavowal. Paradoxically, the act of conforming to a law that requires unveiling is the means by which a certainly highly compromised, even violent, “freedom to appear” is established. Indeed, in the public demonstrations that often follow from acts of public mourning—as often occurred in Syria before half of its population became refugees, where crowds of mourners became targets of military destruction—we can see how the existing public space is seized by those who have no existing right to gather there, who emerge from zones of disappearance to become bodies exposed to violence and death in the course of gathering and persisting publicly as they do. Indeed, it is their right to gather, free of intimidation and the threat of violence, that is systematically attacked by the police, the army, hired gangs, or mercenaries. To attack those bodies is to attack the right itself, since when those bodies appear and act, they are exercising a right outside, against, and in the face of the regime. Although the bodies on the street are vocalizing their opposition to the legitimacy of the state, they are also, by virtue of occupying and persisting in that space without protection, posing their challenge in corporeal terms, which means that when the body “speaks” politically, it is not only in vocal or written language. The persistence of the body in its exposure calls that legitimacy into question and does so precisely through a specific performativity of the body.10 Both action and gesture signify and speak, both as action and claim; the one is not finally extricable from the other. Where the legitimacy of the state is brought into question precisely by that way of appearing in public, the body itself exercises a right that is no right; in other words, it exercises a right that is being actively contested and destroyed by military force and that, in its resistance to force, articulates its way of living, showing both its precarity and its right to persist. This right is codified nowhere. It is not granted from elsewhere or by existing law, even if it sometimes finds support precisely there. It is, in fact, the right to have rights, not as natural law or metaphysical stipulation, but as the persistence of the body against those forces that seek its debilitation or eradication. This persistence requires breaking into the established regime of space with a set of material supports both mobilized and mobilizing.

The conception of individualism ignores the obligation that individuals have towards each other – every inhabitant does not only belong to communities but also the world itself – we all have a commitment to each other and a right to a livable life through the aff’s new form of politicsButler ‘18 (Judith Butler, writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist, “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly”, First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015), pg. 117-119, MB)

Most scholars would want to keep any consideration of Emmanuel Levinas separate from an analysis of Hannah Arendt: He is a philosopher of ethics, drawing on religious traditions, and he emphasizes the ethical importance of passivity and receptivity; she [Arendt] is a social and political philosopher, adamantly secular, who emphasizes time and again the political value of action. Why bring a discussion of Levinas together with one regarding Arendt? Both Levinas and Arendt take issue with the classically liberal conception of individualism, that is, the idea that individuals knowingly enter into certain contracts, and their obligation follows from having deliberately and volitionally entered into agreements with one another. This view assumes that we are only responsible for those relations, codified by agreements, into which we have knowingly and volitionally entered. And Arendt disputes this view. Indeed, it was the substance of the argument that she made against Adolf Eichmann. He thought he could choose which populations should live and die, and in this sense he thought he could choose with whom to cohabit the earth. What he failed to understand, according to Arendt, is that no one has the prerogative to choose with whom to cohabit the earth. We can choose in some ways how and where to live, and in local ways we can choose with whom to live. But if we were to decide with whom to cohabit the earth, we would be deciding which portion of humanity may live and which may die. If that choice is barred to us, that means that we are under an obligation to live with those who already exist, and that any choice about who may or may not live is always a genocidal practice; and though we cannot dispute that genocide has happened, and happens still, we are wrong to think that freedom in any ethical sense is ever compatible with the freedom to commit genocide. The unchosen character of earthly cohabitation is, for Arendt, the condition of our very existence as ethical and political beings. Hence, to exercise that prerogative of genocide is not only to destroy political conditions of personhood but to destroy freedom itself, understood not as an individual act but as a plural action. Without that plurality against which we cannot choose, we have no freedom and, therefore, no choice. This means that there is an unchosen condition of freedom and that, in being free, we affirm something about what is unchosen for us. If freedom seeks to exceed that unfreedom that is its condition, then we destroy plurality and we jeopardize, in her view, our status as persons, considered as zoon politikon. This was one argument that Arendt made about why the death penalty was justified for Eichmann. In her view, Eichmann had already destroyed himself by not realizing that his own life was bound to those he destroyed, and individual life makes no sense, has no reality, outside of the social and political framework in which all lives are equally valued.3 In Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Arendt argues that Eichmann and his superiors failed to realize that the heterogeneity of the earth’s population is an irreversible condition of social and political life itself.4 So Arendt’s accusation against Eichmann bespeaks a firm conviction that none of us may exercise such a prerogative, that those with whom we cohabit the earth are given to us, prior to choice and so prior to any social or political contracts we

might enter into through deliberation and volition. In Eichmann’s case, the effort to choose with whom to cohabit the earth was an explicit effort to annihilate some part of the population—Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, communists, the disabled, and the ill, among others—and so the exercise of freedom upon which he insisted was genocide. Not only is this choice an attack on cohabitation as a precondition of political life in Arendt’s view, but it commits us to the following proposition: we must devise institutions and policies that actively preserve and affirm the unchosen character of open-ended and plural cohabitation. Not only do we live with those we never chose and with whom we may feel no immediate sense of social belonging, but we are also obligated to preserve those lives and the open-ended plurality that is the global population. Although Arendt would doubtless dispute my view, I think what she has offered is an ethical view of cohabitation that serves as a guideline for particular forms of politics. In this sense, concrete political norms and policies emerge from the unchosen character of these modes of cohabitation. The necessity of cohabiting the earth is a principle that, in her philosophy, must guide the actions and policies of any neighborhood, community, or nation. The decision to live in one community or another is surely justified as long as it does not imply that those who live outside the community do not deserve to live. In other words, every communitarian ground for belonging is only justifiable on the condition that it is subordinate to a noncommunitarian opposition to genocide. The way I read this, every inhabitant who belongs to a community belongs also to the earth—a notion she clearly takes from Heidegger—and this implies a commitment not only to every other inhabitant of that earth but, we can surely add, to sustaining the earth itself. And with this last proviso, I seek to offer an ecological supplement to Arendt’s anthropocentrism. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt speaks not only for the Jews but for any and every other minority who would be expelled from habitation on the earth by another group. The one implies the other, and the “speaking for” universalizes the founding interdiction even as it does not override the plurality whose life it seeks to protect. One reason Arendt refuses to separate the Jews from the other so-called nations persecuted by the Nazis is that she is arguing in the name of a plurality coextensive with human life in any and all of its cultural forms. At the same time, her judgment of Eichmann is one that emerges precisely from the historical situation of a diasporic Jew who was herself a refugee from Nazi Germany, but who also objected to the Israeli courts representing a specific nation, when the crime, in her view, was a crime against humanity, and to the courts representing only the Jewish victims of the genocide, when there were many other groups annihilated and displaced in accord with the Nazi policy formulated and implemented by Eichmann and his cohorts. This same notion of unchosen cohabitation implies not only the irreversibly plural or heterogeneous character of the earth’s population, and an obligation to safeguard that plurality, but also a commitment to an equal right to inhabit the earth and so a commitment to equality as well. These two dimensions of her discussion took specific historical form in her argument against the idea of Israel as a state based on principles of Jewish sovereignty and for a federated Palestine in the late 1940s. The political conception of plurality for which she fought was, in her view, implicit in the American Revolution, and it led her to refuse to accept exclusively national, racial, or religious grounds for citizenship. Moreover, she objected to the founding of any state that required the expulsion of its inhabitants and the production of a new refugee class, especially when such a state invoked the rights of refugees to legitimate its founding. Arendt’s normative views are these: there is no one part of the population that can claim the earth for itself, no community or nation-state or regional unit, no clan, no party, and no race. This means that unwilled proximity and unchosen cohabitation are preconditions of our political existence, the basis of her critique of nationalism, the obligation to live on the earth and in a polity that establishes equality for a population necessarily and irreversibly heterogeneous. Indeed,

unwilled proximity and unchosen cohabitation also serve as the basis of our obligations not to destroy any part of the human population and to outlaw genocide as a crime against humanity, but also to invest institutions with the demand to seek to make all lives livable and equally so. Thus, from unchosen cohabitation, Arendt derives notions of universality and equality that commit us to institutions that seek to sustain human lives without regarding some part of the population as socially dead, as redundant, or as intrinsically unworthy of life and therefore ungrievable. Arendt’s views on cohabitation, federated authority, equality, and universality, elaborated from the 1940s through the 1960s, stood in stark contrast to those who were defending nationalist forms of Jewish sovereignty, differential classifications for Jewish and non-Jewish citizens, military policies to uproot Palestinians from their lands, and efforts to establish a Jewish demographic majority for the state. It is often taught that Israel became a historical and ethical necessity for the Jews during and after the Nazi genocide, and that anyone who questions the founding principles of the Jewish state shows an extraordinary insensitivity to the plight of the Jews; but there were Jewish thinkers and political activists at the time, including Arendt, Martin Buber, Hans Kohn, and Judah Magnes, who thought that among the most important lessons of the Nazi genocide was an opposition to illegitimate state violence, to any state formation that sought to give electoral priority and citizenship to one race or religion, and that nation-states ought to be internationally barred from dispossessing whole populations who fail to fit the purified idea of the nation. For those who extrapolated principles of justice from the historical experience of internment and dispossession, the political aim is to extend equality regardless of cultural background or formation, across languages and religions, to those none of us ever chose (or did not recognize that we chose) and with whom we have an enduring obligation to find a way to live. For whoever “we” are, we are also those who were never chosen, who emerge on this earth without everyone’s consent, and who belong, from the start, to a wider population and a sustainable earth. And this condition, paradoxically, yields the radical potential for new modes of sociality and politics beyond the avid and wretched bonds formed through settler colonialism and expulsion. We are all, in this sense, the unchosen, but we are nevertheless unchosen together. It is not uninteresting to note that Arendt, herself a Jew and refugee, understood her obligation not to belong to the “chosen people” but, rather, to the unchosen, and to make mixed community precisely among those whose existence implies a right to exist and to lead a livable life.

Precarity gains intelligibility exclusively when recognizing bodily dependence, human needs, and vulnerability as political issues- because conditions which determine livable life are intrinsically tied to concrete political institutions so too must the solutions we generate be grounded in notions of material precarity- this is the only ethical strategy to combat genocide and sustain life.Butler ‘18 (Judith Butler, writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist, “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly”, First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015), pg. 117-119, MB)

ARENDT’S EURO-AMERICAN FRAMEWORK was clearly limited, and yet another limitation becomes clear if we try to understand the relationship of precarity to practices of cohabitation. For Arendt, the needs of the body are to be relegated to the private sphere. Precarity only makes sense if we are able to

identify bodily dependency and need, hunger and the need for shelter, the vulnerability to injury and destruction, forms of social trust that let us live and thrive, and the passions linked to our very persistence as clearly political issues. If Arendt thought that such matters had to be relegated to the private realm, Levinas understood the importance of vulnerability but failed to really link vulnerability to a politics of the body. Although Levinas seems to presuppose a body impinged upon, he does not give it an explicit place in his ethical philosophy. And though Arendt theorizes the problem of the body, of the located body, the speaking body emerging into the “space of appearance” as part of any account of political action, she is not quite willing to affirm a politics that struggles to overcome inequalities in food distribution, that affirms rights of housing, and that targets inequalities in the sphere of reproductive labor. In my view, some ethical claims emerge from bodily life, and perhaps all ethical claims presuppose a bodily life, understood as injurable, one that is not restrictively human. After all, the life that is worth preserving and safeguarding, that should be protected from murder (Levinas) and genocide (Arendt), is connected to, and dependent upon, nonhuman life in essential ways; this follows from the idea of the human animal, as Derrida has articulated it, which becomes a different point of departure for thinking about politics. If we try to understand in concrete terms what it means to commit ourselves to preserving the life of the other, we are invariably confronted with the bodily conditions of life and so to a commitment not only to the other’s corporeal persistence but to all those environmental conditions that make life livable. In the so-called private sphere delineated in Arendt’s The Human Condition, we find the question of needs, the reproduction of the material conditions of life, and the problems of transience, reproduction, and death alike—everything that pertains to precarious life. The possibility of whole populations being annihilated through either genocidal policies or systemic negligence follows not only from the fact that there are those who believe that they can decide with whom they will inhabit the earth, but also because such thinking presupposes a disavowal of an irreducible fact of politics: the vulnerability to destruction by others that follows from a condition of precarity in all modes of political and social interdependency. We can make this into a broad existential claim, namely, that everyone is precarious, and this follows from our social existence as bodily beings who depend upon one another for shelter and sustenance and who, therefore, are at risk of statelessness, homelessness, and destitution under unjust and unequal political conditions. As much as I am making such a claim, I am also making another, namely, that our precarity is to a large extent dependent upon the organization of economic and social relationships, the presence or absence of sustaining infrastructures and social and political institutions. So as soon as the existential claim is articulated in its specificity, it ceases to be existential. And since it must be articulated in its specificity, it was never existential. In this sense, precarity is indissociable from that dimension of politics that addresses the organization and protection of bodily needs. Precarity exposes our sociality, the fragile and necessary dimensions of our interdependency. Whether explicitly stated or not, every political effort to manage populations involves a tactical distribution of precarity, more often than not articulated through an unequal distribution of precarity, one that depends on dominant norms regarding whose life is grievable and worth protecting and whose life is ungrievable, or marginally or episodically grievable, and so, in that sense, already lost in part or in whole, and thus less worthy of protection and sustenance. My point is not to rehabilitate humanism but, rather, to struggle for a conception of ethical obligation that is grounded in precarity. No one escapes the precarious dimension of social life—it is, we might say, the joint of our nonfoundation. And we cannot understand cohabitation without understanding that a generalized precarity obligates us to oppose genocide and to sustain life on egalitarian terms. Perhaps this feature of our lives can serve as the basis for the right of protection against genocide, whether through deliberate or negligent means.

After all, even though our interdependency constitutes us as more than thinking beings, indeed as social and embodied, vulnerable and passionate, our thinking gets nowhere without the presupposition of the interdependent and sustaining conditions of life.

AT – No Vulnerability

Injection and embracement of precarity is key to stop the re-entrenchment of this violence towards those deemed vulnerable and prevent self-defeating movements – the body’s vulnerability, once exposed by regimes of power, allows for the mobilization of mass political resistanceButler ‘18 (Judith Butler, writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist, “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly”, First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015), pg. 117-119, MB)

That action, I would suggest, has to be supported through solidarity, to be sure, but also by infrastructural conditions, by law, and by the absence of violent or coercive efforts to thwart the way. The struggles I mentioned above presume that bodies have been constrained and are at risk of constraint, that they can be without work and without mobility, that they can suffer violence and forms of coercion. Am I trying to say that bodies are not active, but vulnerable? Or that even vulnerable bodies can act? My argument, in fact, is that it would be as mistaken to think of the body as primarily or definitionally active as it would be to think of the body as primarily and definitionally vulnerable and inactive. If we have to have a definition, it will depend, rather, on being able to think vulnerability and agency together. I am especially aware of how counterproductive it can be to understand women’s bodies as particularly vulnerable. We immediately enter into uncertain terrain, given the long and lamentable gender politics that allocates the distinction between passive and active to women and men, respectively. Yet, if we say that certain groups are differentially vulnerable, we are only saying that under certain regimes of power, some groups are targeted more readily than others, some suffer poverty more than others, some are exposed to police violence more than others. We are making a sociological observation that would have to be backed up in one way or another. And yet, that sociological claim can very easily become a new norm of description, at which point women become defined by their vulnerability. At such a point, the very problem that the description is meant to address becomes reproduced and ratified by the very description. This is one reason we have to pay attention to what it means to mobilize vulnerability, and what it means, more specifically, to mobilize vulnerability in concert. For many of us, that is, for many people, the moment of actively appearing on the street involves a deliberate risk of exposure. Perhaps the word “exposure” helps us think vulnerability outside the trap of ontology and foundationalism. This is especially true for those who, exposed, appear on the street without permits, who are opposing the police or the military or other security forces without weapons. Although one is shorn of protection, to be sure, one is not reduced to some sort of “bare life.” There is no sovereign power jettisoning the subject outside the domain of the political as such; on the contrary, there is a more varied and diffuse operation of power and force that detains and encroaches on bodies in the street or in the cell or on the periphery of towns and borders—and this is a specifically political form of destitution. Of course, feminist theorists have for a long time argued that women suffer social vulnerability disproportionately.9 And though there is always a risk in claiming that women are especially vulnerable—given how many other groups are entitled to make the same claim, and given that the category of women is intersected by class, race, age, and a number of other vectors of power and sites of potential discrimination and injury—there is still something important to be taken from this tradition. The claim can sometimes be taken to mean that women have an unchanging and defining vulnerability, and that kind of argument makes the case for paternalistic provisions of protection. If

women are regarded as especially vulnerable and seek protected status, it becomes the responsibility of the state or other paternal powers to provide that protection. According to that model, feminist activism not only petitions paternal authority for special dispensations and protections, but affirms that inequality of power that situates women in a powerless position and, by implication, men in a more powerful one. And where it does not simply or exclusively put “men” in the position of providing protection, it invests state structures with the paternalistic obligation to facilitate the achievement of feminist goals. Such a view is very different from one that claims, for instance, that women are at once vulnerable and capable of resistance, and that vulnerability and resistance can, and do, and even must happen at the same time, as we see in certain forms of feminist self-defense and institutions (battered women’s shelters, for example) that seek to provide protection without enlarging paternalistic powers, and as happens through networks that support trans women in Turkey or anywhere the expanded and expandable category of women suffers harassment or injury by virtue of appearing as it does. Of course, there are good reasons to argue for the differential vulnerability of women; they suffer disproportionately from poverty and illiteracy, two very important dimensions of any global analysis of women’s conditions (and two reasons why none of us will be “postfeminist” until such time as these conditions are fully overcome). But many of the feminists who have made the turn to vulnerability, as it were, have done so in order to increase the protected standing of women in human rights organizations and international courts. This juridification of the feminist project seeks to prioritize the language needed to strengthen such an appeal to the courts. As important as such appeals may be, they provide a limited language for understanding feminist forms of resistance that are popular and extralegal, the dynamics of mass movements, civil society initiatives, and forms of political resistance informed and mobilized by vulnerability. The need to establish a politics that avoids the retrenchment of paternalism seems clear. At the same time, if this resistance to paternalism objects to all state and economic institutions that provide social welfare, then the demand for infrastructural support becomes illegible within its terms, even self-defeating. Hence, this task is made all the more difficult under conditions of increasing precarity in which ever greater numbers of people are exposed to homelessness, unemployment, illiteracy, and inadequate health care. The struggle, in my view, is how to make the feminist claim effectively that such institutions are crucial to sustaining lives at the same time that feminists resist modes of paternalism that reinstate and naturalize relations of inequality. So though the value of vulnerability has been important to feminist theory and politics, this does not mean that vulnerability serves as a defining characteristic of women as a group. I would oppose this effort to install a new norm for the category of women that rests on a foundational notion of vulnerability. Indeed, the very debate about who belongs to the group called “women” marks a distinct zone of vulnerability, namely, those who are non–gender conforming, and whose exposure to discrimination, harassment, and violence is clearly heightened on those grounds. So some provisionally bound group called “women” is neither more vulnerable than a provisionally bound group called “men” nor is it particularly useful or true to try to demonstrate that women value vulnerability more than men do. Rather, certain kinds of gender-defining attributes, like vulnerability and invulnerability, are distributed unequally under certain regimes of power, and precisely for the purpose of shoring up certain regimes of power that disenfranchise women. We think about goods as distributed unequally under capitalism as well as natural resources, especially water, but we should also surely consider that one way of managing populations is to distribute vulnerability unequally such that “vulnerable populations” are established within discourse and policy. More recently, we note that social movements and policy analysts refer to precarious populations, and that political strategies are accordingly devised to think about ameliorating

conditions of precarity.10 But this same demand is also made through broad popular struggles that both expose and mobilize precarity, showing, as it were, the possibilities of performative political action that emerge in the midst of precarity. It seems clear that if the designation of vulnerability or precarity effaces this form of political demand, it further entrenches the very condition from which it seeks alleviation.

Certain populations are deemed disposable and therefore subject to violence- our political transformation is a balance between personal responsibilities and the idea of vulnerability- this resolves the assumption that anything which is met with retaliation elicits vulnerabilityButler ‘18 (Judith Butler, writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist, “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly”, First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015), pg. 117-119, MB)

There is of course an even more sinister way of wielding both categories of precarity and of vulnerability. Within the terms of both military and economic policy, certain populations are effectively targeted as injurable (with impunity) or disposable (living on in a disposable condition or no longer living, quite literally disposed of, a distinction that constitutes an interval in the time-space of social death). This kind of explicit or implicit marking is used to justify the infliction of injury upon such populations (as we see in times of war, or in state violence against undocumented citizens). So “vulnerability” can be a way of targeting a population for decimation. This has produced a paradox within neoliberalism and its notion of “responsibilization” that designates such populations as accountable for their own precarious position, or their accelerated experience of precaritization. As a counter to this nefarious form of moralizing, human rights advocates have defended the idea of vulnerability as they insist on the need for legal and institutional protection for such groups. The notion of vulnerability here works in two ways, to target a population or to protect it, which means that the term has been used to establish a restrictive political logic according to which being targeted and being protected are the only two alternatives. We can see that the term, so deployed, effectively effaces both popular movements (if not forms of popular sovereignty) and active struggles for resistance and social and political transformation. We may think that these two ways of using the notion of vulnerability are antithetical, and they are, but only within the terms of a problematic logic, one that displaces some other forms of political rationality and practice that are arguably more pressing and more promising. So targeting and protecting are practices that belong to the same rationale of power. If precarious populations have produced their own situation, then they are not situated within a regime of power that reproduces precarity in systemic ways. Their own actions, or their own failures, are the cause of their precarious situations. If they are seen as in need of protection, and if paternalistic forms of power (which sometimes do include philanthropy and humanitarian NGOs) seek to install themselves in permanent positions of power to represent the powerless, then those very populations are excluded from democratic processes and mobilizations. The answer to this dilemma is neither to position precarious populations as hyperresponsible on a moral model nor, conversely, to position them as suffering populations in need of “care” by good Christians (as the social democratic discourse in France,

with its implicit affiliation with Christian values, currently maintains). This approach takes vulnerability and invulnerability as political effects, unequally distributed effects of a field of power that acts on and through bodies; these swift inversions show that vulnerability and invulnerability are not essential features of men or women, but, rather, processes of gender formation, the effects of modes of power that have as one of their aims the production of gender differences along lines of inequality. We can see evidence of this rationale when, for instance, masculinity is said to be “attacked” by feminism—in which case it is masculinity in the “vulnerable” position—or when the general public is said to be “attacked” by sexual and gender minorities of various kinds, or when the state of California is now understood to be “under attack” because it has lost its white majority, or when the state of Arizona is said to be “under attack” by its Latino population, and so trying to establish an ever more impermeable border to the south. Various European nationalities are now said to be “under attack” by new immigrant communities, at which point dominant groups and their racist representatives are construed as occupying a vulnerable condition.

Vulnerability can be mobilized to create an active form of political resistance – interdependency is necessary for assembly in order to create a livable lifeButler ‘18 (Judith Butler, writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist, “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly”, First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015), pg. 117-119, MB)

WHEN THOSE WHO FACE ACCELERATING prospects of precarity take to the streets and begin their claim with “we the people,” then they are asserting that they, those who appear and speak there, are identified as “the people.” They are working to ward off the prospect of oblivion. The phrase does not imply that those who profit are not “the people,” and it does not necessarily imply a simple sense of inclusion: “we are the people, too.” It can mean, “we are still the people”—therefore, still persisting and not yet destroyed. Or it can assert a form of equality in the face of increasing inequality; participants do this not simply by uttering that phrase, but by embodying equality to whatever extent that proves possible, constituting an assembly of the people on the grounds of equality. One might say, equality is experimentally and provisionally asserted in the midst of inequality, to which critics respond: this is vain and useless, since their acts are only symbolic, and true economic equality continues to become more elusive for those whose debts are astronomical and employment prospects foreclosed. And yet, it seems that the embodiment of equality in the practices of assembly, the insistence on interdependency and a fair distribution of labor tasks, the notion of a commonly held ground or “the commons,” all start to put into the world a version of equality that is rapidly vanishing in other quarters. The point is not to regard the body merely as an instrument for making a political claim, but to let this body, the plurality of bodies, become the precondition of all further political claims. Indeed, in the politics of the street that has been with us in the last years, in the Occupy Movement, Tahrir Square in its early stages, Puerta del Sol, Gezi Park, and the favela movement in Brazil, the basic requirements of the body are at the center of political mobilizations—those requirements are, in fact, publicly enacted prior to any set of political demands. Over and against forces of privatization, the destruction of public services and the ideals of the public good precipitated by the takeover of neoliberal forms of rationality in governance and

everyday life, bodies require food and shelter, protection from injury and violence, and the freedom to move, to work, to have access to health care; bodies require other bodies for support and for survival.14 It matters, of course, what age those bodies are, and whether they are able-bodied, since in all forms of dependency, bodies require not just one other person, but social systems of support that are complexly human and technical. It is precisely in a world in which the supports for bodily life of increasing numbers of people are proving to be highly precarious that bodies are emerging together on the pavement or the dirt or along the wall that separates them from their land—this assembly, which can include virtual participants, still assumes a set of interlocking locations for a plural set of bodies. And in this way, the bodies belong to the pavement, the ground, the architecture, and the technology by which they live and move and work and desire. Although there are those who will say that active bodies assembled on the street constitute a powerful and surging multitude, one that in itself constitutes a radical democratic event or action, I can only partially agree with that view. When the people break off from established power, they enact the popular will, though to know that for certain, we would have to know who is breaking off, and where, and who does not break off, and where they are. There are, after all, all sorts of surging multitudes I would not want to endorse (even if I do not dispute their right to assemble), and they would include lynch mobs, anti-Semitic or racist or fascist congregations, and violent forms of antiparliamentary mass movements. I am less concerned with the ostensible vitality of surging multitudes or any nascent and promising life force that seems to belong to their collective action than I am with joining a struggle to establish more sustaining conditions of livability in the face of systematically induced precarity and forms of racial destitution. The final aim of politics is not simply to surge forth together (though this can be an essential moment of affective intensity within a broader struggle against precarity), constituting a new lived sense of the “people,” even if sometimes, for the purposes of radical democratic change—which I do endorse—it is important to surge forth in ways that claim and alter the attention of the world for some more enduring possibility of livable life for all. It is one thing to feel alive, or to affirm aliveness, and yet another to say that that fleeting sense is all that we can expect from politics. Feeling alive is not quite the same as struggling for a world in which life becomes livable for those who have not yet been valued as living beings. Although I understand that something has to hold such a group together, some demand, some felt sense of injustice and unlivability, some shared intimation of the possibility of change, there is also a desire to produce a new form of sociality on the spot. These mobilizations make their claims through language, action, gesture, and movement; through linking arms; through refusing to move; through forming bodily modes of obstruction to police and state authorities. A given movement can move in and out of the space of heightened exposure, depending on its strategies and the military and police threats it must face. In each of these cases, however, we can say that these bodies form networks of resistance together, remembering that bodies who are active agents of resistance are also fundamentally in need of support. In resistance, vulnerability is not precisely converted into agency—it remains the condition of resistance, a condition of the life from which it emerges, the condition that, rendered as precarity, has to be opposed, and is opposed. This is something other than weakness or victimization, since, for the precarious, resistance requires exposing the abandoned or unsupported dimensions of life, but also mobilizing that vulnerability as a deliberate and active form of political resistance, an exposure of the body to power in the plural.

AT – No black criminality

Negrophobia mobilizes black criminalization which is a weapon of white supremacy and Black de-valuation.Chaney ’15 (http://www.jpanafrican.org/docs/vol8no4/8.4-5-CCRR.pdf Cassandra Chaney, Ph.D. Associate Professor, College of Human Sciences and Education, School of Social Work, Department of Child and Family Studies, Louisiana State University//Dewayne Martin)

While this film has been characterized as a cinematic masterpiece, it greatly advanced the aims of White Supremacy. In particular, this film had a deleterious effect on African American males because they were depicted as brutes whose sole intent in life was to rape White women and destroy the White man’s way of life (Loewen, 2007). As an effective Ku Klux Klan recruitment tool, this film galvanized support for the Klan as the preeminent savior of White southern civilization. So far-reaching was the negative effects of this movie for African American people, during a private White House screening by-then President Woodrow Wilson, he reportedly described the film as painting an accurate portrait of African Americans (Loewen, 2007). In short, this film was a catalyst for most of the early 20th century media caricatures of African Americans that still exist today (Baker, 1996; Menzel- Baker, Motley, & Henderson, 2004). The aforementioned images of African Americans have contributed to what Armour (1997) calls Negrophobia, or an irrational fear of African Americans. This irrational fear has contributed to Whites’ general desensitization to African American suffering of all types as well as decreased support for social safety nets. Thus, African American males are devalued and seen as expendable (Burrell, 2010). Unfortunately, Black as a metaphor for criminality is so deeply embedded in the minds of societal members that Whites have reported seeing an African American criminal suspect at the scene of a crime when none was actually present (Chaney & Robertson, 2013b; Leverentz, 2012; Oliver & Fonash, 2002). In a study to determine the effect of network news images on viewer perceptions, Dixon (2008) found that exposure to network news depressed estimates of African American income, increased the endorsement of stereotypes of African Americans as poor and intimidating, and were associated with higher racism scores. Media characterizations of violent criminals as Black has been deeply etched in the psyche of many viewers (Dixon & Maddox, 2005; Leverentz, 2012; Oliver & Fonash, 2002; Oliver, Jackson, Moses, & Dangerfield, 2004). Such negative portrayals of African Americans in media have resulted in wanton stereotyping, extreme fear of African Americans, and African Americans with darker complexions and more Afrocentric phenotypic features being perceived as more worthy of the death penalty in research experiments (Blair, Judd, & Chapleau 2004; Chaney & Robertson, 2013b; Dixon, 2008; Eberhardt, Davies, Purdie-Vaughns, & Johnson, 2006; Maddox & Gray, 2002; Peffley & Hurwitz, 2013). All of the aforementioned serve to legitimize White supremacy, legitimize White life, and de-legitimize African American life so that incidents of police violence against African Americans are not punished nor viewed as a larger societal problem.

In the courthouse, Blackness is always already criminalized and blamed.Chaney ’15 (http://www.jpanafrican.org/docs/vol8no4/8.4-5-CCRR.pdf Cassandra Chaney, Ph.D. Associate Professor, College of Human Sciences and Education, School of Social Work, Department of Child and Family Studies, Louisiana State University//Dewayne Martin)

Since members of law enforcement play a pivotal role in maintaining White Supremacy, it should not come as a surprise that Whites are generally desensitized to police use of excessive force against African

Americans in general, and African American men, in particular. In a recent poll administered by the 2014 General Social Survey conducted by the independent research center the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, seven of ten White Americans polled posited they could envision a condition in which they would endorse an officer striking an adult male citizen. On the contrary, slightly more than four of ten African Americans (42%) and slightly less than four of ten Latinos (38%) would approve of such an action (Holland, 2015). In an analysis of accounts of more than 12,000 police homicides from 1980 to 2012 contained in the FBI’s supplementary homicide report, young African American men (ages 15- 19) were twenty-one times more likely to get killed by police than their White counterparts (Gabrielson, Jones, & Sagara, 2014). Additionally, the analysis found that African American police officers account for only 10% of police killings and 78% of their victims are African American whereas White officers killed 91% of Whites who died at the hands of police and were responsible for 68% of deaths of people of color at the hands of police (Gabrielson et al., 2014). Even more disturbing is the fact that the above figures are a gross under-representation as police departments are not required to submit records of fatal shootings. In fact, several police departments have not submitted data regarding the number and/or circumstances of fatal shootings to the FBI in years. For instance, New York City has not submitted fatal shooting data to the FBI since 2007 (Gabrielson et al., 2014). Generally speaking, police officers do not serve time for killing African American men. According to analysis by The Washington Post and Bowling Green State University, which was based on public records and interviews with law enforcement and legal experts, it was discovered that officers were only charged 54 times for killing civilians since 2005 (Kindy & Kelly, 2015). Also, more than three-fourths of the officers charged were White and two-thirds of the victims were people of color (all but two were African Americans). Forty-three of the charged involved the following variables/factors: (1) A victim was shot in the back; (2) there was a video recording of the incident; (3) incriminating testimony from fellow officers; or (4) allegations of a cover-up (Kindy & Kelly, 2015). Of the 54 instances in which officers were charged, 35 had their cases resolved (21 were acquitted or cases were dropped) and when convicted they served an average of four years behind bars, some only a few weeks (Kindy & Kelly, 2005). Consequently, juries and Whites in general have trouble seeing African Americans as “true” victims and thus may find it more difficult to acknowledge Blacks’ humanity (Feagin, 2014; Fukurai, Butler, & Krooth, 1993; Fukurai, & Krooth, 2003; Tonry, 2011). As of April 15, 2015, unofficially 255 African Americans have been killed by agents of law enforcement in the United States in 2015 (Doy News, 2015). This statistic almost certainly represents an under-estimate since there is no standardized database on police killings of African Americans (Chaney & Robertson, 2013a; Gabrielson et al. 2014). The lack of a large-scale governmental response to this incessant problem represents a major judicial blemish on the United States. When examined from a socio-historical context, it appears that the slave patrols that were a fixture of early policing in America have not ended, have gained greater force, and that ultimately, the lives of this nation’s African American citizens do not matter.

Police brutality emblemizes the inherent dangerousness present in Blackness.Chaney ’15 (http://www.jpanafrican.org/docs/vol8no4/8.4-5-CCRR.pdf Cassandra Chaney, Ph.D. Associate Professor, College of Human Sciences and Education, School of Social Work, Department of Child and Family Studies, Louisiana State University//Dewayne Martin)

There are four ways that the murders of unarmed Blacks support the superiority of Whites. For one, the murder of unarmed Blacks carries forward and solidifies the racist legacy of citizen slave patrols that were initiated during slavery (Blackmon, 2009; Dulaney, 1996; Reichel, 1999; Robertson, 2014). Even though castrations, whippings, maimings, and lynchings (Dulaney, 1996; Loewen, 2005; Robertson, 2014; Ward, 2012) were frequently used in the South as a method of policing the activities of African American men from 1880-1950, the transition of these activities to murder by guns is no less precarious. So, regardless of whether these organizations are referred to as “citizen slave patrols” or “police/law enforcement” (Dulaney, 1996; Reichel, 1999; Roediger, 2010; Skolnick & Fyfe, 1993), a societal disdain for African Americans creates a desensitization to Black suffering and death. Second, White Supremacy is maintained when juries refuse to acknowledge the victimization and humanity of African Americans (Feagin, 2014; Fukurai, Butlter, & Krooth, 1993, Tonry, 2011). Since most juries are made up of Whites, this greatly increases the likelihood that even when members of law enforcement are on trial, members of this entity will share many of the same attitudes about Blacks that police generally have. Stated another way, chances are more likely than not that White jury members will share the same disdain of African Americans that White members of law enforcement have, and not convict Whites that have murdered unarmed Blacks. Ironically, Black members of law enforcement are part of the larger White Supremacist system of law enforcement that in many cases provides these minority members the same rights and protections as Whites. In other words, since Black officers are more likely to hold negative perceptions of Blacks and to be more inclined to brutalize Black suspects than White ones (Dulaney, 1996), it stands to reason that Black officers will rarely be penalized for murdering unarmed Blacks, as well. Third, White Supremacy is maintained when Black men and women are perceived as inherently dangerous and sub-human (Donner, 2014; Karenga, 2010; Walker, 2011). A blatant example of the “Black man as dangerous and sub-human” narrative was offered by Officer Darren Wilson, who when he was allegedly assaulted by the late Michael Brown publicly proclaimed that “He looked like a demon.” Interestingly, the word “demon” is reminiscent of the Black “brute” that originally entered America’s consciousness in the D.W. Griffith 1915 film The Birth of a Nation (Loewen, 2007). During that era, the Black brute’s sole purpose in life was to rape White women and destroy the White man’s way of life. Similarly, the contemporary “demon’s” sole purpose in life is to engage in criminal behavior and actively resist law and order in society. Furthermore, the word “demon” is not only a painful and erroneous characterization of Blackness that has remained stable over time, but is a flagrant societal reminder that Blackness needs to be stopped, regardless of the cost. In this context, the Black man is triply dangerous because of his dangerous mindset, his enormous size, and his race, which is inferior to Whites. In other words, White Supremacy is sustained when Whites embrace the belief that Black men are a menace to society and that society needs to be protected from these men via murder. Finally, although it is impossible to put a monetary value on Black life, the general non- indictment of law enforcement in the murders of unarmed African Americans provides resounding evidence that little personal accountability exists for these murders. While the heads of law enforcement agencies generally proclaim these deaths as “unfortunate” or “tragic,” regrettably, as the officer was indicted in only 13 cases (17% of fatalities), a very weak connection exists between behavior and consequences for tragic behavior among members of law enforcement.

State-sponsored killing via police brutality cements America’s promises to criminalize and maim Blackness as the embodiment of danger.Curry ’14 (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/559369/summary Tommy J. Curry is a Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. His research interests are 19th century ethnology, Critical Race Theory & Black Male Studies. He is the author of The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Temple University Press 2017), which has recently won the 2018 American Book Award. He is the author of Another white Man’s Burden: Josiah Royce’s Quest for a Philosophy of Racial Empire (SUNY Press 2018), and re-published the forgotten philosophical works of William F. Ferris as The Philosophical Treatise of William H. Ferris: Selected Readings from The African Abroad or, His Evolution in Western Civilization (Rowman & Littlefield 2016).//Dewayne Martin)

The death of Michael Brown was not an aberration to American democracy, but the fulfillment of its promises of order and stability for the (white) majority. As historian A.J. William-Myers notes in Destructive Impulses: An Examination of an American Secret in Race Relations: White Violence, “white violence…was part and parcel of the socioeconomic and political structure of the American democratic process.”11 Pointing to the “enormous capacity of American democracy to absorb unprecedented level of violence and not be structurally damaged by it,” Williams-Myers concludes that anti-Black violence and the societal legitimation of the white agents responsible for the death of Black people serve to maintain societal order, and bolster the implicit ideological power of white supremacy in America. Stated differently, contrary to the democratic calls for justice currently insisted upon by activists and scholars alike, the deaths of Black men and boys in America serve to indicate the health of American democracy not its malaise. For young Black boys, maleness in a white supremacist society is fraught with difficulty and the all too likely outcome of death. Even as men, this racialized masculinity is not thought to result in a recognizable intellectual maturity, and social standing of a citizen; rather the masculinity impressed upon these Black-male-bodies is known only through its uncontrollable excess, its lack of maturation, where any and all transgressions (no matter how small or idiosyncratic) are understood to be demonstrations of the more primitive and uncivilized aspects of a not yet evolved savagery. As Geoffrey Canada, President of the Harlem Children Zone, remarks, “The image of the male as strong is mixed with the image of male as violent. Male is virile get confused with male as promiscuous. Male as adventurous equals male as reckless. Male as intelligent often gets mixed with male as arrogant, racist, and sexist … Boys find themselves pulled and tugged by forces beyond their control as they make the confusing and sometimes perilous trip to manhood.” The milieu from which Black manhood springs is saturated with racist caricatures that all seem to legitimate the fear Americans have of Black men. The images and perceptions of Black men as dangerous to society, women, and themselves ultimately create a pattern of thinking that works to justify their seemingly inevitable deaths. The relationship between anti-Black racism (the hate of Blacks) and anti-Black chauvinism (the hate of Black males as the barbarous sex) is not adequately captured by a focus on the manhood denied to Black men and boys. Such positions erroneously depict Black men as purely mimetic creatures incapable of generating identities outside of the decadent tropes offered by white patriarchy. A more correct analysis of racism and chauvinism would understand that Black male oppression and death is rooted in an imposition of a deadly masculine caricature—a barbarism justifying multiple genocidal logics and encouraging a racist misandry throughout this society and the disciplines birthed from it. Ultimately, Black male suffering is made generic, thought to only be the function of “racism,” so in an era pushing intellectuals and policy-makers alike to be antiessentialist (problematizing racial explanations of inequality), Black men are

deemed “unfit” for study. The Black male is not born a patriarchal male. He is raced and sexed peculiarly, configured as barbaric and savage, imagined to be a violent animal, not a human being. His mere existence ignites the negrophobia taken to be the agreed upon justification for his death. Black male death lessens their economic competition with, as well as their political radicality against, white society. It is this fear of Black males that allows society to support the imposition of death on these bodies, and consent to the rationalizations the police state offer as their justifications for killing the Black-male beast (the rapist, the criminal, and the deviant-thug). The young Black male’s death, the death of Black boys, is merely an extension of this logic—the need to destroy the Black beast cub before it matures into full pathology. The Black boy, that child, is seen as the potential Nigger-beast. This anti-Black dynamic which specifically affects the Black boy has been referred to by Elaine Brown as a new kind of racism, a racism built upon the anti-Black mythology of America’s Black males as the super-predator. This super-predator mythology not only acts to legitimize the violence responsible for the deaths of Black males, but inculcates the rationalization that given what Black males actually are, Black male death is necessary and an indispensable strategy for the safety and security of American society. Overlooking the genocidal disposition of America towards Black males presents an incomplete diagnosis of the impetus behind the levels of violence and sanctions imposed upon Black communities (Black women, Black families) in an effort to control the lives of young Black males.

The trope of criminality is engraved into the flesh of black bodies which makes blackness vulnerable to militarization and fuels the prison industrial complex Harriot ‘18 (Michael Harriot is a world renowned wypipologist, 6-25-2018, "Unprotected, Underserved: The (False) Criminalization of Black America," https://www.theroot.com/unprotected-underserved-the-false-criminalization-o-1827083795)//pshah

Any attempt at understanding the effects of policing in black America must begin from a rational, objective perspective. We must first free ourselves from the accepted biased narrative that accompanies enforcement of the law in black communities—namely that the negative effects of the criminal-justice system are due to the disproportionate criminality of the black population. Even the most passionate activists and allies have subconsciously accepted the prevailing premise. They will preface their arguments on police brutality by acknowledging the plague of black-on-black crime and violence in the black community. They will acknowledge the fact that black people need to “put down the guns,” “stop the violence” and “do better.” To be clear, all violence is bad. We need to address all crime, whether it is the black-on-black variety or the kind where white teenagers bring in military weapons to their 10th-grade social studies class. Black people, however, are just more likely to break the law, necessitating more police scrutiny and harsher treatment by law enforcement officers. After all, these officers are just looking at the statistics and doing their jobs. But is it true? Is the disproportionate state violence against black people a result of our disproportionate criminality? Do the inequities in America’s criminal-justice system reflect our misconduct? Are black people policed this way because of racism? Or are police brutality, mass incarceration and the war on black bodies a necessary reality? Let’s look at the facts. Numerous academic studies have shown that crime is largely a socioeconomic phenomenon, including this one, this one and this one by researchers at the University of Minnesota, which states: Arrests statistics and much research indicate that poor people are much more likely than wealthier people to commit street crime. However, some scholars attribute the greater arrests of poor people to social class bias against them. Despite this possibility, most criminologists would probably agree that social class differences in criminal offending are “unmistakable.” The disparity in crime and arrest rates is because

African Americans are twice as likely to fall below the poverty index and poor whites are less likely to go to prison than even wealthy blacks, according to a 2016 study by Duke University and the New School. Poor people commit crimes, and black communities, on average, tend to be poorer. Yet whenever the subject of police brutality is brought up, people who belong to the exclusive Greek-letter organization Mu Alpha Gamma Alpha (I’m pretty sure that’s what “MAGA” stands for) will pull out their bibles and turn to the newest testament—the arrest statistics from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. They will point out that African Americans were arrested for more murders than whites. Therefore, they will explain, black people are more violent. That’s why cops lock them up and shoot them in the face—case closed. But when one takes a look at all of the data, the numbers tell a different story. While white women might clutch their purses when they encounter a black man in a dark parking lot, in comparison with the black population, whites commit more than twice the number of rapes, aggravated assaults, burglaries, larcenies, arsons, frauds, sex offenses, embezzlement, disorderly conduct and drug abuse violations, according to FBI numbers. Although it is true that black people, per capita, commit crime at higher rates, the vast majority of people, black or white, do not commit a crime in any given year. The per capita crime rate is a useless factoid when the reality shows that 95 percent of black people don’t commit a crime in any given year. Whenever almost any kind of crime is committed in the U.S., it is far more likely that the person responsible is white. In fact, regarding the importance of per capita crime rates, Bureau of Justice Statistics data shows that the rate of violence among poor, urban whites (56.4 per 1,000) is higher than the violence rate for urban blacks (51.3 per 1,000). Let’s put it this way: If a random police officer had to solve a random crime without any clues and no knowledge of the perpetrator, statistically, Officer Random would be right far more often if he guessed that it was a white person. Furthermore, if Detective Random stopped a white person on the street, the data shows that that person is statistically as likely to be a criminal as any black person. And yet black people continue to be policed more violently and scrutinized more often by law enforcement. White America continues to push the narrative that black people are violent criminals, even though the numbers don’t show it. But if we are going to examine black criminality, we must also investigate the opposite side of the narrative: Are black people actually targeted by law enforcement? Is it true that cops brutalize, mistreat and kill black people disproportionately? Let’s look at the numbers: Over the past decade, cities and organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union have compiled extensive reports and data on traffic stops and pedestrian searches. The statistics are startling: In San Francisco, African Americans are 3.3 times, and Latinos 2.6 times, more likely than whites to be searched after a traffic stop. But according to an ACLU report: “San Francisco police officers are significantly less likely to find any evidence of criminality in searches of African Americans or Latinos.” In Greensboro, N.C. (pdf), blacks made up 55 percent of traffic stops and were more than twice as likely (102 percent) to be stopped. However, white drivers were 9 percent more likely to have contraband. Between 2011 and 2015, the Metropolitan Nashville (Tenn.) Police Department stopped an average of 1,122 per 1,000 black drivers—more black drivers than were living in the entire county. Black drivers in Nashville were five times more likely than whites to be stopped multiple times in a year. Every year, more than 75 percent of the people who were stopped and frisked by the New York City Police Department were black or Latino. In Philadelphia, African Americans accounted for 69 percent of stop and frisks from January to June 2017 in a city in which they are 48 percent of the population. Almost every city that conducts these kinds of studies finds the same results. But it is not just traffic and pedestrian stops that reveal racially biased policing. The Hamilton Project reveals that, even though blacks and whites use drugs at about the same rate, blacks are 6.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug use. And when it comes to police shootings, the data is incontrovertible. A study by the American Journal of Public Health shows that black men are three times more likely to die from police shootings. Even when they are not violent and have committed no crimes, black people are still shot and killed by police officers at higher rates than whites. Although black people make up 13 percent of the population, in 2017, 34 percent of the people who were shot and killed when they were

unarmed and not attacking were black, Mapping Police Violence reports. To be clear, the disproportionate number of black people shot by police is not because black people commit more crimes. Data from the Washington Post’s police database shows that there is no correlation between crime rates by race and the disproportionate number of police shootings. As Justin Nix, a researcher at the University of Louisville, said, according to the Washington Post, “The only thing that was significant in predicting whether someone shot and killed by police was unarmed was whether or not they were black.” The facts don’t support the narrative. There is no reason to insert black-on-black crime into any discussion of police violence. There is no statistical basis for the way African-American communities are inordinately victimized by law enforcement. Black criminality is a myth. All this week, The Root will examine policing in black America. We will delve into the problems, the perspectives and the solutions to the inequities in how the law is enforced in communities of color across America. Because as you can see ... They’re doing it wrong.

Civil society engenders tropes of criminality and savagery of “beastlike” features onto black flesh – its in the state of vulnerability that black non-being is incapable of finding a place in the white world. Muhammad ‘13 (Khalil Gibran Muhammad is professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. He is the former Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library and the world’s leading library and archive of global black history. Before leading the Schomburg Center, Khalil was an Associate Professor at Indiana University. 03/28/2013, “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America,” Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 2010; 392 pp.: 9780674035973)//pshah

This latest crisis had begun in the 1860s. In a moment equivalent to a historical blink of the eye, four million people were transformed from property to human beings to would-be citizens of the nation. Only a decade before, few white Americans other than abolitionists had anticipated that black people would become the legal equivalents of white people. In those outrageously heady days of the 1850s when slavery debates still raged, colonization schemes were still being hatched, and white optimism still percolated for black extinction if emancipation had to come, the possibility of living among and abiding black judges, politicians, and schoolteachers was, for many, unimaginable.2 By decade’s end the unimaginable had become reality, and the prospect of settlement and incorporation of African Americans added urgency and confusion to what many whites already saw as a desperate situation. “Now, far more than at any time hitherto, the white people of the United States . . . seem to be particularly interested to know precisely what manner of man the negro [sic] is,” proclaimed one writer in his 1868 introduction to The Negroes in Negroland; The Negroes in America; and Negroes Generally, a timely collection of previously published statements by some of the most respected Europe an travelers to Africa and American men of renown. “Of these American writers, those from the North are here more particularly referred to; and it is trusted that the reader will ponder well the words of such truly able and representative men as John Adams, Daniel Webster, Horace Mann, Theodore Parker, Samuel George Morton, William Henry Seward, and others of scarcely less distinction.” In a nutshell, “disinterested” and authoritative white men the world over, from Europe an colonists and anthropologists to American presidents and statesmen, had the same warning to dispatch, according to Hinton Rowan Helper: “Negroes” with their “crime- stained blackness” could not rise to a plane any higher than that of “base and beastlike savagery.” Helper presented his collection of expert opinions as an archaeologist uses fossils to reconstruct some prehistoric creature for the world to behold with gratitude that it no longer walks the earth. In Helper’s case, the caption for posterity read: terrible things await a nation bent on

handing ballots to beasts. “Seeing, then, that the negro does, indeed, belong to a lower and inferior order of beings, why in the name of Heaven, why,” he pleaded with his readers, “should we forever degrade and disgrace both ourselves and our posterity by entering, of our own volition, into more intimate relations with him? May God, in his restraining mercy, forbid that we should ever do this most foul and wicked thing!”3 Helper’s warning failed. Reconstruction proceeded, but not before the seeds of dread, planted by Helper and many other post- emancipation writers, spread across the nation like crabgrass in June. When Shaler began writing about the Negro Problem after federal troops had withdrawn from the South, after ex-Confederates had returned to power, and after the nation had set itself on a path of reconciliation, those seeds continued to produce apprehension about a future fraught with peril. “The forecast of the unprejudiced observer was exceedingly unfavorable. Every experiment of freeing blacks on this continent,” Shaler wrote with seeming exasperation, “has in the end resulted in even worse conditions than slavery brought to them.” Haiti and Jamaica were perfect demonstrations of how blacks’ “defects” could wreak havoc on civilization. Haitians had once belonged to a colonial society of great “fertile lands” and “great industries of sugar and coffee culture” built on “mild slavery.” But with a corrupt government and a failed economy, “the black race [had] fallen through its freedom to a state that is but savagery with a little veneer of Europe and customs.” These were “a people without a single trace of promise except that of extinction through the diseases of sloth and vice.” Jamaica was just as bad. It had once been a “garden land of the tropics,” the “British of the South,” but had now become a land of “barbarism.”4 America must take heed, Shaler continued. Friends of the race who had not simply fought for blacks’ freedom but also demanded their “complete enfranchisement as American citizens,” who by blind faith and by declaration tried to “fi t them for a place in the structure of a self- controlling society,” did not realize that “resolutions cannot help this rooted nature of man.” “The real dangers that this African blood brings to our state,” Shaler cautioned, lay in “the peculiarities of nature which belong to the negroes as a race.” Unlike in “our own race inheritance,” black brains stopped developing sooner, leaving “the negroes” with an animal nature unaltered by the “fruits of civilization.” The results were devastating: blacks were incapable of controlling their sexual impulses; they were unable to work together for a common purpose; and, most importantly, they had no power to delay gratification and plan for the future. Despite their “charming nature,” their “quick sensibilities,” and their “present Americanized shape,” these “peculiarities” were easily overlooked by those who did not “know the negro by long and large experience,” and who falsely believed that they were like them. With patience and “the opportunity to search closely into the nature of this race, they will perceive that the inner man is really as singular, as different in motives from themselves, as his outward appearance indicates.” “There can be no doubt,” Shaler proclaimed, “that for centuries to come the task of weaving these African threads of life into our society will be the greatest of all-American problems.”5

Civil society maintains the fugitive and criminal trope of blackness, the way whiteness fetishizes black bodies for consumption of criminal fault - Here are the statistics the white people ask forOliver ‘03 (Mary Beth Oliver is a distinguished professor in the college of communications at Penn State University, September 2003, “African American Men as "Criminal and Dangerous": Implications of Media Portrayals of Crime on the "Criminalization" of African American Men,” Journal of African American Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2 (September 2003), pp. 3-18, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41819017)//pshah

The body of literature concerning viewers' interpretations and responses to news and entertainment programming featuring black men as criminal suspects illustrates that what viewers "bring to the screen" in terms of their existing attitudes and beliefs plays a profound role in the media-viewer

relationship. With this relationship in mind, the last section of this paper pertains specifically to viewers' memory of crime information. In particular, in this section I overview research that I have con- ducted concerning how biases in the ways in which viewers' mistaken identification of African American men as criminal suspects featured in news stories not only reflects existing stereotypes of black men as "dangerous and criminal," but also likely serves to reinforce stereotyping in ways that can implicate essentially any black man as potentially threatening or violent (Oliver, 1999; Oliver & Fonash, 2002). Memory and Social Cognition As with research concerning interpretations and enjoyment, re- search on memory generally suggests that people tend to recall information about situations or individuals that is consistent with existing attitudes or beliefs (Fyock & Stangor, 1994). In this regard, if individuals harbor stereotypes of black men as criminal, biases in memory should result in greater recall of black than white criminals featured in newscasts, and may even result in mistaken memories of having seen a black suspect portrayed when either no racially identifying information was provided or when the suspect was actually white (Drabman, Robertson, Patterson, Jarvie, Hammer, & Cordua, 1981). Furthermore, this type of mistaken recall should be particularly likely to occur when the type of crime portrayed is consistent with stereotypes associated with African American men (i.e., the crime is violent rather than nonviolent.) In addition to predicting biases in recall per se, research on recognition memory also suggests that when trying to identify who has been seen in a news portrayal from a "line-up" of potential suspects, systematic errors that vary by race may be expected to occur. In particular, research on social cognition suggests that people tend to categorize individuals according to a variety of demographic traits - race included - and tend to perceive that individuals who are categorized into the same group are particularly similar or homogenous (Fiske, 1995; Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000; Taylor & Falcone, 1982). Furthermore, if a target's category is different from the perceiver's category, if a white person perceives a black person, for example, then perceived similarity of the target members is particularly heightened. What does this line of reasoning imply in terms of whites' memories of news? This reasoning suggests that when white viewers see a newscast featuring an African American man as a criminal suspect, not only are they likely to remember seeing an African American man, but they are also likely to confuse the specific individual who was pictured with any individual in the same racial category (i.e. any black man). The discussion thus far of news recall has assumed that perceivers' mistaken recall and identification memory will mirror existing stereotypes associating black men with danger or criminality. On the one hand, given the prevalence and persistence of this stereotype, this is likely a safe assumption to make. Nevertheless, there are clearly variations in the extent to which individuals endorse such stereotypes. Given this variation, should one assume that only viewers with high levels of racism are likely to evidence racially-based patterns in their memories of news? In some regards, the answer to this question appears to be "yes." After all, if a person does not harbor racist attitudes, then it would seem unlikely that their memories would reflect stereo- types of black men as criminal. On the other hand, a growing and substantial body of research suggests that stereotypes can influence cognitions and behaviors in ways that are largely outside of individuals' cognitive awareness (Bargh, 1999; Devine, 1989; Devine & Monteith, 1999; Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995). In general, this research on "implicit stereotyping" suggests that most every- one is at least aware of racial stereotypes, and therefore when a member of a stigmatized group is encountered, these stereo- types are "primed" regardless of the extent to which the stereotypes are endorsed. While individuals who are "low" on measures of racial prejudice may generally be likely to disregard or inhibit primed stereotypical cognitions, these same individuals to mind, nor may they always have the cognitive resources avail- may not always be aware when stereotypes have been brought able to engage in stereotype inhibition. Consequently, primed stereotypes (or implicit stereotypes) have the potential to influence the behaviors and perceptions of all individuals, regardless of their stated or endorsed racial attitudes. To examine what research in social cognition and implicit stereotyping imply about memory of criminal suspects, we (Oliver & Fonash, 2002) conducted an experiment in which white viewers first completed a

questionnaire that included the anti-black attitude scale (Katz & Hass, 1988) as a means of assessing racist attitudes. Approximately two weeks later, these same individuals examined a series of brief newspaper stories that included two news sections pertaining to crime. These two sections featured a total of two stories featuring violent crimes (murder and rape), and two stories featuring nonviolent crimes (embezzlement and mail fraud). Among these four stories, two featured a photograph of a black male criminal suspect, and two featured a photograph of a white male criminal suspect. Although the orders of the stories and the pairing of the photographs and the stories were varied, all participants in the study saw a black male paired with a violent crime and a nonviolent crime, and a white male paired with a violent crime and a nonviolent crime. After viewing the news stories, participants were asked to complete a series of questionnaires pertaining to their perceptions of the stories, with many of these questions designed only to detract their attention from the true purpose of the study. Subsequently, participants were then presented with a series of photographs of individuals, and were asked to indicate the likelihood that each individual was the one featured in each of the crime stories examined using scales ranging from 1 (Definitely Not Pictured in the News Story) to 7 ( Definitely Was Pictured in the News Story). Among the photographs included in this task, three photographs were of African American men who had not been included in the stories, and three were of white men who had not been included in the stories. Hence, the "correct" answer for these photographs was "1" (Definitely Not Pictured), with higher scores indicating greater misidentification. As predicted, the results revealed that participants were more likely to misidentify black men as the suspect when the actual story contained a photograph of a black man ( M = 3.22, SD = 0.82) than a white man ( M = 2.50, SD = 1 .03), t( 59) = 6.14, p < .001. On the other hand, similar patterns were revealed for misidentification of white men, with participants more likely to misidentify white men when the actual story contained a photograph of a white man ( M = 3.10, SD = 0.97) than a black man (M = 2.51, SD = 1 .01), t(59) = 4.00, p < .001. While these findings may appear to suggest that viewers' mistaken identification of suspects is equitable in terms of racial imagery, it is important to keep in mind that in this study, blacks and whites were represented as criminals in equal proportions, with care being taken to hold all other variables constant (e.g., the manner in which the suspect was portrayed). In contrast, the aforementioned con- tent analytic studies of actual crime portrayals demonstrate that African American men are over-represented as criminals in the news and are portrayed in ways that make them appear particularly dangerous and guilty. Hence, our findings that black suspects in the news resulted in greater misidentification of black men as suspects (regardless of white misidentification) suggest that the disparity of misidentification between black and white men outside of controlled laboratory conditions employed here may be particularly pronounced. In addition to this finding, this study also found evidence that black men were especially likely to be misidentified with violent rather than nonviolent crime (see Figure 1). Specifically, our analysis revealed an interaction between the race of the person in the identification task and the type of crime being recalled, F (1,58) = 15.76, eta2 = .21, p < .001. That is, this study found than when the story was about a violent crime, black men were particularly likely to be misidentified as the individual who was pictured. In contrast, white men were somewhat more likely to be misidentified with nonviolent than violent stories, though this difference did not reach statistical significance.

AT – PRF no solve

Performative revolutionary fiat negates state legitimacy which disrupts the spatial organization of power including restrictions to movement Butler ‘18 (Judith Butler, writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist, “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly”, First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015), pg. 117-119, MB)

Many of the massive demonstrations and modes of resistance we have seen in the last months not only produce a space of appearance; they seize upon an already established space permeated by existing power, seeking to sever the relations between the public space, the public square, and the existing regime. So the limits of the political are exposed and the link between the theater of legitimacy and public space is severed; that theater is no longer unproblematically housed in public space, since public space now occurs in the midst of another action, one that displaces the power that claims legitimacy precisely by taking over the field of its effects. Simply put, the bodies on the street redeploy the space of appearance in order to contest and negate the existing forms of political legitimacy- and just as they sometimes fill or take over public space, the material history of those structures also works on them, becoming part of their very action, remaking a history in the midst of its most concrete and sedimented artifices. These are subjugated and empowered actors who seek to wrest legitimacy from an existing state apparatus that depends upon the regulation of the public space of appearance for its theatrical self-constitution. In wresting that power, a new space is created, a new “between” of bodies, as it were, that lays claim to existing space through the action of a new alliance, and those bodies are seized and animated by those existing spaces in the very acts by which they reclaim and resignify their meanings. Such a struggle intervenes in the spatial organization of power, which includes the allocation and restriction of spatial locations in which and by which any population may appear, which implies a spatial regulation of when and how the “popular will” may appear. This view of the spatial restriction and allocation of who may appear—in effect, of who may become a subject of appearance—suggests an operation of power that works through both foreclosure and differential allocation.

DA - Politics of Innocence

Civil society functions as a politics of innocence, rendering revolutionary and insurgent politics unimaginable. Innocence becomes a necessary precondition for the launching of mass antiracist political campaigns as blackness itself is considered synonymous with guilt. Black social death is achieved via coded discourses of “criminality.” There is no innocence to blackness, a protest to the norm is revolutionary. Wang ‘18 (Jackie Wang is a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster, and PhD student at Harvard University. Her latest work, The Twitter Hive Mind Is Dreaming is forthcoming at Robocup Press. In Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e)/Intervention, 2018), Wang examines contemporary incarceration techniques and illustrates various aspects of the carceral continuum, including the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory and algorithmic policing, the political economy of fees and fines, and cybernetic governance. 02/23/2018, “Carceral Capitalism,” ISBN: 9781635900026, pg 260-270)//pshah

While I was reading the local newspaper, I came across a story that caught my attention. The article was about a seventeen-year-old boy from Baltimore named Isaiah Simmons who died in a juvenile facility in 2007, when five to seven counselors suffocated him while restraining him for hours. When Simmons was unresponsive, the counselors dumped his body in the snow and did not call for medical assistance for more than forty minutes. In late March 2012, the case was thrown out. None of the counselors involved in his murder were charged. An article I found online about the case was titled “Charges Dropped Against 5 In Juvenile Offender’s Death.”² By emphasizing that it was a juvenile offender who died, the article immediately flags Simmons as a criminal, signaling to readers that his death is inconsequential and thus not worthy of sympathy. Every comment posted on the article was crude and contemptuous. The general sentiment was that his death was no big loss to society. The news about the case being thrown out barely registered at all.³There was no public outcry, no call to action, no discussion of the myriad issues bound up with Simmons’s death: youth incarceration, racism, the privatization of prisons and jails (he died at a private facility), medical neglect, state violence, and so forth. For weeks after reading the article, I contemplated these questions: What is the difference between Trayvon Martin and Isaiah Simmons? Which cases galvanize activists into action, and which are ignored? In the wake of the Jena Six, Troy Davis, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, and other high-profile cases,⁴ I have taken note of the patterns that structure political appeals, particularly the way innocence becomes a necessary precondition for the launching of mass antiracist political campaigns. These campaigns often focus on prosecuting and harshly punishing the individuals responsible for overt and locatable acts of racist violence, thus positioning the state and the criminal justice system as allies and protectors of the oppressed. When the “innocence” of a black victim is not established, he or she will not become a suitable spokesperson for the cause.⁵ An empathetic structure of feeling based on appeals to innocence has come to ground contemporary antiracist politics. Within this framework, empathy can be established only when a person meets the standards of authentic victimhood and moral purity, which requires black people, in the words of Frank Wilderson, to be cleansed of “niggerization.” Social, political, cultural, and legal recognition happens only when a person is thoroughly whitewashed, neutralized, and made unthreatening. The “spokesperson” activist model, which involves the isolation of cases considered “exemplary,” also tends to emphasize the individual rather than the collective nature of racist injuries. Framing oppression in terms of individual actors is a liberal tactic that dismantles collective responses to oppression and diverts attention from structural violence. Using “innocence” as the foundation to address antiblack violence is an appeal to the white imaginary, though these arguments are certainly made by people of color as well. Relying on this framework re-entrenches a logic that criminalizes race and constructs docile subjects. A liberal politics of recognition can only

reproduce a guilt-innocence schematization that fails to grapple with the fact that there is an a priori association of blackness with guilt (criminality). Perhaps association is too generous—there is a flat-out conflation of the terms. As Wilderson notes in “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” the cop’s answer to the black subject’s question—why did you shoot me?—follows a tautology: “I shot you because you are Black; you are Black because I shot you.”⁶ In the words of Frantz Fanon, the cause is the consequence.⁷ Not only are black men assumed guilty until proven innocent, blackness itself is considered synonymous with guilt.⁸ Authentic victimhood, passivity, moral purity, and the adoption of a whitewashed position are necessary for recognition in the eyes of the state. Wilderson, quoting N.W.A., notes that “a nigga on the warpath” cannot be a proper subject of empathy. ⁹ The desire for recognition compels political subjects to seek alliance with the state and to sacrifice themselves in order to meet the standards of victimhood. This is also the logic of rape-revenge narratives: only after a woman is thoroughly degraded can audiences begin to tolerate her rage (outside of films and books, violent women are not tolerated even when they have the “moral” grounds to fight back, as exemplified by the high rates of women who are imprisoned or sentenced to death for murdering or assaulting abusive partners). Although it is sometimes necessary to make “innocence” appeals for strategic reasons—to win a case or to influence public opinion—these strategies become problematic when they reinforce a framework that renders revolutionary and insurgent politics unimaginable. The prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore notes that “while saving anyone is a good thing to do, to try to assert innocence as a key political organizing strategy is to turn a blind eye to the system and how it works.”¹⁰ For Gilmore, the problem “is not to figure out how to determine or prove the innocence of certain individuals or certain classes of people, but to attack the general system through which criminalizationproceeds.”¹¹These appeals to innocence are also anachronistic because they do not address the transformation and reorganization of racist strategies in the post–civil rights era. A politics of innocence is only capable of acknowledging examples of direct, individualized acts of racist violence while obscuring the racism of a putatively color-blind liberalism that operates on a structural level. Posing the issue in terms of personal prejudice feeds the fallacy of racism as an individual intention, feeling, or personal prejudice, though there is certainly a psychological and affective dimension of racism that exceeds the individual in that it is shaped by social norms and media representations. The liberal color-blind paradigm of racism submerges race beneath the “commonsense” logic of crime and punishment.¹² This effectively conceals racism because it is not considered racist to be against crime. Such cases as the execution of Troy Davis—in which the courts come under scrutiny for racial bias—also legitimize state violence by treating such cases as exceptional. The political response to the murder of Troy Davis does not challenge the assumption that communities need to clean up their streets by rounding up criminals, for it relies on the claim that Davis is not one of those feared criminals, but an innocent black man. Innocence, however, is often code for nonthreatening to white civil society. Troy Davis is differentiated from other black men—the bad ones—and the legal system is diagnosed as being infected with racism, masking the fact that the legal system is the constituent mechanism through which racial violence is carried out (wishful last-minute appeals to the right to a fair trial reveal this, for they assume that trials are intended to be fair). The state is imagined to be deviating from its intended role as protector of the people rather than being the primary perpetrator. H. Rap Brown provides a sobering reminder that “Justice means ‘just-uswhite-folks.’ There is no redress of grievance for Blacks in this country.”¹³ While there are countless examples of overt racism, black social (and physical) death is primarily achieved via coded discourses of “criminality” and mediated forms of state violence carried out by an impersonal carceral apparatus (a matrix of police, prisons, the legal system, prosecutors, parole boards, prison guards, probation officers, and so forth). In other words, incidents where a biased individual attacks or discriminates against a person of color can be identified as racism to “conscientious persons,” but the racism underlying the systematic imprisonment of black Americans under the pretense of the War on Drugs is more difficult to locate and

generally remains invisible because it is spatially confined. When it is visible, it fails to arouse public sympathy, even among the black leadership. As Loïc Wacquant, a scholar of the carceral state, asks, “What is the chance that white Americans will identify with Black convicts when even the Black leadership has turned its back on them?”¹⁴ The abandonment of black convicts by civil rights organizations is reflected in the history of these organizations. From 1975 to 1986, the NAACP and the Urban League identified imprisonment as a central issue, and the disproportionate incarceration of black Americans was understood as a problem that was structural and political. Spokespersons from the civil rights organizations related imprisonment to the general confinement of black Americans. Imprisoned black men were, as Wacquant notes, portrayed inclusively as “brothers, uncles, neighbors, friends.”¹⁵ Between 1986 and 1990 there was a dramatic shift in the rhetoric and official policy of the NAACP and the Urban League that exemplifies the turn to a politics of innocence. By the early 1990s, the NAACP had dissolved its prison program and ceased publication of articles about rehabilitation and post-imprisonment issues. Meanwhile, these organizations began to embrace the rhetoric of individual responsibility and a tough-on-crime stance that encouraged blacks to collaborate with police to get drugs out of their neighborhoods, even going as far as endorsing harsher sentences for minors and recidivists. Black convicts, initially a part of the “we” articulated by civil rights groups, became them. Wacquant writes, “This [hesitation to advocate for Black convicts] is further reinforced by the fact, noted long ago by W. E. B. Du Bois, that the tenuous position of the black bourgeoisie in the socioracial hierarchy rests critically on its ability to distance itself from its unruly lower-class brethren: to offset the symbolic disability of blackness, middle-class African Americans must forcefully communicate to whites that they have ‘absolutely no sympathy and no known connections with any black man who has committed a crime.’”¹⁶ When the black leadership and middle-class blacks differentiate themselves from poorer blacks, they feed into a notion of black exceptionalism that is used to dismantle antiracist struggles. This class of exceptional blacks (Barack Obama, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell) supports the image of America as a post-racial society. The root of this shift in the rhetoric and policy of civil rights organizations is perhaps a fear of affirming the conflation of blackness and criminality. However, by not advocating for prisoners, they shore up and extend the penal state by individualizing, depoliticizing, and decontextualizing the issue of “crime and punishment” and vilifying those most likely to be subjected to racialized state violence. This disidentification with poor, urban black Americans is not limited to black men, but also affects black women, who are vilified via the figure of the Welfare Queen, portrayed as a lazy, sexually irresponsible burden on society (particularly hardworking white Americans). The welfare state and the penal state complement each other, as revealed by Bill Clinton’s 1998 statements denouncing prisoners and ex-prisoners who receive welfare or Social Security: he condemns former prisoners who receive welfare assistance, accusing them of deviously committing “fraud and abuse” against “working families” who “play by the rules.”¹⁷ Furthermore, this complementarity is gendered. Black women are the shock absorbers of the social crisis created by the penal state: the incarceration of black men profoundly increases the burden put on black women, who are forced to perform more waged and unwaged (caring) labor, raise children alone, and who are punished by the state when their husbands or family members are convicted of crimes (for example, a family cannot receive housing assistance if someone in the household has been convicted of a drug felony). The reconfiguration of the welfare state under the Clinton administration (which imposed stricter regulations on welfare recipients) further intensified the backlash against poor black women. In this view, the welfare state is the apparatus used to regulate poor black women who are not subjected to regulation by the penal state that is directed chiefly at black men—though it is important to note that the feminization of poverty and the punitive turn in nonviolent crime policy led to a 400 percent increase in the female prison population between 1980 and the late 1990s.¹⁸Racialized patterns of incarceration and the assault on the urban poor are not seen as a form of racist state violence because, in the eyes of the

public, convicts (along with their families and associates) deserve such treatment. The politics of innocence directly fosters this culture of vilification, even when it is used by civil rights organizations.

Blackness is a preconceived notion of danger; whiteness sees violence rather than resistance and fails to see that its rather the system built in opposition to black bodies. The 1AC is an embodiment of the negation of a politics of innocence which departs from enabling white civil society to purify and morally ennoble itself. Wang ‘18 (Jackie Wang is a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster, and PhD student at Harvard University. Her latest work, The Twitter Hive Mind Is Dreaming is forthcoming at Robocup Press. In Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e)/Intervention, 2018), Wang examines contemporary incarceration techniques and illustrates various aspects of the carceral continuum, including the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory and algorithmic policing, the political economy of fees and fines, and cybernetic governance. 02/23/2018, “Carceral Capitalism,” ISBN: 9781635900026, pg 291-295)//pshah

The insistence on innocence results in a refusal to hear those labeled guilty or defined by the state as “criminals.” When we rely on appeals to innocence, we foreclose a form of resistance that is outside the limits of law and instead ally ourselves with the state. This ignores that the “enemies” in the War on Drugs and the War on Terror are racially defined, and that gender and class delimit who is worthy of legal recognition. When the Occupy movement was in full swing, I read countless articles and encountered participants who were eager to police the politics and tactics of those who did not fit into a nonviolent model of resistance. The tendency was to construct a politics from the position of the disenfranchised white middle-class and to remove, deny, and differentiate the Occupy movement from the “delinquent” or radical elements by condemning property destruction, confrontations with cops, and—in cases like Baltimore— anticapitalist and anarchist analyses. When Amy Goodman asked Maria Lewis from Occupy Oakland about the “violent” protestors after more than four hundred arrests made during an attempt to occupy the vacant Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center in Oakland, I was pleased that Lewis affirmed rather than excised people’s anger: AMY GOODMAN: Maria Lewis, what about some of the reports that said that the protesters were violent? MARIA LEWIS: Absolutely. There was a lot of anger this weekend, and I think that the anger the protesters showed in the streets this weekend and the fighting back that did take place was reflective of a larger anger in Oakland that is boiling over at the betrayal of the system. I think that people, day by day, are realizing, as the economy gets worse and worse, as unemployment gets worse and worse, as homelessness gets worse and worse, that the economic system, that capitalism in Oakland, is failing us. And people are really angry about that, and they’re beginning to fight back. And I think that’s a really inspiring thing.⁵⁷ Although the comment still frames the issue in terms of capitalist crisis, the response skillfully rearticulates the terms of the discussion by a) affirming the actions immediately, b) refusing to purify the movement by integrating rather than excluding the “violent”⁵⁸ elements, c) legitimizing the anger and desires of the protestors, and d) shifting the attention to the structural nature of the problem rather than making moral judgments about individual actors. In other words, it rejects a politics of innocence that reproduces the “good,” compliant citizen. Stokely Carmichael put it well when he said, “The way the oppressor tries to stop the oppressed from using violence as a means to attain liberation is to raise ethical or moral questions about violence. I want to state emphatically here that violence in any society is neither moral nor is it ethical. It is neither right, nor is it wrong. It is just simply a question of who has the power to legalize violence.”⁵⁹ The practice of isolating morally agreeable cases in order to highlight racist violence

requires passively suffered black death and panders to a framework that strengthens and conceals current paradigms of racism. Although it may be factually true to state that Trayvon Martin was unarmed, we should not state this with a righteous sense of satisfaction. What if Martin were armed? What if he was able to defend himself? Had the situation resulted in the death of George Zimmerman rather than of Martin, it is unlikely that the public would have been as outraged and galvanized into action to the same extent. Prior to Zimmerman’s acquittal, many people on the left had faith that there would be “justice for Trayvon,” as though prison time for Zimmerman could somehow compensate for Martin’s death. When we build politics around standards of legitimate victimhood that require passive sacrifice, we will build a politics that requires a dead black boy to make its point. It’s not surprising that the nation or even the black leadership have failed to rally behind CeCe McDonald, a black trans woman who was convicted of second-degree manslaughter after a group of racist, transphobic white people attacked her and her friends, cutting McDonald’s cheek with a glass bottle and provoking an altercation that led to the death of a white man who had a swastika tattoo. Trans women of color who are involved in confrontations that result in the death of their attackers are criminalized for their survival. When Akira Jackson, a black trans woman, stabbed and killed her boyfriend after he beat her with a baseball bat, she was given a four-year sentence for manslaughter. Cases that involve an “innocent” (passive), victimized black person also provide an opportunity for the liberal white conscience to purify and morally ennoble itself by taking a position against racism. We need to challenge the use of certain raced and gendered subjects as instruments of emotional relief for white civil society, or as bodies that can be displaced for the sake of providing analogies to amplify white suffering (“slavery” being the favored analogy). Although we must emphasize that Troy Davis did not kill police officer Mark MacPhail, maybe we also should question why the public is morally outraged by the killing of a cop and not the 136 unarmed black Americans murdered by police officers, security guards, and self-appointed vigilantes in 2012 alone. Talking about these murders will not undo them. Having the “right line” cannot alter reality if we do not put our bodies where our mouths are. As Spivak says, “it can’t become our goal to keep watching our language.”⁶⁰Rejecting the politics of innocence is not about assuming a certain theoretical posture or adopting a certain perspective—it is a lived position.

AFRICOM 1AR

AT – FW

AT – Generic

Counter-Interp: Teams can use traditional fiat – performative revolutionary fiat is a only a reinterpretation of fiat that should be added to how we debate. Solves their offense – they don’t lose any benefits to their impacts.

Disconnection DA – their fw arguments disconnect our revolution and protest from social change and parallel democratic structures that encourage less effective protests

An aff ballot changes the course of debate as a site of resistance – protesting requires that the community become involved in recognizing the invalidity of the state and learning how we can respond

AT – Ground

No link – Our interp still maintains core of the topic affsShifting Ground DA – our interp shifts neg ground to a new realm of criticism that is larger than your interp’s.

AT – Predictability

Imagination DA – the community norm that relies on traditional notions of fiat, predictability, ground, and education plagues the imagination and future of debate and forces out revolutionary struggles in the face of violence

AT – Limits

Theatrical Performance DA — an honest assessment of the community opens potential for debate to become a more valuable training ground that doesn’t confine itself to “predictability, limits, or ground”. Endorse our evolutionary scholarship to revolutionize the approach to revolution.

AT – Fairness

Academic Restlessness DA—academic restlessness must dominate debate, to make it impossible to understand the common enemy that can unite traditional and critical debaters. Our oppression affords us a system to overthrow and we must model our training grounds off it.

AT – Education

(apparently the same as limits)Theatrical Performance DA — an honest assessment of the community opens potential for debate to become a more valuable training ground that doesn’t confine itself to “predictability, limits, or ground”. Endorse our evolutionary scholarship to revolutionize the approach to revolution.

AT – General Theory

Talk with your 2a on which ones of these DA’s you’re going to extend

AT – TVA

Contentment DA—Affirming revolutionary scholarship forces debate out of its comfort zone that allows for continual suppression of revolutions that create social change – the TVA reverts back to that comfort zone

AT – SSD

Inclusivity DA—SSD promulgates broken theories of change, disconnecting our protest from social change. Their “inclusivity” dooms the protest to failure. The system regulates revolutions by coopting them into more “acceptable” or docile

AT – Drop Them

Battleground DA—Drop their traditional scholarship. Debate is the battle ground for resistance in the face of oppression which can only happen through changing the normative practices of debate centered around traditional standards and practices.

Extra AFRICOM Cards

AFRICOM Brief

- The Africa Program assesses how the United States can best utilize the U.S. Africa Command in combination with civilian agencies to address security challenges in Africa. The CSIS Africa and International Security Programs have closely tracked the establishment and development of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) since 2007 by engaging in dialogue with U.S. policymakers, AFRICOM officials, and African leaders.

- The territory of the command consists of all of the African continent except for Egypt- The US arms outposts in Africa to maintain its security interests:

o Neutralize al-Shabaab and transition the security responsibilities of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) to the Federal Government of Somalia (FGS)

o Degrade violent extremist organizations in the Sahel Maghreb and contain instability in Libya

o Contain and degrade Boko Haramo Interdict illicit activity in the Gulf of Guinea and Central Africa with willing and capable

African partnerso Build peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance and disaster response capacity of African

partners- US arms presence is used to essentially police the region

Summary of the entire history of AFRICOM.Fah ’10 (Gilbert Fah, Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow, March 2010, “Dealing with Africom: The Political Economy of Anger and Protest”, The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol.3, no.6, March 2010, http://www.jpanafrican.org/docs/vol3no6/3.5DealingwithAfricom.pdf) \\EG

A brief background of the US military is necessary to better understand why and how Africom came into being. The military cartography of Africa prior to Africom was informed by Washington’s Cold War lens of geopolitics. U.S. defense operations for Africa were overseen by three different commands: the European Command (EUCOM) based in Stuttgart, Germany, which covered West, Central, and Southern Africa; Central Command (CENTCOM) located in Tampa, Florida-USA whose main field of coverage is the Middle East but also the Horn of Africa; and the Pacific Command (PACOM) located in Honolulu, Hawaii-USA which covered the islands of the western coast of Africa.1 The birth place of humanity was a low priority for America during the Cold War despite the numerous proxy wars it tacitly or directly supported. The Cold War ended in 1989 and the logic and rationales governing it became obsolete. Africa had progressively entered the radar screen of the US as “a continent emerging in importance, 22 percent of the earth’s surface, … approaching 800 million inhabitants, growing in political clout… rich in human capital and natural resources.”2 America’s policy planners wanted to reconstruct African military cartography to align with America’s post-Cold War geopolitical interests. Africa was now seen as a unique “region” and a new command was to represent “a realignment of our organizational construct on how we deal with Africa. And so instead of having three commanders that deal with Africa as a third or a fourth priority, we will have a single commander that deals with it, day in day out, as his first and only priority.”3 Africom was officially announced by former President George W. Bush on February 6, 2007. According to its genitor, Africom is a unified command that aims to bring together all the security programs the United States supports on the continent. The Pentagon expected the new command to be headquartered inside the continent and fully operational by the fall of 2008. However, under a cloud of

heavy international criticism and African skepticism, the US military failed to find a country on the continent willing to host its new pet project. Liberia offered to host the new command but did not match the Pentagon’s strategic requirements. Africom is “temporarily” based in Stuttgart-Germany. It is worth noting that Egypt, which is geographically part of the African continent, will remain associated with America’s Central Command. This is due to Egypt’s strategic importance to US foreign policy in the Middle East. Egypt’s exclusion from Africom is proof that Africom’s primary goals are military, geopolitical, and economic; not diplomatic or humanitarian as the official rhetoric insists. Africom’s stated mission is to support humanitarian assistance, civic action, professional development of militaries, assistance in border/maritime security, and natural disaster response. This support is bilateral, sub-regional (ECOWAS for example) and multilateral via the African Union. Such a broad and bold plan of engagement aroused suspicions among African governments. These suspicions were reinforced by America’s negative global image under former President George W Bush. The US Military held several informational sessions around the African continent to explain the goals and philosophy of Africom in hopes of finding a host country for the command. Official and unofficial contacts were made with African leaders. Nigeria, South Africa and Libya, were among Africom’s most outspoken critics and ostensibly stood against the project. Skeptics of Africom cite previous US military forays in Africa which led to a disproportionate development of military institutions relative to instruments of civilian rule. Others see Africom as a naked attempt to exert American control over Africa’s valuable natural resources.4 Many Africans simply believe Africom will hurt Africa5 . There is widespread suspicion (and rightfully so) that America’s policy is primarily driven by a need for resources. The high profile US interventions in the Horn of Africa, Middle East, and Asia—which are perceived as resource grabs—have left Africans wary. Furthermore, Africa already contains many volatile regions where militarization could worsen instability and/or undermine peace-building efforts. For America, Africom represents militarization for benign purposes. But how far back does American militarization span on the continent? What are the results of previous military adventures in Africa? And how has American militarization impacted local cultures of violence?

Performances

Songs

“Police State” by Dead Prez“Me against the World” by 2pac“Behind Enemy Lines” by Dead Prez“I’m a African” by Dead Prez“Land of the Free” by Joey Bada$$“FOR MY PEOPLE” by Joey Bada$$“Y U DON'T LOVE ME? (MISS AMERIKKKA)” by Joey Bada$$“AMERIKKKAN IDOL” by Joey Bada$$“Soldiers Prayer AM” by Outlawz and Dead Prez“Runaway Slave” by Outlawz and Dead Prez“A BOY IS A GUN*” by Tyler the Creator

Asian Performance

US’s military Presence in Africa through AFRICOM is masked through the “Asia pivot” that attempts to refocus China at the center of foreign discourse Gaudilliere ’14 (Pierre Gaudilliere, lieutenant-colonel of French air force and winner of the Foreign Area Officers Association writing award at the Air War College, Foreigner area officer association, 2014, “FROM PIVOT TO SYMMETRY? INTEGRATING AFRICA IN THE REBALANCE TO ASIA”, http://www.faoa.org/Resources/Documents/GAUDILLIERE.pdf, DMW)

Africa, The “Great Forgotten One” Of The Pivot... To Asia First, the administration has quickly reacted with a rhetorical move in order to diminish the negative connotation inherent to the word pivot. The euphemistic use of rebalance, or refocus to Asia tries to counter the impression that the U.S. is pivoting away from other places. Nonetheless, this effort cannot hide the downgrading of Africa contained in official expressions of U.S. grand strategy since 2011. For instance, the Defense Strategic Guidance of 2011 uses the word “Africa” only once throughout its sixteen pages,30 compared to twenty-four appearances in the 2010 National Security Strategy.31 Moreover, symbolically enough, Africa is addressed as the last item on the White House Foreign Policy webpage.32 The 2012 Presidential Policy Directive on U.S. strategy toward sub-Saharan Africa partly fills this rhetorical gap, but its implementation remains hinged on the same structural contradictions. In fact, the translation of U.S. strategic motives into operational objectives leads to selective engagement, as opposed to a holistic strategy that addresses challenges on the whole African continent. In this vein, the 2013 presidential trip to Africa epitomizes two things. First, it underscores the position of Africa on the American agenda. It is the only appearance of Barak Obama on this continent since 2009, a relative “absence” with political implications: “when we talk about U.S.-Africa policy [...] we trace it back to Bill Clinton, you trace it back to George W. Bush, and very little of President Obama. In that sense, [...] Obama has not been felt in Africa.”33 Second, by choosing Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania, the U.S. shows its eagerness to trade with democratic African nations, more than its will to address the root problem of putting illiberal countries and failing states on the road to free market democracy. Moreover, the military component of American engagement in Africa seems also trapped in a strategic “catch-22”. Indeed, AFRICOM has had to face existential dilemmas since its creation in 2008. A spin-off from EUCOM, sharing the continent with CENTCOM (which maintains its “traditional relationship”34 with Egypt),its autonomy has always faced difficulties. Symbolically, the location of AFRICOM’s headquarters in Stuttgart followed a controversy about its implantation on the African continent,35 hampering its credibility. Operationally, it has been heavily dependent on other commands (notably EUCOM and CENTCOM) and has faced subsequent difficulties when leading Operation Odyssey Dawn over Libya.36 In times of financial constraints, the idea of AFRICOM’s dissolution has even surfaced within a broader realignment of the COCOMs.37 These rumors have seen no concretization yet. In fact, some analysts even characterize an American “surge in Africa” in 2013:38 special operations have taken place in Somalia and Libya, and the U.S. increases its mentoring of African troops for counter- terrorism.39 However, the same analysts worry that the emphasis of U.S. Africa policy tends to focus on military actions, thereby narrowing the grand design of a U.S. Africa strategy. Indeed, if only the military part of the 2012 U.S. Strategy for Sub-Saharan Africa is being implemented, this focus on hard power appears inadequate in comparison to China’s broad approach of its African affairs.

Renewed American investment in containment of Africa through programs like Africom is plausible only due to the shift from the “Asia pivot” to Africa in which those weapons and resources are shifted to Africa.Gaudilliere ’14 (Pierre Gaudilliere, lieutenant-colonel of French air force and winner of the Foreign Area Officers Association writing award at the Air War College, Foreigner area officer association, 2014, “FROM PIVOT TO SYMMETRY? INTEGRATING AFRICA IN THE REBALANCE TO ASIA”, http://www.faoa.org/Resources/Documents/GAUDILLIERE.pdf, DMW)

Either defining or dismissing the concept, analysts cannot resist invoking a “new Cold War”1 between China and the U.S.. The position of Africa in this paradigm remains crucial, as it was during the bipolar era. Realists tend to put it in an ontological perspective: “Evidence that China was expanding its interactions with [...] Africa [...] raised the specter of a new global rivalry for power and influence.”2 Moreover, avoiding a too simplistic analogy with the USSR, they also underline a unique consequential feature: “But China is dependent on overseas markets and raw materials, unlike the autarkic Soviet Union, which will give it powerful incentives to interfere in many places round the globe”3.For this school of thought, China’s “development will lead to more friction with the United States.” Less euphemistically, although “[a] war between China and America is far from inevitable, [ if ] inexperienced, reckless or over-confident leaders come to power on either side, the danger of war will rise.”4 The appropriate strategy, in the same vein, encompasses an actualized version of containment, for “America’s most natural and instinctive response to China’s challenge is to push back.”5 However, this offensive reaction renders America’s famous pivot to Asia either incompatible or unsustainable. Accordingly, John J. Mearsheimer describes two global containment scenarios that this essay applies in regards to Africa. First, if the pivot to Asia allows “China [to] become a regional hegemon [in this case, in Africa], the U.S. simply may not be able to contain it.”6 From this declinist point of view, the competition is already lost, as a natural evolution of the global balance of powers. In that case, the American laissez-faire attitude that necessarily derives from it contradicts the proactive stance of current American projects for Africa7. The second hypothesis assumes that “the Chinese economy will continue to rise but not at such a rapid clip, in which case the U.S. will be in a good position to contain China.”8 Such a hard power showdown is also self-defeating. Indeed, the success of containment supposes a renewed U.S. commitment in Africa, with strength and will. The former requires massive economic and military resources, which are, by presidential choice and budget constraints, directed towards East Asia. The latter suffers from the fact that, in the economic and diplomatic realm, “[...] the stakes for China in [Africa] will always, in the end, be higher than for America.”9

The model minority myth perpetuates the anti-black narrative that Black suffering is caused by their inability to pull themselves up by their bootstrapsNakagawa 13

[Scot Nakagawa, credentials, July 14, 2013, “So, I Ask You, What If Trayvon Martin Was Asian?”, HYPERLINK "http://www.racefiles.com/2013/07/14/so-i-ask-you-what-if-trayvon-martin-was-asian/"http://www.racefiles.com/2013/07/14/so-i-ask-you-what-if-trayvon-martin-was-asian/, Accessed: 07/02/2019, KW]

Last year, I asked the question, What If Trayvon Martin was Asian? The post, included below, is timely now in light of all of the warnings against rioting in reaction to the verdict in the George Zimmerman case that all seem to target African Americans. The sentiment seems to be that when African Americans don’t get their way, violence is likely to follow. But the reality is that the most damaging race riots in U.S. history have been led by whites against people of color. In 1923, in Levy County, Florida, a white woman accused a black man of sexually assaulting her. Over two-hundred whites descended upon the city of Rosewood, the town in which the alleged assailant resided, and incited a riot that resulted in the deaths of at least six blacks and two whites. The riot also completely destroyed Rosewood which was later abandoned. In Bellingham, Washington in 1907, hundreds of whites marched against Sikh immigrant workers, demanding they be fired immediately. When their demands weren’t met, a mob of 150 whites rioted, assaulting Sikh workers and corralling them into the basement of Bellingham City Hall. Police officers cooperated with the rioters, using the same rationale that would be used 40 years later to imprison Japanese Americans in concentration camps: that holding the Sikhs in captivity would reduce violence. No rioters were brought to trial, and their actions were widely supported by white people in Bellingham, some of whom claimed Sikh men had insulted white women. In 1951, 4,000 whites rioted to srop a black family from moving into the all-white Cicero neighborhood of Chicago. Police did next to nothing to stop the rioters who also stoned the firemen who called in to put out the fires started by the rioters. It took the Illinois National Guard to finally put an end to the violence. And these are just a few incidents in which angry whites have rioted, taking the lives of both white people and people of color in an effort to preserve white privileges. And, as long as the list of historic events of this sort is, it doesn’t even begin to address the history of organized terrorism against people of color waged through white-led organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. Yet, in spite of all of this evidence of potential violence by whites, there has been no speculation concerning riots in response to a guilty verdict in the Zimmerman trial, and all concerns of a post-not guilty verdict center on Blacks. Makes you go hmmm, doesn’t it? But what if Trayvon Martin was Asian? Here’s what I had to say about that last year: In a Daily Kos article, Laurence Lewis asks the provocative question, “What if Trayvon Martin had been white and George Zimmerman were Black?” I’m guessing you get the point. Clearly, if the races were reversed, things would be very, very different. But this got me to thinking, what if Trayvon Martin had been Asian, say Japanese American for example? Would he have been profiled as a potential menace? Would he have provoked George Zimmerman to say, as revealed on the 911 recording, “These a**holes always get away”? I’m guessing, no. Moreover, a Japanese American Trayvon would be exempt from the kind of character assassination being attempted by right wingers. No one would be combing his school records for evidence that he was a troublemaker. And if it turned out he was once caught with a little pot, it’s not likely he’d be labeled a drug dealer. And would White conservatives be defending the adult Zimmerman by presenting evidence that an Asian minor, described by his teacher as a cheerful A and B student, was suspended from school? I doubt it. Nor would Bill O’Reilly speculate that an innocent verdict for Zimmerman “could very well lead to violence as we saw in the Rodney King case.” The Japanese American community up in arms rioting is not exactly the nightmare vision keeping conservative white folks up at night. In fact, imagining the victim of this tragedy as Asian American makes our society’s negative stereotyping of African Americans especially apparent. Why? Because Asian Americans are subject to a different kind of stereotype that was created as a foil to the racist, victim-blaming narrative concerning African Americans that continues to serve as a justification for attacking the welfare state. That stereotype casts Asian Americans as the model minority: a group of mathletic (though not athletic) super-achievers, overcoming prejudice and economic disadvantage, not

by protest, but through hard work and uncritical patriotism. The model minority myth popped up in the media during the Civil Rights era in a 1966 New York Times Magazine article entitled, “Success Story: Japanese American Style.” Until then, Asian Americans were mostly labeled as evil outsiders in order to justify immigration limits and Japanese American internment during World War II. But in the midst of Black uprisings and protests, the article recast Japanese Americans as a group that had quietly and politely pulled itself up by its bootstraps in spite of terrible obstacles (like being put in concentration camps because, well, you’re making white people nervous ‘cuz you’re Japanese American). The article made the claim that Japanese Americans have a strong culture that values work, family and education that prevents J.A.s from becoming a “problem minority.” Problem minority? W.T.F! But the idea caught on, and over time, the myth expanded to Asians in general. By the 1980s, Ronald Reagan twice publicly congratulated Asian Americans for their success, while smacking down African Americans for supposed dependency on welfare. And in a “some of my best friends are Black” move, Reagan used Black conservative Alan Keyes as a wing man in this strategy. Reagan’s crazy false logic says that if Asian Americans can succeed in spite of terrible obstacles, then persistent poverty among African Americans must be the product of a defect in Black culture or Black people. And while Reagan was praising Asian Americans, the architects of the Reagan revolution were confounding attempts on the part of Black people to achieve success by ginning up anti-Black racism in order to attack welfare. I’d call Reagan a genius, except, well, that would be a compliment, and I just can’t go there. Nowadays, the model minority myth is just accepted as truth, even by lots of Asians. In fact, many Asian Americans commit what they presume to be a victimless crime by taking cover behind the myth of the model minority. But there are victims, and they aren’t only non-Asians. The victims include 54% of Asian American kids who claim to be bullied at school, at least in part, as a result of stereotyping. And, it includes the members of Asian ethnic groups that haven’t been so successful, such as Bangladeshis, Laotians, Cambodians and the Hmong, all of whom have lower per capita incomes than African Americans. The model minority myth marginalizes, even makes invisible, their suffering. But the greatest danger of anti-Asian stereotyping, whether it is “positive” or not, is that it continues to hold Asian Americans separate from other people. And this makes us vulnerable to the flip side of the myth of Asian exceptionalism: the idea of Asian Americans as a threat to “American” jobs. It was this kind of stereotyping that led to the murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American man who was beaten to death by displaced auto workers in 1982 during the U.S. vs. Japan auto wars because he was mistakenly perceived to be Japanese. And, BTW, neither assailant ever did any jail time. And today, as China’s rise as an economic superpower inspires anxiety, even hatred, of the Chinese, the specter of more Vincent Chin’s ought to get us wondering, is it ever a good thing to be used, no matter what the pay off? Today, in the wake of the innocent verdict in the George Zimmerman case, I feel compelled to add this: The stereotypes that afflict African Americans and Asian Americans may be very different, but they are really flip sides of one card; a race card if you will. We would be wise to recognize this, and work together to destroy these stereotypes of the model and problem minority, or Asians may be among the Trayvon Martins looming in our future.

The model minority myth perpetuates anti-black violence – it poses African Americans as the “problem” minority that doesn’t work hard enough to overcome hardships and drives a wedge between African and Asian American communities, even though the two have a very intertwined history in AmericaKuo 15

[Rachel Kuo, writer, scholar, and educator based in New York City, journalist for Everyday Feminism, April 2, 2015, “6 Reasons We Need to Dismantle the Model Minority Myth of Those ‘Hard-Working’ Asians”, HYPERLINK "https://everydayfeminism.com/2015/04/dismantle-model-minority-myth/"https://everydayfeminism.com/2015/04/dismantle-model-minority-myth/, Accessed: 7/6/2019, KW]

“We are threatened, unlike most whites, by efforts to use our race against us.” –Frank Wu Asians are good at math and science. They’re successful economically and academically. They are hard working and high achieving. While these tropes may seem outdated, they’re still well known and recognizable. For example, the other day, just to see what Google searches were most popular, I searched: “Why are…” and the first thing that came up was: “Why are Asians so smart?” Who are these ‘Asians’ that people keep talking about? While these sorts of comments might seem like compliments or affirmations, they are actually overly simplistic generalizations that reveal the devious and exploitative nature of race and racism in the United States. And they all fall under the model minority myth – a stereotype that generalizes Asian Americans by depicting them as the perfect example of an if-they-can-do-it-so-can-you success story. This myth is also a political strategy that highlights the success of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian immigrants with a specific professional and educational background. It is a historical and presently used tool designed to protect institutionalized white supremacy and validate anti-black racism. For a long time, Asian American activists have worked to debunk the model minority myth by discussing its negative consequences and impacts. By positioning of some Asian American groups as a model of success in the United States, we also need to ask: “A model for whom?” Standing up against the myth has been a long-time call to action that has recently been re-incited by non-indictment verdicts for the murders of Eric Garner and Mike Brown, as well as the murders of many others in the Black community. This sentiment is currently amplified by social media movements like #ModelMinorityMutiny and #StartTheConversation, which push for Asian Americans to stand in solidarity alongside other communities of color and to debunk the model minority myth in everyday conversations about racism. Here are some ways to unpack why the model minority myth is used as a tool of oppression, especially one that perpetuates anti-black racism. 1. The myth fosters internalized racism within certain Asian American communities against other communities of color. In order to begin undoing the myth, we must also begin to tackle the ways we’ve internalized anti-blackness. Often, our communities use racist rhetoric that’s disguised as casual observation or advice: They just need to work harder, don’t date them, or don’t go to their neighborhood. The myth can be a protective buffer against the stigma of being seen as “outsiders.” Being cast as ‘perpetual foreigners’ fueled a desire for some Asian immigrants to survive by seeking ways to fit in and belong, to have access to the same resources and privileges as those with the most economic and political power – wealthy, white Americans. As a result, we sometimes subconsciously and consciously act protective and proud of that “model” status. If we’re the model of success, then surely we’ll be free from the persecution of those who don’t, won’t, and can’t adhere to the standard? Right? But it is through this very orchestrated messaging that we’ve

been conditioned to forget that America is stolen land. It is occupied land. It is a country built on slave labor and the colonization of its indigenous people. Yet, America, to some Asian Americans, is viewed as a “promised land,” and many of us came to the United States with a belief that there were opportunities to live free from oppression. Moving forward, we need to re-examine who gives those promises, recognize the villainy behind why they were offered, acknowledge whom we are truly taking them from, and heal from the way they have hurt our diverse communities. We need stand up against the model minority myth and demand resistance against white supremacy and that means letting go of the idea of the “American Dream.” 2. The model minority myth divides people of color and specifically serves as a tool of anti-black racism. Racial myths and stereotypes are often used as a “wedge” to divide groups, whether it’s creating unfair racial hierarchies or emphasizing elements of cultural and racial superiority and/or inferiority. In this specific case, the model minority myth is successful because it constructs Black people as a “problem” minority. It teaches some Asian Americans to compare where we are and what we’ve accomplished with where Black Americans are and what they’ve accomplished. It turns us into juxtapositions and situates us as racial binaries. Asian Americans have different histories of oppression than other communities, and it’s unfair to compare existing struggles. This is rarely talked about outside of activist communities, but some Asian immigrants were intentionally selected to be model minorities, which we’ll discuss more below. Rooted in the ‘pull yourself up by the bootstraps’ ideology, the term ‘model minority’ was popularized during the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement – this stereotype is racist to both Asian Americans and Black Americans. By creating a narrative that hard work equates success, it negates past and present structural barriers that interrupt success for different marginalized groups. The “success” of certain groups of Asian Americans was contrasted with the “failure” of African Americans. The myth comes hand in hand with other statements like, “If Asians can be successful by working hard, why can’t Black people?” It serves as a functional stereotype that uplifted the narrative of meritocracy and the American Dream. In witnessing family friends and relatives talk about their life experiences, themes of hard work and sacrifice are the most salient. My own parents believe that they have worked hard to get to where they are. At some point since they immigrated here, they have learned to believe in the narrative that anyone can find success if they just work hard enough. However, to accept any positive stereotype about the model minority myth is to also comply with a racist system that favors and privileges whiteness – and that is something that not only harms other people of color, it hurts members in our own communities. 3. The myth also serves to create “good” immigrants and “bad” immigrants. The myth creates the idea that some people deserve to be in the U.S. and some people don’t. Some immigrants are lazy. Some snuck in to take away jobs from hard-working “Americans.” Immigration policies purposefully included and excluded certain groups. For example, the 1965 Immigration Act allowed Asians, specifically East Asians, of a certain educational and class background into the United States. However, the model minority myth equates voluntary immigrant experiences with the experiences of those who have descended from slavery and those who arrived involuntarily and/or by force, such as a result of war or U.S. colonization and expansion projects abroad. My parents immigrated to the U.S. seeking political freedom and better economic and educational opportunities. Yet, these freedoms and opportunities are actually limited. They are offered as placations that obscure violent histories and institutions of slavery, colonialism, war, and genocide. These opportunities selectively include and exclude different communities’ ability to participate. 4. The myth flattens and erases Asian American identity. Asian American identities that don’t abide by the model minority rulebook are deemed invalid. Our validity and value is determined by our utility in preserving the racial hierarchy. Not only is it eugenic to ascribe character traits, like quiet, polite, and obedient, to an entire racial group, the

myth prevents coalition building within our diverse Asian American communities. There are radically different histories, experiences, and oppressions across the Asian American diaspora, yet often, we are lumped together as one ambiguous other. Whenever people think about ‘Asian’ identities, they think specifically of East Asian identities, such as Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. Other groups in the Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora are erased, and their lived realities and challenges are diminished. Assuming all Asians are the same, the myth also creates a mono-dimensional Asian American without regard to intersections. It does not take into account class, citizenship, language, gender, sexuality, ability, religion or other social identities. 5. The model minority myth is used to deny racial justice. In invoking this myth, policymakers also fail to recognize existing inequities and create access for Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) subgroups and other racial groups. The myth makes the economic and educational struggles of low-income AAPI families, Pacific Islanders, Southeast Asian refugees, undocumented immigrants, and other groups invisible – its unambiguity and inaccuracy makes it a convenient narrative that prevents solutions to racial and socioeconomic inequity. For example, only 12-13% of Hmong, Cambodian, and Laotian Americans have a college degree and less than 10% of Samoan-Americans do. 2.3 million Asian Americans are uninsured. AAPI groups suffer from physical and mental health disorders due to lack of culturally competent care. They’re left out of leadership roles at the top of organizations. Many AAPI groups also live in poverty, face labor exploitation, and are disenfranchised from the education system. Focusing on those that are doing well makes the issues of those who aren’t far less visible. We also need to begin to understand different histories and state policies in order to tackle the construction of one model minority against a problem minority. Historically, the myth was created to diminish the Black community’s demands for equal rights during the Civil Rights era. By creating a racial hierarchy, the myth also started to prevent solidarity movements between the two communities. 6. The model minority myth erases shared histories of oppression and of solidarity. There is a long legacy of solidarity and shared oppression between Asian immigrants and enslaved Black folks. Most versions of history disconnect the study of slavery from the study of Asian and Latinx immigration, leaving out stories of transracial struggle. Asian immigrants, such as the Chinese, have historically and strategically been thought of as both bridges and wedges between white folks and Black folks. For example, throughout the 19th century, Chinese “coolie” laborers, lived in an intermediary position between slavery and free labor. After the 1850’s, labor became explicitly racialized when Britain brought Chinese laborers to the Caribbean as a solution to suppress Black slave rebellion. The Chinese were given the social potential to form a “middle class family” in order to create a racial hierarchy with White people at the top, Black people at the bottom, and Chinese people somewhere in between. Black activists like Frederick Douglass link Black slavery and Chinese “coolie” labor together in system that strategically separated and these two racial identities and then exploited these divisions. Some examples of earlier solidarity movements that are erased from history books include: In the 1920s, the black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Workers issued a statement of solidarity with Filipino workers that were used to break a strike. During the 1930s, in Seattle, coalitions across Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino American communities emerged to fight against bills that would have made interracial marriage illegal. In the Mississippi Delta, Chinese workers were recruited to work cotton fields during the Reconstruction era. When contracts expired, some stayed to open grocery stories – these stores mostly sold to Black clientele and also offered an alternative to commissaries run by former plantation owners. Civil Rights movements helped end racist immigration laws against South Asians. In the late 1960s, Asian Americans were part of the Third World Liberation Strikes in Berkeley that launched the Black Power movement and inspired the Yellow Power movement. Asian American activists like Grace Lee Boggs and Yuri

Kochiyama worked hard to build interracial solidarity and worked closely with leaders like Malcolm X. As a way to destabilize the model minority myth and construct an alternate history, historian Vivek Bald examined the relationship between Bengali migrants and the African American community in Harlem and showed how racial lines between “Asian-ness” and “Black-ness” blurred. Bengali migrants experienced anti-black racism and witnessed black anti-racist organizing. This history of cross-racial solidarity allows possibilities of a connected, holistic, radical movement towards racial justice. We can begin to resist oppression by unlearning Euro-centric narratives of U.S. history. *** Although the myth has created incentives for silent complicity in a racial system with “winners” and “losers,” this complicity costs us real solidarity and justice. How can we begin to act upon a commitment to social justice and build solidarity with those that we have also oppressed in our own struggles? Drawing from the title of the critical transformative justice anthology, by Jai Dulani, Ching-in Chen, and Leah Lahshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: The revolution starts at home. This begins with reflecting on our own privilege, power, and identity. It means owning and admitting complicity in a racist system that we may feel guilty or defensive about. It means having vulnerable and sometimes difficult conversations with families, friends, and others that we love, respect, and trust. In beginning to have conversations with others like my parents, I also have realized that not engaging in the conversation is an underestimation of them. Assuming that they won’t understand or won’t care is an unfair and exclusionary characterization that they don’t have a place in racial justice movements. Asian American communities are not just bridges or wedges for other groups of color. Uniting under the term people of color allows for building solidarity between movements that also allows for different racial histories. In order to resist white supremacy in a meaningful way, we need to build coalitions across communities of color in order to share and redistribute power and combat racism rooted in anti-blackness and colonialism. Power can come from communities coming together to demand justice. This solidarity can help us more equitably redistribute resources and labor, take care of ourselves and each other, and center the needs of those most impacted by violence. By confronting the mutual enemy of systemic racism, these coalitions can disrupt history and cycles of oppression. Partnerships that are fluid, critical, holistic, intersectional, and inclusive offer solutions that include and address multiple perspectives and issues. We need to acknowledge past and present complicity and complacency in perpetuating anti-black racism and moving past guilt and desire for forgiveness. We need to truly want change. We can begin doing transformative, accountable work by knowing when to start speaking up without usurping another voice. We can have diverse, horizontal leadership across communities where all forms of contributions are valued. We can participate and show up the way others ask us to. We can begin to self-reflect on different forms of privilege and power. For me, in standing up against the model minority myth, I am also refusing further complicity in reinforcing anti-black racism.

Black Criminality

Negrophobia mobilizes black criminalization which is a weapon of white supremacy and Black de-valuation.Chaney ’15 (http://www.jpanafrican.org/docs/vol8no4/8.4-5-CCRR.pdf Cassandra Chaney, Ph.D. Associate Professor, College of Human Sciences and Education, School of Social Work, Department of Child and Family Studies, Louisiana State University//Dewayne Martin)

While this film has been characterized as a cinematic masterpiece, it greatly advanced the aims of White Supremacy. In particular, this film had a deleterious effect on African American males because they were depicted as brutes whose sole intent in life was to rape White women and destroy the White man’s way of life (Loewen, 2007). As an effective Ku Klux Klan recruitment tool, this film galvanized support for the Klan as the preeminent savior of White southern civilization. So far-reaching was the negative effects of this movie for African American people, during a private White House screening by-then President Woodrow Wilson, he reportedly described the film as painting an accurate portrait of African Americans (Loewen, 2007). In short, this film was a catalyst for most of the early 20th century media caricatures of African Americans that still exist today (Baker, 1996; Menzel- Baker, Motley, & Henderson, 2004). The aforementioned images of African Americans have contributed to what Armour (1997) calls Negrophobia, or an irrational fear of African Americans. This irrational fear has contributed to Whites’ general desensitization to African American suffering of all types as well as decreased support for social safety nets. Thus, African American males are devalued and seen as expendable (Burrell, 2010). Unfortunately, Black as a metaphor for criminality is so deeply embedded in the minds of societal members that Whites have reported seeing an African American criminal suspect at the scene of a crime when none was actually present (Chaney & Robertson, 2013b; Leverentz, 2012; Oliver & Fonash, 2002). In a study to determine the effect of network news images on viewer perceptions, Dixon (2008) found that exposure to network news depressed estimates of African American income, increased the endorsement of stereotypes of African Americans as poor and intimidating, and were associated with higher racism scores. Media characterizations of violent criminals as Black has been deeply etched in the psyche of many viewers (Dixon & Maddox, 2005; Leverentz, 2012; Oliver & Fonash, 2002; Oliver, Jackson, Moses, & Dangerfield, 2004). Such negative portrayals of African Americans in media have resulted in wanton stereotyping, extreme fear of African Americans, and African Americans with darker complexions and more Afrocentric phenotypic features being perceived as more worthy of the death penalty in research experiments (Blair, Judd, & Chapleau 2004; Chaney & Robertson, 2013b; Dixon, 2008; Eberhardt, Davies, Purdie-Vaughns, & Johnson, 2006; Maddox & Gray, 2002; Peffley & Hurwitz, 2013). All of the aforementioned serve to legitimize White supremacy, legitimize White life, and de-legitimize African American life so that incidents of police violence against African Americans are not punished nor viewed as a larger societal problem.

In the courthouse, Blackness is always already criminalized and blamed.Chaney ’15 (http://www.jpanafrican.org/docs/vol8no4/8.4-5-CCRR.pdf Cassandra Chaney, Ph.D. Associate Professor, College of Human Sciences and Education, School of Social Work, Department of Child and Family Studies, Louisiana State University//Dewayne Martin)

Since members of law enforcement play a pivotal role in maintaining White Supremacy, it should not come as a surprise that Whites are generally desensitized to police use of excessive force against African

Americans in general, and African American men, in particular. In a recent poll administered by the 2014 General Social Survey conducted by the independent research center the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, seven of ten White Americans polled posited they could envision a condition in which they would endorse an officer striking an adult male citizen. On the contrary, slightly more than four of ten African Americans (42%) and slightly less than four of ten Latinos (38%) would approve of such an action (Holland, 2015). In an analysis of accounts of more than 12,000 police homicides from 1980 to 2012 contained in the FBI’s supplementary homicide report, young African American men (ages 15- 19) were twenty-one times more likely to get killed by police than their White counterparts (Gabrielson, Jones, & Sagara, 2014). Additionally, the analysis found that African American police officers account for only 10% of police killings and 78% of their victims are African American whereas White officers killed 91% of Whites who died at the hands of police and were responsible for 68% of deaths of people of color at the hands of police (Gabrielson et al., 2014). Even more disturbing is the fact that the above figures are a gross under-representation as police departments are not required to submit records of fatal shootings. In fact, several police departments have not submitted data regarding the number and/or circumstances of fatal shootings to the FBI in years. For instance, New York City has not submitted fatal shooting data to the FBI since 2007 (Gabrielson et al., 2014). Generally speaking, police officers do not serve time for killing African American men. According to analysis by The Washington Post and Bowling Green State University, which was based on public records and interviews with law enforcement and legal experts, it was discovered that officers were only charged 54 times for killing civilians since 2005 (Kindy & Kelly, 2015). Also, more than three-fourths of the officers charged were White and two-thirds of the victims were people of color (all but two were African Americans). Forty-three of the charged involved the following variables/factors: (1) A victim was shot in the back; (2) there was a video recording of the incident; (3) incriminating testimony from fellow officers; or (4) allegations of a cover-up (Kindy & Kelly, 2015). Of the 54 instances in which officers were charged, 35 had their cases resolved (21 were acquitted or cases were dropped) and when convicted they served an average of four years behind bars, some only a few weeks (Kindy & Kelly, 2005). Consequently, juries and Whites in general have trouble seeing African Americans as “true” victims and thus may find it more difficult to acknowledge Blacks’ humanity (Feagin, 2014; Fukurai, Butler, & Krooth, 1993; Fukurai, & Krooth, 2003; Tonry, 2011). As of April 15, 2015, unofficially 255 African Americans have been killed by agents of law enforcement in the United States in 2015 (Doy News, 2015). This statistic almost certainly represents an under-estimate since there is no standardized database on police killings of African Americans (Chaney & Robertson, 2013a; Gabrielson et al. 2014). The lack of a large-scale governmental response to this incessant problem represents a major judicial blemish on the United States. When examined from a socio-historical context, it appears that the slave patrols that were a fixture of early policing in America have not ended, have gained greater force, and that ultimately, the lives of this nation’s African American citizens do not matter.

Police brutality emblemizes the inherent dangerousness present in Blackness.Chaney ’15 (http://www.jpanafrican.org/docs/vol8no4/8.4-5-CCRR.pdf Cassandra Chaney, Ph.D. Associate Professor, College of Human Sciences and Education, School of Social Work, Department of Child and Family Studies, Louisiana State University//Dewayne Martin)

There are four ways that the murders of unarmed Blacks support the superiority of Whites. For one, the murder of unarmed Blacks carries forward and solidifies the racist legacy of citizen slave patrols that were initiated during slavery (Blackmon, 2009; Dulaney, 1996; Reichel, 1999; Robertson, 2014). Even though castrations, whippings, maimings, and lynchings (Dulaney, 1996; Loewen, 2005; Robertson, 2014; Ward, 2012) were frequently used in the South as a method of policing the activities of African American men from 1880-1950, the transition of these activities to murder by guns is no less precarious. So, regardless of whether these organizations are referred to as “citizen slave patrols” or “police/law enforcement” (Dulaney, 1996; Reichel, 1999; Roediger, 2010; Skolnick & Fyfe, 1993), a societal disdain for African Americans creates a desensitization to Black suffering and death. Second, White Supremacy is maintained when juries refuse to acknowledge the victimization and humanity of African Americans (Feagin, 2014; Fukurai, Butlter, & Krooth, 1993, Tonry, 2011). Since most juries are made up of Whites, this greatly increases the likelihood that even when members of law enforcement are on trial, members of this entity will share many of the same attitudes about Blacks that police generally have. Stated another way, chances are more likely than not that White jury members will share the same disdain of African Americans that White members of law enforcement have, and not convict Whites that have murdered unarmed Blacks. Ironically, Black members of law enforcement are part of the larger White Supremacist system of law enforcement that in many cases provides these minority members the same rights and protections as Whites. In other words, since Black officers are more likely to hold negative perceptions of Blacks and to be more inclined to brutalize Black suspects than White ones (Dulaney, 1996), it stands to reason that Black officers will rarely be penalized for murdering unarmed Blacks, as well. Third, White Supremacy is maintained when Black men and women are perceived as inherently dangerous and sub-human (Donner, 2014; Karenga, 2010; Walker, 2011). A blatant example of the “Black man as dangerous and sub-human” narrative was offered by Officer Darren Wilson, who when he was allegedly assaulted by the late Michael Brown publicly proclaimed that “He looked like a demon.” Interestingly, the word “demon” is reminiscent of the Black “brute” that originally entered America’s consciousness in the D.W. Griffith 1915 film The Birth of a Nation (Loewen, 2007). During that era, the Black brute’s sole purpose in life was to rape White women and destroy the White man’s way of life. Similarly, the contemporary “demon’s” sole purpose in life is to engage in criminal behavior and actively resist law and order in society. Furthermore, the word “demon” is not only a painful and erroneous characterization of Blackness that has remained stable over time, but is a flagrant societal reminder that Blackness needs to be stopped, regardless of the cost. In this context, the Black man is triply dangerous because of his dangerous mindset, his enormous size, and his race, which is inferior to Whites. In other words, White Supremacy is sustained when Whites embrace the belief that Black men are a menace to society and that society needs to be protected from these men via murder. Finally, although it is impossible to put a monetary value on Black life, the general non- indictment of law enforcement in the murders of unarmed African Americans provides resounding evidence that little personal accountability exists for these murders. While the heads of law enforcement agencies generally proclaim these deaths as “unfortunate” or “tragic,” regrettably, as the officer was indicted in only 13 cases (17% of fatalities), a very weak connection exists between behavior and consequences for tragic behavior among members of law enforcement.

State-sponsored killing via police brutality cements America’s promises to criminalize and maim Blackness as the embodiment of danger.Curry ’14 (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/559369/summary Tommy J. Curry is a Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. His research interests are 19th century ethnology, Critical Race Theory & Black Male Studies. He is the author of The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Temple University Press 2017), which has recently won the 2018 American Book Award. He is the author of Another white Man’s Burden: Josiah Royce’s Quest for a Philosophy of Racial Empire (SUNY Press 2018), and re-published the forgotten philosophical works of William F. Ferris as The Philosophical Treatise of William H. Ferris: Selected Readings from The African Abroad or, His Evolution in Western Civilization (Rowman & Littlefield 2016).//Dewayne Martin)

The death of Michael Brown was not an aberration to American democracy, but the fulfillment of its promises of order and stability for the (white) majority. As historian A.J. William-Myers notes in Destructive Impulses: An Examination of an American Secret in Race Relations: White Violence, “white violence…was part and parcel of the socioeconomic and political structure of the American democratic process.”11 Pointing to the “enormous capacity of American democracy to absorb unprecedented level of violence and not be structurally damaged by it,” Williams-Myers concludes that anti-Black violence and the societal legitimation of the white agents responsible for the death of Black people serve to maintain societal order, and bolster the implicit ideological power of white supremacy in America. Stated differently, contrary to the democratic calls for justice currently insisted upon by activists and scholars alike, the deaths of Black men and boys in America serve to indicate the health of American democracy not its malaise. For young Black boys, maleness in a white supremacist society is fraught with difficulty and the all too likely outcome of death. Even as men, this racialized masculinity is not thought to result in a recognizable intellectual maturity, and social standing of a citizen; rather the masculinity impressed upon these Black-male-bodies is known only through its uncontrollable excess, its lack of maturation, where any and all transgressions (no matter how small or idiosyncratic) are understood to be demonstrations of the more primitive and uncivilized aspects of a not yet evolved savagery. As Geoffrey Canada, President of the Harlem Children Zone, remarks, “The image of the male as strong is mixed with the image of male as violent. Male is virile get confused with male as promiscuous. Male as adventurous equals male as reckless. Male as intelligent often gets mixed with male as arrogant, racist, and sexist … Boys find themselves pulled and tugged by forces beyond their control as they make the confusing and sometimes perilous trip to manhood.” The milieu from which Black manhood springs is saturated with racist caricatures that all seem to legitimate the fear Americans have of Black men. The images and perceptions of Black men as dangerous to society, women, and themselves ultimately create a pattern of thinking that works to justify their seemingly inevitable deaths. The relationship between anti-Black racism (the hate of Blacks) and anti-Black chauvinism (the hate of Black males as the barbarous sex) is not adequately captured by a focus on the manhood denied to Black men and boys. Such positions erroneously depict Black men as purely mimetic creatures incapable of generating identities outside of the decadent tropes offered by white patriarchy. A more correct analysis of racism and chauvinism would understand that Black male oppression and death is rooted in an imposition of a deadly masculine caricature—a barbarism justifying multiple genocidal logics and encouraging a racist misandry throughout this society and the disciplines birthed from it. Ultimately, Black male suffering is made generic, thought to only be the function of “racism,” so in an era pushing intellectuals and policy-makers alike to be antiessentialist (problematizing racial explanations of inequality), Black men are

deemed “unfit” for study. The Black male is not born a patriarchal male. He is raced and sexed peculiarly, configured as barbaric and savage, imagined to be a violent animal, not a human being. His mere existence ignites the negrophobia taken to be the agreed upon justification for his death. Black male death lessens their economic competition with, as well as their political radicality against, white society. It is this fear of Black males that allows society to support the imposition of death on these bodies, and consent to the rationalizations the police state offer as their justifications for killing the Black-male beast (the rapist, the criminal, and the deviant-thug). The young Black male’s death, the death of Black boys, is merely an extension of this logic—the need to destroy the Black beast cub before it matures into full pathology. The Black boy, that child, is seen as the potential Nigger-beast. This anti-Black dynamic which specifically affects the Black boy has been referred to by Elaine Brown as a new kind of racism, a racism built upon the anti-Black mythology of America’s Black males as the super-predator. This super-predator mythology not only acts to legitimize the violence responsible for the deaths of Black males, but inculcates the rationalization that given what Black males actually are, Black male death is necessary and an indispensable strategy for the safety and security of American society. Overlooking the genocidal disposition of America towards Black males presents an incomplete diagnosis of the impetus behind the levels of violence and sanctions imposed upon Black communities (Black women, Black families) in an effort to control the lives of young Black males.

The trope of criminality is engraved into the flesh of black bodies which makes blackness vulnerable to militarization and fuels the prison industrial complex Harriot ‘18 (Michael Harriot is a world renowned wypipologist, 6-25-2018, "Unprotected, Underserved: The (False) Criminalization of Black America," https://www.theroot.com/unprotected-underserved-the-false-criminalization-o-1827083795)//pshah

Any attempt at understanding the effects of policing in black America must begin from a rational, objective perspective. We must first free ourselves from the accepted biased narrative that accompanies enforcement of the law in black communities—namely that the negative effects of the criminal-justice system are due to the disproportionate criminality of the black population. Even the most passionate activists and allies have subconsciously accepted the prevailing premise. They will preface their arguments on police brutality by acknowledging the plague of black-on-black crime and violence in the black community. They will acknowledge the fact that black people need to “put down the guns,” “stop the violence” and “do better.” To be clear, all violence is bad. We need to address all crime, whether it is the black-on-black variety or the kind where white teenagers bring in military weapons to their 10th-grade social studies class. Black people, however, are just more likely to break the law, necessitating more police scrutiny and harsher treatment by law enforcement officers. After all, these officers are just looking at the statistics and doing their jobs. But is it true? Is the disproportionate state violence against black people a result of our disproportionate criminality? Do the inequities in America’s criminal-justice system reflect our misconduct? Are black people policed this way because of racism? Or are police brutality, mass incarceration and the war on black bodies a necessary reality? Let’s look at the facts. Numerous academic studies have shown that crime is largely a socioeconomic phenomenon, including this one, this one and this one by researchers at the University of Minnesota, which states: Arrests statistics and much research indicate that poor people are much more likely than wealthier people to commit street crime. However, some scholars attribute the greater arrests of poor people to social class bias against them. Despite this possibility, most criminologists would probably agree that social class differences in criminal offending are “unmistakable.” The disparity in crime and arrest rates is because

African Americans are twice as likely to fall below the poverty index and poor whites are less likely to go to prison than even wealthy blacks, according to a 2016 study by Duke University and the New School. Poor people commit crimes, and black communities, on average, tend to be poorer. Yet whenever the subject of police brutality is brought up, people who belong to the exclusive Greek-letter organization Mu Alpha Gamma Alpha (I’m pretty sure that’s what “MAGA” stands for) will pull out their bibles and turn to the newest testament—the arrest statistics from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. They will point out that African Americans were arrested for more murders than whites. Therefore, they will explain, black people are more violent. That’s why cops lock them up and shoot them in the face—case closed. But when one takes a look at all of the data, the numbers tell a different story. While white women might clutch their purses when they encounter a black man in a dark parking lot, in comparison with the black population, whites commit more than twice the number of rapes, aggravated assaults, burglaries, larcenies, arsons, frauds, sex offenses, embezzlement, disorderly conduct and drug abuse violations, according to FBI numbers. Although it is true that black people, per capita, commit crime at higher rates, the vast majority of people, black or white, do not commit a crime in any given year. The per capita crime rate is a useless factoid when the reality shows that 95 percent of black people don’t commit a crime in any given year. Whenever almost any kind of crime is committed in the U.S., it is far more likely that the person responsible is white. In fact, regarding the importance of per capita crime rates, Bureau of Justice Statistics data shows that the rate of violence among poor, urban whites (56.4 per 1,000) is higher than the violence rate for urban blacks (51.3 per 1,000). Let’s put it this way: If a random police officer had to solve a random crime without any clues and no knowledge of the perpetrator, statistically, Officer Random would be right far more often if he guessed that it was a white person. Furthermore, if Detective Random stopped a white person on the street, the data shows that that person is statistically as likely to be a criminal as any black person. And yet black people continue to be policed more violently and scrutinized more often by law enforcement. White America continues to push the narrative that black people are violent criminals, even though the numbers don’t show it. But if we are going to examine black criminality, we must also investigate the opposite side of the narrative: Are black people actually targeted by law enforcement? Is it true that cops brutalize, mistreat and kill black people disproportionately? Let’s look at the numbers: Over the past decade, cities and organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union have compiled extensive reports and data on traffic stops and pedestrian searches. The statistics are startling: In San Francisco, African Americans are 3.3 times, and Latinos 2.6 times, more likely than whites to be searched after a traffic stop. But according to an ACLU report: “San Francisco police officers are significantly less likely to find any evidence of criminality in searches of African Americans or Latinos.” In Greensboro, N.C. (pdf), blacks made up 55 percent of traffic stops and were more than twice as likely (102 percent) to be stopped. However, white drivers were 9 percent more likely to have contraband. Between 2011 and 2015, the Metropolitan Nashville (Tenn.) Police Department stopped an average of 1,122 per 1,000 black drivers—more black drivers than were living in the entire county. Black drivers in Nashville were five times more likely than whites to be stopped multiple times in a year. Every year, more than 75 percent of the people who were stopped and frisked by the New York City Police Department were black or Latino. In Philadelphia, African Americans accounted for 69 percent of stop and frisks from January to June 2017 in a city in which they are 48 percent of the population. Almost every city that conducts these kinds of studies finds the same results. But it is not just traffic and pedestrian stops that reveal racially biased policing. The Hamilton Project reveals that, even though blacks and whites use drugs at about the same rate, blacks are 6.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug use. And when it comes to police shootings, the data is incontrovertible. A study by the American Journal of Public Health shows that black men are three times more likely to die from police shootings. Even when they are not violent and have committed no crimes, black people are still shot and killed by police officers at higher rates than whites. Although black people make up 13 percent of the population, in 2017, 34 percent of the people who were shot and killed when they were

unarmed and not attacking were black, Mapping Police Violence reports. To be clear, the disproportionate number of black people shot by police is not because black people commit more crimes. Data from the Washington Post’s police database shows that there is no correlation between crime rates by race and the disproportionate number of police shootings. As Justin Nix, a researcher at the University of Louisville, said, according to the Washington Post, “The only thing that was significant in predicting whether someone shot and killed by police was unarmed was whether or not they were black.” The facts don’t support the narrative. There is no reason to insert black-on-black crime into any discussion of police violence. There is no statistical basis for the way African-American communities are inordinately victimized by law enforcement. Black criminality is a myth. All this week, The Root will examine policing in black America. We will delve into the problems, the perspectives and the solutions to the inequities in how the law is enforced in communities of color across America. Because as you can see ... They’re doing it wrong.

Civil society engenders tropes of criminality and savagery of “beastlike” features onto black flesh – its in the state of vulnerability that black non-being is incapable of finding a place in the white world. Muhammad ‘13 (Khalil Gibran Muhammad is professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. He is the former Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library and the world’s leading library and archive of global black history. Before leading the Schomburg Center, Khalil was an Associate Professor at Indiana University. 03/28/2013, “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America,” Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 2010; 392 pp.: 9780674035973)//pshah

This latest crisis had begun in the 1860s. In a moment equivalent to a historical blink of the eye, four million people were transformed from property to human beings to would-be citizens of the nation. Only a decade before, few white Americans other than abolitionists had anticipated that black people would become the legal equivalents of white people. In those outrageously heady days of the 1850s when slavery debates still raged, colonization schemes were still being hatched, and white optimism still percolated for black extinction if emancipation had to come, the possibility of living among and abiding black judges, politicians, and schoolteachers was, for many, unimaginable.2 By decade’s end the unimaginable had become reality, and the prospect of settlement and incorporation of African Americans added urgency and confusion to what many whites already saw as a desperate situation. “Now, far more than at any time hitherto, the white people of the United States . . . seem to be particularly interested to know precisely what manner of man the negro [sic] is,” proclaimed one writer in his 1868 introduction to The Negroes in Negroland; The Negroes in America; and Negroes Generally, a timely collection of previously published statements by some of the most respected Europe an travelers to Africa and American men of renown. “Of these American writers, those from the North are here more particularly referred to; and it is trusted that the reader will ponder well the words of such truly able and representative men as John Adams, Daniel Webster, Horace Mann, Theodore Parker, Samuel George Morton, William Henry Seward, and others of scarcely less distinction.” In a nutshell, “disinterested” and authoritative white men the world over, from Europe an colonists and anthropologists to American presidents and statesmen, had the same warning to dispatch, according to Hinton Rowan Helper: “Negroes” with their “crime- stained blackness” could not rise to a plane any higher than that of “base and beastlike savagery.” Helper presented his collection of expert opinions as an archaeologist uses fossils to reconstruct some prehistoric creature for the world to behold with gratitude that it no longer walks the earth. In Helper’s case, the caption for posterity read: terrible things await a nation bent on

handing ballots to beasts. “Seeing, then, that the negro does, indeed, belong to a lower and inferior order of beings, why in the name of Heaven, why,” he pleaded with his readers, “should we forever degrade and disgrace both ourselves and our posterity by entering, of our own volition, into more intimate relations with him? May God, in his restraining mercy, forbid that we should ever do this most foul and wicked thing!”3 Helper’s warning failed. Reconstruction proceeded, but not before the seeds of dread, planted by Helper and many other post- emancipation writers, spread across the nation like crabgrass in June. When Shaler began writing about the Negro Problem after federal troops had withdrawn from the South, after ex-Confederates had returned to power, and after the nation had set itself on a path of reconciliation, those seeds continued to produce apprehension about a future fraught with peril. “The forecast of the unprejudiced observer was exceedingly unfavorable. Every experiment of freeing blacks on this continent,” Shaler wrote with seeming exasperation, “has in the end resulted in even worse conditions than slavery brought to them.” Haiti and Jamaica were perfect demonstrations of how blacks’ “defects” could wreak havoc on civilization. Haitians had once belonged to a colonial society of great “fertile lands” and “great industries of sugar and coffee culture” built on “mild slavery.” But with a corrupt government and a failed economy, “the black race [had] fallen through its freedom to a state that is but savagery with a little veneer of Europe and customs.” These were “a people without a single trace of promise except that of extinction through the diseases of sloth and vice.” Jamaica was just as bad. It had once been a “garden land of the tropics,” the “British of the South,” but had now become a land of “barbarism.”4 America must take heed, Shaler continued. Friends of the race who had not simply fought for blacks’ freedom but also demanded their “complete enfranchisement as American citizens,” who by blind faith and by declaration tried to “fi t them for a place in the structure of a self- controlling society,” did not realize that “resolutions cannot help this rooted nature of man.” “The real dangers that this African blood brings to our state,” Shaler cautioned, lay in “the peculiarities of nature which belong to the negroes as a race.” Unlike in “our own race inheritance,” black brains stopped developing sooner, leaving “the negroes” with an animal nature unaltered by the “fruits of civilization.” The results were devastating: blacks were incapable of controlling their sexual impulses; they were unable to work together for a common purpose; and, most importantly, they had no power to delay gratification and plan for the future. Despite their “charming nature,” their “quick sensibilities,” and their “present Americanized shape,” these “peculiarities” were easily overlooked by those who did not “know the negro by long and large experience,” and who falsely believed that they were like them. With patience and “the opportunity to search closely into the nature of this race, they will perceive that the inner man is really as singular, as different in motives from themselves, as his outward appearance indicates.” “There can be no doubt,” Shaler proclaimed, “that for centuries to come the task of weaving these African threads of life into our society will be the greatest of all-American problems.”5

The alternative is to endorse the black criminality in favor of self-centered public activism which changes the landscapes of black rights Muhammad ‘13 (Khalil Gibran Muhammad is professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. He is the former Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library and the world’s leading library and archive of global black history. Before leading the Schomburg Center, Khalil was an Associate Professor at Indiana University. 03/28/2013, “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America,” Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 2010; 392 pp.: 9780674035973)//pshah

Black crime researchers and reformers in fact contributed to and drew inspiration from the cultural discourse on crime. Many black elites had embraced Victorian ideals of morality and respectability in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often trumping their white elite counterparts in sophistication and refinement. Seeing themselves as walking billboards for the race’s capacity for equal citizenship, and distinguishing themselves from “uncouth” and “criminally inclined” poor blacks, black elites often employed the language of racial uplift and the “politics of respectability” to describe black criminality in terms of class and culture. Their race- relations writings and their social welfare efforts were often shot through with class bias and victim- blaming. At times, black northern elites were especially contemptuous of southern migrants. In rhetoric alone, when speaking to all- black audiences or when seeking credibility and financial support from white benefactors, their talk about black criminality seemed indistinguishable from that of their white counterparts. In the first post- civil rights era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries— Jim Crow’s early years— ideology often trumped race for African Americans vying for political, economic, and social resources among whites. Conservative black opinion makers and race reformers who dwelt on the self- destructive behavior of poor blacks were more likely than antiracist activists to be heralded as clear- eyed and unbiased by their influential white peers. For some African American writers and reformers, black criminality was a passport to relevancy in a wider white world in which black voices were actively suppressed.44 Others, such as James Stemons, a Philadelphia race- relations reformer and local crime fighter, used black criminality to engage in a kind of double- speak: they used the rhetoric of black criminality to draw attention to themselves for the purposes of critiquing racism. Often out of genuine concern for public safety, Stemons, Du Bois, Wells, and many others did not ignore crime in their own communities. But neither did they ignore the racial double standards in the urban crime discourse, the mistreatment of black suspects and criminals, and the poor quality of police protection offered to black communities. Despite their elitism, many black reformers tended to offer “root- cause solutions” alongside their class- infused cultural critiques of black criminality.45 Progressive era black social scientists and reformers also exposed and challenged the limits of racial liberalism long before the post- World War II failures of residential and workplace integration in the urban North fueled a national civil rights movement and set the stage for a national political backlash against liberalism.46 White social workers and white philanthropists failed to invest sufficient material resources into the uplift of African American urbanites, advising these communities to “work out their own salvation” before others could help them. But black progressives cried foul, and they pressed for the same responses to their needs that were being offered to white working- class and immigrant urbanites. As much as they embraced the self- help ethos of the era, and as willing as they were to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and build churches, settlement houses, schools, businesses, labor organizations, and entertainment venues in their own communities, they recognized that, dollar for dollar, African Americans stood most in need of community investment and economic resources but were least likely to be helped.47 In the segregated black communities of the urban North, members of the working class and the elite recognized that thoughtful, constructive crime prevention cost money, lots of it. White philanthropy was the dominant financial source for all crime- prevention efforts, but native- born poor whites and new immigrants received the lion’s share of attention and aid. The hidden cost to black residents was not simply victimization by bad guys, but also brutality by bad police officers and the loss of faith in American society by the young and old, who saw the police as a representation of the government’s malign neglect of black people in general.48 As black sociologist Kelly Miller noted, thoughtful, caring policing was an important solution to inspiring blacks to invest in their own citizenship. Better policing would lead to better citizens in a feedback loop.49 The empathy police officers brought to black communities would be one pathway, he argued, through which African Americans would come to know they were valued in modern urban America.50 Beyond their own need to distinguish themselves from social and cultural inferiors, black reformers noted time and time again that the stigma of criminality fell most heavily on the most disadvantaged, isolated, and

neglected people of the urban North. As they saw it, the Progressive era discourse of black criminality was at its best a self- serving justification for segregation and black self-help even as its proponents—white elites— helped Europe’s huddled masses by advocating for social welfare agencies, recreation facilities, better policing, economic fairness, and an end to political corruption. At its worst, the stigma of criminality was an intellectual defense of lynching, colonial-s tyle criminal justice practices, and genocide.

While the afterlife of slavery is far from an abstraction in the lived reality of blackness, recourse to the sociological empirics of suffering already codifies the category of “exploitation” as the base grammar of suffering, ignoring the gratuitousness of anti-black violence and enshrining the call for more public policy as the limit point of our revolutionary demands. Civil society is parasitic by framing blackness as a fugitive condition of which the nation must escape from

Muhammad ‘13 (Khalil Gibran Muhammad is professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. He is the former Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library and the world’s leading library and archive of global black history. Before leading the Schomburg Center, Khalil was an Associate Professor at Indiana University. 03/28/2013, “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America,” Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 2010; 392 pp.: 9780674035973)//pshahAt the dawn of the twentieth century, in a rapidly industrializing, urbanizing, and demographically shifting America, blackness was refashioned through crime statistics. It became a more stable racial category in opposition to whiteness through racial criminalization. Consequently, white criminality gradually lost its fearsomeness. This book asks, how did Europe and immigrants— the Irish and the Italians and the Polish, for example— gradually shed their criminal identities while blacks did not? In other words, how did criminality go from plural to singular? By examining both immigrant and black crime discourses in the urban North as they w ere mutually constituted by new statistical data and made meaningful to a Jim Crow nation, we can more easily discern distinct (and novel) patterns of talking about race and crime. Rather than following the lead of social historians of working- class immigrant and black communities who link ethnic culture to distinct patterns of criminal behavior, this book explores the genealogy of distinct patterns of racial crime discourses. In the period under investigation, crime, despite its variability in form and expression across groups, was a ubiquitous problem across the nation—so much a problem in the urban North that it was not clear that blackness would eventually become its sole signifier. Even the wellsprings of violent crime, as historian and criminologist Jeffrey S. Adler found in his recent definitive study of homicide in Progressive era Chicago, flowed from the same broader cultural, social, economic, and demographic shifts and tensions affecting all non- elite urban people. “Contrary to the impressions of most observers,” he writes, “African American violence was similar to white violence. It resembled white homicide in the form it took; and African- American violence paralleled white violence in how that form changed.”22 From the 1890s through the 1930s, from the Progressive era through Prohibition, African Americans had no monopoly on social banditry, crimes of resistance, or underground entrepreneurship; the “weapons of the weak” and “lower- class oppositional culture” extended far and wide and in many directions.23 The Condemnation of Blackness demonstrates and explains how ideas of racial inferiority and crime became fastened to African Americans by contrast to ideas of class and crime that shaped views of Europe an immigrants and working- class whites.24 Whiteness scholars have shown how crucial

the attributes of skin color, Europe an ancestry, and the gradual adoption of anti- black racism were to immigrant assimilation “into the singular ‘white race.’ ”25 Such benefits, Thomas Guglielmo found recently, even secured the whiteness of Chicago’s “Sicilian Gunmen” because their criminality “never positioned them as non- white in any sustained or systematic way.”26 Building on whiteness and critical race scholarship, I explore how postbellum southern black out-migration to the urban North—to Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York in particular—fueled an invidious black migration narrative framed by crime statistics and reshaped broader racial discourses on immigration and urbanization during Progressive era. Evoking the specter of black rapists and murderers moving north one step ahead of lynch mobs, innovative racial demographers such as Frederick L. Hoffman explicitly sanitized and normalized the criminality of northern white working and immigrant classes. Consequently, the black southern migrant— the “Negro, stranger in our midst”— was marked as an exceptionally dangerous newcomer. One of the strongest claims this book makes is that statistical comparisons between the Foreign-born and the Negro were foundational to the emergence of distinctive modern discourses on race and crime. For all the ways in which poor Irish immigrants of the mid- nineteenth century were labeled members of the dangerous classes, criminalized by Anglo- Saxon police, and over-incarcerated in the nation’s failing prisons, Progressive era social scientists used statistics and sociology to create a pathway for their redemption and rehabilitation.27 A generation before the Chicago School of Sociology systematically destroyed the immigrant house of pathology built by social Darwinists and eugenicists, Progressive era social scientists were innovating environmental theories of crime and delinquency while using crime statistics to demonstrate the assimilability of the Irish, the Italian, and the Jew by explicit contrast to the Negro.28 White progressives often discounted crime statistics or disregarded them altogether in favor of humanizing Europe an immigrants, as in much of Jane Addams’s writings.29 In one of the first academic textbooks on crime, Charles R. Henderson, a pioneering University of Chicago social scientist, declared that “the evil [of immigrant crime] is not so great as statistics carelessly interpreted might prove.” He explained that age and sex ratios—too many young males— skewed the data. But where the “Negro factor” is concerned, Henderson continued, “racial inheritance, physical and mental inferiority, barbarian and slave ancestry and culture,” were among the “most serious factors in crime statistics.”30 Similar comparisons would echo for the rest of the twentieth century. The Progressive era was indeed the founding moment for the emergence of an enduring statistical discourse of black dysfunctionality rather than the 1960s, as is commonly believed. The post-Moynihan social- scientific and public policy view of black pathology that scholars such as Robin D. G. Kelley criticize as “ghetto ethnography” began, statistically speaking, in the 1890s. The racial project of making blacks the “thing against which normality, whiteness, and functionality have been defined,” was foundational to the making of modern urban America.31 Shaped by racial ideology and racism, the statistical ghetto emerged, study by study, in the Progressive era as the northern Black Belt formed block by block.32 Inextricably linked at birth, they grew up together. Northern black crime statistics and migration trends in the 1890s, 1900s, and 1910s w ere woven together into a cautionary tale about the exceptional threat black people posed to modern society. In the Windy City, in the City of Brotherly Love, and in the nation’s Capital of Commerce this tale was told, infused with symbolic references to American civilization, to American modernity, and to the fictive promised land of unending opportunity for all who, regardless of race or class or nationality, sought their fortunes. In these imagined communities of a post- slavery, post- Reconstruction civil rights America, “color-blind universalism” added an additional thread of contempt to the narrative. In a moment when most white Americans believed in the declining significance of racism, statistical evidence of excessive rates of black arrests and the overrepresentation of black prisoners in the urban North was seen by many whites as indisputable proof of black inferiority.33 What else but black pathology could explain black failure in these modern meccas of opportunity? Unlike subsequent commentators in the 1920s and 1930s, Progressive era white race- relations writers frequently asserted that racism had nothing to do with black criminality. They self-

consciously critiqued black criminality in what they perceived to be race- neutral language. The numbers “speak for themselves” was one frequent refrain, followed by “I am not a racist.”34 A variant attached to both rhetorical strategies accused black race-r elations writers of being biased and sentimental toward their own. They were accused of “coddling” their own criminals and excusing their behavior. When black experts dug in, when they made forceful counterarguments of epidemic racism in the heyday of “separate but equal”—even in the North— they were often charged with playing the race card (a concept then still in its infancy). The familiar resonance of these statements and exchanges is a testament to their longevity in American culture and society.35

Civil society maintains the fugitive and criminal trope of blackness, the way whiteness fetishizes black bodies for consumption of criminal fault - Here are the statistics the white people ask forOliver ‘03 (Mary Beth Oliver is a distinguished professor in the college of communications at Penn State University, September 2003, “African American Men as "Criminal and Dangerous": Implications of Media Portrayals of Crime on the "Criminalization" of African American Men,” Journal of African American Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2 (September 2003), pp. 3-18, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41819017)//pshah

The body of literature concerning viewers' interpretations and responses to news and entertainment programming featuring black men as criminal suspects illustrates that what viewers "bring to the screen" in terms of their existing attitudes and beliefs plays a profound role in the media-viewer relationship. With this relationship in mind, the last section of this paper pertains specifically to viewers' memory of crime information. In particular, in this section I overview research that I have con- ducted concerning how biases in the ways in which viewers' mistaken identification of African American men as criminal suspects featured in news stories not only reflects existing stereotypes of black men as "dangerous and criminal," but also likely serves to reinforce stereotyping in ways that can implicate essentially any black man as potentially threatening or violent (Oliver, 1999; Oliver & Fonash, 2002). Memory and Social Cognition As with research concerning interpretations and enjoyment, re- search on memory generally suggests that people tend to recall information about situations or individuals that is consistent with existing attitudes or beliefs (Fyock & Stangor, 1994). In this regard, if individuals harbor stereotypes of black men as criminal, biases in memory should result in greater recall of black than white criminals featured in newscasts, and may even result in mistaken memories of having seen a black suspect portrayed when either no racially identifying information was provided or when the suspect was actually white (Drabman, Robertson, Patterson, Jarvie, Hammer, & Cordua, 1981). Furthermore, this type of mistaken recall should be particularly likely to occur when the type of crime portrayed is consistent with stereotypes associated with African American men (i.e., the crime is violent rather than nonviolent.) In addition to predicting biases in recall per se, research on recognition memory also suggests that when trying to identify who has been seen in a news portrayal from a "line-up" of potential suspects, systematic errors that vary by race may be expected to occur. In particular, research on social cognition suggests that people tend to categorize individuals according to a variety of demographic traits - race included - and tend to perceive that individuals who are categorized into the same group are particularly similar or homogenous (Fiske, 1995; Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000; Taylor & Falcone, 1982). Furthermore, if a target's category is different from the perceiver's category, if a white person perceives a black person, for example, then perceived similarity of the target members is particularly heightened. What does this line of reasoning imply in terms of whites' memories of news? This reasoning suggests that when white viewers see a newscast featuring an African American man as a criminal suspect, not only are they likely to remember seeing an African American man, but they are

also likely to confuse the specific individual who was pictured with any individual in the same racial category (i.e. any black man). The discussion thus far of news recall has assumed that perceivers' mistaken recall and identification memory will mirror existing stereotypes associating black men with danger or criminality. On the one hand, given the prevalence and persistence of this stereotype, this is likely a safe assumption to make. Nevertheless, there are clearly variations in the extent to which individuals endorse such stereotypes. Given this variation, should one assume that only viewers with high levels of racism are likely to evidence racially-based patterns in their memories of news? In some regards, the answer to this question appears to be "yes." After all, if a person does not harbor racist attitudes, then it would seem unlikely that their memories would reflect stereo- types of black men as criminal. On the other hand, a growing and substantial body of research suggests that stereotypes can influence cognitions and behaviors in ways that are largely outside of individuals' cognitive awareness (Bargh, 1999; Devine, 1989; Devine & Monteith, 1999; Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995). In general, this research on "implicit stereotyping" suggests that most every- one is at least aware of racial stereotypes, and therefore when a member of a stigmatized group is encountered, these stereo- types are "primed" regardless of the extent to which the stereotypes are endorsed. While individuals who are "low" on measures of racial prejudice may generally be likely to disregard or inhibit primed stereotypical cognitions, these same individuals to mind, nor may they always have the cognitive resources avail- may not always be aware when stereotypes have been brought able to engage in stereotype inhibition. Consequently, primed stereotypes (or implicit stereotypes) have the potential to influence the behaviors and perceptions of all individuals, regardless of their stated or endorsed racial attitudes. To examine what research in social cognition and implicit stereotyping imply about memory of criminal suspects, we (Oliver & Fonash, 2002) conducted an experiment in which white viewers first completed a questionnaire that included the anti-black attitude scale (Katz & Hass, 1988) as a means of assessing racist attitudes. Approximately two weeks later, these same individuals examined a series of brief newspaper stories that included two news sections pertaining to crime. These two sections featured a total of two stories featuring violent crimes (murder and rape), and two stories featuring nonviolent crimes (embezzlement and mail fraud). Among these four stories, two featured a photograph of a black male criminal suspect, and two featured a photograph of a white male criminal suspect. Although the orders of the stories and the pairing of the photographs and the stories were varied, all participants in the study saw a black male paired with a violent crime and a nonviolent crime, and a white male paired with a violent crime and a nonviolent crime. After viewing the news stories, participants were asked to complete a series of questionnaires pertaining to their perceptions of the stories, with many of these questions designed only to detract their attention from the true purpose of the study. Subsequently, participants were then presented with a series of photographs of individuals, and were asked to indicate the likelihood that each individual was the one featured in each of the crime stories examined using scales ranging from 1 (Definitely Not Pictured in the News Story) to 7 ( Definitely Was Pictured in the News Story). Among the photographs included in this task, three photographs were of African American men who had not been included in the stories, and three were of white men who had not been included in the stories. Hence, the "correct" answer for these photographs was "1" (Definitely Not Pictured), with higher scores indicating greater misidentification. As predicted, the results revealed that participants were more likely to misidentify black men as the suspect when the actual story contained a photograph of a black man ( M = 3.22, SD = 0.82) than a white man ( M = 2.50, SD = 1 .03), t( 59) = 6.14, p < .001. On the other hand, similar patterns were revealed for misidentification of white men, with participants more likely to misidentify white men when the actual story contained a photograph of a white man ( M = 3.10, SD = 0.97) than a black man (M = 2.51, SD = 1 .01), t(59) = 4.00, p < .001. While these findings may appear to suggest that viewers' mistaken identification of suspects is equitable in terms of racial imagery, it is important to keep in mind that in this study, blacks and whites were represented as criminals in equal proportions, with care being taken to hold all other variables constant (e.g., the

manner in which the suspect was portrayed). In contrast, the aforementioned con- tent analytic studies of actual crime portrayals demonstrate that African American men are over-represented as criminals in the news and are portrayed in ways that make them appear particularly dangerous and guilty. Hence, our findings that black suspects in the news resulted in greater misidentification of black men as suspects (regardless of white misidentification) suggest that the disparity of misidentification between black and white men outside of controlled laboratory conditions employed here may be particularly pronounced. In addition to this finding, this study also found evidence that black men were especially likely to be misidentified with violent rather than nonviolent crime (see Figure 1). Specifically, our analysis revealed an interaction between the race of the person in the identification task and the type of crime being recalled, F (1,58) = 15.76, eta2 = .21, p < .001. That is, this study found than when the story was about a violent crime, black men were particularly likely to be misidentified as the individual who was pictured. In contrast, white men were somewhat more likely to be misidentified with nonviolent than violent stories, though this difference did not reach statistical significance.

Civil society functions as a politics of innocence, rendering revolutionary and insurgent politics unimaginable. Innocence becomes a necessary precondition for the launching of mass antiracist political campaigns as blackness itself is considered synonymous with guilt. Black social death is achieved via coded discourses of “criminality.” There is no innocence to blackness, a protest to the norm is revolutionary. Wang ‘18 (Jackie Wang is a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster, and PhD student at Harvard University. Her latest work, The Twitter Hive Mind Is Dreaming is forthcoming at Robocup Press. In Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e)/Intervention, 2018), Wang examines contemporary incarceration techniques and illustrates various aspects of the carceral continuum, including the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory and algorithmic policing, the political economy of fees and fines, and cybernetic governance. 02/23/2018, “Carceral Capitalism,” ISBN: 9781635900026, pg 260-270)//pshah

While I was reading the local newspaper, I came across a story that caught my attention. The article was about a seventeen-year-old boy from Baltimore named Isaiah Simmons who died in a juvenile facility in 2007, when five to seven counselors suffocated him while restraining him for hours. When Simmons was unresponsive, the counselors dumped his body in the snow and did not call for medical assistance for more than forty minutes. In late March 2012, the case was thrown out. None of the counselors involved in his murder were charged. An article I found online about the case was titled “Charges Dropped Against 5 In Juvenile Offender’s Death.”² By emphasizing that it was a juvenile offender who died, the article immediately flags Simmons as a criminal, signaling to readers that his death is inconsequential and thus not worthy of sympathy. Every comment posted on the article was crude and contemptuous. The general sentiment was that his death was no big loss to society. The news about the case being thrown out barely registered at all.³There was no public outcry, no call to action, no discussion of the myriad issues bound up with Simmons’s death: youth incarceration, racism, the privatization of prisons and jails (he died at a private facility), medical neglect, state violence, and so forth. For weeks after reading the article, I contemplated these questions: What is the difference between Trayvon Martin and Isaiah Simmons? Which cases galvanize activists into action, and which are ignored? In the wake of the

Jena Six, Troy Davis, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, and other high-profile cases,⁴ I have taken note of the patterns that structure political appeals, particularly the way innocence becomes a necessary precondition for the launching of mass antiracist political campaigns. These campaigns often focus on prosecuting and harshly punishing the individuals responsible for overt and locatable acts of racist violence, thus positioning the state and the criminal justice system as allies and protectors of the oppressed. When the “innocence” of a black victim is not established, he or she will not become a suitable spokesperson for the cause.⁵ An empathetic structure of feeling based on appeals to innocence has come to ground contemporary antiracist politics. Within this framework, empathy can be established only when a person meets the standards of authentic victimhood and moral purity, which requires black people, in the words of Frank Wilderson, to be cleansed of “niggerization.” Social, political, cultural, and legal recognition happens only when a person is thoroughly whitewashed, neutralized, and made unthreatening. The “spokesperson” activist model, which involves the isolation of cases considered “exemplary,” also tends to emphasize the individual rather than the collective nature of racist injuries. Framing oppression in terms of individual actors is a liberal tactic that dismantles collective responses to oppression and diverts attention from structural violence. Using “innocence” as the foundation to address antiblack violence is an appeal to the white imaginary, though these arguments are certainly made by people of color as well. Relying on this framework re-entrenches a logic that criminalizes race and constructs docile subjects. A liberal politics of recognition can only reproduce a guilt-innocence schematization that fails to grapple with the fact that there is an a priori association of blackness with guilt (criminality). Perhaps association is too generous—there is a flat-out conflation of the terms. As Wilderson notes in “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” the cop’s answer to the black subject’s question—why did you shoot me?—follows a tautology: “I shot you because you are Black; you are Black because I shot you.”⁶ In the words of Frantz Fanon, the cause is the consequence.⁷ Not only are black men assumed guilty until proven innocent, blackness itself is considered synonymous with guilt.⁸ Authentic victimhood, passivity, moral purity, and the adoption of a whitewashed position are necessary for recognition in the eyes of the state. Wilderson, quoting N.W.A., notes that “a nigga on the warpath” cannot be a proper subject of empathy. ⁹ The desire for recognition compels political subjects to seek alliance with the state and to sacrifice themselves in order to meet the standards of victimhood. This is also the logic of rape-revenge narratives: only after a woman is thoroughly degraded can audiences begin to tolerate her rage (outside of films and books, violent women are not tolerated even when they have the “moral” grounds to fight back, as exemplified by the high rates of women who are imprisoned or sentenced to death for murdering or assaulting abusive partners). Although it is sometimes necessary to make “innocence” appeals for strategic reasons—to win a case or to influence public opinion—these strategies become problematic when they reinforce a framework that renders revolutionary and insurgent politics unimaginable. The prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore notes that “while saving anyone is a good thing to do, to try to assert innocence as a key political organizing strategy is to turn a blind eye to the system and how it works.”¹⁰ For Gilmore, the problem “is not to figure out how to determine or prove the innocence of certain individuals or certain classes of people, but to attack the general system through which criminalizationproceeds.”¹¹These appeals to innocence are also anachronistic because they do not address the transformation and reorganization of racist strategies in the post–civil rights era. A politics of innocence is only capable of acknowledging examples of direct, individualized acts of racist violence while obscuring the racism of a putatively color-blind liberalism that operates on a structural level. Posing the issue in terms of personal prejudice feeds the fallacy of racism as an individual intention, feeling, or personal prejudice, though there is certainly a psychological and affective dimension of racism that exceeds the individual in that it is shaped by social norms and media representations. The liberal color-blind paradigm of racism submerges race beneath the “commonsense” logic of crime and punishment.¹² This effectively conceals racism because it is not

considered racist to be against crime. Such cases as the execution of Troy Davis—in which the courts come under scrutiny for racial bias—also legitimize state violence by treating such cases as exceptional. The political response to the murder of Troy Davis does not challenge the assumption that communities need to clean up their streets by rounding up criminals, for it relies on the claim that Davis is not one of those feared criminals, but an innocent black man. Innocence, however, is often code for nonthreatening to white civil society. Troy Davis is differentiated from other black men—the bad ones—and the legal system is diagnosed as being infected with racism, masking the fact that the legal system is the constituent mechanism through which racial violence is carried out (wishful last-minute appeals to the right to a fair trial reveal this, for they assume that trials are intended to be fair). The state is imagined to be deviating from its intended role as protector of the people rather than being the primary perpetrator. H. Rap Brown provides a sobering reminder that “Justice means ‘just-uswhite-folks.’ There is no redress of grievance for Blacks in this country.”¹³ While there are countless examples of overt racism, black social (and physical) death is primarily achieved via coded discourses of “criminality” and mediated forms of state violence carried out by an impersonal carceral apparatus (a matrix of police, prisons, the legal system, prosecutors, parole boards, prison guards, probation officers, and so forth). In other words, incidents where a biased individual attacks or discriminates against a person of color can be identified as racism to “conscientious persons,” but the racism underlying the systematic imprisonment of black Americans under the pretense of the War on Drugs is more difficult to locate and generally remains invisible because it is spatially confined. When it is visible, it fails to arouse public sympathy, even among the black leadership. As Loïc Wacquant, a scholar of the carceral state, asks, “What is the chance that white Americans will identify with Black convicts when even the Black leadership has turned its back on them?”¹⁴ The abandonment of black convicts by civil rights organizations is reflected in the history of these organizations. From 1975 to 1986, the NAACP and the Urban League identified imprisonment as a central issue, and the disproportionate incarceration of black Americans was understood as a problem that was structural and political. Spokespersons from the civil rights organizations related imprisonment to the general confinement of black Americans. Imprisoned black men were, as Wacquant notes, portrayed inclusively as “brothers, uncles, neighbors, friends.”¹⁵ Between 1986 and 1990 there was a dramatic shift in the rhetoric and official policy of the NAACP and the Urban League that exemplifies the turn to a politics of innocence. By the early 1990s, the NAACP had dissolved its prison program and ceased publication of articles about rehabilitation and post-imprisonment issues. Meanwhile, these organizations began to embrace the rhetoric of individual responsibility and a tough-on-crime stance that encouraged blacks to collaborate with police to get drugs out of their neighborhoods, even going as far as endorsing harsher sentences for minors and recidivists. Black convicts, initially a part of the “we” articulated by civil rights groups, became them. Wacquant writes, “This [hesitation to advocate for Black convicts] is further reinforced by the fact, noted long ago by W. E. B. Du Bois, that the tenuous position of the black bourgeoisie in the socioracial hierarchy rests critically on its ability to distance itself from its unruly lower-class brethren: to offset the symbolic disability of blackness, middle-class African Americans must forcefully communicate to whites that they have ‘absolutely no sympathy and no known connections with any black man who has committed a crime.’”¹⁶ When the black leadership and middle-class blacks differentiate themselves from poorer blacks, they feed into a notion of black exceptionalism that is used to dismantle antiracist struggles. This class of exceptional blacks (Barack Obama, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell) supports the image of America as a post-racial society. The root of this shift in the rhetoric and policy of civil rights organizations is perhaps a fear of affirming the conflation of blackness and criminality. However, by not advocating for prisoners, they shore up and extend the penal state by individualizing, depoliticizing, and decontextualizing the issue of “crime and punishment” and vilifying those most likely to be subjected to racialized state violence. This disidentification with poor, urban black Americans is not limited to black men, but also affects black women, who are vilified via the figure of the Welfare Queen, portrayed as a

lazy, sexually irresponsible burden on society (particularly hardworking white Americans). The welfare state and the penal state complement each other, as revealed by Bill Clinton’s 1998 statements denouncing prisoners and ex-prisoners who receive welfare or Social Security: he condemns former prisoners who receive welfare assistance, accusing them of deviously committing “fraud and abuse” against “working families” who “play by the rules.”¹⁷ Furthermore, this complementarity is gendered. Black women are the shock absorbers of the social crisis created by the penal state: the incarceration of black men profoundly increases the burden put on black women, who are forced to perform more waged and unwaged (caring) labor, raise children alone, and who are punished by the state when their husbands or family members are convicted of crimes (for example, a family cannot receive housing assistance if someone in the household has been convicted of a drug felony). The reconfiguration of the welfare state under the Clinton administration (which imposed stricter regulations on welfare recipients) further intensified the backlash against poor black women. In this view, the welfare state is the apparatus used to regulate poor black women who are not subjected to regulation by the penal state that is directed chiefly at black men—though it is important to note that the feminization of poverty and the punitive turn in nonviolent crime policy led to a 400 percent increase in the female prison population between 1980 and the late 1990s.¹⁸Racialized patterns of incarceration and the assault on the urban poor are not seen as a form of racist state violence because, in the eyes of the public, convicts (along with their families and associates) deserve such treatment. The politics of innocence directly fosters this culture of vilification, even when it is used by civil rights organizations.

Violence is only recognized when spaces are accessible to the white imaginary, black neighborhoods and prisons are characterized as “alternate universes” were tropes of criminality are a structural assumption Wang ‘18 (Jackie Wang is a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster, and PhD student at Harvard University. Her latest work, The Twitter Hive Mind Is Dreaming is forthcoming at Robocup Press. In Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e)/Intervention, 2018), Wang examines contemporary incarceration techniques and illustrates various aspects of the carceral continuum, including the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory and algorithmic policing, the political economy of fees and fines, and cybernetic governance. 02/23/2018, “Carceral Capitalism,” ISBN: 9781635900026, pg 273-274)//pshah

The engineering and management of urban space also demarcates the limits of our political imagination by determining which narratives and experiences are even thinkable. The media construction of urban ghettos and prisons as “alternate universes” marks them as zones of unintelligibility, faraway places removed from the everyday white experience. Native American reservations are another example of “void” zones that white people can only access through the fantasy of media representations. What happens in these zones of abjection and vulnerability does not typically register in the white imaginary. In the instance that an “injustice” does register, it will have to be translated into more comprehensible terms. When considering the public responses to Oscar Grant and Trayvon Martin, it seems significant that these murders took place in spaces that are accessible to the white imaginary, which allows white people to narrativize the incidents in terms that are familiar to them. Martin was gunned down while visiting family members in a gated neighborhood; Grant was murdered by police officer Johannes Mehserle at the Fruitvale BART Station in Oakland. These spaces are not “alternate universes” or void zones that lie outside middle-class white experience and comprehension. To what extent is the attention these cases have received attributable to the encroachment of violence on spaces that white people occupy? How does the public respond to cases of racialized violence that occur outside white comfort

zones? When describing the spatialization of settler colonies, Frantz Fanon writes about “a zone of non-being, an extraordinary sterile and arid region,” where “black is not a man.”²⁵ In the regions where black is not “man,” there is no story to be told. Or rather, there are no subjects seen as worthy of having a story of their own.

Blackness is a preconceived notion of danger; whiteness sees violence rather than resistance and fails to see that its rather the system built in opposition to black bodies. The 1AC is an embodiment of the negation of a politics of innocence which departs from enabling white civil society to purify and morally ennoble itself.

Wang ‘18 (Jackie Wang is a student of the dream state, black studies scholar, prison abolitionist, poet, performer, library rat, trauma monster, and PhD student at Harvard University. Her latest work, The Twitter Hive Mind Is Dreaming is forthcoming at Robocup Press. In Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e)/Intervention, 2018), Wang examines contemporary incarceration techniques and illustrates various aspects of the carceral continuum, including the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory and algorithmic policing, the political economy of fees and fines, and cybernetic governance. 02/23/2018, “Carceral Capitalism,” ISBN: 9781635900026, pg 291-295)//pshah

The insistence on innocence results in a refusal to hear those labeled guilty or defined by the state as “criminals.” When we rely on appeals to innocence, we foreclose a form of resistance that is outside the limits of law and instead ally ourselves with the state. This ignores that the “enemies” in the War on Drugs and the War on Terror are racially defined, and that gender and class delimit who is worthy of legal recognition. When the Occupy movement was in full swing, I read countless articles and encountered participants who were eager to police the politics and tactics of those who did not fit into a nonviolent model of resistance. The tendency was to construct a politics from the position of the disenfranchised white middle-class and to remove, deny, and differentiate the Occupy movement from the “delinquent” or radical elements by condemning property destruction, confrontations with cops, and—in cases like Baltimore— anticapitalist and anarchist analyses. When Amy Goodman asked Maria Lewis from Occupy Oakland about the “violent” protestors after more than four hundred arrests made during an attempt to occupy the vacant Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center in Oakland, I was pleased that Lewis affirmed rather than excised people’s anger: AMY GOODMAN: Maria Lewis, what about some of the reports that said that the protesters were violent? MARIA LEWIS: Absolutely. There was a lot of anger this weekend, and I think that the anger the protesters showed in the streets this weekend and the fighting back that did take place was reflective of a larger anger in Oakland that is boiling over at the betrayal of the system. I think that people, day by day, are realizing, as the economy gets worse and worse, as unemployment gets worse and worse, as homelessness gets worse and worse, that the economic system, that capitalism in Oakland, is failing us. And people are really angry about that, and they’re beginning to fight back. And I think that’s a really inspiring thing.⁵⁷ Although the comment still frames the issue in terms of capitalist crisis, the response skillfully rearticulates the terms of the discussion by a) affirming the actions immediately, b) refusing to purify the movement by integrating rather than excluding the “violent”⁵⁸ elements, c) legitimizing the anger and desires of the protestors, and d) shifting the attention to the structural nature of the problem rather than making moral judgments about individual actors. In other words, it rejects a politics of innocence that reproduces the “good,” compliant citizen. Stokely Carmichael put it well when he said, “The way the oppressor tries to stop the oppressed from using violence as a means to attain liberation is to raise ethical or moral questions about violence. I want to state emphatically here that violence in any society is neither moral

nor is it ethical. It is neither right, nor is it wrong. It is just simply a question of who has the power to legalize violence.”⁵⁹ The practice of isolating morally agreeable cases in order to highlight racist violence requires passively suffered black death and panders to a framework that strengthens and conceals current paradigms of racism. Although it may be factually true to state that Trayvon Martin was unarmed, we should not state this with a righteous sense of satisfaction. What if Martin were armed? What if he was able to defend himself? Had the situation resulted in the death of George Zimmerman rather than of Martin, it is unlikely that the public would have been as outraged and galvanized into action to the same extent. Prior to Zimmerman’s acquittal, many people on the left had faith that there would be “justice for Trayvon,” as though prison time for Zimmerman could somehow compensate for Martin’s death. When we build politics around standards of legitimate victimhood that require passive sacrifice, we will build a politics that requires a dead black boy to make its point. It’s not surprising that the nation or even the black leadership have failed to rally behind CeCe McDonald, a black trans woman who was convicted of second-degree manslaughter after a group of racist, transphobic white people attacked her and her friends, cutting McDonald’s cheek with a glass bottle and provoking an altercation that led to the death of a white man who had a swastika tattoo. Trans women of color who are involved in confrontations that result in the death of their attackers are criminalized for their survival. When Akira Jackson, a black trans woman, stabbed and killed her boyfriend after he beat her with a baseball bat, she was given a four-year sentence for manslaughter. Cases that involve an “innocent” (passive), victimized black person also provide an opportunity for the liberal white conscience to purify and morally ennoble itself by taking a position against racism. We need to challenge the use of certain raced and gendered subjects as instruments of emotional relief for white civil society, or as bodies that can be displaced for the sake of providing analogies to amplify white suffering (“slavery” being the favored analogy). Although we must emphasize that Troy Davis did not kill police officer Mark MacPhail, maybe we also should question why the public is morally outraged by the killing of a cop and not the 136 unarmed black Americans murdered by police officers, security guards, and self-appointed vigilantes in 2012 alone. Talking about these murders will not undo them. Having the “right line” cannot alter reality if we do not put our bodies where our mouths are. As Spivak says, “it can’t become our goal to keep watching our language.”⁶⁰Rejecting the politics of innocence is not about assuming a certain theoretical posture or adopting a certain perspective—it is a lived position.

Policing and Militarization

Coyne and Hall-Blanco ‘16 (Christopher J.Coyne, Assc. Prof of Economics @ GMU & Abigail R. Hall-Blanco, Asst Prof of Economics @ Univ of Tampa; Foreign Intervention, Police Militarization, and Minorities; PEACE REVIEW: A Journal of Social Justice, 28:165-170, No. 6, April-June; http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=9a5a192e-47bd-49ca-a16a-24a522d91cb0%40pdc-v-sessmgr02&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=aph&AN=116270270) \\EG

The issues of police militarization and the disproportionate use of force against historically disadvantaged racial groups are inextricably linked. The goal here is to provide insight into the origins of domestic police militarization. To do so, we build on our previous work to discuss how proactive U.S. foreign policy generates undesirable domestic consequences, which threaten the liberties and freedoms of U.S. citizens. In the context of police militarization, past foreign military interventions led directly to the militarization of U.S. police. The undesirable consequences have fallen disproportionately on minorities and disadvantaged groups. The main takeaway is that a proactive, imperialistic foreign policy can impose significant costs on domestic citizens due to expansions in the scope of state power. Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams are police units possessing highly specialized military equipment and training. These groups have become a fixture in many police departments in the United States. In the mid-1980s, approximately 20 percent of police departments had a SWAT team. By the year 2000, nearly 90 percent of police departments serving populations of 50,000 or more had a SWAT team. An estimated 3,000 SWAT deployments occurred in 1980. By the early 2000s, SWAT teams deployed 45,000 times every year. Current estimates place the number of SWAT deployments as high as 80,000 annually. Although now common, SWAT teams are a relatively new innovation, one that can be directly tied to U.S. foreign intervention and to two combat veterans, former Los Angeles police chief and World War II veteran Daryl Gates and former Los Angeles police officer and Marine John Nelson. As a Marine, Nelson served in Vietnam in an elite Force Recon unit. Although originally designed to gather intelligence, these Force Recon teams saw extended combat and were recognized for their use of lethal force. They became well known for being experts at skillfully eliminating enemy targets. For example, the "kill ratio," or number of enemies killed per every soldier lost, was about 7.6 enemies per Marine for regular Marine infantries during the Vietnam War. The kill ratio for the Force Recon units, meanwhile, was about 34 enemies for every man lost in action. The Force Recon units were also more aggressive. Regular Marine units were the aggressors in combat only 20 percent of the time they saw action. The Force Recon teams, in contrast, were the aggressors in an astounding 95 percent of their operations. Stated differently, the Force Recon units were trained to gather information, engage enemy combatants, and kill. They did so efficiently. These experiences were integral in developing John Nelson's skills, knowledge, and abilities regarding methods for controlling large groups, gathering information, and eliminating enemies. He brought this unique human capital with him when he returned to the United States and joined the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). In the 1960s, Nelson was presented an opportunity to use the unique skills of social control that he had developed abroad. In 1965, racial tensions set off the Watts riots in Los Angeles. The riots left the LAPD feeling unprepared. In response to the perceived crisis surrounding the riots, leaders of the LAPD were anxious to develop new ways to effectively control the large crowds regularly in attendance at race rallies. Drawing from his experiences with the Force Recon team, Nelson suggested the development of a similar unit within the LAPD. "A small squad of highly trained police officers armed with special weapons," he suggested, "would be more effective in a riotous situation than a massive police response." To take effect, however, Nelson's idea would need administrative support. It was here that Inspector (later Police Chief) Daryl Gates was

essential. Like Nelson, Gates was a veteran of foreign conflict, serving aboard the USS Ault during World War II. And like Nelson, Gates returned home from war with a unique skill set and had joined the LAPD. By the time Nelson proposed his idea, individuals like Gates had successfully worked their way into the administration of the LAPD. The presence of war veterans created an administrative and cultural openness to the use of military tactics. In fact, Gates himself wanted the LAPD be more militaristic and "aggressive, intimidating, and confrontational by design." It was within this environment that Nelson proposed the idea of a Force Recon style unit within the LAPD. With Gates' support, Nelson's idea was quickly adopted. The link between the newly formed paramilitary unit and the ongoing war in Vietnam was readily apparent. Initially called the "Special Weapons and Attack Team," it was decided that the word "attack" was politically unpalatable. Gates subsequently changed the name to "Special Weapons and Tactics" and the first SWAT team was born. The first SWAT unit consisted of 60 of the LAPD's top marksmen divided into teams consisting of five men—a leader, marksman, observer, scout, and a rearguard. The men selected for the first SWAT team further illustrate how the skills developed in foreign intervention influenced domestic police operations. According to the LAPD, each member of the original SWAT unit had specialized experience and prior military service. Moreover, the new SWAT team continued to incorporate new military tactics in counterinsurgency and guerrilla warfare, hiring military personnel to teach the SWAT unit. The use of SWAT teams throughout the country expanded rapidly as a result of the War on Drugs and War on Terror. As we have written previously, these conflicts served as catalysts to spread police militarization as local police departments became intertwined with the federal government's efforts to combat drugs and terror. This relationship between the political periphery (state and local governments) and the political center (the national government) allowed for the expansion of SWAT operations through the transfer of military-grade equipment and training. For example, the DOD 1208 Program, implemented in 1990, allowed the Department of Defense to transfer military equipment, such as aircraft, armor, watercraft, and weapons, to state and local police to use in their efforts to combat drugs. In 2013, a successor program, Program 1033, transferred almost $500 million in military weapons and gear to domestic law enforcement agencies for the purposes of fighting drugs and terror. The influx of military equipment into local law enforcement, combined with the adoption of military tactics like those employed by SWAT teams, created an arena in which the liberties and freedoms of U.S. citizens were jeopardized. Those most likely to suffer from these changes were those least likely to have the means to avoid the enhanced coercive power of the state—the poor, politically unconnected, and historically marginalized groups. Just as racial minorities are more likely to die while in police custody, so too are SWAT teams more likely to be used against minority groups. According to a recent report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), SWAT raids primarily impact persons of color. Between 2011 and 2012, approximately 50 percent of all SWAT raids were conducted against Black or Hispanic individuals while only 20 percent of raids involved white suspects. The difference is more pronounced when looking at particular types of SWAT raids. For example, some 68 percent of drug raids studied by the ACLU were conducted against minority suspects compared to a much lower rate for whites, even though rates of drug use and selling are similar across racial groups. In some localities, Blacks and Latinos are much more likely to be impacted by SWAT raids than their white counterparts. In Allentown, Pennsylvania, for example, Latinos are 29 times more likely to be affected by a SWAT raid than whites, while Blacks are 23 times more likely. Blacks are 37 times more likely to be the victim of a SWAT raid in Huntington, West Virginia, than their white counterparts. Blacks in Ogden, Utah, are 39 times more likely to be subjected to a SWAT raid and Blacks in Burlington, North Carolina, are 47 times more likely as compared to whites. The question remains why such groups are more likely to be

disproportionally affected by police militarization. Albert Hirschman offers one explanation. He argues that individuals are faced with two options when they confront problems within organizations to which they belong, including governments. First, individuals may "exit," or withdraw from the relationship. Alternatively, they can "voice" their grievances in an attempt to address and repair the problem. For those groups most likely to be adversely affected by police militarization, however, both of these options may be weak or altogether nonexistent for a variety of reasons. For many, exiting a community where police militarization is prevalent may be unviable due to financial constraints. Consider that Hispanics are more than twice as likely, and Blacks almost three times more likely, to live in deep poverty as whites. Given these circumstances, the option to exit is not feasible for many. As a result, these individuals become even more vulnerable to state tools of social control. There is reason to believe that the "voice" mechanism is also weak for racial minorities. One study, for instance, found that increased racial segregation leads to a decrease in black civic efficacy. The authors note that relatively segregated black communities are often represented by politicians who fail to vote for policies favored by black constituents. Ferguson illustrates this concept well. While 67 percent of residents are black, there are nearly no Black political figures. Taken together, the lack of voice and exit opportunities means that minority groups are often the least able to avoid the adverse costs and consequences of militarized police forces. Foreign and domestic policies are often seen as distinct and separate. In reality, however, a proactive foreign policy (i.e., military intervention) generates unseen domestic costs, including the importation of techniques, methods, and tools of state-produced social control. The militarization of domestic policing is one illustration of how innovations in social control developed through foreign interventions can boomerang back to the homeland. When these innovations return home they lower the cost for the political elite of exerting control over the domestic populace. The costs of these expanded powers often fall disproportionally on those least able to move or effectively voice their dissatisfaction with government behaviors. What can be done? Changing the status quo requires a fundamental reconsideration of the scope and scale of government by U.S. citizens. Instead of remaining passive regarding the role of the state in their daily lives, citizens must become skeptical regarding the net benefits of the projection of state power, both domestically and abroad. This is especially important for minority and marginalized groups who are least able to avoid the abusive hand of the state. Unfortunately, many U.S. citizens currently view the state as a solution to their problems when in fact it is a contributing cause to many economic, political, and social ills.

Surplus arms sales from the US creates an endless flow of militarization in the world.ICRC ’99 (https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/resources/documents/publication/p0734.html Established in 1863, the ICRC operates worldwide, helping people affected by conflict and armed violence and promoting the laws that protect victims of war. An independent and neutral organization, its mandate stems essentially from the Geneva Conventions of 1949. We are based in Geneva, Switzerland, and employ some 16,000 people in more than 80 countries. The ICRC is funded mainly by voluntary donations from governments and from National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.//Dewayne Martin)

The Cold War competition between two strategic alliances, in which arms were made available primarily for global political and strategic purposes, has largely disappeared. Major weapons transfers by the principal exporting States are now often motivated primarily by economic and employment benefits. Military, strategic and political factors have become secondary considerations in many instances and are

sometimes completely ignored. The human costs of arms transfers have, until recently, been considered of little importance. A major impetus driving arms sales to developing States has been the rapidly shrinking military budgets of northern industrialized countries. The lack of coherent policies for conversion of military production capacities to serve the civilian economy has meant that military industries with high production capabilities generated by the Cold War are competing intensively to develop new markets, particularly in the developing world. Even the former Czechoslovakia, which made a political decision in the early 1990s to cease arms exports, subsequently chose to re-enter the business for economic and other reasons. In addition, large quantities of surplus weapons have been transferred from the northern hemisphere to developing countries in the form of direct aid, subsidized sales or intra-alliance transfers. Ironically, these surplus arms are the by-product not only of reduced military budgets and forces in the industrialized countries but also of successful arms control agreements that have required members of NATO and the former Warsaw Pact to eliminate hundreds of thousands of weapons from their inventories. This flow of surplus arms is not likely to end soon – unless preventive action is taken without delay. In the coming five to ten years a new wave of surplus weapons and ammunition into developing countries can be expected to result from the need for funds in some States of the former Soviet Union and the modernization of arsenals in countries slated to join NATO or those aspiring to do so. Large-scale arms transfers can be a source of tension in peacetime and generate high levels of casualties once hostilities begin. Massive arms exports to Iraq throughout the 1980s are seen by many observers as having emboldened Iraq’s incursion into Kuwait and as justifying the allied response in the second Gulf War (1990-1991).

AFRICOM perpetuates a militaristic doctrine that aligns with a greater logic of the suppression of revolutionary thought.Freeman ’18 (Netfa Freeman, organizer in Pan-African Community Action 2k18 (Netfa-PACA is a member organization in the Black Alliance for Peace. She also is an analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies, “Shutting down AFRICOM and the New Scramble for Africa”, 3 October 2018, https://www.blackagendareport.com/shutting-down-africom-and-new-scramble-africa) \\EG

The US must cease its military occupation of Africans at home and abroad, and abandon its attempt to rule the world by force. “U.S. Special Forces troops now operate in more than a dozen African nations.” Marking exactly 10 years after the establishment of AFRICOM, short for U.S. Africa Command, the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) has launched “U.S. Out of Africa!: Shut Down AFRICOM,” a campaign designed to end the U.S. invasion and occupation of Africa. Although U.S. leaders say AFRICOM is “fighting terrorism” on the continent in reality AFRICOM is a dangerous structure that has only increased militarism. The real reason for its existence is geopolitical competition with China. When AFRICOM was established in the months before Barack Obama assumed office as the first Black President of the United States, a majority of African nations—led by the Pan-Africanist government of Libya—rejected AFRICOM, forcing the new command to instead work out of Europe. But with the U.S. and NATO attack on Libya that led to the destruction of that country and the murder of its leader, Muammar Gaddafi, in 2011, corrupt African leaders began to allow AFRICOM forces to operate in their countries and establish military-to-military relations with the United States. Today, those efforts have resulted in 46 various forms of U.S. bases as well as military-to-military relations between 53 out of the 54 African countries and the United States. U.S. Special Forces troops now operate in more than a dozen African nations.

“The real reason for AFRICOM’s existence is geopolitical competition with China.” Vice Admiral Robert Moeller, the head of AFRICOM, declared in 2008 , “Protecting the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market is one of Africom’s guiding principles.” AFRICOM is the flip side of the domestic war being waged by the same repressive state structure against Black and poor people in the United States. The Black power and civil rights movement of the 60s and 70s was met with the repressive response of the FBI in the form of its COINTELPRO or Counter Intelligence Program that effectively obliterated these movements for social justice and self-determination. While in the very same era on the continent of Africa, the CIA conspired with other colonizing powers to do the exact same things, exemplified by the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana the and the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. BAP’s U.S. Out of Africa!: Shut Down AFRICOM campaign links the resistance to the domestic war on Black people to U.S. interventionism and militarism abroad. Not only does there need to be a mass movement in the U.S. to shut down AFRICOM, this mass movement needs to become inseparably bound with the movement that has swept this country to end murderous police brutality against Black and Brown people. The whole world must begin to see AFRICOM and the militarization of U.S. domestic police departments as counterparts.

Us militarization in Africa is an extension of a colonial agenda meant to terrorize Black communities around the world.Freeman 4/18 (Netfa Freeman, organizer in Pan-African Community Action 2k18 (Netfa-PACA is a member organization in the Black Alliance for Peace. She also is an analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies, “Why Should Americans Care About NATO/US In Africa? (Pt 2/2)”, 18 April 2019, https://therealnews.com/stories/why-should-americans-care-about-nato-us-in-africa-pt-2-2) \\EG

JACQUELINE LUQMAN: This is Jacqueline Luqman with The Real News. We talked in the first segment about Black Alliance for Peace, an organization that is two years old that has a mission and a focus on reviving the black radical antiwar tradition and focus in the United States. We talked in the first segment about NATO, the far reach of U.S. militarism, and specifically what the United States military is doing in Africa, that many people in America know little to nothing about. But in this segment, we’re going to talk about what all this means to black people domestically. To continue this conversation, I am here joined today by Netfa Freeman; Netfa is the Coordinating Committee member for the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP), he’s also an organizer with Pan-African Community Action (PCA), and Vanessa Beck. Vanessa is a member of the Black Alliance for Peace Research Committee and is also on the Steering Committee for Health Over Profit for Everyone (HOPE). Thank you both for joining me again for this second segment. VANESSA BECK: Thank you, Jacqueline. NETFA FREEMAN: Thank you. JACQUELINE LUQMAN: So we–you guys gave us a lot of information, a lot of very disturbing information; 800 U.S. military bases around the world, the expanded role of the United States military in Africa that few people know about, and NATO–the role of NATO. Let me ask you a question about NATO before we go into the domestic focus of the black radical antiwar sentiment that needs to be revived. When people think about NATO, they usually think about the expansion of NATO in regard to the response of Russia to NATO. Do you think, Netfa, that that overshadows what’s being done in Africa in regard to NATO? NETFA FREEMAN: Yeah, it definitely overshadows. I mean, there’s nothing–I think that particularly our people need to understand what our political, economic, and social interests are. Russia is not our enemy, that’s not what’s happening. They’re killing us in the street every 28 hours, they’re not the ones mass incarcerating us,

they’re not the ones with a big footprint on the African continent. That’s the United States with a big military footprint on the African continent. I don’t even know if Russia has–at most, they might have one base there. And really, what the interests are in terms of–it was strange, because they also talk about China a lot. And China is very, very present on the African continent in a lot of ways. Still, though, it’s not a military footprint. It’s in trade agreements and relationships that people could argue are for the interests of China, but still, that’s what every country, every government and people do. But they’re not bringing militarism, they don’t have the same history of overthrowing governments and CIA coup d’etats. This is the legacy of the United States. And so, when they talk about that in the media and people end up focusing on it, we are not really focusing on things that are in our best interest or help us understand that at all. We don’t understand the legacy and the nature of colonialism, not only that it applies to a new colonialism, all the trappings of independence but with all of the same political and economic relationships and interests and power relations intact, that’s known as neocolonialism. And it exists on the continent of Africa and also applies to us as black people in the United States. JACQUELINE LUQMAN: So that’s a great segue into what I’m going to ask you, Vanessa. Why should black people–why should anyone in the United States care about all of this information you’ve just given us about the expansion of the United States military state? But why should black people care in particular, especially black people in the United States? Why should black people in Baltimore be concerned about what the United States military is doing in Africa? VANESSA BECK: Right. Very, very important question. So while the United States military was ramping up militarization in Africa, simultaneously the Obama administration was ramping up militarization right here, of colonized black and poor working class neighborhoods in the United States. And this involves even using some of the very same weapons and the very same tactics and techniques to kind of squash any kind of uprisings that occur. One thing I like to look at is life expectancy, like let’s take the Upton, Druid Hills neighborhood in Baltimore and compare that to life expectancy in the wealthy white Roland Park. And Roland Park, if you’re lucky enough to be living there, your life expectancy is 84, whereas in Upton, it is 68. And that is on par with nations that the United States occupies and bombs. It’s more on par with that than it is the rest of the United States. JACQUELINE LUQMAN: So we don’t have a situation in Druid Hill where the United States is dropping bombs on the neighborhood, right, there’s no one drone bombing Druid Hill. So how is American militarism abroad affecting the life expectancy of people in poor, and especially poor black neighborhoods? Where is the connection? VANESSA BECK: Well, militarization is not only about dropping bombs, it is also the threat of having militarized police and surveillance in a community. There are two programs, domestically in particular, that are responsible for this occupied–I was going to say occupied feeling, but it’s a reality, occupied reality in our neighborhoods. There’s the 1033 Program which allows any kind of local police to obtain military weapons from the pentagon at reduced rates or for free. And this even applies to school districts, and campus police can get these weapons. And then we also have what has been named the Deadly Exchange Program, which is a police exchange between U.S. police and Israeli police, where they trade tactics and techniques. Now, the Israeli police is known to be one of the most violent occupying police forces that there is, and Israeli police, meanwhile, recognize that United States police are a terrorizing force on black people domestically. So there’s this intensification of militarization that we particularly see when black people are uprising here over shootings or over conditions in their neighborhoods. Then it is very much out in the open. But this affects us, just the daily stress of living under these conditions affects our health, even.

Trump’s “Prosper Africa” is a new term for the Scramble for Africa.Freeman ’18 (Netfa Freeman, organizer in Pan-African Community Action 2k18 (Netfa-PACA is a member organization in the Black Alliance for Peace. She also is an analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies, “John Bolton Says He Wants to Protect Africa from ‘Predatory’ Chinese Behavior. What About Washington’s?”, 21 December 2018, https://ips-dc.org/john-bolton-says-he-wants-to-protect-africa-from-predatory-chinese-behavior-what-about-washingtons/) \\EG

John Bolton’s recent unveiling of the Trump Administration’s “Prosper Africa” plan did what is typical of such U.S. foreign policy announcements. It performed the balancing act of admitting motives to protect vague “U.S. interests” while dishonestly claiming benevolent intentions for the other country, region, or continent concerned. In this case the continent is Africa. The “new” Africa policy, National Security Advisor Bolton suggested, is an adjusted U.S. strategy to “assist” African economic independence from the predatory designs of China and Russia. In reality it is the Trump’s administration taking the baton from the Obama administration in the new Scramble for Africa, a sequel to the proliferation of conflicting European claims to African territory during the New Imperialism period, between the 1880s and the start of World War I. Bolton admits as much when he calls the administration’s new plan a response to “predatory practices pursued by China and Russia [that] stunt economic growth in Africa; threaten the financial independence of African nations; inhibit opportunities for U.S. investment; interfere with U.S. military operations; and pose a significant threat to U.S. national security interests.” He divulged this and the “new” U.S.-Africa policy in a speech he gave at the far-right Heritage Foundation. It should be obvious that Bolton cares little about predation — he just doesn’t want other predators to compete with. He made no mention of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), which has put most African nations under the effective military control of the United States. AFRICOM is the re-colonization of Africa by the U.S., with thousands of U.S. troops now stationed in some 30 African countries and dozens of U.S. bases across Africa. The total estimated cost for AFRICOM in 2018 is $236.9 million. Another quarter-billion dollars over the next six years is projected to be spent to build a U.S. military drone base in Niger, West Africa. Bolton’s claims of having humanitarian concerns for Africa — or for anyone — ring hollow when U.S.-Africa policy is predicated on spreading these instruments of death (while domestic budgets for health care, education, and necessary social services in the U.S. are considered expendable). No mistake should be made in thinking that foreign policy toward Africa is a partisan issue. Its essence is consistently the same. Obama, the first Black president, paved the way for the proliferation of AFRICOM on the continent. During his terms there was a 1,900 percent increase in the U.S. military presence on the continent. African independence movements since the 1950s have been destabilized by U.S. administrations of both parties. Leaders such as Patrice Lumumba of Congo, assassinated by the CIA, and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, who was overthrown in a CIA orchestrated coup, fell victim to U.S. government meddling. With this history, the United States lags behind China in Africa, which is investing in African infrastructure and forgiving debt demanded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). If China and now Russia are increasing their influence in Africa, it’s because Africans see advantages to having an alternative to Washington — and they have every right to do business with, or ally themselves, with the states of their choosing. Regardless of the motivations of China, Russia, or any other non-Western nations, for African countries to have an alternative to U.S.- and Western European-dominated institutions for investment can only be a good thing for Africa. The record of institutions like the World Bank and IMF has been to impose economic structural adjustments that increase profits for Western multinational corporations but spiral African people into poverty. Then there’s the Pentagon. Long-standing U.S. military aid to, and close joint operations with, Rwanda and

Uganda led proxies of these countries into the Congo, contributing to a conflict that resulted in the deaths of 6 million people between 1998 and 2007. More recently, thousands of Ghanaians rallied in the streets of their capital this spring to protest a deal that would give the United States military an expanded role in Ghana. And this month, an AFRICOM press release boasted its success in killing 62 people in Somalia by four “precision airstrikes.” About these things, Bolton seems unconcerned. If anything, Bolton seems to gripe that the U.S. has been too helpful to Africans in the recent past. Bolton says what distinguishes Prosper Africa from the plan of the previous administration is that “The United States will no longer provide indiscriminate assistance across the entire continent, without focus or prioritization. And, we will no longer support unproductive, unsuccessful, and unaccountable UN peacekeeping missions.” This part is consistent with Bolton’s notorious disdain of the United Nations and with Donald Trump’s “America First” doctrine. This might be about the only substantial difference between his Africa policy and that of the previous administration. It basically means the administration just intends to advance U.S. hegemony using less cooperation with other global powers. Federal spending that militarizes other parts of the world might secure access to corporations robbing Africa of its rich mineral resources, and enrich military contractors, but it does little to nothing that benefits common U.S. citizens or the struggling people of Africa. What can average citizens do? One way to end the madness is to support the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) campaign that calls for an end to AFRICOM and to all foreign interference in the affairs of African nations. BAP’s petition calls upon the U.S. Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) to hold hearings on the impact of U.S. militarization in Africa. A mass movement is needed to expose the real bipartisan U.S. foreign policy in Africa. The campaign to “shut down AFRICOM” is part and parcel of a peace movement to demilitarize the U.S. and the world. This objective is a requirement of any legitimate and genuine peace movement.

AFRICOM is a mechanism of white supremacy to legitimize African conflict and justify the siege of Black communities.Collins ’18 (Sam Collins, The Washington Informer, “Black Leftists Lead Call to Dismantle AFRICOM”, 10 October 2018, https://washingtoninformer.com/black-leftists-lead-call-to-dismantle-africom/) \\EG

Members of a Black anti-imperialist collective say people of African descent have been misinformed about the true nature of the United States’ seemingly benevolent military presence in the motherland, currently manifested through U.S. Africa Command. As the unified combatant command, known as AFRICOM, enters its 11th year of existence, the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP), a group comprised of grass-roots Black leftist organizations, has launched a campaign to dismantle what has been likened to the militaristic policing tactics used in Black communities throughout the United States. “The parallels are clear. They treat us like the same people,” said Netfa Freeman, an affiliate of the Institute for Policy Studies in Northwest and member of Pan-African Community Action (PACA), a BAP partner organization. According to its website, AFRICOM works with interagency and international partners to advance the United States’ policy goals on the African continent by building defense capabilities and defeating perceived threats to global security. But AFRICOM’s opponents say the intentions are more nefarious. On Oct. 1, the 10th anniversary of AFRICOM’s official launch, BAP announced its “U.S. Out of Africa!: Shut Down AFRICOM” campaign, an effort to combat the U.S. military presence in the continent. Change.org petitions in English, Spanish, French, German and Arabic, to be delivered to the U.S. House Armed Services Committee and Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), demand the complete withdrawal of

U.S. military forces from Africa and the closure of U.S. military bases worldwide. The petition also calls for CBC opposition to AFRICOM and its commitment to holding hearings about the military program’s impact on the African continent. In the weeks leading up to the campaign, Freeman and other BAP members took to Freeman’s weekly 89.3 (WPFW-FM) radio show “Voices With Vision,” drawing parallels between the U.S. military presence in Africa and policing tactics that keep Black communities across the United States under siege. “There are national security study memorandums that authorized the sale of small guns to Africa for what experts called assisted genocide,” Freeman told The Informer. Freeman said AFRICOM and U.S. Africa Central Command, a similar program that oversees Egypt, fulfills the U.S. government’s true intentions of controlling the flow of natural resources in Africa and the growing Chinese presence, primarily by leveraging relationships with African leaders and inciting conflicts that legitimize the U.S. military presence. “The same thing happens here,” he said. “We see weapons we can’t manufacture coming in [our communities], and a lot of radicalized, but misguided youth get armed. That’s the excuse they use to further militarize spaces [here and in Africa] under the guise of keeping it under control.” The Bush White House announced the launch of AFRICOM in 2007, dubbing it a means of strengthening cooperation with African countries and promoting common goals of improved health, education, democracy and economic growth on the continent. The program expanded under the Obama administration. During his 2009 visit to Ghana, President Barack Obama framed U.S. military activity in Africa as a matter of maintaining global security. For years, AFRICOM has been headquartered at Kelley Barracks in Stuttgart, Germany, mostly due to the staunch opposition of then-Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi, a vocal proponent of African economic self-determination, and other political leaders in Nigeria and South Africa. The 2011 U.S. and NATO-led invasion of Libya, during which Gaddafi was killed, paved the way for AFRICOM’s expansion. Ethiopia and Liberia counted among the African nations that welcomed the possibility of hosting AFRICOM operations. This year, nearly $264 million had been expected to fund AFRICOM-related operations in 53 of Africa’s 54 nations, according to estimates for the 2018 Operation and Maintenance Overview Fiscal Budget filed in 2017. Such allocations have financed intricate military operations throughout the continent. Last month, in coordination with the Somalian government, U.S. troops led the killing of 18 members of al-Shabaab, which officials have labeled an Islamist terrorist organization, in Somalia. Last week, on the day after AFRICOM’s anniversary, an airstrike killed nine more members of that group. “Many of our people think the military is needed and troops are protecting our people,” said Jaribu Hill of the Black Agenda Report, a progressive online news network. “We have to educate people about the politics of war and the damage it does.” Hill outlined an organizing strategy that allows BAP members to directly connect with people in Black communities through home visits and town hall meetings. For Hill, a human rights attorney, rallying support for the campaign requires leaving behind the comforts of social media and educating the ill-informed, whom she described as victims of an anti-African, Jim Crow education system. She said face-to-face interaction with Black people in communities affected by police violence debunks misconceptions about Africa, learned through media propaganda that aligns people’s interests with the military industrial complex and precludes them from identifying with the struggles of their counterparts across the Atlantic Ocean. “[U.S. military occupation] has nothing to do with the security and health and wellness of people living in this country and other countries,” Hill said. “It has to do with white supremacy and domination. We have to break down those terms. It would be necessary to have regular, everyday conversations with our people to increase their whole understanding of the military industrial complex.” Since the campaign started, nearly 500 people have signed the online petition. Organizers said they want to meet their goal of 10,000 signatures by January 2019. BAP members, part of a

collective that also includes Friends of the Congo, a Northwest-based advocacy organization, admitted the high likelihood of the CBC, comprised of nearly 50 Black U.S. lawmakers, ignoring the call to dismantle AFRICOM and challenge U.S. imperialism. In June, the U.S. military budget inched closer to $1 trillion with CBC members’ approval. While not solely responsible, CBC members have also been on record as throwing their support behind the continuation of the 1033 program, a drug war-era relic under which the Department of Defense has issued excess military equipment to local police forces, used in Ferguson, Missouri, Baltimore and other majority-Black communities. In 2014, only seven of 41 CBC members voted for an amendment that would halt the 1033 program. “If we don’t get the CBC on our side, we continue our radical revolutionary work and taking on these issues,” Hill said. “We’re in solidarity with people in other countries and who are victims of imperialism and the military industrial complex.” Hill said Black congressional representatives will be given a chance to stray from a narrative that has made them opponents of the Black radical left. “We know the CBC can’t be relied upon,” she said. “We have never had the full support of the Black caucus. They were not there on the issue of reparations, the prison industrial complex, and police brutality. They have been virtually silent; it’s been a long time since they decried the murders of our people.”

AFRICOM facilitates US attempts to restrict radical thought in Africa and to breed instability throughout the continent.Azikiwe ’17 (Abayomi Azikiwe, Editor, Pan-African News Wire, “U.S. imperialism: Militarism and superexploitation in Africa”, 8 August 2017, https://www.workers.org/2017/08/08/u-s-imperialism-militarism-and-superexploitation-in-africa/) \\EG

Africa policies [of the U.S.] have consistently remained destabilizing and predatory over the decades, despite the well-choreographed pretenses. It is this imperialism that has impeded the capacity of African nations to direct their future. With the ascendancy of President Donald Trump to the White House, a strong focus has been placed on his role as a promoter of racism and national oppression domestically, along with warmongering abroad. We observe keenly the escalation of tension in the Korean peninsula with the placement of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile system. The president’s posture in relationship to the government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea threatened the full resumption of an unresolved war just several weeks ago. There have been increasing aerial attacks against purported al-Qaida targets in Yemen while the people in this Middle Eastern state, the least developed in the region, are suffering immensely from the Pentagon-coordinated war involving Saudi Arabian and Gulf Cooperation Council bombings, which have continued on a daily basis since March 2015, killing an estimated 12,000 people and prompting the widespread outbreak of cholera, impacting over 60,000. The deployment of the Massive Ordnance Air Blast in Afghanistan represented a new level of warfare in that Central Asian country, which has been the focus of U.S. policy since at least 1979, when Islamist forces were unleashed against the Soviet-backed socialist government then in power. Since 2001, the Pentagon and NATO have laid waste to the country further, with thousands of foreign troops continuing to occupy the area. Somalia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Libya and beyond Although the Trump administration’s foreign policy towards Africa has gained far less attention by the Western media, it has continued already existing hostilities on the African continent. Somalia was singled out when Trump ordered the escalation of Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency personnel being stationed in this Horn of Africa state. A U.S. Navy Seal was killed by al-Shabab guerrilla units several weeks ago while

embedded in the U.S. and European Union-backed Somali National Army. Although the administration claimed it was doing away with the supposed restrictions on military actions in Somalia imposed by former President Barack Obama, the interventions by the U.S. in Somalia go back as far as the late 1970s. When Jimmy Carter was in the Oval Office, the U.S. encouraged an invasion by the government of then-President Mohamed Siad Barre against the Ogaden region of Ethiopia. The waning days of the George H.W. Bush tenure were marked by the invasion of 12,000 Marines into Somalia in the failed “Operation Restore Hope” beginning in December 1992, a plan inherited by Bill Clinton, which ended in disaster when the people rose up against the occupation. Since 2006, the U.S., then under President George W. Bush, has encouraged and sponsored intervention into Somali national affairs. First by seeking to empower warlords to subvert the efforts of the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) and, after 2009, by recruiting elements of the UIC into the interim federal regime, Washington sought to guide political events in the oil-rich state. Several neighboring states have been drawn into the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM), which now has approximately 22,000 troops from Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Burundi and Uganda. Police officers from Ghana, Sierra Leone and Nigeria are also a part of the mission. In 1998, Britain, the former colonial power, along with the U.S., the EU and others, began imposing sanctions on the government of the southern African nation of Zimbabwe and the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), led by President Robert Mugabe. In 2000, when Zimbabwe passed legislation granting the right of the African people to radically redistribute land to the people, the sanctions and other forms of hostile propaganda deepened. During the period of 1998-2000, the administration of President Bill Clinton was in power. The same sanctions continued through the entire two terms of the Bush White House. When Obama took office in January 2009, his regime continued and intensified the punitive measures against the ZANU-PF ruling party and various political officials, including President Mugabe. Both Britain and the U.S. attempted to persuade South Africa, while former President Thabo Mbeki was in office, to impose a blockade on Zimbabwe. Britain also drew up plans for an evacuation of its settler population, who held United Kingdom passports. These suggestions failed and through the assistance of successive African National Congress governments, the support of the regional Southern African Development Community and the People’s Republic of China, Zimbabwe has been able to remain afloat. U.S. imperialism through Africom This, of course, was not the case in the oil-rich North African nation of Libya, which under the Jamahiriya system headed by Col. Muammar Gaddafi had attained the highest standard of living anywhere on the continent. It was the Democratic administration of Obama, with Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, which coordinated a war of regime-change and genocide that destroyed Libya as a viable state. Gaddafi was driven from the capital of Tripoli in August 2011 and later captured and brutally murdered by imperialist agents on Oct. 20 of the same year. Today, Libya is a major source of instability and human trafficking internationally. Thousands have died off the coast of Libya in the Mediterranean Sea in attempts to flee the chaos and impoverishment there and throughout other regions of Africa and the Middle East. Now there are at least three identifiable regimes in Libya, which often engage in deadly military struggles for political and economic authority. The country has gone from being Africa’s most prosperous to dire poverty and balkanization. Numerous attempts by counterrevolutionary elements backed up by the White House, EU member-states and the United Nations to form a viable government have failed. The situation in Libya is a direct result of the foreign policy of Barack Obama towards the African continent. Since the launching of the U.S. Africa Command (Africom) in 2008 under Bush, the presence of U.S. military forces on the continent has increased substantially. Obama announced just two years prior to leaving office that his administration would deploy in excess of 3,500 Special Forces and military trainers across 36 nations. A

military base in the Horn of Africa state of Djibouti has been expanded and houses thousands of U.S. troops at Camp Lemonnier. Imperialism in Africa today is at a critical stage, impeding the capacity of nation-states to direct their own futures. Despite Africa’s vast mineral and agricultural wealth and its labor power, a renewed debt crisis compounded by Pentagon, CIA and State Department interference is reversing the gains made in previous years.

AFRICOM is an extension of police brutality and state terror against activists.Schmidt ’10 (Michael Schmidt, researcher and journalist for pambazuka news, an organization which prioritizes discussion of radicalism and justice, 4 February 2010, “The new American imperialism in Africa”, https://www.pambazuka.org/governance/new-american-imperialism-africa, Michael Schmidt reveals the alarming extent of American military expansion in Africa. This article was written four years ago, but still holds strong relevance today in the context of United States Africa Command (AFRICOM). Schmidt describes three avenues that the US is taking to increase its military foothold in Africa in pursuit of its ‘War on Terror’: ‘piggybacking’ off already strong French military presence, creating an unofficial ‘School of the Africas’ in the guise of the African Centre for Strategic Studies, and with its Africa Contingency Operations Training Assistance (ACOTA) programme ‘aimed at integrating African armed forces into US strategic (imperialist) objectives’. Schmidt places blame beyond the US, however, and uncovers the role that African countries, particularly South Africa, are playing in strengthening US military presence through ‘secret pacts’. In light of all this, Schmidt concludes with a warning: ‘It would be naïve to think that bourgeois democracy… will protect the working class, peasantry and poor from state terrorism.’) \\EG

The programmes that Fraser mentions include the ‘Next Generation of African Military Leaders’ course run by the shady African Centre for Strategic Studies based in Washington, which has ‘chapters’ in various African countries including South Africa. The Centre appears to be a sort of ‘School of the Africas’ similar to the infamous ‘School of the Americas’ based at Fort Benning in Georgia. In 2001, it was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). Founded in 1946 in Panama, the School of the Americas has trained some 60,000 Latin American soldiers, including notorious neo-Nazi Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer, infamous Panamanian dictator and drug czar Manuel Noriega, Argentine dictators Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola whose regime murdered 30,000 people between 1976 and 1983, numerous death-squad killers, and Efrain Vasquez and Ramirez Poveda who staged a failed US-backed coup in Venezuela in 2002. Over the decades, graduates of the School have murdered and tortured hundreds of thousands of people across Latin America, specifically targeting trade union leaders, grassroots activists, students, guerrilla units, and political opponents. The murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero of Nicaragua, in 1980, and the ‘El Mozote’ massacre of 767 villagers in El Salvador, in 1981, were committed by graduates of the School. And yet the School of the Americas Watch, an organisation trying to shut WHINSEC down, is on an FBI ‘anti-terrorism’ watch-list. So Africa should be concerned if the African Centre for Strategic Studies has similar objectives, even if the School of the Americas Watch cannot confirm these fears? There is more: we’ve all heard of the ‘Standby Force’ being devised by the African Union (AU), a coalition of Africa’s authoritarian neo-liberal regimes. But the AU has also set up, under the patronage of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe – which also covers North America, Russia and Central Asia – the African Centre for the Study and Research of Terrorism. The Centre is based in Algiers in Algeria, at the heart of a murderous regime that

has itself ‘made disappear’ some 3,000 people between 1992 and 2003 (according to Amnesty International this is equivalent to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, but it is a fact ignored by the African left). The Centre’s director, Abdelhamid Boubazine told me that it would not only be a think-tank and trainer of ‘anti-terrorism’ judges, but that it would also have teeth and would provide training in ‘specific armed intervention’ to support the continent’s regimes. Anneli Botha, the senior researcher on terrorism at the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies, said though, that only ten per cent of terrorist attacks in Africa were on armed forces, and only six per cent were on state figures and institutions, though the latter were ‘focused’. She warned that a major cause of African terrorism was ‘a growing void between government and security forces on the one hand, and local communities on the other’. Caught in the grip of misery and poverty, many people are recruited into rebel armies even though few of these offer any sort of real solution. The Centre in Algiers operates under the AU’s ‘Algiers Convention on Terrorism’, which is notoriously vague on the definition of terrorism. This opens the door for a wide range of non-governmental, protest, grassroots, civic, and militant organisations to be targeted for elimination by the new counter-terrorism forces. It would be naïve to think that bourgeois democracy – which passed South Africa’s equally vaguely-defined Protection of Constitutional Democracy from Terrorism and Other Related Activities Act into law last year – will protect the working class, peasantry and poor from state terrorism.

AFRICOM is the “Scramble for Africa” under a new name.Baroud ’18 (Ramzy Baroud, Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His latest book is The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, 2018). His latest book is The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, 2018). He earned a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter, and is a former Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, UCSB, Foreign Policy Journal, “Shadow Armies: The Unseen, But Real US War in Africa”, 10 January 2018, https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2018/01/10/shadow-armies-the-unseen-but-real-us-war-in-africa/) \\EG

There is a real—but largely concealed—war which is taking place throughout the African continent. It involves the United States, an invigorated Russia and a rising China. The outcome of the war is likely to define the future of the continent and its global outlook. It is easy to pin the blame on US President Donald Trump, his erratic agenda and impulsive statements. But the truth is the current US military expansion in Africa is just another step in the wrong direction. It is part of a strategy that had been implemented a decade ago, during the administration of President George W. Bush, and actively pursued by President Barack Obama. In 2007, under the pretext of the ‘war on terror’, the US consolidated its various military operations in Africa to establish the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM). With a starting budget of half a billion dollars, AFRICOM was supposedly launched to engage with African countries in terms of diplomacy and aid. But, over the course of the last 10 years, AFRICOM has been transformed into a central command for military incursions and interventions. However, that violent role has rapidly worsened during the first year of Trump’s term in office. Indeed, there is a hidden US war in Africa, and it is fought in the name of ‘counter-terrorism’. According to a VICE News special investigation, US troops are now conducting 3,500 exercises and military engagements throughout Africa per year, an average of 10 per day. US mainstream media rarely discusses this ongoing war, thus giving the military ample space to destabilize any of the continent’s 54 countries as it

pleases. “Today’s figure of 3,500 marks an astounding 1,900 percent increase since the command was activated less than a decade ago, and suggests a major expansion of US military activities on the African continent,” VICE reported. Following the death of four US Special Forces soldiers in Niger on October 4, US Secretary of Defense James Mattis made an ominous declaration to a Senate committee: these numbers are likely to increase as the US is expanding its military activities in Africa. Mattis, like other defense officials in the previous two administrations, justifies the US military transgressions as part of ongoing ‘counter-terrorism’ efforts. But such coded reference has served as a pretense for the US to intervene in, and exploit, a massive region with a great economic potential. The old colonial ‘Scramble for Africa’ is being reinvented by global powers that fully fathom the extent of the untapped economic largesse of the continent. While China, India and Russia are each developing a unique approach to wooing Africa, the US is invested mostly in the military option, which promises to inflict untold harm and destabilize many nations. The 2012 coup in Mali, carried out by a US-trained army captain, Amadou Haya Sanogo, is only one example. In a 2013 speech, then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cautioned against a “new colonialism in Africa (in which it is) easy to come in, take out natural resources, pay off leaders and leave.” While Clinton is, of course, correct, she was disingenuously referring to China, not her own country. China’s increasing influence in Africa is obvious, and Beijing’s practices can be unfair. However, China’s policy towards Africa is far more civil and trade-focused than the military-centered US approach. The growth in the China-Africa trade figures are, as per a UN News report in 2013, happening at a truly “breathtaking pace”, as they jumped from around $10.5 billion per year in 2000 to $166 billion in 2011. Since then, it has continued at the same impressive pace. But that growth was coupled with many initiatives, entailing many billions of dollars in Chinese credit to African countries to develop badly needed infrastructure. More went to finance the ‘African Talents Program’, which is designed to train 30,000 African professionals in various sectors. It should come as no surprise, then, that China surpassed the US as Africa’s largest trading partner in 2009. The real colonialism, which Clinton referred to in her speech, is, however, under way in the US’s own perception and behavior towards Africa. This is not a hyperbole, but in fact a statement that echoes the words of US President Trump himself.

AFRICOM mirrors police brutality and perpetuates US authoritarianism.Imani 3/5 (Catherine Imani, writer for Race Baitr, RaceBaitr is a platform created to explore the various ways race is expressed and defined with the goal of creating a world without all of its intersecting oppressions, 5 March 2019, “Activists are being wildly outmaneuvered by gov. tech and data collection, and it’s a problem”, https://racebaitr.com/2019/03/05/activists-are-being-wildly-outmaneuvered-by-gov-tech-and-data-collection-and-its-a-problem/) \\EG

The way the U.S. military defines their battlefield, or “area of operations,” differs greatly from how the average person thinks of the stages of war. I have studied the government’s relationship to Black liberation efforts in the United States for several years now, and their area of operations is as much AFRICOM, Venezuela, or Haiti as it was Ferguson. AFRICOM is the cumulative relationship our military has with a majority of the countries in Africa, where they support strategic allies through armed conflict and strategic humanitarian aid in exchange for control over assets within the United States’ interest. In Venezuela, the U.S. is attempting to enact regime change, while in Haiti they are attempting to ensure the regime is not changed amidst intense protest. The goal in each of these situations is to meet the mission criteria outlined by our government and their senior officials. As it relates to Black liberation

efforts in the United States, the goals of the State will always be to ensure the future of the U.S. Empire. Throughout the entire history of the United States, there has been a particular violence and brutality that has been reserved for African Americans, Black Americans in general, and Native Americans, which has selectively been extended to people outside of these groups under very specific circumstances. The entire foundation of American society is built on our shared oppression, and if that oppression were to stop, so would American society. Since before the Trail of Tears and the technical end of chattel slavery, African Americans, Black Americans more broadly, and Native Americans have been fighting to end our genocide, with the most radical of us recognizing that we cannot be free without a complete restructuring of modern society. As time went on, the State recognized this as well, and made a strategic effort to counter our efforts. Although the State technically cannot enact targeted action against U.S. citizens, they have historically strategically circumvented these prohibitions to ensure our continued oppression, which allows them to retain a non-authoritarian image to the larger U.S. population and global allies while being an authoritarian figure.

AFRICOM plays into a Eurocentric politic of African non-existence—the West has blood on its hands.Okeyo ’17 (Agunda Okeyo, Okeyo is a writer, filmmaker and activist driven to challenge inequality, politics and culture in the U.S. and abroad, Written in contribution to the Huffington Post and Afropunk, “IF BLACK LIVES DON’T MATTER, AFRICAN LIVES DON’T EXIST: WESTERN OBSERVERS IN KENYA HAVE BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS”, 3 November 2017, https://afropunk.com/2017/11/black-lives-dont-matter-african-lives-dont-exist-western-observers-kenya-blood-hands/) \\EG

If Black lives don’t matter enough to say that #BlackLivesMatter, African lives don’t exist. Living in America is an exercise in frustrating tolerance of a people who fail to recognize their ceaseless exploitation of African lives, land and resources. Most Americans are ignorant of this country’s role in the assassination of the late great Patrice Lumumba of Congo, the colonization of Liberia in their attempt to rid themselves of free blacks beginning in the 1820s or the ongoing conflicts they endorse through the military program AFRICOM — exacerbating conflicts in Somalia, South Sudan, Congo, Mali and many other places to passively control African natural resources under the guise of “democracy building” and “security” against insurgents the U.S. birthed in endless middle eastern conflict. The simplest way to understand this willful ignorance is in the same way that the United States responds to their “original sin” of African chattel slavery. Currently, the Trump White House and the Republican Party are striving to unify a broad cross section of Americans on the tacit basis of race, specifically the white race. The world that Western Europe has balkanized and pillaged is untenable, so they are going back to basics: white is right. In the midst of the unprecedented Supreme Court ruling overturning the Kenyan presidential election and the emerging boycott of incumbent Uhuru Kenyatta and his Jubilee party, African self determination must be ignored. This is the U.S. policy when it comes to Africans, black lives don’t matter, thus Africans, the source of all humanity, do not exist. By 2043 the United States will be predominantly black and brown. That cannot stand if “Manifest Destiny,” the white man’s “God given” right to control North American resources, is to hold. The policies and practices of the Republican party are beholden to a white oligarchy that has funded the party’s candidates and exploits since the late 1970s. People like the Koch Brothers owners of Koch Industries, the second-largest privately owned company in the United States, David D.Smith of Sinclair Broadcasting Group, the nation’s largest owner

of television stations, and Robert Mercer, major funder of Breitbart Media, The Trump Campaign and Brexit Campaign, have a vested interest in unfettered white supremacist power. These men represent the top tenth of the top one percent of wealth that former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was railing against during the 2016 U.S. presidential primaries. In order to maintain the grossly unequal position they hold, they must continue to extract outdated energy sources like petroleum, deny verified science around climate change and beat back the coming tide of mixed race, black and brown people. Just as this nation seeks to deny the agency and leadership of African descendants in America, they must also deny the agency of African people. As a Kenyan, this has never been clearer than with this year’s presidential election, an election fraught with blatant corruption from the incumbent Jubilee Party, and yet every Western observer including the Unites States deemed the election free and fair. The absurdity of this determination alongside a reality TV star in the White House after, by most accounts, the best president in modern U.S. history, is laughable. The Cliff Notes version of modern Kenyan politics is as follows: President Uhuru Kenyatta is the son of Kenya’s first president Jomo Kenyatta. After being jailed, tortured then released by the British for his role in fighting for independence, the return of ancestral land and self determination of Kenyan people, he turned around and jailed a number of his allies. Among the leaders he jailed to send a message that he was the new extension of colonial domination, was the late Oginga Odinga—jailed after serving as Kenya’s first Vice President when he exchanged in a public war of words with Kenyatta. In the midst of jailing his allies, Kenyatta also walked off with a gaggle of ancestral land returned by the British, hoarding a majority and leaving thousands of his own people landless until this day. Oginga Odinga was eventually released and spent all his life determined the reclaim the moral soul of Kenya that was sold by Kenyatta to the British, who still maintain a neocolonial relationship with the country. Odinga’s son Raila Odinga over the course of nearly forty years has emerged as Kenya’s strongest opposition leader, extolling egalitarian and democratic socialist values similar to his father and skeptical of Western interests and modern capitalism. Because Raila Odinga is not pandering to U.S. and Western European values of greed and mass exploitation, he seems untrustworthy to them. To the everyday Kenyan, he seems obstinate at worst or fundamentally genuine at best. Arguably, Raila Odinga has won every election since 2007, but his rival Uhuru Kenyatta has British allegiance and is among the the richest men in Africa so ballots are stuffed, critics are intimidated, police or thugs are paid to cause trouble and no matter what, Uhuru always wins. Cut to 2017. This year’s August 8th election was a sham. Mere days before this year’s election, the technician charged with securing the computerized voting system under the country’s Independent Electoral Boundaries Commission (IEBC), Chris Msando, was tortured and murdered. 79 percent of Kenya’s 19.6 million registered voters went to the polls knowing full well what happened, praying their votes mattered. Despite exit polling that projected Odinga of the National Super Alliance (NASA) party to win, he predictably lost. All foreign observers including American John Kerry, who deemed the votes “free, fair and credible,” supported the results. Most Kenyans, based on past experience and logical deduction did not. NASA took their grievances to the Supreme Court and in a landmark ruling, the first time in African history and the fourth time in world history, the presidential election results were overturned. The response throughout Africa, that has been saddled by decrepit, greedy patriarchs since the murder of Patrice Lumumba, was resoundingly positive and hopeful. In the West, there was incredulity and paranoia about rampant bloodshed and crumbling allegiances—nevermind a totally fraudulent election… which puts Donald Trump in perspective. Over the course of four failed bids for president since 2002 Raila Odinga helped usher in a new, democratic constitution in 2010, deemed only second to South Africa in the rights it protects and boasts the strongest Bill of Rights on The Continent. He also

helped incrementally build (tacit) credibility of Kenya’s court system by regularly bringing electoral disputes to the new Supreme Court, established in 2010 with the constitution. This is not the first time Kenya has made world history to lukewarm adulation. In 2010 Kenyan crowd mapping platform Ushahidi, developed in 2008 after the December 2007 elections to plot reports of violence, was the tech used in the Arab Spring and subsequently across the globe from Haiti to Japan to Palestine to Australia in times of crisis. Kenya’s revolutionary electronic money platform M-Pesa is now used globally. Even the power sharing agreement between Kenyatta and Odinga following the 2007 disputed election set precedent across Africa. Again, if black lives don’t matter in the U.S. why would they matter in Brazil, France, or India? How could African lives, people so “black” that the construct of race is no longer a signifier, matter? The answer is that within a Eurocentric world, dehumanizing blackness is critical to exalting whiteness and is stands to reason the minimizing African self determination, exalts European superiority. Thankfully, in Kenya, the construct of race and fallacy of Western superiority is an observable lie. When NASA and Odinga brought the results of the August 8th elections to the Supreme Court they ruled that the results were “neither transparent nor verifiable,” a fitting metaphor for Western opinion or credibility. The superiority of Europe over Africa is “neither transparent nor verifiable.” The notion that African lives don’t exist is “neither transparent nor verifiable.” The rerun of the the Kenyan election on October 28th was boycotted by a majority of voters because attempts to secure the voting system and process was “neither transparent nor verifiable.” Uhuru Kenyatta claims he is the victor even though only 38.84 percent of registered voters turned out to the polls and his “victory” garnered a ludacris 98 percent of the vote. Please. Kenyatta has chosen to retaliate against the Nyanza region, the NASA opposition stronghold, by terrorising, beating and killing people who protest or simply for existing. Furthermore, another IEBC official, Caroline Odinga, serving as Deputy Presiding Officer in Siaya County was sexually assaulted and murdered in late August. Eight days before the rerun election, IEBC senior official Roselyn Akombe, resigned and fled the country to New York City amid death threats, stating that IEBC was not fit to meet the basic expectations of a free, fair, and credible election. Is it that African lives only matter when Western media and governments can point to our mutilated bodies and say “see, these people can’t govern?” No matter what they claim, the foreign observers who knowingly supported a dictator in an Armani suit and undermined the democratic voice of a people have blood on their hands. The fact of the matter is that Kenya is at a crossroads, that some say is the battle for its soul, charge taken on by Oginga Odinga, his son Raila Odinga and perhaps must be carried on by the Kenyan people as whole. What happens now and the role the the international community plays says a lot about internal commitment to democracy and external recognition of African voices, lives and values. Something tells me that to most Kenyans, African Lives Matter.

US military presence in Africa is a tool colonize the ideologies of African peoples and legitimate the US internationally.Turse ’15 (Nick Turse, Turse is an award-winning journalist and historian, the managing editor of TomDispatch.com, and a fellow at the Nation Institute. His new book is Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, “Africa as Battlefield”, 21 May 2015, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/05/africom-africa-counterinsurgency-army) \\EG

Across Africa, the US military has engaged in a panoply of aid projects with an eye toward winning a war of ideas in the minds of Africans and so beating back the lure of extremist ideologies. These so-called

civil-military operations (CMOs) include “humanitarian assistance” projects like the construction or repair of schools, water wells, and waste treatment systems, and “humanitarian and civic assistance” (HCA) efforts, like offering dental and veterinary care. Kindness may be its own reward, but in the case of the US military, CMO benevolence is designed to influence foreign governments and civilian populations in order to “facilitate military operations and achieve U.S. objectives.” According to the Pentagon, humanitarian assistance efforts are engineered to improve “U.S. visibility, access, and influence with foreign military and civilian counterparts,” while HCA projects are designed to “promote the security and foreign policy interests of the United States.” In the bureaucratic world of the US military, these small-scale efforts are further divided into “community relations activities,” like the distribution of sports equipment, and “low-cost activities” such as seminars on solar panel maintenance or English-language discussion groups. Theoretically at least, add all these projects together and you’ve taken a major step toward winning Africans away from the influence of extremists. But are these projects working at all? Has anyone even bothered to check? In one report the Department of Defense’s inspector general found record-keeping by the US military in Africa so abysmal that its officials “did not have an effective system to manage or report community relations and low cost activities.” A spreadsheet supposedly tracking community low-cost activities during 2012 and 2013 was so incomplete that 43 percent of such efforts went unmentioned. Nonetheless, the inspector general did manage to review 49 of 137 identified humanitarian assistance and civic assistance projects, which cost US taxpayers about $9 million, and found that the military officials overseeing CMO “did not adequately plan or execute” them in accordance with AFRICOM’s “objectives.” The task force also failed to report or could not provide information on expenditures for four of six projects selected for special review, despite a requirement to do so and the use of a computerized system specifically designed to track such information. These projects — two schools and a clinic in Djibouti as well as a school in Ethiopia — cost American taxpayers almost $1.3 million, yet US officials failed to properly account for where all that money actually went. All told, officials were unable to verify whether almost $229,000 in taxpayer dollars spent on such projects were properly accounted for. Investigators only inspected four humanitarian assistance worksites — two in Djibouti and two in Tanzania — but even in this tiny sample found one site where the United States military had failed to ensure that the host nation would sustain the project. At the Ali Sabieh Community Water Fountains in Djibouti, renovated by the United States in 2010 to minimize waterborne disease, investigators found a scene of utter disrepair. Doors, pipes, and faucets “had been removed,” while another faucet “had a collapsed top,” leaving the water “exposed to contaminants.” Photographs taken two years after the project was completed display dilapidated, crumbling, and seemingly jerry-rigged structures. One American official assured inspector general investigators of the necessity of obtaining host nation “buy-in” on such projects to achieve success, while another suggested it was crucial that local “sweat equity” be invested in such projects, if they weren’t to become “monuments to U.S. failure.” In Djibouti, however, local residents were apparently given no information about upkeep of the Ali Sabieh project. As a result, Djiboutians threw rocks into a well built by Americans, a method that works to raise water in indigenously built wells. In this case, however, it damaged the well so badly that it stopped working. Examining a sample of projects, the Pentagon’s investigators found that 73 percent of the time CJTF-HOA personnel failed to collect sufficient data thirty days after completion of projects, to assess whether it achieved the stated objectives. For example, at a medical clinic at Manza Bay, the United States built cisterns and a water catchment system. The project was apparently considered a success, but the military had very little data to back up that claim. In Garissa, in neighboring Kenya, a veterinary civic action project was evidently

also declared a triumph without anything to prove it beyond vague upbeat claims of success in impressing local residents.

The market of global capitalism securitizes Africa through AFRICOM.Al-Kassimi ’17 (Khaled Al-Kassimi, Department of Political Science, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada., “The U.S informal empire: US African Command (AFRICOM) expanding the US economic-frontier by discursively securitizing Africa using exceptional speech acts”, 11 September 2017 https://academicjournals.org/journal/AJPSIR/article-full-text-pdf/B7E109666514) \\EG

When Africa was discursively a politicized issue, US foreign relations and military engagements with Africa had been characterized through joint military exercises; training programs with African militaries; covert military operations, counter-terrorism operations; peacekeeping; and peace support operation deployments (Francis, 2010: 10). The Department of Defense (DoD), according to Theresa Whelan a former US national intelligence director of Africa between the years 2003 to 2011, has never focussed on Africa in the same level of consistency it has on other regions of the world (Francis, 2010). This is reaffirmed by Robert Putman explicitly stating that “Despite historic ties with the continent, US policy towards Africa has generally been marked by indifference and neglect” (Francis, 2010: 11) because the dominant theme which characterized “US foreign relations in Africa was driven by US exceptionalism (Francis, 2010: 11). Post-9/11 we begin noticing the repositioning of Africa into the discourse of US strategic national interest. African securitization was acknowledged by explicating to the international community that Africa poses an international security threat to the US in terms of violent wars, armed conflicts, the proliferation of underdevelopment and HIV/AIDS, and finally failed states serving as terrorist havens (Francis, 2010: 12). Thus, in the last six decades, US-African relations have never been dominated by one single security sector. Rather the complexity of the relationship more so after the Cold War and further since the GWOT was marked by “selective engagement, neglect, contradictions and retreat” (Francis, 2010: 12). This labyrinth of complexities was captured in a report released in 2005 by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). “The region [Africa] starkly illustrates both the challenges and the promise of efforts to foster democracy, respect for human rights, poverty alleviation, counterterrorism, regional conflict prevention and peacekeeping, and to curb HIV/AIDS and other infections diseases, organized crime, corruption, and instability. Also at stake are rising US. interests in the region’s energy sector, already prominent and set to expand even further in the coming decade. At the same time, many countries in the region are vulnerable to instability and violence, stemming from vast internal disparities in wealth, poor governance, a lack of state capacity, and rising criminality” (Morrison and Goldwyn, 2005). In the year 2000 President Bush stated that “while Africa may be important, it does not fit into the national strategic interest as far as I can see them” (Francis, 2010: 10). After 9/11, the threat to US energy security and the new scramble for Africa pressed the Bush administration in 2007 to regard African oil resources as a “strategic national interest” (Francis, 2010: 10). It should be noted that the perception of Africa being perceived as a strategic hub for American resources was a “politicized thought process” published in 1997 by AFRICOM which states that the alteration in US interest towards Africa was “the culmination of a ten-year thought process within the Department of Defense” (Keenan, 2010: 113). The year 1997 was a critical year for the US informal empire because it reached the psychological critical 50% resulting in President George Bush uttering a speech act, in the year 2000 during his election campaign making energy security a top priority (Keenan,

2010). This securitization led to the publication of the Cheney Report in 2001 by the National Energy Policy Development Group (Cheney and Powell, 2001).. The report forecasted that by 2020 US oil consumption would increase by 32% and that sub-Saharan Africa was the future source of US oil Al-Kassimi 307 supplies (Cheney and Powell, 2001). The Cheney report (Keenan, 2010: 113) highlighted African oil as a “strategic national interest” thus an “economic-frontier” that the United States might choose military force to control (Volman, 2003). The continuation of AFRICOM’s thought process produced the African Oil Policy Initiative Group (AOPIG, 2002) which included members such as Don Norland, former US ambassador to Chad, and Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski of the US Air Force who is tied to the DoD African policy unit (all security experts who possess political capital). They published another geostrategic study highlighting Africa’s increased importance entitled “African Oil: A Priority for US National Security and African Development” (Forte, 2012). In 2002, AOPIG weaved military and economic goals by stating that the US required a command structure that is strictly dedicated to the African continent to protect US investments and interests because by 2015 the study postulated, Africa would be the main supplier of US oil imports instead of the Persian Gulf (Forte, 2012). AOPIG not only alluded to the importance of fossil fuels but also the deposits of critically important strategic minerals such as “chromium, uranium, cobalt, titanium, diamonds, gold, bauxite, phosphate, and copper” (African Oil Policy Initiative, 2002: 12; Cope, 2016: 256). The US is imperative in securing strategic minerals in Africa as mentioned by Harry Magdoff (2003: 55) because “the Defense Department operates with a list of strategic and critical minerals as a guide to the stockpiling program. These are the materials which are assumed to be critical to the war potential of the US. We must note that the US depends on 80 to 100% on importing strategic minerals”. Mozambique produces 18% of the supply of columbium; South Africa produces 31% of the supply of chromium, and the Congo produces 60% of the supply of Cobalt (Magdoff, 2003). Unified protest across Africa took place when President Bush announced in October 2008 the activation of the United Stated African Command (AFRICOM). Firstly, the establishment is a fundamental shift in the way the US engages with Africa on foreign policy terms because for more than four decades the responsibility of the continent was divided amongst two departments: The Department of Defense (DoD) and the US international agency for development (USAID), as well as three separate military commands EUCOM, CENTCOM and PACOM (Francis, 2010). Thus, the establishment of a command center that is specific to the African continent would naturally instigate debates about the motivations and intentions of such structure. Disapproval has been expressed by the African Union (AU) and the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) by refusing to host the location of AFRICOM on African territory; Liberia was the sole country that expressed interest in hosting AFRICOM (Francis, 2010). This refusal is fueled by the belief that AFRICOM is an extension of the US informal empire which amounts to the militarisation of US foreign policy towards Africa to achieve US strategic economic interest on the continent. This belief holds veritas when we remember that President Obama stated that US strategy in Africa is linked to benefit and promotion of corporate interests. Forte (2012: 196) reminds us of Obama’s corporate capitalist character when he stated that by expanding “Africa’s capacity to access and benefit from the global markets, promote regional integration, and strengthen economic governance” US corporations, “can and should play a role in this process”. This corporate-expansionist mindset is facilitated through the Young African Leaders Initiative program launched in 2012. The program is dedicated to raising African technocrats and politicians that are more prone in dealing comfortably with US thereby advancing their corporate ventures (Forte, 2012). AFRICOM, being perceived as a military command structure of the US informal empire which seeks to expand its economic-frontier, possesses currency amongst scholars of security studies. Academics argue

that AFRICOM is an attempt to counter-balance China’s relation with the continent which by 2009 had invested over US$100 billion and possessed more than 2000 companies working across the continent (Forte, 2012). Not only that, Africa provides one-third of Chinese crude oil imports, and la pièce de résistance is China providing an alternative bilateral monetary mechanism that provides loans to weak African economies rather than requesting loans from the IMF and the World Bank (Francis, 2010). Furthermore, critical voices characterize AFRICOM as a strategic attempt to protect the oil and energy security of the United States which according to Swart “is increasingly becoming important to the world energy supplies even as the region remains under threat from lawlessness and piracy” (Francis, 2010: 6). Military command structures have historically been established to intimidate or coerce rival powers and there is not a reason to believe that AFRICOM will alter such perception. Editors (2002) of the Monthly Review stated that US global reach through the projection of foreign bases and command structures are but a means to access, protect, and control US strategic national interests in the world. The quote is a reminder that Williams “age of corporate capitalism” still characterizes American US foreign policy and that military command structures persist in expanding the economic-frontier of the informal empire. The Editor’s note that: “The projection of US military power into new regions through the establishment of US military bases should not, of course, be seen simply in terms of direct military ends. They are always used to promote the economic and political objectives of US capitalism. For example, US corporations and the US government have been eager for some time to build a secure corridor for US-controlled oil and natural gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea in Central Asia through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian Sea. What is clear at present and bears repeating is that such bases are now being acquired in areas where the United States had previously lost much of its “forward presence” such as in the Middle East and Africa. There can be no doubt, therefore, that the last remaining superpower is presently on a course of imperial expansion, as a means of promoting its political and economic interests, and that the present war on terrorism, which is in many ways an indirect product of the projection of US power, is now being used to justify the further projection of that power.” The securitization of Africa during President Bush and Obama was successful since Africa has historically been associated with all three felicity conditions mentioned earlier. Africa was “othered” in political discourse thereby justifying the establishment of AFRICOM and its mission. The following section will highlight how Africa became fully securitized using exceptional speech acts.

AFRICOM is a ploy to expand US militarism and imperialism onto the African continent.Fah ’10 (Gilbert Fah, Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow, March 2010, “Dealing with Africom: The Political Economy of Anger and Protest”, The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol.3, no.6, March 2010, http://www.jpanafrican.org/docs/vol3no6/3.5DealingwithAfricom.pdf) \\EG

Although American militarization6 of Africa has received more attention in the post-9/11 era as part of the “War on Terror,” Africom’s origins can be traced back to the early 1990s when the Pentagon created a Special Forces Group oriented towards special operations in Africa7 . The militarization of Africa must also be understood as part of America’s global militarization effort to sustain its hegemony8 and imperial ambitions9 . Even if presented as preemptive and altruistic (if not benevolent!), American empire is backed by fierce ideology. This foreign policy framework claims that America has the right to define its national security interests and unilaterally assert itself in the global arena. The terrorist attacks

of 9/11 drew Africa closer to the center of American foreign policy because of terrorism concerns. However, America’s concern has mainly been expressed in terms of further militarization and the creation of Africom to manage it. The George W Bush administration embarked on a long-term push into several parts of Africa to counter what it perceived as sprawling inroads made by Al Qaeda and other terrorist networks operating in poor, lawless, and predominantly Muslim regions10. The US is presently sending military officers to Africa to bolster intelligence gathering and sharing, case austere landing strips for emergency use, and secure greater access and legal protections for American troops in the region11. In 2002, the Pan-Sahel Initiative (PSI) was launched in Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger to protect the region’s porous borders, track movements of people, combat terrorism, and enhance regional stability in these vast and largely uninhabited lands. The US military equipped and trained each participating country’s military under the auspices of PSI. In 2005 PSI was replaced by the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorist Initiative (TSCTI) which added Algeria, Morocco, Nigeria, Tunisia, and Senegal to the list of participants. TSCTI receives up to $100 million per year in American funding, instead of the scant $6.25 million spent annually on PSI12. The Department of Defense runs the Trans-Saraha Initiative which continues PSI’s military training, but also . Similarly, the East African Regional Security Initiative (EARSI) was implemented in East Africa with the same goals as TSTCI and the East African Counter-Terrorism Initiative (EACTI) was employed in Kenya and neighboring countries to train local law enforcement officers. Since 2002, the US has stationed between 1,200 and 18,000 troops in Djibouti under the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA)13 . Maritime security is becoming increasingly important. Through Africom’s deployment of the African Partnership Station, U.S. is building the capacity of West and Central African states to protect their territorial waters, respond to oil spills and other disasters, and patrol vital oil and gas platforms14. The Gulf of Guinea and the Gulf of Aden are areas of particular concern for U.S. maritime protection programs. U.S. officers are building the capacity of African armies in order to patrol their coastal areas, improve their intelligence so that movement of dangerous personnel, arms, money, and other forms of support coming from the Middle East into the Horn and moving along the coast of Africa can be blocked15 . In Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, and South Sudan, U.S. is helping to rebuild professional military forces and is looking to engage in similar Security Sector Reform (SSR) activities in Somalia16. The International Military Educational and Training (IMET) Program and the Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance (ACOTA) Programs are ongoing as well. Over 100,000 African peacekeepers have been trained within these programs and eight African nations are now in the top 20 of all contributions to UN peacekeeping operations17. Beyond this military and civilian capacity building, US is providing logistics support and equipment to some African countries. ACOTA also focuses on training trainers and programs tailored to individual country needs, while IMET programs additionally promotes professionalism and respect for democracy and human rights18 .

AFRICOM is a fatal conspiracy which is an extension of an age-old doctrine of antiblack imperialism, now under the name “1033”. Arms are given to US police to control Black communities and suppress revolutionary thought.Freeman ’18 (organizer in Pan-African Community Action, 2018, Netfa Freeman, is a member organization in the Black Alliance for Peace. She also is an analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies; “Dual US War on Black People;’ PAMBAZUKA NEWS Voices For Freedom and Justice, Oct 22.; https://www.pambazuka.org/pan-africanism/dual-us-war-black-people; db)

Parallel tracks of United States government policy against the Black working class in the US and on the African continent expose much more than incidental similarity, but a concerted fatal conspiracy. For the US, African people globally have no economic value short of being unwitting consumers whose labour-use has expired, and whose resistance to social injustice must be repressed at all costs. This conflict of interests reveals a natural contradiction between North American versus African or Black identities. African-American on many levels is an oxymoron. This month marks the 10th anniversary of the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM), created on 1 October 2008. AFRICOM is the re-colonisation of Africa by the US and constitutes the new scramble for Africa equivalent to when, in the 1800s, the colonial powers fought over which of them would dominate which parts of the resource-rich continent. Pre-dating AFRICOM by ten years is its domestic counterpart, the “National Defense Authorisation Act of 1997” signed into law by Bill Clinton and more commonly known as the 1033 Programme. The 1033 Programme facilitates the transfer of excess US Department of Defense supplies and equipment to state and local law enforcement agencies, which are invariably used against Black and Brown communities in the US. The Programme has allowed police departments to acquire vehicles (land, air, and sea), weapons, computer equipment, fingerprint equipment, night vision equipment, radios and televisions, first aid equipment, tents and sleeping bags, photographic equipment and more. There is no more glaring proof that the US has been waging war against both Black people within its borders and those in Africa than a cursory examination of the responses by the US national security state to Black movements for decolonisation and self-determination inside the US and on the continent. A parallel history in form and essence unfolds when comparing what took place from the 1950s to the 70s in the US Black Power, Civil Rights movements with the independence, anti-colonial movement in Africa. Documented evidence vividly illustrates that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s infamous Counterintelligence Programme, also known as COINTELPRO, orchestrated operations to “infiltrate, intimidate, imprison, and assassinate” the leaders of Black movements for social justice in the US. In Africa, the US executed identical and chronologically aligned repression through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) against the independent African governments and liberation movements sweeping the continent. No matter where in the world African people are, our organising for social justice is treated as a threat to the political, economic, and cultural interest of the US ruling class that actually constitutes the essence of Americanism. Democratically elected leaders of the new African states were subjected to coup d’états and incessant assassination attempts including that of Kwame Nkrumahin Ghana, the successful assassinationof Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and today we can add the 2011 brutal murder of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. The need to feed a growing and insatiable military-industrial complex and to guarantee that no radical Black movements emerge within US borders or on the African continent has given rise to increased and better-coordinated militarisation both in Africa through AFRICOM and Black communities in the US through the 1033 Programme. US state agents continue tantamount treatment, like spyingon Black Lives Matter activists, monitoringtheir social media and creating the bogus FBI designation Black Identity Extremiststo malign them as responsible for violence against police. All the while tolerating organised, criminal infiltrationof law enforcement by violent white supremacists. AFRICOM is the US response to economic competition with China and its increased influence on the continent. AFRICOM is also to prevent the emergence of any independent African influence or force. It is not to fight drug trafficking or terrorism as stated in their promotional materials. The US military presence is a destabilising presence demonstrated by events like the 2012 overthrow of a democratically elected government in Mali by an AFRICOM trainedCaptain Amadou Haya Sanogo and the 2015 coup in Burkina Faso led by AFRICOM trainedColonel-Major Gilbert Diendere. During this month the Black Alliance for Peace has been rolling out its campaign US Out of Africa: Shut Down AFRICOMurging all peace and justice loving people to sign the campaign’s petitiondirected to the House Armed Services Committee and the Congressional Black Caucus. In his last year of office, instead of

doing what he could to abolish the 1033 Programme, Barack Obama put minor restrictions on it, which the Trump administration immediately reversed within its first year. The Bush administration, progenitor of AFRICOM, was rebuked across the African continent when attempting to establish the headquarters for AFRICOM on the continent, forcing the new command to work out of Europe. Then came the Obama administration that paved the way for the proliferation of AFRICOM on the continent, as quisling African leaders fell over themselves to cooperate with the first Black US President. A now acceptable scenario has resulted in 46 various forms of US bases as well as military-to-military relations between almost all of the 54 African countries and the United States. US Special Forces troops now operate in more than a dozen African nations reflecting a 1,900 percent increase in the US military presence in Africa. What impact has increased militarisation abroad had on US Black and Brown communities? Since 1990, about US $6 billion worth of US Department of Defense property has been transferredto local, state, federal and tribal law-enforcement agencies while communities are suffering from austerity cuts. The world saw this deployed against Black rebellions in response to the police shooting of an unarmed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The first actual militarisation of the US police started 28 years before the 1033 Programme in the 1960s with the creation of the Special Weapons And Tactics units –commonly known as SWAT. In South Africa (Azania) the same thing was developed at exactly the same time. The Special Task Force (STF) was an elite police tactical unit of the white settler regime’s South African Police Service (SAPS). The first significant deployments of SWAT and STF units were to repress African/Black movements for liberation. On 9 December 1969 SWAT was deployed for a four-hour confrontation with members of the Black Panthers in a densely populated area of Los Angeles. In 1967 about 2,000 STF forces were deployed to guard the northern border of Rhodesia (modern-day Zimbabwe) to assist Rhodesian security forces against the liberation forces there. Roger Morris, former National Security staffer for Henry Kissinger, admits that of the dozens of coup d’étatsthat have taken place in post-colonial Africa only two or three were free of the hidden hand of US destabilisation. The sale of small arms to “Black Africa” was a policy initiated through Nixon’s National Security Study Memorandum 201: Increased Arms sales to Black Africa to stop the “threat of communism.” Today the conditions they have created are dishonestly used as the pretext for AFRICOM. Likewise in the US, it has been shownthat the rise of so-called street gangs like the Bloods and Crips reflect a generation of radicalised youth misguided after a decimated 1960s Black Power movement. In spite of gun control laws like California’s Mulford Actsupported even by the National Rifle Association to curtail the Black Panther Party’s armed stand to defend the Black community from police terror, by the 1980s semi-automatic weaponry and other sophisticated small arms found its way into US Black communities and countries in Africa. US officials reject as unauthentic the “Study Response To Presidential Security Review Memorandum NSC-46” that outlines a deliberate and sophisticated policy of fostering political divisions between ”Black Africa and the US Black Movement.” Measures like: 1. Specific steps should be taken with the help of appropriate government agencies to inhibit coordinated activity of the Black Movement in the United States. 2. Special clandestine operations should be launched by the CIA to generate mistrust and hostility in American and world opinion against joint activity of the two forces… 3. US embassies to Black African countries specially interested in southern Africa must be highly circumspect in view of the activity … opposing the objectives and methods of US policy toward South Africa…” are all arguably what has been US policy. The double standards and hypocrisy of the US government are clear, making it imperative that the ideological schizophrenia perpetuated by Americanism is broken. A mass movement must emerge that exposes AFRICOM, confronting the powers that be about it; and that makes it inseparable from the concerns we have over the militariatsion in our communities in the United States. All peace and justice loving people can start by signing the US Out of Africa! Shut Down AFRICOM petition, spreading it to others and then getting involved.

Best studies prove – militarizing police forces bad. They disproportionately placed in African American communities, provide no safety benefits, and reputationally hurt local law enforcement agencies.Mummolo ‘13 (Dept of Politics @ Princeton University, 2013, Jonathan-Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University; Militarization fails to enhance police safety or reduce crime but may harm police reputation, Edited by John Hagan, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, and approved July 2, 2018 (received for review March 24, 2018; PNAS Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America; https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2018/08/14/1805161115.full.pdf; db)

As thousands marched in Ferguson, MO to protest the police shooting of Michael Brown in 2014, many Americans were surprised and alarmed by the character of law enforcement’s response. For days, national news networks broadcast images of armored vehicles, snipers taking aim at unarmed Black and brown civilians, and officers clad in battle armor, deployed by state and local police agencies (1). To some people, American police appeared to have suddenly transformed into a wartime occupying force. But to scholars of race and policing, and perhaps to many citizens of color, these images were less surprising. More than half a century earlier, James Baldwin described urban police as “occupying forces” in Black communities (2). And decades of research in the intervening years have documented the ways in which policing efforts like “stop and frisk” and the “war on drugs” have served to maintain race- and class-based social hierarchies (3–6). In part due to this history, critical race scholars have characterized police militarization as another means by which the state exercises social control over racial minorities (7). But despite a prolonged and vigorous national debate, there is little systematic evidence demonstrating the consequences of militarized police tactics or whether they are more prevalent in communities of color. Because of heterogeneity in the way thousands of local law enforcement agencies in the United States document the presence and activities of their militarized units (if they document them at all), the study of police militarization has been hampered by data constraints (8, 9). In the absence of scientific analysis, the arguments of both advocates and critics are largely informed by anecdotal and journalistic accounts. Proponents argue that militarized police units enhance officer safety and deter violent crime (10), while critics allege that these tactics are disproportionately applied in the policing of racial minorities (11–13), potentially eroding the already-anemic levels of trust between citizens and law enforcement in highly policed communities (14). The implications of police militarization for civil rights, public safety, and the exercise of state power depend crucially on the empirical validity of these claims. This study leverages previously unavailable data to describe the communities affected by militarized policing and to estimate its effects on crime, officer safety, and public perceptions of police. I first use a rare census of “special weapons and tactics” (SWAT) team deployments in Maryland to characterize the ways in which militarized police units are used and the characteristics of the communities in which they deploy. I show that militarized police units are more often deployed in communities with high concentrations of African Americans, a relationship that holds at multiple levels of geography and even after controlling for social indicators including crime rates. I then use an original nationwide panel measuring the presence of active SWAT teams in roughly 9,000 US law enforcement agencies, as well as the Maryland SWAT deployment data, to test whether militarized policing lowers crime rates and promotes officer safety. Using within-agency comparisons that greatly mitigate concerns over omitted variable bias, I find no evidence that obtaining or deploying a SWAT team reduces local crime rates or lowers the rates at which officers are killed or assaulted. Finally, using survey experiments that randomly assign images of police officers in news reports, I show that seeing more militarized officers—relative to traditionally equipped police— can inflate perceptions of crime and depress support for police funding and presence. This analysis includes a large oversample of

African American respondents—an important feature given the high rate at which militarized police units deploy in Black neighborhoods. On average, militarized police units do not appear to provide the safety benefits that many police administrators claim. And police may suffer reputational damage when they deploy militarized units. These results suggest that the often-cited tradeoff between public safety and civil liberties is, in the case of militarized policing, a false choice.

Police militarization has arisen out of the war on drugs and 1033.Mummolo ‘13 (Dept of Politics @ Princeton University, 2013, Jonathan-Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University; Militarization fails to enhance police safety or reduce crime but may harm police reputation, Edited by John Hagan, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, and approved July 2, 2018 (received for review March 24, 2018; PNAS Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America; https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2018/08/14/1805161115.full.pdf; db)

Police militarization is a continuum defined by a combination of equipment, tactics, and culture that centers on violent conflict (7, 15, 16). In recent decades, local police agencies have militarized their departments to varying degrees, adopting weapons, attire, tactics, and organizational structures developed for theaters of war. The proliferation of militarized policing is due in part to an expansion of the war on drugs and federal initiatives that supplied localities with excess military equipment and funds to purchase arms (17, 18). Heterogeneity in agency capacity makes it difficult to precisely code police agencies as “militarized” or not. Recently publicized data on military gear disbursements have been used in some studies to estimate the effects of militarization on police violence, crime, and officer safety (19–21). But these data convey only the receipt of equipment from one of several programs that help supply agencies with militarized gear (22). The data also appear incomplete (see SI Appendix, section 1A for details).

Decreases in arms sales create surplus weapons that funnel into domestic militarization.Rahall ’15 (Karena Rahall, “Supervising Attorney at Office of the Appellate Defender”, 2015, “The Green to Blue Pipeline: Defense Contractors and the Police Industrial Complex”, 36 Cardozo L. Rev. 1785, https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1726&context=faculty, Accessed: 6/26/2019, KW)

Part I traces the key factors that have led to the current level of police militarization. After a brief explanation of police militarization's historical roots, this Part uncovers and performs a critical analysis of two central factors contributing to its recent growth: (1) grants and other assistance to police departments from multiple federal agencies; and (2) lobbying by the defense industry and law enforcement. Part II demonstrates that legal claims relating to the effects of militarization, principally claims of excessive force, have failed to provide a remedy for the harms involved in militarized policing. Part III asserts that a remedy is needed, and explores what that remedy might be. Part III.A highlights recent examples of militarization to demonstrate the types of harm involved. Part JJJ.B analyzes the kinds of solutions that are being proposed, and makes additional recommendations. This Article asserts that militarization in both tactics and equipment has led to an escalation in violent encounters between citizens and police that is not being addressed by the judicial system and that requires holistic action.

With the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq drawing down and defense contractors seeking new markets,12 domestic militarization has undergone an expansion, through a process this Article terms the "green to blue pipeline." This trend threatens to further erode what was once a clear delineation between military and domestic policing.13 The influence of federal and corporate money on police decisionmaking means that insufficient attention is given to what local communities actually need. As the juggernaut of militarization moves forward, the police are at risk of being transformed from protectors of the community into soldiers fighting a war against it.

Militarized police don’t bring safety and decrease trust with law enforcement in local communities.Mummolo ‘13 (Dept of Politics @ Princeton University, 2013, Jonathan-Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University; Militarization fails to enhance police safety or reduce crime but may harm police reputation, Edited by John Hagan, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, and approved July 2, 2018 (received for review March 24, 2018; PNAS Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America; https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2018/08/14/1805161115.full.pdf; db)

Discussion and Conclusion Aggressive policing strategies have historically been disproportionately applied to citizens of color in ways that serve to preserve race- and class-based social hierarchies (3). The normalization of militarized policing in the United States (15, 16) has raised concerns that a new, heavy-handed policing strategy is being used in similar ways and is eroding public opinion toward law enforcement, but law enforcement administrators defend the tactics claiming they can deter violent crime and protect police. This study marshals an array of data sources and analytical techniques to systematically evaluate these claims. Consistent with anecdotal evidence (11), militarized police units are more often deployed in areas with high concentrations of African Americans, even after adjusting for local crime rates and other community traits. But I find no firm evidence that SWAT teams lower an agency’s violent crime rate or the rates at which officers are killed or assaulted. Using survey experiments, I show that citizens react negatively to the appearance of militarized police units in news reports and become less willing to fund police agencies and less supportive of having police patrols in their own neighborhoods. Given the concentration of deployments in communities of color, where trust in law enforcement and government at large is already depressed (14, 38), the routine use of militarized police tactics by local agencies threatens to increase the historic tensions between marginalized groups and the state with no detectable public safety benefit. While SWAT teams arguably remain a necessary tool for violent emergency situations, restricting their use to those rare events may improve perceptions of police with little or no safety loss.

1033 provides state agencies with surplus DoD equipment – unnecessarily militarizing police forces.Wofford ‘14 (Reporter for Newsweek 2014,Taylor-general assignment reporter and former freelance writer; “How America’s Police Became An Army: The 1033 Program; NEWSWEEK online August 13; https://www.newsweek.com/how-americas-police-became-army-1033-program-264537; db)

As many have noted, Ferguson, Missouri, currently looks like a war zone. And its police—kitted out with Marine-issue camouflage and military-grade body armor, toting short-barreled assault rifles, and rolling

around in armored vehicles—are indistinguishable from soldiers. America has been quietly arming its police for battle since the early 1990s. Faced with a bloated military and what it perceived as a worsening drug crisis, the 101st Congress in 1990 enacted the National Defense Authorization Act. Section 1208 of the NDAA allowed the Secretary of Defense to "transfer to Federal and State agencies personal property of the Department of Defense, including small arms and ammunition, that the Secretary determines is— (A) suitable for use by such agencies in counter-drug activities; and (B) excess to the needs of the Department of Defense." It was called the 1208 Program. In 1996, Congress replaced Section 1208 with Section 1033. The idea was that if the U.S. wanted its police to act like drug warriors, it should equip them like warriors, which it has—to the tune of around $4.3 billion in equipment, according to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union. The St. Louis County Police Department's annual budget is around $160 million. By providing law enforcement agencies with surplus military equipment free of charge, the NDAA encourages police to employ military weapons and military tactics. 1033 procurements are not matters of public record. And the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), which coordinates distribution of military surplus, refuses to reveal the names of agencies requesting "tactical" items, like assault rifles and MRAPs — for security reasons, a spokesperson for DLA told Newsweek via email. One can only trace "tactical" items as far the county of the requesting agency. In the case of Ferguson, that means St. Louis County. St. Louis County law enforcement agencies have, through the 1033 Program, acquired the following "tactical" equipment, according to Mike O'Connell, Communications Director for the Missouri Department of Public Safety: Despite the fact that police in Ferguson have been photographed with a matte black vehicle which appears to be a "Bearcat" MRAP, O'Connell told Newsweek that no St. Louis County law enforcement agencies have acquired any MRAPs through the 1033 program. Ferguson_APC_8-13 Police officers ride an armored vehicle as they patrol a street in Ferguson MARIO ANZUONI/REUTERS If the vehicle in the above Reuters photo is indeed an MRAP and not one of the nine "utility trucks" acquired by St. Louis County law enforcement, O'Connell said he does not know where it came from. Police in Watertown, Connecticut, (population 22,514) recently acquired a mine-resistant, ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicle (sticker price: $733,000), designed to protect soldiers from roadside bombs, for $2,800. There has never been a landmine reported in Watertown, Connecticut. Police in small towns in Michigan and Indiana have used the 1033 Program to acquire "MRAP armored troop carriers, night-vision rifle scopes, camouflage fatigues, Humvees and dozens of M16 automatic rifles," the South Bend Tribune reported. And police in Bloomington, Georgia, (population: 2,713) acquired four grenade launchers through the program, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

Militarized police strengthens the exclusion of black people from socioeconomic freedom and their oppression.Gamal ‘16 (JD University of Cal @ Berkeley, 2016, Fanna; “The Racial Politics of Protection: A Critical Race Examination of Police Militarization;” CALIF. L. REV 979; file:///C:/Users/dburch/Downloads/FannaGamalTheRacialPoliti.pdf; db)

C. Race and Protection State protection was administered unequally along racial lines to safeguard the status quo, effectively blocking blacks from economic, social, and political uplift. A lack of protection came to define the black experience in the South and throughout the country. Through selective use of military coercion, the federal government made vulnerability to violence and exploitation a material

disadvantage of blackness. Critically, excluding blacks from federal protection was enormously advantageous to many whites. It was economically beneficial because, without intervention, whites were free to rebuild an economic and social order predicated on black exploitation, including, but not limited to, the system of sharecropping. Excluding blacks from federal protection was also politically valuable to many whites because whites could effectively suppress black voters, ensuring the political process perpetuated their interest and advantage. Whiteness was further privileged by government action and inaction. Access to state protection became a racial marker of whiteness, provided racial cohesion, and also positioned whites superordinate to blacks. By examining the historical underprotection of black life we may better understand the present day. Across the country, black communities are both overpoliced and underprotected,54 and police militarization strengthens this harmful paradigm. Law enforcement-transformed into soldiers and outfitted with battle-ready equipment-police black communities as war zones. Principles of militarism, rather than careful and considered intervention, become the dominant means of addressing social problems in these communities. Unsurprisingly, violence and the repeated loss of black life is so often the product of police-community encounters. The exercise of military-like power by police not only disproportionately subjects blacks to military-like control, but also fortifies the boundaries between whiteness and blackness. The spectacles of armored vehicles on city streets, police in military-style uniform, and officers wielding submachine guns communicate a need to control certain communities with excessive force. In the age of paramilitary police tactics, racial control has become militarized. The following Part examines police militarization during the Civil Rights Era and its relationship to the racial politics of protection.

Police militarization suppress black resistance while feigning citizen protection.Gamal ‘16 (JD University of Cal @ Berkeley, 2016, Fanna; “The Racial Politics of Protection: A Critical Race Examination of Police Militarization;” CALIF. L. REV 979; file:///C:/Users/dburch/Downloads/FannaGamalTheRacialPoliti.pdf; db)

BLACK REVOLT AND POLICE MILITARIZATION DURING THE CIVIL RIGHTS ERA After the April 2015 uprisings in Baltimore, many made comparisons to the racial uprisings in the 1960s.55 I argue that in the context of police militarization, the most useful lesson from the 1960s is that the State responds to racial uprisings by increasing police militarization and devaluing black lives. During the late 1950s and 1960s, many white Americans feared that blacks were "becoming increasingly impatient with the status quo and coming ever closer to the violent 'fire next time' described by writer James Baldwin."5 6 During the summer of 1965, many white Americans saw their worst racial nightmares come to fruition as racial uprisings struck more than one hundred cities across the United States.57 Rather than address the root and structural causes of black unrest, the federal government responded to racial violence during the 1960s by militarizing the police under the guise of restoring law and order.5 8 By exploiting racial fears and casting violence as a breakdown of law and order, government officials paved the way for increased police militarization. Police militarization happened slowly, a result of concerted political decisions 59 that allowed local law enforcement to adopt more of the characteristics of an army.

Police militarization uses “law and order” rhetoric to police Black communities.Gamal ‘16 (JD University of Cal @ Berkeley, 2016, Fanna; “The Racial Politics of Protection: A Critical Race Examination of Police Militarization;” CALIF. L. REV 979; file:///C:/Users/dburch/Downloads/FannaGamalTheRacialPoliti.pdf; db)

C. Setting the Stage for Police Militarization The government could have addressed social inequity as the root cause of the riots. Instead, government officials capitalized on racialized fear and anxiety to give the police more power, more weapons, and more authority. 94 For many middle-class whites, racial uprisings in America's urban centers signaled "a rising criminal class that was increasingly out of control." 95 According to an April 1965 Gallop poll, "more than half the country cited race relations as their number-one concern. 96 A poll of white Americans conducted for Newsweek in 1969 found that "85 percent of whites thought that black militants were getting off too easily... and 66 percent thought that the police needed to be given more power." 97 Fearing the possibility of more violence, white America needed reassurance, and government-facilitated police militarization was the panacea offered. Couched in the rhetoric of law and order, the federal government was able to strengthen the police system through militarization. Advancing police militarization as a response to racial uprisings meant constructing an identity for the protestors that placed them outside of state protection and in the realm of state threat. Sure enough, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), under the directorship of J. Edgar Hoover, analyzed racial unrest as a concerted plan between black militant groups and Communist factions looking to overthrow the U.S. government. A report from the FBI dated May 29, 1967,98 advised the president that "[p]ropaganda on the part of communists and other subversives and extremist elements has contributed to Negro unrest. Demagogues like Martin Luther King, Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Floyd McKissick, Cassius Clay, and Dick Gregory have added fuel to the fires of racial discord .... ."99 Not only did the FBI report label prominent civil rights leaders like Dr. King "demagogues," it also refers to riot participants as "young hoodlums"-- much like media reports that characterized marginalized urban youth in Baltimore as "thugs." 100 Critically, the report casts racial uprisings as a clear internal threat to national security and, accordingly, emphasizes the need for a militarized police response. The irony is, viewed from the perspective of many black protestors, the riots of the 1960s may be understood as a demand for state recognition and protection. Across the country, black communities were suffering from discrimination in housing, employment, and education while the government either facilitated unequal conditions or stood idly by. Uprisings in urban areas were a demand for state protection and an end to state-sanctioned black exploitation. But Hoover's response illustrates how the black community was constructed outside of state protection and treated instead as an internal insurrection. In responding to racial unrest, the FBI emphasized the need for increased cooperation and communication between the military and police authorities. The FBI encouraged a "prompt, efficient, and impressive display of force" by the police and advised every police organization to have a written plan for riot control. 10 ' These plans included "steps to be taken if the riot exceeds the capabilities of the department, which could be a mutual-aid pact with police of adjacent communities and/or steps to obtain assistance from the National Guard or Federalized troops if the riot reached such proportion."' 1 2 The report also read, "[T]he utilization of military assistance should be effected without undue delay and the lines of communication should be such that authority for the use of [military] troops could be speedily obtained."'0 3 Thus, if blacks could organize themselves into violent militias with the aim of disturbing the American social order, then the government would counter with greater police armament. The militarized response to the riot also had the more direct effect of marking black communities as the objects of military-like control. As military personnel patrolled black neighborhoods with armored trucks and weaponry, the State communicated its politics of protection. Militarized police control protected white communities by patrolling black ones. Not only were black communities to

receive no state protection, but the rhetoric of law and order would also label them an internal threat. Even as the Kerner Commission's report revealed greater attention could be placed on the substandard conditions of urban ghettos, the government's response was to strengthen its ability to respond to black resistance with military-style tactics. After Watts, a presidential task force that convened in response to the riots offered a number of official recommendations, many of which signaled a trend of increased police-military coordination and armament. The task force recommended enhanced interjurisdictional police coordination techniques and a military liaison system for metropolitan police departments. 104 The task force also recommended increased development of riot control equipment for police utilization and "a national conference or series of conferences among police officials for riot prevention and control training."10 5 Following the riots, the LAPD took this mandate to heart. For top police officials in the LAPD, the riots revealed that police were unprepared to contain the threat posed by racial uprisings. LAPD officials turned to the military for tactical training and guidance. 10 6 The LAPD began "informally consulting" with the Marines and turned to military personnel for techniques to respond to snipers.' °7 Embarrassed by its lack of preparedness during the city's unrest, the LAPD began to cultivate a new breed of police unit that would adopt military tactics and weaponry. What emerged was the first Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team. °8 Not surprisingly, the SWAT team's first target was the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party. On December 6, 1969, a SWAT team raided the party's Los Angeles headquarters,10 9 and after an exchange of gunfire,110 several members of the Black Panther Party surrendered to a militarized police force.1 ' But this was only the beginning of SWAT team activity. Soon, police departments across the country were fighting to replicate the LAPD's model. By 2010, SWAT "spread to nearly every city in the country,"' 12 and federal programs have equipped them with greater amounts of surplus military equipment. 13 D. Protecting Advantage The story of urban unrest in the 1960s can help us analyze police militarization and racial uprisings today. Today, the proliferation of SWAT teams has come under increased scrutiny as an unnecessary form of police militarization. But what we now think of as excessive domestic militarism was once sold to the American public as an appropriate response to racial uprisings and black nationalist groups. Indeed, excessive showings of force by police were more readily accepted when buried in the narrative of white protection and black threat. The troubling reality is that the justifications for police militarization then actually reflect many of the justifications for police militarization now-the dangerous military tactics used by police are a perfect complement to the dangerous black and brown classes that are subject to police control. I draw this connection to encourage critics of police militarization to pay close attention to the rhetoric emerging from cities like Baltimore and Ferguson. Wherever the narrative of "law and order" is used to describe black resistance to the everyday violence of poverty, demilitarization activists should exercise caution. Indeed, "law and order" is a coded term meant to reassure white America that its homes and neighborhoods will remain within the bounds of militarized state protection. Demilitarization activists should continue to assert that black resistance to police brutality does not signal a loss of "law and order." Rather, the real indication of lawlessness is government disregard for black life and opportunity, laid bare by fatal encounters with the police. At the same time, I draw this connection to make an interrelated claim. Namely, police militarization also reflects the underprotection of black and brown communities. Urban uprisings in the 1960s reveal black frustration with conditions in the inner city. However, police militarization was a misguided government response to demands for greater racial equity and resource distribution between blacks in urban ghettos and the white elite. Blacks wanting increased state protection from poverty and exploitation were instead met with greater state repression in the form of militarized overpolicing. Militarism was again cast as an appropriate response to social problems. When police organize around the tenets of militarism and the military model, violence is so often the result of encounters between law enforcement and the black community. Instead of providing protection and service, militarized police patrol communities as war zones, signaling their racial politics of protection. Black communities are treated as sites of internal insurrection, constructing members of

the community outside the boundaries of citizenship and protection. Protection is currency, used by the State to strengthen, rather than dissolve, racial hierarchies.

Militarization of police continues despite lower crime rates – they serve only to increase control of black communities and protect whites, marking blacks as outside of state protection.Gamal ‘16 (JD University of Cal @ Berkeley, 2016, Fanna; “The Racial Politics of Protection: A Critical Race Examination of Police Militarization;” CALIF. L. REV 979; file:///C:/Users/dburch/Downloads/FannaGamalTheRacialPoliti.pdf; db)

The Reality of Police Militarization Across the country, police departments are using aggressive military tactics and weapons to enforce the law. In its June 2014 report, "War Comes Home," the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) documented military weaponry flooding into local police departments. 155 State and local agencies have purchased hundreds of lethal weapons, tactical vests, and body armor at no cost and with virtually no public oversight through the Department of Defense's 1033 Program.156 The ACLU report found a total of 15,054 items of battle uniforms, or personal protective equipment, received by sixty-three responding agencies during their investigation period. 157 Five hundred law enforcement agencies have received Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles built to withstand armor-piercing roadside bombs. In 2007, "the United States spent $50 billion to produce 27,000 MRAPs and deploy them to Iraq and Afghanistan."'1 58 Now out of date, or no longer needed in foreign battlefields, MRAPs have made their way to local police departments where officers patrol communities like war-zones. In addition to the proliferation of military weapons throughout local law enforcement departments, police training also exposes aspiring officers to the culture of militarism that now permeates the force. According to the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics Report on State and Local Law Enforcement Training Academies (BJS Report), the majority of police recruits receive their training in academies with a stress-based military orientation. 159 Stress-based military training is designed to prepare young recruits for combat in war zones by teaching recruits to force the enemy into submission. As one police trainer put it, "We trainers have spent the past decade trying to ingrain in our students the concept that the American police officer works a battlefield every day he patrols his sector."' 60 This training does not prepare recruits to win community trust by solving crimes and protecting constitutional rights. 161 In this logic, police officers are transformed into soldiers, and black and brown communities morphed into battlefields. Military-style tactics are also becoming conventional police strategies. One of the clearest manifestations of military-style tactics is the rise of SWAT teams. A survey of police departments across the country reveals that "the number of SWAT teams in small towns grew from 20 percent in the 1980s to 80 percent in the mid-2000s, and that as of the late 1990s, almost 90 percent of larger cities had them."' 62 It is estimated that "the number of SWAT raids per year grew from 3,000 in the 1980s to 45,000 in the mid-2000s."' 163 Contrary to popular belief that SWAT teams are utilized in active shooter and emergency situations, a report conducted by the University of Missouri-St. Louis's Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice found that from 1986 to 1998 "the overwhelming number of SWAT deployments studied were for the purpose of executing a warrant (34,271 for warrant service, in contrast to 7,384 for a barricaded suspect and 1,180 for hostage-taking cases).' ' 164 Many of these SWAT teams used flash-bang grenades, combat helmets, and battle-dress uniforms to serve search warrants, conduct investigations, and search for drugs. 165 The proliferation of paramilitary policing has occurred with great speed and little public oversight. This culture of paramilitarism in policing has been particularly costly to minority communities and led to unnecessary loss of life. In Detroit, the killing of a black child, seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones, drew national

attention. Early one summer morning, Aiyana slept beside her grandmother when a SWAT team mistakenly raided her home searching for a suspect in a homicide investigation. One officer fired at Aiyana, striking her head and killing her.' 66 Many were outraged at the senseless murder of an innocent child in what appeared to be a military raid fueled by a combat mentality. Many also condemned the excessive use of force that unfairly targeted the black community in Detroit. This disproportionate use of military force against black and brown communities has been observed nationwide. The ACLU found that the use of paramilitary weapons and tactics primarily impacted people of color, particularly when these tactics were used to execute drug searches. 167 Ultimately, police were much more likely to deploy paramilitary tactics to execute a search warrant if all the participants were people of color (84 percent deployment rate) than when all the participants were white (65 percent deployment rate). 1 Acknowledging that military policing, and policing more broadly, disproportionately impacts black and brown people, this Note has looked beyond the racial impacts of this phenomenon to examine its racialized roots. Government-sanctioned police militarization is just part of the story in Ferguson, Baltimore, and countless other cities across the country. By centering on questions of race, we can begin to understand what work race does in facilitating police militarization. At the same time, we may also understand how police militarization constructs race and reinforces racial hierarchies in America. When analyzing the contemporary state of police militarization, we must first disassociate police militarization from actual notions of crime. Some people view increased police militarization as evidence that police work has become more dangerous. Proponents of this argument often see increased police armament as a response to an upsurge in dangerous crime. In fact, since the mid-1990s the job of police officers has become increasingly safer. It is as safe today as it has ever been. 69 The number of officer deaths in 1975 more than halved by 2014, despite many more police officers on the street.' 70 Rates of violent crime have also reduced significantly since the mid-century. The year 2013 saw nearly 9,000 fewer homicides, about 27,000 fewer rapes, and about 368,000 fewer aggravated assaults than 1991.71 This reduction occurred when the country's population increased by sixty-four million people. 72 This means that police militarization has continued without a logical connection to increased risk to police officers. Rather than a response to increases in violent crime, police militarization can be viewed as a state-sanctioned form of racemaking. As the federal government funnels military equipment and training into local police departments, it enables the presence of tanks on city streets, networks of surveillance cameras surreptitiously patrolling entire communities,' 73 and even assault weapons and grenade launchers in public schools.1 74 Even if the official police mandate is to protect and serve all people, the current state of policing is such that black and brown communities are subject to greater surveillance and control. Unlike poor and minority communities, many white communities experience policing of a different nature. Rather than patrol white communities with suspicion, police are often dispatched to white communities to provide security and assistance-this unequal access to security is a key element of the racial politics of protection. Police militarization has the dual impact of increasing state control of black and brown people while simultaneously increasing protections for white people. Militarized policing creates more opportunities for the surveillance of black and brown bodies in the communities where they live, work, socialize, and attend school. This heightened control is not a result of the inherent dangerousness of these groups or of any enhanced risk to police officers that has accumulated over time. Rather, government programs have made black and brown people vulnerable to militarized control based on the color of their skin. This is a material disadvantage of being black or brown-a racial marker. Most importantly, the images of black neighborhoods patrolled by tanks and armored vehicles in Ferguson and Baltimore clearly demarcate who is outside of state protection. As in the 1960s, rather than focus on the substantive grievances of marginalized groups, the State treats these groups as an internal insurrection. When black communities are patrolled with weapons built to subdue foreign enemies, this communicates something about the citizenship status of black people-that their status is inferior, that they are dangerous, and that they are somehow outside the American polity. At the same

time, an absence of images depicting white communities locked down by militarized police conveys white position within the realm of state protection. White people are treated as full citizens, worthy of status.

Discussion needs to start from the racial underpinnings of police militarization – which is inextricably tied to US wars abroad.Gamal ‘16 (JD University of Cal @ Berkeley, 2016, Fanna; “The Racial Politics of Protection: A Critical Race Examination of Police Militarization;” CALIF. L. REV 979; file:///C:/Users/dburch/Downloads/FannaGamalTheRacialPoliti.pdf; db)

CONCLUSION This Note critically examines history to shed light on police militarization today. It argues that police militarization is a result of concerted political decisions that often trade on racial fear and anxiety. Further, the present state of police militarization on display in cities like Ferguson and Baltimore reinforces racial hierarchies and may have lasting consequences for black citizenship and inclusion. I conclude with a reflection that I hope will strengthen and solidify the movement for racial justice and police accountability sweeping this nation. Black Americans have an important stake in antiwar and antimilitarization campaigns. The line between the military and police is blurring, and this means that black and brown communities are poised to be victims of intensified, military-like police control, while remaining severely underprotected by the State. Both nationally and globally, freedom from military control is also a material advantage of whiteness that too often goes unacknowledged. Mainstream America is increasingly scrutinizing the expansion of police militarization, especially in the areas of domestic surveillance. With highprofile whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, the victims of heightened state control now have white faces. There is ground for an alliance of interest across racial groups, but the American mainstream must first acknowledge that police militarization has been facilitated by racist ideologies. We must also reject conversations that ignore the racial underpinnings of police militarization. To neglect race is to neglect one of the driving forces behind police militarization. I also want to conclude with a call for activists and scholars to explore the critical intersections of race, foreign wars, and militarization. There are many ways that these three social forces shape everyday life in this country, and I am increasingly aware that my own life trajectory has been intimately shaped by all three. I was born in Khartoum, Sudan. Most of my family belongs to a small but well-known indigenous tribe found in the northeast part of the country along the banks of the Nile River. In the 1960s, as a result of the construction of the Aswan Dam, much of my family was displaced. The Aswan Dam flooded parts of the Nubian region and prevented the annual inundation of the Nile that provided valuable nutrients to the soil. Many will also recognize Sudan as a site of consistent political strife and military campaigns. One of those campaigns was the twenty-five-year Civil War between Southern Sudanese liberation fighters and the Northern Sudanese government. Racist ideology further complicated the dimensions of this war because many Northern tribes are significantly lighter skinned than the Southern tribes and received material advantages from the British colonial empire. The war, and its impact on the country, was one of the primary reasons my father and mother decided to leave Sudan and immigrate to the United States. In a pre-9/11 world, my father was granted political asylum, which involved battling an incredibly racialized immigration process. I was four years old at the time, a black female, a Muslim, and a new immigrant. Through implicit ands explicit signals, I quickly caught on to the importance of my racial identity in my new home, but it was not until after 9/11 that I began to unpack the connection between my life trajectory and the wars and military campaigns that shaped it. When the United States went to war with Afghanistan and declared its socalled War on Terror, I felt like the country had declared war on the entire Muslim world. I knew many Muslims and immigrants who condemned the war, but virtually none of my black friends, teachers, and community

members spoke out. Looking back on this experience, I see how bifurcated my young mind must have felt. I knew this war deeply impacted my ethnic and religious identity, but I could not understand how the war impacted my racial identity. I include this story to lay bare my motivations for this Note. For me, this particular Note is a means of mending that bifurcation, of putting together that which has been falsely severed. As the United States continues to beat the drums of war across the globe, those of us at the intersection of marginalized groups should shine a light on the dangerous and impoverished logic of wars abroad and at home.

Trump rescinded restrictions on 1033 which is disproportionately used against Black people.Interamerican Commission On Human Rights ’18 (“African Americans, Police Use of Force, and Human Rights in the United States;” doc 156; November 26; OEA/SER L/V/II; db)

1 and that the use of military-type equipment in SWAT (“Special Weapons and Tactics”) raids and similar operations is disproportionately targeted against historically marginalized groups . 2 A recent study by the ACLU

found that 42 percent of people impacted by a SWAT deployment to execute a search warrant were Black and 12 percent were Latino; of deployments in which all individuals impacted were minorities, 68 percent were drug cases , and 61 percent of all individuals impacted by SWAT raids in drug cases were members of historically discriminated groups. 3 Additionally, 79 percent of incidents the ACLU studied involved the use of a SWAT team to search a person’s home, and more than 60 percent of the cases involved searches for drugs.4 According to the ACLU, U.S. policing has become unnecessarily and dangerously militarized, and in municipalities with greater amounts of military equipment, police officers acted more aggressively and adopted a “warrior” mindset, rather than seeing themselves as protectors of a community. 5 On May 18, 2015, President Barack Obama announced new restrictions on the transfer of military equipment to local police departments, in light of concerns about the policing of protests in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland, among others. 6 This Executive Order (EO 13688) created a federal agency working group to oversee and implement protocols around military weapons provided to police by the federal government.7 At that time, the move was greeted with optimism.8 On August 28, 2017, President Donald Trump rescinded EO 13688, removing those restrictions on the transfer and oversight of military equipment .9 In 2015, the Commission noted that a principal concern regarding the excessive or arbitrary use of force by law enforcement in the U.S. is the “militarization” of police in terms of the equipment, training, protocols used, and the difficulty of prosecuting and establishing criminal responsibility for police officers guilty of abuse or excessive use of force.10 The Commission notes with concern reports that with the revocation of EO 13688, police departments will once again receive armed vehicles, high-caliber weapons and ammunition, grenades, camouflage uniforms, and other military equipment,11 raising concerns about a possible increase in the excessive use of force and policing of protest situations that does not comply with international law. 12

This is particularly concerning in light of information received by the Commission that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently concluded that the Pentagon does not verify the quantity of

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military weapons transferred through the 1033 program, and that the DOD “lacks reasonable assurance that it has the ability to prevent, detect, and respond to potential fraud and minimize associated security risks.” 13 The Commission calls on the State to take the necessary steps to halt and reverse the militarization of police departments, as well as to further study and take corrective action in light of the racially disproportionate effect of militarized policing on African Americans and other historically marginalized groups.

African American resistances has responded to with police militarization, surveillance, and restrictions to constitutional rights.Interamerican Commission On Human Rights ’18 (“African Americans, Police Use of Force, and Human Rights in the United States;” doc 156; November 26; OEA/SER L/V/II; db)

120. The Commission has received information about disproportionate police responses to protests and about the excessive policing of African American protesters. In particular, events during protests in Ferguson, Missouri highlight a number of cross-cutting issues in this report, including issues of non-discrimination, excessive force, and police militarization. The Commission notes information indicating that many of the concerns expressed below in the context of Ferguson are generalized in the U.S.; in this respect, it notes the observation of the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association on complaints of police use of excessive force to arbitrarily arrest protesters for minor acts, such as stepping off crowded sidewalks, overwhelming police presence at protests and other of intimidation, and targeting for arrest and abuse on the basis of race or ethnicity. 121. During its on-site visit in Ferguson, the Commission received information about protests after the killing of Michael Brown in August 2014 and the announcement of the decision not to indict Darren Wilson, the white officer responsible for his death, on November 24, 2014, and strong public criticism of the police response to these protests. At least 212 individuals were reportedly arrested during the protests, the majority on charges of “refusal to disperse.” The IACHR received reports of excessive use of tear gas and violence against African Americans as a mechanism of control and/or dispersal, even during peaceful protests, arbitrary detention of protesters, and disrespect of places identified as safe-houses, including places of worship, during protests. The delegation was concerned by allegations that Ferguson police deliberately ignored white protesters and focused on the arrest and use of force against black protesters during protests. 122. The imposition of restrictions on the right to protest, including curfews and designated protest areas, as well as restrictions on the presence and range of action of the media and legal and human rights observers at protests may also have a chilling effect on freedom of expression. Indeed, a federal court later found that the enforcement of a “keep walking/five-second rule” during protests in Ferguson, under which demonstrators constantly had to keep moving during the protests or face arrest, was unconstitutional. 123. At a public hearing on racism in the U.S. criminal justice system, a participant from the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law stated: Instead of having their complaints and concerns heard, lawful protestors [in Ferguson, Missouri] have been met with a harsh militarized response by local and state police forces. They have been jailed without cause, beaten unconscious, blinded by tear gas and pepper spray, and had their human and constitutional rights violated every day with all kinds of pronouncements on new policies and curfews. Sadly, this is not the first time and will not be the last time that police abuse targeting communities of color, unlawfully killing unarmed black men, or suppressing lawful protest will occur. This experience has become the new normal throughout the United States. 124. In November 2014, new protests broke out across the country at the decision of a grand jury not to indict the police officer responsible for Michael Brown’s death. In California, at least 180 people were reportedly arrested in protests. In December, New York 13

police reportedly arrested at least 200 people during protests against the decision of a grand jury not to indict the officer responsible for the death of Eric Garner. Most of the arrests of the demonstrators were made on charges of disorderly conduct and refusal to disperse. 125. Protests in Ferguson after the killing of Michael Brown also highlighted the concerning level of militarization of municipal police, leading to a federal review of programs that supply military equipment to police departments. During those protests, reports indicated that police used armored vehicles, noise-based crowd control devices, shotguns, M-4 rifles, rubber bullets, and tear gas. The use of riot gear and military-grade weapons in peaceful demonstrations may also be a form of intimidation of protesters who are practicing their right to peaceful assembly, and can cause the escalation, rather than de-escalation, of violence. 126. In April 2015, protests in Baltimore and around the country occurred after the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray due to a spinal cord injury while in police custody. At least 486 people were reportedly detained in the protests. On April 27, 2015, the governor of Maryland declared a state of emergency and ordered the National Guard to be deployed. At least 100 people were arrested in New York in protests there. According to reports, assaults and arrests of journalists by the police were recorded during the protests. The Mayor of Baltimore also ordered a curfew that was in effect from April 28 until May 3. The curfew, which was enforced citywide, did not apply to journalists, military personnel, and police, who were able to move about freely in the city between 10:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m., while movement for all other citizens was restricted. 127. The Commission notes reports that police responses to protests, as well as the relationship between the community and police, appear not to have improved in Ferguson since the 2014 protests and subsequent DOJ investigation. In September 2017, thousands in Ferguson protested the acquittal of a police officer in the 2011 killing of Anthony Lamar Smith, an unarmed black man. Media reports indicated that police officers mocked protesters while conducting mass arrests by using the common protest chant “Whose streets? Our streets!” and displayed an overwhelming and militarized presence in response to the protests, provoking a former DOJ investigator to observe, “You can’t legislate goodwill.” The Commission notes recent reports that the DOJ has opened an investigation into St. Louis Police conduct during these protests. 128. Finally, the Commission highlights with concern information received related to the increased surveillance of racial justice activists by domestic law enforcement agencies like the FBI, as well as the denomination of these groups as “Black Identity Extremists.” The Commission notes that the stigmatization of anti-racism activists is not a new phenomenon in the U.S.; during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, activists like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and members of the Black Panther Party were similarly targeted by the FBI’s “Cointelpro” (“counterintelligence program”). The Commission notes that, among other deleterious effects of increased surveillance of racial justice movements, this surveillance also has the effect of increasing the likelihood that its targets will be stigmatized and criminalized, exposing its targets to the increased risk of violence (e.g. in the context of raids), and chilling free speech and freedom of assembly. 129. In light of the foregoing, the Commission calls on the State to guarantee the rights to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, and in particular to ensure their enforcement without discrimination on the basis of race or other prohibited grounds.

Militarized police increase safety risks and undermine rights.Interamerican Commission On Human Rights ’18 (“African Americans, Police Use of Force, and Human Rights in the United States;” doc 156; November 26; OEA/SER L/V/II; db)

237. The Commission is concerned by the level of militarization of local police forces in the United States, as well as by recent information that steps taken to decrease militarization at the federal level are being reversed. In particular, the Commission observes that the use of military-grade tools and tactics by local police forces escalates the risk of excessive force and undermines respect for human

rights. The use of violent tactics and military equipment increases the risk of bodily harm, including injury and death. 238. The Commission notes that militarized policing is not simply a matter of appearance, nor does the use of military-style tactics and equipment simply undermine community trust. Rather, it may violate the principles of necessity and proportionality under international law. When used in the context of peaceful protests, militarized police tactics may undermine the rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly, and the right to take part in the conduct of public affairs. The Commission has stated that the police and armed forces are entrusted with substantively different missions and members of the respective forces are trained for those very different missions; accordingly there should be a clear distinction between internal security and law enforcement as the function of the police and national defense as the function of the armed forces.

States should act without delay to resolve discrimination and violence against African Americans. Interamerican Commission On Human Rights ’18 (“African Americans, Police Use of Force, and Human Rights in the United States;” doc 156; November 26; OEA/SER L/V/II; db)

251. States are obligated to organize their governments—federal, state, and local—and, in general, all the structures through which public power is exercised, including the State’s legislative framework, public policies, law enforcement machinery, and judicial system, to ensure the full enjoyment of human rights of all persons subject to their jurisdiction. Under international human rights law, the State has the non-derogable obligation to respect the right to life and prevent torture. This obligation gives rise, in turn, to the obligation to act with due diligence to protect human rights. This requirement encompasses four basic obligations: prevention, investigation, punishment, and reparation and non-repetition of human rights violations. The failure of the State to carry out this duty, even where the perpetrators are third parties, may amount to State action that gives rise to international responsibility. The Commission has consistently invoked the due diligence principle as a benchmark to rule on cases and situations of racism and other forms of intolerance. 252. The Commission has addressed the scope of the United States’ obligation to guarantee the rights of at-risk persons or groups on various occasions, examining the differential impact that widespread practices of discrimination and violence by State agents or non-State actors have had on certain social groups, including African Americans. 253. There is a strong link between discrimination, violence, and due diligence. For example, the Commission has found on various occasions that a State’s failure to act with due diligence to protect women from violence constitutes a form of discrimination, and denies women their right to equality before the law. The State is obligated not only to abstain from violating rights and act with due diligence to prevent particular acts of violence, but also to remedy an underlying situation of discrimination and injustice. 254. The Commission has interpreted the duty to act with due diligence toward situations of structural violence, such as gender-based violence against women, broadly, encompassing not only the prompt investigation, prosecution, and punishment of these acts, but also the obligation “to prevent these degrading practices.” For example, in Jessica Lenahan v. United States, the Commission highlighted that “the State’s duty to address violence against women also involves measures to prevent and respond to the discrimination that perpetuates this problem.” Thus, “States must adopt the required measures to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women and to eliminate prejudices, customary practices and other practices based on the idea of the inferiority or superiority of either of the sexes, and on stereotyped roles for men and women.” Furthermore, the Commission has previously considered that “the existence of a general pattern of State tolerance and judicial inefficiency towards cases of domestic violence [promotes] their repetition, and reaffirm[s] the inextricable link between the problem of violence against women and discrimination in the domestic setting.” 255. In the case of violence and

discrimination against African Americans, the Commission has previously considered the need for the federal and state governments to take steps “with due diligence and without delay to address the context which fuels forms of structural discrimination and disparate treatment against African Americans and racial minorities in the United States,” considering that this context is a key contributing factor to police violence against African Americans, and that remedying this underlying discrimination is “vital for the full exercise of citizenship by African Americans and to foster a more inclusive democracy in the United States.” Indeed, historic, structural discrimination against African Americans is the “backbone” of many of the problems discussed in this report. 256. In light of the foregoing, the Commission considers that a State’s failure to act with due diligence to prevent violence against African Americans constitutes a form of discrimination and a denial of equality before the law. The State has a positive duty to prevent and respond to the underlying discrimination that perpetuates the commission of police violence against African Americans. The Commission has previously emphasized that it is essential not only to appropriately investigate, prosecute, and punish cases of police violence, but also “to modify […] institutionalized stereotypes towards Afro-descendant[s]” in order to fulfill its duties to prevent and eradicate discrimination. 257. There is an important link between the duty of due diligence and the obligation of States to guarantee access to adequate and effective judicial remedies for victims and their family members when they suffer acts of violence. Finally, it is important to keep in mind the role of intersectional factors (e.g. sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, age, color, ethnicity, national origin, immigration status, religion, disability, situation of poverty, situation of homelessness, and others) that may place certain African Americans and other individuals of color at particular risk of violence or discrimination by State or non-State actors.

PRF

General

The right to assemble precedes any other right granted to the people – sovereignty through assembly is critical to withdraw from and question illegitimate structures that don’t act in the name of the peopleButler ‘18 (Judith Butler, writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist, “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly”, First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015), pg. 117-119, MB)

That assembly may be called “the people” or it may be one version of “the people”—they do not speak in one voice or even in one language. But they are beings with the capacity to move with whatever technical and infrastructural supports they require to do so (this is, importantly, an insight from disability studies that has concrete implications for thinking through public assembly). And that means that they can resolve to stand still, not to move, even to become immoveable in their desires and their demands. The power to move or be still, to speak and to act, belongs to the assembly prior to, and in excess of, whatever rights a particular government decides to confer or to protect. The coming together of a crowd has, as John Inazu contends, “an expressive function” prior to any particular claim or utterance it may make.4 That very power of government may well become what freedom of assembly opposes, and at that moment, we see the operation of a form of popular sovereignty that is distinct from state sovereignty, and whose task it is to distinguish itself from the latter. How, then, do we think about the freedom of assembly and popular sovereignty? I know that some people have come to consider “sovereignty” a bad word, one that associates politics with a singular subject and a form of executive power with territorial claims. Sometimes it is used as synonymous with mastery, and other times with subordination. Perhaps it carries other connotations, though, that we would not want to lose altogether. One only needs to consider debates about native sovereignty in Canada or read the important work of J. Kēhaulani Kauanui on the paradoxes of Hawaiian sovereignty to see how crucial this notion can be for popular mobilizations.5 Sovereignty can be one way of describing acts of political self-determination, which is why popular movements of indigenous people struggling for sovereignty have become important ways to lay claim to space, to move freely, to express one’s views, and to seek reparation and justice. Although elections are the way that government officials are supposed to represent popular sovereignty (or the “popular will” more specifically), the meaning of popular sovereignty has never been fully exhausted by the act of voting. Of course, voting is essential for any concept of popular sovereignty, but the exercise of sovereignty neither begins nor ends with the act of voting. As democratic theorists have argued for some time, elections do not fully transfer sovereignty from the populace to its elected representatives—something of popular sovereignty always remains nontransferable, marking the outside of the electoral process. If not, there would be no popular means of objecting to corrupt electoral processes. In a sense, the power of the populace remains separate from the power of those elected, even after they have elected them, for only in its separateness can it continue to contest the conditions and results of elections as well as the actions of elected officials. If the sovereignty of the people is fully transferred to, and replaced by, those whom the majority elect, then what is lost are those powers we call critical, those actions we call resistance, and that lived possibility we call revolution. So “popular sovereignty” certainly translates into electoral power when the people vote, but that is never a full or adequate translation. Something of popular sovereignty remains untranslatable, nontransferable, and even unsubstitutable, which is why it can both elect and dissolve regimes. As much as popular sovereignty legitimates parliamentary forms of power, it also retains the power to withdraw its support from those same forms when they prove to be illegitimate. If parliamentary forms of power require popular sovereignty for their very legitimacy, they also surely fear

it, for there is something about popular sovereignty that runs counter to, and exceeds or outruns, every parliamentary form that it institutes and grounds. An [A] elected regime can be brought to a halt or overcome by that assembly of people who speak “in the name of the people,” enacting the very “we” that holds final legitimating power under conditions of democratic rule. In other words, the conditions of democratic rule depend finally on an exercise of popular sovereignty that is never fully contained or expressed by any particular democratic order, but which is the condition of its democratic character. This is an extraparliamentary power without which no parliament can function legitimately, and that threatens every parliament with dysfunction or even dissolution. We may again want to call it an “anarchist” interval or a permanent principle of revolution that resides within democratic orders, one that shows up more or less both at moments of founding and moments of dissolution, but is also operative in the freedom of assembly itself.

The right to have rights predates, and is independent from, any political institution- Those excluded from sovereign structures can weaponize the right to appear in order to combat criminal regimes of the law-While the public sphere is built on exclusion and regulated modes of disavowal, performing the right to appear allows assemblages to call the state’s legitimacy into question- the body’s performance against state forces solidifies one’s right to persist, a right not guaranteed by the law but rather the right to have rights Butler ‘18 (Judith Butler, writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist, “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly”, First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015), pg. 117-119, MB)

Luckily, I think Arendt did not consistently follow this model from The Human Condition, which is why, for instance, in the early 1960s, she turned again to the fate of refugees and the stateless, and came to assert in a new way the right to have rights.9 The right to have rights is one that depends on no existing particular political organization for its legitimacy. Like the space of appearance, the right to have rights predates and precedes any political institution that might codify or seek to guarantee that right; at the same time, it is derived from no natural set of laws. The right comes into being when it is exercised, and exercised by those who act in concert, in alliance. Those who are excluded from existing polities, who belong to no nation-state or other contemporary state formation, may be deemed “unreal” only by those who seek to monopolize the terms of reality. And yet, even after the public sphere has been defined through their exclusion, they act. Whether they are abandoned to precarity or left to die through systematic negligence, concerted action still emerges from their acting together. And this is what we see, for instance, when undocumented workers amass on the street without the legal right to do so; when squatters lay claim to buildings in Argentina as a way of exercising the right to livable shelter; when populations lay claim to a public square that has belonged to the military; when refugees take part in collective uprisings demanding shelter, food, and rights of sanctuary; when populations amass, without the protection of the law and without permits to demonstrate, to bring down an unjust or criminal regime of law or to protest austerity measures that destroy the possibility of employment and education for many. Or when those whose public appearance is itself criminal—transgendered people in Turkey or women who wear the veil in France—appear in order to contest that criminal status

and assert the right to appear. The French law that prohibits “ostentatious” religious display in public as well as the hiding of the face seeks to establish a public sphere where clothing remains a signifier of secularism and the exposure of the face becomes a public norm. The prohibition against hiding the face serves a certain version of the right to appear, understood as the right for women to appear unveiled. At the same time, it denies the right to appear for that very group of women, requiring them to defy religious norms in favor of public ones. That required act of religious disaffiliation becomes obligatory when the public sphere is understood as one that overcomes or negates religious forms of belonging. The notion, prevalent in French debate, that women who wear the veil cannot possibly do so from any sense of choice operates in the debate to veil, as it were, the blatant acts of discrimination against religious minorities that the law enacts. For one choice that is clearly made among those who wear the veil is not to comply with those forms of compulsory disaffiliation that condition the entrance to the public sphere. Here as elsewhere, the sphere of appearance is highly regulated. That these women be clothed in some ways rather than others constitutes a sartorial politics of the public sphere, but so too does compulsory “unveiling,” itself a sign of belonging first to the public and only secondarily, or privately, to the religious community. This is especially pronounced in relation to Muslim women whose affiliations to various versions of public, secular, and religious domains may well be coterminous and overlapping. And it shows quite clearly that what is called “the public sphere” in such cases is built up through constitutive exclusions and compulsory forms of disavowal. Paradoxically, the act of conforming to a law that requires unveiling is the means by which a certainly highly compromised, even violent, “freedom to appear” is established. Indeed, in the public demonstrations that often follow from acts of public mourning—as often occurred in Syria before half of its population became refugees, where crowds of mourners became targets of military destruction—we can see how the existing public space is seized by those who have no existing right to gather there, who emerge from zones of disappearance to become bodies exposed to violence and death in the course of gathering and persisting publicly as they do. Indeed, it is their right to gather, free of intimidation and the threat of violence, that is systematically attacked by the police, the army, hired gangs, or mercenaries. To attack those bodies is to attack the right itself, since when those bodies appear and act, they are exercising a right outside, against, and in the face of the regime. Although the bodies on the street are vocalizing their opposition to the legitimacy of the state, they are also, by virtue of occupying and persisting in that space without protection, posing their challenge in corporeal terms, which means that when the body “speaks” politically, it is not only in vocal or written language. The persistence of the body in its exposure calls that legitimacy into question and does so precisely through a specific performativity of the body.10 Both action and gesture signify and speak, both as action and claim; the one is not finally extricable from the other. Where the legitimacy of the state is brought into question precisely by that way of appearing in public, the body itself exercises a right that is no right; in other words, it exercises a right that is being actively contested and destroyed by military force and that, in its resistance to force, articulates its way of living, showing both its precarity and its right to persist. This right is codified nowhere. It is not granted from elsewhere or by existing law, even if it sometimes finds support precisely there. It is, in fact, the right to have rights, not as natural law or metaphysical stipulation, but as the persistence of the body against those forces that seek its debilitation or eradication. This persistence requires breaking into the established regime of space with a set of material supports both mobilized and mobilizing.

Protesting it good even if it doesn’t result in change - increase visibility of a cause, demonstrate power of the people, tell politicians what citizens feel (even if they don’t do anything), and build coalitions of careHead ’19 (Tom Head, author, served on the board of the Mississippi ACLU, May 23, 2019, “Why Protest Events Are Not a Waste of Time”, HYPERLINK "https://www.thoughtco.com/why-protest-events-are-important-721459"https://www.thoughtco.com/why-protest-events-are-important-721459, Accessed: 07/06/2019, KW)

At first glance, the long-standing American practice of street protesting seems very odd. Picking up a picket sign and spending hours chanting and marching in 105-degree heat or 15-degree frost are not ordinary things to do. In fact, such behavior outside the context of a protest might be viewed as a sign of mental imbalance. The history of protest in the U.S. and around the world, however, reveals the abundant good this tradition has done for democracy and the democratic process. The U.S. Bill of Rights enshrines the right to peaceful assembly, evidence that the importance of protest has been recognized since the founding of this nation. But why is protest so useful? Increasing the Visibility of a Cause Policy debates can be abstract and may even seem irrelevant to the people not most directly affected by them. In contrast, protest events put warm bodies and heavy feet out into the world, representing an issue. Protest marchers are real people showing that they care enough about their cause to go out and be ambassadors for it. Marches bring attention. The media, politicians, and bystanders notice when a protest event happens. And if the protest is staged well, it will invariably make some people look at the issue with new eyes. Protests are not persuasive in and of themselves, but they invite conversation, persuasion, and change. Demonstrating Power The date was May 1, 2006. The U.S. House of Representatives had just passed H.R. 4437, a bill that essentially called for the deportation of 12 million undocumented immigrants and the imprisonment of anyone who might help them avoid deportation. A massive group of activists, predominantly but not exclusively Latino planned a series of rallies in response. More than 500,000 people marched in Los Angeles, 300,000 in Chicago, and millions more throughout the country; several hundred even marched in Jackson, Mississippi. The death of H.R. 4437 in committee was not surprising after these actions. When large numbers of people take to the streets in protest, politicians and other key decision-makers notice. There is no guarantee that they will act, but they notice. Promoting a Sense of Solidarity You may or may not feel that you are part of a movement even if you happen to agree with its principles. Supporting LGBTQIA rights in the comfort of your own home is one thing, but picking up a sign and supporting the issue in public is another matter: you let the issue define you for the duration of the protest, and you stand together with others to represent a movement. Protests make the movement feel more real to participants. This gung-ho spirit can also be dangerous. "The crowd," in the words of Søren Kierkegaard, "is untruth." To quote the musician and songwriter Sting, "people go crazy in congregations / they only get better one by one." To guard against the danger of mob thinking as you become emotionally engaged in an issue, remain intellectually honest about it, however challenging that might be. Building Activist Relationships Solo activism isn't usually very effective. It can also become dull very quickly. Protest events give activists a chance to meet, network, swap ideas, and build coalitions and community. For many protests, activists form affinity groups, where they find allies for the very specific angle most important to them. Many activist organizations started out at protest events that united and networked their like-minded founders. Energizing Participants Ask almost anyone who attended the March on Washington in August 1963, and to this day they'll tell you exactly what it felt like. Good protest events can be spiritual experiences for

some people, charging their batteries and inspiring them to get up and fight again another day. Such fortification is, of course, very helpful in the difficult process of working for a cause. By creating newly committed activists, and giving veteran activists a second wind, this energizing effect is a crucial ingredient in the struggle for political change.

The conception of individualism ignores the obligation that individuals have towards each other – every inhabitant does not only belong to communities but also the world itself – we all have a commitment to each other and a right to a livable life through the aff’s new form of politicsButler ‘18 (Judith Butler, writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist, “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly”, First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015), pg. 117-119, MB)

Most scholars would want to keep any consideration of Emmanuel Levinas separate from an analysis of Hannah Arendt: He is a philosopher of ethics, drawing on religious traditions, and he emphasizes the ethical importance of passivity and receptivity; she [Arendt] is a social and political philosopher, adamantly secular, who emphasizes time and again the political value of action. Why bring a discussion of Levinas together with one regarding Arendt? Both Levinas and Arendt take issue with the classically liberal conception of individualism, that is, the idea that individuals knowingly enter into certain contracts, and their obligation follows from having deliberately and volitionally entered into agreements with one another. This view assumes that we are only responsible for those relations, codified by agreements, into which we have knowingly and volitionally entered. And Arendt disputes this view. Indeed, it was the substance of the argument that she made against Adolf Eichmann. He thought he could choose which populations should live and die, and in this sense he thought he could choose with whom to cohabit the earth. What he failed to understand, according to Arendt, is that no one has the prerogative to choose with whom to cohabit the earth. We can choose in some ways how and where to live, and in local ways we can choose with whom to live. But if we were to decide with whom to cohabit the earth, we would be deciding which portion of humanity may live and which may die. If that choice is barred to us, that means that we are under an obligation to live with those who already exist, and that any choice about who may or may not live is always a genocidal practice; and though we cannot dispute that genocide has happened, and happens still, we are wrong to think that freedom in any ethical sense is ever compatible with the freedom to commit genocide. The unchosen character of earthly cohabitation is, for Arendt, the condition of our very existence as ethical and political beings. Hence, to exercise that prerogative of genocide is not only to destroy political conditions of personhood but to destroy freedom itself, understood not as an individual act but as a plural action. Without that plurality against which we cannot choose, we have no freedom and, therefore, no choice. This means that there is an unchosen condition of freedom and that, in being free, we affirm something about what is unchosen for us. If freedom seeks to exceed that unfreedom that is its condition, then we destroy plurality and we jeopardize, in her view, our status as persons, considered as zoon politikon. This was one argument that Arendt made about why the death penalty was justified for Eichmann. In her view, Eichmann had already destroyed himself by not realizing that his own life was bound to those he

destroyed, and individual life makes no sense, has no reality, outside of the social and political framework in which all lives are equally valued.3 In Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Arendt argues that Eichmann and his superiors failed to realize that the heterogeneity of the earth’s population is an irreversible condition of social and political life itself.4 So Arendt’s accusation against Eichmann bespeaks a firm conviction that none of us may exercise such a prerogative, that those with whom we cohabit the earth are given to us, prior to choice and so prior to any social or political contracts we might enter into through deliberation and volition. In Eichmann’s case, the effort to choose with whom to cohabit the earth was an explicit effort to annihilate some part of the population—Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, communists, the disabled, and the ill, among others—and so the exercise of freedom upon which he insisted was genocide. Not only is this choice an attack on cohabitation as a precondition of political life in Arendt’s view, but it commits us to the following proposition: we must devise institutions and policies that actively preserve and affirm the unchosen character of open-ended and plural cohabitation. Not only do we live with those we never chose and with whom we may feel no immediate sense of social belonging, but we are also obligated to preserve those lives and the open-ended plurality that is the global population. Although Arendt would doubtless dispute my view, I think what she has offered is an ethical view of cohabitation that serves as a guideline for particular forms of politics. In this sense, concrete political norms and policies emerge from the unchosen character of these modes of cohabitation. The necessity of cohabiting the earth is a principle that, in her philosophy, must guide the actions and policies of any neighborhood, community, or nation. The decision to live in one community or another is surely justified as long as it does not imply that those who live outside the community do not deserve to live. In other words, every communitarian ground for belonging is only justifiable on the condition that it is subordinate to a noncommunitarian opposition to genocide. The way I read this, every inhabitant who belongs to a community belongs also to the earth—a notion she clearly takes from Heidegger—and this implies a commitment not only to every other inhabitant of that earth but, we can surely add, to sustaining the earth itself. And with this last proviso, I seek to offer an ecological supplement to Arendt’s anthropocentrism. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt speaks not only for the Jews but for any and every other minority who would be expelled from habitation on the earth by another group. The one implies the other, and the “speaking for” universalizes the founding interdiction even as it does not override the plurality whose life it seeks to protect. One reason Arendt refuses to separate the Jews from the other so-called nations persecuted by the Nazis is that she is arguing in the name of a plurality coextensive with human life in any and all of its cultural forms. At the same time, her judgment of Eichmann is one that emerges precisely from the historical situation of a diasporic Jew who was herself a refugee from Nazi Germany, but who also objected to the Israeli courts representing a specific nation, when the crime, in her view, was a crime against humanity, and to the courts representing only the Jewish victims of the genocide, when there were many other groups annihilated and displaced in accord with the Nazi policy formulated and implemented by Eichmann and his cohorts. This same notion of unchosen cohabitation implies not only the irreversibly plural or heterogeneous character of the earth’s population, and an obligation to safeguard that plurality, but also a commitment to an equal right to inhabit the earth and so a commitment to equality as well. These two dimensions of her discussion took specific historical form in her argument against the idea of Israel as a state based on principles of Jewish sovereignty and for a federated Palestine in the late 1940s. The political conception of plurality for which she fought was, in her view, implicit in the American Revolution, and it led her to refuse to accept exclusively national, racial, or religious grounds for citizenship. Moreover, she objected to the founding of any state that required the expulsion of its

inhabitants and the production of a new refugee class, especially when such a state invoked the rights of refugees to legitimate its founding. Arendt’s normative views are these: there is no one part of the population that can claim the earth for itself, no community or nation-state or regional unit, no clan, no party, and no race. This means that unwilled proximity and unchosen cohabitation are preconditions of our political existence, the basis of her critique of nationalism, the obligation to live on the earth and in a polity that establishes equality for a population necessarily and irreversibly heterogeneous. Indeed, unwilled proximity and unchosen cohabitation also serve as the basis of our obligations not to destroy any part of the human population and to outlaw genocide as a crime against humanity, but also to invest institutions with the demand to seek to make all lives livable and equally so. Thus, from unchosen cohabitation, Arendt derives notions of universality and equality that commit us to institutions that seek to sustain human lives without regarding some part of the population as socially dead, as redundant, or as intrinsically unworthy of life and therefore ungrievable. Arendt’s views on cohabitation, federated authority, equality, and universality, elaborated from the 1940s through the 1960s, stood in stark contrast to those who were defending nationalist forms of Jewish sovereignty, differential classifications for Jewish and non-Jewish citizens, military policies to uproot Palestinians from their lands, and efforts to establish a Jewish demographic majority for the state. It is often taught that Israel became a historical and ethical necessity for the Jews during and after the Nazi genocide, and that anyone who questions the founding principles of the Jewish state shows an extraordinary insensitivity to the plight of the Jews; but there were Jewish thinkers and political activists at the time, including Arendt, Martin Buber, Hans Kohn, and Judah Magnes, who thought that among the most important lessons of the Nazi genocide was an opposition to illegitimate state violence, to any state formation that sought to give electoral priority and citizenship to one race or religion, and that nation-states ought to be internationally barred from dispossessing whole populations who fail to fit the purified idea of the nation. For those who extrapolated principles of justice from the historical experience of internment and dispossession, the political aim is to extend equality regardless of cultural background or formation, across languages and religions, to those none of us ever chose (or did not recognize that we chose) and with whom we have an enduring obligation to find a way to live. For whoever “we” are, we are also those who were never chosen, who emerge on this earth without everyone’s consent, and who belong, from the start, to a wider population and a sustainable earth. And this condition, paradoxically, yields the radical potential for new modes of sociality and politics beyond the avid and wretched bonds formed through settler colonialism and expulsion. We are all, in this sense, the unchosen, but we are nevertheless unchosen together. It is not uninteresting to note that Arendt, herself a Jew and refugee, understood her obligation not to belong to the “chosen people” but, rather, to the unchosen, and to make mixed community precisely among those whose existence implies a right to exist and to lead a livable life.

Precarity gains intelligibility exclusively when recognizing bodily dependence, human needs, and vulnerability as political issues- because conditions which determine livable life are intrinsically tied to concrete political institutions so too must the solutions we generate be grounded in notions of material precarity- this is the only ethical strategy to combat genocide and sustain life.Butler ‘18 (Judith Butler, writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on

Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist, “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly”, First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015), pg. 117-119, MB)

ARENDT’S EURO-AMERICAN FRAMEWORK was clearly limited, and yet another limitation becomes clear if we try to understand the relationship of precarity to practices of cohabitation. For Arendt, the needs of the body are to be relegated to the private sphere. Precarity only makes sense if we are able to identify bodily dependency and need, hunger and the need for shelter, the vulnerability to injury and destruction, forms of social trust that let us live and thrive, and the passions linked to our very persistence as clearly political issues. If Arendt thought that such matters had to be relegated to the private realm, Levinas understood the importance of vulnerability but failed to really link vulnerability to a politics of the body. Although Levinas seems to presuppose a body impinged upon, he does not give it an explicit place in his ethical philosophy. And though Arendt theorizes the problem of the body, of the located body, the speaking body emerging into the “space of appearance” as part of any account of political action, she is not quite willing to affirm a politics that struggles to overcome inequalities in food distribution, that affirms rights of housing, and that targets inequalities in the sphere of reproductive labor. In my view, some ethical claims emerge from bodily life, and perhaps all ethical claims presuppose a bodily life, understood as injurable, one that is not restrictively human. After all, the life that is worth preserving and safeguarding, that should be protected from murder (Levinas) and genocide (Arendt), is connected to, and dependent upon, nonhuman life in essential ways; this follows from the idea of the human animal, as Derrida has articulated it, which becomes a different point of departure for thinking about politics. If we try to understand in concrete terms what it means to commit ourselves to preserving the life of the other, we are invariably confronted with the bodily conditions of life and so to a commitment not only to the other’s corporeal persistence but to all those environmental conditions that make life livable. In the so-called private sphere delineated in Arendt’s The Human Condition, we find the question of needs, the reproduction of the material conditions of life, and the problems of transience, reproduction, and death alike—everything that pertains to precarious life. The possibility of whole populations being annihilated through either genocidal policies or systemic negligence follows not only from the fact that there are those who believe that they can decide with whom they will inhabit the earth, but also because such thinking presupposes a disavowal of an irreducible fact of politics: the vulnerability to destruction by others that follows from a condition of precarity in all modes of political and social interdependency. We can make this into a broad existential claim, namely, that everyone is precarious, and this follows from our social existence as bodily beings who depend upon one another for shelter and sustenance and who, therefore, are at risk of statelessness, homelessness, and destitution under unjust and unequal political conditions. As much as I am making such a claim, I am also making another, namely, that our precarity is to a large extent dependent upon the organization of economic and social relationships, the presence or absence of sustaining infrastructures and social and political institutions. So as soon as the existential claim is articulated in its specificity, it ceases to be existential. And since it must be articulated in its specificity, it was never existential. In this sense, precarity is indissociable from that dimension of politics that addresses the organization and protection of bodily needs. Precarity exposes our sociality, the fragile and necessary dimensions of our interdependency. Whether explicitly stated or not, every political effort to manage populations involves a tactical distribution of precarity, more often than not articulated through an unequal distribution of precarity, one that depends on dominant norms regarding whose life is grievable and worth protecting and whose life is ungrievable, or marginally or episodically grievable, and so, in that sense, already lost in part or in

whole, and thus less worthy of protection and sustenance. My point is not to rehabilitate humanism but, rather, to struggle for a conception of ethical obligation that is grounded in precarity. No one escapes the precarious dimension of social life—it is, we might say, the joint of our nonfoundation. And we cannot understand cohabitation without understanding that a generalized precarity obligates us to oppose genocide and to sustain life on egalitarian terms. Perhaps this feature of our lives can serve as the basis for the right of protection against genocide, whether through deliberate or negligent means. After all, even though our interdependency constitutes us as more than thinking beings, indeed as social and embodied, vulnerable and passionate, our thinking gets nowhere without the presupposition of the interdependent and sustaining conditions of life.

Black bodies magnetize bulletsWilderson 2007, Assistant Professor of African American Studies & Drama at UC Irvine, Warfare in the American Homeland-Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy pg31-33

Slavery is the great leveler of the black subject’s positionality. The black American subject does not generate categories of entitlement, sovereignty, and immigration for the record. We are “off the map ” with respect to the cartography that charts civil society’s semiotics; we have a past but no a heritage. To the data generating demands of the Historical Axis, we present a virtual blank, much like that which the Khoisian presented to the Anthropological Axis. This places us in a structurally impossible position, one that is outside the articulations of hegemony . However, it also places hegemony in a structurally impossible position because- and this is key- our presence works back on the grammar of hegemony and threatens it with its incoherence . If every subject, even the most massacred among them,

Indians- is required to have analogs within the nations structuring narrative and the experience of one subject on whom the nation’s order of wealth was built is without analog then that subject’s presence destabilizes all other analogs. Fanon writes: “Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder. If we take him at his word, then we must accept that no other body functions in

the Imaginary, Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a repository of complete disorder as the black body. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real, for in its magnetizing of bullets the black body functions as a map of gratuitous violence through which civil society is possible-namely, those bodies for which violence is, or can be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Symbolic, for blackness in America generates no categories for the chromosome of history and no data for the categories of immigration or sovereignty . It is an experience with analog-a past without a heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Imaginary , for whoever says “rape says black” (Fanon), whoever says “prison” says black, and whoever says “AIDS” says black - the Negro is a phobogenic object. Indeed it means all those things: a phobogenic object, a past without a heritage, the map of gratuitous violence, and a program of complete disorder. Whereas this realization is, and should be, cause for alarm, it should not be cause for lament or, worse, disavowal-not at least, for a true revolutionary or for a truly revolutionary movement such as prison abolition. If a social movement is to be neither a social-democratic nor Marxist in terms of structure of political desire, then it should grasps the invitation to assume the positionality of subjects of social death. If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that the “Negro has been inviting whites”, as well as civil society’s junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and remain today-even in the most anti-racist movements, such as the prison abolition movement-invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire today is pro white, but is usually anti black, meaning that it will not dance with death. Black liberation , as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the United States. This is not because it raises the specter of an alternative policy (such as socialism or community control of existing resources),

but because its condition of possibility and gesture of resistance function as a negative dialectic; a politics of refusal to

affirm, a “ program of complete disorder.” One must embrace its disorder, its incoherence, and allow oneself to be elaborated but, if indeed, one’s politics are to be underwritten by a desire to take down this country. If this is not the desire that underwrites one’s politics, then through what strategy of legitimation is the word “prison” being linked to the word “abolition”? What are this movement’s lines of political accountability? There is nothing foreign, frightening, or even unpracticed about the embrace of disorder and incoherence. The desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by disorder and incoherence is not anathema in and of oneself. No one, for example, has ever been know to say, “Gee-whiz, if only my orgasms would end a little sooner, or maybe not come at all.” Perhaps there is

something more terrifying about the joy of black than there is in the joy of sex (unless one is talking sex with a Negro). Perhaps coalitions today prefer to remain in-orgasmic in the face of civil society with hegemony as a handy prophylactic, just in case. If through this stasis or paralysis they try to do the work of prison abolition, the work will fail, for it is always work from a position of coherence (Le., the worker) on behalf of a position of incoherence of the black subject, or prison slave. In this way, social formations on the left remain blind to the contradictions of coalitions between workers and slaves. They remain coalitions operating within the logic of civil society and function less as revolutionary proses than as crowding out scenarios of black antagonisms, simply feeding our frustration. Whereas the positionality of the worker (whether a factory worker demanding a monetary wage, an immigrant, or a white woman demanding a social wage) gestures towards the reconfiguration of civil society, the positionality of the black subject (whether a prison slave or a prison slave-in-waiting-) gestures towards the disfiguration of civil society. From the coherence of civil society, the black subject beckons with the incoherence of civil war, a war that reclaims blackness not as a positive value but as a politically enabling site , to quote Fanon, of “absolute dereliction.” It is a “scandal” that rends civil society asunder. Civil war then becomes the unthought , but never forgotten, understudy of hegemony. It is a black specter waiting in the wings, an endless antagonism that cannot be satisfied (via reform or reparation) but that must, nonetheless, be pursued to the death.

Vulnerability

Injection and embracement of precarity is key to stop the re-entrenchment of this violence towards those deemed vulnerable and prevent self-defeating movements – the body’s vulnerability, once exposed by regimes of power, allows for the mobilization of mass political resistanceButler ‘18 (Judith Butler, writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist, “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly”, First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015), pg. 117-119, MB)

That action, I would suggest, has to be supported through solidarity, to be sure, but also by infrastructural conditions, by law, and by the absence of violent or coercive efforts to thwart the way. The struggles I mentioned above presume that bodies have been constrained and are at risk of constraint, that they can be without work and without mobility, that they can suffer violence and forms of coercion. Am I trying to say that bodies are not active, but vulnerable? Or that even vulnerable bodies can act? My argument, in fact, is that it would be as mistaken to think of the body as primarily or definitionally active as it would be to think of the body as primarily and definitionally vulnerable and inactive. If we have to have a definition, it will depend, rather, on being able to think vulnerability and agency together. I am especially aware of how counterproductive it can be to understand women’s bodies as particularly vulnerable. We immediately enter into uncertain terrain, given the long and lamentable gender politics that allocates the distinction between passive and active to women and men, respectively. Yet, if we say that certain groups are differentially vulnerable, we are only saying that under certain regimes of power, some groups are targeted more readily than others, some suffer poverty more than others, some are exposed to police violence more than others. We are making a sociological observation that would have to be backed up in one way or another. And yet, that sociological claim can very easily become a new norm of description, at which point women become defined by their vulnerability. At such a point, the very problem that the description is meant to address becomes reproduced and ratified by the very description. This is one reason we have to pay attention to what it means to mobilize vulnerability, and what it means, more specifically, to mobilize vulnerability in concert. For many of us, that is, for many people, the moment of actively appearing on the street involves a deliberate risk of exposure. Perhaps the word “exposure” helps us think vulnerability outside the trap of ontology and foundationalism. This is especially true for those who, exposed, appear on the street without permits, who are opposing the police or the military or other security forces without weapons. Although one is shorn of protection, to be sure, one is not reduced to some sort of “bare life.” There is no sovereign power jettisoning the subject outside the domain of the political as such; on the contrary, there is a more varied and diffuse operation of power and force that detains and encroaches on bodies in the street or in the cell or on the periphery of towns and borders—and this is a specifically political form of destitution. Of course, feminist theorists have for a long time argued that women suffer social vulnerability disproportionately.9 And though there is always a risk in claiming that women are especially vulnerable—given how many other groups are entitled to make the same claim, and given that the category of women is intersected by class, race, age, and a number of other vectors of power and sites of potential discrimination and injury—there is still something important to be taken from this tradition. The claim can sometimes be taken to mean that women have an unchanging and defining vulnerability, and that kind of argument makes the case for paternalistic provisions of protection. If

women are regarded as especially vulnerable and seek protected status, it becomes the responsibility of the state or other paternal powers to provide that protection. According to that model, feminist activism not only petitions paternal authority for special dispensations and protections, but affirms that inequality of power that situates women in a powerless position and, by implication, men in a more powerful one. And where it does not simply or exclusively put “men” in the position of providing protection, it invests state structures with the paternalistic obligation to facilitate the achievement of feminist goals. Such a view is very different from one that claims, for instance, that women are at once vulnerable and capable of resistance, and that vulnerability and resistance can, and do, and even must happen at the same time, as we see in certain forms of feminist self-defense and institutions (battered women’s shelters, for example) that seek to provide protection without enlarging paternalistic powers, and as happens through networks that support trans women in Turkey or anywhere the expanded and expandable category of women suffers harassment or injury by virtue of appearing as it does. Of course, there are good reasons to argue for the differential vulnerability of women; they suffer disproportionately from poverty and illiteracy, two very important dimensions of any global analysis of women’s conditions (and two reasons why none of us will be “postfeminist” until such time as these conditions are fully overcome). But many of the feminists who have made the turn to vulnerability, as it were, have done so in order to increase the protected standing of women in human rights organizations and international courts. This juridification of the feminist project seeks to prioritize the language needed to strengthen such an appeal to the courts. As important as such appeals may be, they provide a limited language for understanding feminist forms of resistance that are popular and extralegal, the dynamics of mass movements, civil society initiatives, and forms of political resistance informed and mobilized by vulnerability. The need to establish a politics that avoids the retrenchment of paternalism seems clear. At the same time, if this resistance to paternalism objects to all state and economic institutions that provide social welfare, then the demand for infrastructural support becomes illegible within its terms, even self-defeating. Hence, this task is made all the more difficult under conditions of increasing precarity in which ever greater numbers of people are exposed to homelessness, unemployment, illiteracy, and inadequate health care. The struggle, in my view, is how to make the feminist claim effectively that such institutions are crucial to sustaining lives at the same time that feminists resist modes of paternalism that reinstate and naturalize relations of inequality. So though the value of vulnerability has been important to feminist theory and politics, this does not mean that vulnerability serves as a defining characteristic of women as a group. I would oppose this effort to install a new norm for the category of women that rests on a foundational notion of vulnerability. Indeed, the very debate about who belongs to the group called “women” marks a distinct zone of vulnerability, namely, those who are non–gender conforming, and whose exposure to discrimination, harassment, and violence is clearly heightened on those grounds. So some provisionally bound group called “women” is neither more vulnerable than a provisionally bound group called “men” nor is it particularly useful or true to try to demonstrate that women value vulnerability more than men do. Rather, certain kinds of gender-defining attributes, like vulnerability and invulnerability, are distributed unequally under certain regimes of power, and precisely for the purpose of shoring up certain regimes of power that disenfranchise women. We think about goods as distributed unequally under capitalism as well as natural resources, especially water, but we should also surely consider that one way of managing populations is to distribute vulnerability unequally such that “vulnerable populations” are established within discourse and policy. More recently, we note that social movements and policy analysts refer to precarious populations, and that political strategies are accordingly devised to think about ameliorating

conditions of precarity.10 But this same demand is also made through broad popular struggles that both expose and mobilize precarity, showing, as it were, the possibilities of performative political action that emerge in the midst of precarity. It seems clear that if the designation of vulnerability or precarity effaces this form of political demand, it further entrenches the very condition from which it seeks alleviation.

Certain populations are deemed disposable and therefore subject to violence- our political transformation is a balance between personal responsibilities and the idea of vulnerability- this resolves the assumption that anything which is met with retaliation elicits vulnerabilityButler ‘18 (Judith Butler, writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist, “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly”, First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015), pg. 117-119, MB)

There is of course an even more sinister way of wielding both categories of precarity and of vulnerability. Within the terms of both military and economic policy, certain populations are effectively targeted as injurable (with impunity) or disposable (living on in a disposable condition or no longer living, quite literally disposed of, a distinction that constitutes an interval in the time-space of social death). This kind of explicit or implicit marking is used to justify the infliction of injury upon such populations (as we see in times of war, or in state violence against undocumented citizens). So “vulnerability” can be a way of targeting a population for decimation. This has produced a paradox within neoliberalism and its notion of “responsibilization” that designates such populations as accountable for their own precarious position, or their accelerated experience of precaritization. As a counter to this nefarious form of moralizing, human rights advocates have defended the idea of vulnerability as they insist on the need for legal and institutional protection for such groups. The notion of vulnerability here works in two ways, to target a population or to protect it, which means that the term has been used to establish a restrictive political logic according to which being targeted and being protected are the only two alternatives. We can see that the term, so deployed, effectively effaces both popular movements (if not forms of popular sovereignty) and active struggles for resistance and social and political transformation. We may think that these two ways of using the notion of vulnerability are antithetical, and they are, but only within the terms of a problematic logic, one that displaces some other forms of political rationality and practice that are arguably more pressing and more promising. So targeting and protecting are practices that belong to the same rationale of power. If precarious populations have produced their own situation, then they are not situated within a regime of power that reproduces precarity in systemic ways. Their own actions, or their own failures, are the cause of their precarious situations. If they are seen as in need of protection, and if paternalistic forms of power (which sometimes do include philanthropy and humanitarian NGOs) seek to install themselves in permanent positions of power to represent the powerless, then those very populations are excluded from democratic processes and mobilizations. The answer to this dilemma is neither to position precarious populations as hyperresponsible on a moral model nor, conversely, to position them as suffering populations in need of “care” by good Christians (as the social democratic discourse in France,

with its implicit affiliation with Christian values, currently maintains). This approach takes vulnerability and invulnerability as political effects, unequally distributed effects of a field of power that acts on and through bodies; these swift inversions show that vulnerability and invulnerability are not essential features of men or women, but, rather, processes of gender formation, the effects of modes of power that have as one of their aims the production of gender differences along lines of inequality. We can see evidence of this rationale when, for instance, masculinity is said to be “attacked” by feminism—in which case it is masculinity in the “vulnerable” position—or when the general public is said to be “attacked” by sexual and gender minorities of various kinds, or when the state of California is now understood to be “under attack” because it has lost its white majority, or when the state of Arizona is said to be “under attack” by its Latino population, and so trying to establish an ever more impermeable border to the south. Various European nationalities are now said to be “under attack” by new immigrant communities, at which point dominant groups and their racist representatives are construed as occupying a vulnerable condition.

Vulnerability can be mobilized to create an active form of political resistance – interdependency is necessary for assembly in order to create a livable lifeButler ‘18 (Judith Butler, writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist, “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly”, First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015), pg. 117-119, MB)

WHEN THOSE WHO FACE ACCELERATING prospects of precarity take to the streets and begin their claim with “we the people,” then they are asserting that they, those who appear and speak there, are identified as “the people.” They are working to ward off the prospect of oblivion. The phrase does not imply that those who profit are not “the people,” and it does not necessarily imply a simple sense of inclusion: “we are the people, too.” It can mean, “we are still the people”—therefore, still persisting and not yet destroyed. Or it can assert a form of equality in the face of increasing inequality; participants do this not simply by uttering that phrase, but by embodying equality to whatever extent that proves possible, constituting an assembly of the people on the grounds of equality. One might say, equality is experimentally and provisionally asserted in the midst of inequality, to which critics respond: this is vain and useless, since their acts are only symbolic, and true economic equality continues to become more elusive for those whose debts are astronomical and employment prospects foreclosed. And yet, it seems that the embodiment of equality in the practices of assembly, the insistence on interdependency and a fair distribution of labor tasks, the notion of a commonly held ground or “the commons,” all start to put into the world a version of equality that is rapidly vanishing in other quarters. The point is not to regard the body merely as an instrument for making a political claim, but to let this body, the plurality of bodies, become the precondition of all further political claims. Indeed, in the politics of the street that has been with us in the last years, in the Occupy Movement, Tahrir Square in its early stages, Puerta del Sol, Gezi Park, and the favela movement in Brazil, the basic requirements of the body are at the center of political mobilizations—those requirements are, in fact, publicly enacted prior to any set of political demands. Over and against forces of privatization, the destruction of public services and the ideals of the public good precipitated by the takeover of neoliberal forms of rationality in governance and

everyday life, bodies require food and shelter, protection from injury and violence, and the freedom to move, to work, to have access to health care; bodies require other bodies for support and for survival.14 It matters, of course, what age those bodies are, and whether they are able-bodied, since in all forms of dependency, bodies require not just one other person, but social systems of support that are complexly human and technical. It is precisely in a world in which the supports for bodily life of increasing numbers of people are proving to be highly precarious that bodies are emerging together on the pavement or the dirt or along the wall that separates them from their land—this assembly, which can include virtual participants, still assumes a set of interlocking locations for a plural set of bodies. And in this way, the bodies belong to the pavement, the ground, the architecture, and the technology by which they live and move and work and desire. Although there are those who will say that active bodies assembled on the street constitute a powerful and surging multitude, one that in itself constitutes a radical democratic event or action, I can only partially agree with that view. When the people break off from established power, they enact the popular will, though to know that for certain, we would have to know who is breaking off, and where, and who does not break off, and where they are. There are, after all, all sorts of surging multitudes I would not want to endorse (even if I do not dispute their right to assemble), and they would include lynch mobs, anti-Semitic or racist or fascist congregations, and violent forms of antiparliamentary mass movements. I am less concerned with the ostensible vitality of surging multitudes or any nascent and promising life force that seems to belong to their collective action than I am with joining a struggle to establish more sustaining conditions of livability in the face of systematically induced precarity and forms of racial destitution. The final aim of politics is not simply to surge forth together (though this can be an essential moment of affective intensity within a broader struggle against precarity), constituting a new lived sense of the “people,” even if sometimes, for the purposes of radical democratic change—which I do endorse—it is important to surge forth in ways that claim and alter the attention of the world for some more enduring possibility of livable life for all. It is one thing to feel alive, or to affirm aliveness, and yet another to say that that fleeting sense is all that we can expect from politics. Feeling alive is not quite the same as struggling for a world in which life becomes livable for those who have not yet been valued as living beings. Although I understand that something has to hold such a group together, some demand, some felt sense of injustice and unlivability, some shared intimation of the possibility of change, there is also a desire to produce a new form of sociality on the spot. These mobilizations make their claims through language, action, gesture, and movement; through linking arms; through refusing to move; through forming bodily modes of obstruction to police and state authorities. A given movement can move in and out of the space of heightened exposure, depending on its strategies and the military and police threats it must face. In each of these cases, however, we can say that these bodies form networks of resistance together, remembering that bodies who are active agents of resistance are also fundamentally in need of support. In resistance, vulnerability is not precisely converted into agency—it remains the condition of resistance, a condition of the life from which it emerges, the condition that, rendered as precarity, has to be opposed, and is opposed. This is something other than weakness or victimization, since, for the precarious, resistance requires exposing the abandoned or unsupported dimensions of life, but also mobilizing that vulnerability as a deliberate and active form of political resistance, an exposure of the body to power in the plural.

PRF Delegitimizes Government

Performative revolutionary fiat negates state legitimacy which disrupts the spatial organization of power including restrictions to movement Butler ‘18 (Judith Butler, writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist, “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly”, First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015), pg. 117-119, MB)

Many of the massive demonstrations and modes of resistance we have seen in the last months not only produce a space of appearance; they seize upon an already established space permeated by existing power, seeking to sever the relations between the public space, the public square, and the existing regime. So the limits of the political are exposed and the link between the theater of legitimacy and public space is severed; that theater is no longer unproblematically housed in public space, since public space now occurs in the midst of another action, one that displaces the power that claims legitimacy precisely by taking over the field of its effects. Simply put, the bodies on the street redeploy the space of appearance in order to contest and negate the existing forms of political legitimacy- and just as they sometimes fill or take over public space, the material history of those structures also works on them, becoming part of their very action, remaking a history in the midst of its most concrete and sedimented artifices. These are subjugated and empowered actors who seek to wrest legitimacy from an existing state apparatus that depends upon the regulation of the public space of appearance for its theatrical self-constitution. In wresting that power, a new space is created, a new “between” of bodies, as it were, that lays claim to existing space through the action of a new alliance, and those bodies are seized and animated by those existing spaces in the very acts by which they reclaim and resignify their meanings. Such a struggle intervenes in the spatial organization of power, which includes the allocation and restriction of spatial locations in which and by which any population may appear, which implies a spatial regulation of when and how the “popular will” may appear. This view of the spatial restriction and allocation of who may appear—in effect, of who may become a subject of appearance—suggests an operation of power that works through both foreclosure and differential allocation.

Perm/Ethical obligation

Even in the face of unchosen cohabitation, we have an ethical obligation to speak out against the oppression the state exerts in our name - protest police militarization that entraps black bodies.Butler ‘18 (Judith Butler, writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist, “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly”, First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015), pg. 117-119, MB)

We might think that interdependency is a happy or promising notion, but it is often the condition for territorial wars and forms of state violence. Indeed, I am not sure that we have yet been able to think about the unmanageability of dependency at the level of politics—to what fear, panic, repulsion, violence, and domination it can lead. It is true that I am trying to struggle toward an affirmation of interdependency in what I have offered here, but I am trying to underscore just how difficult it is to struggle for social and political forms that are committed to fostering a sustainable interdependency on egalitarian terms. When any of us are affected by the sufferings of others, it is not only that we put ourselves in their place or that they usurp our own place; perhaps it is the moment in which a certain chiasmic link comes to the fore and I become somehow implicated in lives that are clearly not the same as my own. And this happens even when we do not know the names of those who make their appeal to us or when we struggle to pronounce the name or to speak in a language we have never learned. At their best, some media representations of suffering at a distance compel us to give up our more narrow communitarian ties and to respond, sometimes in spite of ourselves, sometimes even against our will, to a perceived injustice. Such presentations can bring the fate of others near or make it seem very far away, and yet, the kinds of ethical demands that emerge through the media in these times depend on this reversibility of proximity and distance. Indeed, certain bonds are actually wrought through this very reversibility, however incomplete it is. And we might find ways of understanding the interdependency that characterizes cohabitation precisely as these bonds. For if I am here and there, I am also not ever fully there, and even if I am here, I am always more than fully here. Is there a way to understand this reversibility as limited by bodily time and space in such a way that the other is not radically other, and I am not radically over here as an I, but the link, the joint, is chiasmic and only and always partly reversible and partly not? There are, as we know, antagonistic ties, wretched bonds, raging and mournful modes of connectedness. In those cases, living with others on adjacent lands or on contested or colonized lands produces aggression and hostility in the midst of that cohabitation. The mode of unchosen cohabitation that belongs to the colonized is surely not the same as the notion of a democratic plurality established on grounds of equality. But they both have their mode of wretched attachment and adjacency.6 Even in situations of antagonistic and unchosen modes of cohabitation, certain ethical obligations emerge. First, since we do not choose with whom to cohabit the earth, we have to honor those obligations to preserve the lives of those we may not love, those we may never love, do not know, and did not choose. Second, these obligations emerge from the social conditions of political life, not from any agreement we have made or from any deliberate choice. And yet, these very social conditions of livable life are precisely those that have to be achieved “We cannot rely on them as presuppositions that will guarantee our good life together. On the contrary, they supply the ideals toward which we must struggle, which involves a passage through the problem of violence. Because we are bound to realize these conditions; we are also bound to one another, in passionate and fearful

alliance, often in spite of ourselves, but ultimately for ourselves, for a “we” who is constantly in the making. Third, these conditions imply equality, as Arendt tells us, but also an exposure to precarity (a point derived from Levinas), which leads us to understand a global obligation imposed upon us to find political and economic forms that minimize precarity and establish economic political equality. Those forms of cohabitation characterized by equality and minimized precarity become the goal to be achieved by any struggle against subjugation and exploitation, but also the goal that starts to be achieved in the practices of alliances that assemble across distances to achieve that very goal. We struggle in, from, and against precarity. Thus, it is not from pervasive love for humanity or a pure desire for peace that we strive to live together. We live together because we have no choice, and though we sometimes rail against that unchosen condition, we remain obligated to struggle to affirm the ultimate value of that unchosen social world, an affirmation that is not quite a choice, a struggle that makes itself known and felt precisely when we exercise freedom in a way that is necessarily committed to the equal value of lives. We can be alive or dead to the sufferings of others—they can be dead or alive to us. But it is only when we understand that what happens there also happens here, and that “here” is already an elsewhere, and necessarily so, that we stand a chance of grasping the difficult and shifting global connections in ways that let us know the transport and the constraint of what we might still call ethics

Opaque solidarity/ Hunger strikes solve

Opaque forms of solidarity and opposition to precarity constitute a form freedom of assembly and challenge to the legitimacy of the institution. Hunger strikes in prisons are perfect examples of bodily performativity being used to challenge the regulatory power of the prisonButler ‘18 (Judith Butler, writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist, “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly”, First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015), pg. 117-119, MB)

At the outset, I confessed that I experience a certain thrill, dating back to my adolescent years, when bodies get together in the street, and yet I am quite suspicious of those political views that hold, for instance, that democracy has to be understood as the event of the surging multitude. I don’t think so. It seems to me that we have to ask what it is that holds such a group together, what demand is being shared, or what felt sense of injustice and unlivability, what intimation of the possibility of change heightens the collective sense of things. For all that to be democratic, there has to be an opposition to existing and expanding inequalities, to ever-increasing conditions of precarity for many populations both locally and globally, and to forms of authoritarian and securitarian control that seek to suppress democratic processes and movements. Although we sometimes do imagine that political deliberation and action take place in the form of an assembly, there are other ways of conferring and acting that do not presuppose the occupation of the same ground. There are bodies that assemble on the street or online or through other less visible networks of solidarity, especially for prisoners whose political claims are made through forms of solidarity that may or may not appear directly in any one public space, and whose solidarity, when it emerges, rests on a common and forcible exclusion from public space, and a forcible isolation in cells monitored by police or security personnel. This raises the question of what form the freedom of assembly takes when it is explicitly denied as a right. If we say there is no freedom of assembly in prison, or that it is limited, then we certainly acknowledge that those in prison have been forcibly deprived of that freedom, and we can then debate the justice or injustice of having been deprived of that quite essential dimension of citizenship. I am all for that. At the same time, however, I want to suggest that furtive and sometimes effective ways of exercising freedom of assembly do happen in prison, and that we won’t be able to conceptualize that form of resistance without conceding that point. The forms of solidarity and action that do emerge within prisons, including hunger strikes, also constitute a form of freedom of assembly, or a form of solidarity implied by such a freedom, and that also needs to be acknowledged as an active form of resistance. So already we see that the street and the square are not the only platforms for political resistance, and that where there is no freedom to enter the square or take to the street, grounds for resistance certainly exist. Can the four walls of the prison cell also turn out to be a platform, analogous perhaps to the overturned tank that suddenly becomes a platform on which people stand to voice their public opposition to the military, as happened in Cairo in 2009? The confined body does not always have the freedom to move, but can it still make use of its confinement to express resistance? At such moments, the public square is not the support for such action (though people gathered there, supporting those in prison, surely can be support, and can make use of that spatial support and its symbolic power), but support assumes yet another meaning, on the inside and the outside, in modes of solidarity, through ways that the body can exercise the refusal to eat and to work, to devise modes of communication, and to refuse to be a functional prisoner, intervening

“to thwart the reproduction of the institution of the prison. Prisons depend upon the successful regulation of human acts and movements, the reproduction of the body of the prisoner, and when that regulatory power fails, as it does, for instance, in the hunger strike, so too does the prison lose its capacity to function. Moreover, this failure to function is also linked to the imperiling or the killing of the prisoner itself. One might remember in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” that the apparatus of punishment destroys the prisoner precisely when it goes out of control. This going out of control is perhaps induced by the hunger striker, but really, what is wanted is to expose the killing machine that the prison has always been, even when it works efficiently. For if the effective reproduction of the prisoner takes place in tandem with the decimation of the condition of livability for the prisoner, then death-bound movement is already happening prior to any hunger strike. The hunger strike exposes the death-dealing already at work in the prison. In this sense, the hunger strike is a bodily enactment, following its own protocols of performativity; it enacts what it seeks to show, and to resist

Solvency/ Freedom of Assembly Pre-req

The freedom of assembly is a fundamental right not rooted within citizenship and sovereignty that functions as a precondition to politics- this exercise of freedom of assembly can contest the exercise of illegitimate policies unrepresentative of the peopleButler ‘18 (Judith Butler, writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist, “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly”, First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015), pg. 117-119, MB)

In some human rights discourses, the freedom of assembly is described as a fundamental form of freedom that deserves to be protected by government, which means that governments are obligated to protect that freedom; paradoxically, governments must protect the freedom of assembly against governmental interference, which is a way of saying that governments are under strict obligations to restrain themselves from attacking the rights of assembly by the illegitimate use of police and judicial powers to detain, arrest, harass, threaten, censor, imprison, injure, or kill. As we can see, there is a risk in this formulation from the start: Does freedom of assembly depend upon being protected by government, or does it depend upon a protection from government? And does it make sense for the people to rely on government to protect itself from government? Does the right only exist if a government confers this right on its people, and does it only exist to the extent that a government agrees to protect that right? If so, then the destruction of those rights of assembly by a government cannot be opposed by asserting the rights of assembly. We can agree that freedom of assembly cannot be found in natural law, but is it still in some important way independent of any and every government? Does freedom of expression, in fact, exceed, even defy, those acts of government by which it is protected and/or violated? These rights do not, and cannot, depend on governmental protection in those cases when the legitimacy of a government and the power of the state are being contested precisely by such an assembly, or when a specific state has contravened the rights of assembly such that its population can no longer freely congregate without threat of state interference, including military and police brutality. Moreover, when the power of the state to “protect” rights is identical to the power of the state to withdraw that very protection, and people exercise the freedom of assembly to contest that form of arbitrary and illegitimate power that bestows and withdraws protection at will, then something in or of freedom of assembly moves outside the jurisdiction of state sovereignty. One aspect of state sovereignty is this very capacity to withdraw protection of the rights of populations.2 That may be true, but perhaps what is being opposed is the idea that freedom of assembly itself can be lost as a right when the state opposes the aims of that assembly and seeks to outlaw assembly itself. That happens, as we know, when the state itself becomes engaged in facilitating the expansion of markets, in turning its own services over to financial institutions, and thereby transforming public entitlements into consumer goods or investment opportunities. The antiprivatization movement seeks to stop the saturation of the state in market forces. Such movements often happen in tandem with a call to question the legitimacy of a government that has assumed authoritarian powers—no one is arguing that free markets now foster democracy, as Milton Friedman notoriously did in Chile under Pinochet. In those cases in which privatization and authoritarianism are publicly opposed, the state uses its own military, police, and legal powers to suppress the freedom of assembly and other such (potentially revolutionary) freedoms. So, freedom of assembly is something other than a specific right allocated and

protected by existing nation-states. This is why, although there are many excellent studies on the history of freedom of assembly in the United States, for instance, they do not always give us insight into transnational forms of alliances, or global networks such as those that characterized the Occupy Movement. If we restrict the analysis of freedom of assembly to a particular national history of that right, we may unwittingly imply that the right only exists insofar as the state confers and protects that right. We may then depend upon the continuation of the nation-state to secure the efficacy of that right. That, of course, turns out not to be true if, by “freedom of assembly,” the nation-state protects precisely that right that could, if collectively exercised, bring down the state itself. I take it that this is what is meant when Arendt and others see in freedom of assembly a recurrence of the right of revolution.3 Still, even if a particular regime contains or protects such a right, it seems to me that the freedom of assembly has to precede and exceed any form of government that confers and protects that right of assembly. I say this not to affirm forms of permanent anarchy, and certainly not to condone forms of mob rule, but only to suggest that freedom of assembly may well be a precondition of politics itself, one that presumes that bodies can move and gather in an unregulated way, enacting their political demands in a space that, as a result, becomes public, or redefines an existing understanding of the public.

We the People

“We the people” is always an exclusionary term that is restricted to those striving for hegemony. Our democracy controlled by elected officials is precisely what nullifies the will of the people because claims to representation are condensed down into a set of votes classified as a majority.Butler ‘18 (Judith Butler, writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist, “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly”, First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015), pg. 117-119, MB)

Sometimes the people, or some people, are confined or absent, or outside the purview of the street and the camera—they are the uncapturable, though they may well be captured in another sense. It never really happens that all of the possible people who are represented by the notion of “the people” show up in the same space and at the same time to claim that they are the people! As if they were all free to move, as if they all of their own volition arrived together in some space and time that can be described or photographed in some all-inclusive way! Indeed, it would be odd, if not terrifying, to imagine every member of the group called “the people” coming together and speaking in unison—that would be a fantasy, if not a potentially persecutory phantasm, whose seductive power is linked with its fundamental unrealizability. Usually, we associate the event of everyone speaking the same thing at the same time with forms of fascism or other compulsory forms of conformity. In fact, “we the people”—the utterance, the chant, the written line—is always missing some group of people it claims to represent. Some people fail to show up or are constrained from doing so; many live on the margins of the metropole, some are congregated on the border in refugee camps waiting for documentation, transfer, and shelter, and yet others are in prison or detained in camps. Those who are situated elsewhere may, if they can, be saying something else, or they are texting or blogging, or functioning through new media; some are emphatically or indifferently not speaking at all. This means that “the people” never really arrive as a collective presence that speaks as a verbal chorus; whoever the people may be, they are surely internally divided, appearing differentially, sequentially, not at all, or in degree, probably also in some measure both gathered and dispersed, and so ultimately not a unity.8 In fact, as we know from the summer demonstrations in both Turkey and Egypt in 2013, one group gathers in one place and claims to be the people, and another group gathers across the way and makes the same claim, or the government gathers a group of people precisely in order to take the image that functions as the visual signifier of “the people.” Access to any public square presupposes access to some media that relays the events outside of that space and time; the public square is now partially established as a media effect, but also as part of the enunciatory apparatus by which a group of people claims to be the people; the connection of the public square with the media that circulates the event means that the people disperse as they gather; the media image shows and disperses the gathering. This implies the need to radically rethink the public square as always already dispersed through the media representation without which it loses its representative claim. It also means that whoever the people may be is not quite known or knowable, and not only because the media frame limits and morphs the idea of the people it relays. What is known, however, is that the people, whoever they may be, show up and do not, are subject to various restrictions of movement and assembly, and are internally divided about who they are. Showing up together does not mean that everyone agrees with everything that is said in the name of the assembly or even that the assembly has a name. The contest over the name becomes a hegemonic struggle, and

“the people” seems to be another name for that contest. So, what follows? A people do not need to be united on every issue, and cannot be. And neither do they all have to gather in a single space for concerted action to take place in the name of the people. That name, “the people,” even the declaration, “we the people,” does not quite capture what the people do, for there is always something other than the particular group that has formed and appeared and seems to be speaking of what all the people might want, precisely because there is a gap between what happens in the name of the people and what the people want. Not all the people want the same thing or want it in the same way—this failure does not need to be lamented. The name of the people is appropriated, contested, and renewed, always at risk of being expropriated or dismissed, and the fragility and ferocity that mark the hegemonic struggle over the name are but signs of its democratic operation. So even as some speaker or set of speakers invoke a “we” that fairly and fully represents all the people, the plural “we” cannot really do what it nevertheless does; such speakers may surely continue to strive for more inclusive aims, underscoring the aspirational character of the “we,” but if the “we” is to work politically, it has to be restricted to those who attempt to achieve and exercise hegemonic power through its invocation. Indeed, those who assemble as the “we,” presenting themselves as “the people,” are not finally representing the people fully and adequately; rather, they are performing several functions at once: for instance, if they can vote, they provide the legitimating ground for those who come to represent the people through elections. But perhaps equally importantly, the claim of elected officials to be representative requires the condensation of the people into a set of votes that can be tallied as a majority. In this sense, the people are abbreviated and nearly lost at the moment in which they elect those who represent them, and political representation in this sense abbreviates, quantifies, something we might call the will of the people. At the same time, something nonelectoral is also at work. The people who speak the “we,” whether within the electoral process, outside it, or against it, constitute themselves as the people in the course of enacting or vocalizing that plural pronoun either literally or figuratively. Standing together in the face of the police can be precisely an enactment of that plural pronoun without saying a word. When the Turkish government in the summer of 2013 banned assemblies in Taksim Square, one man stood alone, facing the police, clearly “obeying” the law not to assemble. As he stood there, more individuals stood “alone” in proximity to him, but not exactly as a “crowd.” They were standing as single individuals, but they were all standing, silent and motionless, as single individuals, evading the standard idea of an “assembly” yet producing another one in its place. They technically obeyed the law forbidding groups from assembling and moving by standing separately and saying nothing. This became an articulate yet wordless demonstration.

The United States is founded upon popular sovereignty as the basis for its system of authority. Declaring “we the people” is an embodied protest that uproots the legitimacy of the government’s political authority to legislate as representative of the people.Butler ‘18 (Judith Butler, writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist, “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly”, First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015), pg. 117-119, MB)

IN DEMOCRATIC THEORY, “we the people” is nevertheless first and foremost a speech act. Someone says “we” along with someone else, or some group says it together, perhaps chanting, or they write it and send it out into the world, or they stand one by one, or perhaps provisionally together, motionless and wordless, enacting assembly; when they say it, they seek to constitute themselves as “the people” from the moment in which it is declared. So considered as a speech act, “we the people” is an enunciation that seeks to bring about the social plurality it names. It does not describe that plurality, but gathers that group together through the speech act. It would seem, then, that a linguistic form of autogenesis is at work in the expression “we the people”; it seems to be a rather magical act or, at least, one that compels us to believe in the magical nature of the performative. Of course, “we the people” starts a longer declaration of wants and desires, intended acts, and political claims. It is a preamble; it prepares the way for a specific set of assertions. It is a phrase that gets us ready for a substantive political claim, and yet, we have to pause at this way of starting up the sentence and ask whether a political claim is already being made, or is in the making even before someone speaks or signs. It is perhaps impossible for all the people who might say “we the people” at the same time to speak that phrase in unison. And if somehow an assembled group were to yell out, “we the people,” as sometimes happens in the assemblies of the Occupy Movement, it is a brief and transitory moment, one in which a single person speaks at the same time that others speak, and some unintended plural sounding results from that concerted plural action, that speech act spoken in common, in sequence, with all the variations that repetition implies. But let us admit that such a moment of literally speaking in unison, and naming ourselves as “the people,” rarely happens quite like that—simultaneous and plural. After all, the declaration of “we the people” in the United States is a citation, and the phrase is never fully freed of its citationality. The Declaration of Independence of the United States begins with such a phrase, one that authorizes the writers to speak for the people more generally. It is a phrase that establishes political authority at the same time that it declares a form of popular sovereignty bound by no one political authority. Derrida has analyzed this in some very important ways, as has Bonnie Honig. Popular sovereignty can give itself (in assent) and withdraw itself (in dissent or in revolution), which means that every regime is dependent on it being given if it hopes to base its legitimacy on something other than coercion. The speech act, however punctual, is nevertheless inserted in a citational chain, and that means that the temporal conditions for making the speech act precede and exceed the momentary occasion of its enunciation. And for yet another reason the speech act, however illocutionary, is not fully tethered to the moment of its enunciation: the social plurality designated and produced by the utterance cannot all assemble in the same place to speak at the same time, so it is both a spatially and temporally extended phenomenon. When and where popular sovereignty—the self-legislative power of the people—is “declared” or, rather, “declares itself,” it is not exactly at a single instance, but instead in a series of speech acts or what I would suggest are performative enactments that are not restrictively verbal. So I suppose my question might be formulated this way: What are the bodily conditions for the enunciation of “we the people,” and do we make a mistake if we separate the matter of what we are free to say from how we are free to assemble? I propose to think about the assembly of bodies as a performative enactment, and so to suggest not only that (a) popular sovereignty is a performative exercise, but (b) it necessarily involves a performative enactment of bodies, sometimes assembled in the same place and sometimes not. First, I propose that we have to understand the idea of popular sovereignty that “we the people” seeks to secure. If “we the people” set forth in the Constitution “declare a set of truths to be self-evident” as they apparently do in the Declaration of Independence, then we are already in a bit of a bind. A performative declaration seeks to bring about those truths, but

if they are “self-evident” then they are precisely the kind of truths that don’t need to be brought about at all. Either they are performatively induced or they are self-evident, but to bring about that which is self-evident seems paradoxical. We could say that a set of truths is being brought into being or we could say that we found those truths somewhere and that we did not bring them into being. Or we can say that the kind of truths at issue here have to be declared as self-evident for that self-evidence to be known. In other words, they have to be made evident, which means that they are not self-evident. This circularity seems to risk contradiction or tautology, but perhaps these truths only become evident in the manner in which they are declared. In other words, the performative enactment of the truth is the way of making evident that very truth, since the truth in question is not pregiven or static but enacted or exercised through a particular kind of plural action. If it is the very capacity for plural action that is at stake in claiming popular sovereignty, then there is no way to “show” this truth outside of the plural and invariably conflictual enactment we call self-constitution. If the plural subject is constituted in the course of its performative action, then it is not already constituted; whatever form it has prior to its performative exercise is not the same as the form it takes as it acts, and after it has acted. So how do we then understand this movement of gathering, which is durational, and implies occasional, periodic, or definitive forms of scattering? It is not one act, but a convergence of actions different from one another, a form of political sociality irreducible to conformity. Even when a crowd speaks together, they have to gather in close enough proximity to hear each other’s voice, to pace each person’s own vocalization, to achieve rhythm and harmony to a sufficient degree, and so to achieve a relation both auditory and corporeal with those with whom some signifying action or speech act is undertaken. We start to speak now and stop now. We start to move now, or more or less at a given time, but certainly not as a single organism. We try to stop all at once, but some keep moving, and others move and rest at their own pace. Temporal seriality and coordination, bodily proximity, auditory range, coordinated vocalization—all of these constitute essential dimensions of assembly and demonstration. And they are all presupposed by the speech act that enunciates “we the people”; they are the complex elements of the occasion of that enunciation, the nonverbal forms of its signification. If we try to take vocalization as the model of the speech act, then the body is surely presupposed as the organ of speech, both the organic condition and the vehicle of speech. The body is not transmuted into pure thought as it speaks, but signifies the organic conditions for verbalization, which means, according to Shoshana Felman, that the speech act is always doing something more and other than what it is actually saying. So just as there is no purely linguistic speech act separated from bodily acts, there is no purely conceptual moment of thought that does away with its own organic condition. And this tells us something about what it means to say “we the people,” since whether it is written in a text or uttered on the street, it designates an assembly in the act of designating and forming itself. It acts on itself as it acts, and a corporeal condition of plurality is indexed whether or not it appears on the occasion of the utterance. That bodily condition, plural and dynamic, is a constitutive dimension of that occasion. The embodied character of the people proves quite important to the kinds of demands that are made, since it is more often than not that basic bodily needs are not being met by virtue of the devastated ways of life. It may offend us theoretically to speak of “basic bodily needs,” as if a certain ahistorical notion of the body is invoked for the purposes of making moral and political claims to fair treatment and the just distribution of public goods. But perhaps it would be even less acceptable to refuse to speak about bodily needs at all for fear of falling into a theoretical impasse. It is not a matter of accepting the ahistorical or historical version of the body, for even the formulation of historical construction has its invariant features, and every universal concept of the body is drawn from very specific historical formations. So neither side of that debate knows what

kind of relation it is in to the other. Every particular bodily need can be articulated historically in one way or another, and it may well be that what is called a “need” is precisely a historical articulation of urgency that is not for that reason a mere effect of the articulation. In other words, there is no way to separate the idea of a bodily need from the representational scheme that differentially recognizes bodily needs and, too often, fails to recognize them at all. This does not make bodily needs fully ahistorical, but neither does it make them into pure effects of a specifically historical discourse. Once again, the relation between the body and discourse is chiastic, suggesting that the body has to be represented and that it is never fully exhausted by that representation. Moreover, the differential ways that it is and is not represented saturate the representation of needs in fields of power. One can also take into account the production of needs discussed by Marx and amplified theoretically by Agnes Heller13 without claiming that “there is no such thing as a need.” We could doubtless use other words, and trace the productive character of the words we use to amplify the phenomena, but we would still be talking about something, even if there is no way to get at that something without the language we use, even if we invariably transfigure that something by using the language we do. The notion of “needs” then would be an always already linguistically transfigured sense of requirement or urgency, and would be adequately captured neither by those synonyms nor by any others.

Other SolvenciesWe must include the reconceptualization of “freedom” through black philosophy and maroon philosophers that understands freedom as resistance in the face of captivity and oppression. Western conceptualizations of freedom are far too theoretical to account for how blackness is positioned outside of hegemony, sovereignty, etc., and therefore cannot access Western notions of freedom.James 13

[Joy James, the F. C. Oakley Third Century Chair, Professor in Humanities and of political science at Williams College, 2013, “Afrarealism and the Black Matrix”, pg. 124-125, Accessed: 7/11/2019, KW]

Black philosophy functions as both a corrective and a creative source for political theory in particular and philosophy in general: it approaches the life of the mind, aesthetics, ethics, and transcendence through the human struggle for “ freedom ”— not as an abstract value but as concretized in resistance to captivity . Black philosophy’s savant is an Afrarealism that explores its contributions and contradictions. Through black radical, feminist-womanist, queer theories, Afrarealism confronts theoretical limitations and political practices in conceptualizing freedom. It has been operative in the “New World” for half a millennium. It is as old as black theory and philosophy’s hunger for liberty. Although Afrarealism often seems relegated to the underground of resistance and to the shadows of formal concepts, its resilience allows for continuous agency. Fed upon and fetishized by Europe since the 1500s, emerging states in the Americas refined the efficacy of terror and genocide while inadvertently incubating the maroons that birthed Afrarealism. Prefigured in the Atlantic slave trade, and challenged by the maroonage of ship rebellions and mutinies, racial capital and racial rape became the conquistadores of the Americas.3 Five hundred years of flights from captivity , into communal and conceptual wilderness, created the maroon philosophers’ natural habitat at the boundary of democracy. Such outsider terrain superficially appears as a reservation or cell; yet it is in part a trajectory into freedom . For centuries democracy was idealized through the rise of white citizenship,4 and portrayed as the manifestation of freedom. Black radical thought witnessed it as building democracy’s boundaries: establishing the definitional norms for democratic citizenship through racially fashioned captivity.5 Afrarealism recognizes two coterminous phenomena: democracy as a boundary defining freedom through captivity, and maroon philosophy at the borders reimagining freedom through flight. Afrarealism does not equate democracy with freedom as some black philosophy does. Rather, Afrarealism’s journey moves adjacent to a democracy originating and reproducing amid racial captivity and racial rape. Afrarealism also sojourns with black philosophy’s challenges to racial supremacy. Afrarealism sees through the lens of a black matrix. As both spectacle and spectrum, the black matrix allows a broader grasp of anti-black state and citizenship terror , and wounded agency pursuing freedom .6 A form of maroon philosophy (all black philosophy is not radicalized as maroon philosophy), Afrarealist political theory treks beyond conventional militarized borders to survey democracy’s violence toward the black matrix and black reproductivity. The violent exploitation of black productivity in agricultural, industrial, penal, and cultural markets is a historical and structural feature of democracy. These aggressions and violations I have earlier described as “state violence.”7 Democracy’s aggressions against the black matrix, its terror against black reproductive labor, its sanction of racial rape I describe here as state “intimate violence.” State violence and intimate state violence are two related but distinct phenomena. Violations of black productivity coexist with terror

against black reproductivity. Afrarealism witnesses both and calls for greater scrutiny to assaults against black reproductivity, an under-theorized feature of black captivity.

The aff’s protest is one of melancholic hope, which is distinct from triumphant narratives of progress – it is an exposure of the unsettling catastrophes of the past that implicate anti-black violence now, and an understanding that struggle and resistance are ways to mitigate the perniciousness of the world. Winters 16

[Joseph R. Winters, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Duke University., 2016, “Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress”, Duke University Press, Accessed: 7/10/2019, KW]

As Du Bois and Ellison indicate, progressive accounts of history have been complicit with the violence of modern life. These narratives work to rationalize the violence enacted against “less advanced” groups, people who need to be civilized, saved, or brought into the fold of universal history . Similarly, they encourage people to forget , deny, or downplay the violence that happens against people of color in the name of progress. As I show throughout this book, these concerns about the dangers and erasures of progress resonate with the reflections of Walter Benjamin, the literary critic of the twentieth century who is often associated with the Frankfurt School. In his well-known essay “On the Concept of History,” Benjamin acknowledges that progress is a “storm,” that this idea has justified and been complicit with numerous historical

catastrophes.33 But just as important for my argument, he suggests that progressive narratives vitiate our ability to remember, contemplate, cite, and mourn these catastrophes. For Benjamin, progress renders history coherent and harmonious by resolving the traumatic dimensions of history, by incorporating history’s traumas into affirmative accounts that underwrite the positions of those in power . As he puts it, memory is always in danger of “becoming a tool of the ruling classes,” a situation that threatens to “murder the dead twice,” to erase and eliminate the dissonant quality of past suffering , injustice, struggle, and loss.34 Think, for instance, of the way Obama’s presidency is often placed in a linear trajectory that begins with chattel slavery, travels through Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, traverses the civil rights movement, and culminates with Obama’s election.35 This kind of story places black American struggles into a transparent, forward-marching story that easily makes sense of and resolves past and present traumas and conflicts. In other words, we don’t have to be disturbed by this ponderous racial past because it has been lifted away, or is being lifted away, by the achievements of the present. As McCain’s speech shows us, Obama’s victory might invoke the memory of racial suffering but this dissonant memory is quickly superseded by an optimistic interpretation of this historic moment that reassures us of American progress and supremacy. The “triumphs” of the present enable us to explain away and buffer

ourselves from the unsettling quality of America’s racial history. Similarly, overconfident claims about black American advancement and racial progress assume that these achievements have been distributed equally across class and gender lines. This overconfidence screens from view the ways racial fears and anxieties, traditionally directed toward black subjects , can get redirected and attached to other bodies and communities that seemingly pose a threat to the nation’s well-being and collective images . But , as Du Bois and Ellison also demonstrate, it is not easy to simply dismiss the idea of progress in light of the multiple and conflicting ways that this trope has been used, especially in the context of black freedom struggles . I acknowledge that a basic notion of progress has inspired many struggles, acts of resistance, and movements that many of us admire. It is a concept that has been deployed, resignified, and enacted by communities and individuals that have experienced the underside of this concept and process . I think,

for instance, of Martin Luther King’s faith in a universe that “bends toward justice.” I also am reminded of Theodor Adorno’s claim that progress provides a preliminary “answer to the doubt and the hope that things will finally get better, that people will at least be able to breathe a sigh of

relief.”36 What would critique, resistance, or political struggle mean apart from a minimal notion of progress, a hope that the quality of life will improve, especially for those groups that have been systematically marginalized ? I therefore acknowledge that progress , a trope that facilitates certain ways of interpreting, constructing, and relating to historical change and development, has had different meanings and connotations. ( To claim, for instance, that humanity necessarily moves forward, improves, and approaches a state of fulfillment is not necessarily the same thing as claiming that progress is the result of contingent human efforts, interventions, and interactions.) I also take it that this idea is intertwined with other fraught ideas and ideals that many people cherish— freedom, equality, inclusion, recognition, reconciliation, agency, and so forth. Although I take seriously the complexities involved with this category, in what follows I am primarily concerned with progress as a triumphant category, as a tool that helps to reinforce, affirm, and justify the order of things (and conceal the nasty aspects of the existing state

of affairs). In other words, this book specifically targets narratives , images, and strategies tha t rely on the denial or easy resolution of painful tensions and contradictions in the past and present , those facets of life that remind us that the status quo is harsh and cruel for many people under its sway. While attachments to progress are not always explicit, my sense is that it lurks behind and discloses itself in collective commitments to American exceptionalism, the American Dream, a postracial society, leaving the past behind, and spreading democracy and capitalism, even through war, to less “developed” nations. For many people, catastrophic events in the modern age, like the Holocaust, the slow extermination of Native Americans, The Middle Passage, genocide in Rwanda, and perpetual wars and ecological disasters, have shattered the notion that history necessarily moves toward a more complete and fulfilling state. At the same time, this idea of progress episodically flashes up. It operates in both subtle and explicit ways to mitigate and diminish the tragic qualities of history and human existence . The denial of ongoing racial disparity and violence is, in part, a result of our culture’s yearning for a future (and a present) that has been liberated from certain kinds of unsettling losses, memories, and conflicts. If progress is the condition of the possibility of hope in our culture, then this is a hope that has little to no room for melancholy. Du Bois and Ellison make up an important part of what I call the black literary and aesthetic tradition, a tradition that often underscores themes like melancholy, remembrance, loss, and tragedy in ways that gesture toward a different

kind of hope. This melancholic hope, in opposition to triumphant , overconfident narratives , tropes, and images, suggests that a better, less pernicious world depends partly on our heightened capacity to remember, contemplate, and be unsettled by race-inflected violence and suffering . When I use the phrase black literary and aesthetic tradition, I have in mind authors, artists, and texts that have responded to, articulated, and rendered audible and visible the painful contradictions associated with black subjectivity , modern processes of racialization, and so forth. I am thinking of a variety of texts and discourses that delineate and exemplify the ways black Americans have developed enduring, yet precarious, cultural practices, institutions, and resources, enabling blacks to survive within the tentacles of white supremacy .37 By tradition, I mean something like what Alasdair MacIntyre calls “arguments extended in time,” discourses that travel across time and space, elaborating on recurring themes, topics, and conditions while acknowledging historical discontinuities and breaks.38 In this book, the black literary and aesthetic tradition refers specifically to essays, novels, speeches, music, and films, different kinds of texts that reflect and give meaning, and

meanings, to the diverse experiences of being formed as a black subject in America and the modern world more generally. By using the language of tradition, I acknowledge and accept the dangers involved in imposing unity and coherence onto experiences, phenomena, and expressions that are diverse, pluralistic, and scattered. I similarly acknowledge that the qualifier black or the phrase black subjectivity is unstable and takes on different, conflicting meanings across time. For instance, if Du Bois defined black Americanness or Negroness as “riding in a Jim Crow car” (suggesting that this legal and social condition provided blacks with a common, unifying obstacle), then surely something about being and identifying as black has changed significantly since 1964 and the passing of the Civil Rights Act. Finally, I take it that traditions are imagined and constructed according to certain interests, desires, and aims. For this book, the black literary and aesthetic tradition is a construct that enables

me to connect and juxtapose authors and artists that share concerns, ideas, and commitments germane to my investigation. This “shared”

dimension should not obscure the fact that every imagined tradition is defined just as much by disagreement and tension as it is by consensus and overlap . 39 In what follows, I consider how black thinkers, writers, and artists have articulated the pains, pleasures, and struggles associated with inhabiting a black body in the modern world, experiences that trouble progressive narratives and that invite us to think hope and melancholy together , to imagine vulnerability and heightened receptivity to loss as sites for a different kind of hope. In order to express and articulate this melancholic hope, these writers and artists often

draw from black musical practices and styles, such as the spirituals, blues, jazz, and more recently, hip hop. Du Bois, for instance, treats the sorrow songs of slave communities as expressions of “death and disappointment” that simultaneously voice longings for a better, more just existence. As Du Bois pays tribute to the spirituals and sorrow songs in his well-known text The Souls of Black Folk, he does this in part by using sorrow as a trope throughout the text, a trope that works to invoke different kinds of emotions and affects in the reader. Writers like Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison use blues and jazz in their novels and essays to register the “painful details” of black life, the tragic and comic dimensions of human existence, and the breaks, cuts, and wounds that accompany migration, exile, and dislocation. Similarly, filmmakers like Spike Lee and Charles Burnett incorporate jazz and blues songs in their cinematic representations of black communities and cultures. By combining image and sound, these films enable and compel audiences to both see and hear the pleasures and pains, doings and sufferings, struggles and losses experienced by black bodies. For these authors and filmmakers, musical practices like jazz and the blues, especially when incorporated into literature and film, signify different modes of being in the world, different ways of relating to others, time, history, and loss.

Black Weapons

Symbolic Artillery

Black bodies are literal artillery—weapons of civil society to justify conflict and reign terror. Flesh severed from life, a metaphysical nothingness, Blackness is left as a machine whose only purpose is destruction. It is from this understanding of arms that we choose to descend from with regards to the topic.Warren ’18 (Calvin Warren, Calvin Warren is an Assistant Professor in WGSS. He received his B.A. in Rhetoric/Philosophy (College Scholar) from Cornell University and his MA and Ph.D. in African American/American Studies from Yale University, 2018, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation) \\EG

The question of value, then, reconfigures our proper metaphysical question. In essence, it inquires about how to ground value of a being lacking place in the world.32 The illustrators provide an answer to this inquiry: since black being exists for destruction, why not make this being an extension of war machines? In this fantasy, black being is a sentient weapon, blurring the distinction between machine and flesh, weapon and body. Warfare provides value for sentient refuse. Black bodies are literal artilleries of destruction — there is no self to protect, just an open vulnerability to deadly violence. We might also suggest that the black weapon prefigures the suicide bomber, which preoccupies contemporary analysis of necropolitics. But martyrdom is absent from such an analysis because the black weapon is pure use value. The weapon does not sacrifice itself; destruction is its reason for existence. Black weapons also lack any relationality between humans and a political community from which to ground such self-sacrifice. Black death, vulnerability, injury, and destruction are mere comedic by-products of a war between humans. In the image, soldiers easily affix cannons to black bodies and position these weapons in the line of fire. The battlefield is precisely the space of emancipation — a death-scape. And the being emancipation creates in this space is the black weapon. War allegorizes the metaphysical holocaust, which places black being in extraordinary harm without regard to any ontological ground of resistance. This war, unlike the Civil War, is without end. The black weapon is being for another within an economy of brutality, strategy, and calculation. This catachrestic fantasy realizes the terror Heidegger envisioned with his critique of technological reasoning. The complete collapse between technology and flesh could only be realized with black being, and the image articulates this understanding.33 It is unthinkable that the union soldiers would become weapons because they are human beings. Thus, it is not just that the image is viciously satirical, but also that the image exposes a kernel of truth: it is indeed plausible that black being could be used in such a way in an antiblack world. Humor encases a metaphysical truth. Black being lacks ontological security and is malleable in the hands of humans. This is ontological terror. We might also revisit the Lacanian terms enjoyment and interpassivity — for it seems that both are operative in the catachrestic fantasy. The cynosure of the image is a black weapon with a minstrel-like smile (a smile that indicates utter obsequiousness to vicious demands and unawareness of immediate danger), gladly sitting on the ground to facilitate the soldier’s reloading. The smile is a signifier of stupid enjoyment, a masochistic embrace of destruction. Through the smile, the black weapon is aligned with the nothing and all the terror it entails. The smile, then, is the figuration of interpassivity and enjoyment. The terror of nothing is projected onto black bodies (black weapons must hold the destructive enjoyment for the white subject, standing as a substitutional receptacle for the human’s enjoyment), and the enjoyment is vicious — it is the enjoyment of continual destruction (the metaphysical holocaust).34 The smile also dockets a certain duty or obligation of black being — to rejoice in destruction as service (in this way, service as black suicide is inconceivable for the illustrator; only honor and duty explain the stupid enjoyment. The illustrators, then, impose a fallacious agency on the weapon,

which is part of the vicious humor, since a weapon has no choice in the matter/manner of its destruction). And we might say the smile signals “arbitrary [black] death as a legitimate feature of a system,” as Lewis Gordon poignantly notes.35 The arbitrariness of black perishment exposes its meaningless enjoyment through the loss of meaning.36 The metaphysical world is a battlefield for blacks, blacks reconfigured as weapons for a war without end. At any moment, at any time, blacks could perish — or, to retool Heidegger, this perishment occurs in einem Augenblick (in a blink of an eye, or immediately). Again, I am using the term perishment over Gordon’s death to docket the utter lack of meaning and being black destruction entails. Thus, there can never be Ereignis for black weapons, no event in which death enables an authentic embrace of being. Heideggerian death is impossible for black being. There is only death as perishment — meaningless, arbitrary, and eventless destruction. The smile is the internecine sign of this destruction. The smile, then, is absolutely essential to the image (its punctum, to borrow Barthes’s term).37 The smile gets us to the essence of the image. What the black weapon is smiling at is nothing. This, ultimately, is the fantasy the illustrator presents, and it serves to disavow the brutal context within which the weapon is placed. For the illustrator, blacks embrace the terroristic nothing antiblackness imposes upon it. Imposition is recast as masochistic embrace. The image stages an encounter with nothing as a dutiful embrace of onticide. The black body is finished. The image articulates the closure of metaphysics: the black body is nothing more than an antiblack invention, an instrument of a destructive will to power. Any agency we imagine we can extract from this body by reclaiming and celebrating it has evaporated in a toxic atmosphere. By closure, however, I do not mean the end (as is the fantasy of some postmetaphysicians) but the completion of its internecine aim concerning black being. The aim, the metaphysical enterprise, is to sever the flesh from the body through the work of violence, degradation, and terror, such that what is left is not a human body, but a body as machine. This is what the image proudly proclaims. The image, then, can be read as an antiblack celebration, a triumph over black being (and the intransigent remainder of the flesh). In his brilliant essay “The Black Body as Fetish,” Anthony Farley argues that the black body serves as the object of white fantasy; the body is pressed into narratives of savagery and degradation to maintain white mastery and racial innocence. Taking something like Žižek’s advice, “Enjoy your symptom,” seriously,38 Farley suggests that a masochistic embrace of the function of the black body in antiblack fantasy produces pleasure (or jouissance):

Instrument of Terror

Living in the wake means living as a weapon, an excuse to legitimate and empower violence as terror’s embodiment. It is from this understanding of weaponry that we use in addressing the topic.Sharpe ’16 (Christina Sharpe, Professor at York University, Sharpe is a scholar of English literature and Black Studies, 2016, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being) \\EG

If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery. (Hartman 2007, 6) Living in/the wake of slavery is living “the afterlife of property” and living the afterlife of partus sequitur ventrem (that which is brought forth follows the womb), in which the Black child inherits the non/status, the non/being of the mother. That inheritance of a non/status is everywhere apparent now in the ongoing criminalization of Black women and children. Living in the wake on a global level means living the disastrous time and effects of continued marked migrations, Mediterranean and Caribbean disasters, trans-American and -African migration, structural adjustment imposed by the International Monetary Fund that continues imperialisms/colonialisms, and more. And here, in the United States, it means living and dying through the policies of the first US Black president; it means the gratuitous violence of stop-and-frisk and Operation Clean Halls; rates of Black incarceration that boggle the mind (Black people represent 60 percent of the imprisoned population); the immanence of death as “a predictable and constitutive aspect of this democracy” (James and Costa Vargas 2012, 193, emphasis mine). Living in the wake means living the history and present of terror, from slavery to the present, as the ground of our everyday Black existence; living the historically and geographically dis/continuous but always present and endlessly reinvigorated brutality in, and on, our bodies while even as that terror is visited on our bodies the realities of that terror are erased. Put another way, living in the wake means living in and with terror in that in much of what passes for public discourse about terror we, Black people, become the carriers of terror, terror’s embodiment, and not the primary objects of terror’s multiple enactments; the ground of terror’s possibility globally. This is everywhere clear as we think about those Black people in the United States who can “weaponize sidewalks” (Trayvon Martin) and shoot themselves while handcuffed (Victor White III, Chavis Carter, Jesus Huerta, and more), those Black people transmigrating21 the African continent toward the Mediterranean and then to Europe who are imagined as insects, swarms, vectors of disease; familiar narratives of danger and disaster that attach to our always already weaponized Black bodies (the weapon is blackness). We must also, for example, think of President Obama’s former press secretary Robert Gibbs, who said, commenting on the drone murder of sixteen-year-old US citizen Abdulrahman Al-Alwaki, “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if you are truly concerned about the well being [sic] of your children” (Grim 2012).22 We must consider this alongside the tracking of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent without papers by drones in the midst of the ongoing ethnic cleansing in the Dominican Republic.23 We must consider Gibbs’s statement alongside Barack Obama’s reprimands of Black men in the United States, his admonishing them to be responsible fathers. Consider, too, the resurgence of narratives that Black people were better off in chattel slavery. This is Black life in the wake; this is the flesh, these are bodies, to which anything and everything can be and is done.

Wake of a Gun

The Black condition is defined as an instrument of conflict, in the recoil of gunshots, as a relegating force which is attached to metaphors of weaponization and militarism.Sharpe ’16 (Christina Sharpe, Professor at York University, Sharpe is a scholar of English literature and Black Studies, 2016, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being) \\EG

A reprise and an elaboration: Wakes are processes; through them we think about the dead and about our relations to them; they are rituals through which to enact grief and memory. Wakes allow those among the living to mourn the passing of the dead through ritual; they are the watching of relatives and friends beside the body of the deceased from death to burial and the accompanying drinking, feasting, and other observances, a watching practiced as a religious observance. But wakes are also “the track left on the water’s surface by a ship (figure 1.4); the disturbance caused by a body swimming, or one that is moved, in water; the air currents behind a body in flight; a region of disturbed flow; in the line of sight of (an observed object); and (something) in the line of recoil of (a gun)”; finally, wake means being awake and, also, consciousness. In the wake, the semiotics of the slave ship continue: from the forced movements of the enslaved to the forced movements of the migrant and the refugee, to the regulation of Black people in North American streets and neighborhoods, to those ongoing crossings of and drownings in the Mediterranean Sea, to the brutal colonial reimaginings of the slave ship and the ark; to the reappearances of the slave ship in everyday life in the form of the prison, the camp, and the school. As we go about wake work, we must think through containment, regulation, punishment, capture, and captivity and the ways the manifold representations of blackness become the symbol, par excellence, for the less-than-human being condemned to death. We must think about Black flesh, Black optics, and ways of producing enfleshed work; think the ways the hold cannot and does not hold even as the hold remains in the form of the semiotics of the slave ship hold, the prison, the womb, and elsewhere in and as the tension between being and instrumentality that is Black being in the wake. At stake is not recognizing antiblackness as total climate. At stake, too, is not recognizing an insistent Black visualsonic resistance to that imposition of non/being. How might we stay in the wake with and as those whom the state positions to die ungrievable deaths and live lives meant to be unlivable? These are questions of temporality, the longue durée, the residence and hold time of the wake. At stake, then is to stay in this wake time toward inhabiting a blackened consciousness that would rupture the structural silences produced and facilitated by, and that produce and facilitate, Black social and physical death.

Sheer Potentiality

Blackness is a site of sheer potentiality, an impending terror birthed through the Middle Passage which is tied to the nature of threats. Sharpe ’16 (Christina Sharpe, Professor at York University, Sharpe is a scholar of English literature and Black Studies, 2016, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being) \\EG

With these logics in mind, I want to suggest that what is also being birthed is what I call anagrammatical blackness that exists as an index of violability and also potentiality. J. Kameron Carter (2013, 593) gets at something like this when in “Thinking with Spillers” he writes that the “ ‘passage,’ then, in ‘Middle Passage’ is sheer possibility and potentiality, while the ‘middle’ in ‘Middle Passage’ is . . .—existence in the middle itself.” As I continue to think with Spillers’s grammar, “which is really a rupture and a radically different kind of cultural continuation” (Spillers 2003b, 209), and Fred Moten’s opening sentences in In the Break, that “the history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist” and “blackness—the extended movement of a specific upheaval, an ongoing irruption that anarranges every line—is a strain that pressures the assumption of the equivalence of personhood and subjectivity” (Moten 2003, 1), I arrive at blackness as, blackness is, anagrammatical. That is, we can see the moments when blackness opens up into the anagrammatical in the literal sense as when “a word, phrase, or name is formed by rearranging the letters of another” (Merriam-Webster Online). We can also apprehend this in the metaphorical sense in how, regarding blackness, grammatical gender falls away and new meanings proliferate; how “the letters of a text are formed into a secret message by rearranging them” or a secret message is discovered through the rearranging of the letters of a text. Ana-, as a prefix, means “up, in place or time, back, again, anew.”11 So, blackness anew, blackness as a/temporal, in and out of place and time putting pressure on meaning and that against which meaning is made. We see again and again how, in and out of the United States (as my point of departure and arrival), girl doesn’t mean “girl” but, for example, “prostitute” or “felon,”12 boy doesn’t mean “boy,” but “Hulk Hogan” or “gunman,” “thug” or “urban youth.”13 We see that mother doesn’t mean “mother,” but “felon” and “defender” and/or “birther of terror” and not one of the principal grounds of terrors multiple and quotidian enactments.14 We see that child is not “child,” and a Coast Guard cutter becomes, in Brathwaite’s hands, a Coast Guard gutter—not a rescue or a medical ship but a carrier of coffins, a coffle, and so on.15 As the meanings of words fall apart, we encounter again and again the difficulty of sticking the signification. This is Black being in the wake. This is the anagrammatical. These are Black lives, annotated. (I will return to what I am calling Black annotation in the final section of this work, “The Weather.”)

Muting, Over-Dubbing, and Legitimizing

Can you hear a shadow? In an antiblack world, Black suffering becomes muted and overdubbed as the weaponizing and legitimizing force of violence.Brady ’12 (Nicholas Brady, Graduate student from UC Irvine, 11 October 2012, “Louder Than the Dark: Toward an Acoustics of Suffering”, https://thefeministwire.com/2012/10/louder-than-the-dark-towards-an-acoustics-of-suffering/) \\EG

Can you hear a shadow? The more enlightened, the deeper the shadows, but can the shadow enunciate the depth of its sorrow back to the world it is invariably bound to? A silhouette is wheeled to the corner of a hallway, its face obscured. The nurse has demanded that she leave the hospital. Unbeknownst to the shadow, the police happen to be in the building at the same time and are asked to remove her from the premises. They drag her out of the wheelchair and handcuff her, leaving her slouched on the ground. A few more cops come and they cart her away to literally rot in a jail cell. The shadow’s name is Anna Brown. She has also been named “the homeless lady,” as well as “the crackhead” or “drug sick” individual by the officers that arrested her. She went to the hospital after spraining her ankle, was arrested because she refused to leave due to continued pain, and was found dead on the prison floor because her sprain produced blood clots that lodged into her lungs. Due to medical malpractice and the police officers’ violence, Anna passed away alone on the floor of a prison cell. Yet, that last sentence was entirely too nice, for in truth Anna Brown was murdered. The hesitation to describe this as a “murder” is because that implies an event, a narrative, a “when,” “where,” and “who” (as in “who done it?”). Yet this was not an event with an acting subject; she was instead murdered by subjectivity itself: a series of incidents centered on her body, each reverberating off each other into an orchestra of death. Each proceeding was an echo of the one preceding it: waves of suffering reflecting off each action through time. Her death was caused by the incoherence of her voice, her calls for care, her screams of agony. Put another way, she was murdered by civil society’s inability-–and lack of desire-–to hear her being. Discourse on race normally focuses on the material and the visual, but the video of Anna Brown’s death points us less to the images and more to the centrality of aurality to black suffering. The first part of the video is without audio, but this does not mean sound is absent per se. That the video lacks audio in the beginning says more than perhaps the soundtrack itself could, for it makes explicit the inaudibility of black suffering. We know that Anna Brown had expressed her lasting pain, in spite of the doctor’s opinion that she was fine. The hospital then ordered her to leave and she protested, saying that she was still in pain. She was forcibly wheeled to the hallway and eventually arrested by the police. Her vocal protests, critiques of inadequate service and expression of her persistent pain, fell on deaf ears. She spoke the knowledge of her body, but her voice was muted and over-dubbed by the knowledge of the professionals. How can the black know about itself? How can the shadow speak back? The violence that produces the subject (in this case, the doctor) robs Anna Brown of vocality, not so much literally as ontologically. Insofar as an object (a commodity, a slave) can speak, it cannot be said that it can communicate. At the etymological root of “communicate” is the logic of the commons or community: informing to participate in the world, sharing one’s utterance(s) to join the community. Communication, not even to imply anything as serious as the ethics of dialogue, requires an equal ontological status amongst the communicators. That several titles of the video online have called her the “homeless woman” evidences one singular truth (the desire to insult her notwithstanding): Anna Brown, as the descendent of slaves, has no home while the doctors are in their own dominion. In a public lecture titled “People-of-Color-Blindness,” Jared Sexton describes an experience at a jazz club where the microphones go off, but the band continues to play. Even though the sociality between the band and the audience has

been shut down, the band still plays on. Sexton uses this example to dramatize how even though the black is socially dead, that does not signify that black life is non-existent. Instead, our social death signifies that black life is sealed off from the world and happens elsewhere: “underground or in outer space.” In this way Anna speaks, but the microphone that would project her subjectivity to the world has been turned off. Her suffering has been rendered unreal while her voice is heard as incoherent and dangerous. If Anna Brown’s suffering is inaudible, the second half of the video speaks to how her voice and pain are criminalized. When the police arrive, they surround Anna and then drag her out of the wheelchair, handcuff her, and leave her on the hospital floor. She is given two different charges: her protests for better service are charged as “trespassing” and her inability to walk due to her injury is charged as “resisting arrest.” When she is in the police car, the camera in the vehicle has a microphone. When they arrive at the prison, Anna continues to tell them she can’t walk and that she needs to be in a hospital. The police officers ignore her statements and instead oscillate between asking her “are you going to get out” and threatening her; “you have two seconds to [swing your legs out]…” Each implies that she can move her legs and she is choosing not to. As Saidiya Hartman writes in Scenes of Subjection, “the slave was recognized as a reasoning subject who possessed intent and rationality solely in the context of criminal liability.” Her suffering remains inaudible, but her voice can only be heard by the police as challenging the law, resisting arrest, disrespecting their authority; her voice can only be heard as a legitimizing force for their violence. As they drag her out of the car, she screams out in pain before the door is shut and her voice becomes muffled.

Tool of Innocence

Blackness is the tool of civil society to avoid blame for everything it fucks up.Warren ’18 (Calvin Warren, Calvin Warren is an Assistant Professor in WGSS. He received his B.A. in Rhetoric/Philosophy (College Scholar) from Cornell University and his MA and Ph.D. in African American/American Studies from Yale University, 2018, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation) \\EG

This lack of properness and metaphysical truth is a symptom of the nothing, for nothing lacks any proper place in metaphysics and cannot be understood through its episteme. Black being as nothing, then, will always be out of place and improper in an antiblack world. It is the terror of the metaphysical infrastructure, and one can never be a true or proper man when one bears the weight of nothing. Through this analysis, we can understand the anxiety concerning black being, placement, and nothing in antebellum culture. In August 1842, for example, the free black population of Philadelphia held a parade commemorating the abolition of slavery in the West Indies. An angry mob of white citizens disrupted the parade, attacked participants, and commenced to destroy black homes and property. Seeking redress through the courts for loss of property and injury, the free black population realized that justice within such a context was impossible, as the grand jury acquitted the rioters and blamed free blacks for inciting this violence. Robert Purvis, a leader in the free black population of Philadelphia, responded to the grand jury’s decision with dismay:49 “The measure of our suffering is full. . . . From the most painful and minute investigation, in the feelings, views and acts of this community — in regard to us — I am convinced of our utter and complete nothingness in public estimation [emphasis mine].”50 What sparked the riot, this devastating expression of antiblackness? We can locate this eruption of violence at the metaphysical fault line between necessity and hatred. Black being is both a necessary instrument for the human’s self-constitution and an object of ferocious hatred, since it bears the nothing of a metaphysical order. In other words, the riot is the symptom of a metaphysical problem: the public celebration of black freedom sparks a terror in that ontological boundaries are challenged and the transformation from black being, as invention/instrument, to human being, as free, is not only considered but celebrated. It is also no surprise that the grand jury blamed the victims for the riot, since black freedom is a form of violence for the human, a violence that must be met with extreme force. The riot is a response to ontological terror. “Free,” when paired with “black,” is recast as a weapon against the human and the metaphysical structure that sustains the human. We are dealing with two registers of violence — one is an ontological violence and another is a physical form of antiblack destruction. But Purvis’s response to the violence is perspicuous. He is “convinced of our utter and complete nothingness in public estimation.” If we read this statement as a mere political lamentation, that blacks constitute a political cypher (nothingness) within the law and political processes, then we limit our understanding of the riot as event. The riot, within this reading, is just a form of cruelty or irrational intolerance or a political-economic strategy of subjection. With political readings of antiblack violence, violence is not gratuitous but must be linked to some type of recognizable transgression; when antiblack violence cannot be linked to recognizable transgression, it is considered cruel or irrational — a form of individual pathology and not systemic necessity. If, however, the essence of politics is nothing political, then we might read Purvis’s political commentary as a response to the proper metaphysical question. His answer is that black being is nothingness in public estimation. We can understand nothingness as the condition (-ness) of bearing nothing in an antiblack world. Antiblack violence, then, constitutes the structure of this nothing. Black being is always already under attack; peace, within an antiblack world, is a fallacy (much like freedom). The metaphysical infrastructure that supports the fiction of the white human is

sustained by antiblack violence. The riot is an ontological necessity, not just political cruelty. We can understand the grand jury’s decision philosophically: Being black is both the cause and effect of violence, and when this being claims freedom, extreme violence is always justified and necessary.

Blackness for Sale

Phantasmagoric Currency

The rupture created through the Trans-Atlantic slave trade forever altered the definition of commodity—one that predicates itself through the perpetual reference to Blackness as the distinction between thing and human. The distribution of Blackness across the world through popular culture shows its attachment to exchange and sale.Raegno ’09 (Alessandra Raegno, Faculty at Georgia State University, November 2009, “Optic Black: Blackness as Phantasmagoria”, https://www.academia.edu/216230/Optic_Black_Blackness_as_Phantasmagoria) \\EG

In Capital’s chapter on the commodity Karl Marx argues that a man-made thing appears as a commodity when it is subject to exchange. Later, in the passage of the so-called “Dancing Table,” which has been tremendously influential in theories of fetishism,1 Marx describes the seeming ‘transformation’ of a mundane and unproblematic sensuous object, such as a table, into a commodity. The commodity, he writes, is something supra-sensible, something beyond the table’s tangible materiality. Among other things, the passage addresses the way in which the concept of ‘form’ (in this case the ‘commodity form’ – the fact that, when coming forth as object of exchange, the table assumes the form of a commodity) emerges as a principle of visibility: there is form when something appears as something else. The table doesn’t change: it still has four legs, a top, and it is still made of wood. But what changes is the way it exists in the social space. No longer simply a use value, i.e. an object that is valued because of the use that it can be put to, but an exchange value as well.2 What interests me is that Marx established that the commodity as such is not a thing, but rather a form, a way of being, an appearance, the expression of the thing’s ability to exchange. This is important because blackness has a very intimate relationship with the commodity form, one rooted in slavery of course,3 but surviving also in the way blackness has continued to circulate in popular and visual culture.4 This relationship, in other words, is all but new and yet, what I think needs more attention is the concept of form understood, in the Marxian sense, as a principle of visibility; as the appearance of something—both in the sense of its ‘coming into visibility’ and in the sense of the way something looks. Thus this essay asks: when does the commodity black become visible as such? Or, more precisely, what type of commodity is the one for which blackness acts as principle of visibility?5 To pursue these questions this essay does not concern itself with cinematic portrayals of blackness, i.e. it is not about blackness as a visual object in search of adequate representation, but rather about blackness as a language and a principle of visualization. This is so because I am convinced that blackness—a most carnal and at the same time most abstract visual property—can shed light onto the contemporary ontology of the visual; it can teach us something about the way in which we live with, understand, and use, images. Race, in fact, continues to provide the most enduring template for what constitutes a visible sign. My methodological premise lies in something that Benjamin said about prostitution and that Stephen Best has argued characterizes slavery even more, which is the fact that the commodity celebrates its becoming human in the slave, in the attempt to look at itself in the face.6 The idea is that there is something to be gained by looking not only at what happens to the concept of the person when it can be commodified but also, conversely, at what happens to the concept of the commodity when the black slave is counted as one.7 Therefore my emphasis on the form of the commodity attempts to get at precisely this: the way in which, in our contemporary moment, ‘black’ gives form—i.e. appearance and visibility—to commodity status. This also explains not only what set of visual materials I focus on to begin to answer the questions posed by this essay, but also how I look at them: not so much for what they show, but for what face they put on,

what sits on their surface, as it were, what they wear on their sleeves. That blackness and whiteness are distinct from black and white people is increasingly accepted today as is the overwhelming self-referentiality of the images circulating in our contemporary visual culture. And yet, racial images (and what constitutes a ‘racial image’ is another concept that this essay puts into play) are still affected by what in a literary context Henry Louis Gates defined as a naturalist fallacy, i.e. the expectation that visual signifiers of race are responsible for faithfully and authentically representing ‘black people,’ rather than social relations.8 In other words, visual signifiers of race are still taken at face value. Hence my emphasis on form, appearance, surface, and face. Especially face, which, as Kimberly Lamm suggests, is “an image suspended between the concept of race and the physicality of the body.”9 I begin with Spike Lee’s film Bamboozled because its use of blackface makes an explicit demand to seriously engage with the film’s surfaces. Blackface, in fact, is a very specific kind of racial image, one created by the application of a man-made signifier on top of the face: a black coating that functions as the subject’s interface. Blackface is obviously not a naturalistic sign—it does not resemble anything or anyone—but rather a second-degree signifier of race: it is an image of blackness as image of race. Its referent is not black people, but the epidermality of race, in other words, the fact that race’s scopic regime is built on the blackness of the skin. Through this leverage that the film employs literally at the level of the plot, and metaphorically as a trope of the relations of exploitation and commodification of blackness in the entertainment industry, Bamboozled argues that the commodity form in contemporary material culture has a face, and that face is black. This is because material culture is still determined by the commodity relations of slavery. Bamboozled presents slavery, as Bill Brown puts it, not as a historical phenomenon—a historical event that, occurred in the past and has attained its closure—but rather as a historical ontology, i.e. an enduring systemic breakdown of the distinction between humans and things

The modern whip is the Nike Logo—Blackness is intimately tied to spheres of commodification and exchange as a racial index of valuation. Raegno ’09 (Alessandra Raegno, Faculty at Georgia State University, November 2009, “Optic Black: Blackness as Phantasmagoria”, https://www.academia.edu/216230/Optic_Black_Blackness_as_Phantasmagoria) \\EG

The Liberty Paint episode stages assimilation as the production of whiteness via incorporation of the raw materials of blackness in a manner that erases the traces of this very process. Lucius Browkway is a ghost in the machine: he is an enabling black presence that augments a white color capital. But whereas in Ellison, as per Harryette Mullen’s persuasive reading, whiteness is manufactured through processes of assimilation dependent on black invisibility, Lhamon’s starting point is the contribution to whiteness performed by the excessive visibility of blackness, and their endorsement of such visibility in order to display their refusal to fit. Optic black, in other words, is performative and deliberately exhibitionist.22 What is at stake, then, is not simply the performance of demeaning images for purposes of subversion—what is often referred to as the ‘reversal of the stereotype’ or, as Manthia Diawara, commenting on the art of Michael Ray Charles, Kara Walker, and David Levinthal puts it, the ‘desire for’ the stereotype23—but rather a shift in the location of blackness from the sphere of production to the sphere of exhibition. While Ellison indicts a cultural optics that spectralizes black labor for the production of a white color capital, the notion of optic black, instead, calls attention to the fact that blackness has become a visual signifier which becomes more valuable the more it is removed from the sphere of production. Blackness

severs its connection to black labor, but once liberated from it, acts instead as currency in the sphere of exchange. In this respect, Bamboozled’s great achievement is showing how blackness migrates from the surface of the body to the surface of commodity culture and beyond this to the vocabulary of capitalist realism, where commodity culture attempts to look at itself in the face. The work of Hank Willis Thomas claims a similar place for blackness. His photographs are generally crafted to reproduce not only the aesthetic, but also the intermediate plane of capitalist realism, slipping in and around our consciousness just as advertising does, so that their commonplace appearance, argues Rene de Guzman, “gives them the kind of legitimacy accorded to things existing in the natural world.” This means that his works’ ontological claim to the real is dependent both on their ability to camouflage as actual advertising and on sharing advertising’s cumulative effect—the insistence with which it clutters our visual landscape.24 This is the case in a pseudo Master Card ad (Fig. 6) crafted around the photograph of the funeral of Thomas’s cousin Songha Willis Thomas, inexplicably shot dead by another black man who had just stolen his gold chain. Built and publicly hung as a billboard, this image’s deceptive face, fully compliant with the aesthetics of other ‘priceless’ Master Card ads, encourages a distracted reception, while the superimposed text quietly, but sternly, demands that the viewer conjures up the horrible loss that lies beneath it. For his UNBRANDED series25 Willis Thomas collected a number of print advertisements from 1968 to 2008 featuring African American models or directed at black consumers, and digitally removed their captions. The goal was to show how blackness functions as a language through which capitalist realism enables material relations to be rendered and resolved as visual relations. Stripping these images of their advertising text reveals the underlying work and trajectories of desires. (Fig. 7) The fantasy structure that sustains the unholy marriage between race and consumption comes to the surface and makes black bodies appear central to the signification of capitalism, sometimes simply as items within a color palette and other times as part of a wish fulfillment (Fig. 8)—vital ingredients to the reproduction and reaffirmation of a color capital that remains optic white.26 The UNBRANDED series further superficializes a language that is already entirely focused on its outer appearance and, just like blackface, has no referent outside of its own economy of desire. In his earlier B®ANDED series, instead, Hank Willis Thomas specifically interrogates the relationship of advertising images to the visual archives of slavery, which he re-animates from within the icons of contemporary consumer culture (Fig. 9). As Robin Kelley puts it, Willis Thomas is not interested “in blackface imagery; he draws on the archives of slavery itself, which he then links to contemporary representations of black men. Nor is he interested in artifice. What makes his work resonate so powerfully is his ability to plumb the archives without stripping the object/artifacts/texts of their historical moorings.”27 Of vital important to his project is the choice of the photographic medium, which he employs in a historical perspective in order to both reanimate and disrupt its role in naturalizing the visuality of race.28 His work superficializes photography as well, in order to dispute the way in which, historically and semiotically, the photographic effect has come to reinforce the racial effect – the fact that as the photographic image is conceived as a trace of the object before the camera (an index, semiotically speaking) so black skin is read as a trace of ‘race’.29 In the B®ANDED series one has the sense that photography and race are equally handled as a second skin: none of them is natural, but both have been naturalized and made to adhere to the body. For Willis Thomas, in other words, race is a form of political and economic domination that has become incarnated in the sense of acquiring a social (rather than biological) materiality.30 Hence he renders the enduring ontology of slavery as a trace, which has and continues to visibly mark the body—branding it, in fact. Scarred Chest, (Fig. 10) recapitulates two very different but still connected iconographic traditions: on the one hand Mapplethorpe’s erotica then co-opted within an advertising frame in Annie

Leibovitz’ photo of Dennis Rodman; on the other hand, the abolitionist icon The Scourged Back – an image widely circulated because of its ability to index the brutality of slavery.31 By substituting the whipping marks with the Nike logo, Willis Thomas constructs blackness and commodity culture as two competing inscriptions of value onto the body. The key concept being that they are both inscriptions – iconic projections of a socio-material arrangement, not intrinsic properties of the object. An image where race appears equally constructed by the blackness of the skin and the branding of the brand foregrounds the ability of race to ‘attach’ itself to the body. By reanimating the properly structure of slavery still contained within the contemporary commerce of blackness as the primary form of racial indexing – indeed by setting up against each other photographic and epidermal indexicality – Willis Thomas disrupts the coincidence between photographic and racial index. In peeling one off from the other, and inserting icons of consumer culture in their middle (Fig. 11 B®ANDED “Absolut”) he simultaneously challenges photography’s own reliance on its own face value. In his work it is the commodity form that takes the semblance of the index: it brands, it acquires its own corporeality, and, acting like a second skin, it becomes face value.32

Around the globe, Blackness is sold in the marketplace of desire—a world of social anxiety and anti-black exchange. Marked with a phantasmatic price-tag, Blackness operates as a cultural and social icon which powers civil society.Raegno ’09 (Alessandra Raegno, Faculty at Georgia State University, November 2009, “Optic Black: Blackness as Phantasmagoria”, https://www.academia.edu/216230/Optic_Black_Blackness_as_Phantasmagoria) \\EG

But what happens when there is no face to speak of? When blackness is no longer available as a visual object? As Harry Elam comments, the increased visibility of blackness in contemporary visual and material culture paradoxically attests to a new and de-materialized way in which it functions—as an agent of abstraction. Blackness, in other words, seems to circulate on its own, quite apart from black bodies and consequently, from the history of black people as well. In order to explore what guarantees this circulation, a good number of artists (both black and ‘postblack’33) have interrogated this new stage of the commodity form of race by exposing its rules of legibility in scenarios deprived of visual objects. I am thinking, for example, about conceptual cyber art such as damali ayo’s rent-a-negro.com, a website where it is seemingly possible to rent a well-mannered African-American woman to be accompanied at social events or simply to increase one’s reputation; or Keith Obadike’s Blackness for Sale. The latter artwork is an ebay auction of the artist’s blackness. In his product description, Obadike claims, among other things, that the ‘blackness’ he is selling can be used to create black art, but not serious art; it can be used to say the N-word without repercussions, but it is not recommended while seeking justice or employment. It offers ‘cool,’ but not fairness. Following the rules of engagement of the marketplace allows Obadike to describe the commodity blackness in its contemporary form, that is, as a phantasmatic entity—valued for what it enables, both discursively and socially. Obadike exposes a number of factors that determine the variable value of blackness and offers to sell, just like damali ayo, not what blackness is, but what it does. In these works blackness does not pre-exist the act of exchange, but rather, it exists as the manufactured product of a transaction that the works themselves initiate. Consequently, the works expose that racial identity is not lodged in a pre-existing essence, but it is rather reconfigured as a number of possible subject positions in response to the art itself.34 Blackness,

then, emerges as a structuring principle and a language of social relations. By being openly set forth in the form of a commodity, it offers, as Marx explains in his opening chapter of Capital, the best vantage point on the capitalist system as a whole. Blackness for Sale brings to the surface another important sense in which the index speaks to the value of blackness, a value that has become independent from its visual presence. In fact, Obadike’s goal was to test the value of blackness in a commercial context shared precisely with cookie jars and darkies posters, but by withholding any image and just allowing consumers to fantasize as to what blackness would mean to them: “many people” he claims, “understand blackness as something that lives in the realm of vision and because there was no photo on the auction page it gave room for some to fantasize about how they would occupy this space.”35 And yet, blackness still functions as a principle of visualization,36 partly because it operates in the context of what Michael Kaplan has called ‘iconomics:’ the way in which a market index measures value as well as indicates the status of the system by providing an image of the investors’ feelings about it.37 In fact, the market index is determined by, but also reflective of, the collective opinion of the market participants: each investor speculates about what others might be speculating about. Consequently, as a social imaginary, iconomics is a system of simulation, whose only referent is the feelings that people have about the system itself. Similarly, even though it does not unfold through visual means, Obadike’s art work functions pictorially, as an indexical icon, because it provides a picture of a system that, having to face its own desires, is caught in the act of looking at itself in the face. What artists such as Obadike and damaly ayo show, according to Harry Elam, is that blackness has reached a new level of abstraction and it can now “travel on its own, separate and distinct from black people.” Blackness, he argues, has acquired the status of currency: “blackness functions as something that you can apply, put on, wear, that you use to assuage social anxiety and perceived threat: the desire to be included without the necessity of including black folk.” The problem, Elam specifies, is that “it remains exceedingly attractive and possible in this post-black, postsoul age of black cultural traffic to love black cool and not love black people.38 The fact that blackness can be made ‘detachable’ from black bodies – where it was made to adhere by what had been constructed as its natural, ontological, visuality – is an indication of a new phase of development of the commodity form, what I will call blackness as phantasmagoria, i.e. the stage in which an increasingly simulacral status of the visual develops its own, independent, social-materiality.39 The phantasmagoria was a pre-cinematic device comprising a fully darkened room with a ‘magic lantern’ placed behind a screen so that the screen and the apparatus would be concealed from view; the audience only saw floating images without anchorage in any specific place. This detachment of the visual from the material is what Marx found useful to describe commodity fetishism and what Benjamin relied on to articulate his notion of exhibition value. However, as Tom Gunning points out, because the phantasmagoria is based on a conscious deception of the senses, it contains the possibility for its own de-mystification. I introduce the concept of phantasmagoria here because I believe it can offer critical tools to understand how blackness has transitioned from being a bodily index to a market index; from being the signifier of a corporeal property to being the signifier of speculative value. It suggests that blackness might be the signifier for the current ontology of the image, one in which an increasingly simulacral status of the visual has developed its own, independent, social-materiality. Finally, it allows us to understand the current moment as another phase in the journey of blackness from the surface of the body, to the surface of material culture to where it is now—on the surface of the visual.

Black Cultural Consumption

Global capitalism sponsors the sale Black culture to stimulate consumption and trap Black people in a cycle of self-destruction and powerlessness.Collins ’06 (Patricia Collins, Collins is a Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, 1 September 2006, “New Commodities, New Consumers: Selling Blackness in a Global Marketplace”, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1468796806068322) \\EG

Complementing the traditional focus on production with greater attention to the growing significance of consumption within global capitalism provides new directions for understanding the experiences of African American youth. Black American youth are far from marginalized within a massive global black culture industry that uses their images to sell a wide array of products. Moreover, black American youth also constitute a consumer market of their own who will purchase music, alcohol, drugs, cell phones, gym shoes, their own images and other products that are created specifically for them. African American youth are not marginalized but rather remain essential to new consumer markets, both as suppliers of commodities that are bought and sold, and as reliable consumer markets. African American youth are a hot commodity in the contemporary global marketplace and global media. Their images have catalyzed new consumer markets for products and services. The music of hip hop culture, for example, follows its rhythm and blues predecessor as a so-called crossover genre that is very popular with whites and other cultural groups across the globe. Circulated through film, television, and music, news and advertising, mass media constructs and sells a commodified black culture from ideas about class, gender and age. Through a wide array of genres ranging from talk shows to feature length films, television situation comedies to CDs, video rentals to cable television, the images produced and circulated within this area all aim to entertain and amuse a highly segmented consumer market. This market is increasingly global and subject to the contradictions of global marketplace phenomena.2 One implication of the significance of consumption for understanding social class relations of black youth concerns the constant need to stimulate consumer markets. Contemporary capitalism relies not just on cutting the costs attached to production, but also on stimulating consumer demand. Just as sustaining relations of production requires a steady supply of people to do the work, sustaining relations of consumption needs ever-expanding consumer markets. Moreover, just as people do not naturally work and must be encouraged or compelled to do so, people do not engage in excess consumption without prompting. In this context, advertising constitutes an important site that creates demand for commodities of all sorts. Marketing and advertising often create demand for things that formerly were not seen as commodities, for example, the rapid growth of the bottled water industry, as well as for intangible entities that seem difficult to commodify. In this regard, the rapid growth of mass media and new informational technologies has catalyzed a demand for black culture as a commodity. As the black culture industry recognizes, most market demand for products and services stems not from needs but rather from unmet desires that must be constantly stimulated. In this context, physical addictions create ideal consumers who are willing to assume debt to pay for their addictions. If consumers become addicted to tobacco, alcohol, drugs or similar products, despite health risks, they can be counted on to consume. As the repetitive behavior of shopping addicts suggests, the ideal consumer is one who is addicted to consumption itself, never mind the actual product or service consumed. In this context, the interconnections among the marketing of black culture, addictive behavior of consumers who buy its products, and any consumer debt that ensues are tightly linked.3 Under this ever-expanding impetus to create new consumer markets, nothing is exempt from commodification and sale, including the pain that African American youth experience with poverty and powerlessness. Nowhere is this more evident

than in the contradictions of rap. As Cornel West points out,‘the irony in our present moment is that just as young black men are murdered, maimed and imprisoned in record numbers, their styles have become disproportionately influential in shaping popular culture’ (West, 1993). In this context, rap becomes the only place where black youth have public voice, yet it is a public voice that is commodified and contained by what hip hop producers think will sell. Despite these marketplace limitations, rap remains a potential site of contestation, a place where African American youth can rebel against the police brutality, lack of jobs, and other social issues that confront them (Kelley, 1994). Thus, work on the black culture industry illustrates how images of black culture function to catalyze consumption.

Imprisoning of Black Bodies

**Aff Idea: Prison Abolition**Accumulation defines the condition of Black bodies in the system of global capitalism. With the primal theft of body through chattel slavery, civil society characterized itself through the sale and consumption of Black bodies. From the prison-industrial system to felon disenfranchisement laws, the sale of Blackness creates the body politics of modernity.Collins ’06 (Patricia Collins, Collins is a Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, 1 September 2006, “New Commodities, New Consumers: Selling Blackness in a Global Marketplace”, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1468796806068322) \\EG

The actual bodies of young African Americans may also be commodified as part of a new black body politics. Here, the literature on gender and globalization, especially the sex industry, is helpful in understanding how a new black body politics might operate within relations of consumption. Situating feminist analyses of body politics within relations of production and consumption that characterize contemporary globalization provides new avenues for understanding commodification and the emergence of a new black body politics.4 For Marx, all workers under capitalism are alienated; they are objectified as they sell their labor power to employers for a wage in order to survive. For women, especially those in racial/ethnic groups as well as in industrializing and developing countries alike, good jobs are more difficult to find. Under these circumstances, some women do not sell their bodily labor to produce a commodity. Instead, their bodies become commodities. In a global context, as newly industrializing countries struggle to find commodity niches in the global economy, they frequently find the best niches taken. Consequently, in some countries sex tourism becomes a significant market fostering national economic development and international capital accumulation (Wonders and Michalowski, 2001). This new gender scholarship offers a new framework for analyzing a new black body politics that African American youth confront under conditions of globalization. In the United States, African Americans also find the good jobs taken and confront a similar issue of the pressures to commodify their bodies, especially if those bodies are young. More importantly, this impetus to commodify black bodies is not new. Chattel slavery in the American South prior to and during the formation of the American nation state clearly treated the bodies of people of African descent as commodities. Objectifying black bodies enabled slave traders and slave owners to turn black people’s bodies into commodities. Slavers assigned monetary value to black people’s bodies, and then traded black bodies as commodities on the open market. Some scholars on race have taken a closer look at how the institution of chattel slavery accomplished this process of objectification, commodification and exploitation. Literary critic Hortense Spillers suggests that relations of slavery and colonialism transformed understandings of black people’s bodies. Spillers identifies how ‘captive bodies’, namely, the bodies of enslaved Africans, were severed from their agency, a use of violence that eliminated gender: ‘Their New World, Diasporic plight marked a theft of the body – a willful and violent . . . severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire’ (Spillers, 2000: 160). This theft of the body severed it from its own agency and thus formed the moment of objectification. Spillers suggests that this new objectified body became a canvas for racist discourse: ‘These indecipherable markings on the captive body render a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh whose severe disjunctures come to be hidden to the cultural seeing by skin color’ (Spillers, 2000: 61). Once objectified and marked in this fashion, slave owners and slave traders treated black bodies as commodities that can be traded, bought and sold on

the open market. The treatment of actual bodies as objects and subsequently as commodities within consumer markets as opposed to the appropriation of the labor power that bodies contain may be a more fundamental element of contemporary capitalist economies than is commonly recognized. French sociological theorist Colette Guillaumin lays the foundation for a different kind of historical materialist analysis that rests on body politics (Guillaumin, 1995). Like traditional social class analysis, Guillaumin focuses both on the economy (the exploitative dimension of appropriation for various social systems such as slavery and social institutions such as marriage), and on questions of power and domination. However, Guillaumin’s materialist analysis differs from traditional functionalist and/or Marxist analyses of stratification/class. In contrast to traditional social class analyses that begin with the sale of labor power within capitalist relations, Guillaumin’s materialist framework originates in the appropriation of the body that contains the labor power itself. Because no form of measuring the value of labor in isolation from the body itself exists, Guillaumin contends that racism and sexism both draw upon this physical appropriation of bodies. Guillaumin identifies slavery as the fundamental historical relationship that fostered modern understandings of ideologies of race. Enslaving African bodies constituted the original theft – the stealing of labor came later. Racial ideologies explaining this process emerged after slavery was in effect. Guillaumin’s theory of the sexual oppression of women (her analysis of sexage) follows a similar logic. For Guillaumin, the seizure of women’s time, claiming the products of their bodies such as children, mandating that women use their bodies to fulfill a sexual obligation, requiring that women’s bodies provide physical care for children, the elderly, the sick as well as healthy men, all illustrate how men as a class feel that they can appropriate the bodies of women as a class. Guillaumin points out that people only publicly take that which they feel already belongs to them, as is the case of the public harassment of women in the workplace and on the street. Guillaumin provides a provocative piece of the puzzle for constructing an argument concerning the commodification of the actual bodies as well as representations of the bodies of African American youth within contemporary global capitalist economies. New forms of commodification within the constant pressure to expand consumer markets catalyze a new black body politics where social class relations rest not solely on exploiting labor power and/or mystifying exploitation through images, but also on the appropriation of bodies themselves. Whereas young black bodies were formerly valued for their labor power, under advanced capitalism, their utility lies elsewhere. Because bodies are not simply raced but also gendered, this new black body politics takes gender-specific forms. In particular, beginning in the 1980s, the bodies of young black men became increasingly appropriated by the prison system. Typically, these alarming rates of incarceration have been interpreted as central to new mechanisms of social control (Collins, 2004: 215–46). The discipline of young African American men that lands so many in prison seems woven into the fabric of everyday life. Within large urban areas, gangs, ghettoes, public schools, public housing and prison work together in a quasi-seamless fashion. Prisons and ghettos gain meaning from one another and both shape new racial formations within American society (Wacquant, 2001). On one level, the growth of the punishment industry constitutes an effective political response to this puzzle of idleness among young black men as well as an effective mechanism for curtailing their citizenship rights. If there are no jobs, one can hardly make them go to them. Racial profiling and locking up men seemed designed to discipline them into not challenging a system that treated them as throwaways. The issue of felon disenfranchisement speaks to this need to discipline black men through the prison system. In the early 2000s, 48 states in the United States had felon disenfranchisement laws. Under felon disenfranchisement laws, criminal offenders typically forfeit voting rights as a collateral consequence of their felony convictions. These laws appear to be race neutral, yet because young black men are

disproportionately incarcerated, these laws have a racially disparate impact on this group. In a comprehensive study of these laws, Behrens and Ugger conclude: our key finding can be summarized concisely and forcefully: the racial composition of state prisons is firmly associated with the adoption of state felon disenfranchisement laws. States with greater nonwhite prison populations have been more likely to ban convicted felons from voting than states with proportionately fewer nonwhites in the criminal justice system. (Behrens and Uggen, 2003: 596) Yet the growth of the punishment industry also illustrates how black male bodies are objectified, commodified and incorporated in service to maintaining prisons as consumer markets. In essence, Black men’s commodified bodies become used as raw materials for the growing prison industry. It is very simple – no prisoners, means no jobs for all of the ancillary industries that service this growth industry. Because prisons express little interest in rehabilitating prisoners, they need a steady supply of bodies. The focus is less on appropriating the labor of incarcerated black men (although this does happen) than in finding profitable uses for their bodies while the state absorbs the costs of incarceration. If Kentucky Fried Chicken found chickens in short supply, they would close and their profitability would shrink. The Kentucky Fried Chicken Corporation has little interest in extracting labor from its chickens or in coaxing them to change their ways. Rather, the corporation needs a constant supply of cheap, virtually identical chickens to ensure that their business will remain profitable. In this way, prisons made use of the bodies of unemployed, unskilled young black men, the virtually indistinguishable young black men who populate corners of American cities. The vast majority of young black people who are incarcerated by the punishment industry are male, yet it is important to remember that disproportionately high numbers of young black women are also incarcerated and thus are subject to this form of commodification. Moreover, young black women may also encounter an additional bodily commodification of their sexuality. The majority of sex workers may be female, obscuring the minority of males who also perform sex work as well as the objectification and commodification of black male bodies within mass media as an important component of the sex work industry. In essence, the bodies and images of young African Americans constitute new commodities that are central to global relations of consumption, not marginalized within them.

Prostitution Economy

**Aff Idea: Sex Work**The global economy of Black commodification extends into the sale and distribution of sexualized Black bodies—the raw material of the sex work industry.Collins ’06 (Patricia Collins, Collins is a Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, 1 September 2006, “New Commodities, New Consumers: Selling Blackness in a Global Marketplace”, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1468796806068322) \\EG

Here, I want to take a closer look at this process by exploring how sexuality has grown in importance in the commodification of the bodies and images of black American youth and how this sex work in turn articulates with black agency in responding to advanced capitalism. In essence, black youth are now caught up in a burgeoning sex work industry, one that is far broader than commercial sex work as depicted in the media. Young African Americans participate in the sex work industry, not primarily as commercial workers as is popularly imagined, but rather, as representations of commodified black sexuality as well as potential new consumer markets eager to consume their own images. Racialized images of pimps and prostitutes may be the commercial sex workers who are most visible in the relations of production, yet the industry itself is much broader.5 A broader definition of sex work suggests how the sex work industry has been a crucial part of the expansion of consumer markets.6 The sex work industry encompasses a set of social practices, many of which may not immediately be recognizable as sex work, as well as a constellation of representations that create demand for sexual services, attach value to such services, identify sexual commodities with race, gender and age-specific individuals, and rules that regulate this increasingly important consumer market. Feminists argue that class, race, ethnicity, age and citizenship categories work to position women differently within the global sex work industry.7 By far, international trafficking of women and girls for purposes of prostitution has received the lion’s share of attention. Here, race, ethnicity and age shape the commodification of women’s bodies to determine the value placed on categories of sex workers. The discussions of global prostitution and trafficking of women highlight the exploitation of large numbers of women, yet it is difficult to locate young African American women and the sex work of young black men within this literature. In particular, women who are not engaged in visible sex work or who do not show up on crime statistics on sex workers are often considered outside the realm of sex work. Here, I want to pursue a different argument, namely, the case that sex work is permeating the very fabric of African American communities in ways that resemble how sex work has changed the societies of developing countries. In essence, poor and working-class African American youth increasingly encounter few opportunities for jobs in urban neighborhoods while the mass marketing of sexuality permeates consumer markets. In this sense, their situation resembles that of black youth globally who confront similar pressures in response to globalization. At the same time, the situation of African American youth is unique in that the sexualized images that they encounter are of themselves. In essence, their own bodies often serve as symbols of this sexualized culture, placing African American youth in the peculiar position claiming and rejecting themselves. How might this happen?

Consumerism subsumes the social fabric of Nigerian life. The global sex work industry redefines Nigerian family values and puts Black female bodies up for auction in the market of exploitation. Collins ’06 (Patricia Collins, Collins is a University Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, 1 September 2006, “New Commodities, New Consumers: Selling Blackness in a Global Marketplace”, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1468796806068322) \\EG

From the Bahamas to Cuba, Caribbean societies that depend heavily on tourism recognize how important sex work can be for local economies (Alexander, 1997). These societies recognize how sex work has been reconfigured within their domestic borders, especially following the Structural Adjustment Policies of the 1980s (Emeagwali, 1995). Building on this literature, I investigate how reconfiguration of the sex work industry within the United States has shaped the domestic relations within African American communities generally and for poor and working-class African American youth in particular. Nigeria, the most populous nation state on the African continent, provides an important case for building such an analysis. Reporting on patterns of trafficking in Italy, Eshohe Aghatise describes differential mechanisms used to traffic women from Eastern Europe and Nigeria as well as the differential value placed on women within Italian sex markets. The trafficking of Nigerian women and young girls into Italy for prostitution began in the 1980s in response to Nigeria’s economic problems caused by structural adjustment policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (Emeagwali, 1995). As Agahtise points out: women and girls started leaving Nigeria for Europe on promises of fantastic well-paying jobs to be obtained in factories, offices, and farms. They arrived in Italy only to find themselves lured into prostitution and sold into sexual slavery to pay off debts, which they were told they incurred in being ‘helped’ to come to Europe. (Aghatise, 2004: 1129) Most Nigerian victims of trafficking are illiterate and lacked any exposure to urban life. The shifting patterns of economic and social change within Nigerian society also contributed to the patterns of trafficking. Traffickers preyed not only on the poverty of Nigerian victims, but also on the breakdown of social and cultural values within Nigerian society, in particular, the disintegration of family structures and a weak social welfare state. For many families, sending female children abroad became a status symbol: Subscribing to a consumerist model that is widely publicized on television and in magazines with messages of high living in the West, and in the oral reports of ‘been-tos’ (a popular name in Nigeria given to those who have been to Western Europe, Canada or the United States), many families believe that it is easy to obtain wealth abroad, and that earning money, in whatever way, will be quick. (Aghatise, 2004: 1132) Aghatise offers a especially harsh criticism of a society that embraces consumerism and sells its daughters to pay for it: The beginning years of Nigeria’s economic boom from petrol dollars left the legacy of a people who had acquired a taste for a high standard of living and a consumer society that no longer had the means to satisfy its purchasing habits but was not ready to admit or accept it. (Aghatise, 2004: 1133) Trafficking of women and girls to Italy demonstrates the fraying social fabric of Nigerian society, especially the ways in which women absorb the pressures placed on families under changing public policies. Most of the women trafficked to Italy are from polygamous families from the Edo ethnic group where wives are in a continuous struggle for a share of the family resources for themselves and their children. Even if men have jobs, their earnings are rarely enough to provide for the needs of the entire family. As Aghatise suggests: because many men continue to marry more than one wife, it is women who are expected to assume more and more responsibility for families . . . women traditionally play an adhesive role in the social context of the Edo ethnic group. The success or failure of a family in its individual and collective

projects is usually attributed to the women in the house. Thus, the greater responsibility is implicitly that of the women. (Aghatise, 2004: 1135) The worsening conditions within the Nigerian economy, the weak welfare state, and cultural expectations of women meant that women who were trafficked in the 1990s were mainly much younger girls who set out on a job search to help their families. Trafficking of girls and women is a problem, yet an additional issue concerns the use of girls within domestic sex work markets. In a rare analysis of how sex work is organized within a black society, Bamgbose examines emerging patterns of adolescent prostitution in Nigeria. As she bluntly claims, ‘the truth is that in Nigeria, cultural values have broken down’ (Bamgbose, 2002: 569). Bamgbose describes how the global sex industry now penetrates into Nigerian society: Adolescent prostitution is now out in the open in Nigeria after decades of what has amounted to a cross-cultural conspiracy of silence . . . it has assumed the proportion of a multibillion-dollar industry with adolescents being sold and traded like other mass-produced goods. It is no longer restricted to certain parts of the world; it has penetrated into Nigerian society and is now a thriving business in most Nigerian cities. (Bamgbose, 2002: 571) Because the men who patronize the sex industry prefer younger sex workers, young women more often service clientele, with older women working as madams who procure the adolescent sex workers. Offering a rare insight into adolescent sex work within an African society, Bamgbose describes how the domestic Nigerian sex work industry operates, one divided into a continuum of activities of the ‘Sugar Daddy Syndrome’, ‘night brides’, ‘floating prostitutes’, ‘call girls’, and finally, trafficking: Unlike the traditional prostitutes who are usually older women, adolescent prostitutes start their careers in prostitution in more comfortable hotel rooms or in a more sophisticated style. This is what gave rise to the form of prostitution termed the ‘Sugar Daddy Syndrome’. (Bamgbose, 2002: 572) Under the Sugar Daddy Syndrome, young girls patronize men, usually older in age, for sexual pleasure. Such older men, who are wealthy, are usually referred to as ‘sugar daddies’ or ‘man friends’. They are the favorites of adolescent girls who seek financial and material support in return for their services. The duration of this relationship lasts longer than a one-night stand, and the economic power wielded by such older and wealthy men, irrespective of educational status, puts the young girls involved in a particularly vulnerable position (Bamgbose, 2002: 572–3).

Endlessly circulated images of hypersexualized Black women normalizes the economy of sexual exchange which constructs the “modern Jezebel”. In the US, this sexualization led to spikes in HIV rates and further commodification of female bodies.Collins ’06 (Patricia Collins, Collins is a Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, 1 September 2006, “New Commodities, New Consumers: Selling Blackness in a Global Marketplace”, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1468796806068322) \\EG

The consequences of this sex-for-material-goods situation can be tragic. The pressures for young black women to engage in sex work have affected the rapid growth of HIV/AIDS among poor black women in the Mississippi Delta and across the rural South. Between 1990 and 2000, Southern states with large African American populations experienced a dramatic increase in HIV infections among African American women. For example, in Mississippi, 28.5 percent of those reporting new HIV infections in 2000 were black women, up from 13 percent in 1990. In Alabama, the number rose to 31 percent, from 13 percent, whereas in North Carolina, it rose to 27 percent, from 18 percent (Sack, 2001). Most of the women contracted HIV through heterosexual contact, and most found out that they were HIV positive when

they became pregnant. The women took risks that may at first seem nonsensical. Yet in the context of their lives there was a sense that because they had so little control over other aspects of their lives, they felt that if God wanted them to get AIDS, then they resigned themselves to getting it. These examples suggest that many young African American women resign themselves to commodifying their bodies as a necessary source of income. They may not be streetwalkers in the traditional sense, but they also view commodified black sexuality as the commodity of value that they can exchange. These relations also become difficult to disrupt in the context of a powerful mass media that defines and sells images of sexualized black women as one icon of seemingly authentic black culture. Young African American women encounter a set of representations that naturalizes and normalizes social relations of sex work. Whether she sleeps with men for pleasure, drugs, revenge, or money, the sexualized bitch constitutes a modern version of the Jezebel, repackaged for contemporary mass media. In discussing this updated Jezebel image, cultural critic Lisa Jones distinguishes between gold diggers/skeezers, namely, women who screw for status, and crack ‘hos’, namely, women who screw for a fix (1994: 79). Some women are the ‘hos’ who trade sexual favors for jobs, money, drugs and other material items. The female hustler, a materialist woman who is willing to sell, rent, or use her sexuality to get whatever she wants constitutes this sexualized variation of the bitch. This image appears with increasing frequency, especially in conjunction with trying to catch an African American man with money. Athletes are targets, and having a baby with an athlete is a way to garner income. Black women who are sex workers, namely, those who engage in phone sex, lap dancing, and prostitution for compensation, also populate this universe of sexualized bitches. The prostitute who hustles without a pimp and who keeps the compensation is a bitch who works for herself.

Black pimps and prostitutes define the nature of global racial capitalism—wherein Blackness is put up for sale on an auction block and sold to the highest bidder.Collins ’06 (Patricia Collins, Collins is a Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, 1 September 2006, “New Commodities, New Consumers: Selling Blackness in a Global Marketplace”, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1468796806068322) \\EG

Black male involvement in the sex work industry may not involve the direct exploitation of black men’s bodies as much as the objectification and commodification of sexualized black male images within hip hop culture. The prevalence of representations of black men as pimps speaks to this image of black men as sexual hustlers who use their sexual prowess to exploit women, both black and white. Ushered in by a series of films in the ‘Blaxploitation’ era, the ubiquitous black pimp seems here to stay. Kept alive through HBO produced quasi-documentaries such as Pimps Up, Hos Down, African American men feature prominently in mass media. Despite these media constructions, actual pimps see themselves more as businessmen than as sexual predators. For example, the men interviewed in the documentary American Pimp all discuss the skills involved in being a successful pimp. One went so far as to claim that only African American men made really good pimps. Thus, the controlling image of the black pimp combines all of elements of the more generic hustler, namely, engaging in illegal activity, using women for economic gain, and refusing to work. Representations of black women and men as prostitutes and pimps permeate music videos, film and television. In the context of a powerful global mass media, black men’s bodies are increasingly objectified within popular culture in ways that resemble the treatment of all women. Violence and sexuality sell, and associating black men with both is virtually sure to please.

Yet the real struggle is less about the content of black male and black female images and more about the treatment of black people’s bodies as valuable commodities within advertising and entertainment. Because this new constellation of images participates in commodified global capitalism, in all cases, representations of black people’s bodies are tied to structures of profitability. Athletes and criminals alike are profitable, not for the vast majority of African American men, but for the people who own the teams, control the media, provide food, clothing and telephone services to the prisons, and who consume seemingly endless images of pimps, hustlers, rapists, and felons. What is different, however, is how these images of authentic blackness generate additional consumer markets beyond the selling of these specific examples of cultural production. Recognizing the value of commodified black culture, many African American rap stars have started their own record labels, clothing companies, and more recently, sports drink divisions. Their desire lies in sharing the profits of a huge global consumer market of youth who purchase the rap CDs, sports drinks, gym shoes, and clothing lines of hip hop culture. Take, for example, the 2003 release of Pimp Juice, a new sports beverage that was lauded by Vibe magazine as the best energy drink. Despite Pimp Juice’s claims that it provides vitamins and that its 10 percent apple juice content makes it healthy, the yellow and white design of its can resembles beer cans. Initially, Pimp Juice was marketed within African American neighborhoods, yet by 2004 Pimp Juice was disseminated by 60 distributors in the United States, in 32 states and in 81 markets. According to its distributor, because Pimp Juice is flying off the shelves in the UK, the Caribbean Islands, and Mexico, the distributor aims to sell the product in Australia, Japan, China and Israel. The irony of this particular product is that Nelly, the rap star whose song titled ‘Pimp Juice’ helped resurrect the popularity of the concept of the pimp, also owns the company that distributes Pimp Juice. This one product illustrates the increasingly seamless relations among the commodification of black images (pimp/prostitute), struggles between corporations and hip hop capitalists (rap star Nelly) in search of new consumer markets, the expansion of new consumer markets (how Pimp Juice is marketed to black consumers), and potentially new systems of control within African American civil society that grow from the same conditions that sparked changes within Nigerian society. Beverage makers claim that pimp juice is a benign sports drink – www.letitloose.com, Pimp Juice’s official web site describe it as a ‘healthy, non-carbonated energy drink possessing a tropical berry flavor’ – yet when Black American youth buy pimp juice at their corner store, they most likely are singing the lyrics Nelly’s song ‘Pimp Juice’ while they pay $1.89 for one can of actual ‘Pimp Juice’. The lyrics of Nelly’s song ‘Pimp Juice’ make it clear what pimp juice really is and who it is for. Nelly opens his song by boasting that because his woman only wants him for his ‘pimp juice’, he needs to ‘cut her loose’. He then moves on to describe the power seats, leather and sunroof of his pimpmobile. When ‘hoes see it’, according to Nelly, they ‘can’t believe it’. Nelly knows their game and puts them out, telling them to dust their shoes off so as not to touch his rug. For those who still don’t get it, Nelly ends his song with a rousing definition of pimp juice: ‘your pimp juice is anything, attract the opposite sex, it could be money, fame, or straight intellect’. Always an equal-opportunity kind of guy, Nelly proclaims, ‘bitches got the pimp juice too, come to think about it dirty, they got more than we do’. By itself, the song ‘Pimp Juice’ is just a song. Yet when coupled with the music video of Nelly representing a pimp and mass marketing campaigns that put cans of actual Pimp Juice in corner stores for young African Americans to see and buy, the circle is complete. African American youths’ encounters with Pimp Juice comprise the case examined here, yet the new commodities and new consumer markets in this example point to much larger issues. The hip hop capitalism of Nelly’s brilliant marketing of ‘Pimp Juice’ illustrates how sexualized understandings of black women’s and men’s bodies and culture become marketed and put up for sale in the global marketplace. It also focuses on new consumers of bodies and

images, in particular, how black people become target audiences for their own degradation (e.g. the case of pimp juice) as well as Nelly’s plans to go global with this popular product. When it comes to the commodification of black bodies, few African Americans celebrate the criminal justice system. At the same time, when it comes to the commodification of images associated with prison culture as well as an array of products that seemingly signal a seemingly authentic black culture, blacks are well represented among the consumers of these images.

Pornography Market

**Aff/Neg Idea: Pornography**Respectability politics grasp onto the pornographic market to exploit the bodies of Black women and constrain their self-determining sexual deviancy.Miller-Young ’10 (Mireille Miller-Young, Professor at UCSB, “Putting Hypersexuality to Work: Black Women and Illicit Eroticism in Pornography”, 7 April 2010, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1363460709359229) \\EG

For over 30 years western feminists have had powerful and deeply divisive debates about the roles of pornographic media and sexual commerce in promoting heterosexist institutions and social relations. These debates, which became known as the ‘Sex Wars’, exacerbated many bitter philosophical divisions between feminists (Duggan and Hunter, 1995). Touting Robin Morgan’s catchphrase, ‘Porn is the theory, rape is the practice’, (Morgan, 1980) radical, anti-pornography feminists defined pornography as the ‘graphic and sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words’ (Dworkin and MacKinnon, 1988: 36). According to their argument, pornography represents the ‘subordination of women perfectly achieved’, (Dworkin, 1993: 523) as it commodifies rape, and endorses and encourages men’s abusive sexual desires and behaviors towards women (Russell, 2000: 50). Alternatively, anticensorship, liberal, and sex-positive feminists identified pornography as a convenient but hazardous scapegoat for attacks on sexual dissent, and as a complex discourse ‘full of multiple, contradictory, layered, and highly contextual meanings’ (Duggan and Hunter, 1995: 7). Even within a heterosexist system of domination, they argued, oppressed groups, such as women and sexual minorities, view pornography in a multiplicity of ways, often counter-appropriating seemingly exploitative material and positively transforming their meaning. Although largely a heteronormative capitalist mode of production, pornography nevertheless offers women and men, consumers and participants, spaces and possibilities for counter-appropriation, self-expression, pleasure, and labor (Kipnis, 1997; Weitzer, 2000). On the margins of the Sex Wars, African American feminist scholars have written a great deal about the issue of sexual representation, focusing on the exploitation of black women’s bodies within patriarchal, racial capitalism in the USA. They have examined how African American women’s sexualities are inherently informed by the objectification of their bodies necessitated by the sexual economy of slavery, and black women’s own historical efforts to reclaim their bodies and define their womanhood. These writers explain how black women have challenged dominant imaginings of black sexuality as pathological, explaining also their attempts to achieve sexual autonomy in the face of the widespread discourse of black sexual deviancy (Hobson, 2005; Rose, 2003; SharpelyWhiting, 2007). Yet, for black women, defining sexual autonomy has not been an easy task. First, what Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (1993) terms a ‘politics of respectability’ has historically discouraged black women from creating a framework for sexual subjectivity outside of heteronormative, domestic, and bourgeois family relations (White, 2001). Many black queer scholars (Johnson and Henderson, 2005; McBride, 1998; Stallings, 2007) have noted the difficulty in addressing issues of sexual subjectivity, due to what Matt Richardson notes as the ‘erasure of a broad array of black sexuality and gendered being, in favor of a static heterosexual narrative’ (Richardson, 2003: 63). In addition to the politics of respectability, historian Darlene Clark Hine (1989) proposes black women possess a ‘culture of dissemblance’, a culture of masking, silence, secrecy, and disavowal of sexuality in black women’s lives, employed as a method to protect them from sexual injury. Unfortunately, these twin cultural traditions frame sexual deviance as dangerous and marginalize women who deviate from respectability and dissemblance by participating in non-normative sexualities, including queer, contractual, or public sexuality (Hammonds, 1997; Stallings,

2007). According to Evelynn Hammonds (1997), ‘The restrictive, repressive and dangerous aspects of black female sexuality has been emphasized by black feminist writers while pleasure, exploration, and agency have gone under-analyzed’ (1997: 385). Those black feminist scholars who have written about pornography tend to find affinity with radical feminists, deeming the form inherently dangerous for women – especially black women. For example, Patricia Hill Collins (2000), Alice Walker (1980, 1981), Tracy Gardener (1980), Luisah Teish (1980), and Aminatta Forna (2001 [1992]) contend that sexual violence is ‘typically or implicitly a theme of pornography’ (Collins, 2000: 135). Though violence and misogyny towards black women in pornography, sex work and elsewhere is a critical and extremely painful concern, the theoretical equivalence made by scholars between pornography and violence remains troubling. Pornography is framed as a monolithic cultural production and industry and is blamed for the degradation and violation of black women, rather than situated as a historically complex, dynamic media genre. As Linda Williams (2004a: 12) notes, pornography is a ‘genre for the production of sexual viewing pleasure’ – including, potentially, black women’s own pleasure.

A framework of the illicit erotic economy uncovers the creative and productive elements in a world of sexual capital. To survive and prosper, Black women own their sexual deviancy through transgressions of cultural and social norms.Miller-Young ’10 (Mireille Miller-Young, Professor at UCSB, “Putting Hypersexuality to Work: Black Women and Illicit Eroticism in Pornography”, 7 April 2010, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1363460709359229) \\EG

While some hardcore images are misogynistic, violent and racist, not all pornography is such. If we look, for example, at pornography created by black women such as Vanessa Blue, Diana Devoe, Venus Hottentot, or Shine Louise-Houston, we see erotic expression that is much more creative and pleasurable than many critics might suspect.3 As producers and consumers, women participate in pornography’s sexual economy in ways that suggest that its consubstantiation with violence and subordination should be re-evaluated (Chapkis, 1997; Duggan and Hunter, 1995; Juffer, 1998). We should also interrogate how pornography addresses the sexual desires, fantasies, fetishes and expressions of black sexual subjects as well the presumed white male voyeuristic consumer. It is crucial to take account of the deeply problematic issues of racialized sexism in pornography as a media genre and industry, while at the same time uncovering the voices and experiences of black erotic laborers as they mobilize their sexualities for pleasure and profit. Illicit Eroticism in a Global Economy of Sex Work In a globalizing economy where media industries and sexual commerce offer avenues for mobility and profit (Bernstein, 2007; Ehrenreich and Hoschchild, 2002), black women are finding new ways to employ erotic embodiment by putting sexuality to work in often informal, illicit economies of sex (Achebe, 2004; Collins, 2006; Kempadoo, 1999, 2005). Noting their complex eroticization in transnational racial economies of desire, Kemala Kempadoo asserts that, ‘the sale of sexual labor is an integral part of many working Third World women’s lives and strategies’ (Kempadoo, 1998: 124). Through my research on black women in the US porn industry, I developed the paradigm of ‘illicit erotic economy’ as a way to theorize: (1) the historical representation of black bodies as sites for a vast array of forbidden sexual desires, fantasies, and practices, and (2) how black subjects symbolically and strategically labor within the prohibited terrain of sex. Taking the lead from the work of Sharon Harley (2002) on African American women’s use of underground economies during the early 20th century, I consider illicit eroticism as a

framework to understand how black subjects labor in the sexual economy. Reflective of African Americans’ historical engagement in informal, underground, illegal, and quasi-legal income generating activities – from prostitution to pimping, drug dealing, music and movie pirating, street performance, and childcare – illicit eroticism offers black women who are marginalized in the formal labor market ways to survive and prosper. Encompassing a range of informal and intimate labors, illicit erotic workers employ their sexual capital, talents, and knowledges to perform sexual service work on ‘the margins’ of an economy increasingly focused on the commodification of intimacy (Agustin, 2007: 21; Zelizer, 2005). More than survival skills, illicit eroticism eschews the logics of sexual respectability, dissemblance, and normativity. Black women in pornography transgress multiple moral, cultural, and social boundaries as they mobilize their outlaw, racialized sexuality for work. They use the demand for their mythic hypersexuality as a vehicle to, as Luise White suggests in her research on prostitution in colonial Nairobi, to ‘reproduce themselves and their dependents’ (1990: 12). One performer underscores this point – black women in pornography labor for their families: ‘I have always had a family to take care of, in some fashion or another. I have no idea what it is like to earn all my money and keep it all’. Historian Robin D.G. Kelley (1997) argues that this selective appropriation of selfcommodification is both strategic and creative in its engagement with capitalism: African Americans have mobilized self-commodification through the transformation of leisure, pleasure, and creative expression into labor. Black sex workers transform what Kelley defines as ‘labor not associated with wage work – sexual play and intercourse – into income’ (1997: 73). This ‘play-labor’ (1997: 45–6) is not necessarily resistant to hegemonic institutions of power, nor is it meant to be. It is one strategy by which young people, women, minorities, Third World subjects, the working-class, and others navigate the capitalist political economy by using their corporeal resources – resources that may be the only ones they can control. Participating in a continuum of sexual labor – from dating to erotic massage, streetwalking, escorting, modeling, exotic dance, phone sex, internet porn, S/M domination, or performing in sex films – black women strategically maneuver the illicit erotic economy to promote their survival, autonomy, and well-being. According to my research, women are motivated by what is considered relatively flexible and high-income work offering increased opportunities for self-care, and a sense of recognition for their erotic embodiment and sexual talents. Some enter the industry on a casual basis, to pay for rent, childcare, school fees, family bills, or a car, while others seek careers in the sex-obsessed entertainment industry and see adult entertainment as a stepping-stone to something else. For many women, fame vis-á-vis the adult industry is seen as a viable, if defiant, aspiration – one that reflects what cultural critics have noted as the ‘pornification’ of popular culture during the last 15 to 20 years (Paasonen et al., 2007). This kind of sexual visibility could reflect a desire by young black women to harness the subjective power of eroticism made popular by black actresses, entertainers, and sexual outlaws like Pam Grier, Lil’ Kim, or Josephine Baker.

In the sexual marketplace Blackness is a devalued commodity of sexual fantasies sold in a commercial empire of white idealism.Miller-Young ’10 (Mireille Miller-Young, Professor at UCSB, “Putting Hypersexuality to Work: Black Women and Illicit Eroticism in Pornography”, 7 April 2010, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1363460709359229) \\EG

During seven years of ethnographic forays into adult industry worksites – including film sets, production offices, business conventions, awards ceremonies, and industry events – I observed many instances of blatant disregard for black women. Like their locations in the back and on the margins of the most important adult entertainment business convention in the world, Adult Video News’ Adult Expo, black women’s place in the commercial hardcore industry is peripheral and precarious. Black women are systemically positioned in spaces and roles of lesser importance to white women, who are valued as the most prized commodities in the sexual marketplace of hardcore. Women of color generally occupy a diminished space in comparison to idealized white adult performers, yet black women seem to be most disparaged, and as a consequence, vulnerable to the kinds of verbal and symbolic violence that I witnessed at the Adult Expo. In an industry that values and trades in the sexuality of women, one would think that black women’s presumed hypersexuality would give them an advantage. In fact, paradoxically, it is just the opposite. Like the cruel comments of the director I overheard, rather than being valued for their erotic skills, black women are devalued as ‘skanks’. If black women are so derided in the adult entertainment industry, why do they enter it, and what do they make of entrenched racism and heterosexism within the business? Considering the devaluing of their representations and labor in pornography, I investigate how black women put their hypersexuality to work for their own interests in survival, success and erotic autonomy (Alexander, 2005). Hierarchies of value organize the production, distribution, and consumption of pornography media, in addition to structuring work and labor relations in the adult entertainment industry. According to this logic of sexual economy (Davis, 2002), some bodies are worth more than others; yet all are evaluated and commodified through the lens of race, gender, class, and, sexuality. Although these valuation regimes are presentin most social and economic institutions and relations in our society, they are iterated in explicit detail in hardcore pornography, where erotic desires and fantasies are commercialized in a $12–14 billion dollar per year US industry that spans the globe (Johnston, 2007). While the diversification of the sex industries – including people, products, services, and technologies – has transformed and expanded both productive and consumptive practices, the hegemony of whiteness in defining human capital (including erotic value) disadvantages people of color. The black female body is, in relation to other racialized and gendered bodies in the flourishing sex industries, devalued and marginalized in pornography’s hierarchal, sexual marketplace. While many scholars have theorized about how gender informs pornography’s sexual representations and labor relations, there is a paucity of research on how race forms a matrix of power that shapes the practices and principles of the adult entertainment industry in its visual representation as well as its structural and social relations (see Bernardi, 2006; Shimizu, 2007; Williams, 2004b). In this article I examine the structural inequalities and social biases black women face in the adult industry. Through the oral testimonies of these workers, this study reveals that black women in adult entertainment sustain incisive critiques about how hegemonic whiteness impacts their conditions of labor, including earnings, employment opportunities, and erotic embodiment. Responding to these intersecting racial and gender hierarchies of valuation, black women sex workers (Leigh, 1997) grapple with the devaluation of their bodies and sexual labor, sometimes through the creation of pornography that represents their own desires. What can we learn from black sex workers’ utilization of hypersexuality and selfcommodification as they live and labor within advanced capitalism? Given feminists’ entrenched battles over sexual representation and commerce, I consider the key challenges and concerns about elucidating black sex workers’ supposedly deviant or counternormative behaviors. I illuminate black women’s intimate labor in hardcore and their struggles for survival, success, and sexual agency. In my research methodology, which combines feminist methods of ethnography, oral history, archival and

textual analysis, I situate black sex workers as critical knowledge producers and cultural workers actively laboring to create space in the sexual marketplace for a self-defined black female sexuality. Engaging black women working day to day in the sex industry, looking specifically at their needs, experiences, challenges, and desires, I argue that it is precisely through women’s own discussions of their representations and labor in the sexual economy that we can analyze the complexities and ambiguities of black women’s experiences of pleasure and danger, exploitation and disenchantment. Our methodologies should consider how black women’s labor in the sexual economy indicates their attempts at survival, mobility, self-authorship, and self-care (Cohen, 2004; Foucault, 1990 [1978]).

Whiteness occupies the most valuable sexual capital that situates Blackness within the sexual market as a hyper-disposable repulsive object of exchange.Miller-Young ’10 (Mireille Miller-Young, Professor at UCSB, “Putting Hypersexuality to Work: Black Women and Illicit Eroticism in Pornography”, 7 April 2010, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1363460709359229) \\EG

What do black women sex workers have to say about the kinds of challenges to erotic autonomy they confront as they carve out space within a deeply racialized and gendered sexual economy? In my study, black professional adult actresses have been vocal about issues of wage inequality, employment marginalization, and interpersonal bias, even as they assert their autonomy in choosing to work in the pornography industry. In an industry that treats most sex workers as disposable, black women are the most devalued; they are hyper-disposable. The perceived easy accessibility of black women’s sexuality organizes how hardcore media produces and markets black female bodies as well as how it treats black women workers at worksites. I want to foreground the voices of black women professional sex workers to understand the function of gendered, racialized, sexuality in the political economy of adult entertainment with regards to black female bodies. Black female bodies are devalued in a sexual marketplace that reifies whiteness, especially white femininity (Nagle, 1997). The young, blonde, lithe, busty, white woman is constructed as the most valuable sexual commodity. As seen at the AVN Adult Expo, white women’s bodies are the primary currency of the multi-billion dollar adult entertainment business. They are the focus of companies like Vivid, Hustler, and Wicked, and they are the ‘cash cows’ for an industry that is immensely lucrative for major US corporations such as AT&T, TimeWarner, and DirectTV that profit from selling hardcore over pay-per-view cable channels, video on demand, the internet, and in millions of hotel rooms each year (PBS Frontline, 2001a; PBS Frontline, 2001b). Although they are fetishized for their difference, the bodies of women of color hold much less currency for these corporations because they receive significantly less demand compared to white female bodies. The devalued status of black female bodies is significantly evident in wage inequalities, and this is one of the sorest issues for black women sex workers in the business. Concentrated in the bastardized niche genres of black and interracial porn, black actresses have largely been both hired less and paid half to three quarters of what white female actresses earn. Black women contractors for professional companies are currently paid $400–$900 for one ‘boy/girl’ sex scene, depending on their notoriety and the company’s film budget, while white actresses tend to be paid $1000–$2000. (Vanessa Blue, 13 August 2008). Black professional adult actresses identify the problems of pay inequality as part of a wide-ranging, exploitative, and racist devaluation of their labor. Actress Lola Lane pointed to the inequality and pay: ‘I think I am still not getting equal to what the other girls are getting’ (Lola Lane, 10 January 2003). After

years in the porn industry, Lola Lane succeeded in demanding a higher rate from producers than when she started, but she still felt that it was not equal to white women’s pay rates. Sierra, another professional adult actress and exotic dancer described the ways that workers lack the knowledge of wage rates that intensifies racial inequality: The thing is salaries aren’t discussed and [producers] try to get you right then and there. You have to negotiate your own salary . . . I’ve talked to [black] girls who’ve gotten $300–400 to do a scene. I’m like $300 is all you got? I won’t even leave my house for $300. You must be crazy! I’ve known a lot of white girls that come into the business and get started with regular straight scenes and get $1000 . . . Unfortunately, most of us entering this business don’t know what we’re worth (Sierra, personal interview, 28 April 2003). Vulnerable to exploitation by pornographers looking for the next new talent at the cheapest cost, young women entering the sex industry are hurt by a culture of silence about wages, exacerbated by a stigmatized and complex field of work.5 While their age and lack of knowledge about industry standards for actresses sometimes places them at a disadvantage, full-time, professional actresses also battle to maintain their careers in a climate that favors younger women (Diana Devoe, personal interview, 11 January 2003). As indicated by one African American adult industry executive, the inequality in pay is the ‘primary issue’ for black actresses, and ‘knowing that you could have gotten more, is really disappointing’ (Anonymous, personal interview, 5 December 2002). Beyond the issue of wages, these contract workers feel an extreme pressure to conform to high standards of whiteness in order to win opportunities such as film roles, marketing and PR agreements, and long-term contracts. The rule tends to be: live up to the requirements of white sexual embodiment, in other words, assimilate to white beauty standards, or risk being ghettoized in the most undervalued sectors of the business, such as the low-end genre of ‘ghetto porn’ (Sinnamon Love, personal interview, 5 December 2002). For Lola Lane the obvious racism embedded in the privileging of white femininity was painful: You know I’ve been booked for shoots and they think I’m white over the phone, (because there’s another Lola) and they say ‘Oh you’re the black girl. We can’t shoot you’, or ‘Your butt is too big’. So it can hurt your feelings (Lola Lane, personal interview, 10 January 2003). This construction of beauty and desirability is inherently defined by what it is not – the deviant and repulsive black woman’s body – has very real, economic implications for women of color sex workers. As Lola’s testimony shows, the preference for white actresses and the stratification of opportunities along the color line creates a tremendous sense of disappointment, frustration and injustice among black actresses as they are left out of potentially lucrative opportunities to work. You have to get that tough skin or you’re not going to make it, otherwise you get low self-esteem. You are like ‘Hey, what’s wrong with me?’ I go to these casting calls . . . and they are only looking at the white girls. It’s like, ‘Why am I here?’ You find it humiliating (Lola Lane, personal interview, 10 January 2003). Lola’s feeling of constantly feeling measured against an unattainable and cruel standard of beauty and femininity is something many black women in America face everyday (Craig, 2002). A deeply emotional process of confrontation, pain, and self-hatred – and sometimes counter-hegemonic resistance and healing – black women must negotiate their unalterable difference and the overriding stigma of being a racial Other in an industry that funnels the cultural capital of white beauty as the primary economic capital of its workers. According to Angel Kelly (personal interview, 20 April 2003), ‘Black women are always feeling measured by white beauty standards, and increasingly the skinny and plastic’. Indeed, many of the professional adult actresses I interviewed had responded to the pressure to look like ideal porn stars by having some form of plastic surgery. The increasing employment of black women that look like, as black adult actor Byron Long (personal interview, 10 January 2003) puts it, ‘chocolate Barbie dolls’, has meant that black women with more voluptuous and natural bodies tend to be seen as less attractive, more

disposable and are marginalized in niche markets like ghetto porn, BBW (Big Beautiful Women), and fat porn. They do not appear in higher status hardcore feature films produced by the top companies and directors. Those women who defy the politics of disposability and fight for a longer career in the industry attempt to project what one production executive calls ‘crossover appeal’. According to professional adult actress Sinnamon Love (personal interview, 5 December 2002), ‘the farther away they are from the natural, voluptuous figure of a black woman, the better it is, and the more likely they are to get the jobs’. The process of demanding black women appear white while they are still represented as exotic Others sustains the fantasy of difference for presumably white male consumers without disrupting the racial order. This systemic hierarchy of valuation shapes working conditions and challenges the legitimacy of black women sex workers. They must work within limited categories defined and regulated by a racial economy of desire; those that do not fit within the categories are kept out with evasive excuses: ‘We can’t shoot you right now, but as soon as we’re shooting something, we’ll call you’. This was what an employer told performer Stacy Cash (personal interview, 10 January 2004) when she called to inquire about bookings. ‘But if you send in a picture of a girl that is lighter than you’, she added, ‘then they’ll shoot her. It depends on what their preferences are . . . you have to work within the category that you are in’. Stacy is not alone in experiencing the pain of rejection due to racism and colorism – in fact she is part of a global economy of desire that uses, but also discriminates against, black and brown women. Kemala Kempadoo proposes we acknowledge that, ‘even with the heightened exoticization of the sexuality of Third World women and men, they are positioned in the global sex industry second to white women’ (Kempadoo and Doezema, 1998: 11). Whiteness is the hegemonic ideal of attractiveness and desirability, Kempadoo argues, ‘and white sexual labor is most valued within the global sex industry’ (1998: 11).

Pornography provides a unique space in the field of sexual commerce to retain autonomy, deviancy, and respect for Black women.Miller-Young ’10 (Mireille Miller-Young, Professor at UCSB, “Putting Hypersexuality to Work: Black Women and Illicit Eroticism in Pornography”, 7 April 2010, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1363460709359229) \\EG

Black women struggle to employ tactics of everyday survival and labor within the parameters of a racialized sexual economy, focusing on gaining opportunities, mobility, and power by working within the system. There are some entrepreneurial actresses that are also actively reforming black women’s traditional roles as sex workers by becoming hardcore directors, producers, agents, and webmistresses. Using hardcore as a space for selffashioning and self-promotion, these cultural workers create their own pornographies. Vanessa Blue, who learned filmmaking and built an editing studio in her home by reading ‘how-to’ books, has directed 20 hardcore videos and dozens of digital short films. Vanessa is part of a new emergence of black women professional performers becoming directors, including Diana Devoe, Sinnamon Love, and Marie Luv. In feature adult films like Dark Confessions, Taking Memphis, and Black Reign, Vanessa creates representations that attempt to highlight the erotic power and beauty of the women in the images, while sustaining an ethical working environment for sex workers, especially women. As a director, Vanessa is adamant about paying her performers the rates they request and never pressuring them to take on sex acts or situations they are uncomfortable with. By authoring illicit erotic texts that represent and reimagine the desires and fantasies of black sexual subjects, Vanessa

produces a space for black eroticism beyond the framework of stereotyped black sexuality dominant in traditional porn, such as in My Baby Got Back, South Central Hookers and Ghetto Gaggers. Vanessa (personal interview, 13 August 2008) asserts: ‘I always loved porn and I always wanted to make it and to be a part of it. I liked watching people be free and enjoy themselves, and I liked shooting it. I always wanted to be behind the camera . . . [I thought to myself] “Let me see if I can become the director!”’ Vanessa Blue represents how black women may take up pornography, and all its challenges, in fascinating and transformative new ways for work, identity formation, and sexual expression. This essay focuses on black professional adult entertainment actresses, but has implications for other sex workers, especially those marginalized and disciplined by pornography’s racial economy of desire. Because pornography’s hierarchies of value privilege a very narrow definition of white femininity as the object of the gaze, women of color work in peripheral and precarious locations. Their representations and experiences as sex workers are shaped by a racialized and gendered sexual commerce where stereotypes, structural inequalities, and social biases are the norm. As I described in my field notes of the AVN Adult Expo and my research into discrimination and bias in their work, black women are devalued as hyperaccessible and superdisposable in an industry that simultaneously invests in and marginalizes fantasies about black sexuality. As black women labor to make the presentation of their presumed hypersexuality work for them, they face a myriad painful choices and challenges. In light of feminist arguments that these women are victimized by an alienating and exploitative sex industry, I have attempted to show that black illicit erotic workers, while victimized by multiple axes of discrimination and harm, also employ an outlaw sexuality to achieve mobility, erotic autonomy, and self-care. We should do more to shape our studies so that they engage not just with the images that the hardcore industry sells, but the women that are working hard to be seen and heard. The informants in this study feel further alienated by feminist scholars that talk about them, but not to them, and who see them as colluding with misogynists rather than carving out a vital space for black women to see themselves as desirable and desiring subjects. These women’s narratives about and critiques of racism and sexism in the sex industry are valuable to understanding their interventions as performers and laborers to lay claim to legitimacy for all sex workers. Taking on new roles as directors and producers, black women are agents in a transforming sex industry. By embracing the counternormative work of deviance, hypersexuality, and self-commodification in order to survive under capitalism, they seek pleasure, recognition, and respect.

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Interpretation and violation – the affirmative should defend the hypothetical implementation of topical government action – prefer this – it’s the most predictableEricson, 3 [Jon M, “The Debater’s Guide,” Third Edition, pg. 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.

White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution)

Most of contemporary activism is voluntarist. The essence of voluntarism is the belief that the actions of individuals can change the world. The basic idea is that certain collective social behaviours have a unique political power. Voluntarism is based on the assumption that voluntary actions are the dominant factor in revolution and that the primary challenge for activists is to get large numbers of people to choose the correct behaviours. This means that activists emphasize their free will, believing that their decision to act can overcome other structural factors that may make revolution seem impossible. For the philosopher Slavoj Zizek, voluntarism is defined by “the belief that one can ‘move mountains,’ ignoring ‘objective’ laws and obstacles. Voluntarists have total faith in the power of action. Voluntarist activists believe that collective action can overcome all odds. Or, according to Alexander the Great, “There is nothing impossible to him who will try.” Once this assumption has been made, the primary challenge becomes determining which actions to advocate. The possibilities are limitless, and to narrow the choice voluntarist activists have created many secondary theories to explain why they’ve chosen this protest tactic over another.

Activists urge people to “take action” because voluntarists believe political reality can be changed through direct action, the exertion of direct pressure through any unmediated action, such as strikes, blockades, or demonstrations designed to achieve immediate results, as distinguished from indirect actions such as negotiation, lobbying or constitutional processes. Voluntarists often think of activism as a ladder of engagement that begins with non-action and passivity and climbs toward activity with direct

action at the pinnacle. The goal is to escalate engagement up the ladder. Action, individual and collective, is the ideal. Voluntarist activists would never accept, for example, that doing nothing (i.e., the absence of action) could yield greater intended political change than doing something-anything-unless the act of doing nothing, like being silent or refusing to work, was publicly performed as protest. Activity, the willful intention to change the world, is necessary for activists who eschew passivity, inner contemplation and theoretical speculation in favour of being practical, applied and empirical.

Until the explosion of political activism in the 1960s, an unconscious voluntarism (in the sense that actions were chosen haphazardly) was the norm. Crowds adopted unruly behaviours spontaneously and then spread them. Consider, for example, the Nika Revolt of AD 532 that nearly toppled Constantinople. This spontaneous incendiary riot probably came closer to overthrowing a world power than any riot in human history. There was no conscious theory guiding the event. It just happened, leaving many historians wondering whether the Nika Revolt was a political protest or just a bout of hooliganism. Likewise today, whenever we are unsure if a popular unrest is revolutionary, it is often a sign that the people are being unconscious in their choice of tactics. Conscious voluntarism emerged later in history when the crowd began to understand itself as a coherent social movement whose coordinated actions had political implications. Consciously voluntarist activists think strategically in terms of tactics, campaigns and movements.

The publication of William Gamson’s The Strategy of Social Protest in 1975 was a milestone for conscious voluntarism. Gamson, a sociologist, took an empirical approach to studying protest. He compiled a database of protest groups in the United States between 1800 and 1945. He then took a random sample and looked for patterns behind contesting group success. The result was ironic: Gamson’s conclusions were ccounterintuitive, and the most important pattern that he identified ignited a furor of opposition to voluntarism.

The first counterintuitive conclusion that Gamson came to is that protest groups do not increase their odds of success by working on campaigns that many other groups are also tackling. On the contrary, according to Gamson, “having many other challenging groups in the field at the same time does not seem to have much effect on the probability of success of any given challenger.” This is good news for solo activists and unconventional movements because it frees us from working on popular campaigns whose efficacy we question. Coalition building is an activist cliché presumed to be mandatory to success. And these coalitions, often funded by foundations, tend to overdetermine the aims and targets of contemporary activism. Sometimes activists assume that working together and getting other groups “on board” is crucial to campaign progress. Gamson’s historical analysis of challenging group success refutes this assumption. The founding of Occupy Wall Street, which emerged from Adbusters in Canada rather than the many groups in the United States who were working together to get money out of politics and bring income inequality into the mainstream discourse, corroborates Gamson’s findings.

Once conclusion above all defined Gamson as a voluntarist catalyzing fierce opposition to The Strategy of Social Protest, He discovered in the data proof that the likelihood of success increased when protesters embraced certain actions. Good news for the core assumption of voluntarism. Unfortunately, after extensive statistical research, the end result was a clear endorsement of violence. Gamson discovered that one of the actions that had a significant positive impact on the probability of success was adopting violent tactics. “Unruly groups, those that use violence, strikes and other constraints, have better than average success,” Gamson reports. This was unacceptable conclusion in 1975, a year when

urban guerrillas like the Red Army Faction were taking hostages, bombing buildings and executing politicians. It would be going too far to say that Gamson advocated violence; instead, he embraced the empiricism of voluntarist activism and reported what the saw in the data.

At the same time as the core voluntarist tenet-actions make change-was vindicated, activists were put in an ill-favoured position of advocating violence as the most effective form of action. You may dismiss Gamson. Or you may try to make the counterintuitive argument that contemporary forms of non-violent direct action are a less lethal form of violence that still fits Gamson’s definition of the effective use of violence. Either way, the ideal of non-violence takes a hit from the possibility that political reality will only be altered violently, rather than through the repertoire of peaceful tactics.

Contemporary revolution theory has moved forward. The defeat of the Red Army Faction in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Weather Underground in the U.S. and others who embraced violence stands as a historic warning. The theory of facoism, the idea promulgated by Fidel Castro, Che Guevera and Regis Debray that mobile groups of armed guerrillas can spark a broad-based revolution by roaming rural areas and committing sporadic acts of anti-government violence, was a disastrous failure in Bolivia and elsewhere. At the same time, violent groups have a tendency to be infiltrated by agents provocateurs or front groups for use in false-flag operations. And regardless of whether the data suggest the efficacy of violence for contesting groups between 1800 and 1945, the twenty-first-century activist’s repertoire is distinctly non-violent and often performative, directed toward garnering media attention. “One way of thinking about the most visible actions in the social movement repertoire is to consider them as performances directed at certain audiences,” writes the sociologist Hank Johnson. Volntarist action-oriented protest today is mostly, but not always, about appealing to spectators through public events.

White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution)

Mental environmentalism is the solution to the impasse plaguing mainstream environmentalism. The traditional alliance between environmentalism and technocrats has effectively alienated the world from the environmentalist struggle. When scientists dictate the aims of activists, the result is a brittle materialist conception of protest that is unable to deal with the fluid ecological crisis-a crisis that is above all existential.

The first credible scientific warnings about catastrophic climate change emerged in the 1970s and have grown persistently graver since. As long as corporations were able to dictate the domestic policies of Western democracies, reckless economic growth would be pursued, whatever the data told us. So activists waited for big-bang apocalyptic events-historic storms, melting ice caps, record-breaking heat waves, species extinctions-that would signal the catastrophe and shift public sentiment. Yet each of these dreaded events happened quietly, and the world still seemed to function. Few of us understood that the real apocalypse would be subtle. We kept waiting, only to realize in a flash that the dreaded

event had already happened: the world has tipped past that point of no return that we had been fearing. As of 2015 the global concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now exceeds 400ppm. And scientists say that the warming of the oceans is unstoppable. “Even if we were to freeze greenhouse gases at current levels, the sea would actually continue to warm for centuries and millennia, and as they continue to warm and expand the sea levels will continue to rise,” acknowledges a U.S. government climate scientist in July 2015. The climate calamity is in the past. And now we need a fundamental reorientation in our approach to environmental activism. We must reshape humanity’s internal reality in order to restore our external reality.

Ever since the catastrophic storms started, there have been prophecies of an environmentalist movement that would materialize in full force. Many people woke up in the mid-twentieth century with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which warned of the dangers of DDT. For others it was the first photos of Earth taken from space, or the live video of BP’s underwater oil well rupturing into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

Of the many battlefronts on which our global struggle will be fought, it is the ecological struggle that has the greatest potential to unite humanity. From an ecological perspective, all the species that thrive on Earth are essentially one organism: either we all win or we all lose. Despite the dreams of lifeboat survivalists, it does not matter if you have a backyard bunker stocked with a decade of provisions. No one can outlive the eternal consequences of climate change.

Climate change is a unique challenge because it is a force outside human control that will compel our species to adapt. Either we will adapt toward a utopian vision that benefits the many or toward a dystopian vision that benefits the few.

For environmentalism to fulfill its universalist political promise, it must abandon the technocratic approach that has dominated the ecological paradigm for decades. There has been a fetishization of our ability to correlate climate change with scientifically verifiable hypotheses. Environmentalists got stuck in proving the scientific argument and have been falling down the rabbit hole of computer models and intellectual abstraction ever since. We are in a situation that the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard calls the “differend”: an irresolvable language game in which the absolutely final proof of climate change is human extinction…but of course by that point there will be no one alive to verify the final proof. Scientists believed that their computer models could prove without a doubt the veracity of climate change. But pursuing this kind of total rational proof of a phenomenon that exceeds human conceptual capacities is the wrong course for activism.

I think we have forgotten that the power of Silent Spring-the way it captured the attention of so many readers-does not lie in the valid and profound science of bioaccumulation that Rachel Carson pioneered but in the beauty of the opening chapter; “A Fable for Tomorrow”: “There once was a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.” Carson paints an idyllic picture of a pastoral community known for its fertile agriculture and thriving biodiversity: “Along the roads, laurel, viburnum and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler’s eye through much of the year.” And then, as in a fairy tale, Carson describes a sudden calamity, the beauty is lost-an “evil spell settles on the community,” an invisible malady spreads across the land. Flocks of chickens die, vegetation withers and ultimately nature grows silent. If this were a different author, perhaps the people would have solved the crisis by offering sacrifices to the gods or praying for help. Instead, Carson moves away from blaming supernatural forces. She sees an exclusively natural cause for the crisis. The

“evil spell” is not a spell, after all. “No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life on this stricken world.” Carson concludes, “The people had done it to themselves.”

Modern environmentalism originated in an imaginative fiction about a cursed land. This beginning has been largely repudiated by mainstream environmentalism that has chosen scientific facts over the fantastical, spiritual approach. Environmentalism has thus become an empirical expedition largely regulated by Western scientists who tell us how many ppm of carbon dioxide will trigger an apocalypse (350 ppm, says environmentalist bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org) and how many degrees hotter our Earth can be before we are collectively doomed (20 C, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). To move forward, environmentalism must end its obsession with materialism.

Environmentalism is a story we tell ourselves to interpret unusual natural phenomena. Whereas previous generations interpreted calamities like plagues and storms as portends from God, we see these events as signs of climate change and proof of the guilt of human civilization. And while it is true that human activity is the primary cause of climate change, it is time for a new storyline. Climate change is happening because of the state of our minds.

Environmentalism is first and foremost an existential and spiritual question. The ecological crisis is a matter of survival on the species level. Without our Earth, the future dies: we die, and we doom our descendents. An ecological uprising is vital to the perpetual continuation of life. Environmentalism is an elemental struggle, the most dangerous kind because any attempt by authorities to decrease our freedoms can be conceivably justified by the severity of the ecological crisis.

White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution)

I am haunted by an eco-facist nightmare. I see the return of human slavery on a global scale after industry scientists demonstrate that human labour is the most sustainable source of energy. Building on energy efficiency calculations that were carried out when the memory of American slavery was still fresh, scientists could prove conclusively that an energy slave fed a minimal diet is “greener” than any known form of non-renewable and renewable energy resource. The big agriculture companies will tell us that feeding high-yield genetically modified corn to the indentured is the most efficient way to generate electricity. And the rising costs of fossil fuels will make energy serfdom, slavery and indentured servitude economically logical. The virtues of 100 percent employment overnight will be touted. We will see people chained to bicycle-powered charging stations for the elite’s electric vehicles. The honeybees will die off and the crops will need pollinating; a few million conscripted people will be forced to pollinate by hand. Slave labour will be relied on as the economic pressures of climate change became too great. The propagandists of the old American South were very convincing at the time, with stories of how humanely slaves were treated: one postcard even boasted of the free medical care and retirement that slaves enjoyed. Slavery has existed throughout history, and many of the great civilizations tolerated the practice. How long until the argument is made and insidious advertising sways a fearful public desperate to mitigate climate change?

The ecological catastrophe will deepen and political leaders across the political spectrum will no longer deny climate change. They will see the political advantages of proclaiming themselves ecological saviours and of speaking in global terms. They will know the benefits of maintaining an emergency, or disaster capitalism, as the author and activist Naomi Klien calls it. They will ration commodities and defend a wartime climate-change economy that justifies every authoritarian gesture. They will be on every screen. And they will engineer elections to win many votes.

I am concerned about the potential for scientific-oriented environmentalism to flip into a dark force in our world. I foresee that great tragedies could be carried out under the technocratic ecological flag. To join politics with catastrophic environmentalism is dangerous. It will attract the most power hungry…and the most calculative. Their lifeboat mentality will be the pretext for genocide and enslavement. And yet, some kind of universal ecological politics is absolutely necessary for the survival of humanity.

If we look with clear eyes at the world today, we see that it is so deeply interconnected that any viable solution to the challenges we experience individually will require, at least partially, a globally implemented agenda. Carbon emissions will need to be regulated in every place on Earth if we are going to weather the climate change storm. There is no hope if China were to shovel the coal more slowly while Canada continued to devastate Northern Alberta. Irreversible climate change. The last gasp of capitalism. The spiritual crisis of ultramodernity. The existential threat we face is now no longer individual but inherently global. People power has not kept pace with the transformations wrought by hyper-capitalism. The necessity of a universalist politics is more clear than ever. But so too are the filings of every universalist project to date.

To block the rise of the eco-fascists, there must be no “I’ who will be the savior. Anyone who claims to be a Green Caesar is after something far more sinister. The saving grace will only come from a “We.” Either the people become the voice of a new kind of global environmentalism-a mental environmentalism that shifts how we perceive the world-or the basest ego instincts will rule. Our selfless We shall mitigate the ecological crisis for the benefit of all. From the outset, we see that the pre-existing structures of global governance-the United Nations, the WTO, IMF and World Bank-will not get the job done. Even if, as the political activist Ralph Nader once dreamt, the super-rich were to suddenly switch sides and throw their tremendous capital behind our vision, they would find that apparatuses built for the conquest of Mammon are rotten beyond repair when it comes to mobilizing the people on a global scale. There are those-the transhumanists, in particular-who believe humanity can prosper on a dead planet. In Synthetic Worlds, Edward Castronova imagines that humanity can thrive in virtual worlds, computer-based simulated environments, hooked up to machines and cared for by artificial intelligences. The number of transhumanists is growing because the alternative-yielding power to a global bottom-up people’s insurrection-would end their prestige and way of being. Those who claim we don’t need the Earth are no better or more trustworthy than the Cold War technocrats who counselled a terrified public that it would be possible to survive global nuclear war. There is blackmail inherent in technocrats’ reassurances-a promise that until the end of time, no matter how bad it gets, their way will be the only way. You are the ones who will call their bluff. The people are looking for a path forward. We stand at the pinnacle of the greatest danger, and yet it is only from our precarious position that we can leap to safety. Pressure is building. May the urgency of our moment force us to jump.

White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution)

One signature of ultramodernity is the uneven distribution of temporality. Some humans are living in an immersive cybernetic reality while others carry on old beliefs and ancient customs. Just as each of us perceives time differently, so too do all the beings that inhabit our world.

Consider the example of the housefly. Flies see the world in slow motion, a scientific paper in Animal Behaviour reports. To arrive at this conclusion, scientists in Ireland used the “critical flicker fusion frequency” test (CFF) to determine the time-interval perception of dozens of animals. The idea behind CFF is simple. Imagine a strobe light whose pulses slowly increase until it looks as if it is emitting a constant “fused” light. Some animals perceive flickers of the strobe at intervals much shorter than you and I. A housefly, for example, can detect four flashes where a human sees only one light. And other species, such as the European eel and the leatherback turtle, perceive one light when humans see four distinct flickers. The ability to detect flickers correlates with the perception of time. The housefly experiences time more slowly than humans, and we experience time more slowly than the European eel. Scientists found that “smaller organisms and those with higher metabolic rates perceive temporal change on finer timescales.” They suggest that time perception is a factor in species differentiation that helps us understand predator-prey relationships.

Studying the temporality of flies reveals lessons for the predator-prey relationship of protest and power. The speed differential between species means that our world comprises many temporal niches. We may occupy the same space but we do not occupy the same time. Each organism is able to perceive actions only within its temporality. By moving faster than other species in the same space, weaker species “encode information in high-frequency signals that can be detected by intended receivers such as [others of the same species] but that are not susceptible to ‘eavesdropping’ by (generally larger) predators.” In other words, from the perspective of activism by moving ultrafast or ultraslow in relation to power, protesters gain protection through invisibility. Where a nimble group of activists perceives four flashes, metaphorically speaking, a large police bureaucracy perceives only one. The Internet allows social movements to form, flicker and evolve faster than the response time of authorities.

Going one step further, the fastest reaction time of a typical human is one second. It will take you that long to “notice potential danger and physically react,” says a separate study in Scientific Reports. “Even a chess grandmaster requires approximately 650 milliseconds just to realize her king is in checkmate.” In the article entitled “Abrupt Rise of New Machine Ecology beyond Human Response time,” scientists express concern about the recent emergence of financial algorithms operating on stock exchanges that move in sub-second time scales invisible to humans. They point to the troubling increase in “ultrafast extreme events” (UEEs) that coincides with the start of the global economic crisis in 2008. These UEEs are dramatic price fluctuations that occur faster than human perception. Extreme financial events are imperceptible. Their consequences, however, are profound in the offline (real) world. One day we will have ultrafast extreme protest events.

Flies, humans and financial algorithms have a minimum reaction time based on their metabolic rate. So too does the “social organism”-the cultures, networks and institutions of our society. Like the humans that compose them, large corporations and state bureaucracies take time to react to emerging protest movements.

The fast future of activism takes place in this gap. Next generation movements exploit differentials in time perception by moving ultrafast in relation to the status quo. The speed of youth networks allows new protest behaviours to arise and be disseminated before older, slower structures notice. Temporal arbitrage-turning the differential between time scales into an advantage for protesters-is one of future social movements’ greatest strengths. The fast future movements will be designed to emerge and withdraw in under a lunar cycle so as to triumph before the status quo and law enforcement mobilize to react.

White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution)

The future of protest is also slow. Future movements will re-conceive activism in time scales of centuries, not seconds, by focusing their meme warfare on provoking epiphanies in people who are not yet born. From the perspective of a long-term vision, today’s protests aren’t failing: our protests are setting in motion a victorious process that will take generations to unfold. Activists must be patient and willing to wait hundreds of years, just as the early Christians endured persecution until a rare cosmological occurrence triggered the conversion of Constantine. Contemporary activists tend to overestimate the effect of a protest in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. Activists of the future will privilege tactics designed to impact the world a hundred years after their death. Theurgist protesters will prophesy a future event, like an earthquake, that converts the powerful to their cause by signaling the righteousness of the movement. And all of us will act today in ways designed to spark epiphanies in the minds of the next generation.

The slow future of protest is the one that Thomas Jefferson refers to in writing, “The generation which commences a revolution rarely completes it.” Others have estimated that every revolution takes three generations. Revolution is akin to building a cathedral in medieval Europe. The architects who designed it and the masons who built it did not live to see their work completed. Notre-Dame de Paris, for example, took a hundred years to complete. It is the same with revolution. As you are not able to choose which part of the multi-generational cycle you’re born into, it may be that you will live your entire life in preparation for a revolution that your grandchildren will finish. The slow future is the deep-time perspective that traces the continuity of struggle back to the earliest days of antiquity and into the furthest stretches of what is to come.

Slow time is composed of the memories, myths and stories that guide our action. Activists of the future will situate their struggle within the five-thousand-year-long and ongoing story of liberation that began before Ipuwer’s lament in ancient Egypt, continuing through the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street,

Idle No More, Black Lives Matter and the social uprisings that followed. This is a prophetic storyline in which you play a destined role. The future of protest is a slow movement that ensouls the people with a new spirit, a new hope. And in this future the gods roam and political miracles are possible.

Fast protests will always occur. And they may grow in frequency, too. But repeated, isolated fast events cannot make a revolution alone. The slow storyline is what grants these events meaning, continuity and the strength to liberate. I trace this story of protest through the prophets of the great religions as well as the great political revolutions.

One strength of Internet-enabled meme warfare has been its swiftness. However, protest memes will evolve from their current primitive state. The meme is much more than a contagious idea. Dawkins, an atheist and critic of religion, merged “gene” with “mimeme,” meaning “intimated thing,” to explain how culture is transmitted. Dawkins saw that memes underpin the essence of humanity-our complex and evolving culture. Slow memes of the future will transmit nuanced social behaviours to self-aware social movements. These behaviours will exceed single, repeated protest actions. Imagine instead contagious memes that carry sophisticated behaviours of collective liberation through techniques of self-governance, new cultural rituals that are protests because they transmit new ways of living together.

Tomorrow’s activists will leverage prophetic yearnings for a grand transformation into an epic uprising. Memes of the future will go beyond critique to provide a revolutionary formula for interpreting natural phenomena in divine terms in order to win elections, administer cities and build a World Party.

White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution)

The people’s war is asymmetric. In the streets protesters face an adversary equipped with great resources, armoured and intending to terrify. If this were an arm-wrestling match, we would reasonable expect a crushing defeat. Fortunately for social-change creators, revolution often favours the weak. In his 2005 book, How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict, the military historian Ivan Arreguin-Toft undertakes a statistical analysis of conflicts since 1800 in which one side had ten times the resources or more. In doing so, he discovers two fundamental principles of war. The first principle is that over time the weaker adversary wins more frequently. Weaker forces are more likely to win today than they were in 1800. In fact, since 1950 the weaker side has won more often than lost. This trend will continue; the ad vantages of being weaker, smaller and nimbler are growing. The second principle is the most important of all: the weaker adversary tends to win conflicts when they innovate. If the weaker refuses to mimic the stronger adversary’s actions, they win 63% of the time. In essence, if we innovate, we win.

The first step toward protest innovation is detachment from our current repertoire of tactics. This detachment is achieved by an understanding of the reasons behind our actions. Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how to pull off a revolution. Outside of military schools, there are few

classes on the practicalities of insurrection. A world-class university library might have half a dozen books, at best, that try to pass on the art of rising up. I’ve spent weeks scouring the University of California, Berkeley’s main library, one of the top five largest libraries in North America, only to find a small shelf of tactically outdated books, mainly published in the 1930s or the 1970s, on the topic of how to shake off an undemocratic regime. The library is full of books critiquing society, of course.

Many of us spend a lot of time thinking and writing and debating about why we should revolt. There are countless articles from everywhere on the political spectrum that advocate insurrection, and every day there are more. And each of us carries within ourselves a series of favourite reasons why we demand change. The spiritual crisis plaguing our mental environment is one of my prime motivators. We can talk for hours about whether this reason or that reason is the best. But isn’t it curious-with so many compelling and openly debated reasons for revolt floating around-that so few revolutions erupt? If everyone is convinced that political change should happen, why isn’t it happening all the time? The answer is because we don’t know how to do it.

The only way to learn the art of revolution is to try, fail and try again. The dynamics of social change are too fluid for anything less than relentless innovation and persistence.

Figuring out how to enact change at the government level can be difficult, if not impossible. Capitalist governments are more and more paralyzed when it comes to providing social goods. Tax revenue is being diverted away from caring for citizens and toward servicing sovereign debt. Austerity is being coupled with a suppression of alternatives because austerity is profitable to the wealthiest 1 percent of humanity. And the current political establishment will go to great lengths to maintain sovereignty by preventing others from reforming the structures of governance or providing needed social services.

Taking power from the top is increasingly impossible for a people’s movement: to win an election typically requires tremendous wealth and corporate backing. At the same time, taking power from below with the typical repertoire of non-violent marches, rallies and petition campaigns also seems fruitless, given the degree of physical violence-tear gas, baton charges, sound cannons and more-that the government now uses to silence our democratic protests. Innovation that breaks the fundamental paradigms of the protest model is the only way forward.

Historically, the odds are against revolution. Jack Goldstone, the sociologist who studies revolutions, calculates the probability of success to be roughly 4 percent. Our path is strewn with failure. Revolutions are rare and rarely succeed. Those who feel compelled to continue on the path know full well that it is far more likely that they will end up in jail before they see a better world. Maybe they will be in jail for twenty years, like Nelson Mandela, or two years, like Fidel Castro, or just overnight, like thousands of Occupiers. Only once we’ve overcome our fear of failure, only once we’ve wagered that revolution is necessary for the larger part of humanity, whatever the personal cost to ourselves, will we begin to step forward.

Modern corporatist democracies thrive on the illusion that political change is possible and that there is a safe way through the labyrinth. And they have been very successful in influencing most activists to follow their advice on which way to go be an NGO worker, a social entrepreneur, a lobbyist. The people are told that what distinguishes our society from the authoritarians who came before is that political dissent is protected and encouraged. They say that in our homeland, government is beholden to the people.

But a whole series of thorny real-world tactical questions remain unacknowledged and unanswered. What do you do when the government does not respond to the demands of the people? Once you’ve gotten as far as possible with protesting in the streets, only to discover that this route will not lead you through the labyrinth, in which direction do you turn?

Our goal as revolutionaries is to foresee the tactics and maneuvers of insurrection that will flip the status quo on its head. Some say the social cost of revolution is great enough to dissuade any attempt. They say the risk of ruin is too high. This counsel should give you reason to pause, to hesitate before setting off on a path that will profoundly impact the lives of billions of humans. But social transformations are as painful as they are necessary. And they are possible only to the degree that we see both the pain and the necessity of our actions before acting.

Every action creates its own reaction. In our just-in-time world even the smallest and most benign disruptions can have tragic outcomes. When I was a young activist blocking traffic to protest the first day of the Iraq War in 2003, I grappled with a dilemma: the possibility that an ambulance might get stuck in the traffic jam. Perhaps a man could be having a heart attack and be unable to get to the hospital because my protest has blocked the road. What if he dies? When is the possibility of unintended harm sufficient to outweigh the necessity of civil disobedience?

Sincere revolutionaries take seriously the moral and ethical dilemmas that arise from instigating protest. It is one thing to strike against an unjust society out of impatient nihilism, wishing only to hurt, and it is another entirely to rise up collectively in order to heal a global culture that is terminally ill. Nihilists are present during successful revolutions, and yet nihilism cannot carry you all the way in your struggle for justice.

Justice to the activist is a question of how far to go in pursuing a revolution. Boxing matches have spoken and unspoken rules, and so do wars between states (the Geneva Convention), spontaneous riots (target the megacorps; protect the local businesses), terrorism (strike symbolic targets), violent coups (take out the executive branch, assume military control of the constitution) and non-violent revolutions (amass in a central square; demand the resignation of the ruling leader). We choose the tactics by assessing the historical moment. What is appropriate in one decade is inappropriate in the next, so it is constant dance with the limits of political possibility. We improvise while always heading toward our goal of a new planetary social order, and innovation increases the likelihood of success.

We keep the goal in sight when we are clear about the ideal we are heading toward. And some roads, like political terrorism, plainly lead nowhere. The degeneration of leftist revolutionaries in the 1970s into urban guerilla cells, in Germany and Italy, for example, was only possible because those involved succumbed to the negative feelings of discouragement, nihilism and a loss of hope. When the wildcat strike that started in Paris May 1968 failed, some activists wrongly saw their only hope in acts of isolated destruction. Similarly, the horizon of possibility of nineteenth-century Russian nihilists continually shrank away from an optimism that they could instigate a broad peasant uprising and turned into a pessimistic assassination politics. And we witnessed the same cycle following the failure of the Occupy Gezi protests to effect change in Turkey that led to the hostage taking, and murder, of a prosecutor by the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front in March 2015. Terrorism is the last recourse of a shattered political movement.

White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution)

The people must capture legislative and executive control constitutionally and legitimately. The greatest problems with political violence is that it makes attaining legitimate sovereignty almost impossible.

Legitimacy is a profound concern for our global people’s movement. An essential assumption of horizontalism is that those who disagree with our movement are still worthwhile, potential partisans; therefore, it is fatally counterproductive to harm civilians literally or burn bridges metaphorically.

In states with a strong constitution, the transfer of power from governments to the people must be carried out in a manner that is constitutionally legitimate so that one day, when the mainstream is ready of their own volition, they may join the people without shame. This objective is the foundation of our just-war theory. It precludes barbarism, scorched earth policies or collective punishments-the hallmarks of military regimes. And it is intended from the outset to avoid civil wars, which are the death knell to people’s democracies.

The failure of the Paris Commune in 1871 was due in part to the reuse of the barricade tactic that was defeated in 1848. But is was also largely due to the communards’ inability to elevate their cause from an insurrection in a capital city to a legitimate transfer of power from the government to the people. The Paris Commune was only an echo of the French Revolution. The events of 1789 were a high-water mark because revolutionaries succeeded in establishing themselves as the legitimate power and social guide.

Our movement learned this lesson again during Occupy Wall Street with the inability of prefigurative anarchism, the notion that activists could build an ideal society in the Zuccotti Park encampment without making demands of the existing society, to assume control of the pre-existing structures of governance. We believed our movement could attain sovereignty simply by holding consensus-based assemblies in the public sphere. This assumption proved to be magical thinking. Our encampments were never recognized as sovereign because Occupiers did not control the legitimacy-granting structures of society.

Revolution is a two-step process. There is the political revolution: the toppling of the existing power structures and the ascent of the rebels to government. And there is the social revolution that follows: the cultural upheaval whereby the people establish a new social reality. Power is as much in the culture, the memes and the money that flows through our social networks as it is in the structures of government. Capitalism can maintain its supremacy without directly controlling the reins of government by, to give one example, regulating the flows of money. Economic sanctions and artificially induced economic depressions through the control of commodity prices are a form of warfare that can bring down any nascent revolution. And removing this weapon-the centrality of money in society-from the armoury of the elites requires nothing less than a total revaluation of all aspects of life.

There are ethical problems of how to carry out political and social revolutions. In the first case we are fighting an enemy that is external to us; and in the second we are fighting an enemy that is internal. To assimilate without coercion the forces within our body politic that still in their hearts hold allegiance to the old world is our great challenge. As the influential twentieth-century philosopher and political theorist Herbert Marcuse observes, “the aim here is to transform the will itself, so that people no longer want what they now want.” In Islam, the interior struggle to transform oneself is considered the greatest struggle. Likewise, the cultural struggle to awaken the hearts of millions is the most important revolutionary effort of all.

To be successful, a revolution must overcome the internal inertia of the people that resists change of any kind. This inertia is experienced on an individual level as the fear of changing one’s routines and of breaking old habits. On a social level, it is the tremendous peer pressure that we exert on one another not to act differently, not to dance too wildly or to leap too far off course. Great civilizations are held together for centuries by this tendency to follow the path laid out. And so too are civilizations in decline. The individual and society at large are conservative and will tend toward continuing the same general course, even if it is known to lead to ecological collapse and species death.

White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution)

In the seventeenth century, innovation was synonymous, literally, with political revolution, rebellion and insurrection. Thus, Shakespeare has Henry IV lament the “fickle changelings and poor discontents,/ Which gape and rub the elbow at the news/ of hurly-burly innovation.” Innovators were revolutionaries who demanded a change in the system. Four hundred years later, innovation remains an integral part of revolution.

“Innovation” means “to renew, to make new.” For activists, innovation means to introduce a new way of protesting that breaks the pattern. Significant social eruptions are often preceded by a tactical innovation such as the transposition of lockboxes, a tactic developed for defending forests, to the streets of Seattle. History shows that the weaker side-the adversary with ten times fewer resources-in asymmetric conflicts tends to win if they innovate. Innovation in the context of protest means acting differently from our adversary and our predecessors. It means adopting tactics that are experimental and untested. And it also means refusing to mirror or mimic our opponent. As the military historian Ivan Arreguin-Toft has shown, the weak win wars when they adopt an approach that differs from their stronger adversary.

Innovation is necessary, but is also difficult, time-consuming and an inefficient use of energy. It requires committing resources to experiments that are bound to fail. (Frederick the Great, for example, experimented for a decade, and tested eight different methods, before successfully developing the echelon tactic of oblique deployment that made Prussia victorious in the eighteenth century.) Thus, at the outset of a social protest both sides have a tendency to eschew innovation in favour of following the script of whatever worked last time. If protesters can resist this urge, they will have an advantage. The stronger actor is overextended and does not have the resources to respond to each new conflict with its

full energy. Instead, the stronger has a tendency to wait for an event to mature before committing extra resources. During Occupy, for example, many local police forces did not have the resources to control the size of the crowds and therefore had to wait for support from other local agencies before cracking down on the movement. The stronger side places its faith in the assumption that they will always be able to bring overwhelming force to bear in the future, taking this fact as an assurance of long-term success and giving the weaker the advantage of knowing the likely short-term response of our adversary. Once rebels have a good intuition for how the status quo would respond if, for instance, we were to set up an encampment on Wall Street, we can act on a meta-level by creating ambush situations that exploit the knee-jerk response of authorities.

Innovation is open-ended. It simply means that we embrace a unification of the four theories of revolution-voluntarism, structuralism, subjectivism, and theurgism-to create new forms of protest. We take freely from any tactic that has ever worked in all of history. Moreover, we mash up and mutate these tactics in unpredictable ways. Oftentimes when we innovate, we are looking for tactics that a six-person group of activists can deploy inexpensively and that other small groups of protesters can easily replicate. The total cost of launching Occupy Wall Street was only a few hundred dollars. The resulting impact was priceless. Innovation allows movements to swerve in new directions. The point is to always maintain an aura of unpredictability. The adversary must be forced to treat each new campaign as if it were a nascent event that could spiral out of control without their overwhelming response. Innovation by the weak compels the strong into an unsustainable position of total mobilization and constant readiness.

White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution)

To be weak and to win requires spirit-the inner force that grants patience, perseverance and resilience in the face of adversity. As activists, we launch protests knowing that we will be outnumbered for several years prior to victory. Defeat in specific engagements does not break our spirit because of our profound assurance that victory is inevitable. Our fearless movement is already very resilient on a collective level. Clearing away Occupy’s encampments did not put an end to our multigenerational revolution. But on an individual level, we can improve our esprit de corps when mobilized in the streets.

If protesters begin each campaign from an awareness that the nature of our struggle is such that our adversary is at least ten times stronger, we will no longer be afraid of being outnumbered. We can instead turn our creative innovation to questions of how to bounce back and counterattack. From a strategic perspective, the situation is the same whether we are high school students who want to publish an underground newspaper, bottom-up community activists fighting a corrupt mayor or urban protesters blocking traffic in an effort to end police violence. The stronger, despite their superior strength, do not always win. The underdog can, and often does, succeed in power struggles. Having the largest militarized police force doesn’t guarantee that revolutions will fail, nor does having all the power in the world assure invulnerability to defeat. There is an ephemeral force that exceeds the material-the

esprit de corps, or the loyal group spirit that gives strength to the social body-and the side that can harness the people’s primal heroism will often be the victor.

The ancient roman military is an exemplar for studying the decisive power of spirit over spears. Quite literally, it was the Roman military’s esprit de corps that defeated the most lethal form of warfare then known to humanity: the Macedonian phalanx of spears that Alexander the Great had developed to great success. In fact, the Roman legion was the first in history to withstand a double-thick phalanx assault. The romans inculcated a heroic spirit with a modular military structure whose divisions were distinguished by their own history, emblem, rituals and heroes. New recruits endeavoured to uphold the honour of past soldiers in their division. The Romans improved on the Spartan warrior culture that celebrated facing down death rather than fleeing. They combined this spirit with several tactical innovations such as adopting the Spanish short sword, which proved gruesomely lethal, and the maniple, a subdivision of a legion, which, containing fewer soldiers, benefited an army’s deployment and fluid movement. This smaller, more adept unit gave the Romans an edge over numerically superior adversaries whose soldiers were trained to prevail through brute, overwhelming force alone. Spirit conquered spear; the phalanx gave way to the legion, the legion to a rapidly responsive unit, a model that modern militaries still emulate.

White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution)

The dominant paradigm of activism is the voluntarist’s ladder of engagement. In this model, there are a series of rungs leading from the most insignificant actions to the most revolutionary, and the goal of organizers is to lead people upward through these escalating rungs. This strategy appears to make common sense, but has a nasty unintended consequence. When taken to its logical conclusion, the ladder of engagement encourages activists to pitch their asks to the lowest rung on the assumption that the majority will feel more comfortable starting at the bottom of the protest ladder, with clicking a link or signing a virtual petition. This is fatal. The majority can sniff out the difference between an authentic ask that is truly dangerous and might get their voices heard and an inauthentic ask that is safe and meaningless. The ladder of engagement is upside down. Activists are judged by what we ask of people. Thus, we must only ask the people to do actions that would genuinely improve the world despite the risks.

Rather than pursuing the idea of the ladder of engagement, I live by the minoritarian principle that the edge leads the pack. This principle means that when trying to shift the direction of the majority, propose ideas from the edges of politics. As Starhawk observes, referencing one of the principles of permaculture farming, “The edge where two systems meet can be a place of great fertility in nature.” Authenticity goes hand in hand with edginess. The campaign ideas that work are the ones that put butterflies in our bellies and thrill us into asking, Would I do that? Would I camp on Wall Street if it meant an end to the financial stranglehold over our democracies? Would I uproot my family and move to Nehalem if it meant liberty, equality, community? Would I build a World Party no matter the cost? The majority does not follow its centre; it undulates toward its inspirational edges.

Listen to your heart when searching for tactics to transpose. Scour the edges of politics and adapt the protest behaviours that make you excited and a bit nervous.

The corollary of this principle is that our political imagination must be in constant flux as it incorporates emergent tactics. This principle is minoritarian because it places a greater emphasis on cultivating tactics that are being developed by political outsiders rather than privileging the majority. The edge, left or right, is where we find the best tactics to transpose into our struggle. It is often these edgy tactical approaches that need to be merely tweaked and applied to a new context for their potential to take off. In the case of Occupy Wall Street, for example, all that was needed to transform the occupation tactic into a social movement was to move occupying out of classrooms and into financial districts. By reminding ourselves that the edge leads the pack, we are often able to see the potential of a new tactic before it has matured.

White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution)

Activism is at a crossroads. We can stick to the old paradigm, keep protesting in the same ways and hope for the best. Or we can acknowledge the crisis, embark on wild experimentation and prepare for revolution.

This book is a call for a spiritual insurrection. The way forward is an amalgamation of the four theories of revolution-structuralism, voluntarism, subjectivism and theurgism-with an emphasis on targeting the mental environment, the collective imagination, in order to achieve socio-political change. I see weakness in our adversary’s reliance on temporal power. It is time to take the struggle to the immaterial, spiritual battlefront. A monopoly on the material and physical realms of life has left the money worshippers overconfident and vulnerable to a social movement that pulls the people’s allegiance out from under the current world. To win this war, we must split the atom metaphorically and unleash the greatest creative force: the wild human spirit. While corporations spread messages of greed or fear or lust, activists of the future raise our eyes to the higher path. We call for a spiritual reorientation. We prophesy a people’s fellowship of equals guided by unity, liberty and mutual aid.

White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution)

In The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings, the philosopher Alain Badiou unravels the “we are the 99 percent” paradox that has plagued our movement: how can we be the 99 percent if only a small fraction of the world’s population ever participated in our general assemblies? The same question will return again and again as the protests grow and yet ultimately never exceed 50 percent of the population. So where does our authority come from if we are not the majority? Rather than

increase the number of people in our movement-a process that destroys our revolutionary impulse-Badiou argues that we must rid ourselves of the electoral notion that authority “emerges in the form of a numerical majority.” Instead, it is from our ability to conjure events like the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street-“historical riots, which are minoritarian but localized, unified and intense”-that the true “general will,” or the collective desires of the people, emerges. Badiou’s argument makes perfect sense when we consider how minuscule was the number of participants on the first day of the Tahrir Square Uprising, and yet those people were better expressing the desires of their entire country than the tens of millions who stayed home.

Many of us already see our people’s movement as the manifestation of the general will. For Badiou, it is now a matter of courageously asserting that we represent an absolute truth about how the world should, and will from now on, be governed. Social movements legitimize themselves in the grand gesture of asserting that we are a “new political possibility.” And we find our strength in, as Badiou puts it, “the authority of truth, the authority of reason.” This explicit connection between impulses to assert authority and our planetary movement may be surprising, but Badiou believes an open embrace of people power is secretly what we desire, if not need. It is “precisely this dictatorial element that enthuses everyone just like the finally discovered proof of a theorem, a dazzling work of art or a finally declared amorous passion-all of them things whose absolute law cannot be defeated by any opinion.” The so-called dictatorial element is the confidence that allows activists to craft a revolutionary meme and deploy it globally, knowing that we’re unleashing an unpredictable series of events that is worth the risk.

Backed by the people’s will, all things are possible. Look historically and see that amazing transformations have happened in a generation or two. During the World Wars of the twentieth century, tremendous social changes (food rationing, conscription, new wartime social rituals) happened in the span of months. Occupy was launched in weeks. The next movement may arise in days. Mobilizations on a scale rarely seen in human history can strike at any moment, if the people are awake.

When my uncle Alfred took me to baseball games in Texas, my favourite part was the human wave: a social game spectators play when the action on the field is getting slow. I’d watch it come toward us. People standing up and sitting down in unison created a powerful visual effect and feeling of connectedness. I watched with great expectation to see how many complete circles we could make as a mass. The human wave was joyful because it required the voluntary participation of anonymous others. It only took off if the time was ripe the mood was right.

Authoritarians think force is the answer to the problem of how to shift the destiny of humanity. And they will be able to convince some people of this. But the coercive path will not lead to global peace. There is no way to conquer the world physically. It is only possible to unite the world spiritually. The spiritual insurrection begins internally with a revealed truth, but it doesn’t stop there: the epiphany spreads contagiously. Violence can be used to divide the world but it cannot be used to unify the world. No army can hold territory if the people are hostile. But on the immaterial plane, at the level of ideas and cultural imagination, civilian activists can make the world’s armies put down their guns, throw their uniforms into the bonfire and welcome the people’s governance with open hearts. By taking the people’s war, a sacred war, to the mental environment, activists of the future do more than change minds: they will shape how reality manifests.

White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution)

Not every person you will meet on the journey of revolution will be on the side of the good or the true. It would be unwise to assume that everyone who protests is a friend of revolution. State and monied forces surveil, discredit and infiltrate in the hope of ultimately extinguishing the flame of collective liberation. The dark side of protest is an ever-present shadow. Some forces operate explicitly and wear the insignias of police power. Others work through deception and mask themselves under false flags, pretending to be on the side of rebels they are secretly working to undermine. We have seen police go so far as to marry and have children with activists they are monitoring. When it comes to revolutionary activism, it can be very difficult to distinguish light from night, newcomers from entryists-forces that enter movements to control them from the inside-and friend from front groups.

Social protest movements can adopt either an open or closed membership model. In open social movements, like Occupy Wall Street, anyone can join the movement through voluntary self-nomination. To be a participant in an open social movement is as easy as claiming you are a member. In closed movements, on the contrary, members are vetted and credentialed by a central authority. This central authority can be a single leader or, as in the case of the Five Star Movement in Italy whose representatives are chosen democratically, reputation can be earned through the votes of others within the movement.

Open social movements suffer a weakness to the Sybil attack, a method of undermining peer-to-peer networks that was first identified by computer scientists. The core difficulty in an open social movement is that if no one authenticates members, an attacker can fabricate multiple identities and distort the true makeup of the movement. Imagine a peer-to-peer computer network that appears to be composed of one hundred distinct computers but in actuality seventy-five of the nodes are bots under the control of a single entity, person or organization. Any information that is transmitted in the social network would likely pass through one or more of these seventy-five hostile nodes. Perhaps the message will be intentionally distorted as it passes on. Moreover, the attacker could broadcast a message from seventy-five seemingly different voices to overly influence the network. Here is how one team of computer scientists describe the Sybil attack and its importance: “an attack against identity in which an individual entity masquerades as multiple simultaneous identities. The Sybil attack is a fundamental problem in many systems, and it has so far resisted a universally applicable solution.” The Sybil attack is elegant, simple and yet difficult to prevent.

Successful revolutions discover methods of distinguishing genuine members and excluding the false. From the letters of St. Paul, it is clear that the early Christians faced two kinds of adversaries: the Romans who persecuted the social movement, and the sectarians who spread doctrinal dissension among the early adherents. For St. Paul, the latter adversary, the false participant, was necessary for the truth to be seen: “I hear that there are divisions among you; and I partly believe it, for there must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized” (1 Corinthians 11:18-19). Front groups mimic sources of discontent to attract genuine people who

sympathize with movement causes. These individuals are drawn into a storyline that is remarkably similar to the lineage of revolution, with one important exception: the actions endorsed are designed to fail. Protest failure wastes resources-protesters’ and organizers’ time along with movement’s reputation.

There is reason to believe that some of the activist organizations operating today are directly funded by secret services, or corporate forces, in a bid to undermine the wider movement. This claim may seem surprising; however, evidence exists that front groups have been deployed by the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States since the Cold War as a conscious strategy to neutralize revolutionary impulses. The most well-researched example, the subject of the book Patriotic Betrayal by Karen M. Paget, is the National Student Association (NSA), a campus activist organization founded in 1947 and with chapters on four hundred campuses during its peak in the 1960s. The NSA was unmasked by as a CIA front group by Ramparts magazine, which in 1967 ran a story declaring, “The CIA has infiltrated and subverted the world of American student leaders.” According to a recent article in the New Yorker by the Harvard professor Louis Menand, the “CIA embedded agents in the NSA, and it worked behind the scenes to insure that pliable students got elected to run the association and that the desired policy positions got adopted.” The fact that the NSA was a front group was revealed during an unrelated investigation by the U.S. House of Representatives into philanthropic foundations. Investigators grew suspicious when they received resistance from the Internal Revenue Service after asking about the J.M. Kaplan Fund. Menand writes in the New Yorker that the chair of the committee, Congressman Wright Patman, accused the CIA of funneling money through the J.M. Kaplan Fund along with several other foundations both real and invented. As a February 1967 Los Angeles Times report notes, “’’The J.M. Kaplan Fund has been operating as a conduit for channeling CIA funds,’ Congressman Patman announced on August 31, 1964.” According to Menand, the CIA ‘approached wealthy people it knew to be sympathetic and asked them to head dummy foundations...expenses were paid by the agency…the dummy foundations were used to channel money to groups the agency wanted to support.” A report from the Congressional Quarterly published on February 24, 1967 reveals that the CIA used at least forty-seven foundations to channel $12,422,923 to organizations. Some of the foundations alleged to have worked with the CIA continue to operate. The J.M. Kaplan Fund, for example, still exists today with a mission “to champion inventive giving that supports transformative social, environmental, and cultural causes.” In 2015 the J.M. Kaplan Fund announced it would fund an “Innovation Prize to support “inter-disciplinary innovation in the fields of cultural heritage, human rights, the built environment, and the natural environment…. The Prize is particularly designed for high-risk, early stage ideas being piloted or prototyped by dynamic visionaries.”

The case of United Against Nuclear Iran, a supposedly non-governmental, non-partisan, non-profit organization, encourages us to keep our eyes wide open. In 2014 United Against Nuclear Iran was sued for defamation, only to have the U.S. department of Justice step in to quash the case, which was thrown out of court. According to the New York Times, the government argued that the “case should be dropped because forcing the group to open its files would jeopardize national security.” Based on this unusual intervention by the U.S. Department of Justice, it is legitimate to ask, as did Glenn Greenwald, a civil liberties lawyer and journalist, if the group has links to Israeli and U.S. intelligence services. We may never know the truth because the defamation case was not allowed to proceed. Still, it is clear that United Against Nuclear Iran is operating in the United States to influence domestic policy and sway public opinion under the guise of being an unaffiliated non-profit activist organization, and yet the U.S.

government argues that opening its files would reveal state secrets and potentially jeopardize national security.

More insidious are front groups that purport to be on the side of the people by mimicking genuine social movements and authentic activist groups. It can be difficult to tell the fake from the real. And, just as many student activists within the NSA did not realize they were actually working for the CIA, it is possible that the activist organization offering you a campaign job is not who it seems. Front groups may try to use you as an unwitting pawn to gather information about fellow activists. One tipoff that you may have been recruited by a front group is being asked to work on protest movements that target foreign governments rather than your home country, since front groups function to divert attention away from domestic revolution. Another indication is that the group is being operated by a well-funded incubator, a wealthy parent organization that spins off multiple movements rather than focusing on a core issue. These incubators often do not disclose the shared connection with their subsidiary creations or the public. A third indication is that the leadership of the parent organization lacks a clear activist lineage or background in protest and yet still has been placed in high positions (on the boards of well-known environmental NGOs, for example).

I’ve been an activist long enough to know that the best way to avoid front groups is to follow your heart, listen to your intuition and fight for your community.

White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution)

Hear, people of the world, I bring glad tidings to you. Tomorrow will be better than yesterday. Your family will prosper. Songbirds will serenade. Eagles will soar. Life will flourish. The humblebees will return and the destitute will be fed. Your neighbor will be your friend. Your communities will be rich with medicine and universities. Work will be plentiful, jobs fruitful and art revered. The tyranny of leaders has ended; the rule of the people has begun. The good times are ahead.

We are the people formerly scattered and divided into distinct creeds, nationalities and classes. We once fought among ourselves. No longer. Now our humanity is evolving. We are finding universal common cause and we are uniting, driven by an unconscious existential necessity, into one social organism with a will to fight for survival. This is our destiny.

I have addressed this epistle to your heroic self. I pray it reaches your heart. Each word is an invitation to accept your fate as partisan in the people’s revolution, an ancient spiritual insurrection that is necessary for the survival of our families, friends and communities. True democracies-people’s democracies-emerge in moments of crisis when everyday people are required by historical necessity to fend for one another, self-govern their communities and look after their collective survival. You are in one of those moments of necessity. Every kind of person is needed and especially those who have felt like outcasts in the old world. Rome was founded by vagabonds and wanderers.

You are being called to join us in taking control of the complex world. We, your brothers and sisters, already operate it. Now a transformation of values is necessary to gently steer the craft of civilization toward safer shores. Unity, liberty and mutual aid will be restored to the pantheon of virtues. We will smash the idolatry of Mammon. Our weapon: the force of an epiphany that you share, an epiphany that leaps each day from person to person and people to people. By liberating ourselves from the fatal assumptions of materialism, consumerism and the suicidal logic of endless growth, our epiphany holds the key to igniting a period of sustained creative innovation in all aspects of life. To mitigate the climate catastrophe, the people will release the wild spirit of humanity and reshape the world for the good of all beings. This project you must accomplish before old-world capitalism sinks humanity’s mother ship. This our Great Task and heroes are needed.

Just as some persons can augur tomorrow’s weather by look at today’s sky, there are those who have an intuition for the Kairos of spiritual insurrections, a knack for sniffing out when the people are yearning and the historical moment is ripe for a mighty heave. You are in one of the magical moments of revolutionary possibility. And with the right manoeuvres by a concerned force of everyday people-a people just like yourself, people who “come as they are” to the struggle-we will kick off a reorientation in the human spirit. We will change the direction of civilization for the next millennia and ensure that our children live in a world that they revere.

I am not promising a utopia. Utopias do not exist, as the etymology of the word attests. Revolutions, however, do happen and have happened many times in history. You are in the midst of one right now. Still, you must know that the old world has left behind a desecrated planet with structures of global governance in disarray and an economic system in decay. The first few decades of the coming insurrection are not going to be easy. But they will be fulfilling-personally, communally and spiritually. And at the end of each day, you will sleep soundly knowing that you fought the righteous fight for the future of our species and the magic of resistance.

The people are rising up. And the people will rise up again and again. It was your fate to be born during these tumultuous times. Now your individual existence is destined to be overshadowed by a multi-generational struggle that stretches back to the dawn of civilization. At stake is humanity’s eternal future. Our people’s revolt has been going on for thousands of years (and in any given century you can find our protests, petitions and uprisings). Now the tempo of our insurrection is increasing under the trifecta of capitalism’s collapse, catastrophic climate change and the spiritual crisis of ultramodernity. We, the people, feel the necessity of social rebirth in our souls and see it in our families. The potency of our movement is growing. Every step forward involves the reinvention of protest.

Yours will be revolution through revelation. That was, after all, the experience of Occupy: a communal spiritual awakening. Without a grand gesture-a divine miracle-there is no guarantee that there will be a world for our children. The good demands that you aim at the highest goal. On the horizon is a diverse and sustained insurrection that establishes global sovereignty for the people.

In the years ahead, everyday folk will take control of our democracies one by one and subordinate the pursuit of money to the stewardship of the newly mundialized world. I shudder at the consequences if the old world persists any longer. And I see that the people are finally up to their great task. The ingredients for the people’s revolution already exists. The tactics and new rituals have been unevenly distributed around the world. The reversal can happen at any moment. For years to come, the anima mundi, the world soul that connects all beings, will coalesce in repeated lightning strikes here

and there and finally everywhere at once. Now you need only unleash the greatest creative force known in history: the collective will to break out of old patterns and establish a new way of being-a new social order.

The end of protest is the beginning of the spiritual revolution within ourselves, the political revolution in our communities, the social revolution on Earth.

White ‘16 (Micah White, editor at Adbusters whose essays and interviews have been published in the New York Times, The Guardian Weekly and Folha de Sao Paulo. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation and has been profiled by the New Yorker, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. He directs Boutique Activist Consultancy-a think tank specializing in impossible campaigns- and is a frequent guest lecturer; The End of Protest: a New Playbook for Revolution)

We are waiting for you.

A great mission rests on your shoulders. I know you did not choose to be born under this shadow of a collapsed earth, at a time of unrest. Your history has selected you all the same. Remember that without our present faith in your future coming, civilization will slide into the madness of scorched earth consumerism. I do not know how long we must wait for you. We shall prepare for you to emerge like lightning.

You are closer than any previous generation of humanity has ever been to achieving people’s democracy. And not just in my country or your country but in every country. A people’s democracy on a planetary scale is within your reach-that is, if you have the courage, creativity and tenacity to seize it.

We are finding our courage on a collective species-wide level. Soon the people will learn to act in a coordinated uprising of seven billion.

Against the backdrop of an increasingly tumultuous world, to be a partisan is to be on the side of the angry, indebted and hungry. It is to use any weapon you have at hand-art if are an artist, code if a hactivist, words if you are a poet or prayer if you are a theurgist-to turn the tide in favour of those who seek a new world order. Be opportunistic. Help when you can. “Strike weakness, avoid strength, be patient.” It does not matter if others don’t know the work you’ve done. Your deeds will live forever in our collective victory.

I have brought a message of peace; I pray it has been heard.

Ross 2k (Assc. Director of the Center for AfroAmerican and African Studies @ U Mich, 2000, Marlon-Professor of English; Pleasuring Identity, or the Delicious Politics of Belonging; NEW LITERARY HISTORY, Vol. 31, No. 4, Is There Life after Identity Politics?; Autumn, 2000; pp.827-850.) \\EG

On the surface, where we like to think that faces exist (note the "face" lurking in "surface"), this equation of "identity politics" with facets may sound pretty innocuous. And in a sense it is. It certainly does not sound scandalous enough to compel the question, "Is there life after identity politics?" My point is that before "identity politics," however we date the emergence of that, there was identity, and wherever there is identity, there is a struggle over power of some sort. In our farfetched prehistory, this may have meant my clan against yours, your tribe against someone else's, or their kinfolk against one another. It may have meant a seemingly simple division of social roles between menfolk and womenfolk,

whereby the pressure of utility--the need for divisions of labor--inexplicably enables one group to assume priority over the other. 4 The face/t nature of identity--our tendency to observe real (in other words, [End Page 832] essential) categories in the surfaces of uniquely materialized faces--constantly reminds us that we judge others' facets by their sur/faces, even when we've never encountered them in person. This fact (of history, not "science") understandably creates a great deal of frustration and anxiety, intellectual and otherwise, in the essays of this volume. After all, centuries of chattel slavery, sexual bondage, ethnic exclusion, colonial theft, warfare, economic exploitation, internment, apartheid, lynching, rape, and downright genocide have revolved around fixing faces into categories based on face/ts of identity. Given that--thanks to "identity politics"--we now, most of us, acknowledge these horrific practices as historical facts, it is easy to forget that the feat of making them horrible facts of history is a hard-won and fragile victory based as much in the face/ts of identity as in these genocidal practices themselves. Given these horrifying facts of history, it is also too easy to forget to what extent we can and do find pleasure in our group identifications, even in, or perhaps especially in, those identities historically burdened by the divisive politics of identity. In other words, it makes a difference that there was a politics of identity before the "identity politics" that we supposedly are about to lose forever. At the risk of splitting hairs, I want to suggest that it is absolutely necessary to distinguish between this longer human history of the politics of identity and the current episode of "identity politics" at issue among these contributors. If, for a moment, we accept the notion that "identity politics" is a brief episode, a particular object quickly fading from the sight-lines of amorphous faces, even if we accept this particular narrative of identity, then we are stillfaced with (yes that metonymic face again) a politics for identity before this particular episode of "identity politics." It is a monstrous mistake to think that the politics of identity is something that happened only recently and is on the decline just because we have a name, "identity politics," for a local, putatively short-lived phenomenon--a phenomenon that in actuality arises out of a long, uncharted human history in which "identity" has always been the heart of "politics," if not self-consciously politicized in now familiar ways. If the politics of identity has been with us since at least the beginnings of recorded human history, then I must ask again, why the urge to prophesy the death of "identity politics"?

Ross 2k (Assc. Director of the Center for AfroAmerican and African Studies @ U Mich, 2000, Marlon-Professor of English; Pleasuring Identity, or the Delicious Politics of Belonging; NEW LITERARY HISTORY, Vol. 31, No. 4, Is There Life after Identity Politics?; Autumn, 2000; pp.827-850.) \\EG

So, each of the contributors to this volume poses a future for or beyond identity riveted to her or his own identifications and misidentifications as an author, scholar, teacher, activist, citizen, family member, lover, and so forth--as a person, in the most identical and thus impersonal sense of that word. (We are all persons under the skin means that we are all the same person after all.) A few of the contributors I have met in person, as we like to say. I'm very much aware of how my physical [End Page 827] encounter with them has some bearing on my sense of who they are as a facet (note the "face" in "facet") of what they write. Most of the contributors, though, I have never met in person. And yet I have a pretty vivid image (a mental image, not a physical one, no doubt an imaginary one) of what identifies them with particular agendas, ideas, feelings, institutions, ideologies, and cultural groups. I don't need an actual face, a curriculum vitae, a biography, a family chronicle, or a genetic map to infer an identity for those I have never met in person. The face is only one aspect (a word that means that which we can look at) of a human body, but it is taken as, if not the key to the soul, at least a locked door through

whose keyhole we can peep to glimpse the messy inner life of an individual as a specimen of the group identifications that she or he has internalized. The face, as the front door of the head, has, not surprisingly, been the most intensely scrutinized body part--whether by gentle scientists cautiously manipulating calipers in the ethnological laboratory or by brutal bigots brandishing guns in the lynching mob. Eyes, nose, ears, forehead, mouth, lips, eyebrows, nostrils, teeth, tongue, all have been calibrated and recalibrated with both the most delicate instruments and the clumsiest weapons of the cartoon, the camera, and the naked eye of the white supremacist. A single squiggle of the pen--to narrow the eyes, broaden the nose, bulge the lips, lower the chin, loll the tongue--can sketch a jew, a jap, a nigger, a spick, a native savage the way a simple shortening of a hemline can turn a chaste lady into a whore who wants it. We should not overlook the paradox here. On the one hand, the face provides the fastest take on the unique individuality of a person--quicker than any fingerprint or DNA test. On the other hand, the face is the key index of identity, a word that names similitude as the foundation and structure of being or striving to become human. Thus, ironically, the face that marks my singular signature of personhood for the "naked" eye also is supposed to demarcate my identity, my similitude in relation to self, family, tribe, clan, gender, sexuality, class, race, region, religion, nation, and ultimately human beingness. This is why we can so facilely speak of individual identity or unique identity, an oxymoron that inexplicably binds the uniqueness of personhood to its sameness within a specifically classifiable group. A face is a facsimile in the truest sense in that it fabricates similitude from the fabric of individuality and likewise stamps unique personhood onto the crowded page of group sameness. To be two-faced is to commit a sin against not only trustworthiness but also identity, for the single face ensures that we are true both to the self and to others; it ensures our kinship to humanity. Just as the face abstracts a full human body into an aspect readable through collective identity, so actual and imagined faces (as synecdochies for the body) [End Page 828] always metamorphose into the codeable facets of identity. My face not only is the barest marker that places me in one race and one gender; it more subtly becomes a passport that confirms my collective status within the politics of class, sexuality, regionalism, and nationalism. I may be born into wealth, but my black face will mark me as a common thief in an upscale store anywhere in the United States. I may be a French citizen, but my Algerian face will mark me for the rifled policeman as an automatic threat to the nation. I may be sexually straight as an arrow, but bashers convinced of my faggoty nature will be confident that perverse desire leers in my eyes. Yes, we all now understand that the self is a canny bricoleur, that the groups that build and inhabit the self are themselves necessarily hybrid formations; we have committed to memory the mantras of the socially constructed nature of identity. None of this matters in the face of a heavy-handed policeman, security guard, customs officer, or any other corporate state bureaucrat who tags your face not in the shadows cast by hybridity but in the bright light of his own--and his culture's--identity know-how. The more "hybrid" he finds the face to be, the less he is able immediately to classify its roots with certainty, the more suspect the face becomes, and the more suspicious the state official has a right to be of the person wearing the face. At that threshold where hybridity theoretically thrives, in the borderlands of state authority, is exactly where the hybrid face is most reduced to a facile code of single identity items: age, height, weight, sex, birthplace, citizenship and thus alien status. The "intersectionality" of these items, rather than unsettling or complicating the state's take on identity, mainly serves to further specify and concretize the face within predetermined identity categories. What is not coded on your passport is coded in your face. The face reveals the definiteness of your "race," broadly defined as your tribal identity roots: it promises that you are who you appear to be in the spittin' image of the passport photo. The corporate state (which means that the state has a body, too, whose heads can meet you face to

face) derives its identity authority not so much from its technologies of legitimation (passports, visas, photography, fingerprinting, birth certificates, radar surveillance, canine patrols, loaded artillery of many sorts) as from us. 1 I submit my face to the camera's eye; I submit my face to the eyes of the customs officer. I agree to be, for however brief a moment, exactly that Black male born in Cuero, Texas on that date that made me an unknowing and unwilling but no less complicit subject of the United States of America's authority.

Ross 2k (Assc. Director of the Center for AfroAmerican and African Studies @ U Mich, 2000, Marlon-Professor of English; Pleasuring Identity, or the Delicious Politics of Belonging; NEW LITERARY HISTORY, Vol. 31, No. 4, Is There Life after Identity Politics?; Autumn, 2000; pp.827-850.) \\EG

Some British romantic poets have suggested that we come to value most that which we feel is about to be forever lost to us. We cherish a particular rainbow because we see it once, briefly, as it fades from view. We cherish the magical notion of a rainbow most at that critical point in history when physics begins to explain away its magic. In their deeply insightful essays, Christopher Nealon, Elizabeth Freeman, and Robyn Wiegman, each in a different way, seek to factor into gender/sexuality [End Page 833] identities the affects and effects of nostalgia, looking back with envy and/or regret, and progress, looking forward with cautious or zealous anticipation. I admire the critical verve of these essays, and would suggest that each does a bit to unpack the romanticization of the past or the future that sometimes operates in progressive "identity politics." In the spirit of their efforts against the grain of romantic thinking, I would suggest that the role that nostalgia plays in what we value can work contrary to the notions we find in British romanticism. We can prospectively, as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, create the sense that something must be in a condition of about-to-be-lost so that its impending disappearance can be more easily judged a failure, a fad, a diversion, a fait accompli. This serves to diminish and thus devalue if not the impact of the phenomenon for the present, at least the chances of its influence into the future. That lingering effect--the affect of nostalgia--is momentary, sure to vanish with the popularity of the thing itself. Behind the dread of anticipating a momentous loss can lurk the desire to lose that thing. Behind the anxiety over the afterwards of "identity politics" is a deeper anxiety fueling a desire to be finished with all identity for good. And, I would argue, to be finished with identity is to be finished with politics. Worrying over the death of "identity politics" is really a matter of worrying that identity may have an afterlife after all--that is, that the frustrations of identity formation and articulation may live on even after this particular mode of multicultural "identity politics" is gone. As we all must recognize, it is hard to make an historical judgment of a phenomenon to which we are in the midst of being indebted. Various authors in this volume--Wiegman, Grant Farred, David Palumbo-Liu, Russ Castronovo, and Eric Lott--have composed here forceful critiques of those on the left who bemoan the detrimental effects of "identity politics" as rigidifying trivial differences, impeding necessary coalitions, enforcing a crippling political correctness, balkanizing the public sphere, and distracting us from economics (narrowly defined) as the structural cause of oppression. 5 If this is so, if our dread is not so much over the impending death of "identity politics" as it is over identity's imminent afterlife, then we have to ask what is feeding this "deeper" anxiety. It would be easy to suggest that some of us are frustrated with "identity politics" because it has failed; thus because we judge it as having failed, we

wish-fulfill its end. As several of the contributors note, this sentiment can be found on the political left as well as on the right. Significantly, the "left" and "right" political orientation is yet another way in which persons' faces are remaindered in impersonal facets, in which people's bodies get personified and then abstracted into the affairs of state as identity categories, for "left" and "right" are shorthand for opposed sides or hands of a political [End Page 834] body, which we dub the "body politic." As the object of critique of most of the essays in this volume, "the left" is an identity formation no less than race, class, gender, sexuality, or nationality, although it tends to be overlooked as such. "No," Walter Benn Michaels and Kenneth Warren might differently exclaim: "The left" is shorthand for a particular cluster of political arguments and agendas, and thus cannot be equated with those identity formations generated by biologically-inspired and affectionally-induced categories of race, sex, sexuality, or caste. As Nealon has nicely theorized, "affect" may operate in much more complicated ways in identity formation than we usually consider, and, as Priscilla Wald forewarns us in her very instructive investigation of the identity implications of the new gene sciences, our "grammar" may be so indebted to racialist and racist habits that any attempt scientifically to separate identity from reason (whether rationalist science or commonsense reportage or logical argumentation) is already infected and plagued. For Professor Michaels, who has a fondness for commonsense rationalism, the notion of what constitutes a legitimate argument cuts the world bilaterally into either (1) a substantive difference of opinion (the proper forum of ideology and the only true procedure for politics), or (2) a mere difference in perspective (a flimsy and false "subject position" articulated in "identity politics" theory). Thus, he further segregates universal conflicts spawned by disagreements in ideology from the merely local "conflicts of interest" spawned by the "false consciousness" (my phrase) of "identity politics." In his argument, Professor Michaels skillfully reduces "identity politics" to merely a difference in point of view, as though groups struggling over political power are so many characters vying for our attention in a realistic novel. It strikes me that Professor Michaels's often stunning argumentation is suffused with a curious nostalgia and preference for the stark bilateral ideology of Cold War politics over the rather multilateral pincers movements of "identity politics," when in fact, as Grant reminds us, the Cold War, the old Left, New Left, and "identity politics" are all messily overlapped in a political and cultural history that is anything but simply bilateral. Cultural differences, according to Professor Michaels, are not ideological differences, because ideology is about the truth value (the universalizable rightness or wrongness) of a stance, whereas cultural identity is about "the politics of survival": "Because the transformation of ideological differences into cultural differences makes the differences themselves valuable, the politics of a world divided into cultures (a world where difference is understood as cultural) must be the politics of survival--a politics, in other words, where the worst thing that can happen will be a culture's death." Professor Michaels is on to something [End Page 835] here, for we do sometimes talk about groups as though they are endangered species. There's a viciously long tradition of this in regard to the Indian groups of the Americas--whereby their nativity as Americans is constantly confused with and predicates a need to save them from extinction. Environmentalists sometimes become zealous mimics of what they think are Native American spiritual practices, allowing their desire to preserve Native American culture stand in the place of any participatory struggle along with American Indians for a fair share of political and economic power. In this disturbing logic, Native Americans peoples are confused with the wildlife and habitats that environmentalists seek to preserve from extinction. More recently, we have heard a lot of talk about saving Black men from extinction. Nonetheless, Professor Michaels seems to overlook the realities feeding such language: the actual endangerment of individuals within these groups because the groups themselves have, in one way or another, been subject to

policies of dispossession, humiliation, and outright genocide as cultural groups. I don't mean this to be hyperbole. Alarm on the left over disappearing cultural practices is driven largely by concern for disappeared people, as individuals and as groups, whose lives have been systematically brutalized in the hope of diminishing their numbers and thus their ability to put their bodies, synecdochically speaking, on the line in opposition to various imperialist and racist agendas. By substituting the idea of the culture for the people who practice the culture, Professor Michaels makes it seem as though interventions by and for people experiencing corporate state brutalities are merely actions to preserve the cultures that they practice, and that come to represent their presence as a collective identity. More to the point, Professor Michaels cleverly inverts the operative logic of the "politics of survival." People do not struggle to survive as a group in order to possess a culture--that is, they do not struggle to survive in order to preserve their cultural identity. To the contrary, they struggle to preserve their cultural identity as a way of surviving, as individuals, the acts committed against them as a cultural group. They recognize that to survive as individuals depends on their ability to cohere, politick, and speak as a collective body experiencing assault because of their group identity. That there is greater strength in numbers and greatest strength in unified numbers is a harsh reality of politics, one not invented by "identity politics," but understood well by those who have had to practice "identity politics" in order to survive and thus to increase the odds of garnering a fair share of the country's resources. Moreover, cultural practices often serve as the glue bonding together disparate individuals in a group, oppressed or otherwise, through an economy of pleasure in a sort of deliciously kindred know-how. [End Page 836] For racially oppressed groups like American Blacks, for instance, such cultural practices constitute a means for survival as well as pleasurable ends whereby the pleasure taken in identificatory cultural practices cements the bonds enabling survival. Call and response, shouting, the spiritual, Black preaching, oratory, signifying, blues, jazz, loud-talk, churchiness, and many other culturally specified manners help to perform and reproduce a will to struggle together against the common foe of racism, always under conditions in which actual solidarity of identity, much less of purpose, is in fact impossible.

Ross 2k (Assc. Director of the Center for AfroAmerican and African Studies @ U Mich, 2000, Marlon-Professor of English; Pleasuring Identity, or the Delicious Politics of Belonging; NEW LITERARY HISTORY, Vol. 31, No. 4, Is There Life after Identity Politics?; Autumn, 2000; pp.827-850.) \\EG

On the one hand, individuals sometimes identify as a group in order to struggle for a share of power against others with whom they disagree and to whom they are subordinated. Black women, for instance, vote in a higher percentage and more consistently than any other identity group for the Democratic Party. They do not do so in order merely to assert a different perspective as an identity group; they do so instead because they understand how their interests, as a collective group, place [End Page 837] them in peril if they do otherwise. Their group identity is the most effective means for them to take sides in an ongoing argument in which others constantly attempt to distort and diminish their share of political, economic, and social resources. If they do not see how their collective interests pivot on asserting their collective identity, then they shall not be able to see the argument before them, much less the ideology operating to buttress that argument. Their collective identity clarifies which side of the argument they have to be on in order to have a political voice. On the other hand, sometimes groups exploit a rational disagreement, creating oversimplified bilateral sides in order to empower themselves as a group by subordinating others as a group. Every time politicians attack "welfare mothers," they

manufacture a bilateral argument of us against them, sometimes a very rationalist one, just to enhance their own political power within the status quo. The interplay between opinion and identity is neither either/or nor both/and but all at once. Rational arguments can be used to mask ideology, and contrarily they can be used to bring it to light, just as the appeal to identity can be exploited to reveal a true difference of opinion or exploited to fabricate a rational disagreement in order to win the upper hand in a competition among groups. Finally, limiting ideology to a rational disagreement of opinion seems to cover over the naked reality of what it means to take sides in any argument not purely defined by rationality, which no argument can be. Such words as "side" and "stance," exploited by Professor Michaels because they are inescapable in our deliberative discourses, again remind us that "left" and "right" are oblique references to the human body, and I would suggest, as such, they are also references not to just individual stray bodies, but to collectivities of bodies comprising the body politic. People take stances--they take sides--because they stand somewhere, and where they always stand in taking a side is in some identity-formation, assumed or affirmed, normalized or marginalized, politic or politicized, covered or exposed by the supposed reasonableness of the side they choose to take. If politics were a forum among equals, like the relative equality of colleagues at some academic conference, the attractiveness of Professor Michaels's argument would be undeniable. Politics, however, is a struggle exactly because inequality exists among individuals constituted as groups. 7 Ideology is not just the content or substance that thought takes in politics, defined as the struggle for power; it is moreover the form (including point of view) and direction (including point of view) that thought takes as it structures and is structured by politics. Contrary to Professor Michaels's assertions, therefore, point of view is not extrinsic to an argument; instead it is an intrinsic facet of an argument as it helps to shape that argument's form, direction, and content. Although it is [End Page 838] much more than this, "identity politics" is, to some extent, about what point of view is available to (and is occupied by) those engaged in a struggle for power, and about how that power will be exercised. It is a matter not just of what is being said, but also who is saying it about whom, and directed toward whose individual and collective benefit and/or detriment.

A2: CEDE THE POLITICAL (AHHHH TRICKY TRICKY DB!)Ross 2k (Assc. Director of the Center for AfroAmerican and African Studies @ U Mich, 2000, Marlon-Professor of English; Pleasuring Identity, or the Delicious Politics of Belonging; NEW LITERARY HISTORY, Vol. 31, No. 4, Is There Life after Identity Politics?; Autumn, 2000; pp.827-850.) \\EG

From the perspective of a face-down between pro-identity and anti-identity leftists, it can indeed appear as though "identity politics" ensures the failure of leftist agendas. The phrase "political correctness" has become a talisman of this prediction of failure. The phrase was coined in the 1970s by lesbian feminists frustrated with the ideological rigidities expressed by some lesbian-feminist separatists. It was quickly picked up on the left more generally, frequently used as a term of affectionate and humorous critique for those who sought to consolidate the left at the expense of healthful dissent and to the effect of a banal uniformity. By the late 1980s, political conservatives had successfully expropriated the term as a way of tarnishing the "liberal" agenda with [End Page 842] the illiberal attributes of social and intellectual intolerance. One of the key successes of the Reaganite movement was exactly this ironic inversion whereby the label "liberal"--those espousing social, political, and economic inclusion based in multicultural "identity politics"--became identified with illiberal values of intolerance, bigotry, and elitist exclusion, previously targeted as the pet province of conservatives. I would concede that the right wing

has been astonishingly successful in exploiting against the left the very differences celebrated as bringing voice to submerged identity groups on the left. I would rush to add, however, that this tactical right-wing success is a result of the strategic emerging triumph of "identity politics," instead of its promised failure. 9 Even while lamenting its rhetoric and values, and while claiming it as a seductive tribal mentality that threatens to deform the face of Western civilization, conservatives in the United States have begun to borrow the practices of "identity politics" to cover over their own internal divisions and to bolster their ideological agenda. The 2000 Republican Convention, with its parade of token racial and sexual minorities up to the podium, was intended to stage inclusiveness as a nationalist value and to reclaim it as a rightful legacy of the "party of Lincoln." As conservatives concede the importance of inclusion based in identity, they implicitly acknowledge how the winnowing of a white numerical majority by the increasing percentage of racial minorities as a total of the population threatens the tried-and-true politics--practiced historically by both Republicans and Democrats--of scapegoating Blacks, the poor, and immigrants to muster an electoral majority of alarmed white voters. It is no longer enough to be able to cast "liberals" as an intolerant group; conservatives must now seize with their raised left hand the value of inclusion itself while with the legerdemain of the right hand behind their back they seek to roll back affirmative action, curtail public assistance, step up incarceration of the poor, privatize public resources, infiltrate religion into the state, stigmatize unions, minimize wages, and generally preserve power, influence, and resources for the less than two percent of the population who truly rule socially, politically, and economically. When national right-wing religious organizations attempted to defeat a local ordinance outlawing sexual orientation discrimination in Ypsilanti, Michigan, for instance, they sent in a few conservative African Americans to lead the charge--allied with some local Black ministers--in the mistaken notion that they could exploit perceived and actual rifts between some white homosexuals and some African Americans. Seeing through the identity charade, Blacks voted for the ordinance in overwhelming numbers. Their rejection of the religious right wing's experiment in racial "identity politics" does not mean that they reject "identity politics" itself, but instead indicates that they possess a [End Page 843] sophisticated identity know-how partly fostered by the triumph of a leftist "identity politics" that their own grassroots movements were instrumental in forging long before academics dreamed up a marketable label for it. In trumpeting the "triumph" of "identity politics," I do not mean that either the left or the identities associated with it have won their fair share of the resources, only that we have begun to master a political discourse of identity that again puts the powerful on alert. As I move to my conclusion, I want to explore this limited triumph a bit further, especially as it relates to an economy of pleasure largely unexamined in identity theory.

PRF

2 – PRF=Questioning of Legit

The right to assemble precedes any other right granted to the people – sovereignty through assembly is critical to withdraw from and question illegitimate structures that don’t act in the name of the peopleButler 18 (Judith Butler – Writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist – “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly” – First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015) – pg. 160-163//Gavsie)That assembly may be called “the people” or it may be one version of “the people”—they do not speak in one voice or even in one language. But they are beings with the capacity to move with whatever technical and infrastructural supports they require to do so (this is, importantly, an insight from disability studies that has concrete implications for thinking through public assembly). And that means that they can resolve to stand still, not to move, even to become immoveable in their desires and their demands. The power to move or be still, to speak and to act, belongs to the assembly prior to, and in excess of, whatever rights a particular government decides to confer or to protect. The coming together of a crowd has, as John Inazu contends, “an expressive function” prior to any particular claim or utterance it may make.4 That very power of government may well become what freedom of assembly opposes, and at that moment, we see the operation of a form of popular sovereignty that is distinct from state sovereignty, and whose task it is to distinguish itself from the latter. How, then, do we think about the freedom of assembly and popular sovereignty? I know that some people have come to consider “sovereignty” a bad word, one that associates politics with a singular subject and a form of executive power with territorial claims. Sometimes it is used as synonymous with mastery, and other times with subordination. Perhaps it carries other connotations, though, that we would not want to lose altogether. One only needs to consider debates about native sovereignty in Canada or read the important work of J. Kēhaulani Kauanui on the paradoxes of Hawaiian sovereignty to see how crucial this notion can be for popular mobilizations.5 Sovereignty can be one way of describing acts of political self-determination, which is why popular movements of indigenous people struggling for sovereignty have become important ways to lay claim to space, to move freely, to express one’s views, and to seek reparation and justice. Although elections are the way that government officials are supposed to represent popular sovereignty (or the “popular will” more specifically), the meaning of popular sovereignty has never been fully exhausted by the act of voting. Of course, voting is essential for any concept of popular sovereignty, but the exercise of sovereignty neither begins nor ends with the act of voting. As democratic theorists have argued for some time, elections do not fully transfer sovereignty from the populace to its elected representatives—something of popular sovereignty always remains nontransferable, marking the outside of the electoral process. If not, there would be no popular means of objecting to corrupt electoral processes. In a sense, the power of the populace remains separate from the power of those elected, even after they have elected them, for only in its separateness can it continue to contest the conditions and results of elections as well as the actions of elected officials. If the sovereignty of the people is fully transferred to, and replaced by, those whom the majority elect, then what is lost are those powers we call critical, those actions we call resistance, and that lived possibility we call revolution. So “popular sovereignty” certainly translates into electoral power when the people vote, but that is never a full or adequate translation. Something of popular sovereignty remains untranslatable, nontransferable, and even unsubstitutable, which is why it can both elect and dissolve regimes. As much as popular sovereignty legitimates parliamentary forms of power, it also retains the power to withdraw its support from those same forms when they prove to be illegitimate. If parliamentary forms of power require popular sovereignty for their very legitimacy, they also surely fear it, for there is something about popular sovereignty that runs counter to, and exceeds or outruns, every

parliamentary form that it institutes and grounds. An [A] elected regime can be brought to a halt or overcome by that assembly of people who speak “in the name of the people,” enacting the very “we” that holds final legitimating power under conditions of democratic rule. In other words, the conditions of democratic rule depend finally on an exercise of popular sovereignty that is never fully contained or expressed by any particular democratic order, but which is the condition of its democratic character. This is an extraparliamentary power without which no parliament can function legitimately, and that threatens every parliament with dysfunction or even dissolution. We may again want to call it an “anarchist” interval or a permanent principle of revolution that resides within democratic orders, one that shows up more or less both at moments of founding and moments of dissolution, but is also operative in the freedom of assembly itself.

3 – AT: “X Cant Access Protest”?

People without access to the public sphere can still gain sovereignty through the assembly of others – protests can be representational for those without the right to appearButler 18 (Judith Butler – Writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist – “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly” – First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015) – pg. 169-175//Gavsie)THESE ACTS OF SELF-MAKING or self-constitution are not the same as representing a people who are already fully formed. The term “the people” does not only represent a preexisting collection of people; if it did, the term would postdate the production of the collectivity itself. Indeed, the term can never adequately represent a collectivity that is in the process of being made or making itself—both its inadequacy and its self-division are part of its enacted meaning and promise. The discursive invocation of the “we” refers then to a people whose needs, desires, and demands are not yet fully known, and whose coming together is bound up with a future that is yet to be lived out. Indeed, such practices of self-determination are not quite the same as acts of self-representation, and yet both of these are at work in exercising the freedom of assembly in which “we the people” is spoken or enacted in some way. That enactment is performative inasmuch as it brings into being the people whom it names, or it calls upon them to gather under the utterance. And this means that performative actions such as these are part of the process called political self-determination, designations of who we are that are also, at the same time, engaged in making that very “we.” Further, the invocation of “we” separates popular sovereignty from state sovereignty; it names and inaugurates that separation time and again. The plurality always breaks with those who are elected, or whose election is questionable to us, or in relation to a state whose representatives we have never had the choice to elect, as is the clear case under occupation and for the undocumented and the partial or noncitizen. So, something that must fail as representation, and that we might call nonrepresentational and nonrepresentative, nearly tautological, becomes the basis of democratic forms of political self-determination—popular sovereignty, distinct from state sovereignty, or, rather, popular sovereignty precisely as it intermittently distinguishes itself from state sovereignty. Popular sovereignty makes sense only in this perpetual act of separating from state sovereignty; thus, it is a way of forming a people through acts of self-designation and self-gathering; these are repeated enactments verbal and nonverbal, bodily and virtual, undertaken across different spatial and temporal zones, and on different kinds of public stages, virtual realities, and shadow regions. The vocalized performative, “we the people,” is surely part of the enactment we are calling self-constitution, but this figure cannot be taken as a literal account of how political self-determination works. Not every act of political self-determination can be translated into that verbal utterance—such a move would make the verbal domain more privileged than any other. In fact, the enactment of political self-determination is necessarily a crossing of the linguistic and the bodily, even if the action is silent and the body is sequestered. How do we, for instance, understand the hunger strike if not precisely as the practiced refusal of a body that cannot appear in public?10 This means that appearing in public in a bodily form is not an adequate figure for political self-determination. At the same time, the hunger strike that is not reported and represented in public space fails to convey the power of the act itself. Prisoner networks are precisely those forms of solidarity that do not, cannot, appear in public in a bodily form, relying predominantly on digital media reports with few, if any, images. Those networks of prisoners, activists, lawyers, and extended kin and social relations, whether in Turkey, in Palestinian prisons and detention camps, or at Pelican Bay in California, are also forms of “assembly” in which those with suspended citizenship exercise a form of freedom through strikes, petitions, and forms of legal and political representation. Even as they do not appear, are not allowed to

appear, they are nevertheless exercising a certain right to appear in public, either before the law or in public space, objecting precisely to the interdiction against appearing in public that is the condition of imprisonment. Given all this, let us recapitulate what this means and does not mean for rethinking the freedom of assembly in relation to popular sovereignty: (1) popular sovereignty is thus a form of reflexive self-making that is separate from the very representative regime it legitimates; (2) it arises in the course of that very separation; (3) it cannot legitimate any particular regime without being separate from it, that is, partially uncontrolled by a regime and not operationalized as its instrument, and yet it is the basis from which legitimate government is formed through fair and inclusive elections; and (4) its act of self-making is actually a series of spatially distributed acts, ones that do not always operate in the same way and for the same purposes. Among the most important of these spatial distinctions is that between the public sphere and spheres of forcible confinement, including the prison where political prisoners, those who have exercised freedom of assembly and freedom of speech, are contained and subjugated. The passage into and out of the public sphere is regulated precisely by legal and police power and the institution of the prison. Further, (5) the enactment of “we the people” may or may not take linguistic form; speech and silence, movement and immobility, are all political enactments; the hunger strike is precisely the inverse of the fed body standing freely in the public domain and speaking—it marks and resists the deprivation of that right, and it enacts and exposes the deprivation that prison populations undergo. The invocation of the people becomes—and must become—contestable at the very moment that it appears. “Appearance” can designate visible presence, spoken words, but also networked representation and concerted acts of silence. A differential form of power that takes both spatial and temporal forms establishes who may be part of such an enactment and the means and methods of such enactments. Confinement implies being spatially separated from public assemblies, but also involves the duration of the sentence, or the unknowable duration of indefinite detention. Since the public sphere is constituted in part through sites of forcible sequestering, the borders that define the public are also those that define the confined, the sequestered, the imprisoned, the expelled, and the disappeared. Whether we are speaking about the borders of the nation-state where the undocumented are confined within refugee encampments, where rights of citizenship are denied or indefinitely suspended, or about prisons where indefinite detention has become the norm, the interdiction against appearing, moving, and speaking in public becomes the precondition of embodied life. The prison is not exactly the inverse of the public sphere, since prisoner advocacy networks traverse the walls of the prison. Forms of prisoner resistance are forms of enactment that by definition cannot be part of the public square, though through networks of communication and proxy representation, they surely can. And yet, no matter how virtual we want to think the public sphere (and there are many good reasons for thinking that), the prison remains the limit case of the public sphere, marking the power of the state to control who can pass into the public and who must pass out of it. Thus, the prison is the limit case of the public sphere, and that freedom of assembly is haunted by the possibility of imprisonment. One may be imprisoned for what one says or one may be imprisoned simply for assembling. Or one may be imprisoned for writing or teaching about assemblies or about freedom struggles, or for teaching about popular struggles for sovereignty, such as teaching about the Kurdish freedom movement in Turkish universities. All of these are reasons why those with the freedom to appear can never fully or adequately represent the people, since there are people who, we know, are missing from the public, missing from this public assembled here in Gezi Park; they are those who must find representation, even as those who seek to represent them risk imprisonment for doing so. And it is not just that there are some people who happen to be missing from the gathering because they had something else to do; rather, there are those who could not have gathered in Gezi Park, or can no longer gather, or who are indefinitely restrained from gathering. That very power of confinement is a way of defining, producing, and controlling what will be the public sphere and who will be admitted to public assembly. It works alongside privatization as a process that seeks to make public space into the entrepreneurial field of the

market-driven state. So though we may wonder why it is that crowds that gather to oppose privatization are broken up and dispersed by police force, gassing and physical assault, we have to remember that the state that is off-loading public space to private enterprise, or that now makes such decisions according to market values, is involved in at least two ways of controlling and decimating public space. Some lament that a movement that begins by opposing privatization inevitably becomes a movement that opposes police violence. But let us try to see that the seizure of public space from popular sovereignty is precisely the aim of both privatization and police assaults on freedom of assembly. In this way as well, the market and the prison work together in a prison industry that, as Angela Davis has clearly shown, works to regulate rights of citizenship—and in the United States this happens in irrefutably racist ways as black men continue to constitute the vast majority of prisoners.11 We can add that the market and the prison work together as well to constrict, decimate, and appropriate public space, severely qualifying Hannah Arendt’s notion of “the right to appear.” That said, I want to return to the theoretical point about freedom of assembly in order to suggest some of the political implications of how we think. My inquiry began with the following questions: In what sense is freedom of assembly a punctual expression of popular sovereignty? And does it have to be understood as a performative exercise, or what Jason Frank calls “the small dramas of self-authorization”?12 I began by suggesting that the performative power of the people does not first rely on words. Assembly only makes sense if bodies can and do gather or connect in some way, and then speech acts that unfold from there articulate something that is already happening at the level of the plural body. But let us remember that vocalization is also a bodily act, as is sign language, and this means that there is no speaking without the body signifying something, and sometimes the body signifies something quite different from what a person actually says.

6 – Aff Method Good

It is impossible to live a good life within a bad life – the act of the performative embodiment of protest by the 1AC calls for new ways of livable lifeButler 18 (Judith Butler – Writes comparative literature on gender theory and is a gender theorist who works at UC Berkeley, Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School, Developed the theory on Gender Performativity, LGBTQ activist – “Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly” – First Harvard University Press paperback edition published in 2018 (copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College in 2015) – pg. 213-219//Gavsie)And yet, if we return to Adorno’s claim that it is not possible to live a good life in a bad life, we see that the term “life” occurs twice, and this is not simply incidental. If I ask how to lead a good life, then I am seeking recourse to a “life” that would be good whether or not I was the one who might be leading it, and yet I am the one who needs to know, and so in some sense it is my life. In other words, already, from within the perspective of morality, life itself is doubled. By the time I get to the second part of the sentence, and I seek to know how to live a good life in a bad life, I am confronted with an idea of life as socially and economically organized. That social and economic organization of life is “bad” precisely because it does not provide the conditions for a livable life, because the livability is unequally distributed. One might wish simply to live a good life in the midst of a bad life, finding one’s own way as best as one can and disregarding the broader social and economic inequalities that are produced through specific organizations of life, but it is not so simple. After all, the life I am living though clearly this life and not some other, is already connected with broader networks of life, and if it were not connected with such networks, I could not actually live. So my own life depends on a life that is not mine, not just the life of the other, but a broader social and economic organization of life. So my own living, my survival, depends on this broader sense of life, one that includes organic life, living and sustaining environments, and social networks that affirm and support interdependency. They constitute who I am, which means that I cede some part of my distinctively human life in order to live, in order to be human at all. Implicit in the question of how to live a good life in a bad life is the idea that we might still think about what a good life might be, that we can no longer think of it exclusively in terms of the good life of the individual. If there are two such “lives”—my life and the good life, understood as a social form of life—then the life of the one is implicated in the life of the other. And this means that when we speak about social lives, we are referring to how the social traverses the individual, or even establishes the social form of individuality. At the same time, the individual, no matter how intensively self-referential, is always referring to itself through a mediating form, through some media, and its very language for recognizing itself comes from elsewhere. The social conditions and mediates this recognition of myself that I undertake. As we know from Hegel, the “I” who comes to recognize itself, its own life, recognizes itself always also as another’s life. The reason why the “I” and the “you” are ambiguous is that they are each bound up in other systems of interdependency, what Hegel calls Sittlichkeit. And this means that although I perform that recognition of myself, some set of social norms is being worked out in the course of that performance that I author, and whatever is being worked out does not originate with me, even as I am not thinkable without it. In Adorno’s Probleme der Moralphilosophie, what begins as a moral question about how to pursue the good life in a bad life culminates in the claim that there must be resistance to the bad life in order to pursue the good life. This is what he writes: “das Leben selbst eben so entstellt und verzerrt ist, dass im Grunde kein Mensch in ihm richtig zu leben, seine eigene menschliche Bestimmung zu realisieren vermag—ja, ich möchte fast so weit gehen: dass die Welt so eingerichtet ist, dass selbst noch die einfachste Forderung von Integrität und Anständigkeit eigentlich fast bei einem jeden Menschen überhaupt notwendig zu Protest führen muss” [“life itself is so deformed and distorted that no one is able to live the good life in it or to fulfil his destiny as a human being. Indeed, I would almost go so far as to say that, given the way the world is organized, even the simplest demand for integrity and decency must necessarily lead almost everyone

to protest”].11 It is interesting that at such a moment Adorno would claim that he almost (fast) goes so far as to say what he then says. He is not sure the formulation is quite right, but he goes ahead anyway. He overrides his hesitation, but keeps it nevertheless on the page. Can it be so simply said that the pursuit of the moral life can and must, under contemporary conditions, culminate in protest? Can resistance be reduced to protest? Or, further, is protest for Adorno in the social form that the pursuit of the good life now takes? That same speculative character continues as he remarks that “Das einzige, was man vielleicht sagen kann, ist, dass das richtige Leben heute in der Gestalt des Widerstandes gegen die von dem fortgeschrittensten Bewusstsein durchschauten, kritisch aufgelösten Formen eines falschen Lebens bestünde” [“The only thing that can perhaps be said is that the good life today would consist in resistance to forms of the bad life that have been seen through and critically dissected by the most progressive minds”].12 In the German, Adorno refers to a “false” life, and this is translated into English as “the bad life”—of course, the difference is quite important, since for morality, the pursuit of the good life may well be a true life, but the relation between the two has yet to be explained. Further, it seems that Adorno appoints himself to the elect group of those who are progressive and capable enough to conduct the critical activity that must be pursued. Significantly, that practice of critique is rendered synonymous with “resistance” in this sentence. And yet, as in the sentence above, some doubt lingers as he makes this set of proclamations. Both protest and resistance characterize popular struggles, mass actions, and yet in this sentence, they characterize the critical capacities of a few. Adorno himself wavers slightly here even as he continues to clarify his speculative remarks, and he makes a slightly different claim for reflexivity: “dieser Widerstand gegen das, was die Welt aus uns gemacht hat, ist nun beileibe nicht bloss ein Unterschied gegen die äussere Welt … sondern dieser Widerstand müsste sich allerdings in uns selber gegen all das erweisen, worin wir dazu tendieren, mitzuspielen” [“This resistance to what the world has made of us does not at all imply merely an opposition to the external world on the grounds that we would be fully entitled to resist it.… In addition, we ought also to mobilize our own powers of resistance in order to resist those parts of us that are tempted to join in”].13 What Adorno might be said to rule out at such moments is the idea of popular resistance, of forms of critique that take shape as bodies amass on the street to articulate their opposition to contemporary regimes of power. But also, resistance is understood as a “no-saying” to the part of the self that wants to go along with (mitzuspielen) the status quo. It is understood both as a form of critique that only the elect few can undertake and as a resistance to a part of the self that seeks to join with what is wrong, an internal check against complicity. These claims limit the idea of resistance in ways that I myself would not finally be able to accept. For me, both claims prompt further questions: What part of the self is being refused, and what part is being empowered through resistance? If I refuse that part of myself that is complicit with the bad life, have I then made myself pure? Have I intervened to change the structure of that social world from which I withhold myself, or have I isolated myself? Have I joined with others in a movement of resistance and a struggle for social transformation? These questions have, of course, been posed to Adorno’s views for some time—I remember a demonstration in Heidelberg in 1979 when some groups on the left were contesting Adorno, protesting his limited idea of protest! For me, and perhaps for us today, we might still query in what way resistance must do more than refuse a way of life, a position that finally abstracts the moral from the political at the expense of solidarity, producing the very smart and morally pure critic as the model of resistance. If resistance is to enact the very principles of democracy for which it struggles, then resistance has to be plural and it has to be embodied. It will also entail the gathering of the ungrievable in public space, marking their existence and their demand for livable lives, the demand to live a life prior to death, simply put. Indeed, if resistance is to bring about a new way of life, a more livable life that opposes the differential distribution of precarity, then acts of resistance will say no to one way of life at the same time that they say yes to another. For this purpose, we must reconsider for our times the performative consequences of concerted action in the Arendtian sense. Yet in my view, the concerted action that characterizes resistance is sometimes found in the

verbal speech act or the heroic fight, but it is also found in those bodily gestures of refusal, silence, movement, and refusal to move that characterize those movements that enact democratic principles of equality and economic principles of interdependency in the very action by which they call for a new way of life that is more radically democratic and more substantially interdependent. A social movement is itself a social form, and when a social movement calls for a new way of life, a form of livable life, then it must, at that moment, enact the very principles it seeks to realize. This means that when it works, there is a performative enactment of radical democracy in such movements that alone can articulate what it might mean to lead a good life in the sense of a livable life. I have tried to suggest that precarity is the condition against which several new social movements struggle; such movements do not seek to overcome interdependency or even vulnerability as they struggle against precarity; rather, they seek to produce the conditions under which vulnerability and interdependency become livable. This is a politics in which performative action takes bodily and plural form, drawing critical attention to the conditions of bodily survival, persistence, and flourishing within the framework of radical democracy. If I am to lead a good life, it will be a life lived with others, a life that is no life without those others; I will not lose this I that I am; whoever I am will be transformed by my connections with others, since my dependency on another, and my dependability, are necessary in order to live and to live well. Our shared exposure to precarity is but one ground of our potential equality and our reciprocal obligations to produce together conditions of livable life. In avowing the need we have for one another, we avow as well basic principles that inform the social, democratic conditions of what we might still call “the good life.” These are critical conditions of democratic life in the sense that they are part of an ongoing crisis, but also because they belong to a form of thinking and acting that responds to the urgencies of our time.

Debate Bad

Debate is bad Hoofd 2007 (Ingrid M. Hoofd, National University of Singapore, “The Neoliberal Consolidation of Play and Speed: Ethical Issues in Serious Gaming” in “CRITICAL LITERACY: Theories and Practices Volume 1: 2, December 2007,” p. 6-14, 2007)//robf

Serious games are a fascinating next stage in the continuous exploitation of digital media technologies over the last decades for training, learning, and education. As formal education and training always involves the transmission and repetition of certain culturally and socially specific sets of skills and moral values, it would be of paramount importance to ensure that developments within the serious gaming industry are in step with the effects of the good intentions of nurturing people within a social framework that emphasises a fair, culturally diverse, and blooming society. In this light, it is interesting that from the very advent of the information society, digital technologies have been depicted as central to the development of a more just and equal society by harbouring the promise of bridging gaps between classes, races, and genders locally as well as globally. Driven by the vision of this utopian potential of new technologies, the education industry and larger policy organisations have been exploring the pedagogical possibilities of these technologies both in- and outside the traditional classroom for the last twenty-five years. Indeed, the implementation of increasingly more sophisticated and technologically mediated methods and tools for learning and education, takes as its starting point the techno-utopian assumption that (new) interactive technologies themselves are the primary harbingers of a fair and blooming society through facilitating (student) empowerment. This paper takes issue with this widespread techno-utopian perspective by seeking to shed light on the larger ethical implications of serious gaming. It will do so through foregrounding the relationship between global injustices, and the aesthetic properties and discourses of serious gaming. So while reframing serious games themselves in a new ethical perspective constitutes the main objective of this paper, it is equally important to situate serious games within a larger political discourse on the teaching of new skills. Firstly then, policy papers and academic studies on serious games all display an assumption of the inherent neutrality of gaming technologies, as if these technologies were mere tools equally suitable for all. What also becomes apparent in the language used in these studies and proposals, is how this instrumentalist vision of gaming technologies for learning goes hand in hand with a particular neo-liberal assumption of what constitutes a fit individual, and by extension of what the hallmarks of a ‘healthy’ society may be. For instance, in the European Union study “Serious Gaming – a fundamental building block to drive the knowledge work society” by Manuel Oliveira on the merits of serious games for education, justification runs along the lines of gaming ‘encouraging risk-taking and a winning attitude’ and creating a ‘performance-oriented individual.’ Similarly, Michael Guerena from the US Orange County Department of Education proposes in one of the Department’s web-casts that serious games instil “twenty-first century skills” like risk-taking, adaptability, self-direction, interactive communication, and ‘planning and managing for results’ in the students through the “channelling of fun.” Likewise, the UK-based Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association last year published their white paper Unlimited learning - Computer and video games in the learning landscape, in which they argue that serious games will “create an engaged, knowledgeable, critical and enthusiastic citizenry” whose “work practices will be geared towards networked communication and distributed collaboration” (49). Concerns around the ethical implications of serious games regarding their entanglements with larger social (gendered, classed, and raced) inequalities have until now largely been coined in terms of game content or representation. In a recent case in Singapore, the government’s proposition of using the RPG

Granado Espada in secondary school history classes was followed by an outcry from various local academics condemning the stereotypical characters and simplistic representation of medieval Europe in the game. Likewise, various authors have critiqued current serious games not only because of simplistic representation of characters and surroundings, but especially because simulations generally tend to oversimplify complex social problems and situations. Gibson, Aldrich, and Prensky’s Games and Simulations in Online Learning (vi - xiv) for instance discuss these demerits of serious games. While such a critical analysis of how game content contributes to the reproduction of dominant discourses is definitely helpful, I would argue that the aesthetics of serious games involve much more than mere content. Instead, this paper will argue that the formal quest for instantaneity that research around digital media has displayed through the development of interactive technologies for education is already itself by no means a neutral affair. This is because the discourses that inform this quest and that accompany this search for instantaneity arguably enforce the hegemony of a militaristic, masculinist, humanist, and of what I will call a ‘speed-elitist’ individual. Moreover, I suggest that the propensity of current games to have sexist or racist content, is merely symptomatic of gaming technology’s larger problematic in terms of the aesthetic of instantaneity. In short, (serious) computer games have become archives of the discursive and actual violence carried out in the name of the utopia of technological progress and instantaneity under neo-liberal globalisation. This archival function is possible exactly because cybernetic technologies promise the containment and control of such supposedly accidental violence, while in fact exacerbating these forms of violence. This leads me to conclude that such violence is in fact structural to new serious gaming technologies, rather than accidental. I will elaborate this hypothesis by looking at various theorists who seek to understand this structural imperative of new technologies, and their relationship to the neo-liberalisation of learning and education. In turn, I will look at how this problematic structural logic informs the two popular serious games Real Lives and Global Warming Interactive. Secondly, the advent of serious gaming interestingly runs parallel with the contemporary dissemination and virtualisation of traditional learning institutions into cyberspace. While the existence of learning tools in other areas of society besides actual learning institutions has been a fact since the advent of schools, the shift of methods of learning into online and digital tools is symptomatic of the decentralisation of power from ‘old’ educational institutions and its usurpation into instantaneous neo-liberal modes of production. I am summarising the work of Bill Readings on the university here, because it sheds light on the shift in education tout court towards virtualisation, and its relationship to the ‘new hegemony of instantaneity.’ In The University in Ruins, Readings argues that the shift from the state-run university of reason and culture to the present-day global knowledge enterprise must mean that the centre of power in effect has shifted elsewhere. More important, says Readings, is that the function of the new ‘university of excellence,’ one that successfully transforms it into yet another trans-national corporation, relies on the fantasy that the university is still that transcendental university of culture in service of the state and its citizens. So the invocation of the fantasy of an ‘originary’ university of reason and progress, that produces unbiased knowledge for the good of all, facilitates the doubling of the production of information into other spaces outside the university walls proper. While Readings surely discusses only higher education institutions in The University in Ruins, I would argue that the logic of a shifting centre of power from the state into the technocratic networks and nodes of speed operates quite similarly in the case of primary, secondary, and other types of formal education. Indeed, the current virtualisation of learning and the emphasis on lifelong learning marks a dispersal of traditional learning institutions into online spaces. This dispersal works increasingly in service of the ‘speed-elite’ rather than simply in service of the nation-state. The heralding of serious

games for education can therefore be read as a symptom of the intensified reach of the imperatives of neo-liberal globalisation, in which consumption enters the lives of locally bound as well as more mobile cosmopolitan citizens of all ages through harping on the technological possibility of the confusion of production and play. Through the imperative of play then, production increasingly and diffusely colonises all niche times and -spaces of neo-liberal society. In other words, (the emphasis on) play allows not only a potential increase in production and consumption through the citizen-consumer after her or his formal education of ‘skills’, but starkly intensifies flows of production and consumption already at the very moment of learning. While such an integration of play and production is generally understood within the framework of the neo-liberal demand for the circulation of pleasure, it is useful here to widen the scope from understanding the learner as a mere consumer of pleasure into the larger set of problematic interpellations that marks subjugation in contemporary society. Intriguingly, a host of research has emerged over the past years pointing towards the intricate relationship between subjugation, military research objectives, and videogame development. Such research suggests an intimate connection between the C3I logic and humanist militaristic utopias of transcendence, which incriminates interactive technologies as inherently favouring culturally particular notions of personhood. In the case of computer- and video-games for entertainment, researchers have argued that the aesthetic properties of gaming technologies give rise to so-called ‘militarised masculinity.’ In “Designing Militarized Masculinity,” Stephen Kline, Nick DyerWitheford, and Greig de Peuter argue for instance that interactive games open up very specific subject positions that “mobilize fantasies of instrumental domination” (255). This specific mobilisation that video-games invoke, is not only due to the remediation of violent television- and film- content, but also due to the intimate connection between gaming- and military industries which grant these technologies their particular cybernetic aesthetic properties (see also Herz 1997). This element of militarisation partly informs my concept of ‘speed-elitism.’ I extrapolate the idea of ‘speed-elitism’ largely from the works of John Armitage on the discursive and technocratic machinery underlying current neo-liberal capitalism. In “Dromoeconomics: Towards a Political Economy of Speed,” Armitage and Phil Graham suggest that due to the capitalist need for the production of excess, there is a strong relationship between the forces of exchange and production, and the logic of speed. In line with Virilio’s argument in Speed and Politics, they argue that various formerly the less connected social areas of war, communication, entertainment, and trade, are now intimately though obliquely connected. This is because all these forces mutually enforce one another through the technological usurpation and control of space (and territory), and through the compression and regulation of time. Eventually, Armitage and Graham suggest that “circulation has become an essential process of capitalism, an end in itself” (118) and therefore any form of cultural production increasingly finds itself tied-up in this logic. So neo-liberal capitalism is a system within which the most intimate and fundamental aspects of human social life – in particular, forms of communication and play – get to be formally subsumed under capital. In “Resisting the Neoliberal Discourse of Technology,” Armitage elaborates on this theme of circulation by pointing out that the current mode of late-capitalism relies on the continuous extension and validation of the infrastructure and the neutral or optimistic discourses of the new information technologies. Discourses that typically get repeated – like in the policy papers – in favour of the emerging speed-elite are those of connection, empowerment and progress, which often go hand in hand with the celebration of highly mediated spaces for action and communication. Such discourses however suppress the violent colonial and patriarchal history of those technological spaces and the subsequent unevenness brought about by and occurring within these spaces. I would claim that Armitage’s assessment of accelerated circulation, and the way new

technologies make play complicit in the techno-utopian endeavour of speed, is crucial for understanding the larger ethical issues surrounding serious games. It is helpful at this point to look at Paul Virilio’s and Jacques Derrida’s work because this helps us understand the complicity of the aesthetics of interactive and visually oriented gaming technologies in speed-elitism. In “Cyberwar, God, and Television,” Paul Virilio talks about the simulation industry’s function of “exposing [one] to the accident in order not to be exposed to it” (322). What is according to him ‘accidented’ through the virtualisation of accidents and violence, for instance in video-games, is reality itself. This ‘accident of reality’ that virtuality brings about, argues Virilio, is due to the fact that simulation technologies fragment space through their property of instantaneous connection with previously far-away places. The hallmark of this fragmentation is therefore that it brings about an intensification of forms of in- and exclusion through actual disconnection. Eventually, there will be “two realities: the actual and the virtual” (323), and I would claim that consequently the privileged speed-elite will be able to live in the illusion of engaging with social reality that the virtual grants, at the cost of the (s)lower classes who will suffer the social and ecological effects of the accidents of virtualisation. The illusion of mastery for Virilio consists in the sense of the “incorporation of the world within oneself” that “real time technologies permit” (328) due to their militaristic compulsion that seeks to “reduce the world to the point where one could possess it” (329). I maintain that these statements spell out exactly the function and logic of serious gaming. Virilio elaborates the idea of the ‘museum of accidents’ later in his infamously apocalyptic “The Museum of Accidents.” His evaluation of certain visual simulation technologies as ‘museums of accidents’ and in particular in how these accidents involve the increasing stratification of individuals within a new global imperative of speed, resonates well with Jacques Derrida’s work on the ‘archiving’ properties of new technologies and their implications. In Monolingualism of the Other, or The Prosthesis of Origin, Derrida parallels the concept and the technique of memory and archiving with these new technologies. He argues that the tragedy of the disappearance of various cultures calls forward a desire in the R&D community – like teachers and developers of serious games – to prevent this from happening by using the immense possibilities of presentday archiving technologies. However, he cautions that this scientific quest to rescue through archiving languages and cultures from going extinct due to ongoing globalisation processes, once more presupposes that cultures and peoples are pre-given static entities, or simple identities, that can then be simply ‘stored’. Moreover, it falsely presupposes that archiving technologies are neutral tools, as well as that the ideology behind this archiving desire is a universal or neutral one. But since the very technicity of archiving is one that is already entangled with the same dominant culture that archives, the necessary translation or recognition of materials fit for archiving will have as its logical parameters this dominant culture. This kind of messianistic desire, as much as the quest for understanding the other (or rather, the claim that one does empathise with and understand the other), is therefore actually a violent, neocolonialist, and possessive sort of encapsulation. Similarly, the well-intended pedagogical aim to ‘salvage otherness’ from the tragedy of disappearance under globalisation works completely in accordance with that very tragedy. One could compare this well-intended encapsulation for instance with the anthropological display of artefacts of certain cultures in Western museums. It may be far more important to save actual humans than to salvage, understand, and store their perceived culture or language, and Derrida warns that the choice for one generally does not imply a choice for the other. This ‘virtual empathy’ that new simulation technologies endow, which sadly works in accordance with the ‘structural accident’ of disenfranchisement under neoliberal globalisation, is indeed present in the aesthetic of many serious games currently available. The widely praised and sympathetic game Real Lives is a good example of this. The pedagogical objective of Real

Lives, as its website declares, is to “learn how people really live in other countries.” The producers maintain that Real Lives is an “empathy-building world” which will grant the students an “appreciation of their own culture and the cultures of other peoples.” The game opens with assigning a character who just got born at any place in the world to the player. Since the attribution of the character is based on actual statistical possibilities of place of birth and economic status, the character has a high propensity of being born poor in countries like India, Mexico, or in other highly populated places. During the course of the game, the player can take actions like deciding to go to school or staying home to help her/his parents, which hobbies to take up, what job to take, and so forth. The game time takes one-year leaps in which the player can see the outcome of outside events, like disease or floods, and of his or her own actions. The software shows a map of the character’s birth region and its statistics, like population density, gross annual income, currency, health standards, and etcetera. The character is also assigned traits, like happiness, athleticism, musicality, health, and so on. While the player’s actions definitely influence the health and economic status of the played character and her family, the potentially interesting part of the game lies in the fact that events and situations that are ostensibly beyond the player’s control influence the outcomes. Such a game structure potentially endows the student with a sense that simple meritocratic discourses are flawed. However, what is also obvious in Real Lives, is that the attribution based on statistical facts may very easily lead to a simplistic view of a country and its inhabitants. While India for instance surely has many poor people and girls often are not allowed to go to school, to have the student chance time and again on these representations can easily lead to the repetition of stereotypes and a failure to grasp the complexity of Indian society. More serious however is the formal technological mode of objectification and its distancing effects that the game generates. This objectification resides in how the ‘clean’ interface – the ‘flight simulator’ like visual layout on the screen with the overview of categories and character attributes, the major actions and events in the character’s life induced at the stroke of a few keys – in reality grants the player a sense of control by engaging with a machine programmed in such a way that it appears to let the student identify with and act out his or her empathy vis-à- vis a ‘real’ child in need. This discursive confusion of reality and virtuality is for instance also present in the web-game Darfur Is Dying, in which the player and virtual character get confused through the problematic claim that you can “start your experience (as a refugee)” and that it offers a “glimpse of what it is like” (emphases mine) to be a refugee. At the same time, the actual children in need on the ground disappear from the player’s radar, turning them into a distant and vague large group of ‘others’ who are effectively beyond the student’s reach of immediate responsibility. As Virilio suggests, the time spend through engaging in virtual empathy eclipses the ‘real accidents’ from the student’s view and experience. What is more, Real Lives eclipses the larger social and economical relationships between the material production and consumption of such virtual engagement and the continuous exploitation and ‘museumising’ of peoples on the brink of (social, economical, and environmental) accident, disenfranchisement, and even death. While relatively well-off youth may indulge in turning other peoples’ distress into a ‘fun’ educational game, such indulgence is precisely based on a neo-liberal structure that exploits the environment, especially of the poor, and allows for the outsourcing and feminisation of ever cheaper third-world labour. As Derrida proposed, the archiving into visual technologies of certain cultures and peoples threatened with extinction does not at all imply saving these actual people and their cultures – in fact, it may very well do exactly the opposite. Long-term minor attitudinal changes in the student notwithstanding, the disconnecting properties of the new cybernetic technologies of speed that Real Lives is part of therefore displace the effect of the producer’s and student’s good intentions and empathy into an instantaneous technocratic

violence that effectively ‘plays with lives.’ Another telling example of this displacement of well-intended interactive play is the environmental game Global Warming Interactive – CO2Fx. This web-based game, funded by the United States National Science Foundation and developed by a group of people from various American consultancies and educational organisations, aims at teaching the student about the kinds of decision making involved in global warming. The game invariably starts with a map of the country of Brazil in the 1960s, and gives statistics about the carbon emission, air temperature, and general welfare of the population. The player can then control government budget expenditures for science, agriculture, social services, and development initiatives, after which the system jumps ten years into the future, generating results based on these expenditures. The game eventually ends by showing the relative increase in temperature in the virtual year of 2060, warning the player that more international cooperation is required to really tackle global warming. The major issue with Global Warming Interactive is once more that it completely obscures the relationship between the computing technology itself that allows the CO2Fx simulation, and global warming. A telling moment of this dissimulation is when the game urges the player to “switch off the television!” because television uses quite a bit of energy, while the energy consumption of the infrastructure, mode of production, student consumption, and tools that sustain the game itself is being blissfully ignored. Armitage’s claim that increasingly modes of thought, learning, and exchange are formally subsumed under capital through the new technological infrastructure certainly rings true here. The game is also a stark simplification of how government decisions affect a complex issue like climate change, and is fraught with problematic and often techno-utopian assumptions about how to tackle the climate change problem. A good example of this assumption is the recurring recommendation throughout the game to the player to spend more money on scientific research, as this expenditure supposedly promises to solve or alleviate the warming problem. The speed-elitist, humanist, and techno-utopian discourses that permeate American academia and consultancy firms are clearly reflected in Global Warming Interactive, leaving the student inculcated with a currently dominant belief system that lies precisely at the base of environmental pollution and economical disenfranchisement that urges certain groups of poor people in a country like Brazil to survive on environmentally unfriendly business solutions, like slash-burning the forests. One is also left to wonder why the game uses the country of Brazil in the first place, and not the United States – arguably the largest global polluter today. There is indeed a problematic (neo)colonialist undertone to the current one-country version of Global Warming Interactive. Extending the content of the game, as the developers seeks to do, by including more countries in the simulation, would not alleviate this problem, but would simply concur with the actual contemporary shift from previous colonialist social hierarchies into speed-elitist hierarchies. But more seriously, giving the player simulated government omnipotence through the Virilian ‘museumisation’ of the economical and social structures underlying global warming in that ‘other’ country of Brazil, grants a the player an illusion of mastering and of dealing constructively with the major ‘accident’ of climate change and its impact on the (s)lower classes while actually fuelling it. Meanwhile, player or student empathy is displaced into instantaneous networks of ever increasing neo-liberal circulation and production. Scholars like David Leonard in “’Live in your world, play in ours?’: Race, video games, and consuming the other” and Lisa Nakamura in “Race in/for Cyberspace” have in the past argued that many entertainment games contain elements of racial and gendered stereotyping allowing the gamer to engage him or herself on the basis of what Nakamura calls ‘identity tourism’ and Leonard calls ‘blackface.’ These problematic modes of (dis)identification allow the user not only to enter the game via dominant modes of representation, but also entail a form of ‘safely experiencing the other’ through cybernetic technologies, where the (imagined) other

effectively becomes consumed through the high-tech prosthesis of the self. Neither Nakamura nor Leonard however elaborate how and why this element of a ‘safe prosthesis’ appears to be a central aesthetic of gaming technologies. After all, much media content suffers from stereotypical representation, and one could argue in line with Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other that media are always prostheses to the self. I would argue that what is specific about serious gaming technologies that emerges from my interpretations of Derrida’s, Armitage’s, and Virilio’s assessments is the illusion of control by the self that these technologies facilitate, due to their element of interactive instantaneity. It is the new technologies’ aesthetic properties themselves – rather than simply a narrative and its repetition of dominant ideologies – that grant a ‘fantasy of connection, wholeness, and mastery’ through interactivity as if it was an immediate and transparent property of the gaming subject. What is therefore at work in serious games like Real Lives and Global Warming Interactive is a form of double objectification. The illusion of constructive engagement with a pressing social issue through these seemingly ‘clean’ and ‘neutral’ technologies, combined with the distancing effect brought about by these technologies from their actual (social and environmental) implications, make the gamer complicit in the neo-liberal endeavour that paradoxically precisely leads to contemporary speed-elitist disenfranchisement. In short, interactive technologies like serious games bring about a displacement of good intentions through claims of technological progress and empowerment for all. So despite (or perhaps because of) the good intentions of game designers and publishers, these games then in fact exhibit the doubling of the colonialist logic that inspired humanist narratives of progress. This doubling runs parallel to the virtualisation of learning that is taking place under neo-liberal globalisation and its speed-elitist modes of intensified in- and exclusion this shift incurs. These games can therefore, in line with Virilio’s argument, be understood as attempts at (eventually unsuccessfully) containing the accident of the real and its social repercussions brought about by these technologies of speed. To conclude, the development of serious games is implicated in what Derrida in Monolingualism refers to as a ‘disappearance’ of those cultures, idioms, and ways of being that do not conform to these tightening particular hegemonic structures of acceleration. ‘Healthy’ personhood becomes singularly understood through a restrictive and stratifying emphasis on mediated learning as more pleasurable, as well as on humanistic character traits like creativity, activity, risktaking, mediated empathy, mobility, and competitiveness, as the rhetoric in policy papers and optimistic studies also shows. Such particular valorisations are problematic because they recreate a meritocratic, masculinist, militaristic, and speed-elitist hierarchy between economically as well as otherwise diverse groups and communities within a global community which understands individuals solely in terms of active and productive citizenship. In line with this, serious games themselves can in their very form be understood as Virilian ‘museums of accident.’ This means that the virtualisation of social engagement and sense of social and environmental ‘accident control’ that these games call forward is obliquely yet intrinsically related to new modes of ‘accidenting’ material reality. This potentially disenfranchises those who are not (positively) addressed within these properties of subject-formation, and leads to increasing levels of stress and competitiveness in individuals and students as it becomes progressively more imperative for individual survival to conform to the demands of the speed-elite. Without doubt, this paper has analysed only a few serious games currently available and surely more analyses need to be conducted. I suggest nonetheless that since the problematic of speed, which gives rise to double objectification, is structurally present in all visual interactive technologies, it is by default at work in all serious games. As I suggested at the start, the pedagogical and ethical enterprise of serious gaming is therefore serious indeed, as its aesthetic properties become increasingly implicated in precisely the opposite of what

serious gaming promises to help make possible – the fair, culturally diverse, and blooming society that we all want.

Case Neg

Political progress happens through institutions---recognizing that doesn’t produce complacency---building politics is far more valuable than theorizing about anti-institutional black agencyReed 15 – professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania

(Adolph, “The James Brown Theory of Black Liberation,” https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/10/adolph-reed-black-liberation-django-lincoln-selma-glory/)

What approach to political action can follow from the contention that the Thirteenth Amendment was empty window dressing and that black slaves’ emancipation was like James Brown’s backward, Nixonian ideal of self-help?∂ The perspective that shrivels the scope of black political concern to expressing racial “agency” similarly diminishes the significance of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the US Supreme Court’s 1944 Smith v. Allwright decision that outlawed the infamous “white primary” (and exponentially increased black voting in the South), the 1954 Brown decision, 1964 Civil Rights law, and 1965 Voting Rights Act as if all were in some twisted way racially inauthentic because acknowledging their significance as moments in the struggle for social justice detracts from the James Brown Theory of Black Liberation.∂ That ideological commitment is what impelled Ava DuVernay to make the seemingly gratuitous move of falsifying Martin Luther King Jr’s relationship with the Johnson administration around the Selma campaign: “I wasn’t interested in making a white savior movie,” she replied to critics, “I was interested in making a movie centered on the people of Selma.”∂ Of course, she doesn’t do the latter either, but her commitment to not “making a white savior movie” also led her to misconstrue the tension between the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Selma, which stemmed precisely from the SNCC activists’ objection that King and his organization maintained secret, backdoor dealings with the Johnson administration.∂ The psychobabbling bromides that elevate recognition and celebration of black agency rest on an ideological perspective that in practical terms rejects effective black political action in favor of expressive display. It is the worldview of an element of the contemporary black professional stratum anchored in the academy, blogosphere, and the world of mass media chat whose standing in public life is bound up with establishing a professional authority in speaking for the race. This is the occupational niche of the so-called black public intellectuals.∂ The torrent of faddish chattering-class blather and trivial debate sparked by Michael Eric Dyson’s recent attack on Cornel West in the New Republic illustrates the utter fatuity of this domain, as if there were any reason to care about a squabble between two freelance Racial Voices with no constituency or links to radical institutions between them.∂ In an illustration of what this game is all about, the Nation, sensing space for competing brands, projected some Alternative Black Voices into this circus of spurious racial representation in a piece entitled “6 Scholars Who Are ‘Reimagining Black Politics.’ ”∂ Twenty years practically to the week before publication of Dyson’s essay, I took stock of what was then the newly confected category of the Black Public Intellectual and noted that the notion’s definitive irony was that its avatars were quite specifically not organically rooted in any dynamic political activity and in fact emerged only after opportunities for real connection to political movements had disappeared. Nor were the “public intellectuals” connected to any particular strain of scholarship or criticism.∂ Rather, their status was no more than a posture and a brand. By the early 2000s, it was possible to see young people entering doctoral programs with their sights on the academy as a venue for pursuing careers as public intellectuals — i.e. among the free-floating racial commentariat. And that was before the explosion of the blogosphere and Twitterverse, which have exponentially increased both avenues for realizing such aspirations and the numbers of people pursuing them.∂ But the politics enacted in those venues is by and large an ersatz politics, and the controversies

that sustain them are by and large ephemeral, vacant bullshit — the “feud” between Iggy Azalea and Azealia Banks, whether black people were dissed because Selma wasn’t nominated for/didn’t win enough Oscars, and so on.∂ In the context of this sort of non-stop idiotic bread and circuses — and this may be an apt moment to remind that the blogosphere is open to any fool with a computer and Internet access — it is good to reflect on one of the crucial moments in American history when the linking of social and political forces presented a clear choice between egalitarian and inegalitarian interests, and masses of black people joined with others to strike a consequential blow for social justice and to wipe the scourge of slavery from the United States.∂ No, it wasn’t a final victory over inequality — it didn’t usher in a utopian order, and the greatest promises opened by the triumph were unfulfilled or largely undone. But it was one of the most important victories that egalitarian forces have won, along with those of the twentieth-century labor, civil rights, and women’s movements, and it is worth reflecting on it and the ways it changed the country for the better.∂ That struggle against the slaveholders’ insurrection, along with those latter movements, also underscores the fact that the path to winning the kind of just world to which a left should aspire requires building a politics that seeks, as the old saying goes, to unite the many to defeat the few. Any other focus is either unserious or retrograde.

Simulated legal debates are crucial for social transformation---teaching legal precision is net-better for eliminating oppression even if one-shot legal solutions don’t work the first time Karl Klare, George J. & Kathleen Waters Matthews Distinguished University Professor, Northeastern University School of Law, “Teaching Local 1330—Reflections on Critical Legal Pedagogy,” (‘11). School of Law Faculty Publications. Paper 167. http://hdl.handle.net/2047/d20002528

By now it has begun to dawn that one of the subjects of this class session is how lawyers translate their moral intuitions and sense of justice into legal arguments. Most beginning students have found themselves in the situation of wanting to express their moral intuitions in the form of legal arguments but of feeling powerless to do so. A common attitude of Northeastern students is that a lawyer cannot turn moral and political convictions into legal arguments in the context of case-litigation. If you are interested in directly pursuing a moral and/or political agenda, at a minimum you need to take up legislative and policy work, and more likely you need to leave the law altogether and take up grass roots organizing instead. I insist that we keep the focus on litigation for this class period. After the straw poll, I ask the students to simulate the role of Staughton Lynd‟s legal assistants and to assume that the court has just definitively rejected the claims based on contract, promissory estoppel, and the notion of a community property right. However, they should also assume, counter-factually, that Judge Lambros stayed dismissal of the suit for ten days to give plaintiffs one last opportunity to come up with a theory. I charge the students with the task of making a convincing common law argument, supported by respectable legal authority, that the plaintiffs were entitled to substantial relief. Put another way, I ask the students to prove that Judge Lambros was mistaken—that he was legally wrong—when he concluded that there was no basis in existing law to vindicate the workers‟ and community‟s rights. In some classroom exercises, I permit students to select the side for which they wish to argue, but I do not allow that in this session. All students are asked to simulate the role of plaintiffs‟ counsel and to make the best arguments they can—either because they actually believe such arguments and/or because in their simulated role they are fulfilling their ethical duty to provide zealous representation. A recurring, instant reflex is to say: “it‟s simple—the workers‟ human rights were violated in the Youngstown case.” I remind the class that the challenge I set was to come up with a common law theory. The great appeal

of human rights discourse for today‟s students is that it seems to provide a technical basis upon which their fervent moral and political commitments appear to be legally required. “What human rights?” I ask. The usual answers are (1) “they had a right to be treated like human beings” or (2) “surely there is some human right on which they can base their case.” To the first argument I respond: “well, how they are entitled to be treated is exactly what the court is called upon in this case to decide. Counsel may not use a re-statement of the conclusion you wish the court to reach as the legal basis supporting that conclusion.” To the second response I reply: “it would be nice if some recognized human right applied, but we are in the Northern District of Ohio in 1980. Can you cite a pertinent human rights instrument?” (Answer: “no.”) The students then throw other ideas on the table. Someone always proposes that U.S. Steel‟s actions toward the community were “unconscionable.” I point out that unconscionability is a defense to contract enforcement whereas the plaintiffs were seeking to enforce a contract (the alleged promise not to close the plant if it were rendered profitable). In any case, we have assumed that the judge has already ruled that there was no contract. Another suggestion is that plaintiffs go for restitution. A restitution claim arises when plaintiff gives or entrusts something of value to the defendant, and the defendant wrongfully refuses to pay for or return it. But here we are assuming that Judge Lambros has already ruled that the workers did not endow U.S. Steel with any property or value other than their labor power for which they were already compensated under the applicable collective bargaining agreements. If the community provided U.S. Steel with value in the nature of tax breaks or infrastructure development, the effect of Judge Lambros‟ ruling on the property claim is to say that these were not investments by the community but no-strings-attached gifts given in the hope of attracting or retaining the company‟s business. At this point I usually give a hint by saying, “if we‟ve ruled out contract claims, and we‟ve ruled property claims, what does that leave?” Aha, torts! A student then usually suggests that U.S. Steel committed the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress (IIED).15 I point out that, even if it were successful, this theory would provide plaintiffs relief only for their emotional injuries, but not their economic or other losses, and most likely would not provide a basis for an injunction to keep the plant open. In any event, IIED is an intentional tort. What, I ask, is the evidence that U.S. Steel intends the plant shutdown to cause distress? The response that “they should know that emotional distress will result” is usually not good enough to make out an intentional tort. An astute student will point out that in some jurisdictions it is enough to prove that the defendant acted with reckless disregard for the likelihood that severe emotional distress would result. I allow that maybe there‟s something to that, but then shift ground by pointing out that a prima facie requirement of IIED is that the distress suffered go beyond what an “ordinary person” may be expected to endure or beyond the bounds of “civilized behavior.”16 Everyone knows that plants close all the time and that the distress accompanying job-loss is a normal feature of American life. A student halfheartedly throws out negligent infliction of emotional distress, to which my reply is: “In what way is U.S. Steel‟s proposed conduct negligent? The problem we are up against here is precisely that the corporation is acting as a rational profit-maximizer.” A student always proposes that plaintiffs should allege that what U.S. Steel did was “against public policy.” First of all, I say, “public policy” is not a cause of action; it is a backdrop against which conduct or contract terms are assessed. Moreover, what public policy was violated in this case? The student will respond by saying “it is against public policy for U.S. Steel to leave the community devastated.” I point out once again that that is the very conclusion for which we are contending—it is circular argument to assert a statement of our intended conclusion as the rationale for that conclusion. This dialogue continues for awhile. One ineffective theory after another is put on the table. Only once or twice in the decades I have taught this exercise have the students gotten close to a viable legal theory.

But this is not wasted time—learning occurs in this phase of the exercise. The point conveyed is that while law and morals/politics are inextricably intertwined, they are not the same. For one thing, lawyers have a distinct way of talking about and analyzing problems that is characteristic of the legal culture of a given time and place. So-called “legal reasoning” is actually a repertoire of conventional, culturally approved rhetorical moves and counter-moves deployed by lawyers to create an appearance of the legal necessity of the results for which they contend. In addition, good lawyers actually possess useful, specialized knowledge not generally absorbed by political theorists or movement activists. Legal training sensitizes us to the many complexities that arise whenever general norms and principles are implemented in the form of rules of decision or case applications. Lawyers know, for example, that large stakes may turn on precisely how a right is defined, who has standing to vindicate it, what remedies it provides, how the right is enforced and in what venue(s), and so on. We are not doing our jobs properly if we argue, simply, “what the defendant did was unjust and the plaintiff deserves relief.” No one needs a lawyer to make the “what the defendant did was unjust” argument. As Lynd‟s account shows, the workers of Youngstown did make that argument in their own, eloquent words and through their collective resistance to the shut-downs. If “what the defendant did was unjust” is all we have to offer, lawyers bring no added value to the table. Progressive students sometimes tell themselves that law is basically gobbledygook, but that you can assist movements for social change if you learn how to spout the right gobbledygook. In this view of legal practice, “creativity” consists in identifying an appropriate technicality that helps your client. But in the Youngstown situation, we are way past that naïve view. There is no “technicality” that can win the case. In this setting, a social justice lawyer must use the bits and pieces lying around to generate new legal knowledge and new legal theories. And these new theories must say something more than “my client deserves to win” (although it is fine to commence one‟s research on the basis of that moral intuition). The class is beginning to get frustrated, and around now someone says “well, what do you expect? This is capitalism. There‟s no way the workers were going to win.” The “this-is-capitalism” (“TIC”) statement sometimes comes from the right, sometimes from the left, and usually from both ends of the spectrum but in different ways. The TIC statement precipitates another teachable moment. I begin by saying that we need to tease out exactly what the student means by TIC, as several interpretations are possible. For example, TIC might be a prediction of what contemporary courts are most likely to do. That is, TIC might be equivalent to saying that “it doesn‟t matter what theory you come up with; 999 US judges out of 1,000 would rule for U. S. Steel.”17 I allow that this is probably true, but not very revealing. The workers knew what the odds were before they launched the case. Even if doomed to fail, a legal case may still make a contribution to social justice if the litigation creates a focal point of energy around which a community can mobilize, articulate moral and political claims, educate the wider public, and conduct political consciousness-raising. And if there is political value in pursuing a case, we might as well make good legal arguments. On an alternative reading, the TIC observation is more ambitious than a mere prediction. It might be a claim that a capitalist society requires a legal structure of a certain kind, and that therefore professionally acceptable legal reasoning within capitalist legal regimes cannot produce a theory that interrogates the status quo beyond a certain point. Put another way, some outcomes are so foreign to the bedrock assumptions of private ownership that they cannot be reached by respectable legal reasoning. A good example of an outcome that is incompatible with capitalism, so the argument goes, is a court order interfering with U.S. Steel‟s decision to leave Youngstown. This reading of the TIC comment embodies the idea that legal discourse is encased within a deeper, extra-legal structure given by requirements of the social order (capitalism), so that within professionally responsible legal argument the best lawyers in the world could

not state a winning theory in Local 1330. Ironically, the left and the right in the class often share this belief. I take both conservative and progressive students on about this. I insist that the claim that our law is constrained by a rigid meta-logic of capitalism—which curiously parallels the notion that legal outcomes are tightly constrained by legal reasoning—is just plain wrong. Capitalist societies recognize all sorts of limitations on the rights of property owners. Professor Singer‟s classic article catalogues a multitude of them.18 The claim is not only false, it is a dangerous falsehood. To believe TIC in this sense is to limit in advance our aspirations for what social justice lawyering can accomplish. Now the class begins to sense that I am not just playing law professor and asking rhetorical questions to which there are no answers. The students realize that I actually think that I have a theory up my sleeve that shows that Judge Lambros was wrong on the law. If things are going well, the students begin to feel an emotional stake in the exercise. Many who voted in the straw poll that the plaintiffs deserved to win are anxious to see whether I can pull it off. Other students probably engage emotionally for a different reason—the ones who have been skeptical or derisive of my approach all term hope that my “theory,” when I eventually reveal it, is so implausible that I will fall flat on my face. I begin to feed the students more hints. One year I gave the hint, “What do straying livestock, leaking reservoirs, dynamite blasting, and unsafe products have in common?”—but that made it too easy. Usually my hints are more oblique, as in “does anything you learned about accident law ring a bell?” Whatever the form, the students take the hints, and some start cooking with gas. Over the next few minutes, the pieces usually fall into place. The legal theory toward which I have been steering the students is that U.S. Steel is strictly liable in tort for the negative social effects of its decision to disinvest in Youngstown. I contend that that is what the law provided in Ohio in 1980, and therefore a mechanism was available for the District Court to order substantial relief. A basic, albeit contested theme of modern tort law, which all students learn in first year, is that society allows numerous risky and predictably harmful activities to proceed because we deem those activities, on balance, to be worthwhile or necessary. In such cases, the law often imposes liability rules designed to make the activity pay for the injuries or accidents it inevitably causes. For more than a century, tort rules have been fashioned to force actors to take account of all consequences proximately attributable to their actions, so that they will internalize the relevant costs and price their products accordingly. The expectation is that in the ordinary course of business planning, the actor will perform a cost/benefit analysis to make sure that the positive values generated by the activity justify its costs. Here, I remind the students of the famous Learned Hand Carroll Towing formula19 comparing B vs. PL, where B represents the costs of accident avoidance (or of refraining from the activity when avoidance is impossible or too costly); and P x L (probability of the harm multiplied by the gravity of the harm) reflects foreseeable accident costs.20 The tort theory that evolved from this and similar cost/benefit approaches is called “market deterrence.” The notion is that liability rules should be designed to induce the actor who is in the best position to conduct this kind of cost/benefit analysis with respect to a given activity to actually conduct it. Such actors will have incentives to make their products and activities safer and/or to develop safer substitute products and activities.21 Actors will then pass each activity‟s residual accident costs on to consumers by “fractionating” and “spreading” such costs through their pricing decisions. As a result, prices will give consumers an accurate picture of the true social costs of the activity, including its accident costs. Consumers are thus enabled to make rational decisions about whether to continue purchasing the product or activity in light of its accident as well as its production costs. In principle, if a particular actor produces an unduly risky product (in the sense that its accident costs are above “market level”), that actor‟s products will be priced above market, and he/she will be driven out of business.22 Tort rules have long been crafted with an eye toward

compelling risky but socially valuable activities or enterprises to internalize their external costs. My examples—to which the students were exposed in first year—are the ancient rule imposing strict liability for crop damage caused by escaping livestock;23 strict liability under the doctrine of Rylands v. Fletcher for the escape of dangerous things brought onto one‟s property;24 strict liability under Restatement (Second) § 519 for damage caused by “abnormally dangerous activities” such as dynamite blasting;25 and most recently, strict products liability.26 Of course, there are many exceptions to this approach. For example, “unavoidably unsafe” or “Comment k products” are deemed non-defective and therefore do not carry strict liability. And of course the U.S. largely rejected Rylands. Why was that? Because, as was memorably stated in Losee v. Buchanan: “We must have factories, machinery, dams, canals and railroads. They are demanded by the manifold wants of mankind, and lay at the basis of all our civilization.”27 In assuming that entrepreneurial capitalism would be stymied if enterprises were obliged to pay for the harms they cause, the Losee court accepted a strong version of TIC. Time permitting, I touch briefly on the debate about whether the flourishing of the negligence principle in the U.S. subsidized 19th century entrepreneurial capitalism,28 the possible implications of the Coase Theorem for our discussion of Local 1330,29 and the debate about whether it is appropriate for courts to fashion common law rules with an eye toward their distributive as well as efficiency consequences.30 With this as background, I argue that the District Court should have treated capital mobility—investors‟ circulation of capital in search of the highest rate of return—as a risky but socially valuable activity warranting the same legal treatment as straying cattle and dynamite blasting. Capital mobility is socially valuable. It is indispensable for economic growth and flexibility. Capital mobility generates important positive externalities for “winners,” such as economic development and job-creation at the new site of investment. However, capital mobility also predictably causes negative external effects on “bystanders” (the ones economists quaintly label “the losers”). We discussed some of these externalities at the outset of the class—the trauma associated with income interruption and pre-mature retirement, waste or destruction of human capital, multiplier effects on the local economy, and social pathologies and community decline of the kind experienced in Youngstown. The plaintiffs should have argued that capital mobility must internalize its social dislocation costs for reasons of economic efficiency, and that this can be accomplished by making investors strictly liable in tort for the social dislocation costs proximately caused by their capital mobility decisions. An investor considering shifting capital from one use to another will compare their respective rates of return. In theory, the investment with the higher return is socially optimal (as well as more profitable for the individual investor). The higher-return investment enlarges the proverbial pie. But investors must perform accurate comparisons of competing investment opportunities in order for the magic hand of the market to perform its magic. A rational investor bases her analysis primarily on price signals reflecting estimated rates of return on alternative investment options. This comparison will yield an irrational judgment leading to a socially suboptimal investment decision unless the estimated rate of return on the new investment reflects its external effects, both positive and negative. Investors often have public-relations incentives to tout the positive economic consequences promised at the new location. To guarantee rational decision making, the law must force investors contemplating withdrawal of capital from an enterprise to also carefully consider the negative social dislocation costs properly attributable to the activity of disinvestment. This can be achieved by making capital mobility strictly liable for its proximately caused social dislocation costs.31 This approach erects no inefficient barriers to capital mobility, nor does it bar all disinvestment decisions that may cause disruption and loss in the exit community. Other things being equal, if the new investment discounted by the social dislocation costs of exit will generate a higher rate of return than

the current use of the capital, the capital should be disinvested from the old use and transferred to the new use. However, if investors are not forced by liability rules to take into account the social dislocation costs of disinvestment, the new investment opportunity will appear more attractive than it really is in a social sense. The situation involves a classic form of market failure. The market is imperfect because investors are not obliged to take into account the negative social dislocation costs proximately caused by their decisions. Inaccurate price signals lead to the overproduction of capital movement and therefore to a suboptimal allocation of resources. Apart from any severance and unemployment benefits received by workers at the old plant, the social dislocation costs of disinvestment are almost entirely externalized onto the workers and the surrounding community. Strict tort liability will induce investors and their downstream customers to fractionate and spread the dislocation costs of capital mobility when pricing the products of the new activity. This will provide those who use or benefit from the new activity at the destination community more accurate signals as to its true social costs and oblige them to fractionally share in the misfortunes afflicting the departure community. Suppose, for example, that U.S. Steel invested the money it took out of Youngstown toward construction of a modern, high-tech steel mill in a Sunbelt state. The price of steel produced at the new mill should fractionally reflect social dislocation costs in Youngstown. According to legal “common sense” and mainstream economic theory, the movement of capital from a lesser to a more profitable investment is an unambiguous social good. Allowing capital to migrate to its highest rate of return guarantees that society‟s resources are devoted to their most productive uses. Society as a whole is better off if capital is permitted freely to migrate to the new investment and there to grow the pie. In short, the free mobility of capital maximizes aggregate welfare. We are all “winners” in the long run, even if some unfortunate “losers” might get hurt along the way. It follows as an article of faith that any legal inhibition on the mobility of capital is inefficient and socially wasteful. This is why mainstream legal thinking refuses to accord long-term workers or surrounding communities any sort of “property interest” in the enterprise which a departing investor is obliged to buy out before removal.32 An unwritten, bed-rock assumption of US law is that capital is not and should not be legally responsible for the social dislocation costs occasioned by its mobility.33 Such costs are mostly externalized onto employees and the surrounding community, even if the exit community had subsidized the old investment with tax breaks and similar forms of corporate welfare. The legal common sense about capital mobility is mistaken. It is not a priori true that the movement of capital toward the greatest rate of return unambiguously enhances aggregate social welfare. Free capital mobility maximizes aggregate welfare and allocates resources to their most productive uses only in a perfect market; that is, only in the absence of market failure. The claim that free capital mobility is efficient is sometimes true, and sometimes it is not. It all depends on the particular facts and circumstances on the ground. Voilà. Judge Lambros was wrong. In 1980, a mechanism did exist in our law to recognize the plaintiffs‟ claims and afford them substantial relief for economic, emotional, and other losses.34 All that was required was a logical extension of familiar torts thinking. Had Judge Lambros correctly applied well-known and time-honored torts principles, he would have treated the social dislocation costs of the plant closure as an externality that must be embedded in U.S. Steel‟s calculations regarding the relative profitability of the old and new uses to which it might put its capital. This would close the gap between private and social costs, thereby tending to perfect the market. Notice an important rhetorical advantage of this theory—its core value is economic efficiency. The plaintiffs can get this far along in their argument without mentioning “fairness,” “equity,” or “justice,” let alone “human rights,” values that are often fatal to legal argument in U.S. courts today.35 I now brace myself for the “you gotta be kidding me” phase of the discussion. Objections cascade in. The

progressive students want to be convinced that this is really happening. The mainstream students want to poke holes and debunk. A few of them are grateful at last for an opportunity to show how misguided they always knew my teaching was. Always, students assert that my summary discussion of the cost/benefit analysis omitted various costs and benefits. For example, one year I omitted to say that the social dislocation costs in the exit community must be discounted by ameliorative public expenditures such as unemployment insurance benefits. My response to this type of objection is always the same: “you are absolutely right, that cost or benefit should be included in the analysis. And here are a few more considerations we would need to address to perfect the cost/benefit analysis which I left out only in the interest of time.” But I learn from this discussion; not infrequently, students contribute something I had not previously considered. A frequent objection is that the task of quantifying the social dislocation costs associated with capital mobility is just too complicated and difficult. I concede that it is a complex task and that conservative estimates might be required in place of absolute precision. I ask, however, whether it is preferable to allow investors to proceed on the basis of price-signals we know to be wrong or to induce them to use best efforts to arrive at fair estimates. Separation of powers always comes up, as it should. I go through the usual riffs. Yes, I concede, these problems cry out for a comprehensive legislative solution rather than case-by-case adjudication. But standard, well-known counter-arguments suggest that Judge Lambros should nevertheless have imposed tort liability in this case. For one thing, determining the rules of tort liability has always been within the province of courts. Deferring to the status quo (that those who move capital are not legally responsible for negative externalities) is every bit as much a choice, every bit as much “activism” or “social engineering,” as altering the status quo. Legal history is filled with cases in which the legislature was only prompted to address an important public policy concern by the shock value of a court decision. Particularly is this so in cases involving the rights and interests of marginalized, insular, and under-represented groups like aging industrial workers. I note that Congress eventually responded to the plant closing problem with the WARN Act, a modest but not unimportant effort to internalize to enterprises some of the social dislocation costs of capital disinvestment. The statute liquidates these costs into a sum equal to sixty days‟ pay after an employer orders a plant closing or mass layoff without giving proper notice.36 I call the students‟ attention to the provision of WARN barring federal courts from enjoining plant closings37 and ask why Congress might have included that restriction. Another common objection concerns causation. A student will say: “The closedown of the mills, let alone the shutdown of any particular plant, could not have caused all of the suicides, heart failures, domestic violence, and so on, in Youngstown. Surely many such tragedies would have occurred anyway, even if U.S. Steel had remained. It isn‟t fair to impose liability on U.S. Steel for everything bad that happened in Youngstown during the statute-of-limitations period.” I immediately say that this is a terrific point, and that I was hoping someone would raise it. I compliment the student by saying that the question shows that he/she is now tapping legal knowledge. Typically, the class is concerned with causation-in-fact or “but for” causation. Their question is, how do we know that a plant shutdown caused any particular case of heart failure or suicide in Youngstown? Problems of causal uncertainty are a familiar issue, and I remind students that they were exposed to several well-known responses in Torts. A time-honored, if simplistic device is to shift the burden of proof regarding causationinfact to the defendant, when everyone knows full well that the defendant has no more information than the plaintiff with which to resolve the problem of causal uncertainty.38 In recent decades, courts have developed more sophisticated responses to problems of causal uncertainty as, for example, in the DES cases. As the court stated in Sindell:39 In our contemporary complex industrialized society, advances in science and technology create fungible goods which may harm consumers and

which cannot be traced to any specific producer. The response of the courts can be either to adhere rigidly to prior doctrine, denying recovery to those injured by such products, or to fashion remedies to meet these changing needs. Just as Justice Traynor in his landmark concurring opinion in Escola . . . recognized that in an era of mass production and complex marketing methods the traditional standard of negligence was insufficient to govern the obligations of manufacturer to consumer, so should we acknowledge that some adaptation of the rules of causation and liability may be appropriate in these recurring circumstances . . . .40 At this point, some of the progressive students are beginning to salivate. They came to law school with the hope that legal reasoning would provide them a highly refined and politically neutral technology for speaking truth to power. The first semester disabuses most of them of that crazy idea. They have learned that they will not find certainty or answers in legal discourse, and that legal texts are minefields of gaps, conflicts, and ambiguities with moral and political implications. I can tell from the glint in their eyes that they are beginning to ask themselves whether this economics stuff, which they formerly shunned like the plague, might provide a substitute toolbox of neutral technologies with which to demonstrate that redress for workers and other subordinated and marginalized groups is legally required. I cannot allow them to think that. Therefore, unless an alert student has spotted it, I now reveal my Achilles‟ heel. The weak link in my argument is the age-old question of proximate causation. Assume we solve the causation-in-fact problem. For example, assume that by analogy to the Sindell theory of market-share liability, the court arrives at a fair method of attributing to the plant shutdown some portion of the social trauma and injuries occurring in the wake of U.S. Steel‟s departure from Youngstown. How do we know whether the plant closing proximately caused these harms? What do we mean by “proximate causation” anyway, and why does it matter? These questions present another exciting, teachable moment. Naturally, the students haven‟t thought about proximate cause since first year. They barely remember what it is and how it differs from causation-in-fact. Some 3Ls shuffle uncomfortably knowing that the Bar examination looms, and they are soon going to need to know about this. I provide a quick review of proximate causation which addresses the question, how far down the chain of causation should liability reach? I illustrate my points by referring to Palsgraf v. Long Island R.R,41 which all law students remember. Perhaps U.S. Steel might fairly be held accountable for the suicide of steelworkers within ninety days of the plant closing, but we might draw the line before holding U.S. Steel liable for a stroke suffered by a steelworker‟s spouse five years later. Now keyed in to what proximate cause doctrine is about, the students eagerly wait for me to tell them what the “answer” is, that is, where proximate causation doctrine would draw the line in the Youngstown case. That‟s when I give them the bad news. I explain that proximate causation doctrine does not provide a determinate analytical method for measuring the scope of liability. We pretend that buzzwords like “reasonable foreseeability” or “scope-of-the-risk” give us answers, but ultimately decisions made under the rubric of proximate causation are always value judgments.42 The conclusion that “X proximately caused Y” is a statement about the type of society we want to live in. At this juncture, the 3Ls grumpily realize that I am not going to be much help in preparing them for their bar review course. I now distribute a one-page hand-out on proximate causation prepared in advance. The handout reprints Justice Andrews‟ remarkable observation in his Palsgraf dissent: What we . . . mean by the word „proximate‟ is, that because of convenience, of public policy, of a rough sense of justice, the law arbitrarily declines to trace a series of events beyond a certain point. This is not logic. It is practical politics . . . . It is all a question of expediency. There are no fixed rules to govern our judgment. There are simply matters of which we may take account.43 I point out that causation-in-fact analysis, too, always involves perspective and value judgments.44 Why assume that water escaping the reservoir diminished

the value of the neighboring coal mining company‟s land? Why not assume that the coal company‟s decision to dig close to the border diminished the value of the manufacturer‟s land (by increasing the cost of using the type of reservoir needed in its production process)? For that matter, why assume that the cattle trample on the neighbors‟ crops? Why not assume that the crops get in the way of the cattle? My handout also contains my variation on Robert Keeton‟s famous definition of proximate cause45: When a court states that „the defendant‟s conduct was the proximate cause of (some portion of) the plaintiff‟s injuries,‟ what the court means is that (1) the defendant‟s conduct was a cause-in-fact of that portion of plaintiff‟s injuries; and (2) the defendant‟s conduct and the plaintiff‟s specified injuries are so related that it is appropriate, from the moral and social-policy points of view, to hold the defendant legally responsible for that portion of the plaintiff‟s injuries. What we mean when we ask whether the social dislocation costs associated with the shutdown of the steel plant were proximately caused by capital mobility is whether these costs are, in whole or in part, properly attributable from a moral/political point of view to U.S. Steel‟s decision to disinvest. Economic “science” does not and cannot establish in a value-neutral manner that the social dislocation costs of the plant shutdown are a negative externality of capital mobility. A conclusion of that kind requires a value judgment that we disguise under the rubric of “proximate causation,” a value judgment about whom it is appropriate to ask to bear what costs related to what injuries. The lesson is that in legal reasoning there is no escape from moral and political choice. If things have gone according to plan, time conveniently runs out, and the class is dismissed on that note. What am I trying to accomplish in a class like this? What are the objectives of critical legal pedagogy? Legal education should empower students. It should put them in touch with their own capacity to take control over their lives and professional education and development. It should enable them to experience the possibility of participating, as lawyers, in transformative social movements. But all too often classroom legal education is deadening. The law student‟s job, mastering doctrine, appears utterly unconnected to any process of learning about oneself or developing one‟s moral, political, or professional identity. Classroom legal education tends to reinforce a sense of powerlessness about our capacity to change social institutions. Indeed, it often induces students to feel that they are powerless to shape and alter their own legal education. Much of legal education induces in students a pervasive and exaggerated sense of the constraint of legal rules and roles and the students‟ inability to do much about it. In capsule form, the goals of critical legal pedagogy are— • to disrupt the socialization process that occurs during legal education; • to unfreeze entrenched habits of mind and deconstruct the false claims of necessity which constitute so-called “legal reasoning”; • to urge students to see their life‟s work ahead as an opportunity to unearth and challenge law‟s dominant ideas about society, justice, and human possibility and to infuse legal rules and practices with emancipatory and egalitarian content; • to persuade students that legal discourses and practices comprise a medium, neither infinitely plastic nor inalterably rigid, in which they can pursue moral and political projects and articulate alternative visions of social organization and social justice; • to train them to argue professionally and respectably for the utopian and the impossible; • to alert them that legal cases potentially provide a forum for intense public consciousness-raising about issues of social justice; • to encourage them to view legal representation as an opportunity to challenge, push, and relocate the boundaries between intra-systemic and extra-systemic activity, that is, an opportunity to work within the system in a way that reconstitutes it; and • to show that the existing social order is not immutable but “is merely possible, and that people have the freedom and power to act upon it.”46 The most important point of the class is that social justice lawyers never give up. The appropriate response when you think you have a hopeless case is to go back and do more work in the legal medium.

The alt fails to account for international dynamics and essentializes blackness.Wright 15 – (2015, Michelle, PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan, Professor of African American Studies and Comparative Literature Studies at Northwestern University, “Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology,” pp. 147-55, endnote on p. 188)

When interpellated through the Middle Passage epistemology, Blackness has a limited set of qualitative values or denotations that link it to the events in that epistemology such as the commitment to collective and individual struggle, “racial uplift,” and the maintenance of strong communities through “traditional” or heteropatriarchal family structures. More generally, the Middle Passage epistemology (like other established Black linear progress or antiprogress narratives—e.g., Afrocentrism, PanAfricanism, Negritude, Afropessimism)10 also links all Black collectives across the Diaspora to the experience of racism and the need to overcome it—so how can Ramses II be “Black”? Even further, what does it mean for us to claim him as “Black”? It is hard to interpellate Ramses (or any of the other African kings, queens, leaders, intellectuals, politicians, scientists, etc., whose physiognomy we would acknowledge as stereotypically “Black”) within the qualitative definition of Middle Passage Blackness as making common cause with African Americans—or any other “Black” community fighting racism and seeking socioeconomic and political equality in the African Diaspora. In attempting to interpellate Ramses within this definition, we must produce Blackness as a fixed identity that transcends time and space; through this, Ramses no longer belongs to his own spacetime but retroactively becomes a denigrated “Negro” who must combat his oppression. A paradox or—as Massey terms it, “a dichotomous result”—now confronts us: was Ramses II a Black freedom fighter or a ruler of extraordinary and largely unquestioned power, one of the greatest and most oppressive in the history of Egyptian pharaohs? It is the qualitative definition of Black progress that creates this dichotomy, a paradox that then “empties out” all meaning in qualitative collapse. The attempt to interpellate Ramses II through a Black progress narrative exposes the continuing attempt and subsequent failure of the progress narrative to interpellate Ramses. He is Black because he is a Black African, but he is not Black, because neither “Black” nor “African” operated as identities in Ramses’s spacetime. Ramses II’s life speaks to the greatness of African empires, but his unapologetic use of massive slave labor should “expel” him from Black progressive membership, the same way in which some discourses attempt to expel Blacks whose actions deliberately harmed other Blacks. While we should perhaps not lose sleep over the “odd individual” whose terrible behaviors bar him, her, or them from full or perhaps even partial mention in a Black progress narrative, there are other Black individuals who are barred from mention who have not acted against the principle of striving for collective progress. This dichotomy also threatens to create interpellative problems for Blacks who, unlike the Egyptian pharaoh, move across the Atlantic at the same time as millions of Black Africans are being sailed to and sold into the Americas, but not in the same directions, veering away from our progress narrative. Black slaves transported outside of the Americas to Europe, India, and elsewhere do not retain a collective identity. They are sold individually and disappear into households, perhaps factories, fields, or country roads and city streets, intersecting with populations at large. From the point of view of Black linear progress narratives, progress has not been achieved because the collective has evanesced (and is therefore unable to achieve its goal of overcoming racism), or read another way, their histories have become irrelevant to the collective historical theme of overcoming racism. Qualitatively speaking, it appears difficult if not impossible to interpellate Blackness using a Black Atlantic linear progress narrative in a significant and lasting way. In “The World Is All of One Piece: The African Diaspora and Transportation to Australia,” which is included in Ruth Simms Hamilton’s book Routes of Passage, Cassandra Pybus reprises a version

of Sidney Mintz’s question about the qualitative limits of Black Atlantic studies: A transnational historical consciousness and a capacity to encompass experience in disparate time and space are great strengths of African diaspora studies. In so far as there is a weakness, it is that the Atlantic world remains the locus of discussion. While some attention has begun to drift toward the Indian Ocean, less scholarship has been directed toward the distant Pacific. . . . In the diaspora at the detailed penal transportation records we can find information about the African end of the eighteenth century that is very hard to come by elsewhere and that points in directions in which historians may not otherwise look.11 Pybus understands that her topic is framed by African Diaspora studies yet constrained by its “Atlantic focus”; she then observes that despite this swirl of scholarly activity in the Atlantic, there is a “drift” and “direction” toward the Indian Ocean and the “distant Pacific.” This passage draws a connecting line moving horizontally (well, south by southeast) from the moment of the American Revolution in the Middle Passage timeline to other moments in those kingdoms and empires that border the Indian Ocean and, more specifically, to the moment of the British penal colony of Australia. By moving us horizontally into the Pacific, Pybus traces the journey of those (primarily) U.S. Blacks who allied with the defeated British and accompanied them on their return to England. Once there, the promised support from the Crown never materialized, and many of these former soldiers, spies, and support staff found themselves on the London streets. These (primarily) men would have been in competition with an already burgeoning class of the dispossessed filling the streets of London and other industrial centers. As Robert Hughes argues in his monumental history of the settling of white Australia, The Fatal Shore, land grabs by the aristocracy and the replacement of cottage industries with large industrialized factories deprived farmers, laborers, and urban workers of their former careers as well as prospects for new ones (many machines, such as looms, required fewer adult workers). Theft, especially with the poor now rubbing shoulders with the wealthy in crowded urban centers, skyrocketed, and Parliament responded with deeply punitive measures; to steal a bit of ribbon or bread could send you to prison or heavy labor or, most fearful of all, condemn you to “transport” (to a British penal colony). With the American colonies no longer available for convicts, Britain turned to its recently neglected “discovery” of Australia as a convenient replacement, and so white and Black Britons, along with a few U.S. and Caribbean Blacks, found themselves transported as part of the First Fleet settlers. Pybus’s second horizontal reading comes, counterintuitively, mostly through records created by hierarchies such as court, maritime, colonial, and penal records, due to the paucity of “horizontal” archives (correspondence between peers, diaries, etc.). Pybus, not unlike Hughes in The Fatal Shore, constructs a horizontal narrative of these Black convicts and settlers through (unavoidably) mostly vertical archival sources: state, judicial, colonial, and penal records that read these human beings as mere numbers filling ships, accepting punishment, and perhaps enriching the Crown through forced labor. To an even greater extent than Hughes, Pybus works to retrieve the very multivalent human experiences behind these records of discipline and punishment, to see the interactions denoted, denounced, and pronounced through their eyes, so to speak, looking out horizontally rather than down from the (at least figurative) heights of the judge’s bench and foreman’s lash. Yet despite these two horizontal readings, qualitative collapse looms here because Pybus has framed this history as a horizontal connection to what is ultimately a vertical framework that finds meaning in the struggle against racism. Pybus’s Black Founders offers us a notable exception to our assumptions about Blackness, but in her work, as in other histories she mentions, Blackness evanesces as the convicts and settlers perhaps married, procreated, and most certainly died without moving a coherent Black Atlantic collective forward in its quest for equality in a majority white society. Or, rather more complicatedly, in Black Founders Blackness evanesces into either the white

Australian population or the Australian Aboriginal population, in the latter case an indigenous Blackness. Most likely reflecting on this, Pybus herself does not think that this discovery of Australia’s “Black founders” radically changes the history of the African Diaspora or Australia: “My point is not that this cohort of convicts is especially significant to the history of Australia—though it certainly challenges the conventional reading of the colonial experience—but to examine what it can tell us about the wider world.”12 If we add Epiphenomenal time to our Black Atlantic frame, however, we can avoid the qualitative collapse that (re)produces these histories as interesting in their own right but marginal to our understanding of Black Atlantic history. Interpellated through Epiphenomenal time, the Blackness in Black Founders first changes a person’s relationship to Blackness and indigeneity. Rather than simply “losing” indigenous status once captured and then sold, Blackness intersects twice more with indigeneity, and on two continents: North America and Australia. In both cases, indigenous peoples sometimes helped Black slaves escape, the latter often marrying into specific American Indian nations. Middle Passage U.S. Blackness now shares a spacetime through indigeneity and raises questions about Central and South American intersections (such as the Garifunas of Nicaragua).13 One might also see a third, more controversial intersection, between U.S. Blacks who “returned” to establish the free state of Liberia and the indigenous populations who found themselves oppressed in the resulting socioeconomic and political hierarchy. The qualitative value of Pybus’s Blackness now meaningfully intersects with the Americas but is not swallowed by it, because the frame is horizontally comparative rather than vertically subordinating. The intersection of Blackness with indigeneity in the Americas, Australia, and Africa also subverts the notion of a “purely” diasporic Blackness, even within the progress narrative itself, because the latter honors indigeneity as the “origin” to which the collective must eventually return. In this moment of interpellation, origin/home is achieved not necessarily through return but through intersections with other “first nations” in the Atlantic and Pacific. Even further, we can see how Blackness, in intersecting with indigeneity when (formally) seeking “return,” as in Liberia, might produce not egalitarian unity but instead oppressive hierarchy. Black Founders also provides us with perhaps unheard of dimensions of Blackness that, once recognized, might usefully connect to other possible spacetimes that share this dimension. As noted before, the “Atlantic Blacks” who arrived with the First Fleet and on subsequent convict ships experienced a range of lives or careers that cannot be summed up through one collective trajectory, especially that of the progress narrative. Pybus shows that in our present moment of reading, Blackness becomes ambiguous in its meaning in these early colonies. On the one hand, racial designations are clearly marked in the official records, but unlike in the Americas, socioeconomic and political castes are not created to wholly segregate them. There are many marriages one would designate as “interracial,” but even if one could access some understanding of how “interracial marriage” would translate in this spacetime, marriage is rarely an ideal that denotes the cessation of difficulties over differences. As more than one wag has pointed out, the dominance of heterosexual marriage certainly does not reflect an egalitarian harmony of relations between the sexes. The marriages in question are thus racialized outside of social racializations, meaning that to be Black in these colonies does not automatically designate a subaltern status below that of whites. In cases where Black convicts were executed or subjected to physical punishment (whipping was the most common), we might see racially motivated causes, but in the brutal tide of regular executions and torturous punishment, it is difficult to extrapolate consistently a narrative in which this Blackness can be separated from the brutal imperial and capitalist caste system that ruled all British subjects, including the white working poor. Blacks intermixing with the white working poor populations in England and Australia intersect with similar interactions during the earlier spacetime of indentured servitude in the United

States and the later one of late nineteenth-century Irish immigration to northeastern urban centers of the United States. If we step back from Pybus’s initial frame, which connects the history of the Black Atlantic in Australia horizontally, and instead honor the horizontality of her interpellations of Black individuals and their intersections (through marriage, penal life, executions, manumission, etc.), one can read this history as a series of moments that intersect not only with Black Atlantic histories in the Americas but also with histories in Europe, Africa, and perhaps India. It should be noted that, while we are discovering intersections of collectives, we do so wholly within idealist frameworks that can be further interpellated only through individuals who make up those collectives; beneficially, however, the collective identities that intersect with these individuals produce yet more collectives in more spacetimes—more dimensions of Blackness across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. While the era of the Middle Passage produces many and varied kinds of Blackness through the intersection of linear and Epiphenomenal time, the conflated eras of World War II and the postwar era offer yet more. I understand World War II and the postwar period as a conflation of eras because it is impossible to pinpoint where one ends and the other begins; however, when we are operating with Epiphenomenal time, this ambiguity is productive rather than restrictive. Indeed, breadth, depth, ambiguity, ambivalence, and dominance are the strengths contributed by these overlapping eras: breadth because World War II involved almost the majority of Black Africans and Black Diasporans across the globe, whereas slavery—which forms the cornerstone of the Middle Passage epistemology—did not; depth because the various narratives, such as that of Black African men attempting to resist forcible conscription by French and British colonial forces, or that of African American men and women who fought for the right to be drafted, require explanation and further research; ambiguity because we find Blackness where we do not expect it and struggle to interpret it, such as Black German individuals who served in Hitler’s army and Black Brazilian troops tasked with defending Italy; ambivalence because it is a war and its equally destructive aftermath ironically connects the African Diaspora many times over with ease and diversity; and finally, dominance because World War II and the postwar era constructed an interpellative frame that has been used by so many across the globe, a frame that highlights the contemporary and global importance of Blackness far more frequently than themes of the Middle Passage ever do. While the rise of the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), the Arab Spring, and other sociopolitical and economic events seem to signal the framing of a new era, journalists, pundits, and politicians alike still interpret many of these events as effects of the World War II/postwar era. Even the most rigid histories cannot sustain a completely linear Second World War narrative. For example, the invasion of Poland in 1939 must be explained by the rise of Nazism, which perhaps requires a notation about the Versailles Treaty. Likewise, the bombing of Pearl Harbor is necessary to explain the entrance of the United States into the war as a direct combatant. The Second World War, therefore, has at least two beginnings and, even by conservative estimates, at least two endings: the surrender of the Nazis in Berlin and the signed surrender by the Japanese on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. This gives us a war with at least two timelines to which there correspond two themes, two notions of progress, and many ways in which occupied nations must be understood: as collaborators, as wholly oppressed, as underground resisters, and so on. This nonlinear set of peoples, places, and events forces anyone seeking interpellations through World War II to accept all the exceptions to its linear progress narrative—that is, it forces researchers to incorporate great nuance into their interpellations (in asking when the Second World War ended, for example, we have to amend the question to reflect all the surrenders and dates that dominant discourses on World War II cite in response because, whether there were multiple wars or one great war may be a matter of definition, but there is no question that there were multiple

narratives that intersected). This means that qualitative collapse will occur less frequently in interpellations made through a wholly linear progress narrative on the war (because dominant discourses do not offer, really, any wholly linear narratives of it), but when it does, the effect is almost always “deafening,” as if it were drowning out alternative interpellations.14 Blackness can manifest through this multidimensionality, in most cases quite easily. In contrast to the difficulty involved in explaining how Blacks from the Atlantic found themselves in Australia, the global reach of the Second World War makes it easy to explain how Blackness has spread almost everywhere. When using both Epiphenomenal and linear spacetimes to interpellate Blackness in these eras, no long, creative narratives are needed to explain the presence of West Africans under British rule, East Africans under Italian Fascist rule, or the fight for equality both at home and abroad that was the self-appointed task of many an African American man or woman in uniform; moreover, using both spacetimes enables Black European studies to explain without much difficulty how Blacks of African descent came to fight under Hitler. We can arrive at these explanations by starting with the individual, rather than the collective, as a point of interpellation. We can then link such an individual to his, her, or their variously realized collective identities (understanding that we should never claim that an individual is fully realized, as we can work within distinct spacetimes only as they are imagined in the now, not in both the present and the past). Unfortunately, many of these dimensions as interpellated through the postwar epistemology are easily achieved through vertical structures: we need only locate (in ascending order) a military battalion, a regiment, or a division that would contain Black soldiers and its encampments and headquarters. Vertical readings alone can often interpellate an agential and diverse Blackness: Black soldiers and field nurses with agency, Black civilians with choices, and a whole roster of intersections with a broad variety of peers (soldiers and civilians) across vast geographies. At first glance, performing vertical interpellations through linear narratives appears to bear the same fruit as a horizontal reading: Blackness with agency and diversity. This might explain why so many Black collective progress narratives of World War II use this multidimensionality to produce hierarchical, or vertical, interpellations for the collective. The “Windrush narrative” of Black Britain, for example, readily narrates the contributions of Black British Caribbeans in the Second World War, yet uses a progress narrative to interpellate this Blackness. Like the histories of African American men who fought for the United States during World War I, the “Windrush” narrative underscores the painful hypocrisy of serving the British Crown only to be treated as an undesirable emigrant in the postwar era.15 Drawing on oral histories of service in the war and archival records from the British War Office, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (1999) interpellates Black Britishness as agential and diverse, a proud component of the history of World War II but of official British histories of the war more particularly.16 To be sure, even when operating within World War II/postwar frameworks, we encounter obstacles. Hierarchies of power are not (unfortunately) wholly erased, and they can be complicated by the complexities of global alliances and rivalries (no matter how easily they are manifested in the postwar epistemology). The postwar epistemology’s emphasis on the “now,” in the absence of a geographical center (a component of even the most traditional narratives of the Second World War/postwar era),17 allows, say, Samoan warriors aiding the Allies to be interpellated through collective identities that certainly include hierarchal structures (e.g., the military command structure) but also relationships whereby power must constantly be negotiated (e.g., in relationships between soldiers or between soldiers and civilians). The “now” complicates power, meaning that while an Epiphenomenal interpellation enables agency, it will also reflect those vertical hierarchies that inevitably accompany so many moments of interpellation in every individual life across the globe.18 ***BEGIN ENDNOTE*** 18. One could read Smith’s first novel as

interpellating Blackness through U.S. versions of Afropessimism, but this is a distinction lacking meaningful difference. While it eschews the Middle Passage Epistemology’s progress narrative (Blacks are destined to always be oppressed), it needs this linear progress narrative to argue against progress. While claiming to be static, U.S. versions of Afropessimism nonetheless doggedly track each moment of the Middle Passage Epistemology to state yet again that no progress has been made. ***END ENDNOTE***

Humanitarian aid key to relief missions in south-west Africa.Vandiver 19 (John Vandiver joined Stars and Stripes in 2007 and is based in Stuttgart, Germany. He is a 1996 graduate of the University of Delaware and previously covered local government and education at the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey. Before being assigned to Stuttgart in 2008, John worked out of Stars and Stripes’ bureau in Baumholder, Germany, “AFRICOM to aid Mozambique following deadly tropical storm”, Stars and Stripes, 03/25/2019 https://www.stripes.com/news/africa/africom-to-aid-mozambique-following-deadly-tropical-storm-1.574196)//Shreyas

STUTTGART, Germany — U.S. military personnel were en route Monday to Mozambique to assess damage and plan a relief mission aided by U.S. Afri ca Com mand in connection with deadly floods that swept through the region. President Donald Trump directed the military on Sunday to support humanitarian efforts in Mozambique after more than 700 people died as a result of a March 14 cyclone that has caused widespread flooding through a region stretching from Mozambique to Zimbabwe and Malawi . The death toll is expected to rise as flood waters recede. “U.S. Africa Command is actively monitoring and assessing the situation while positioning assets to support the Government of the Republic of Mozambique,” AFRICOM chief Gen. Thomas Waldhauser said in a statement. “We are actively working with the Department of Defense, interagency partners, and Government of the Republic of Mozambique to provide assistance.”

Domestic support now is key to maintain heg BUT public re-committing is key – the plan kills this.Brands 18 [Hal, Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments." American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump." Page 21-23]

Fifth and finally, sustaining America’s post–Cold War strategy entails persuading the American public to

recommit to that strategy and the investments it requires . The state of American opinion on that subject is currently ambiguous. Polling data indicates that public support for most key aspects of American internationalism has recovered somewhat from where it

was in 2012–13, and is again at or near postwar averages.32 But the 2016 election cycle and its eventual outcome revealed strong support for candidates who advocated rolling back key elements of post–Cold War (and

post–World War II) grand strategy, from free trade to U.S. alliances. This atmosphere reflects discontent with the failures and frustrations of U.S. grand strategy in the post–Cold War era, no doubt, yet it also reflects the fact that American strategy seems at risk of becoming a victim of its own success .33 By helping to foster a comparatively

stable and congenial environment, American policies have made it more difficult for Americans to remember why significant investments in the global order are needed in the first place.

Today, this ambivalence is becoming increasingly problematic , for the simple reason that properly resourcing American strategy requires making politically difficult trade-offs with respect to entitlements and other ballooning domestic costs. It is also becoming problematic, of course, because even if the American public seems to support particular aspects of American grand strategy, the public has shown itself willing to elect a

president who appears to care little for the successful postwar and post–Cold War tradition , even if he has, so far, maintained more aspects of that tradition as president than his campaign rhetoric might have led one to expect. In the future—and

indeed, looking beyond Trump ’s presidency— sustaining American grand strategy will thus require more intensive political efforts .

American leaders will need to more effectively make the case for controversial but broadly beneficial policies such as free trade , while also addressing the inevitable socioeconomic dislocations such policies cause.34 They will need to more fully articulate the underlying logic and value of alliances and other commitments whose costs are often more visible —not to say greater— than their benefits . They will need to remind Americans that their country’s leadership has not been a matter of charity ; it has helped produce an international order that is exceptional in its stability, liberalism, and benefits for the United States. Not least, they will need to make the case that the costs that the country has borne in support of that order are designed to avoid the necessity of bearing vastly higher costs if the international scene returned to a more tumultuous state. After all, the success of American statecraft is often reflected in the bad things that don’t happen as well as in the good things that do. Making this point is essential to reconsolidating domestic support now and in the future—and to preserving a grand strategy that has delivered pretty good results for a quarter century .

No heg means cascading prolif and extinction – deterrence doesn’t check and pursuit of heg is inevitable.Brands 15 ( Hal Brands is on the faculty at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University The Elliott School of International Affairs The Washington Quarterly Summer 2015 38:2 pp. 7–28)

The fundamental reason is that both U.S. influence and international stability are thoroughly interwoven with a robust U.S. forward presence . Regarding influence, the protection that Washington has afforded its allies has equally afforded the United States great sway over those allies’ policies .43 During the Cold War and after,

for instance, the United States has used the influence provided by its security posture to veto allies’ pursuit of nuclear weapons, to obtain more advantageous terms in financial and trade agreements , and even to affect the composition of allied nations’ governments.44 More broadly, it has used its alliances as vehicles for shaping political, security, and economic agendas in key regions and bilateral relationships, thus giving the United States an outsized voice on a range of important issues. To be clear, this influence has never been as pervasive as U.S. officials might like, or as some observers might imagine. But by any reasonable standard of comparison, it has nonetheless been remarkable.

One can tell a similar story about the relative stability of the post-war order. As even some leading offshore balancers

have acknowledged, the lack of conflict in regions like Europe in recent decades is not something that has occurred naturally. It has occurred because the “American pacifier” has suppressed precisely the dynamics that previously fostered geopolitical turmoil . That pacifier has limited arms races and security competitions by providing the protection that allows other countries to under-build their militaries . It has soothed historical rivalries by affording a climate of security in which powerful countries like Germany and Japan could be revived economically and reintegrated into thriving and fairly cooperative regional orders . It has induced caution in the behavior of allies and adversaries alike , deterring aggression and dissuading other destabilizing behavior . As John Mearsheimer has noted, the United States “effectively acts as a night watchman,” lending order to an otherwise disorderly and anarchical environment.45

What would happen if Washington backed away from this role ? The most logical answer is that both U.S. influence and global stability would suffer . With respect to influence, the United States would effectively be surrendering the most powerful bargaining chip it has traditionally wielded in dealing with friends and allies, and jeopardizing the position of leadership it has used to shape bilateral and regional agendas for decades. The consequences would seem no less damaging where stability is concerned. As offshore balancers

have argued, it may be that U.S. retrenchment would force local powers to spend more on defense, while perhaps assuaging certain points of

friction with countries that feel threatened or encircled by U.S. presence. But it equally stands to reason that removing the American pacifier would liberate the more destabilizing influences that U.S. policy had previously stifled . Long-dormant security competitions might reawaken as countries armed themselves more vigorously ; historical antagonisms between old rivals might reemerge in the absence of a robust U.S. presence and the reassurance it provides. Moreover, countries that seek to revise existing regional orders in their favor —think Russia in Europe, or China in Asia—might indeed applaud U.S. retrenchment, but they might just as plausibly feel empowered to more assertively press their interests. If the United States has been a kind of Leviathan in key regions,

Mearsheimer acknowledges, then “take away that Leviathan and there is likely to be big trouble.”46

Scanning the global horizon today, one can easily see where such trouble might arise. In Europe, a revisionist Russia is already destabilizing its neighbors and contesting the post-Cold War settlement in the region. In the Gulf and broader Middle East, the threat of Iran ian ascendancy has stoked region-wide tensions manifesting in proxy wars and hints of an incipient arms race , even as that region also contends with a severe threat to its stability in the form of the Islamic State. In East Asia, a rising China is challenging the regional status quo in numerous ways, sounding alarms among its neighbors—many of whom also have historical grievances against each other. In these circumstances, removing the American pacifier would likely yield not low-cost stability, but increased conflict and upheaval .

That conflict and upheaval, in turn, would be quite damaging to U.S. interests even if it did not result in the

nightmare scenario of a hostile power dominating a key region. It is hard to imagine, for instance, that increased instability and acrimony would produce the robust multilateral cooperation necessary to deal with transnational threats from pandemics to piracy. More problematic still might be the economic consequences. As

scholars like Michael Mandelbaum have argued, the enormous progress toward global prosperity and integration that has occurred since World War II (and now the Cold War) has come in the climate of relative stability and security provided largely by the U nited States.47 One simply cannot confidently predict that this progress would endure amid escalating geopolitical competition in regions of enormous importance to the world economy.

Perhaps the greatest risk that a strategy of offshore balancing would run, of course, is that a key region might not be able to maintain its own balance following U.S. retrenchment. That prospect might have seemed far-fetched

in the early post-Cold War era, and it remains unlikely in the immediate future. But in East Asia particularly, the rise and growing assertiveness of China has highlighted the medium- to long-term danger that a hostile power could in fact gain regional primacy . If China’s economy continues to grow rapidly, and if Beijing continues to

increase military spending by 10 percent or more each year, then its neighbors will ultimately face grave challenges in containing Chinese power even if they join forces in that endeavor . This possibility, ironically, is one to which leading advocates of retrenchment have been attuned. “The United States will have to play a key role in countering China,” Mearshimer writes, “because its Asian neighbors are not strong enough to do it by themselves.”48

If this is true, however, then offshore balancing becomes a dangerous and potentially self-defeating strategy. As

mentioned above, it could lead countries like Japan and South Korea to seek nuclear weapons , thereby stoking arms races and elevating regional tensions. Alternatively, and perhaps more worryingly, it might encourage the scenario that offshore balancers seek to avoid, by easing China’s ascent to regional hegemony. As Robert Gilpin has written,

“Retrenchment by its very nature is an indication of relative weakness and declining power , and thus retrenchment can have a deteriorating effect on relations with allies and rivals .”49 In East Asia today, U.S. allies rely on U.S. reassurance to navigate increasingly fraught relationships with a more assertive China precisely because they understand that they will have great trouble balancing Beijing on their

own. A significant U.S. retrenchment might therefore tempt these countries to acquiesce to, or bandwagon with, a rising China if they felt that prospects for successful resistance were diminishing as the United States retreated.50 In the same vein, retrenchment would compromise alliance relationships, basing agreements, and other assets that might help Washington check Chinese power in the first place—and that would allow the United States to surge additional forces into theater in a crisis. In sum, if one expects that Asian countries will be unable to counter China themselves, then reducing U.S. influence and leverage in the region is a curious policy. Offshore balancing might promise to preserve a stable and advantageous environment while reducing U.S. burdens. But upon closer analysis, the probable outcomes of the strategy seem more perilous and destabilizing than its proponents acknowledge.

AFRICOM Neg

Cap K

We need to look at a broader capitalistic approach greater than the militarization of the 1033 program due to the social death Capitalism constructs social death and now we can’t deny the capitalistic misery because it’s too great and is what creates fear, surveillance, and punishment even taking into consideration the death of black folks to militarized police having this be embedded as the DNA of American society.Giroux ‘14 (Henry, pioneering work in public pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, higher education, media studies, and critical theory., "Militarism's Killing Fields: From Gaza to Ferguson", pgs. 11-13, file:///C:/Users/Dimarvin/Dropbox/WAKE!!!/Articles/Militarism%20s%20Killing%20Fields%20From%20Gaza%20to%20Ferguson.pdf, 2014, D.P)

SWAT teams now deployed to conduct even routine practices such as carrying out raids on unlicensed barber shops, and raiding night clubs in violation of liquor inspections, they have also become part of both a huge security industry ‘expected to grow to $31 billion by 2014’ and a public and state spending program that amounts to ‘$75 billion a year on national security’ (Greenwald, 2014). In 2013, SWAT teams in the United States conducted over 80,000 raids, with ‘80 percent … linked to search warrants to investigate potential criminal suspects, not for high-stakes “hostage, barricade, or active shooter scenarios”’ (Chen, 2014). The militarization of American society is fueled by a Department of Defense program labeled 1033, which ‘has provided $4.3 billion in free military equipment to local police’ (Chen, 2014). At the same time, states have ‘received at least $34 billion in federal grants to purchase military grade supplies in the decade after 9/11 … . Even in remote cities like Fargo, North Dakota, rated one of the safest cities in America police officers have traveled with military style assault rifles in their patrol cars’ (Chen, 2014). What the arming of America testifies to is not simply the militarizing of the police but a process of militarization defined by Michael Geyer as the ‘contradictory and tense social process in which civil society organizes itself for the production of violence’ (cited in Womack, 2004; also see Gillis, 1989). This speaks to a much broader threat to American society than the arming of the police. In light of the ongoing militarization of American society, I want to introduce a caveat. I think it is a mistake to simply focus on the militarization of the police and their racist actions in addressing the killing of Michael Brown. What we are witnessing in this brutal killing and mobilization of state violence is symptomatic of the neoliberal racist punishing state emerging all over the world, with its encroaching machinery of social death. The neoliberal killing machine is on the march globally. The spectacle of neoliberal misery is too great to deny any more and the only mode of control left by the corporate controlled societies is violence, but a violence that is waged against the new precariat, such as immigrant children, protesting youth, the unemployed, and black youth. In the case of Michael Brown, it should be clear that his death cannot be reduced to an isolated incident in a town in which Whites are overwhelmingly in power. In fact, as Steven Rosenfeld points out, According to the most recently available federal crime statistics reported by USA Today, a white police officer killed a black person at least twice a week in the U. S. from 2005 through 2012. ‘The shooting of a black teenager in Ferguson, MO, last Saturday was not an isolated event in American policing. Eighteen percent of the blacks killed during those seven years were under age 21, compared to 8.7 percent of whites’. (Rosenfeld, 2013) The racist, symbolic, and capacious violence now waged by the neoliberal state has become so widespread that it permeates the news, media, social networks, and online sources so as to become normalized rather than a source of alarm. Yet, to the degree that neoliberal ideology is in disarray, it becomes more and more obsessed with security and expanding the punishing state. This suggests at one level that neoliberal states can no longer justify and legitimate their exercise of ruthless power and its effects

under casino capitalism. Instead, the state no longer attempts to produce consensus, but on reproducing a culture of fear (Bauman, 2010, p. 8). But rather than responding with palliative reforms, the neoliberal state appears both obsessed with security and politically indifferent and ethically frozen in light of the human suffering, exploitation, misery, and culture of cruelty it produces. Part of this is due to the way in which global corporate power is now separated from the politics of the nation state. As Zygmunt Bauman andLeonidas Donskis observe: the advanced separation aimed at divorce between power (the ability to see things done) and politics (the capacity to decide what things are to be done), has resulted in the ‘ludicrous and degrading’, all too manifest incapacity of nation-state politics to perform its function. … Power and politics live and move in separation from each other and their divorce lurks round the corner. On the one hand, there is power, safely roaming the global expanses, free from political control and at liberty to select its own targets; on the other, there is politics, squeezed and robbed of all or nearly all of its power, muscles and teeth. (Bauman & Donskis, 2013, pp. 59–60) Yet, given the fact that corporate power now floats above and beyond national boundaries, the financial elite can dispense with political concessions in order to pursue their toxic agendas. Moreover, as SlavojŽižek argues ‘worldwide capitalism can no longer sustain or tolerate … global equality. It is just too much’ (2013, p. 58). Moreover, in the face of massive inequality, increasing poverty, the rise of the punishing state, and the attack on all public spheres, neoliberalism cannot no longer pass itself off as synonymous with democracy. The capitalist elite, whether they are Hedge Fund managers, the new billionaires from Silicon Valley, or the heads of banks and corporations, are no longer interested in ideology as their chief mode of legitimation. Force is now the arbiter of their power and ability to maintain control over the commanding institutions of American society. Finally, I think it is fair to say that they are too arrogant and indifferent to how the public feels. Neoliberal capitalism has nothing to do with democracy and this has become more and more evident among people, especially youth all over the globe. As Žižek has observed, ‘the link between democracy and capitalism has been broken’ (2013, p. 68). The important question of justice has been subordinated to the violence of unreason, to a market logic that divorces itself from social costs, and a ruling elite that has an allegiance to nothing but profit and will do anything to protect their interests. This is why I think it is dreadfully wrong to just talk about the militarization of local police forces without recognizing that the metaphor of ‘war zone’ is apt for a global politics in which the social state and public spheres have been replaced by the machinery of finance, the militarization of entire societies not just the police, and the widespread use of punishment that extends from the prison to the schools to the streets. Some have rightly argued that these tactics have been going on in the black community for a long time and are not new (Nopper & Kaba, 2014). Police violence certainly has been going on for some time, but what is new is that the intensity of violence and the level military-style machinery of death being employed is much more sophisticated and deadly. For instance, as Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers point out, the militarization of the police in the United States is a recent phenomenon that dates back to 1971. They write: The militarization of police is a more recent phenomenon [and marks] the rapid rise of Police Paramilitary Units (PPUs, informally SWAT teams) which are modeled after special operations teams in the military. PPUs did not exist anywhere until 1971 when Los Angeles under the leadership of the infamous police Chief Daryl Gates, formed the first one and used it for demolishing homes with tanks equipped with battering rams. By 2000, there were 30,000 police SWAT teams [and] by the late 1990s, 89% of police departments in cities of over 50,000 had PPUs, almost double the mid-80 s figure; and in smaller towns of between 25,000 and 50,000 by 2007, 80% had a PPU quadrupling from 20% in the mid80 s. [Moreover,] SWAT teams were active with 45,000 deployments in 2007 compared to 3,000 in the early 80 s. The most

common use … was for serving drug search warrants where they were used 80% of the time, but they were also increasingly used for patrolling neighborhoods. (Zeese & Flowers, 2014) At the same time, the impact of the rapid militarization of local police forces on poor black communities is nothing short of terrifying and symptomatic of the violence that takes place in advanced genocidal states. For instance, according to a recent report, entitled ‘Operation Ghetto Storm’, produced by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, ‘police officers, security guards, or self-appointed vigilantes extra judicially killed at least 313 African Americans in 2012. … This means a black person was killed by a security officer every 28 hours’. The report suggests that ‘the real number could be much higher’ (Hudson, 2013).3 Glenn Greenwald is right in arguing that ‘abusive policing, police militarization is overwhelmingly and disproportionately directed at minorities and poor communities, ensuring that the problem largely festers in the dark’; it also ‘degrades the mentality of police forces in virtually every negative way and subjects their target communities to rampant brutality and unaccountable abuse’ while posing ‘grave and direct dangers to basic political liberties, including rights of free speech, press and assembly’ (Greenwald, 2014). The emergence of the warrior cop and the surveillance state go hand-in-hand and are indicative not only of state sanctioned racism but also of the rise of the authoritarian state and the dismantling of civil liberties. Brutality mixed with attacks on freedom dissent, and peaceful protest harbor memories of past brutal regimes such as the dictatorships in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. The events in Ferguson speak to a history of representation in both the United States and abroad that Americans have chosen to forget at their own risk. In spite of his generally right-wing political views, Rand Paul got it right in arguing that When you couple this militarization of law enforcement with an erosion of civil liberties and due process that allows the police to become judge and jury— national security letters, no-knock searches, broad general warrants, pre-conviction forfeiture—we begin to have a very serious problem on our hands. Given these developments, it is almost impossible for many Americans not to feel like their government is targeting them. Given the racial disparities in our criminal justice system, it is impossible for African-Americans not to feel like their government is particularly targeting them. (Paul, 2014)

The Alternative is to express moral outrage and engaging organized struggles to oppose and transform the capitalist societyGiroux ‘14 (Henry, pioneering work in public pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, higher education, media studies, and critical theory., "Militarism's Killing Fields: From Gaza to Ferguson", pgs. 14, file:///C:/Users/Dimarvin/Dropbox/WAKE!!!/Articles/Militarism%20s%20Killing%20Fields%20From%20Gaza%20to%20Ferguson.pdf, 2014, D.P)

What he does not name is the problem, which is a society marked ‘by a dangerous and unprecedented confluence of our democratic institutions and the military’ (Baker, 2009). As Danielle M. LaSusa (2014) observes, the United States is a society that is not simply on the precipice of authoritarianism but has fallen over the edge into what Hannah Arendt once called ‘dark times’. Under the regime of neoliberalism, the circle of those considered disposable and subject to state violence is now expanding. The heavy hand of the state is not only racist; it is also part of an authoritarian mode of governance willing to do violence to anyone who threatens neoliberal capitalism, white Christian fundamentalism, and the power of the military-industrial-academic-surveillance state. America’s embrace of murderous weapons to be used on enemies abroad has taken a new turn and now will be used on those considered

disposable at home. As the police become more militarized, the weapons of death become more sophisticated and the legacy of killing civilians becomes both an element of domestic as well as foreign policy. Amid the growing intensity of state terrorism, violence becomes the DNA of a society that refuses to deal with larger structural issues such as massive inequality in wealth and power, a government that now unapologetically serves the rich and powerful corporate interests, and makes violence the organizing principle of governance? (see, especially, Balko, 2013; Alexander, 2010; Nelson, 2000) The worldwide response to what is happening in Ferguson sheds a light on the racist and militarized nature of American society so as to make its claim to democracy seem both hypocritical and politically insipid. At the same time, such protests make visible what Goya called the sleep of reason, a lapse in witnessing, attentiveness, and the failure of conscience, which lie at the heart of neoliberal’s ongoing attempt to depoliticize the American public. Political life has come alive once again in America, moving away from its withdrawal into consumer fantasies and privatized obsessions. The time has come to recognize that Ferguson is not only about the violence and consolidation of white power and racism in one town, it is also symptomatic of white power and the deep-seated legacy of racism in the country as a whole, which goes along with what America has become under the intensifying politics of market fundamentalism, militarism, and disposability. Ferguson prompts us to rethink the meaning of politics and to begin to think not about reform but a major restructuring of our values, institutions and notions of what a real democracy might look like. We need to live in a country in which we are alarmed rather than entertained by violence. It is time for the American to unite around our shared fate as stakeholders in a radical democracy, rather than being united around our shared fears and the toxic glue of state terrorism and everyday violence. It is time to express a sense of moral outrage and engage in organized struggles to oppose and transform a society that as Susan Sontag has observed ‘dissolves politics into pathology’ (cited in Becker, 1997, p. 28)

Set Col linkThe aff’s notion of “we some people” is exclusionary to indigenous populations and reduces them to conditions of bare life – the people are those who are proper citizens which is inaccessible by marginalized communities under settler colonialismRifkin 9 Mark Rifkin, “Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the ‘Peculiar’ Status of Native Peoples,” Cultural Critique 73 (Fall 2009): 88-124 //jazmyn

The "People" stands less for the actual assemblage of persons within the state than for the set of those who fit the ideal "body" and who consequently will be recognized as "citizens," with the rest of the resident population consigned to the realm of " bare life"-the people who are not the People and thus are excluded from meaningful participation while remaining the objects of state control. However, when reflecting on the status of Indigenous populations in relation to the settler-state , a third category emerges that is neither people nor People-namely peoples. The possibility of conceptualizing the nation as "a whole political body" requires narrating it as "a unitary subject" rather than a collection of

separate, unsubordinated, self-governing polities. Conversely, for "inclusion" to be articulated as "total," it needs to have a clear domain over which it is extended. In critiquing the approach of previous theorists to the issue of sovereignty, Agamben notes, "The problem of sovereignty was reduced to the question of who within the political order was invested with certain powers, and the very threshold of the political order

itself was never called into question" (12), but Agamben's account itself assumes a clear "within" by not posing the question of how sovereignty produces and is produced by place, how the state is realized as a spatial phenomenon as part of "the very threshold of the political order itself."

I am suggesting, then, that the biopolitical project of defining the proper " body " of the people is subtended by the geopolitical project of defining the territoriality of the nation, displacing competing claims by older /other

political formations as what we might call bare habitance. Agamben notes, "The camp is a piece of land placed outside the normal juridical order, but it is nevertheless not simply an external space'' (169-70), but that definition also seems to capture rather precisely the status of the reservation, a space that while

governed under "peculiar" rules categorically is denied status as "external," or "foreign." Examining the reservation, and more broadly the

representation of Native collectivity and territoriality in U.S. governmental discourses, through the prism of Agamben's analysis of the state of exception helps highlight the kinds of ''sovereign violence" at play in the (re)production and naturalization of national space.8 The effort to think biopolitics without geopolitics, bare life without bare habitance, results in the erasure of the politics of collectivity and occupancy: what entities will count as polities and thus be seen as deserving of autonomy, what modes of inhabitance and land tenure will be understood as legitimate, and who will get to make such determinations and on what basis?9 Focusing on the fracture between "the People" and "the people" imagines explicitly or implicitly either a reconciliation of the two (restoring a version of the "trinity" of state, land, and birth) or the proliferation of a boundary less humanness unconstrained by territorially circumscribed polities. These options leave little room for thinking indigeneity, the existence of peoples forcibly made domestic whose self-understandings and aspirations cannot be understood in terms of the denial of (or disjunctions within) state citizenship.10 While in the next section I will address how biopolitical and geopolitical dynamics work together, specifically in the translation of Native peoples into aggregates of individual domestic subjects (as either a race or a culture), I first want to explore in

greater detail how the production of national space depends on coding Native peoples and lands as an exception. Administrative mappings of U.S. jurisdiction remain haunted by the presence of polities whose occupancy precedes that of the state and whose existence as collectivities repeatedly has been officially recognized through treaties. The Supreme Court decisions with which I began all register this difficulty. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, the court explicitly finds that the "acts of our government plainly recognize the Cherokee nation as a state," indicating they are ''a distinct political society, separated from others, capable of managing its own affairs and governing itself" (16). Yet the majority opinion also insists, ''The Indian territory is admitted to compose a part of the United States," adding, "They occupy a territory to which we assert a title independent of their will" (17). Following a similar line of reasoning, U.S. v. Kagama insists "the colonies before the Revolution and the States and the United States since, have recognized in the Indians a possessory right to the soil. . . . But they asserted an ultimate title in the land itself" (381), and Justice Rehnquist in Oliphant v. Suquamish argues, "Indian tribes do retain elements of 'quasisovereign' authority after ceding their lands to the United States," although "their exercise of separate power is constrained so as not to conflict with the interests of [the U.S.'s] overriding sovereignty" (208- 9). Each of these formulations acknowledges a tension between the kinds of political identity and authority suggested by the ability to enter into formal agreements with the United states and the claim that such otherwise (or previously) "distinct political societ[ies]" are fully enclosed within the boundaries of the state and thus subject in some fashion to its rule.