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Whiteness 1NCShortThe affirmative is simply an attempt at particular reforms of colonialism and indo-colonialism that fails to address the underlying issues of surveillance that are based in race. All institutions of power have now become based on race. Undoing one harm will not solve. Lieberman, 2003ROBERT C. LIEBERMAN professor of political science and public affairs at Columbia University 2003 (Race and the Limits of Solidarity American Welfare State Development in Comparative Perspective Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform (Paperback) by Sanford F. Schram (Editor), Joe Soss (Editor), Richard C. Fording (Editor))An alternative approach is to compare the United States to other countries that share certain political and social characteristics in order to see how countries with differently organized racial politics confronted similar problems of welfare state development and whether particular racial configurations are associated with particular social policy coalitions. In the United States, the centrality of race, usually taken as an exceptional feature of American politics, arises from the history of African slavery in North America that reaches back almost as far as permanent European settlement of the continent (Berlin 1998; see also Tannenbaum 1946; Elkins 1959). But slavery was only one form of rule based on racial distinctions. More generally, the processes by which racially defined rule shapes political institutions and strategic political circumstances may apply in a variety of contexts (Davis 1966). Other systems in which rule is based on racial categories include apartheid (including Jim Crow in the American South), certain brands of nationalism (including nationalism's totalitarian variants), and, most relevant for the present comparison, imperialism and colonialism. "Two new devices for political organization and rule over foreign peoples were discovered during the first decades of imperialism," wrote Hannah Arendt (1968, r8). "One was race as a principle of the body politic, and the other was bureaucracy as a principle of foreign domination." Like slavery and segregation, imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries constituted rule by "whites" of European descent over "blacks," conducted through a set of formal institutions and social arrangements supported by an ideology of racial superiority. All of these forms of rule were also justified and explained by other means economic, political, diplomatic and a complete explanation of slavery, segregation, or imperialism would surely involve all of these (see Baumgart 1982). But underlying these explanations, or at least deeply intertwined with them, is what W. E. B. Du Bois (1986, 16) called the color line, "the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Africa and Asia, in America and the islands of the sea." Similarly, imperialism and colonialism, no matter how extensively they involved other factors, constituted irreducible structures of racial rule.Resisting racism is the highest ethical duty. Any concessions or legitimization of exclusion corrupts and bankrupts ethics, entrenching systems of violence.Memmi 00 (Albert, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at University of Paris, Racism, p. 163-5)The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never achieved, yet for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism. One cannot even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other people which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. It is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which [person] man is not [themself] himself an outsider relative to someone else?). Racism illustrates in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated; that is it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animality to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that one’s moral conduct only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism because racism signifies the exclusion of the other and his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is “the truly capital sin.”fn22 It is not an accident that almost all of humanity’s spiritual traditions counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. But no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. “Recall,” says the bible, “that you were once a stranger in Egypt,” which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming once again someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal – indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and practical morality. Because, in the end, the ethical choice commands the political choice. A just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible.The alternative is a genealogical criticism of whiteness. An historical tracing of struggle helps modern activists trace the roots of whiteness and create new types of resistanceMedina, 2011 (Jose Medina, October 2011, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt, Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism)As Foucault puts it, ?it is the coupling together of the buried scholarly knowledge and knowledges that were disqualified by the hierarchy of erudition and sciences? that gives strength to genealogical critique.34 What both of these forms of subjugated knowledges brings to the fore is the ?historical knowledge of struggles,? ?the memory of combats, the very memory that had until then been confined to the mar-gins.?35 And this is exactly what the critical and transformative work of genealogical investigations consists in, according to Foucault: with the ?coupling together of scholarly erudition and local memories,? genealogical investigations provide ?a meticulous rediscovery of struggles and the raw memory of fights?; ?this coupling allows us to constitute a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of that knowledge in contemporary tactics.?36 Genealogical investigations can unearth multiple paths from buried or forgotten past struggles to the present; and thus they can promote a critical awareness that things are as they are because of a history of past struggles that are hidden from view, which can have a great impact on how we confront our struggles in the present. As McWhorter’s genealogical investigations il-lustrate so well, ?one consequence of that awareness is the recognition that today’s status quo was far from inevitable and need not persist into tomorrow.?37 Genea-logies are insurrections against hegemonic power/knowledge effects of discursive practices. Thus, for example, McWhorter’s genealogical account of racism in the US is ?an intellectual assault on the power-effects of institutionalized, entrenched, and taken-for-granted academic, clinical, moralistic, and religious discourses about ra-cism.?38 And it is important to note that the possibilities of critique that are opened up by unearthing marginalized past struggles benefit not only those whose expe-riences and lives have been kept in the dark, but the entire social body, which can now become critically conscious of the heterogeneity of histories and experiences that are part of the social fabric. This is why McWhorter’s genealogy of racism makes racial oppression relevant in novel and unexpected ways to a wide variety of groups and publics that can now relate to old struggles in new ways.39LongThe affirmative is simply an attempt at particular reforms of colonialism and indo-colonialism that fails to address the underlying issues of surveillance that are based in race. All institutions of power have now become based on race. Undoing one harm will not solve. Lieberman, 2003ROBERT C. LIEBERMAN professor of political science and public affairs at Columbia University 2003 (Race and the Limits of Solidarity American Welfare State Development in Comparative Perspective Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform (Paperback) by Sanford F. Schram (Editor), Joe Soss (Editor), Richard C. Fording (Editor))An alternative approach is to compare the United States to other countries that share certain political and social characteristics in order to see how countries with differently organized racial politics confronted similar problems of welfare state development and whether particular racial configurations are associated with particular social policy coalitions. In the United States, the centrality of race, usually taken as an exceptional feature of American politics, arises from the history of African slavery in North America that reaches back almost as far as permanent European settlement of the continent (Berlin 1998; see also Tannenbaum 1946; Elkins 1959). But slavery was only one form of rule based on racial distinctions. More generally, the processes by which racially defined rule shapes political institutions and strategic political circumstances may apply in a variety of contexts (Davis 1966). Other systems in which rule is based on racial categories include apartheid (including Jim Crow in the American South), certain brands of nationalism (including nationalism's totalitarian variants), and, most relevant for the present comparison, imperialism and colonialism. "Two new devices for political organization and rule over foreign peoples were discovered during the first decades of imperialism," wrote Hannah Arendt (1968, r8). "One was race as a principle of the body politic, and the other was bureaucracy as a principle of foreign domination." Like slavery and segregation, imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries constituted rule by "whites" of European descent over "blacks," conducted through a set of formal institutions and social arrangements supported by an ideology of racial superiority. All of these forms of rule were also justified and explained by other means economic, political, diplomatic and a complete explanation of slavery, segregation, or imperialism would surely involve all of these (see Baumgart 1982). But underlying these explanations, or at least deeply intertwined with them, is what W. E. B. Du Bois (1986, 16) called the color line, "the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Africa and Asia, in America and the islands of the sea." Similarly, imperialism and colonialism, no matter how extensively they involved other factors, constituted irreducible structures of racial rule.Simply reforming the American system of surveillance is not enough. The 1AC is an attempt at making themselves feel better for the atrocities committed by the state, but this does not go far enough. Refusing to confront racialized surveillance means that the affirmative only reinforces what it probably would critique. Giroux, 2006Henry A. Giroux Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University 2006 (College Literature 33.3 (2006) 171-196 Reading Hurricane Katrina)The Bush administration was not simply unprepared for Hurricane Katrina as it denied that the federal government alone had the resources to address catastrophic events; it actually felt no responsibility for the lives of poor blacks and others marginalized by poverty and relegated to the outskirts of society. Increasingly, the role of the state seems to be about engendering the financial rewards and privileges of only some members of society, while the welfare of those marginalized by race and class is now viewed with criminal contempt. The coupling of the market state with the racial state under George W. Bush means that policies are aggressively pursued to dismantle the welfare state, eliminate affirmative action, model urban public schools after prisons, aggressively pursue anti-immigrant policies, and incarcerate with impunity Arabs, Muslims, and poor youth of color. The central commitment of the new hyper-neoliberalism is now organized around the best way to remove or make invisible those individuals and groups who are either seen as a drain or stand in the way of market freedoms, free trade, consumerism, and the neoconservative dream of an American empire. This is what I call the new biopolitics of disposability: the poor, especially people of color, not only have to fend for themselves in the face of life's tragedies but are also supposed to do it without being seen by the dominant society. Excommunicated from the sphere of human concern, they have been rendered invisible, utterly disposable, and heir to that army of socially homeless that allegedly no longer existed in color-blind America. How else to explain the cruel jokes and insults either implied or made explicit by Bush and his ideological allies in the aftermath of such massive [End Page 175] destruction and suffering? When it became obvious in the week following Katrina that thousands of the elderly, poor, and sick could not get out of New Orleans because they had no cars or money to take a taxi or any other form of transportation, or were sick and infirmed, the third-highest-ranking politician in Washington, Rick Santorum, stated in an interview "that people who did not heed evacuation warnings in the future may need to be penalized" (Hamill 2005). For Santorum, those who were trapped in the flood because of poverty, sickness, and lack of transportation had become an unwelcome reminder of the state of poverty and racism in the United States, and for that they should be punished. Their crime, it seems, was that a natural disaster made a social and politically embarrassing disaster visible to the world, and they just happened to be its victims. Commenting on facilities that had been set up for the poor in the Houston Astrodome in Texas, Bush's mother and the wife of former President George H.W. Bush said in a National Public Radio interview, "So many of the people here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them" ("Barbara Bush" 2005). Other right-wing ideologues seeking to deflect criticism from the obscene incompetence and indifference of the Bush administration used a barely concealed racism to frame the events of Katrina. For example, Neil Boortz, a syndicated host on WFTL-AM in Florida stated that "a huge percentage" of those forced to leave New Orleans were "parasites, like ticks on a dog. They are coming to a community near you" (Norman 2005). On the September 13 broadcast of The Radio Factor, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly overtly indulged his own racism before millions of his viewers in claiming that poor black people in New Orleans were basically drug addicts who failed to evacuate the city because they would not have access to their fix (2005). In one of the most blatant displays of racism underscoring the biopolitical "live free or die" agenda in Bush's America, the dominant media increasingly framed the events that unfolded during and immediately after the hurricane by focusing on acts of crime, looting, rape, and murder, allegedly perpetrated by the black residents of New Orleans. In predictable fashion, politicians such as Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco issued an order allowing soldiers to shoot to kill looters in an effort to restore calm. Later inquiries revealed that almost all of these crimes did not take place. The philosopher, Slavoj ?i?ek, argued that "what motivated these stories were not facts, but racist prejudices, the satisfaction felt by those who would be able to say: 'You see, Blacks really are like that, violent barbarians under the thin layer of civilization!'" (2005). It must be noted that there is more at stake here than the resurgence of old-style racism; there is the recognition that some groups have the power to protect themselves from such stereotypes and others do not, and [End Page 176] for those who do not—especially poor blacks—racist myths have a way of producing precise, if not deadly, material consequences. Given the public's preoccupation with violence and safety, crime and terror merge in the all-too-familiar equation of black culture with the culture of criminality, and images of poor blacks are made indistinguishable from images of crime and violence. Criminalizing black behavior and relying on punitive measures to solve social problems do more than legitimate a biopolitics defined increasingly by the authority of an expanding national security state under George W. Bush. They also legitimize a state in which the police and military, often operating behind closed doors, take on public functions that are not subject to public scrutiny (Bleifuss 2005, 22).3 This becomes particularly dangerous in a democracy when paramilitary or military organisations gain their legitimacy increasingly from an appeal to fear and terror, prompted largely by the presence of those racialized and class-specific groups considered both dangerous and disposable.Racism is the zero-point of the holocaust. Despite the best intentions of the 1AC, the state will continue to try and destroy difference and “impure” elements. Elden, 2002Elden, Lecturer in politics at the University of Warwick, England, 2002 (Stuart, boundary 2 - Volume 29, Number 1, page project muse)The reverse side is the power to allow death. State racism is a recoding of the old mechanisms of blood through the new procedures of regulation. Racism, as biologizing, as tied to a state, takes shape where the procedures of intervention "at the level of the body, conduct, health, and everyday life, received their color and their justification from the mythical concern with protecting the purity of the blood and ensuring the triumph of the race" (VS, 197; WK, 149). 37 For example, the old anti-Semitism based on religion is reused under the new rubric of state racism. The integrity and purity of the race is threatened, and the state apparatuses are introduced against the race that has infiltrated and introduced noxious elements into the body. The Jews are characterized as the race present in the middle of all races (FDS, 76). 38 The use of medical language is important. Because certain groups in society are conceived of in medical terms, society is no longer in need of being defended from the outsider but from the insider: the abnormal in behavior, species, or race. What is novel is not the mentality of power but the technology of power (FDS, 230). The recoding of old problems is made possible through new techniques. A break or cut (coupure) is fundamental to racism: a division or incision between those who must live and those who must die. The "biological continuum of the human species" is fragmented by the apparition of races, which are seen as distinguished, hierarchized, qualified as good or inferior, and so forth. The species is subdivided into subgroups that are thought of as races. In a sense, then, just as the continuum of geometry becomes divisible in Descartes, 39 the human continuum is divided, that is, made calculable and orderable, two centuries later. As Anderson has persuasively argued, to suggest that racism has its roots in nationalism is a mistake. He suggests that "the dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class, rather than in those of nation: above all in claims to divinity among rulers and to ‘blue' or ‘white' blood and breeding among aristocracies." 40 As Stoler has noted, for Foucault, it is the other way around: "A discourse of class derives from an earlier discourse of races." 41 But it is a more subtle distinction than [End Page 147] that. What Foucault suggests is that discourses of class have their roots in the war of races, but so, too, does modern racism; what is different is the biological spin put on the concepts. 42 But as well as emphasizing the biological, modern racism puts this another way: to survive, to live, one must be prepared to massacre one's enemies, a relation of war. As a relation of war, this is no different from the earlier war of races that Foucault has spent so much of the course explaining. But when coupled with the mechanisms of mathematics and medicine in bio-power, this can be conceived of in entirely different ways. Bio-power is able to establish, between my life and the death of the other, a relation that is not warlike or confrontational but biological: "The more inferior species tend to disappear, the more abnormal individuals can be eliminated, the less the species will be degenerated, the more I—not as an individual but as a species—will live, will be strong, will be vigorous, will be able to proliferate." The death of the other does not just make me safer personally, but the death of the other, of the bad, inferior race or the degenerate or abnormal, makes life in general healthier and purer (FDS, 227–28). "The existence in question is no longer of sovereignty, juridical; but that of the population, biological. If genocide is truly the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a return today of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population" (VS, 180; WK, 136). "If the power of normalization wishes to exercise the ancient sovereign right of killing, it must pass through racism. And if, inversely, a sovereign power, that is to say a power with the right of life and death, wishes to function with the instruments, mechanisms, and technology of normalization, it must also pass through racism" (FDS, 228). This holds for indirect death—the exposure to death—as much as for direct killing. While not Darwinism, this biological sense of power is based on evolutionism and enables a thinking of colonial relations, the necessity of wars, criminality, phenomena of madness and mental illness, class divisions, and so forth. The link to colonialism is central: This form of modern state racism develops first with colonial genocide. The theme of the political enemy is extrapolated biologically. But what is important in the shift at the end of the nineteenth century is that war is no longer simply a way of securing one race by eliminating the other but of regenerating that race (FDS, 228–30). As Foucault puts it in La volonté de savoir: [End Page 148] Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of all; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity. Massacres have become vital [vitaux—understood in a dual sense, both as essential and biological]. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. (VS, 180; WK, 136) The shift Foucault thinks is interesting is what might be called a shift from sanguinity to sexuality: sanguinity, in that it had an instrumental role (the shedding of blood) and a symbolic role (purity of blood, differences of blood); sexuality, when mechanisms of power are directed to the body, to life. The theme of race is present in both, but in a different form (VS, 194; WK, 147). We have moved from "a symbolics of blood to an analytics of sexuality. Clearly, nothing was more on the side of the law, death, transgression, the symbolic, and sovereignty than blood; just as sexuality was on the side of the norm, knowledge, life, meaning, the disciplines and regulations" (VS, 195; WK, 148). In Nazism, the two are combined. Eugenics and medical/mathematical techniques are coupled with the fantasy of blood and the ideal of the purity of the race. Foucault notes that there was immediate control of procreation and genetics in the Nazi regime, and that regulation, security, and assurance were imposed over the disciplined, ordered society; but at the same time, the old sovereign power of killing traversed the entire society. This was not simply confined to the state, nor simply to the SA or the SS, but ultimately to everyone, as, through denunciation, everyone could have this power over their neighbor (FDS, 231). While destruction of other races was central to Nazism, the other side of it was the exposure of the German race itself to death, an absolute and universal risk of death. The entire German population was exposed to death, and Foucault suggests that this was one of the fundamental duties of Nazi obedience. Only this exposure of the entire population to the universal risk of death could constitute the Germans as the superior race, regenerated in the face of those races either totally exterminated or completely subjugated. We have, therefore, in Nazism, both the absolute generalization of bio-power and the generalization of the sovereign right of death. Two mechanisms—one classical, archaic; one new—coincide exactly. A racist state, a murdering state, a suicidal state. Accompanying the final solution was the order of April 1945 that called for the destruction of the conditions of life of the German [End Page 149] people themselves. A final solution for other races, an absolute suicide for the German race (FDS, 231–32).Resisting racism is the highest ethical duty. Any concessions or legitimization of exclusion corrupts and bankrupts ethics, entrenching systems of violence.Memmi 2000 (Albert, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at University of Paris, Racism, p. 163-5)The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never achieved, yet for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism. One cannot even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other people which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. It is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which [person] man is not [themself] himself an outsider relative to someone else?). Racism illustrates in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated; that is it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animality to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that one’s moral conduct only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism because racism signifies the exclusion of the other and his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is “the truly capital sin.”fn22 It is not an accident that almost all of humanity’s spiritual traditions counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. But no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. “Recall,” says the bible, “that you were once a stranger in Egypt,” which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming once again someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal – indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and practical morality. Because, in the end, the ethical choice commands the political choice. A just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible.Despite America’s entrance into a “post-racial” society after 2008, racial politics still destroy communities because of difference. Difference is not respected – it is targeted. Giroux, 2009GIROUX, Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, 2009 (H.A. “Youth and the Myth of Post-Racial Society Under Barack Obama, p. ) With the election of Barack Obama, it has been argued that not only will the social state be renewed in the spirit and legacy of the New Deal, but that the punishing racial state and its vast complex of disciplinary institutions will, if not come to an end, at least be significantly reformed.[1] From this perspective, Obama's presidency not only represents a post-racial victory, but also signals a new space of post-racial harmony. In assessing the Obama victory, Time Magazine columnist Joe Klein wrote, "It is a place where the primacy of racial identity - and this includes the old Jesse Jackson version of black racial identity - has been replaced by the celebration of pluralism, of cross-racial synergy."[2] Obama won the 2008 election because he was able to mobilize 95 percent of African-Americans, two-thirds of all Latinos and a large proportion of young people under the age of 30. At the same time, what is generally forgotten in the exuberance of this assessment is that the majority of white Americans voted for the John McCain-Sarah Palin ticket. While "post-racial" may mean less overt racism, the idea that we have moved into a post-racial period in American history is not merely premature - it is an act of willful denial and ignorance. Paul Ortiz puts it well in his comments on the myth of post-racialism: The idea that we've moved to a post-racial period in American social history is undermined by an avalanche of recent events. Hurricane Katrina. The US Supreme Court's dismantling of Brown vs. Board of Education and the resegregation of American schools. The Clash of Civilizations thesis that promotes the idea of a War against Islam. The backlash facing immigrant workers. A grotesque prison industrial complex. [Moreover] ... [w]hile Americans were being robbed blind and primed for yet another bailout of the banks and investment sectors, they were treated to new evidence from Fox News and poverty experts that the great moral threats facing the nation were greedy union workers, black single mothers, Latino gang bangers and illegal immigrants.[3] Missing from the exuberant claims that Americans are now living in a post-racial society is the historical legacy of a neoconservative revolution, officially launched in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan, and its ensuing racialist attacks on the welfare "Queens"; Bill Clinton's cheerful compliance in signing bills that expanded the punishing industries; and George W. Bush's "willingness to make punishment his preferred response to social problems."[4] In the last 30 years, we have witnessed the emergence of policies that have amplified the power of the racial state and expanded its mechanisms of punishment and mass incarceration, the consequences of which are deeply racist - even as the state and its legal apparatuses insist on their own race neutrality. The politics of racism has hardly disappeared from the landscape of American culture and the institutions that support it. Poor minority kids now find themselves on a fast tack extending from school to juvenile courts to prison. And the number of poor and minority kids, now aptly called the "recession generation" by Dr. Irwin Redlener, president of New York City's Children's Health fund, has increased from 13 million before the economic meltdown to an expected 17 million by the end of the year. And who are these kids? These are the kids marginalized by race and class, who are largely seen either as a drain on the economy or stand in the way of market freedoms, free trade, consumerism and the whitewashed fantasies of a cleansed, Disneyfied social order. These are kids who, not only have to fend for themselves in the face of life's tragedies, but are also supposed to do it without being seen by the dominant society. Excommunicated from the sphere of human concern, they have been rendered invisible, utterly disposable, and heir to that army of socially homeless that allegedly no longer existed in colorblind America. Most of them, if not homeless, live in dilapidated housing, attend schools that are underfunded and literally falling apart, receive food stamps and eat mostly junk food when they can get it. They are the major targets of gun violence, lack decent health care and they often find themselves in hospital emergency rooms. These are the kids who experience daily, whether on the street or in school, draconian discipline policies that endlessly criminalize every aspect of their behavior and increasingly banish them from the very institutions such as schools that remain their last chance for getting a fair shake in life. It gets worse. For instance, a full 60 percent of black high school dropouts, by the time they reach their mid-thirties, will be prisoners or ex-cons and the drop out rate is as high as 65 percent in some cities.[5] This apartheid-based system of incarceration bodes especially ill for young black males. According to Paul Street: It is worth noting that half of the nation's black male high-school dropouts will be incarcerated - moving, often enough, from quasi-carceral lock-down high schools to the real "lock down" thing - at some point in their lives. These dropouts are over represented among the one in three African American males aged sixteen- to twenty-years old who are under one form of supervision by the US criminal justice system: parole, probation, jail, or prison.[6] As the toll in human suffering increases daily, Obama and his Wall Street advisers bail out the banks and the rich just as crucial social services for children are being cut back, unemployment is soaring into record numbers and more and more youth of color are disappearing into an abysmal pit of poverty, despair and hopelessness. Raised in a blood-drenched culture of violence mediated by an economic Darwinism that harbors a rabid disdain for the common good, poor minority kids appear to be completely off the radar of public concern and government compassion. And Obama, for all of his soaring poetic imagery of unity and justice, falls flat on his face by allowing his Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan to offer up reform policies that amount to nothing more than another version of Bush's No Child Left Behind with its anti-union ideology and obsessive investment in measurement and accountability schemes that strips any talk of educational reform of any viability while turning schools into nothing more than testing factories - policies that disproportionately punish brown and black youth. These racially exclusionary set of policies and institutions have become especially cruel since the beginning of the neoconservative revolution in the 1980s, and are not poised to disappear soon under the presidency of Barack Obama - in fact, given the current economic crisis, they may even get worse. In short, the discourse of the post-racial state ignores how political and economic institutions, with their circuits of repression and disposability and their technologies of punishment, connect and condemn the fate of many impoverished youth of color in the inner cities to persisting structures of racism that "serve to keep [them] in a state of inferiority and oppression."[7] Not surprisingly, under such circumstances, individual suffering no longer registers a social concern as all notions of injustice are assumed to be the outcome of personal failings or deficits. Signs of the pathologizing of both marginalized youth and the crucial safety nets that have provided them some hope of justice in the past can be found everywhere from the racist screeds coming out of right-wing talk radio to the mainstream media that seems to believe that the culture of black and brown youth is synonymous with the culture of crime. Poverty is now imagined to be a problem of individual character. Racism is now understood as merely an act of individual discrimination (if not discretion), and homelessness is reduced to a choice made by lazy people. Unfortunately, missing from the discourse of those who are arguing for the kind of progressive change the Obama administration should deliver is any mention of the race-based crises facing youth and the terrible toll it has taken on generations of poor black and brown kids. Bringing this crisis to the forefront of the political and social agenda is crucial, particularly since Obama, in a number of speeches prior to assuming the presidency, refused to adopt the demonizing rhetoric often used by politicians when talking about youth. Instead, he pointedly called upon the American people to reclaim young people as an important symbol of the future and democracy itself: [C]ome together and say, "Not this time." This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids.[8] But if Barack Obama's call to address the crucial problems facing young people in this country is to be taken seriously, the political, economic and institutional conditions that both legitimate and sustain a shameful attack on poor minority youth have to be made visible, open to challenge and transformed. This can only happen by refusing the race-based somnambulism and social amnesia that coincide with the pretense of post-racial politics and society, especially when the matter concerns young people of color. To reclaim poor minority youth as part of a democratic vision and a crucial symbol of the future requires more than hope and a civics lesson: It necessitates transforming the workings of racist power arrangements both in and out of the government along with the market-driven institutions and values that have enabled the rise of a predatory corporate state and a punishing state that have produced a polity that governs through the logic of finance capital, consumerism, crime, disposability and a growing imprisonment binge. The marriage of economic Darwinism and the racialized punishing state is on full display not merely in the rising rate of incarceration for black and brown people in the United States, but also in places like East Carroll Parish in Louisiana where inmates provide cheap or free labor at barbecues, funerals, service stations, and a host of other sites. According to Adam Nossiter, "the men of orange are everywhere" and people living in this Louisiana county "say they could not get by without their inmates, who make up more than 10 percent of its population and most of its labor force. They are dirt-cheap, sometimes free, always compliant, ever-ready and disposable....You just call up the sheriff, and presto, inmates are headed your way. 'They bring me warm bodies, 10 warm bodies in the morning,' said Grady Brown, owner of the Panola Pepper Corporation. 'They do anything you ask them to do....' 'You call them up, they drop them off, and they pick them up in the afternoon,' said Paul Chapple, owner of a service station."[9] Nossiter claims that the system is jokingly referred to by many people who use it as "rent a convict" and is, to say the least, an "odd vestige of the abusive-convict-lease system that began in the South around Reconstruction."[10] This is not merely an eccentric snapshot of small town racism, it is also an image of what kind of future poor minority youth might inhabit. Treating prisoners as commodities to be bought and sold like expendable goods suggests the degree to which the punishing state has divested itself of any moral responsibility with regard to those human beings who, in the logic of free-market fundamentalism, are considered either as commodities or as waste products, and this is true especially of young people. At the same time, as racism has been relegated to an anachronistic vestige of the past, especially in light of Barack Obama's election to the presidency, the workings of the punishing state are whitewashed and removed from the racialized violence that deeply influences and constrains the lives of so many young people. Consequently, the American public becomes increasingly indifferent to the ways in which the practices of a market-driven society - market deregulation, privatization, the hollowing out of the social state and the disparaging of the public good - wage a devastating assault on African-American and Latino communities, young people and, increasingly, immigrants and other people of color, who are relegated to the borders of American normalcy. Alarmingly, the punishing state, when coupled with the growing disappearance of newspapers and other crucial public spheres, not only produces vast amounts of inequality, suffering and racism, but also propagates collective amnesia, cynicism and moral indifferenceThe alternative is a genealogical criticism of whiteness. An historical tracing of struggle helps modern activists trace the roots of whiteness and create new types of resistanceMedina, 2011 (Jose Medina, October 2011, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt, Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism)As Foucault puts it, ?it is the coupling together of the buried scholarly knowledge and knowledges that were disqualified by the hierarchy of erudition and sciences? that gives strength to genealogical critique.34 What both of these forms of subjugated knowledges brings to the fore is the ?historical knowledge of struggles,? ?the memory of combats, the very memory that had until then been confined to the mar-gins.?35 And this is exactly what the critical and transformative work of genealogical investigations consists in, according to Foucault: with the ?coupling together of scholarly erudition and local memories,? genealogical investigations provide ?a meticulous rediscovery of struggles and the raw memory of fights?; ?this coupling allows us to constitute a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of that knowledge in contemporary tactics.?36 Genealogical investigations can unearth multiple paths from buried or forgotten past struggles to the present; and thus they can promote a critical awareness that things are as they are because of a history of past struggles that are hidden from view, which can have a great impact on how we confront our struggles in the present. As McWhorter’s genealogical investigations il-lustrate so well, ?one consequence of that awareness is the recognition that today’s status quo was far from inevitable and need not persist into tomorrow.?37 Genea-logies are insurrections against hegemonic power/knowledge effects of discursive practices. Thus, for example, McWhorter’s genealogical account of racism in the US is ?an intellectual assault on the power-effects of institutionalized, entrenched, and taken-for-granted academic, clinical, moralistic, and religious discourses about ra-cism.?38 And it is important to note that the possibilities of critique that are opened up by unearthing marginalized past struggles benefit not only those whose expe-riences and lives have been kept in the dark, but the entire social body, which can now become critically conscious of the heterogeneity of histories and experiences that are part of the social fabric. This is why McWhorter’s genealogy of racism makes racial oppression relevant in novel and unexpected ways to a wide variety of groups and publics that can now relate to old struggles in new ways.39Systems of whiteness and racism exist purely because we refuse to confront it explicitly. The 1NC’s overt questioning of whiteness solves. Green, 03Anne Green, assistant professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University, director of the Writing Center, 2003 [Difficult Stories: Service-Learning, Race, Class, and Whiteness, JSTOR, National Council of Teachers]Most of the academy is still white and middle class.3 Whiteness, as Peggy McIntosh theorizes, works because whiteness can remain a largely unmarked and invisible category to white people. In the writing about service-learning, whiteness and middle class privilege are often unspoken categories that define those who perform service and those who write about service-learning. As a white teacher of service-learning with a complex relationship to social class, I've found this silence around subject position troubling. If servicelearning takes place, as it often does, when mostly white students at predominantly white institutions serve mostly poor people of color in urban settings, then teachers of service-learning need to reflect on how whiteness and class privilege function in the service-learning paradigm. By telling If service-learning takes place, as it often does, when mostly white students at predominantly white institutions serve mostly poor people of color in urban settings, then teachers of service-learning need to reflect on how whiteness and class privilege function in the service-learning paradigm. By telling more explicit stories about race and class, it is possible to open a door for more complex theorizing about the relationship between those who serve and those who are served. If we change some of the ways that we tell stories about service-learning to include reflections about race and social class, we can create a different kind of space for discussions about the social change work that service ideally creates. Rather than encouraging students to tell the familiar story of how service-learning feels good, teachers of service-learning can work with students to tell difficult stories. Telling the difficult story requires a willingness to break our silences around race, class, and service. For those of us who are white, this means beginning the work of dismantling racism by unpacking white privilege. For those of us who are middle class, this means acknowledging differences of class, caste, and culture and not assuming that those who are working class or poor want middle class culture or aspire to middle class materialism. Stories become a way to understand race and class differently and with more complexity. I hope that by teaching students to tell stories about race and class, they will learn (and I will learn with them, again and again) that all stories about race and class are both partial and contradictory, and that these partial and contradictory stories are absolutely necessary if service-learning will lead to social change. Including stories in the classroom helps students learn to reflect on their multiple and contradictory positions-all of their voices in all of the stories that they tell. The stories that follow are based on two courses that I taught to the same group of first-year service-learning students. The fall course was a writing course and the spring course was a literature course. Both courses are required. When students enroll in the first service-learning course, they are strongly encouraged to continue their service-learning experience with the second course in the sequence. Neg StuffLinksWe must realize that whiteness is what structures social hierarchies. The 1AC’s attempts at liberal reform only serve to continue and mask the oppressive regimes that exist. Only our alternative can transform communities. Sullivan, 08Shannon Sullivan, Professor at Pennsylvania State University, 2008, ("Whiteness as Wise Provincialism: Royce and the Rehabilitation of a Racial Category." A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy 44.2 (2008): 236-262. Project MUSE.) It is useful to anti-racist struggle to think of a similar relationship holding between particular races, including the white race, and humanity at large. While it might initially seem paradoxical, the larger entity of humanity can best be served by people’s ties to smaller, more local entities such as their racial groups. A person’s racial group is not the only smaller entity that provides the rich existential ties of which Royce speaks—he rightly mentions family, and we could add entities such as one’s neighborhood, one’s church, mosque or synagogue, and even [End Page 243] groups based on one’s gender or sexual orientation. But race also belongs in this list of sites of intimate connection that can and often do sustain individual lives and that can support rather than undermine the well being of humanity. Forgetting one’s duty to one’s particular race in the name of working for racial justice, for example, tends to turn that goal into a remote abstraction. “You cannot be loyal to merely an impersonal abstraction,” Royce reminds us.13 Effectively serving the goal of racial justice is more likely to occur if one concretely explores how racial justice could emerge out of loyalty to one’s particular race. This claim might not seem objectionable when considering racial groups that are not white. Loyalty to other members of their race has been an important way for African Americans, for example, to further the larger cause of racial justice. Black slaves who helped each other escape their white masters fought against slavery and thus helped humanity as a whole. But the history of whiteness suggests that white people’s loyalty to their race not only would not help, but in fact would undermine struggles for racial justice. How could white people serve the larger interests of the human race by being loyal to a race that has oppressed, colonized, and brutalized other races? What possible duties or obligations to their race could white people have, responsibilities that must be remembered if racial justice is to be a concrete, lived goal for white people to work toward? On the one hand, these questions can seem outrageous, even dangerous. Talk of duty to the white race smacks of militarist white supremacist movements, and indeed the first of the Creativity Movement’s sixteen commandments in their “White Man’s Bible” is that “it is the avowed duty and holy responsibility of each generation to assure and secure for all time the existence of the White Race upon the face of this planet,” and the sixth is that “your first loyalty belongs to the White Race.”14 Noel Ignatiev’s concern about the scholarly validation of white supremacy through the critical conservation of whiteness could not be better placed than here. Temporarily setting aside the dangerous aspect of these questions, they also can seem nonsensical if they do not refer to the goals of white supremacist movements. What anti-racist duties, we might ask with some sarcasm, do white people have that must not be forgotten? African Americans and other non-white people might be able to combine loyalty to their racial group with loyalty to humanity, but white people cannot. Their situations are too different to treat their relationships to their races as similar. Those relationships are asymmetrical, which means that white people’s loyalty to the human race, including racial justice for all its members, conflicts with loyalty to whiteness. Loyalty to humanity would seem to require white people to be race traitors. On the other hand, these questions present a needed challenge to white people who care about racial justice. Rather than rhetorically or [End Page 244] sarcastically, the questions can be asked in the spirit of Royce’s call for each “community [to] live its own life, and not the life of any other community, nor yet the life of a mere abstraction called humanity in general” (67). For white people to fight white supremacy and white privilege does not mean for them to attempt to shed their whiteness and become members of the human species at large. Attempting to become raceless by living the life of an abstraction called humanity merely cultivates a white person’s ignorance of how race, including whiteness, and racism inform her habits, beliefs, desires, antipathies, and other aspects of her life. It does not magically eliminate her white privilege for even if she succeeds in thinking of herself as a raceless member of humanity, she likely will continue to be identified and treated as white, even if unreflectively or unconsciously, by others. By allowing her white privilege to go unchecked in this way, a white person’s living the life of abstract humanity actually tends to increase, not reduce her racial privilege. To increase the chances of reducing her racial privilege, she must resist the temptation to see herself as raceless and instead figure out what it could mean for her to live her own life as a racialized person. Living as a racialized, rather than abstract person does not mean attempting to take on a different race. Attempting to take on a different race implicitly acknowledges that whiteness is problematic, and it can seem to be an expression of respect for non-white people. But it often is no better a response to white privilege than attempting to shed one’s whiteness. This is because a white person’s taking on the habits, culture, and other aspects of another race often is an expression of ontological expansiveness, which is a habit of white privileged people to treat all spaces—whether geographical, existential, linguistic, cultural, or other—as available for them to inhabit at their choosing.15 Appropriating another race in this way thus is closer to imperialist colonialism than a gesture of respect. For this reason, white people need to stop trying to flee the responsibilities and duties that come with being white and figure out how to live their own racialized life, not the life of another race. Once they no longer ignore or attempt to flee their whiteness, they can then ask how work for racial justice fits with their duties and responsibilities as a white person and how they might live their own anti-racist white life.AT – NO LINK – This is the logic that normalizes racism. Systems of whiteness ensure that interrogations of the institution are always moved aside because they are not relevant. Wise, 09 Tim Wise, 2009 (Color-Blind, Power-Oblivious: Eric Holder and the Whitewashing of Racism )Sadly, whites are rarely open to what black and brown folks have to say regarding their ongoing experiences with racist mistreatment. And we are especially reluctant to discuss what that mistreatment means for us as whites: namely that we end up with more and better opportunities as the flipside of discrimination. After all, there is no down without an up, no matter how much we'd like to believe otherwise. It is white denial, as much as anything, which has allowed racial inequity to persist for so long, and it's nothing new. In the early 1960s, even before the passage of modern civil rights laws, two out of three whites said blacks were treated equally, and nearly 90 percent said black kids had equal educational opportunity. Matter of fact, white denial has a longer pedigree than that, reaching back at least as far as the 1860s, when southern slave-owners were literally stunned to see their human property abandon them after the Emancipation Proclamation. After all, to the semi-delusional white mind of the time, they had always treated their slaves "like family." Until we address our nation's long history of white supremacy, come to terms with the legacy of that history, and confront the reality of ongoing discrimination (even in the "Age of Obama"), whatever dialogue we engage around the subject will only further confuse us, and stifle our efforts to one day emerge from the thick and oppressive fog of racism. For however much audacity may be tethered to the concept of hope, let us be mindful that truth is more audacious still. May we find the courage, some day soon, to tell it.Domestic surveillance is rooted in colonialism resulting in continually reproduced racialized organization and deployment in the name of “security”Kundnani and Kumar 14 [Arun Kundnani and Deepa Kumar. "Race, Surveillance, and Empire." Race, Surveillance, and Empire. International Socialist Review, 2014. Web. 18 May 2015. <;., LG]In what follows, we argue that the debate on national security surveillance that has emerged in the United States since the summer of 2013 is woefully inadequate, due to its failure to place questions of race and empire at the center of its analysis. It is racist ideas that form the basis for the ways national security surveillance is organized and deployed, racist fears that are whipped up to legitimize this surveillance to the American public, and the disproportionately targeted racialized groups that have been most effective in making sense of it and organizing opposition. This is as true today as it has been historically: race and state surveillance are intertwined in the history of US capitalism. Likewise, we argue that the history of national security surveillance in the United States is inseparable from the history of US colonialism and empire. The argument is divided into two parts. The first identifies a number of moments in the history of national security surveillance in North America, tracing its imbrication with race, empire, and capital, from the settler-colonial period through to the neoliberal era. Our focus here is on how race as a sociopolitical category is produced and reproduced historically in the United States through systems of surveillance. We show how throughout the history of the United States the systematic collection of information has been interwoven with mechanisms of racial oppression. From Anglo settler-colonialism, the establishment of the plantation system, the post–Civil War reconstruction era, the US conquest of the Philippines, and the emergence of the national security state in the post-World War II era, to neoliberalism in the post-Civil Rights era, racialized surveillance has enabled the consolidation of capital and empire. It is, however, important to note that the production of the racial “other” at these various moments is conjunctural and heterogenous. That is, the racialization of Native Americans, for instance, during the settler-colonial period took different forms from the racialization of African Americans. Further, the dominant construction of Blackness under slavery is different from the construction of Blackness in the neoliberal era; these ideological shifts are the product of specific historic conditions. In short, empire and capital, at various moments, determine who will be targeted by state surveillance, in what ways, and for how long. In the second part, we turn our attention to the current conjuncture in which the politics of the War on Terror shape national security surveillance practices. The intensive surveillance of Muslim Americans has been carried out by a vast security apparatus that has also been used against dissident movements such as Occupy Wall Street and environmental rights activists, who represent a threat to the neoliberal order. This is not new; the process of targeting dissenters has been a constant feature of American history. For instance, the Alien and Sedition Acts of the late 1790s were passed by the Federalist government against the Jeffersonian sympathizers of the French Revolution. The British hanged Nathan Hale because he spied for Washington’s army in the American Revolution. State surveillance regimes have always sought to monitor and penalize a wide range of dissenters, radicals, and revolutionaries. Race was a factor in some but by no means all of these cases. Our focus here is on the production of racialized “others” as security threats and the ways this helps to stabilize capitalist social relations. Further, the current system of mass surveillance of Muslims is analogous to and overlaps with other systems of racialized security surveillance that feed the mass deportation of immigrants under the Obama administration and that disproportionately target African Americans, contributing to their mass incarceration and what Michelle Alexander refers to as the New Jim Crow.4 We argue that racialized groupings are produced in the very act of collecting information about certain groups deemed as “threats” by the national security state—the Brown terrorist, the Black and Brown drug dealer and user, and the immigrant who threatens to steal jobs. We conclude that “security” has become one of the primary means through which racism is ideologically reproduced in the “post-racial,” neoliberal era. Drawing on W. E. B. Dubois’s notion of the “psychological wage,” we argue that neoliberalism has been legitimized in part through racialized notions of security that offer a new “psychological wage” as compensation for the decline of the social wage and its reallocation to “homeland security.”Surveillance is driven by the construction of threats based on the racial “other”Kundnani and Kumar 14 [Arun Kundnani and Deepa Kumar. "Race, Surveillance, and Empire." Race, Surveillance, and Empire. International Socialist Review, 2014. Web. 18 May 2015. <;., LG]National security surveillance is as old as the bourgeois nation state, which from its very inception sets out to define “the people” associated with a particular territory, and by extension the “non-peoples,” i.e., populations to be excluded from that territory and seen as threats to the nation. Race, in modern times, becomes the main way that such threats—both internal and external—are mediated; modern mechanisms of racial oppression and the modern state are born together. This is particularly true of settler-colonial projects, such as the United States, in which the goal was to territorially dispossess Indigenous nations and pacify the resistance that inevitably sprang up. In this section, we describe how the drive for territorial expansion and the formation of the early American state depended on an effective ideological erasure of those who peopled the land. Elaborate racial profiles, based on empirical “observation”—the precursor to more sophisticated surveillance mechanisms—were thus devised to justify the dispossession of native peoples and the obliteration of those who resisted. The idea of the American nation as the land of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants enabled and justified the colonial-settler mission.5 Thus, when the US state was formed after the Revolutionary War, white supremacy was codified in the Constitution; the logical outcome of earlier settler-colonial systems of racial discrimination against African slaves and Indigenous populations.6 But the leaders of the newly formed state were not satisfied with the thirteen original colonies and set their sights on further expansion. In 1811, John Quincy Adams gave expression to this goal in the following way: “The whole continent of North America appears to be destined by Divine Providence to be peopled by one nation, speaking one language, professing one general system of religious and political principles, and accustomed to one general tenor of social usages and customs.”7 This doctrine, which would later come to be known as “manifest destiny” animated the project of establishing the American nation across the continent. European settlers were the “chosen people” who would bring development through scientific knowledge, including state-organized ethnographic knowledge of the very people they were colonizing.8 John Comaroff’s description of this process in southern Africa serves equally to summarize the colonial states of North America: “The ‘discovery’ of dark, unknown lands, which were conceptually emptied of their peoples and cultures so that their ‘wilderness’ might be brought properly to order—i.e., fixed and named and mapped—by an officializing white gaze.”9 Through, for example, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the United States sought to develop methods of identification, categorization, and enumeration that made the Indigenous population “visible” to the surveillance gaze as racial “others.” Surveillance that defined and demarcated according to officially constructed racial typologies enabled the colonial state to sort “tribes” according to whether they accepted the priorities of the settler-colonial mission (the “good” Indians) or resisted it (the “bad” Indians).10 In turn, an idea of the US nation itself was produced as a homeland of white, propertied men to be secured against racial others. No wonder, then, that the founding texts of the modern state invoke the Indigenous populations of America as bearers of the “state of nature,” to which the modern state is counterposed—witness Hobbes’s references to the “the Savage people of America.”11 The earliest process of gathering systematic knowledge about the “other” by colonizers often began with trade and religious missionary work. In the early seventeenth century, trade in furs with the Native population of Quebec was accompanied by the missionary project. Jesuit Paul Le Jeune worked extensively with the Montagnais-Naskapi and maintained a detailed record of the people he hoped to convert and “civilize.”12 By studying and documenting where and how the “savages” lived, the nature of their relationships, their child-rearing habits, and the like, Le Juene derived a four-point program to change the behaviors of the Naskapi in order to bring them into line with French Jesuit morality. In addition to sedentarization, the establishment of chiefly authority, and the training and punishment of children, Le Juene sought to curtail the independence of Naskapi women and to impose a European family structure based on male authority and female subservience.13 The net result of such missionary work was to pave the way for the racial projects of colonization and/or “integration” into a colonial settler nation. By the nineteenth century, such informal techniques of surveillance began to be absorbed into government bureaucracy. In 1824, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun established the Office of Indian Affairs (later “Bureau”), which had as one of its tasks the mapping and counting of Native Americans. The key security question was whether to forcibly displace Native Americans beyond the colonial territory or incorporate them as colonized subjects; the former policy was implemented in 1830 when Congress passed the Indian Removal Act and President Jackson began to drive Indians to the west of the Mississippi River. Systematic surveillance became even more important after 1848, when Indian Affairs responsibility transferred from the Department of War to the Department of the Interior, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs sought to comprehensively map the Indigenous population as part of a “civilizing” project to change “the savage into a civilized man,” as a congressional committee put it. By the 1870s, Indians were “the quantified objects of governmental intervention”; resistance was subdued as much through “rational” techniques of racialized surveillance and a professional bureaucracy as through war.14 The assimilation of Indians became a comprehensive policy through the Code of Indian Offenses, which included bans on Indigenous cultural practices that had earlier been catalogued by ethnographic surveillance. Tim Rowse writes that For the U.S. government to extinguish Indian sovereignty, it had to be confident in its own. There is no doubting the strength of the sense of “manifest destiny” in the United States during the nineteenth-century, but as the new nation conquered and purchased, and filled the new territories with colonists, it had also to develop its administrative capacity to govern the added territories and peoples. U.S. sovereign power was not just a legal doctrine and a popular conviction; it was an administrative challenge and achievement that included acquiring, by the 1870s, the ability to conceive and measure an object called “the Indian population.”15 The use of surveillance to produce a census of a colonized population was the first step to controlling it. Mahmood Mamdani refers to this as “define and rule,” a process in which, before managing a heterogeneous population, a colonial power must first set about defining it; to do so, the colonial state “wielded the census not only as a way of acknowledging difference but also as a way of shaping, sometimes even creating, difference.”16 The “ethnic mapping” and “demographics unit” programs practiced by US law enforcement agencies today in the name of counterterrorism are the inheritors of these colonial practices. Both then and now, state agencies’ use of demographic information to identify “concentrations” of ethnically defined populations in order to target surveillance resources and to identify kinship networks can be utilized for the purposes of political policing. Likewise, today’s principles of counterinsurgency warfare—winning hearts and minds by dividing the insurgent from the nonresistant—echo similar techniques applied in the nineteenth century at the settler frontier.The sovereign has developed into an indo-colonial entity that violently coerces communities of colorKundnani and Kumar 14 [Arun Kundnani and Deepa Kumar. "Race, Surveillance, and Empire." Race, Surveillance, and Empire. International Socialist Review, 2014. Web. 18 May 2015. <;., LG]By 1890, coast-to-coast colonization was effectively complete, with the surviving Native American population consigned to reservations. Thereafter, the priority became the projection of US power further afield, again justified through a racialized understanding of American exceptionalism. As Paul Kramer writes in the context of the US conquest of the Philippines: [T]he war’s advocates subsumed US history within longer, racial trajectories of “Anglo-Saxon” history which folded together US and British imperial histories. The Philippine-American War, then, was a natural extension of Western conquest, and both taken together were the organic expression of the desires, capacities, and destinies of “Anglo-Saxon” peoples. Americans, as Anglo-Saxons, shared Britons’ racial genius for empire-building, a genius which they must exercise for the greater glory of the “race” and to advance “civilization” in general. Unlike other races, they “liberated” the peoples they conquered; indeed, their expressions of conquest as “freedom” proliferated as the terrors they unleashed became more visible.31 The resistance that Filipinos mounted to American benevolence could then only be seen as an atavistic barbarism to be countered through modern techniques of surveillance and repression. While local police departments within the United States had begun to develop techniques of political surveillance, it was under the US colonial regime in the Philippines that systematic and widespread surveillance of political opponents and the manipulation of personal information as a form of political control was first institutionalized. A unit within the police called the Constabulary Information Section was established in Manila in 1901, founded by Henry Allen, a former military attaché to Tsarist Russia.32 The Constabulary Information Section cultivated hundreds of paid Filipino agents across the country, making it “scarcely possible for seditionary measures of importance to be hatched without our knowledge,” as Allen wrote to President Theodore Roosevelt.33 The techniques of compiling dossiers on dissidents’ private lives, spreading disinformation in the media, and planting agents provocateurs among militants were applied to combating radical nationalist groupings in Manila. Control over information proved as effective a tool of colonial power as physical force. As historian Alfred W. McCoy notes, during World War I police methods that had been tested and perfected in the colonial Philippines migrated homeward to provide both precedents and personnel for the establishment of a US internal security apparatus.… After years of pacifying an overseas empire where race was the frame for perception and action, colonial veterans came home to turn the same lens on America, seeing its ethnic communities . . . as internal colonies requiring coercive controls.34 On this basis, a domestic national security apparatus emerged, with notions of race and empire at its core. From 1917, the FBI and police department red squads in US cities increasingly busied themselves with fears of subversion from communists, pacifists, anarchists, and the ten million German Americans who were suspected of harboring disloyalties. During World War I, thirty million letters were physically examined and 350,000 badge-carrying vigilantes snooped on immigrants, unions, and socialists.35 Concerns over privacy set limits to such surveillance after the war, but with increasing left-wing and right-wing radicalization in the 1930s, President Roosevelt decided to issue a secret executive order that authorized a shift in the FBI’s role from a narrowly conceived law enforcement agency focused on gathering evidence for criminal prosecutions into an intelligence agency. Thereafter, it was dedicated to spying on “subversive” political movements (primarily communists, but also fascists) and countering their ability to influence public debate. This meant the FBI systematically identifying subversives based on “ideological and associational criteria.”36 It also opened the door to the burgeoning counter-subversion practices that the bureau would launch over the following decades. Already during World War II, the FBI was collecting detailed files on suspected communists while Black organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Nation of Islam were also surveillance targets.37 At the end of the Second World War, the United States emerged as one of two superpowers on the world stage. Pushing back against the isolationists, Cold War liberals made the case for the establishment of a permanent national security state. According to historian Paul Hogan, the national security mindset that emerged involved a conviction that a new era of total war had dawned on the United States. In total war, the battle was not confined to the front lines but extended to the home front as well, as did the awesome destruction that modern weapons could inflict not only on military combatants but also on industry, urban centers, and civilian populations. Modern war was total war in this sense that modern armies depended on the output of citizen soldiers in farms and factories behind the battle line. In total war all of the nation’s resources and all of its energy and talent had to be mobilized on behalf of the war effort, thereby obliterating the old distinction between civilian and military, between citizen and soldier, between home front and the front line. When American leaders talked about total war they did so in these terms and also in terms that recognized that modern weapons could bring massive destruction from great distances with barely a moment’s notice. In the new age, American leaders would no longer have the time to debate the issue of war or peace or to prepare at a slow pace.38 This was an updating and reworking of the settler-colonial mentality, with the notion of Manifest Destiny being explicitly drawn on in making the case for an exceptional American empire. The notion of the “citizen-soldier” was built upon earlier settler-colonial racialized security narratives. However, American exceptionalism, as it emerged in this period, was based on the premise that the United States was not only unique among other nations and therefore destined to play a leading global role, but also a nation built upon liberal principles. This meant that the centrality of whiteness to the security narrative was muted and less prominent. Even though the white middle-class home was cast as the locus of a privatized notion of self-defense and military preparedness through government civil defense policies and programs,39 the image of the US empire was one of liberalism, inclusivity, and the “melting pot.” The United States sought quite consciously to differentiate itself from past empires as it positioned itself to be one of two hegemons on the global stage. In this context, the existence of Jim Crow segregation was an embarrassment for the ruling class. In 1947, the National Security Act was passed which entrenched “security” as a key element of the postwar order. Every aspect of life—the social, political, intellectual, and economic—was conceived as playing a role in national defense, and a massive security establishment was built up. The 1947 act created the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council (NSC), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The National Security Agency (NSA) was formed in 1952, conceived as an organization to carry out the gathering of “signals intelligence.” During this period, there was also the integration of corporate America, of universities, of research institutions, and of the media into the machinery of the national security state. The earlier distinctions between the citizen and soldier and between the home front and the battle front were blurred to shore up an imperial system at home and abroad. Through the notion of “security” different systems of racial oppression are created to prevent threatsKundnani and Kumar 14 [Arun Kundnani and Deepa Kumar. "Race, Surveillance, and Empire." Race, Surveillance, and Empire. International Socialist Review, 2014. Web. 18 May 2015. <;., LG]The election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 was said to have ushered in a new “post-racial” era, in which racial inequalities were meant to be a thing of the past. African Americans and Muslim Americans placed their hopes in Obama, voting for him in large numbers. But in the so-called post-racial era, the security narrative of hard-working families (coded white) under threat from dangerous racial others has been as powerful as ever. The unprecedented mass deportation of more than two million people during the Obama presidency is one form taken by this post-racial racialized securitization. Over the last two decades, the progressive criminalization of undocumented immigrants has been achieved through the building of a militarized wall between Mexico and the United States, hugely expanding the US border patrol, and programs such as Secure Communities, which enables local police departments to access immigration databases. Secure Communities was introduced in 2008 and stepped up under Obama. It has resulted in migrants being increasingly likely to be profiled, arrested, and imprisoned by local police officers, before being passed to the federal authorities for deportation. Undocumented migrants can no longer have any contact with police officers without risking such outcomes. There is an irony in the way that fears of “illegal immigration” threatening jobs and the public purse have become stand-ins for real anxieties about the neoliberal collapse of the old social contract: the measures that such fears lead to—racialization and criminalization of migrants—themselves serve to strengthen the neoliberal status quo by encouraging a precarious labor market. Capital, after all, does not want to end immigration but to profit from “a vast exploitable labor pool that exists under precarious conditions, that does not enjoy the civil, political and labor rights of citizens and that is disposable through deportation.”66 What brings together these different systems of racial oppression—mass incarceration, mass surveillance, and mass deportation—is a security logic that holds the imperial state as necessary to keeping “American families” (coded white) safe from threats abroad and at home. The ideological work of the last few decades has cultivated not only racial security fears but also an assumption that the security state is necessary to keep “us” safe. In this sense, security has become the new psychological wage to aid the reallocation of the welfare state’s social wage toward homeland security and to win support for empire in the age of neoliberalism. Through the notion of security, social and economic anxieties generated by the unraveling of the Keynesian social compact have been channeled toward the Black or Brown street criminal, welfare recipient, or terrorist. In addition, as Susan Faludi has argued, since 9/11, this homeland in need of security has been symbolized, above all, by the white domestic hearth of the prefeminist fifties, once again threatened by mythical frontier enemies, hidden subversives, and racial aggressors. That this idea of the homeland coincides culturally with “the denigration of capable women, the magnification of manly men, the heightened call for domesticity, the search for and sanctification of helpless girls” points to the ways it is gendered as well as racialized.67Contemporary strategies of capitalism rely on the incarceration of black bodies and surveillance on non-white individuals because they are stigmatized as non-productive members of capitalKundnani and Kumar 14 [Arun Kundnani and Deepa Kumar. "Race, Surveillance, and Empire." Race, Surveillance, and Empire. International Socialist Review, 2014. Web. 18 May 2015. <;., LG]The expansion of the surveillance state in the twentieth century was one aspect of a wider penetration of the state into the lives of Americans. Working class struggle had somewhat unexpectedly driven this expansion: the state responded by taking on a mediating role between labor and capital, offering a measure of protection from the ravages of a market economy through Keynesian economics and the creation of a welfare state after the New Deal—albeit one that was underdeveloped compared to Western Europe. State managers sought to stabilize capitalism by imposing a degree of “rationality” on the system through regulating the economy and providing social services, all of which required a greater penetration of the state into civil society.48 In the new era of neoliberal capitalism that began in the 1970s, ruling elites sought to break this social contract, which rested on the premise that, if the working class “played by the rules,” it could see increases in wages and living conditions. From the 1970s onwards, this arrangement was undone. Alongside, there were also the beginnings of a contraction of the social wage of welfare provisions, public housing, education, and healthcare. The end result was growing inequality and a new regime of the one percent. The state responded to the permanent joblessness, ghettoization, and stigmatization that neoliberalism produced among the poor by turning to policies of mass criminalization and incarceration. Thus, the neoliberal onslaught went hand in hand with securitization. As Lo?c Wacquant writes, since the civil rights era America has launched into a social and political experiment without precedent or equivalent in the societies of the postwar West: the gradual replacement of a (semi-) welfare state by a police and penal state for which the criminalization of marginality and the punitive containment of dispossessed categories serve as social policy at the lower end of the class and ethnic order.49 The law and order rhetoric that was used to mobilize support for this project of securitization was racially coded, associating Black protest and rebellion with fears of street crime. The possibilities of such an approach had been demonstrated in the 1968 election, when both the Republican candidate Richard Nixon and the independent segregationist George Wallace had made law and order a central theme of their campaigns. It became apparent that Republicans could cleave Southern whites away from the Democratic Party through tough-on-crime rhetoric that played on racial fears. The Southern Strategy, as it would be called, tapped into anxieties among working-class whites that the civil rights reforms of the 1960s would lead to them competing with Blacks for jobs, housing, and schools. With the transformation of the welfare state into a security state, its embedding in everyday life was not undone but diverted to different purposes. Social services were reorganized into instruments of surveillance. Public aid became increasingly conditional on upholding certain behavioral norms that were to be measured and supervised by the state, implying its increasing intrusion into the lives of the poor—culminating in the “workfare” regimes of the Clinton administration.50 In this context, a new model of crime control came into being. In earlier decades, criminologists had focused on the process of rehabilitation; those who committed crimes were to be helped to return to society. While the actual implementation of this policy was uneven, by the 1970s, this model went out of fashion. In its place, a new “preventive” model of crime control became the norm, which was based on gathering information about groups to assess the “risk” they posed. Rather than wait for the perpetrator to commit a crime, risk assessment methods called for new forms of “preventive surveillance,” in which whole groups of people seen as dangerous were subject to observation, identification, and classification.51 The War on Drugs—launched by President Reagan in 1982—dramatically accelerated the process of racial securitization. Michelle Alexander notes that At the time he declared this new war, less than 2 percent of the American public viewed drugs as the most important issue facing the nation. This fact was no deterrent to Reagan, for the drug war from the outset had little to do with public concern about drugs and much to do with public concern about race. By waging a war on drug users and dealers, Reagan made good on his promise to crack down on the racially defined “others”—the undeserving.52 Operation Hammer, carried out by the Los Angeles Police Department in 1988, illustrates how racialized surveillance was central to the War on Drugs. It involved hundreds of officers in combat gear sweeping through the South Central area of the city over a period of several weeks, making 1,453 arrests, mostly for teenage curfew violations, disorderly conduct, and minor traffic offenses. Ninety percent were released without charge but the thousands of young Black people who were stopped and processed in mobile booking centers had their names entered onto the “gang register” database, which soon contained the details of half of the Black youths of Los Angeles. Entry to the database rested on such supposed indicators of gang membership as high-five handshakes and wearing red shoelaces. Officials compared the Black gangs they were supposedly targeting to the National Liberation Front in Vietnam and the “murderous militias of Beirut,” signaling the blurring of boundaries between civilian policing and military force, and between domestic racism and overseas imperialism.53 In the twelve years leading up to 1993, the rate of incarceration of Black Americans tripled,54 establishing the system of mass incarceration that Michelle Alexander refers to as the new Jim Crow.55 And yet those in prison were only a quarter of those subject to supervision by the criminal justice system, with its attendant mechanisms of routine surveillance and “intermediate sanctions,” such as house arrests, boot camps, intensive supervision, day reporting, community service, and electronic tagging. Criminal records databases, which are easily accessible to potential employers, now hold files on around one-third of the adult male population.56 Alice Goffman has written of the ways that mass incarceration is not just a matter of imprisonment itself but also the systems of policing and surveillance that track young Black men and label them as would-be criminals before and after their time in prison. From stops on the street to probation meetings, these systems, she says, have transformed poor Black neighborhoods into communities of suspects and fugitives. A climate of fear and suspicion pervades everyday life, and many residents live with the daily concern that the authorities will seize them and take them away.57 A predictable outcome of such systems of classification and criminalization is the routine racist violence carried out by police forces and the regular occurrences of police killings of Black people, such as Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014. Surveillance privileges whitenessBall, Haggerty, and Lyon 12 [Kirstie Ball, Kevin Haggerty, David Lyon, Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, Taylor & Francis, April 27, 2012, LG]To say that racializing surveillance is a technology of social control is not to take this form of surveillance as involving a very specific set of social practices that maintain a fixed racial order of things. Rather is suggests that how things get ordered by way of surveillance depends on space, time and is subject to change, but most often upholds “Othering” practices that first accompanied European colonial expansion and that sought to structure social relations and institutions in ways that privilege whiteness. Racializing surveillance is not static or applied only to particular human groupings. It relies on techniques, some of which are discussed below, to reify boundaries along racial lines, and in so doing, it reifies race. While the focus here is on race and surveillance and how they are coupled, race must be understood as operating in an interlocking fashion with class, gender, sexuality, location and other markers of identity. Although the examples cited are mainly from the United States, the techniques and technologies discussed have been and are applied other space and at other times to order things racially, for instance census taking as a means of racial classification, or identification documents with biometric identifiers used for “negatively discriminatory practices” (Lyon 2003).Surveillance is a method of stocktaking of non-white bodies while further privileging whitenessBall, Haggerty, and Lyon 12 [Kirstie Ball, Kevin Haggerty, David Lyon, Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, Taylor & Francis, April 27, 2012, LG]Having its roots in the Latin censere—to assess or judge—the census is used by the state to manage its residents by way of formalized categories. Census enumeration fixes individuals within a particular time, and renders a population legible in racializing, as well as gendering and special ways. This “state stocktaking,” as Goldberg puts it, makes known “population size, shape, distribution, quality and flow of labor supply, taxation and conscription pools, political representation, voter predictability, and the necessities of population reproduction” (2002: 189). While such “state stocktaking” that sees the census informant provide the enumerator with answers to a series of questions regarding biographical data might seem benign and everyday, this involves a form of racializing surveillance not only through its reinscription of racial categories but also when the collected data is used for discriminatory outcomes, like drawing voting districts along racial lines. For example, some of the statistical knowledge generated by census taking has been controversially used in the state of Texas to realign congressional and legislative districts in a manner that ensure that the voting population remain majority white, regardless of growth in the Hispanic and Afircan-American populations. This move has been reproduced in other states in such a way that it may violate the 1965 Voting Rights Act that outlawed discriminatory voting practices. One constant has remained in terms of racial categories and the US census form: an unspecified “whiteness.” “White has always been listed first among the boxes from which to choose in order to answer the question “what is your race?” The current proliferation of racial categories was first reserved for the management of blackness, and then later for other groupings to reflect changing immigration patterns. For example, in the 1890 census “Mulatto,” “Quadroon,” and “Octoroon” appeared as subcategories of “Black” “only to be collapsed into the singularity of an unqualified blackness” by the 1900 census, reflecting the one-drop rule of hypodescent (Goldberg 2002: 189). “Mulatto” was reintroduced in 1910 and was replaced with “Negro” by the 1930 census, a category that fell in and out of favor, depending on each subsequent decennial enumeration. For the 2010 census “Black, African-Am or Negro” were subsume under one box. As Goldberg notes, when the category “Mexican” was introduced it was understood to mean not white unless the census informant “explicitly and accurately claimed white descent” (2002: 190). Thus, it was left to the enumerator to judge whether the census informant’s claim to whiteness was valid, rather than accepting at face value the informant’s self-identification as white. It was not until 1940 when both the Mexican government and the US State Department intervened that the category “Mexican became formalized as white. The category was later replaced with the new subcategory “Hispanic” in 1980. The market research industry relied at its outset on information culled from the US Census that was then correlated with other date, such as credit scores and retail loyalty card transactions, to profile through patterns (or by “lifestyle segments”) and for direct marketing strategies (Parenti 2003: 103). For Oscar H. Gandy, Jr., data mining and internet “cookie” technologies of the sorts now used for consumer profiling and market segmentation raise concerns around privacy and the possibilities of “computer-enhanced discriminatory techniques,” when, for example, information brokers profile an individual’s web browsing activity and this information is then used to provide (or deny) e-commerce services and transactions in a discriminatory manor (Gandy, Jr 2006: 363). This practice falls under the rubric of what David Lyons calls “digital discrimination,” marking the differential application of surveillance technologies where “flows of personal data—abstracted information—are sifted and channeled in the process of risk assessment, to privilege some and disadvantage others, to accept some as legitimately present and to reject others” (2003: 674). This sifting of data flows to rend some segments of populations as legitimate while rejecting other demographic groupings as illegitimate along racial lines was apparent in 2001 when inaccurate vote registration lists for certain county election boards in the state of Florida were generated by a subsidiary of the data-mining company ChoicePoint and were used to disenfranchise “an estimated eight thousand potential voters, many of them African Americans” who, as Gandy points out, were “far less likely to have supported George W. Bush” in the US presidential election (2006: 373). In other instances, zip codes and credit scores might be used to restrict the products and services available to certain consumers, or to target specific consumers for predatory lending services like payday loans, pawn shops and “high cost” subprime mortgages that contribute to the higher foreclosure rates in segregated black and Latino neighborhoods.ImpactsSocial Death – we live in an anti-black society – black bodies are marked as “born dead” – they are not delegitimized because they were never legitimized to being with – this system of gratuitous violence makes possible mass exterminationBrady 12 (Nicholas Brady, activist scholar, executive board member of Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, BA in philosophy from Johns Hopkins, PhD student at the University of California-Irvine Culture and Theory program, 10-26-12, “The Flesh Grinder: Prosecutorial Discretion and the Terror of Mass Incarceration,” ) gzThe recent murder of Trayvon Martin brought the national conversation back to a topic that had been repressed for the myth of a post-racial America propagated since the election of Barack Obama to the presidency: the fundamental openness of the black body to wanton and excessive abuse and “premature death” (Gilmore, 28). That the national narrative around Martin’s death, even the narratives built by black political and civil leaders, only had Emit Till to compare his death to is example par excellance of the complete lack of any language we have to discuss the machinations that make a phrase such as “black death” into a redundancy. Trayvon Martin was not a singular case but was one of 120 black people killed extra-judicially (by police officers, security officials, and vigilante justice-seekers) in 2012 between January and July . That every 36 hours on average a black life is taken extra-judicially means that Trayvon Martin is not exceptional, but we do not have a language to deal with either the exceptional or the quotidian. Into the abyss, though the demand for justice, something productive happened: the rallying cry for justice made an invisible and ethereal part of the justice system into something a little more material. The call to arrest and charge George Zimmerman brought our attention to the role of the Prosecutor in the criminal punishment system. After the protests, statement from the President, and daily media blitzes, a special prosecutor was assigned to the case to meet the calls for justice. Angela Corey would become the face for an area of the law that is both ubiquitous and unthought. It seems she understood this for her statement, before officially giving the charge, set up a context for evaluating prosecutors, ? The Supreme Court has defined our role as Proscutors [as] not only “ministers of justice” but “seekers of the truth.”… Every single day our prosecutors across this great country handle difficult cases and they adhere to that same standard: a never ending search for the truth and a quest to always do the right thing for the right reason. There is a reason cases are tried in a court of law and not in the court of public opinion or the media. Because details have to come out in excruciating and minute fashion. Detail by detail, bit of evidence by bit of evidence. And it is only then, when the Trier of fact whether judge or jury, gets all the details that then a decision can be rendered. ? Corey is laboring to legitimize a system that took weeks to actually arrest George Zimmerman, yet this labor represses her own case history, for example the case of Marissa Alexander. Alexander is a mother who was convicted of attempted murder because she shot a warning shot at the father of her children who has admitted to beating her on several occasions before. Alexander was arrested on spot and charged within days in a case where the “stand your ground” defense was also being called upon. This supposed contradiction of methods that meet different bodies is the norm of the criminal punishment system, and this paper will attempt to string out some parts of the structure that make it so. ? In many disciplines there has been renewed attention given to mass incarceration. Yet, in spite of the growing level of multidisciplinary scrutiny on police surveillance and violent gulags, a major actor has slipped through virtually untouched in the humanities' attention to prisons. This major actor, regularly described in criminology and legal scholarship as the most powerful agent in the criminal punishment system, is the Prosecutor. The office of the prosecutor exists in a place where matter doesn't matter. Or put differently, the prosecutor’s agency is assembled where black matter no longer matters and where what matters, the happenings of the human and the quest for civil justice, can only be produced through the quotidian grinding and destruction of black flesh.? This paper will seek to shine a light, or better yet a shadow, on the white knights of the justice system. While one would think they know the job of a Prosecutor given its ubiquity on television crime dramas and movies, the mundaneness of their actual day-to-day activities are mystified by television's fascination with the drama of the trial, whether fictional or "real." In fact, it is rare that you will find a prosecutor who takes even 10 percent of their cases to trial. Over 90 percent of cases are settled through a plea bargain where the defendant will agree to plead guilty usually for the guarantee of less time, parole, or a lighter charge. As one law professor put it, the plea bargain is not an addendum to the criminal justice system, it is the criminal justice system (Scott and Stuntz, 1912). In spite of its centrality, there is little literature on the inner-workings of the plea bargain outside of schematic analysis in criminology. Instead of focusing on the theatrics of the trial, this paper will analyze the day-to-day grind of the plea bargain in order to explicate the quotidian terror that lies at the heart of prosecutorial discretion. ? From day-to-day a Prosecutor can be working on anywhere between 20 to 100 cases at a time (Heumann, 98). While a Prosecutor is given wide discretion to charge a case the way they want, there are hierarchies that determine the norms and procedures of each office. There are the district attorneys that the general population votes into office and the deputy attorneys that answer directly to him or her. Underneath them are the line prosecutors who work on the majority of the cases but whose decisions generally follow the established protocols of the veteran prosecutors and deputies. New prosecutors often come straight from law school with lofty dreams of becoming courtroom heroes only to learn that their job is much more akin to assembly-line justice. Legal scholar Abraham Blumberg describes this as the, “emergence of ‘bureaucratic due process,’… consist[ing] of secret bargaining sessions [and] employing subtle, bureaucratically ordained modes of coercion and influence to dispose of large case loads” (Blumberg, 69). ? While each office is different from the next, there is a stunning amount of unity at the procedural level. Deputy district attorneys will reject thirty to forty percent of cases the police send to them on face. The remaining 60 percent are considered suspects that are, according to the evidence provided, conclusively guilty. For the Prosecutor, these cases would be slam-dunk wins in front of a jury (Lewis, 51). This begs the question: What is the dividing line between cases that are charged and cases that get dropped by Prosecutors? ? Some statistics on the racial component of sentencing might lead us to an answer. In terms of drug crimes, according to a comprehensive report by Human Rights Watch, blacks are 14 percent of drug users, but are 37 percent of people arrested for drug possession, and are anywhere between 45 to 60 percent of those charged . These strings of numbers reveal an anti-black trajectory: the cases that the Prosecutor overwhelmingly pursues are black cases, the ones he drops are overwhelmingly non-black. A defense attorney called these for-sure-guilty cases “born dead.” This is a curious phrase, but when considering the historic connection between blackness and crime dating back to the inception of the national polity through slavery, the defense attorney’s phrasing gets us to a much more paradigmatic argument. Walt Lewis, a Los Angeles prosecutor, describes a “criminal justice” continuum where bodies are transformed from being “free” to being “incarcerated” (Lewis, 20). One is first arrested by the police and becomes a “suspect.” If the prosecutor decides to charge, then you go from being a “suspect” to a “defendant.” Finally if you are found guilty, you go from being a “defendant” to a “convict.” This process describes a temporality that transforms the “human” into the incarcerated “inhuman.” As violent as this process can be, the black’s fate is fundamentally different and more terrifying. The black is arrested, charged, and convicted at disproportionate rates because we were never actually “suspects” or “defendants.” Instead, we were always criminals, always already slaves-in-waiting. Instead of a continuum, the black body floats in a “zone of non-being” where time and transformation lose all meaning. Cases involving black bodies do not need to be rock-solid in terms of facts for their bodies have already been marked by the law as criminal (Fanon, 2). Thus cases involving black bodies are always for-sure victories, are always already “born dead.” ? In an interesting case that made it all the way to the Supreme Court titled United States versus Armstrong, a group of black defendants levied a critique similar to this paper’s argument . A group of black men were brought on charges of possessing 50 grams of crack cocaine. Unlike a normal defense where the details of the state’s accusation would be called into question, the defense instead argued that the prosecution selectively charges black people in cases involving crack cocaine. The first argument of the defense was that the majority of crack cocaine users in California are actually whites, not black people. The second argument of the defense used testimonies from government lawyers to prove that of all 841 cases the state brought against people possessing crack cocaine, all of them were black. Using these two claims, the defense said there was adequate proof to show that prosecutors were using unconstitutional means, racial markers, to select who would be charged and who wouldn’t be charged. According to past rulings by the Supreme Court, if selective prosecution can be proven then that is adequate grounds to vacate the sentence, even if the defendants were caught “red-handed.” Against this defense, the prosecution counter-argued that it does not selectively prosecute based on race, but instead on fact and circumstance. The district court that initially heard the appeal ruled that the state should turn over records of the 841 cases in question to prove who was right in the dispute. The state refused to reveal its documents and instead appealed the decision all the way up to the Supreme Court. Overturning the district and federal circuit court, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the prosecution for a few reasons. The first reason Rehnquist gave was that it is not in the best interest of the government’s war on crime to monitor prosecutors. Rehnquist argued that the prosecutor must have the freedom to operate in the way she sees fit. The second and most important reason Rehnquist gave was by far the most explicitly racist and I will quote it in full: quote “a published 1989 Drug Enforcement Administration report concluded that "[l]arge scale, interstate trafficking networks controlled by Jamaicans, Haitians and Black street gangs dominate the manufacture and distribution of crack.… [and] the most recent statistics of the United States Sentencing Commission… show that: More than 90% of the persons sentenced in 1994 for crack cocaine trafficking were black.” . The Supreme Court answered the defendant’s accusation of selective prosecution by arguing that such a prosecution strategy is legitimate because it can be verified through statistics that black people are the major users and distributors of crack cocaine. To word it differently, the Supreme Court ruled that it was in the state’s interest to terrorize black communities because we are the most heinous drug users in the country. To be black is to be marked as a danger that must be controlled, seized, and incarcerated. Prosecutors act within and perpetuate this matrix of violence that precedes discourse. When a Prosecutor sees a case with a black body, he knows the same statistic the Supreme Court quoted and he knows, if not consciously then unconsciously, that this case is already done, already guilty, already “born dead.” Biopower - the state adoption and employment of whiteness is biopoliticalHill, 2009 (Mike, Assistant Professor of English at the University at Albany, “Whiteness as War by Other Means: Racial Complexity in an Age of Failed States,” Small Axe, Number 29, 13(2), p. 82) I do not of course want to summarize the arc of Foucault’s history of race and warfare here. In fact, as he moves back and forth from the Levelers of the seventeenth century, to the disciplinary society of the eighteenth century, and then finally to the state racism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I would insist that Foucault’s genealogy of government produces no historical “arc” whatsoever. The lectures on state security and population are broken histories, riddled with reversals and folds of enigma, and are therefore uniquely historical in the way they establish how racial identification becomes an affair that the state can contain. Rights and their repression, demography, the “medico-normalizing techniques” connected to genocide, population management, the whole juridical apparatus that enforces “racism” even while it sanctions rights-based resistance—all this occurs for Foucault at particular moments in the history of governing that eventuates in what he calls “bio-power.”30 Two items under this oft-sited heading are important for my purposes in the remainder of this essay. The first is how race is interrogated in Foucault’s argument for concealing certain abusive simplifications about collective belonging that enforce the coherent territorial or national boundaries. A second and related feature of what Foucault presents under the heading of biopower is a challenge precisely to such territorial coherence that is experienced against the grain of the presumed geopolitical unity of time. To reduce his argument to its bare necessities, Foucault argues that (nineteenth-century) “biology” displaces (seventeenth-century) “race struggle” by using certain highly rationalized experience of shared historical time against the way in which the Levelers put prophetic knowledge to work as a sort of revolutionary war analytic.31 So what Foucault is getting at in his notion of race war is a dynamic that infuses race and racial resistance with a temporal dimension, a way of doing history that releases, with as much hope as fear, the kind of crypto-Hobbesian collective uncertainties that gave George Will cause to insert the words Leviathan and mob for the dying poor of New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward.Violence - White supremacy is the dominant ordering system of America. This produces racial hierarchies that maintain white privilege while naturalizing violence against people of colorRodriguez 07 (Dylan, Professor University of California Reverside, November, Kritika Kultura” American Globality and The U.S. Prison Regime: State violence and White Supremacy frm Abu Ghraib to Stockton to Bagong Diwa”)Variable, overlapping,?and mutually constituting white supremacist regimes have?in fact?been fundamental to the formation?and movements?of the United States,?from racial chattel slavery and frontier genocide to recent and current modes of neoliberal land displacement and warfare.?Without exception, these regimes have been differently entangled with the state’s changing paradigms, strategies, and technologies of human incarceration and punishment ( to follow the prior examples: the plantation, the reservation, the neoliberal sweatshop, and the domestic-to-global prison).?The historical nature of these entanglements is widely acknowledged,?although explanations of the structuring relations of force tend to either isolate or historically compartmentalize the complexities of historical white supremacy.?For the theoretical purposes of this essay,?white supremacy maybe understood as a logic of social organization that produces?regimented,institutionalized,?and militarized?conceptions of hierarchized “human” difference, enforced through?coercions and?violences that are structured by genocidal possibility?(including physical extermination?and curtailment of people’s collective capacities to socially, culturally, or biologically reproduce).?As a historical vernacular and philosophical apparatus of domination,?white supremacy is?simultaneously?premised on?and?consistently innovating?universalized conceptions of the white “human”?vis-à-vis the rigorous production,penal discipline,?and?frequent?social, political, and biological neutralization or extermination of the (non-white) sub-or non-human.?To consider white supremacy as essential to American social formation, facilitates a discussion of modalities through which this material logic of violence overdetemines the social, political, economic, and cultural structures that compose American globality?and constitute the common sense that is organic?to its ordering.?Us v. Them dichotomy Kundnani and Kumar 14 [Arun Kundnani and Deepa Kumar. "Race, Surveillance, and Empire." Race, Surveillance, and Empire. International Socialist Review, 2014. Web. 18 May 2015. <;., LG]While racial security was central to the settler-colonial project in North America, territorial dispossession was only one aspect of the process of capital accumulation for the new state; the other was the discipline and management of labor. As Theodore Allen shows in The Invention of the White Race, the “white race” did not exist as a category in Virginia’s colonial records until the end of the seventeenth century. Whiteness as an explicit racial identity had to be cultivated over a period of decades before it could become the basis for an organized form of oppression.17 A key moment in the production of whiteness was the response of the ruling Anglo elite to Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676. The rebellion was begun by colonial settlers who wanted a more aggressive approach to securing the territory against Indigenous peoples. But it also involved African and Anglo bond laborers joining together in a collective revolt against the system of indentured servitude. This threatened not only the profitability but also the very existence of the plantation system. Over the following three decades, the Virginia Assembly passed a series of acts that racialized workers as Black and white. Those who could now call themselves white were granted some benefits by law, whereas those designated Black were turned from bond laborers (who could therefore expect to be free after a period of time) into slaves—property with no rights whatsoever and no hope of freedom. To win them to the side of the plantation bourgeoisie, poor white men were given privileges—they had access to land and enjoyed common law protections such as trial by jury and habeas corpus that were denied to Black enslaved people.18 In practice this meant that white men, for instance, could rape Black women and not be charged with a crime (because Blacks were property and so only “damages” were to be paid to the slave owner). Further, property rights and the legal notion of settled land not only denied Native American property claims but even erased the existence of Indigenous people on the basis that, because white settlers had transformed the pristine North American wilderness into productive land, they were the real “natives.”19 Once the legal and ideological work had been done to naturalize race as a visible marker of inherent difference and to separate “us” from “them,” it could be made use of as a stable category of surveillance; the patrols set up to capture runaway slaves—arguably the first modern police forces in the United States20—needed only to “see” race in order to identify suspects. Moreover, the plantation system was stabilized by enabling non-elite whites to see security as a racial privilege and shared responsibility. W. E. B. Du Bois argued in Black Reconstruction that, in the slave plantations of the South, poor whites were brought into an identification with the planter elite by being given positions of authority over Blacks as overseers, slave drivers, and members of slave patrols. With the associated feeling of superiority, their hatred for the wider plantation economy that impoverished them was displaced onto Black enslaved people: class antagonism was racialized and turned into a pillar of stability for the system. Meanwhile, in the North, labor leaders had little appetite for abolition, fearing competition from a newly freed Black workforce.21 After abolition, the same racial anxieties were mobilized to disenfranchise the Black laborer in the South. Du Bois used the term “psychological wage” to describe this sense of superiority granted to non-elite whites in the South: It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent under their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness.… On the other hand, in the same way, the Negro was subject to public insult; was afraid of mobs; was liable to the jibes of children and the unreasoning fears of white women; and was compelled almost continuously to submit to various badges of inferiority. The result of this was that the wages of both classes could be kept low, the whites fearing to be supplanted by Negro labor, the Negroes always being threatened by the substitution of white labor.22 We suggest below that, since the 1970s, neoliberalism has involved a similar kind of process, in which the social wage of the New Deal welfare state was progressively withdrawn and racialized notions of security offered in its place as a psychological compensation. These racialized notions of security are also inflected by gender. As Du Bois notes in the above quote, free Black men were positioned as threats to white women in the post–Civil War era. Unlike during slavery, when Black men were not indiscriminately labeled as rapists and lynching was rare, the period between 1865 and 1895 saw the lynching of over ten thousand African Americans. Fredrick Douglass argued that, when all the other methods of demonizing Black people failed, the myth of the Black rapist was developed to justify lynchings and white terror.23 Vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan justified their brutality by claiming to keep white women safe from the Black rapist, as visualized, for instance, in D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. Such constructions of white women in need of protection from predatory Black men were reminiscent of the “captivity scenarios” of the seventeenth century, in which Native Americans were accused of kidnapping white women, a charge that then justified genocide.24 Thus, from the early settler-colonial period onwards, “security” and “protection” were defined by elites in gendered and racial terms. In particular, the white, heterosexual family was positioned as the subject of a security narrative that cast racialized others as threats to the “homeland.” The “homeland” so defined also needed to be secured from racialized immigrant threats, but which immigrants counted as white in this “homeland” was somewhat unstable. When Irish immigrants began to arrive in the United States in large numbers from the 1850s onwards, they were considered nonwhite because they were perceived to be of Celtic rather than Anglo Saxon background. More importantly, Irish Catholics faced the same exclusionary practices that Catholics did in previous centuries. Even though by the mid-eighteenth century, the need for “English colonies to be economically sustainable and militarily secure from indigenous threat,” opened up non-English immigration to North America, Catholics (along with Indian tribes) were denied basic rights on the grounds that they were religiously and culturally different from the WASP population.25 Over time, however, Irish and Italian immigrants were made white. From the late nineteenth century, the policing of the United States’s borders was another context where racial and imperial security was intertwined with practices of surveillance. Congress first sought to police borders as part of a strategy of regulating labor in 1882, when it excluded Chinese immigrants. In 1909, US immigration officials began excluding around half of all Asian Indians from entering. Following concern from the British government that anti-colonial nationalists from India were using the United States as a base to spread radical politics, US officials began to interrogate Indian migrants at West Coast ports, and a British agent arranged for the Justice Department to monitor all mail moving between India and the Berkeley and San Francisco post offices.26 In 1917, legislation was introduced to create a “barred Asiatic zone,” stretching from Afghanistan to the Pacific, from which no one could be admitted to the United States.27 With the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, a comprehensive system of national quotas was introduced reflecting a global racial hierarchy. Through immigration policy, an idea of the US homeland as a Western European, white ethnoracial identity was institutionalized. To implement such a vision, appropriate systems of record keeping and surveillance of immigrants were required.28 Through these various means, Mae M. Ngai argues, Asian Americans and Mexican Americans were produced as “alien citizens,” formally US citizens but legally racialized and excluded. The surveillance of these groups made possible the repatriation of 400,000 persons of Mexican descent during the Great Depression (of whom half had been thought to be US citizens) and the internment of 120,000 of Japanese ancestry during World War II (two-thirds of whom were citizens).29 In the nineteenth century, the political surveillance of labor militancy had routinely been practiced by private agencies such as Pinkerton and Burns, who were directly contracted by capitalists rather than through the state. But toward the end of the century, such practices began to be absorbed into government agencies. Following the so-called Tompkins Square Riot of 1874—actually a demonstration in New York against unemployment that was attacked by the police—the New York Police Department began to assign detectives to spy on socialist and union meetings. By the mid-1890s, the department was tapping 350 phones.30 By 1900, a number of police departments in the United States had created “red squads” specifically to deploy informants to left-wing organizations and meetings.Colonialism - Systems of whiteness results in forms of indo-colonialism and colonialism. White, 07 Julie Ann White, Ohio University, 07, “The Hollow and the Ghetto: Space, Race, and the Politics of PovertyI begin with a piece from Charles Mills’s The Racial Contract (1997,41–42): “The norming of space is partially done in terms of the racingof space, the depiction of space as dominated by individuals of a certain race. At the same time, the norming of an individual is partially achieved by spacing it, that is, representing it as imprinted with the characteristics of a certain kind of space.” He continues, “Morally vice and virtue are spatialized” (p. 46). Mills and, more recently, Uday Mehta (1999) have noted that, historically, the contrast between civilized, white, European spaces and wild, savage spaces is used to justify imperial expansion and to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable: the humanist universalism of liberalism and liberal states, and the colonizing practices of empire. Such practices often involved forced conversion, segregation, enslavement, genocide, the dismantling of indigenous traditions, particularly family and religious institutions, and the creation and state enforcement of new or previously meaningless ethnic divides—frequently by states expressly committed to human rights and equality. In the 1960s, as former colonies were gaining their independence, there were those within both academic and activist circles who turned to internal colonialism to describe the black experience in the United States. Some focused on understanding the American ghetto as a colony chiefly in the economic sense—that is, a geographically isolated and exploited labor market. Others placed greater emphasis on colonization as the practice of shaping the consciousness and reshaping the culture of the colonized. But both approaches found sympathizers. Similar arguments were made, though almost exclusively by academics, in the Appalachian context. Certainly, where colonialism is understood spatially chiefly as a practice of exploiting natural resources and labor from one region or territory for profits to be reaped by a distantly located class of owners, the colonial model applies well. It has always been the case and it remains so that despite the tremendous market value of natural resources, particularly of coal, few in the region who mine it see the profits. Appalachia remains by virtually every measure one of the poorest regions in the country.AlternativeGeneral Alt SolvencyOnly the alternative can solve because it is the only position that places race at the forefront of the struggle. Alcoff, 2005Linda Martin Alcoff, Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College/CUNY Graduate Center, 2005, “The Whiteness Question”One of the most difficult aspects of these white anti-racist projects is what I have called “the whiteness question,” meaning the question of white identity. Many race theorists have argued that antiracist struggles require whites' acknowledgment that they are white; that is, that their experience, perceptions, and economic position have been profoundly affected by being constituted as white (Frankenberg 1993). Race may be a social construction without biological validity, yet it is real and powerful enough to alter the fundamental shape of all our lives (Gooding-Williams 1995; Taylor 2003). Part of white privilege has been precisely whites' ability to ignore the ways white racial identity has benefited them. A liberal approach to answering this question is developed in Judith Katz's now-classic White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-racism Training (1978). This book is representative of the popularized psychological approach to antiracism, an approach often generated in, and aiming to be suited for, the kinds of in-house workshops and encounter groups that have developed from corporate America since the 1960s, though Katz's own context was closer to universities. Many corporations have discovered that racism (sometimes) impedes productivity, and therefore they have hired consultants to retrain and “sensitize” white management personnel. This is, of course, only part of the audience for antiracism training; some universities and movement organizations have also tried approaches such as Katz's. But the specific social location and source of funding needs to be kept in mind when analyzing the reeducation approaches used in antiracism workshops. White Awareness attributes widespread responsibility for racism to whites. However, Katz is highly critical of white guilt fixations on the grounds that these are self-indulgent. She explains that such criticisms led her to move from black-white group encounters to all-white groups. She also avoided using people of color to reeducate whites, she says, because she found that this led whites to focus on getting acceptance and forgiveness from their nonwhite trainers. Katz describes facing the enormity and depth of racism as painful and demoralizing, since one loses one's sense of self-trust and even self-love; but she nonetheless holds out the hope that whites can become antiracist and that “we may ultimately find comfort in our move to liberation” (vii). She holds that racism causes whites to suffer; it cripples their intellectual and psychological development and locks them “in a psychological prison that victimizes and oppresses them every day of their lives” (14). Such claims do not, of course, entail that whites' victimization by racism is worse than or equal to that of other groups, but Katz's wording is striking. Throughout the book, racism is portrayed as a kind of macro-agent with its own agenda, operating separately from white people. This problem takes on added significance given that antiracism and “sensitivity” training occur within the context of a corporate culture that continues to use racism and cultural chauvinism as an excuse to pay people of color far lower wages by undervaluing comparably challenging or even more difficult work. Katz makes no reference to exploitation or the need for a redistribution of resources, and instead treats racism as a psychological pathology that can be solved through behavior modification. Although racism no doubt is debilitating for whites in a number of ways, unless we analyze who benefits from and promotes racism, both objectively and subjectively, we cannot see clearly what needs to be done to counter it.The alternative is the only way to solve. Any other attempts, like the 1AC, leave room for oppressive systems to maintain the status quo. Schram, 03SANFORD F. SCHRAM teaches social theory at Bryn Mawr 2003 (PUTTING A BLACK FACE ON WELFARE the Politics of Welfare Reform (Paperback) by Sanford F. Schram (Editor), Joe Soss (Editor), Richard C. Fording (Editor)'While this gentility is understandable, it is also harmful. The unwillingness to address more forthrightly the racial composition of the welfare population springs in part from a fear that conservatives will use such information to reinforce their arguments that welfare recipients are "different." This reticence extends to discussing the "differences" associated with all single mothers on welfare, black or white, thereby often leaving the field open to conservatives to decide how differences are interpreted There are many parallels for this sort of reticence. For years liberals were reluctant to examine seriously what was alleged to be "welfare fraud" when recipients were not reporting all of their other small sources of income. For years, the topic was dominated by conservative viewpoints that led to the development of obsessive practices by states to hunt down and punish violators who failed to report all of their income even if it was minimal. "Welfare fraud" became another way to harass economically distressed welfare recipients and depict them as undeserving. Finally, after decades of a crackdown on these alleged abuses of welfare studies such as the one by Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein ('997) offered an alternative perspective, showing that low benefits left recipients no choice to supplement their welfare checks with unreported income. Unfortunately, by the time that Edin and Lein published their findings in 1997, the campaign to combat fraud and withhold aid from "cheaters" had held down welfare benefits for over two decades so that they had on average declined in real value by over 40 percent by the early 1970s (Moffitt 92.). The prior failure to join the discussion about the issue of "welfare aid" was therefore at best unhelpful. At worst, this lapse in political courage provided an opening for conservatives to frame the issue of unreported income in the worst possible light as "welfare fraud." This in turn enabled states to tighten access and reduce benefits, in effect punishing people in most cases for trying to survive by combining inadequate welfare benefits with small amounts of unreported income. Reluctance to discuss particular issues about welfare and poverty can have its negative effects. But the whole point of getting involved and dissscussing potentially difficult issues about welfare and poverty is to prevent serious issues from being framed in tendentious ways. Talking about the proportionate numbers of nonwhites receiving welfare does not have involve Moynihan's "tangle of pathology" perspective. Yet, if only the Moynihans of the world get involved in highlighting the racial composition of the welfare population, that is just what may happen. Others need engage these issues, not just to check the facts about the racial composition of the welfare population, but more importantly to address how facts are being framed and how assumptions of otherness inform the interpretation of those facts.Only the alternative can solve ethics. Slocum, 09Rachel Slocum, 2009, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, St. Cloud State University (“The Embodied Politics of Pain in U.S. Anti-Racism”, ACME, vol8/Slocum09.pdf)In white struggles against racism, Alcoff notes that a sense of self-love is important. Yet the ‘new abolitionism’, which asks white people to become ‘traitors’ to whiteness, toward its eventual abolition (see Ignatiev and Garvey, 1996), requires a portrait of white racism that reveals how white self love has been derived through killing people, taking their resources and obliterating their knowledge systems. To present this as the complete picture of whiteness “threatens [whites’] very ability to be moral today, because it threatens their ability to imagine themselves as having a socially coherent relation to a past and a future toward which anyone could feel an attachment” (1998, 18-19). In exploring this abolitionist sentiment, Alcoff wonders, “[i]s it possible to feel o.k. about being white?” (1998, 8). Rejecting the suggestion that to be anti-racist whites must discard or disdain white identity, she answers that it is possible. Whiteness takes many dangerous forms (that are not only the purview of whiteness)—imperialism, militarism, colonialism, racism, cultural and economic exploitation—and also takes forms emboldened by curiosity, love or a sense of responsibility. Whiteness, moreover, also encompasses an interest in other non-supremacist ways of being white. It comes in the form of appreciation, anti-oppression work and desiring proximity to difference. These explorations potentially open doors to critical knowledge about all racialized difference. The wish to be nonwhite in order to be part of a group expressed by the young white man in the section on training might be acknowledged neither as white betrayal, nor as white insensitivity to privilege, neither with adulation nor with tears. Instead it could be simply interesting or an opening for discussion. The subjective investment of white youth (and others) in anti-racist politics is desirable, but the means to encourage such investment is to connect local histories and lived culture to the anti-oppression agenda (Nayak, 2003). The breadth of histories and geographies of race and racisms is important to continue researching. This does not mean an emphasis on ethnic whiteness that dissolves the power of whiteness into national diasporic identities that practice discrete, intact forms of white culture. In England, white subject positions are tenuously held and cannot be exhaustively explained by their embeddness in an imperialist past (2003, 156). After all, people of color have been known to work in racist alliance with whites against other groups of color suggesting the need for a plural concept of racisms (Nayak, 2003). Nayak writes, I would suggest that making slippery the frozen status of white- Anglo ethnicity may allow for new points of connection to emerge for white youth. Moreover, if these emergent ethnicities can be encouraged to flourish outside the ideological nexus that merges whiteness, racism and nationhood, there remains cause for hope. Historical context is keyKundnani and Kumar 14 [Arun Kundnani and Deepa Kumar. "Race, Surveillance, and Empire." Race, Surveillance, and Empire. International Socialist Review, 2014. Web. 18 May 2015. <;., LG]The mechanisms of surveillance outlined in this essay were responses to political struggles of various kinds—from anticolonial insurgencies to slave rebellions, labor militancy to anti-imperialist agitation. Surveillance practices themselves have also often been the target of organized opposition. In the 1920s and 1970s, the surveillance state was pressured to contract in the face of public disapproval. The antiwar activists who broke into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971 and stole classified documents managed to expose COINTELPRO, for instance, leading to its shut down. (But those responsible for this FBI program were never brought to justice for their activities and similar techniques continued to be used later against, for example in the 1980s, the American Indian Movement, and the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador.68) Public concern about state surveillance in the 1970s led to the Church committee report on government spying and the Handschu guidelines that regulated the New York Police Department’s spying on political activities. Those concerns began to be swept aside in the 1980s with the War on Drugs and, especially, later with the War on Terror. While significant sections of the public may have consented to the security state, those who have been among its greatest victims—the radical Left, antiwar activists, racial justice and Black liberation campaigners, and opponents of US foreign policy in Latin America and the Middle East—understand its workings. Today, we are once again in a period of revelation, concern, and debate on national security surveillance. Yet if real change is to be brought about, the racial history of surveillance will need to be fully confronted—or opposition to surveillance will once again be easily defeated by racial security narratives. The significance of the Snowden leaks is that they have laid out the depth of the NSA’s mass surveillance with the kind of proof that only an insider can have. The result has been a generalized level of alarm as people have become aware of how intrusive surveillance is in our society, but that alarm remains constrained within a public debate that is highly abstract, legalistic, and centered on the privacy rights of the white middle class. On the one hand, most civil liberties advocates are focused on the technical details of potential legal reforms and new oversight mechanisms to safeguard privacy. Such initiatives are likely to bring little change because they fail to confront the racist and imperialist core of the surveillance system. On the other hand, most technologists believe the problem of government surveillance can be fixed simply by using better encryption tools. While encryption tools are useful in increasing the resources that a government agency would need to monitor an individual, they do nothing to unravel the larger surveillance apparatus. Meanwhile, executives of US tech corporations express concerns about loss of sales to foreign customers concerned about the privacy of data. In Washington and Silicon Valley, what should be a debate about basic political freedoms is simply a question of corporate profits.69 Another and perhaps deeper problem is the use of images of state surveillance that do not adequately fit the current situation—such as George Orwell’s discussion of totalitarian surveillance. Edward Snowden himself remarked that Orwell warned us of the dangers of the type of government surveillance we face today.70 Reference to Orwell’s 1984 has been widespread in the current debate; indeed, sales of the book were said to have soared following Snowden’s revelations.71 The argument that digital surveillance is a new form of Big Brother is, on one level, supported by the evidence. For those in certain targeted groups—Muslims, left-wing campaigners, radical journalists—state surveillance certainly looks Orwellian. But this level of scrutiny is not faced by the general public. The picture of surveillance today is therefore quite different from the classic images of surveillance that we find in Orwell’s 1984, which assumes an undifferentiated mass population subject to government control. What we have instead today in the United States is total surveillance, not on everyone, but on very specific groups of people, defined by their race, religion, or political ideology: people that NSA officials refer to as the “bad guys.” In March 2014, Rick Ledgett, deputy director of the NSA, told an audience: “Contrary to some of the stuff that’s been printed, we don’t sit there and grind out metadata profiles of average people. If you’re not connected to one of those valid intelligence targets, you are not of interest to us.”72 In the national security world, “connected to” can be the basis for targeting a whole racial or political community so, even assuming the accuracy of this comment, it points to the ways that national security surveillance can draw entire communities into its web, while reassuring “average people” (code for the normative white middle class) that they are not to be troubled. In the eyes of the national security state, this average person must also express no political views critical of the status quo. Better oversight of the sprawling national security apparatus and greater use of encryption in digital communication should be welcomed. But by themselves these are likely to do little more than reassure technologists, while racialized populations and political dissenters continue to experience massive surveillance. This is why the most effective challenges to the national security state have come not from legal reformers or technologists but from grassroots campaigning by the racialized groups most affected. In New York, the campaign against the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslims has drawn its strength from building alliances with other groups affected by racial profiling: Latinos and Blacks who suffer from hugely disproportionate rates of stop and frisk. In California’s Bay Area, a campaign against a Department of Homeland Security-funded Domain Awareness Center was successful because various constituencies were able to unite on the issue, including homeless people, the poor, Muslims, and Blacks. Similarly, a demographics unit planned by the Los Angeles Police Department, which would have profiled communities on the basis of race and religion, was shut down after a campaign that united various groups defined by race and class. The lesson here is that, while the national security state aims to create fear and to divide people, activists can organize and build alliances across race lines to overcome that fear. To the extent that the national security state has targeted Occupy, the antiwar movement, environmental rights activists, radical journalists and campaigners, and whistleblowers, these groups have gravitated towards opposition to the national security state. But understanding the centrality of race and empire to national security surveillance means finding a basis for unity across different groups who experience similar kinds of policing: Muslim, Latino/a, Asian, Black, and white dissidents and radicals. It is on such a basis that we can see the beginnings of an effective multiracial opposition to the surveillance state and empire.Domestic Surveillance is historically rooted in racist policyKornweibel 86 [Theodore Kornweibel, University Publications of America, 1986, , LG]The First World War and the subsequent Red Scare years establish two benchmarks in American civil liberties. At no other time in the nation's history, before or after, was the Bill of Rights so freely transgressed. Second, these years mark the birth of modern political surveillance in the United States. During the late teens and early twenties of the present century the Justice Department and its Bureau of Investigation (renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935), the intelligence branches of the Army and Navy, the State and Post Office Departments, and other agencies of the federal bureaucracy engaged in widespread investigation of those deemed politically suspect. Prominent among the targets of this sometimes coordinated, sometimes independent surveillance were aliens, members of various protest groups, Socialists, Communists, opponents of World War I, militant labor unionists, ethnic or racial nationalists, and outspoken opponents of the policies of the incumbent presidents. Black Americans in all of the above categories were subject to federal scrutiny, harassment, and prosecution. The era is hardly notable for scrupulous attention to the First and Fourth Amendments to the federal constitution. Blacks who opposed World War I or the selective service, those who advocated self-defense during the race riots of the "Red Summer" of 1919, or those who were involved in radical labor unions fared no better at the hands of federal agencies than black Communists and Socialists, as well as members of the black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), headed by the charismatic Marcus Garvey. Disapproval of all of the foregoing was legion among the white majority population. It took no great public pressure to persuade the Bureau of Investigation, Military Intelligence Division, and other worried agencies to conduct surveillance of a wide range of black figures, both well-known and obscure. Many white Americans, in and out of government, perceived militant blacks as doubly threatening to the American way of life: threatening for their advocacy of radical or dissident or nationalistic political ideas; and threatening because any gains they made would lead to changes in the racial status quo that were disquieting to many whites. Modern political surveillance in the United States had its birth during World War I and the Red Scare period. The Bureau of Investigation was the leading character in this drama. It transformed itself, with little congressional interference, from a relatively insignificant component of the Justice Department into a large, bureaucratized, and semi-autonomous agency, defining itself as the guardian of the nation's security against foreign and domestic forces and individuals representing numerous dangerous "-isms." Much of the credit for this expansion of mission could be claimed by young J. Edgar Hoover, who as a special assistant to the Attorney General, organized and headed the General Intelligence Division (or "anti-radical division") of the Bureau. Hoover also spearheaded the Bureau's efforts after 1919 to silence black radical publications, neutralize black Socialists and Communists, and cripple the one truly mass-based black movement, the nationalistic UNIA.Domestic Surveillance is rooted in racist attempts at cataloguing and making visible the black bodyBall, Haggerty, and Lyon 12 [Kirstie Ball, Kevin Haggerty, David Lyon, Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, Taylor & Francis, April 27, 2012, LG]According to Christian Parenti, the history of surveillance in America can be traced to the “simple accounts” of slave owners (2003:15). Of course, the accounting practices of transatlantic slavery were also present outside of the Americas. These simple accounts included slave vessel manifests listing human cargo, plantation inventories, diaries which contained observations about plantation life and instructions for governing slaves. One example involved the “General Rules” recorded by Charles Tait for his Columbus, Texas plantation: “4th In giving orders always do it in a mold tone, and try to leave the impression on the mind of the negro that what you say is the result of relection.” The detailed cataloguing of slave life was a mechanism of disciplinary power, where disciplinary power, as Michel Foucault tells us, is “exercised through its invisibility,” while imposing a “compulsory visibility” on its targets (1979: 187). Disciplinary power, then, operated on the enslaved as a racializing surveillance that individuals were at once subjected to and that produced them as racial, and therefore enslavable, subjects. Such a racializing surveillance was apparent in the plantation security system, a system that relied on, as Parenti lays out, three “information technologies: the written slave pass, organized slave patrols, and wanted posters for runaways” (2003: 15). Here, surveillance and literacy were closely articulated as slave and indentured servants who could read and write could also forge passes and manumission papers or alter existing ones by replacing dates, names and other unique identifiers, in this way functioning as “antebellum hackers” able to “crack the code of the planters’ security system” (20). These forged passes were used for unauthorized travel outside of the plantation and were produced by fugitives upon demand by slave patrollers, or “pattie rollers,” who were often non-property owning but armed white men who policed slave mobilities. Sometimes producing a forged pass was not necessary. Any piece of printed text would do give that fugitive slaves were aware that many of these pattie rollers were illiterate, so they would hand over these “passes” when apprehended. This security system, then, relied on the “racially defined contours of (white) literacy and (Black) illiteracy,” a dichotomy that was not so readily upheld (18). Less easily counterfeited passes were later fashioned out of metal. The compulsory visibility of the racial subject can be seen in the circulation of newspaper advertisements and wanted posters for runaway slaves and truant servants. These texts were primarily aimed at a white public that was assumed to be literate and free, and who in consuming these texts became part of the apparatus of surveillance, the eyes and ears of face-to-face watching and regulating. In detailing physical descriptions, the surveillance technology of the fugitive slave advertisement made the already hypervisible racial subject legible as “out of place.” For instance, a March 15 1783 advertisement in The Royal Gazette offering a “Two Dollars reward” for “a Mulatto, or Quadroom Girl, about 14 years of age, named Seth, but calls herself Sall,” attests to the role of fugitive slave notice, and similary wanted posters, in upholding racial categorization. This notice went on to state: “Sometimes says she is white and often paints her face to cover that deception.” Seth’s, or Sall’s, duplicity is not limited to her use of an alias, as this notice tells us, but also to her racial ambiguity, witness her apparent choosing to self-identify or pass as white, rather as “a Mulatto” (one black parents and one white parent) or a “Quadroon Girl” (one black grandparents) as per the racial nomenclature that arose out of slavery. Later such classifications as a form of population management were made official with the first US federal census in 1790. I will return to the census as a technology that formalized racial categorization later. For now, the wanted notice for fugitive slaves as an information technology demonstrates that then as now race was a social construct that required constant policing and oversight. However, the format of the fugitive notice was repurposed in the form of handbills that functioned as a means of counter-surveillance. An 1851 handbill produced by abolitionist Theodore Parker attests to this as cautioned “colored people of Boston” to steer clear of “watchmen and police officers” and to “keep a sharp look out for kidnappers, and have top eye open.” “Top eye” here was a directive to look out and about with keen intent as police officers were empowered to act as slave catchers under fugitive slave laws. Black spectatorship, along with the gazes of white abolitionists and other allies, functioned as a form of oppositional looking back at racializing surveillance.Surveillance is an attempt by the sovereign to impose and enforce norms based on raceBall, Haggerty, and Lyon 12 [Kirstie Ball, Kevin Haggerty, David Lyon, Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, Taylor & Francis, April 27, 2012, LG]Starting with John Fiske’s assertion that surveillance “is a way of imposing norms” where “those who have been othered into the ‘abnormal’ have [surveillance] focused more intensely upon them,” (1998:81) this chapter considers certain moments, both historical and contemporary, where surveillance reifies the social construct of race. The four sections that make up this chapter (the slave pass, the rogues’ gallery, the census, the biometric body) examine extraordinary acts of surveillance, as well as those of the everyday, that are racializing in their effects. I focus on racializing surveillance as a technology of social control. Racializing surveillance is that where surveillance practices, policies and performances concern the production of norms pertaining to race and exercise a “power to define what is in or out of place” (Fiske 1998:81). Mindful of David Theo Goldber’s caution that the term “racialization” should be used precisely, and not merely to ascribe “racial meanings or values to social conditions or arrangements” (Goldberg 2002: 12), my use of the term “racializing surveillance” signals those moments when enactments of surveillance reify boundaries and border along racial lines, and where to outcome is often discriminatory treatment. In his discussion of black masculinities and video surveillance in the public sphere, Fiske argues that “surveillance is a technology of whiteness that racially zones city space by drawing lines that Blacks cannot cross and whites cannot see” (1998: 69). Drawing from Fiske’s claim and situation race as socially constructed rather than biologically fixed, this chapter explores surveillance and the work it does to zone space, draw lines and shape looking relations. GenealogyGenealogical interrogation lays the groundwork for everyday activity and can create broad change.Medina, 2011 (Jose Medina, October 2011, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt, Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism)As Foucault puts it, ?it is the coupling together of the buried scholarly knowledge and knowledges that were disqualified by the hierarchy of erudition and sciences? that gives strength to genealogical critique.34 What both of these forms of subjugated knowledges brings to the fore is the ?historical knowledge of struggles,? ?the memory of combats, the very memory that had until then been confined to the mar-gins.?35 And this is exactly what the critical and transformative work of genealogical investigations consists in, according to Foucault: with the ?coupling together of scholarly erudition and local memories,? genealogical investigations provide ?a meticulous rediscovery of struggles and the raw memory of fights?; ?this coupling *<+ allows us to constitute a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of that knowledge in contemporary tactics.?36 Genealogical investigations can unearth multiple paths from buried or forgotten past struggles to the present; and thus they can promote a critical awareness that things are as they are because of a history of past struggles that are hidden from view, which can have a great impact on how we confront our struggles in the present. As McWhorter’s genealogical investigations il-lustrate so well, ?one consequence of that awareness is the recognition that today’s status quo was far from inevitable and need not persist into tomorrow.?37 Genea-logies are insurrections against hegemonic power/knowledge effects of discursive practices. Thus, for example, McWhorter’s genealogical account of racism in the US is ?an intellectual assault on the power-effects of institutionalized, entrenched, and taken-for-granted academic, clinical, moralistic, and religious discourses about ra-cism.?38 And it is important to note that the possibilities of critique that are opened up by unearthing marginalized past struggles benefit not only those whose expe-riences and lives have been kept in the dark, but the entire social body, which can now become critically conscious of the heterogeneity of histories and experiences that are part of the social fabric. This is why McWhorter’s genealogy of racism makes racial oppression relevant in novel and unexpected ways to a wide variety of groups and publics that can now relate to old struggles in new ways.39The genealogical methodology is a system by which pluralism flourishes and is preferable to any other methodology to solve the white exceptionalism of the status quo. Genealogy focuses on subjugated knowledge, opening up new opportunitiesMedina, 2011(Jose Medina, October 2011, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt, Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism)The central goal of this paper is to show the emancipatory potential of the epistemological framework underlying Foucault’s work. More specifically, I will try to show that the Foucaultian approach places practices of remembering and for-getting in the context of power relations in such a way that possibilities of resistance and subversion are brought to the fore. When our cultural practices of remembering and forgetting are interrogated as loci where multiple power relations and power struggles converge, the first thing to notice is the heterogeneity of differently situ-ated perspectives and the multiplicity of trajectories that converge in the epistemic negotiations in which memories are formed or de-formed, maintained alive or killed. The discursive practices in which memory and oblivion are manufactured are not uniform and harmonious, but heterogeneous and full of conflicts and tensions. Foucault invites us to pay attention to the past and ongoing epistemic battles among competing power/knowledge frameworks that try to control a given field. Different 2 Ibid. 95. Foucault Studies, No. 12, pp. 9-35. 11 fields—or domains of discursive interaction—contain particular discursive regimes with their particular ways of producing knowledge. In the battle among power/ knowledge frameworks, some come on top and become dominant while others are displaced and become subjugated. Foucault’s methodology offers a way of exploiting that vibrant plurality of epistemic perspectives which always contains some bodies of experiences and memories that are erased or hidden in the mainstream frame-works that become hegemonic after prevailing in sustained epistemic battles. What Foucault calls subjugated knowledges3 are forms of experiencing and remembering that are pushed to the margins and rendered unqualified and unworthy of epistemic respect by prevailing and hegemonic discourses.Dispelling the myth of the lone individual overthrowing tyranny is key to understanding and implementing movements for social change and liberation across the entire political spectrum.Dreier, 2006Peter Dreier, Professor of Politics and Director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Program at Occidental College, 2006 “Rosa Parks: Angry, Not Tired” Dissent vol.53 #1 pgs. 88-92ALTHOUGH THE civil rights agenda is still unfinished, the freedom struggle resulted in many legal victories and important social, political, and economic changes that transformed America. Rosa Parks became an American icon. Schools, streets, and community centers are named in her honor. In 1999, President Bill Clinton presented her with the Medal of Freedom, the highest award the U.S. government can bestow on a civilian. When Nelson Mandela visited Detroit in 1990, he insisted on meeting with Parks. Mandela said that Parks had inspired him while he was jailed in South Africa. The real Rosa Parks is more interesting than the legend. Parks is often paired with Jackie Robinson, who had defied bus segregation laws while in the Army and who broke baseball's color line in 1947, as civil rights pioneers. But the integration of baseball was not simply an act of individual heroism on Robinson's part. It took an interracial protest movement among liberal and progressive activists, as well as the Negro press, which had agitated for years to integrate Major League Baseball before Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey signed Robinson to a contract in 1945, then brought him up to the majors two years later. Similarly, Parks did not single-handedly "spark" the bus boycott. She was part of a network of organizations and activists (including many women) who had the leadership capacity and resources—telephone lists, mimeograph machines, access to teachers, clergy, and others—to act strategically. Although legend has framed the Montgomery boycott as a spontaneous outburst of protest, it was rooted in the experiences of Parks and other activists, who had learned valuable lessons from their mentors in the labor and civil rights movements. Indeed, the success of any movement for social change depends on the often invis ible day-to-day work of unsung grassroots leaders who make important choices about strategy, tactics, fund-raising, developing new leaders, cultivating allies, deciding when to engage in lawsuits and elections and when to resort to protest, picking battles they can win, and knowing when to compromise. Contemporary struggles for justice—union campaigns, environmental activism, efforts to promote fair trade, the campus crusade against sweatshops, challenges to U.S. militarism and the war in Iraq, battles to sustain the momentum of gay rights and women's equality, and agitation to preserve and expand the victories of the civil rights movement— may seem modest by comparison to the movements of the 1960s that began in Montgomery in 1955. But one of the key lessons of that era is that history is full of surprises. Many ideas that were once considered outrageous, utopian, and impractical are today taken for granted. The radical ideas of one generation often become the common sense of subsequent generations. That only happens when people like Rosa Parks—a movement activist, not a tired old woman—join forces for the long haul.Perm DebateThe permutation is only a form of masking that ensures whiteness prevails. Sullivan, 08Shannon Sullivan, Professor at Pennsylvania State University, 2008, ("Whiteness as Wise Provincialism: Royce and the Rehabilitation of a Racial Category." A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy 44.2 (2008): 236-262. Project MUSE.)A wise whiteness also would caution, however, that white people’s appreciation for racial diversity and variety also can be an insidious form of whiteness in disguise. Too often, celebrations of multiculturalism and racial diversity function as a smorgasbord of racial difference offered up for (middle-to-upper class) white people’s consumption and enjoyment. They do this by acknowledging some differences while simultaneously concealing others. It is very easy for white people to recognize and even celebrate racial difference in the form of different food, dress, and cultural customs. It tends to be much more difficult for them to recognize racial difference in the form of economic, educational, and political inequalities. Royce’s criticism of the leveling tendencies of modern culture does not explicitly depoliticize the issue, and he does mention that variety is needed particularly to counter “the purely mechanical carrying-power of certain ruling social influences,” an example of which is the hegemony of white culture (76). But given the [End Page 247] tendency of white (middle-to-upper class, in particular) people to see whiteness as cultureless and boring and thus want to spice it up by dabbling in other, “exotic” cultures, care must be taken that appreciation of diversity is not sanitized through an avoidance of the history and present of white privilege. When that happens, appreciation of plurality and diversity tend to become a covert vehicle for white ontological expansiveness. In contrast, a wise whiteness values and thus transactionally conserves different races, as Outlaw does, without depoliticizing the meaning of those differences.The permutations insistence that we can do both is an exercise of privilege that victims of whiteness do not have. Only an unapologetic criticism of whiteness can solve. Croll, 07Paul R. Croll, Department of Sociology at Minnesota University, 2007 (“Modeling Determinants of White Racial Identity: Results from a New National Survey”, Social Forces, LN)Understandings of whiteness have the potential to take our public discussion of race in America in new, productive directions and shift the focus of racial inequality in America. Whiteness is something that is hard to sweep back under the rug once it is uncovered. However, it is important to note that attention to whiteness alone does not mean that the possessive investment in whiteness (Lipsitz 1998) will go away. Whites can be simultaneously aware of their white racial identity, and at the same time, take advantage of the privileges afforded them based on their white status. This raises important questions about our traditional American ideals. What are the implications when Americans still adhere to ideals of hard work, effort and opportunity for all, yet also are conscious and aware of systems of privilege afforded to some, but not others, based on the color of their skin? The "culture of poverty" argument and other explanations for low socioeconomic status and achievement have historically relied upon the assumption that it is possible for all Americans to succeed, provided they work hard enough and persevere. What happens to these traditional explanations for inequality when attention to whiteness increases? Despite the growing visibility of whiteness, these explanations have not gone away. Therefore, the power of whiteness may be shifting to one of choice. Decades ago, the power of whiteness was believed to be its invisibility. Now that the veil of invisibility is being slowly removed, the power of whiteness remains. Whiteness may be the luxury to choose when to see it and when to ignore it, an important shift from presumed unconsciousness. Future research should examine the choices afforded whites to further our understandings of race relations in America.The permutation is an attempt to forget centuries of injustice, which reifies whiteness by making us think that we have done something to forward a progressive agenda. This is the wrong approach. Only a discussion where race is constantly brought to the front can solve. Mills, 07Charles w. Mills, professor of moral and intellectual philosophy at john evans, 2007 [race and epistemologies of ignorance, state university, new york press, 33-34]At the level of symbolism and national selfrepresentation, then, the denial of the extent of Native American and black victimization buttresses the airbrushed white narrative of discovery, settlement, and building of a shining city on the hill. But the editing of white memory has more concrete and practical consequences also: as earlier emphasized it enables a selfrepresentation in which differential white privilege, and the need to correct for it, does not exist. In other words, the mystification of the past underwrites a mystification of the present. The erasure of the history of Jim Crow makes it possible to represent the playing field as historically level, so that current black poverty just proves blacks' unwillingness to work. As individual memory is assisted through a larger social memory, so individual amnesia is then assisted by a larger collective amnesia. In his re search on the continuing, indeed deepening, gap between white and black Americans, Thomas Shapiro (2004, 7576) remarks on how often white in terviewees seemed to "forget" what they had just told him about the ex tensive parental assistance they received, claiming instead that they had worked for it: "[X's] memory seems accurate as she catalogues all sorts of parental wealthfare with matching dollar figures .... However, as soon as the conversation turns to how she and her husband acquired assets like their home, cars, and savings account, her attitude changes dramatically ... .The [Xs] describe themselves as selfmade, conveniently forgetting that they inherited much of what they own." Thus the "taken forgranted sense of [white] entitlement" erases the fact that "transformative assets," "inherited wealth lifting a family beyond their own achievements," have been crucial to their white success (76, 10, emphasis in original) and that blacks do not in general have such advantages because of the history of discrimination against them. Thomas McCarthy (2002,2004) points out the importance of a politics of memory for closing the "peculiar gap be tween academic historical scholarship and public historical consciousness that marks our own situation" (2002, 641) and emphasizes that the even tual achievement of racial justice can only be accomplished through a systematic national reeducation on the historic extent of black racial sub ordination in the United States and how it continues to shape our racial fates differentially today. AT: Cap = RCStructural accounts which restrict the consideration to economic benefits ignore the public and psychological wages of whiteness and the role such wages have in upholding capitalist oppression. Olson, 2004Olson, Professor of Political Science at Northern Arizona University, 04 (Joel, The Abolition of White Democracy, Minnesota Press, 2004)The key to explaining why white workers sided with the elites on the basis of racial interests rather than with Black workers on the basis of class interests, Du Bois suggests, lies not so much in the particular events of Reconstruction but in a set of privileges white workers had enjoyed even before the Civil War. Du Bois argues that white workers actively oppressed their fellow workers in exchange for the “wages of whiteness.” It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public offcials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them.29 The wages of whiteness literally pay off in terms of higher wages, two-tiered wage scales, exclusive access to certain jobs, and informal unemployment insurance (first hired, last fired). They also ensure access to land, capital, and markets to those who can afford them, giving white workers-cum-entrepreneurs the chance to become capitalists. But they also grant whites an elevated social status, which in many ways is as significant as the tangible benefits. The public and psychological wages of whiteness grant the white worker the same political rights and privileges accorded elites: legal equality with all other whites, the right to elect leaders, join political parties, assemble and speak freely, bear arms. They provide the white citizen with an air of both equality and superiority: equal to all white people—even the rich—yet superior to all Black people—even the rich. The wages of whiteness ensure that no matter how poor, mean, or low a white citizen may be and in spite of gender or other social identities, he or she still has, in many ways, a social status higher than the most intelligent, well-off Black person. “The most educated and deserving black man,” Du Bois solemnly notes, “was compelled in many public places to occupy a place beneath the lowest and least deserving of the whites.”30 The flip side of white wages was Black subordination. The Black man “was subject to public insult; was afraid of mobs; was liable to the jibes of children and the unreasoning fears of white women; and was compelled almost continuously to submit to various badges of inferiority.”31 Black women additionally faced the threat of sexual assault without any expectation of legal or social protection. The wages of whiteness drove a wedge between Black and white workers such that, although they shared a language, dialect, religion, music, food, and (often enough) condition of squalor, they seemed to have almost nothing in common. Du Bois insists that the white workers’ actions cannot be explained away as false consciousness. Devious capitalists plot to divide and conquer the working class by fomenting racial divisions. Some white workers may be irrationally prejudiced against African Americans. Nevertheless, “The bulk of American white labor is neither ignorant nor fanatical. It knows exactly what it is doing and it means to do it. [White labor leaders] have no excuse of illiteracy or religion to veil their deliberate intention to keep Negroes and Mexicans and other elements of common labor, in a lower proletariat as subservient to their interests as theirs are to the interests of capital.”32 White workers, Du Bois emphasizes, repress the Black community because they see it in their (shortterm) interests to do so. The tragedy is that in exchange for such wages poor whites maintain a system that exploits them, too. For even as these wages specifically benefited white workers, Du Bois maintains, they were absolutely necessary for the continued power of the capitalist class. In all class systems, laborers must be disciplined if they are to work efficiently. 33 American slavery was no different in this respect. What was unique about the policing of enslaved Southern workers and later free Black workers was that it was done not by a middle group standing between worker and owner (such as a managerial class or a mulatto race/class) but by fellow workers. In this peculiar system of discipline, there were more police than the policed because the entire white population of the “solid South” was conscripted into the struggle to secure the political obedience and economic productivity of the Black worker.34 But since planters made up only a small percentage of the whites, workers effectively policed workers. Northern white labor also policed the slaves by enforcing the fugitive slave law, sharing the same political party with Southern elites, acquiescing to Southern dominance of the national government, and degrading free Black Northerners. Slavery and later Jim Crow segregation, Du Bois concludes, “was held stable and intact by the poor white.”35 In this way a unique system of “docility utility” was achieved that maximized the political obedience and economic usefulness of all workers. This system is reproduced by more than conscious intent and tacit consent. In a sense, race functions like a discipline. Disciplines, Michel Foucault argues, are “techniques for assuring the ordering of human multiplicities.” They are specific institutions like armies, workshops, hospitals, and prisons, but they are also “general formulas of domination” in the modern era.36 This domination is productive as much as it is repressive. That is, disciplines produce subjects who are economically useful and politically docile through norms, techniques, routines, and other rote means of minutely organizing time and space. The wages of whiteness serve precisely this function of organizing, directing, shaping, producing, and repressing individuals in order to create relations of docility-utility.37 More than a means of dividing and conquering the working class, white privilege is a central form of power in the accumulation of humans that, Foucault notes, always accompanies the accumulation of capital. Our genealogy places racial identity within an historical context, yet retains an understanding of race as something which people are forced to internalize by their material conditions – the alternative solves bestZuberi & Bonilla-Silva, 2008Zuberi and bonilla-silva, zuberi is a professor and chairman of sociology at the university of pennsylvania, bonilla-silva is a preofessor of sociology at duke university, 2008[white logic, white method, pg. 6-7]I suggest that when we discuss the "effect of race," we are less mindful of the larger social world in which the path to success or failure is influenced. Usually someone in attendance argues that "race causes a person to be in a certain condition." This is like arguing that race is a proxy for an individ?ual's biological makeup, or like smoking causes cancer. Alternatively, I suggest that we place statistical analysis of race within a historical and social context. It is not a question of how a person's race causes disadvantage and discrimination. The real issue is the way the society responds to an individual's racial identification. The question has more to do with society itself, not the innate makeup of individuals. Racial identity is about shared social status, not shared individual characteristics. Race is not about an individual's skin color. Race is about an individual's relationship to other people within the society. While racial identification may be internalized and appear to be the result of self designation, it is, in fact, a result of the merging of self imposed choice within an externally imposed context. When we forget or make slight of this point, social science becomes the justification for racial stratification. To this end, I argue that race is a social construct. Within this construct, the person of color does not exist outside of his or her othemess. It is the international belief in race as real that makes race real in its social consequences. Nevertheless, a belief is not a fact, and we should question how and why we believe something to be real. We must demystify aspects of currently accepted notions of racial statistics by showing the extent to which this research has been shaped by extrinsic factors such as the interests and social position of particular scholars/researchers and debated issues long since forgotten.AT: Black/White Binary BadGeneric criticisms of dualisms and/or dichotomies ignore the historically specificity and necessity of the white world/dark world framework. The force of the white/dark distinction accounts for the assimilation strategies of other ethnicities and remains central to any political analysis.Olson, 2004Olson, Professor of Political Science at Northern Arizona University, 04 (Joel, The Abolition of White Democracy, Minnesota Press, 2004)Dualisms are increasingly out of fashion in political theory. They are often regarded as simplistic and insufficient, especially by those who prefer models of difference, pluralism, and/or hybridity.73 But there is nothing inherently vulgar about dualisms. In fact, theory cannot do without them. Whatever their limitations, dichotomies such as public/ private, rich/poor, feminine/masculine, and radical/reformist make useful distinctions that pinpoint the locus of political tensions. In explaining how one category defines the other, dualisms emphasize social relations and the role of power and conflict in them. This emphasis is not always found in models of difference or pluralism, given their tendency toward tolerance of different positions. Rather than obliterating diversity, as often charged, historically sensitive bipolar frameworks synthesize it by providing an account of the relations of power that have come to produce differentiation.74 The key, as Linda Nicholson points out, is to avoid ahistorical uses of dualisms, not dualisms per se.75 Du Bois’s “two worlds” framework remains useful because its two principal categories are not Black and white (which would indeed be insufficient) but the white world and the dark world, both of which may include other social ethnic- geographic groups besides European and African Americans. As such, it goes “beyond Black and white” while still placing conflict, power, and alienation at the heart of the racial order. The value of a white/not-white bipolar analysis is evident in that the operations of power it describes are at work even in those analyses that explicitly seek to go beyond racial dualism. One example is Neil Foley’s excellent book The White Scourge, which describes how white workers in east Texas from the Civil War to World War II tried to force Mexican workers into a racially subordinate status. Mexicans resisted these efforts by fighting against racial discrimination but also by trying to prove themselves white, which they did largely by distinguishing themselves from African Americans. Mexican workers ultimately failed to become white, Foley argues, but they were never fully identified with Black Texans because of their success in distinguishing themselves from African Americans. As a result, Mexican workers fell in between Black and white, revealing the inadequacy of the bipolar model. Over time Mexicans came to locate themselves in the ethnoracial middle ground between Anglo Americans and African Americans, not white enough to claim equality with Anglos and yet, in many cases, white enough to escape the worst features of the Jim Crow South. Although Mexicans and Anglos lived in a segregated society that strongly discouraged social interaction, the line of separation was not as rigidly maintained between the two groups as it was between whites and blacks.76 Foley’s powerful account of race and class in Texas cotton country, however, actually demonstrates the value of the bipolar model rather than its irrelevance. The problem faced by Mexicans in central Texas, as Foley recognizes, was not that they failed to put into the white or Black worlds by virtue of their brown skin or Mexican heritage. The problem was that, given the bipolar nature of the racial order, they were forced to prove they deserved membership in the white world or face a subordinate status. Caught between the compactor walls of privilege and subordination, Mexican workers both resisted discrimination and tried to prove themselves white, the latter of which involved such sundry tactics as denying their African and indigenous roots and protesting their exclusion from lynch mobs.77 The tragic predicament of these Mexican workers and their only partial success in resolving it confirm the power and presence of the bipolar model rather than refute it Similarly, Claire Jean Kim argues that Asian Americans today are both valorized as a model minority and ostracized from the body politic as inassimilable, thus placing them in a “triangulated” position in relation to African Americans and whites. Race is not a simple binary, Kim holds, but at minimum a triangular relationship of white superiors, Black inferiors, and Asian inassimilables. Kim’s triangulation thesis is smart and original, yet as with Foley’s work it reveals the underlying presence of a bipolar racial order and its attendant pressures rather than refuting it. On the West Coast in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean immigrants were clearly racially subordinated as not-white.78 But when, as Kim reports, Chinese Americans in the Mississippi Delta under Jim Crow did everything within their power to distinguish themselves from African Americans, including giving their children “white names” and joining white churches “in a deliberate bid to become white,” this suggests that the Mississippi Chinese attempted to become American citizens by pursuing the classic immigrant route of assimilating by whitening. As Kim herself writes, “If the Black struggle for advancement has historically rested upon appeals to racial equality, the Asian American struggle has at times rested upon appeals to be considered white (and to be granted the myriad privileges bundled with whiteness).”79 The triangulation that Kim describes, then, is a product of racial bipolarity. The tragic choice forced on Asians and Mexicans has been to either prove themselves white (as Irish, Italian, Greek, and other immigrants before them did) or endure the degradations of not-white status, a status reserved particularly but not exclusively for African Americans. The changes in American society since the civil rights movement should certainly invite a reevaluation of its racial categories as well as its means of racial formation. Yet a growing Latino and Asian American population does not automatically create a nation that has surpassed racial bipolarity. Races are produced through politics, not demographics. Distilling diverse peoples into white and not-white categories historically has been the modus operandi of the American racial order. Indeed, while white supremacy is usually defined as a form of exclusion, it is just as much a kind of inclusion—into the white “club” for those who can successfully claim membership. Before declaring a multiracial era, one must show that the racial order no longer operates in a bipolar manner.80 Multiracial formation, in other words, must be demonstrated through an analysis of the social and political order. Simply assuming that an ancestry that is not stereotypically African or European must be of a different race reproduces the tension between multiracialism and social construction and reflects a superficiality with which multiracial theories ironically charge bipolar models. Until proven otherwise, the bipolar model will continue to remain central to American society, as Lawrie Balfour comments, despite the wide variety of racial and ethnic identities.81 Uncritically assuming that contemporary race relations are a “mosaic,” a “hybrid,” “kaleidoscopic,” or that “we are all minorities now” obscures the dualism at the heart of white democracy and adds little to a theoretical understanding of race in the post–civil rights era. AT: Debate Space BadThe procedural “bracketing out” of our alternative of radical structural change is only meant to safeguard the status quo.Meszaros, 1989 (Istvan, Chair of philosophy @ U. of Sussex, The Power of Ideology, p. 232-23, Sydnor)6.1.1 Nowhere is the myth of ideological neutrality – the self-proclaimed Wertfeihert or value neutrality of so-called rigorous social science’ – stronger than in the field of methodology. Indeed, we are often presented with the claim that the adoption of the advocated methodological framework would automatically exempt one from all controversy about values, since they are systematically excluded (or suitably ‘bracketed out’) by the scientifically adequate method itself, thereby saving one from unnecessary complication and securing the desired objectivity and uncontestable outcome. Claims and procedures of this kind are, of course, extremely problematical. For they circularly assume that their enthusiasm for the virtues of ‘methodological neutrality’ is bound to yield ‘value neutral’ solutions with regard to highly contested issues, without first examining the all-important question as to the conditions of possibility – or otherwise – of the postulated systematic neutrality at the plane of methodology itself. The unchallengeable validity of the recommended procedure is supposed to be self-evident on account of its purely methodological character. In reality, of course, this approach to methodology is heavily loaded with a conservative ideological substance. Since, however, the plane of methodology (and ‘meta-theory’) is said to be in principle separated from that of the substantive issues, the methodological circle can be conveniently closed. Whereupon the mere insistence on the purely methodological character of the criteria laid down is supposed to establish the claim according to which the approach in question is neutral because everybody can adopt it as the common frame of reference of ‘rational discourse’. Yet, curiously enough, the proposed methodological tenets are so defined that vast areas of vital social concern are a priori excluded from this rational discourse as ‘metaphysical’, ‘ideological’, etc. The effect of circumscribing in this way the scope of the one and only admissible approach is that it automatically disqualifies, in the name of methodology itself, all those who do not fit into the stipulated framework of discourse. As a result, the propounders of the ‘right method’ are spared the difficulties that go with acknowledging the real divisions and incompatibilities as they necessarily arise from the contending social interests at the roots of alternative approaches and the rival sets of values associated with them. This is where we can see more clearly the social orientation implicit in the whole procedure. For – far from offering an adequate scope for critical enquiry – the advocated general adoption of the allegedly neutral methodological framework is equivalent, in fact, to consenting not even to raise the issues that really matter. Instead, the stipulated ‘common’ methodological procedure succeeds in transforming the enterprise of ‘rational discourse’ into the dubious practice of producing methodology for the sake of methodology: a tendency more pronounced in the twentieth century than ever before. This practice consists in sharpening the recommended methodological knife until nothing but the bare handle is left, at which point a new knife is adopted for the same purpose. For the ideal methodological knife is not meant for cutting, only for sharpening, thereby interposing itself between the critical intent and the real objects of criticism which it can obliterate for as long as the pseudo-critical activity of knife-sharpening for its own sake continues to be pursued. And that happens to be precisely its inherent ideological purpose. 6.1.2 Naturally, to speak of a ‘common’ methodological framework in which one can resolve the problems of a society torn by irreconcilable social interest and ensuing antagonistic confrontations is delusory, at best, notwithstanding all talk about ‘ideal communication communities’. But to define the methodological tenets of all rational discourse by way of transubstantiating into ‘ideal types’ (or by putting into methodological ‘brackets’) the discussion of contending social values reveals the ideological colour as well as the extreme fallaciousness of the claimed rationality. For such treatment of the major areas of conflict, under a great variety of forms – from the Viennes version of ‘logical positivism’ to Wittgenstein’s famous ladder that must be ‘thrown away’ at the point of confronting the question of values, and from the advocacy of the Popperian principle of ‘little by little’ to the ‘emotivist’ theory of value – inevitably always favours the established order. And it does so by declaring the fundamental structural parameters of the given society ‘out of bounds’ to the potential contestants, on the authority of the ideally ‘common’ methodology. However, even on a cursory inspection of the issues at stake it ought to be fairly obvious that to consent not to question the fundamental structural framework of the established order is radically different according to whether one does so as the beneficiary of that order or from the standpoint of those who find themselves at the receiving end, exploited and oppressed by the overall determinations (and not just by some limited and more or less easily corrigible detail) of that order. Consequently, to establish the ‘common’ identity of the two, opposed sides of a structurally safeguarded hierarchical order – by means of the reduction of the people who belong to the contending social forces into fictitious ‘rational interlocutors’, extracted from their divided real world and transplanted into a beneficially shared universe of ideal discourse – would be nothing short of a methodological miracle. Contrary to the wishful thinking hypostatized as a timeless and socially unspecified rational communality, the elementary condition of a truly rational discourse would be to acknowledge the legitimacy of contesting the given order of society in substantive terms. This would imply the articulation of the relevant problems not on the plan of self-referential theory and methodology, but as inherently practical issues whose conditions of solution point towards the necessity of radical structural changes. In other words, it would require the explicit rejection of all fiction of methodological and meta-theoretical neutrality. But, of course, this would be far too much to expect precisely because the society in which we live is a deeply divided society. This is why through the dichotomies of ‘fact and value’, ‘theory and practice’, ‘formal and substantive rationality’, etc., the conflict-transcending methodological miracle is constantly stipulated as the necessary regulative framework of ‘rational discourse’ in the humanities and social sciences, in the interest of the ruling ideology. What makes this approach particularly difficult to challenge is that its value-commitments are mediated by methodological precepts to such a degree that it is virtually impossible to bring them into the focus of the discussion without openly contesting the framework as a whole. For the conservative sets of values at the roots of such orientation remain several steps removed from the ostensible subject of dispute as defined in logico/methodological, formal/structural, and semantic/analytical terms. And who would suspect of ideological bias the impeccable – methodologically sanctioned – credentials of ‘procedural rules’, ‘models’ and ‘paradigms’? Once, though, such rules and paradigms are adopted as the common frame of reference of what may or may not be allowed to be considered the legitimate subject of debate, everything that enters into the accepted parameters is necessarily constrained not only by the scope of the overall framework, but simultaneously also by the inexplicit ideological assumptions on the basis of which the methodological principles themselves were in the first place constituted. This is why the allegedly ‘non-ideological’ ideologies which so successfully conceal and exercise their apologetic function in the guise of neutral methodology are doubly mystifying. FrameworkPolicymaking BadCritical policy analysis exposes the ways that normative policies and practices perpetuate racial inequityChase & Dowd, 2012 (Megan M. Chase, Doctoral student at the Center for Urban Education, Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California, Los?Angeles Alicia C. Dowd, associate professor of education at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education and co-director of the Center for Urban Education. Dr. Dowd's research focuses on political-economic issues of public college finance equity, organizational effectiveness, and accountability and the factors affecting student attainment in higher education, Educational Policy “Transfer Equity for "Minoritized" Students: A Critical Policy Analysis of Seven States”, 7 December 2012, p.7, )The work of Young (1999) and others demonstrates how using CPA is especially important in a highly stratified society like the United States because otherwise the impact of status differentials such as race, class, and gender remain hidden. For scholars concerned with exposing and ameliorating the ways in that educational policy and practice subordinate racial and ethnic minority groups, CPA provides a lens to formulate research questions, interpret data, and propose changes to policies, practices, and institutions (Heck, 2004). A critical analysis is useful because it provides a lens that helps us see the ways in that everyday policies and practices, such as those having to do with transfer, perpetuate racial and gender inequity (Harper, Patton, & Wooden, 2009). For example, Iverson (2007) conducted a study that exam-ined how university diversity policies shape the reality of students of color on campus. She found that the dominant discourses in diversity plans construct students of color as outsiders, concluding that such policies serve to (re)pro-duce the subordination of students of color. In addition, Shaw (2004) ana-lyzed welfare reform legislation from a critical policy perspective, where she found that welfare policy perpetuates social stratification by creating onerous barriers to education for women on welfare. These examples highlight how utilizing a critical policy framework can aid researchers in understanding how well-intentioned policy can potentially harm marginalized populations.Only a critical approach to policy making can solve for racial equality Chase & Dowd, 2012 (Megan M. Chase, Doctoral student at the Center for Urban Education, Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California, Los?Angeles Alicia C. Dowd, associate professor of education at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education and co-director of the Center for Urban Education. Dr. Dowd's research focuses on political-economic issues of public college finance equity, organizational effectiveness, and accountability and the factors affecting student attainment in higher education, Educational Policy “Transfer Equity for "Minoritized" Students: A Critical Policy Analysis of Seven States”, p. 7 December 2012, )A critical approach to policy analysis emphasizes the need to counter the policies, structures, practices, and allocation of resources that result in or reinforce racial inequity (Chesler & Crowfoot, 2000). As Chesler and Crowfoot (2000) argue “our history of racial injustice is maintained through contemporary policies and practices, and is reflected in the dramatic dif-ferentials . . _ in opportunity and other outcomes that still exist between people of color and White persons” (ip. 436). From this view, transfer poli-cies and practices can be discriminatory and function as a form of institutionalized racism, where institutionalized racism is defined as racism that occurs in structures and operations at the organizational level (Jones, 2000). This notion emphasizes how large-scale institutional structures and policies “operate to pass on and reinforce historic patterns of privilege and disadvantage,” such as deciding which groups gain access to the baccalaureate and which do not (Chesler & Crowfoot, 2000, p. 441). However, it is important to note that institutionalized racism in the form of policy is most often uninten-tional. Referred to as indirect institutionalized discrimination, this form of racism occurs with no prejudice or intent to harm, despite its negative and differential impacts on minoritized populations (Chesler & Crowfoot, 2000). Chesler and Crowfoot (2000) note that,organizational procedures can have discriminatory impact even if individual actors are unaware of such impacts or are non-discriminatory in their personal beliefs, and even if their behavior appears to be a fair-minded application of ‘race-neutral’ or ‘color-blind’ rules (p. 442).Policy making omits the fact that it is institutionalized and racistChase & Dowd ’12 (Megan M. Chase, Doctoral student at the Center for Urban Education, Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California, Los?Angeles Alicia C. Dowd, associate professor of education at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education and co-director of the Center for Urban Education. Dr. Dowd's research focuses on political-economic issues of public college finance equity, organizational effectiveness, and accountability and the factors affecting student attainment in higher education, Educational Policy “Transfer Equity for "Minoritized" Students: A Critical Policy Analysis of Seven States”, 7 December 2012, p.8 )Racism in organizational policy can also include acts of omission, such as failing to recruit minority students or hiring policies that exclude scholars of color. As an example, transfer policies can be enacted without conscious discriminatory intent, yet can produce results with inequitable and negative effects on students of color. Demonstrating how to critically evaluate policies in terms of their potential for discriminatory impact provides the basis for redesigning policies in a more equitable manner. In this study, CPA includes the examination of state transfer policies with the goal of understanding if such policies are a form of institutionalized rac-ism. CPA was chosen as the preferred method of analysis because, as other authors have indicated, written texts contribute to the construction of social reality; thus, by analyzing texts (in the case of this study, written policies), we were able to examine what is missing from enacted policy and who is privileged as a result (Allan et al., 2010; Fairclough, 1989). In addition, CPA is used to identify indirect forms of institutional discrimination. Knowing that policies do not fully drive behaviors, we recognize problem identification is a necessary but insufficient step toward reducing structural barriers to transfer for minoritized students.Aff StuffBlack/White Distinction is BadFocusing on the white-black binary marginalizes other racial identities.Perea, 1997 (Juan, Law professor at the University of Florida, "The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race," 85 Calif. L. Rev. 1213)Paradigms of race shape our understanding of race and our definition of racial problems. The most pervasive and powerful paradigm of race in the United States is the Black/White binary paradigm. I define this paradigm as the conception that race in America consists, either exclusively or primarily, of only two constituent racial groups, the Black and the White. Many scholars of race reproduce this paradigm when they write and act as though only the Black and the White races matter for purposes of discussing race and social policy with regard to race. The mere recognition that "other people of color" exist, without careful attention to their voices, their histories, and their real presence, is merely a reassertion of the Black/White paradigm. If one conceives of race and racism as primarily of concern only to Blacks and Whites, and understands "other people of color" only through some unclear analogy to the "real" races, this just restates the binary paradigm with a slight concession to demographics. My assertion is that our shared understanding of race and racism is essentially limited to this Black/White binary paradigm. n27 This paradigm defines, but also limits, the set of problems that may be recognized in racial discourse. Kuhn's notion of "normal science," which further articulates the paradigm and seeks to solve the problems perceivable because of the paradigm, also applies to "normal research" on race. Given the Black/White paradigm, we would expect to find that much research on race is concerned with understanding the dynamics of the Black and White races and attempting to solve the problems between [*1220] Blacks and Whites. Within the paradigm, the relevant material facts are facts about Blacks and Whites. In addition, the paradigm dictates that all other racial identities and groups in the United States are best understood through the Black/White binary paradigm. Only a few writers even recognize that they use a Black/White paradigm as the frame of reference through which to understand racial relations. n28 Most writers simply assume the importance and correctness of the paradigm, and leave the reader grasping for whatever significance descriptions of the Black/White relationship have for other people of color. As I shall discuss, because the Black/White binary paradigm is so widely accepted, other racialized groups like Latinos/as, Asian Americans, and Native Americans are often marginalized or ignored altogether. As Kuhn writes, "those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all." n29This produces a flawed understanding of race that ensures oppression continues. Perea, 1997 (Juan, Law professor at the University of Florida, "The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race,” 85 Calif. L. Rev. 1213)My argument is not that this history should not be an important focus of racial studies. Rather, my argument is that the exclusive focus on the development of equality doctrines based solely on the experience of Blacks, and the exclusive focus of most scholarship on the Black-White relationship, constitutes a paradigm which obscures and prevents the understanding of other forms of inequality, those experienced by non-White, non-Black Americans. The Black/White binary paradigm, by defining only Blacks and Whites as relevant participants in civil rights discourse and struggle, tends to produce and promote the exclusion of other racialized peoples, including Latinos/as, Asian Americans and Native Americans, from this crucial discourse which affects us all. This exclusion is both the power and the stricture of the Black/White binary paradigm. Its power derives from the fact that a limited subject of inquiry makes possible the study of the Black-White relationship in extraordinary detail and with great insight. Its stricture, however, is that it has limited severely our understanding of how White racism operates with particularity against other racialized peoples. Furthermore, the binary paradigm renders the particular histories of other racialized peoples irrelevant to an understanding of the only rac-ism - White racism against Blacks - that the paradigm defines to be important. This perceived irrelevance is why the history of Latinos/as, Asian Americans, and Native Americans is so frequently missing from the texts that structure our thinking about race. One could defend the Black/White paradigm on the grounds that it represents the efforts of scholars to study the most virulent form of rac-ism in the United States, White racism against Blacks, and that study of the most virulent form will naturally encompass less virulent forms such as those experienced by Latinos/as. The extent of White racism against Blacks, cruelly manifested in slavery, was unprecedented. Pervasive and continuing racism against Blacks justifies every effort dedicated to its eradication. There are at least three reasons, however, why an exclusive focus on Blacks and Whites is not justified. First, it is important to work to eradicate all racism, not just the racism experienced by Blacks. Second, it is wrong to assume that racism against Latinos/as is simply a less virulent form of the same racism experienced by Blacks. As Blauner described, racism against Latinos/as has a different genesis. It may also be different in kind in ways that are very important. For example, Blacks may or may not ever experience the language and accent discrimination faced by many Latinos/as. Finally, our national demographics are changing significantly. One cannot simply ignore the concerns of an increasingly [*1254] large and subordinated group of Latinos/as forever. A society is just only if everyone can participate in it on equal terms.Debate Space Bad Challenging racism by utilizing the punishment paradigm that is inherent in the ballot is ineffective – we should instead engage in discussion outside debateWise, 2008(Tim J, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, p. 101-107)LET'S NOT LIE to ourselves about the fear, though. It's real, whether we're challenging a family member, friend, colleague, or complete stranger. And sometimes we blow it. Before I ever stood up and challenged a store clerk for racially profiling customers, there were dozens of times that I saw it and did nothing. For every" time I interrupted someone for making a racist joke or comment, or responded forcefully to such a thing, there were dozens of times that I didn't, when I let things slide, with a nervous laugh but little else. There was even the time that I said nothing after listening to a guy who was the head of the volunteer literacy program at Tulane talk about one of the kids he was tutoring, noting that while he was a cute little eight-year-old now, by the time he was a teenager, he'd be "just another nigger." I said nothing to this, and the silence then (and at other times) haunts me, as it should. The point is, resistance takes work, it takes practice, and it helps to have as much support as possible. We shouldn't be ashamed of the times we fall short, but resolve to develop strategies that make resistance easier and more likely to succeed. Because sometimes, whether we're prepared or not, we'll be put to the test. At times like that, cultivated creativity is among the most important weapons at our disposal. Several years ago. I began to notice a disturbing tendency whenever issues of race would come up in a group of whites that really didn't know each other all that well but happened to be together at a party or other social event, or for that matter, in a pub, coffee shop, or pretty much anywhere else. What I noticed, because it was hard to miss, was that in these situations it seemed almost inevitable that someone in the group—often several someones—would take the opportunity to make some kind of overtly racist comment, or tell a racist joke, as if it were perfectly acceptable to do so, and as if no one else in the group would mind. "White bonding" was what I called it, for lack of a better term. At first I thought I was the only one having this experience so I kept it to myself, but then when I began to mention it to others they talked of having the same thing happen to them. In fact, I would later learn that others whom I had never met were actually using the same term I had chosen to describe it—white bonding. Given the frequency with which it seemed to be happening, it became apparent that I would need to develop some kind of interruption strategy. Of course, coming to realize the importance of such a method is one thing, while actually developing it and putting it into practice is quite another. One thing I've learned and am confident of, however, is that when it comes to practicing antiracist resistance, we should strive to make people think more, not less. Our resistance, to the extent this is possible, should be engaging, not enraging. Take racist jokes, for instance. The simple truth, for most of us. is that our typical responses just don't cut it. First, too often we don't respond at all, but rather let the joke or comment slide, which obviously isn't a very good strategy. But even when we do respond, it's doubtful the response has much effect. You know the response I'm talking about: the one where we offer up something like "I'm really offended that you just said that, and I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't say those kinds of things around me again." Though such a reply lets everyone know where we stand, it is almost guaranteed to make the offending party defensive, and to reply the only way a person in that situation can, which is to make you the problem—the one without a sense of humor, the one who needs to "loosen up," or understand that "it's just a joke." Not to mention that telling someone not to engage in racist commentary in front of you isn't the same as getting them to stop practicing racism, period. It's self-serving, really. It amounts to seeking protection for one's own ears, rather than trying to truly challenge the offending individual, and move them to a different place. A few years ago, I started trying something different: a response to racist jokes that would make clear where I stood, but would also engage the joke-teller in a process of critical thinking, reflection, and even dialogue. One night a few years back, I was out with a group of people, all of them white, including several students who had brought me in for a presentation at their school. As the evening went along, a few others who knew some of the students at the table (but who were unaware of the purpose for my visit) joined us. At some point in the evening, and for reasons I have long since forgotten, conversation turned to race, and I braced myself, knowing that things could turn very bad. very quickly. One of the young men who had joined the group late asked if we wanted to hear a joke, and then, without waiting for a response, he simply launched into it. As expected, it was every bit as racist as I had feared it would be when he began. When he was done, most everyone remained quiet or rolled their eyes. A few people laughed nervously and a few others said something to the effect that the joke had been terrible, and that he "really shouldn't tell jokes like that." I, on the other hand, laughed as though it had been the funniest joke I'd ever heard, because I needed to gain his confidence, his trust, for the setup that was to come. Although my laughter had clearly confused my hosts for the evening—after all, they had just paid me to come and give an antiracism talk, and here I was laughing at racism—I saw my opening, and took it. "Hey I've got one. Wanna hear it?" I asked. Naturally, he did. I continued: "Did you hear the one about the white guy who told this really racist joke because he assumed everyone he was hanging out with was also white?" "No, I haven't heard that one," he replied, clearly not seeing where this was headed, and apparently expecting a genuine punch line, all the while missing the fact that he was it. "Actually there is no joke," 1 explained. "That was just my way of telling you that I'm black. My mom is black." Telling a lie of this magnitude, I should point out. takes practice. So much so that 1 had actually rehearsed it for weeks before getting to try it out. But here was the moment, and I had pulled it off. looking right into his eyes and making him actually believe that I was black. Indeed. I could be black. There arc lots of African Americans lighter than myself, or folks with one black parent who may look white but who would certainly have been classified as black back in the day. and who identify' themselves as such now. His response was as immediate as it was revealing. "Oh my God," he demurred. "I'm so sorry. I didn't know." It was at that point that I fessed up. I wasn't really black, I noted, but as white as him. Now his look of embarrassment turned to one of confusion. After all, whites don't normally claim to be black when we're not. There just isn't much in it for us. "I'm not black," I said, "but I find it interesting that when you thought I was, you apologized. In other words, you know that joke was messed up, so that if you'd been around a black person knowingly, you never would have said it. So why did you feel comfortable saying it in front of us? Why do you think so little of white people?" Now he was really confused. It was one thing to have someone imply that he didn't much like black folks—which fact he no doubt already knew— but to be told that he must have some kind of negative bias against whites, against his own group? That was a new one. "What do you mean?" he asked. "Well," I explained, "You must think all whites are racists, and specifically, that we're all the kind of racists who enjoy racist jokes. Otherwise you wouldn't take a chance making that kind of comment around white folks you don't even know. So tell me, why do you think so little of white people?" He stammered for a few seconds, but instead of getting angry, instead of telling me to get a sense of humor, he began to actually engage, and we proceeded to have a conversation about race. There is no way we'd have had that talk had I chastised him in the traditional manner. But by engaging him in a process, a reflective process that called into question how he knew what he knew—how he knew we were white, and how he knew we would all approve of racist jokes—I was able to stretch out the dialogue and ultimately contribute to making it more productive than it otherwise would have been. For whites to resist racism this way sends a message to other whites: they can't take anything for granted. They can't presume to know our views; they can't be too sure that we'll accept their efforts at white bonding. Far from merely providing a feel-good moment, planting those seeds of doubt in other whites is an important step in the process of resistance, because racism, especially of an institutional nature, requires the collusion of many persons; the lone bigot can't accomplish it. By throwing racists off balance, we increase the costs associated with acting out, with putting their racism into practice. In the case of joke tellers, they can never be too sure that the next stranger they try that with isn't one of those whites—the black white people, or the kind of white person who won't appreciate the commentary—and as such may actually dial back their tendency to act in racist ways. Just as antiracism takes practice, so does racism. So if we can inject enough self-consciousness and doubt into the minds of those who engage in racist behavior, we make it harder for such persons to practice it. And without practicing their racism, they may just stop utilizing it altogether. Genealogy BadFragmentation/fluidity guarantees cooption by multinational corporations – we need collectively organized resistance. McIvor, 2010 (David, Kettering Foundation, Nov. 8, 2010, “The Politics of Speed: Connolly, Wolin, and the Prospects for Democratic Citizenship in an Accelerated Polity,” Polity, Vol. 43, )However, Shapiro does not seem to entertain the possibility that such desynchronization might instead bring about more intense class and cultural stratification. This will, it is true, make the recognition of “contending co-presences” more frequent, as the life experiences of the rich and “the rest” desynchronize. Yet it may also make the “continuous renegotiation” of these co-presences more difficult and hence less certain. At the very least, Shapiro does not demonstrate why social centrifugalism and the “disruptions of economic and cultural times” contain “democratic” potential, or why exactly they should be celebrated—aside from the fact that they open up our political and cultural identities to new sources of inspiration and agon. Yet if political action remains, in Weber's phrase, the “slow boring of hard boards,” and if democracy is essentially concerned with equality, then Shapiro's reluctance to provide strategies of negotiation for an accelerating, pluralizing world undercuts his own normative/political vision.25 Shapiro also does not adequately address the Deweyan anxiety that in the absence of an organized public (or multiple organized publics), concentrated economic powers will exert undue influence over public policy. Social centrifugalism or fragmentation is a fact, but, as Sheldon Wolin puts it, “some fragments are less fragmented than others … multiculturalism and multinational corporations are not equivalences.”26 In a society of vast inequality of power and privilege, where influence is concentrated in cultural and economic elites and punishment and privation are meted out to an increasingly permanent underclass, fragmentation requires an accompanying strategy of organization. Otherwise centrifugalism will perversely support a system it supposedly disrupts. Social speed begets pluralization, but it remains to be seen whether it serves a pluralistic democracy.Genealogy is an ineffective method of combatting whiteness because it misunderstands how power operatesGunder, 2010 (Michael, University of Aucklands, New Zealand, “Planning as the ideology of (neoliberal) space,” Planning Theory 9: 298, )For Foucault, ideology is neither negative nor positive, ideology is coexistent with knowledge as practised; it is the use of ideology which determines its positivity or nega- tivity for social purposes (Sholle, 1988). Foucault (1980: 131) argues that every ‘society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the type of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true’, and genealogy is the tool through which we can examine this truth and see ‘how we govern ourselves and others through its production’ (McCarthy, 1990: 443). This regime of truth is beyond simple ideology critique, for Foucault (1980: 133) the ‘political question . . . is not error, illusion, alienated conscious- ness or ideology; it is truth itself’. Accordingly, Foucault admonishes us to move on from a concept of ideology, or hegemony, as it still maintains the concept of sovereignty, be it a sovereignty of the people, an idea, or that of government (Doxiadis, 1997). Foucault argues for a move away from a legitimizing source of power. This is an argument consis- tent with that of Deleuze (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983) to do away with the societal shap- ing hegemony, or power, of transcendental ideals (Smith, 2007; Wood, 2009). I agree with the desires of Foucault and Deleuze to do away with the striating nature of authority – sovereign, religious or undefined sublime ideal – to shape societal action and direction. To that end I support the research regime of Hillier (2005, 2007, 2008) to propose a Deleuzian-derived multiplanar theory of spatial planning and governance. But, and this is a big but, we still reside in a global culture steeped in transcendent ideals of a better world, a world shaped by ideology, and I would suggest that we will likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Further, for Z?iz?ek (1999: 66), Foucault’s abandonment ‘of the problematic of ideology entails a fatal weakness’, for Foucault’s theorizing cannot explain the ‘concrete mechanism of the emergence’ of power; that is, he cannot bridge ‘the abyss that separates micro-procedures from the spectre of Power’ itself and its very materialization of causal effect within the world. That is, Foucault fails to ‘theorize the generative principle of sociosymbolic forma- tions’ (Vighi and Feldner, 2007: 142). Hence, an engagement with striating ideology is crucial to engaging with an understanding of contemporary spatial planning, gover- nance and wider society as to what hegemonically defines THE accepted truth. Indeed, McCarthy (1990) actually attributes Foucault’s genealogical project of discourse analy- sis to this very ideological agenda, even though Foucault disavows himself from the very act of ideological critique.Cap = RCWhiteness is merely a creation of the bourgeoisie to divide-and-conquer the working class – overthrowing capitalism is the only way to solveWise, 2008(Tim J, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, p. 148-152)TO UNDERSTAND WHY whites should join the struggle against our own privileges, it might help to know some history—specifically, the history of how we became white in the first place, and for what purpose. Contrary to popular belief, the white race is a quite modern creation, which only emerged as a term and concept to describe Europeans in the late 1600s and after, specifically in the colonies of what would become the United States. Prior to that time, "whites" had been a collection of Europeans with little in common, and often long histories of conflict, bloodshed, and conquests of one another's lands and peoples. The English, for example, did not consider themselves to be of the same group as the Irish, Germans, Italians, or French. Indeed, even within a nation like Scotland, whence so much of my family had come, intragroup conflicts, such as those between Highlanders (like my family, the McLeans) and those down country, were common. While most Europeans by that time may have thought of themselves as Christians (and even then, the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants were legion) there is no evidence that they conceived of themselves as a race of people, with a common heritage or destiny. But the notion of the white race found traction in the North American colonies, not because it described a clear scientific concept or some true historical bond between persons of European descent, but rather because the elites of the colonies (who were small in number but controlled the vast majority of colonial wealth) needed a way to secure their power. At the time, the wealthy landowners feared rebellions, in which poor European peasants might join with African slaves to overthrow aristocratic governance; after all, these poor Europeans were barely above the level of slaves themselves, especially if they worked as indentured servants. As mentioned earlier, from the mid-1600s to the early 1700s a series of laws were promulgated in Virginia and elsewhere, which elevated all persons of European descent, no matter how lowly in economic terms, above all persons of African descent. The purpose of such measures was to provide poor Europeans (increasingly called whites) with a stake in the system, even though they were hardly benefiting in material terms from it. In other words, whiteness was a trick, and it worked marvelously, dampening down the push for rebellion by poor whites on the basis of class interest, and encouraging them to cast their lot with the elite, if only in aspirational terms. White skin became, for them, an alternative form of property to which they could cleave, in the absence of more tangible possessions. This divide-and-conquer tactic would be extended and refined in future generations as well. During the Civil War era, Southern elites made it quite clear that their reason for secession from the Union was the desire to maintain and extend the institution of slavery and white supremacy, which institutions they felt were threatened by the rise of Lincoln and the Republican Party. One might think that seceding and going to war to defend slavery would hardly meet with the approval of poor white folks, who didn't own slaves. After all, if slaves can be made to work for free, any working-class white person who must charge for their labor will be undercut by slave labor and find it harder to make ends meet. Yet by convincing poor whites that their interests were racial, rather than economic, and that whites in the South had to band together to defend "their way of life," elites in the South conned these same lower-caste Europeans into joining a destructive war effort that cost hundreds of thousands of their own lives. Then, during the growth of the labor union movement, white union workers barred blacks from apprenticeship programs and unions because of racism, with the encouragement of owners and bosses who would use workers of color to break white labor strikes for better wages and working conditions. By bringing in blacks and others of color to break strikes, bosses counted on white workers to turn on those who replaced them, rather than turning on the bosses themselves. And indeed, this is what happened time and again, further elevating whiteness above class interest in the minds of European Americans. The effectiveness of racist propaganda to unite whites around race, even if it meant overlooking economic interests, has been stunning. And while it would be nice to think that this kind of shortsighted mentality were a thing of the past, it appears to still maintain a grip on an awful lot of whites in the present day as well. The root of gentrification and racial segregation is the bourgeoisie control of land. We should mobilize against this, not whitenessRameau, 2008Max Rameau?a Haitian born Pan-African theorist, campaign strategist, organizer and author Mar 13, 2008 Take Back The Land: Land, Gentrification And The Umoja Village Shantytown chpt 5 pgs 53-58 accessedIt is easy to see that while much movement has occurred, little tangible progress has been made in dealing with the root issue of power and control over land To be thorough and fair, it is often argued that there are really two root causes at stake here, both land and racism or White Supremacy and that ending the root issue of White Supremacy would have also ended segregation. While that might be true, the reality is that ending White Supremacy and hate in someone else is neither easy nor a substitute for building power for one's self. As such, even if we were willing and able to devote our entire existence and resources towards the task of teaching to hate us less, after the successful completion of the mission, we would still have before us the task of building power and control over the land. Therefore, the issue of land, more specifically power and collective over land, is root and primary. Those who benefit from our misery, of course, would rather that we only the surface issues and then give up the struggle alter making on that front. Our mission and objectives must be more substantial, however. Sickness cannot be cured by wiping a runny nose and liberation cannot be achieved by setting our sites on superficial changes which do not address the root causes of exploitation and oppression. For these reason and others it is clear that in order to address the crisis of gentrification and low-income housing in a real way, our responses must be rooted in land-bases do solutions. The work of Take Back the Land is not fundamentally about the homeless or even gentrification: it is fundamentally about the collective control over landPermPolicy focus is key to challenge structures of white supremacyThemba-Nixon, 2000 Executive Director of The Praxis Project, a nonprofit organization helping communities use media and policy advocacy Makani, July 31, Colorlines, Changing the Rules: What Public Policy Means for Organizing, Vol 3.2) “This is all about policy," a woman complained to me in a recent conversation. "I'm an organizer." The flourish and passion with which she made the distinction said everything. Policy is for wonks, sell-out politicians, and ivory-tower eggheads. Organizing is what real, grassroots people do. Common as it may be, this distinction doesn't bear out in the real world. Policy is more than law. It is any written agreement (formal or informal) that specifies how an institution, governing body, or community will address shared problems or attain shared goals. It spells out the terms and the consequences of these agreements and is the codification of the body's values-as represented by those present in the policymaking process. Given who's usually present, most policies reflect the political agenda of powerful elites. Yet, policy can be a force for change-especially when we bring our base and community organizing into the process. In essence, policies are the codification of power relationships and resource allocation. Policies are the rules of the world we live in. Changing the world means changing the rules. So, if organizing is about changing the rules and building power, how can organizing be separated from policies? Can we really speak truth to power, fight the right, stop corporate abuses, or win racial justice without contesting the rules and the rulers, the policies and the policymakers? The answer is no-and double no for people of color. Today, racism subtly dominates nearly every aspect of policymaking. From ballot propositions to city funding priorities, policy is increasingly about the control, de-funding, and disfranchisement of communities of color. Take the public conversation about welfare reform, for example. Most of us know it isn't really about putting people to work. The right's message was framed around racial stereotypes of lazy, cheating "welfare queens" whose poverty was "cultural." But the new welfare policy was about moving billions of dollars in individual cash payments and direct services from welfare recipients to other, more powerful, social actors. Many of us were too busy to tune into the welfare policy drama in Washington, only to find it washed up right on our doorsteps. Our members are suffering from workfare policies, new regulations, and cutoffs. Families who were barely getting by under the old rules are being pushed over the edge by the new policies. Policy doesn't get more relevant than this. And so we got involved in policy-as defense. Yet we have to do more than block their punches. We have to start the fight with initiatives of our own. Those who do are finding offense a bit more fun than defense alone. Living wage ordinances, youth development initiatives, even gun control and alcohol and tobacco policies are finding their way onto the public agenda, thanks to focused community organizing that leverages power for community-driven initiatives. - Over 600 local policies have been passed to regulate the tobacco industry. Local coalitions have taken the lead by writing ordinances that address local problems and organizing broad support for them. - Nearly 100 gun control and violence prevention policies have been enacted since 1991. - Milwaukee, Boston, and Oakland are among the cities that have passed living wage ordinances: local laws that guarantee higher than minimum wages for workers, usually set as the minimum needed to keep a family of four above poverty. These are just a few of the examples that demonstrate how organizing for local policy advocacy has made inroads in areas where positive national policy had been stalled by conservatives. Increasingly, the local policy arena is where the action is and where activists are finding success. Of course, corporate interests-which are usually the target of these policies-are gearing up in defense. Tactics include front groups, economic pressure, and the tried and true: cold, hard cash. Despite these barriers, grassroots organizing can be very effective at the smaller scale of local politics. At the local level, we have greater access to elected officials and officials have a greater reliance on their constituents for reelection. For example, getting 400 people to show up at city hall in just about any city in the U.S. is quite impressive. On the other hand, 400 people at the state house or the Congress would have a less significant impact. Add to that the fact that all 400 people at city hall are usually constituents, and the impact is even greater. Recent trends in government underscore the importance of local policy. Congress has enacted a series of measures devolving significant power to state and local government. Welfare, health care, and the regulation of food and drinking water safety are among the areas where states and localities now have greater rule. Devolution has some negative consequences to be sure. History has taught us that, for social services and civil rights in particular, the lack of clear federal standards and mechanisms for accountability lead to uneven enforcement and even discriminatory implementation of policies. Still, there are real opportunities for advancing progressive initiatives in this more localized environment. Greater local control can mean greater community power to shape and implement important social policies that were heretofore out of reach. To do so will require careful attention to the mechanics of local policymaking and a clear blueprint of what we stand for. Much of the work of framing what we stand for takes place in the shaping of demands. By getting into the policy arena in a proactive manner, we can take our demands to the next level. Our demands can become law, with real consequences if the agreement is broken. After all the organizing, press work, and effort, a group should leave a decisionmaker with more than a handshake and his or her word. Of course, this work requires a certain amount of interaction with "the suits," as well as struggles with the bureaucracy, the technical language, and the all-too-common resistance by decisionmakers. Still, if it's worth demanding, it's worth having in writing-whether as law, regulation, or internal policy. From ballot initiatives on rent control to laws requiring worker protections, organizers are leveraging their power into written policies that are making a real difference in their communities. Of course, policy work is just one tool in our box.Permutation solves-The alt is pure ideology. The combination is key to social changeDelgado, 1992Charles Inglis Thomson Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School Richard, May 1992. California Law Review, lexisTransformation in the Critical Vision. -- The vision of change that Critical scholars experss flows directly from their focus on ideology as the major obstacle that separates the actual from the possible. Because it is ideology that prevents people from conceiving of -- and hence from implementing -- a freer social condition, the Critics propose the exposure of ideology as the logical first step toward social transformation. Emphasizing how ideology obscures the contingency of human relations, Gordon proposes unearthing conventional thought in order to excavate the potential for change. "[The] point is to unfreeze the world as it appears to common sense as a bunch of more or less objectively determined social relations and to make it appear as . . . it really is: people acting, imagining, rationalizing, justifying." n90 Gabel, too, argues that it is necessary to reveal the ways in which "law is actually constitutive of our social existence." n91 He believes that this can best be achieved by experiencing the character of living through legal ideas, while at the same time critiquing the ways in which these phenomena "appear in our unreflective consciousness." n92 Reflecting his concern that rights discourse misdirects and abstracts our struggle for a better society, Tushnet also advocates ongoing critique, proposing that popular aspirations for change be [*1355] recast in the Cenering the discussion around policies are key to solving for racism and not identityYamamoto, 1997Eric K. Yamamoto, Professor of Law, William S. Richardson School of Law, University of Hawai'i. Michigan Law Review, 95 Mich. L. Rev. 821, February, 1997, lexis Prominent race scholars Manning Marable and bell hooks, speaking to teachers, political lawyers, and community activists, locate the only hope for African Americans and other racial minorities in the formation of interracial alliances, whether those alliances are created to enhance cooperative working and living arrangements or to combat white racism. n208 Marable's "theory of liberation," which is built on a "transformationist redistribution of resources and the democratization of state power along more egalitarian lines," and hook's "practical model for social change," which speaks to the inducement of enlightened whites to surrender race privileges, both depend upon political power mustered through coalitions of racial groups that are, at some deep level, mutually distrustful. The problem with this vision, as George Fredrickson points out, is that neither Marable nor hooks offers a persuasive view of how to forge interracial alliances or form and maintain co- [*866] alitions at a time of "disruptive equilibrium." n209 I suggest that theorizing about and acting practically upon concrete interracial justice claims is one aspect of the "how to." In the face of increasingly complex intergroup justice grievances and the limits of legal justice, the call for alliances and coalition-building underscores the need for development of a sophisticated interracial jurisprudence with practical implications. That jurisprudence needs to unravel the ideological strands of the Court's recognition of multiracial conflict to justify its ban of affirmative race consciousness, to interrogate the complexities of group agency and responsibility for disabling intergroup constraints, and in doing so to respond to justice grievances among communities of color that undermine alliance-forging efforts. n210 ................
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