CEDA Controversy Paper Anti-Racism 2017-18 KK, CE, KM, TY
Anti-Racism Topic Paper
CEDA 2017-18
Dr. Kevin D. Kuswa, Camelia El-Kasri, Krishna Menon, and Tristan Yang1
Berkeley Preparatory School, Tampa, FL
1 Thanks to the folks who provided feedback this year as well as last year’s authors, especially Rashad Evans, Nadia Hussein, Charles Anthony-Athanasopoulus, Corinne Sugino, Daryl Burch, and Nish Neel-Kandan.
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1. Matters That Matter 4 2. Trump 16 3. Areas 21 a) Education 23 b) Voting Rights 27 c) Immigration/Security 33 d) Incarceration/Criminal Justice 44 e) Housing/Lending 52 f) other 53 4. By Whom? 55 5. Beyond and Spectral Race 60 Ontology 62
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1. Matters That Matter
Racism is a separate concept from race, but the two are inextricably linked. Without the social construction of race, racism could not exist. Albert Memmi reminds us that a key element of racism is that it is based on perceptions - both real and "imagined" differences between groups of people - and that those differences assign values that benefit one group at the expense of others. Thus, power is distributed according to both real and perceived racial differences, creating structural inequities that benefit the perceived superior group and impede others. Audre Lorde explains racism as an "inherent superiority" of one race over another that not only justifies power, but also the "right to dominance." Solorzano describes three central elements to an understanding of racism: there is a perceived superiority of one group over others; the perceived superior group has the power to carry out racist acts; and various racial and ethnic groups are affected by those acts. n12 Solorzano's definition of racism underlines that the benefit of the perceived superior group is the power it holds to maintain domination. Historically, in the U.S., whites have occupied a perceived superior status within a system of racial domination, justified by ideologies of white supremacy that has, over time, distributed power and resources inequitably to People of Color.
Lindsay Perez Huber, 2016
It was true under Obama, but it is even more necessary in a Trump Presidency: Debating
about race in terms of racial disparity in particular policy sectors buttressed by institutional
racism (i.e. structural white privilege) should happen this upcoming season. This paper is
specific to the imperative to debate race and racism post-Trump, but it also builds on the Race
topic paper submitted for the 2016-17 season. That can be found here:
http://www.cedadebate.org/forum/index.php?topic=6878.0.
Last year’s paper should fill in many of the holes that will accompany this paper and
vice-versa. Whether you believe in ghosts or not, it’s time to ask the affirmative to bring down
some of the signs.
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Steve Martinot, San Fran. State, ‘7 (https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~marto/onto.race.htm, “Race and the Ghosts of Ontology,” April, APA Newsletters; Spring2007, Vol. 6 Issue 2, p4)
Race became a ghost the day after all the signs came down; the day after "White only" or "Colored only" disappeared; the day after no one any longer said, "we don't serve Negroes here"; the day after no black person answered a want ad and was told, "sorry, we're not hiring right now"; the day after no black person had to pay a higher mortgage rate than whites; the day after no police officer looked at the color of the driver before stopping him/her; the day after the laws used exclusively in black communities were taken off the books; the day after both college enrollments and prison inmate populations reflected the racial percentages of the states they served. In other words, the signs haven't been taken down. New Orleans, in the wake of the government's use of a storm emergency, signifies that most of them are still up. Instead, race became a non-ghost when the court system narcissistically complimented itself on being colorblind. Race became a non-ghost when state governments refused to require police to report the race of a traffic stop or "probable cause" action. (Arrest records contain this information, but arrest records have come to presume guilt.) Race became a non- ghost when derogatory terms were busted back to "slurs," as if they simply signified rather than serving as means of assault. Race has always been a mask, draped over the faces of those whites who act frightened, or hostile, or contemptuous depending on which script from the structure of racialization they are reading. To philosophize race means it is neither non-ghost nor mask. During the Jim Crow era, a number of thinkers addressed the question of whether race existed as a biological division of the human species (as delineated by 18th century naturalists); they demonstrated that the concept was biologically vacuous, demographically illusory, morally criminal, and politically corrupt.[1] After the great war against fascism, a mass political movement finally assaulted the dehumanization imposed by the Jim Crow signs. Yet today, the philosophy still has to be done. Leonard Harris compiles a volume in which he places objectivist and constructivist accounts of race and racism in juxtaposition. Robert Bernasconi compiles the signal texts on race from the last 200 years. Lucius Outlaw compiles essays on race and philosophy. Critical Race theory discusses the meaning of "social construct." Lawrence Blum wants to reserve "racism" as a moral term. Anne Stubblefield responds by arguing that this is quite insufficient politically, or historically—and thus, morally. All of them, 30 years after the Civil Rights movement, are driven by the question, how do we get those damned signs taken down.[2] Why would so many theorizations appear now? Perhaps it is because the signs themselves became ghosts that not only still haunt us, but continue to dominate social and political policy. It requires some serious thought to live in a world dominated by the ghosts of Jim Crow, of forced labor and debt servitude and chain-gangs lurking in a prison industry— and by the ghosts of movements for liberation as well; it requires new conceptual lenses to see what this world is now made of. Harris organizes his book as a forum on the important question of what it means that "race" is a "social construct." The issues are its reality—a biological vs. a social reality— and what "social reality" means in the first place. Two schools of thought have emerged, called constructivism and objectivism, that for Harris are irreconcilable. Harris gives the following definitions. For the objectivist, races are natural divisions in the human species based on some inherent objective trait (biological, psychological, geographical). The objectivist "can believe that there are groups, such as races, which exist independent of cultural and social ideas ... [and] can consider racial groups as objective causal agents, that is, [that] race causes groups to exist." (Harris,18) The constructivist, on the other hand, "does not believe that groups exist independent of cultural or social ideas, ... [and] can believe that races are constructed causal agents." (Harris,19) That is, races are "unnatural," culturally specific, and based on self-description and "malleable" social psychology. In Harris's definitions, there is a strange cohabitation of ambiguity and the "absolute." He phrases the fundamental or definitive moment of both objectivism and constructivism in terms of possibility—that they "can believe" what they do, suggesting that they don't necessarily have to. Furthermore, those beliefs are tied (or not) only to "ideas" (as an absolute domain), obviating their possible production by overarching historico-social "factors"—factors that might also have produced those "ideas." Harris attributes to constructivism the belief that human facts are "absolutely" dependent on contingent cultural ideas, bestowing on the process (of construction) a rigidity or inflexibility. Instead, fluidity is attributed to objectivism. For Harris, objectivism "can argue [has choice in how it approaches things] that the uses of racial categories are justified because they refer to objective realities"; whereas constructivists believe "the use of racial categories is never justified" referentially [that is, Harris grants them no choice in the matter]. Absoluteness appears on the side of constructivism, while tactics and strategies pertain to objectivism. (Harris,443) Harris admits he is (dare I say "constructs himself as"?) a "moderate" objectivist. (Harris,442) Objectivism and constructivism confront each other irreconcilably across the act of reference to race. As Anna Stubblefield demonstrates, this was the tenor of the debate between Kwame Anthony Appiah and Lucius Outlaw.[3] Appiah is an objectivist who argues that race does not exist, and thus no real reference can be made to race as such; Outlaw is a constructivist who argues that reference to races as constructed is real. In their irreconcilability across issues of morality, philosophy, and culture, the objectivist and constructivist positions are reminiscent of the old materialism-idealism split; either race exists materially, or it is only an idea. One has "real" being, and the other is absolutely contingent. What the materialism-idealism split provides is the convenience of a clean-cut division (despite the dual chicken-egg accusations each has always levied at the other). Why would a clean-cut division be necessary or desirable, and for whom? There are constructivists who argue that though race is socially constructed, it is not simply an idea; rather, it is produced by a complex process of economic, cultural, and social evolution in response to real historical factors.[4] Under Harris's definitions, the question of the "real" materials out of which race was constructed, including structures and operations of power, could not be asked. Such a question would imply an underlying objective reality to which racial entities as constructed would make real reference. Harris: "constructivists deny that races can exist as natural or objective entities." (Harris,20) Perhaps the objectivists have to cleanly dissociate themselves from constructivism in order to define (against Appiah (Harris,267)) what "real reference" would mean. But then, the real issue is reference, and not race. Objectivists argue that race has to exist as a real referent to serve a social purpose, while some constructivists argue that the definition and constitution of races is already the
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social purpose (materially) to be served. There is a possibility that if we add history and historicity to this thought-complex about race, things will get out of hand. But let’s do it anyway. We live in a culture (the US) in which whiteness and white supremacy are not simply ideas produced by this culture; they are the very bedrock and foundation of its political, economic, social, and cultural structures.[5] That's the real problem. How do we navigate between the real absence of a sense of justice under white hegemony, and the implicit (when not overt) demand for justice within the philosophizations of race under consideration here? The history of colonialist conquest of the Americas is a history of whites constructing race and racial identities for themselves. By imposing racial definitions on Africans and Native Americans, the objective of whites was to engender "fundamental" differences between themselves and the Africans and Native Americans. In producing this relationality, whites act like objectivists, producing Africans and Native Americans as real groups in otherness, attributing transcendental and transhistorical values to a real "us-not-them" paradigm, to which their imposed dehumanization on the "them" gave "objective" testimony. Nevertheless, in their arrogated self-superiorization by these means, their objectivist perspective was only something they constructed for themselves. On the other side, Africans and Native Americans discovered themselves having been constructed as objective groups by colonialist occupation—objectivist despite themselves (in their need for psychic survival and defense), and constructivist against themselves (seeing themselves made into conquered and victimized people). The constructivists would say that race was not something discovered among people (for instance, among people colonized by Europeans); the objectivists would say that when Europeans discovered the difference, what they were looking at was race. When European colonialists then defined race (the constructivists would say "invented", and the objectivists would add "referentially" to that) to legitimate their theft of land and kidnapping of people for forced labor, they did so from a position of power. "Racialization" amounted to a complex socio-political act in the interests of power. How can race exist if it was invented-or-discovered as a socio-political strategy? How can race not exist if that strategy has had the effect of enslaving, killing, segregating, criminalizing, and robbing millions in the name of race? Which is the ghost of which?
1- Lilian Smith, Killers of the Dream (New York: Norton, 1949); Ashley Montagu, Man's Most Dangerous Myth: the Fallacy of Race (Cleveland: World, 1964); Alain Locke, "The Concept of Race as Applied to Social Culture," in The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, ed. Leonard Harris (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1989), p. 187-199. 2- Leonard Harris, ed., Racism (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999); Robert Bernasconi, Race (Malden: Blackwell, 2001); Lucius Outlaw, On Race and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1996); Lawrence Blum, I'm Not a Racist, But …: the Moral Quandry of Race (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2002); Anna Stubblefield, Ethics Along the Color Line (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2005). 3- Anna Stubblefield is a constructivist who argues that race as constructed is real, and for taking race into account as an important moral principle. She begins with the history of the invention of race and whiteness in the English colonies, and sustains throughout her discussion the notion that whites and white identity are what have an interest in maintaining race and racism, and thus constitute the core of the problem. If the role of racism is to maintain a hierarchy with respect to race, then it belongs to those who have an interest in doing so. All racism, by implication, is then white racism. Others, beset by that hierarchy, primarily have an interest in resisting it. She calls upon white people to take responsibility for what whiteness and white supremacy have done to others in the course of its colonialist criminalities, and its distribution to white society of its unmerited and ill-gotten gains. 4- Oliver Cox, Caste, Class, and Race (New York: Doubleday, 1948); Lucius Outlaw, On Race and Philosophy; Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race (New York: Verso, 1996); Steve Martinot, The Rule of Racialization (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 2003); Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics (New York : Routledge, 2003). 5- This is the central argument throughout Martinot, The Rule of Racialization. See also, Alexander Saxton’s The Indispensible Enemy (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975) and Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992), both of whom address the question from somewhat different perspectives.
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We discuss immigration further below, but it is important to note at the outset that immigration is one of the most significant intersections of government authority, identity, exclusion, and racial politics as a whole. This is not a new intersection, but the traffic has certainly picked up in the Trump Administration, and most of the vehicles are nativist patrol cars rather than the freedom of mobility you would think human beings in two peaceful nation-states should possess. The anti-racism approach is an important one because of the solvency possibilities when connecting particular laws to inequity based on race as well as the stable negative ground of both the criticisms of shallow reformism that works through the state and relies on extreme particularism for its advocacy AND a variety of competitive counterplans that can solve the case and avoid the aff’s agent or the way the aff prioritizes. Regardless, the debate is moving under all of us by the day—it’s time to learn to walk on the coals because things are heating up.
Fulton, 4-12 (April 12, 2017 'F-ing Horrifying': Sessions Outlines Immigration Crackdown in 'Trump Era' Meanwhile, Trump appoints immigration hardliners to key agency posts by Deirdre Fulton, staff write)
In "the Trump era," as Attorney General Jeff Sessions called it on Tuesday, immigration officials will undertake a harsh crackdown on undocumented migrants—a campaign one veteran federal prosecutor described as "fucking horrifying." In his speech at a border port of entry in Nogales, Arizona, "[t]he nation's top law enforcement official outlined a series of changes that he said mark the start of a new push to rid American cities and the border of what he described as 'filth' brought on by drug cartels and criminal organizations," the Associated Press reported. "This is a new era," the immigration hardliner told Customs and Border Protection personnel. "This is the Trump era. The lawlessness, the abdication of the duty to enforce our immigration laws, and the catch-and-release practices of old are over." Mother Jones reported: In his remarks, Sessions said nonviolent immigrants who enter the country illegally for a second time will no longer be charged with a misdemeanor—they'll be charged with a felony. He also recommended that prosecutors charge "criminal aliens" with document fraud and aggravated identity theft, which carries a two-year minimum sentence. In January, President Donald Trump expanded the definition of which immigrants can be considered "criminal" to include anyone who has committed "a chargeable criminal offense," which could include sneaking across the border. As he proposed stiffer penalties for nonviolent immigrants, Sessions also targeted gangs and cartels "that turn cities and suburbs into war zones, that rape and kill innocent citizens and who profit by smuggling poison and other human beings across our borders." Invoking unusually severe language in the written version of his announcement, Sessions proclaimed, "It is here, on this sliver of land, where we first take our stand against this filth." (Politico notes that the term "filth," which appeared in prepared remarks, was omitted from Sessions' speech when he gave it.) One anonymous federal prosecutor told Daily Beast reporter Betsy Woodruff the directives were generating widespread negative response: "It's fucking horrifying. It's totally horrifying and we're all terrified about it, and we don't know what to do." "The things they want us to do are so horrifying—they want to do harboring cases of three or more people," the prosecutor continued. "So if you're illegal and you bring your family over, then you're harboring your kid and your wife, and you can go to jail." Others blasted Sessions' inflammatory rhetoric. "Attorney General Sessions is grandstanding at the border in an attempt to look tough and scare immigrants," said Frank Sharry, executive director of the immigration reform advocacy group America's Voice Education Fund. "It's yet another example of the Trump administration treating all immigrants as threats and as criminals. This is the smokescreen they use to justify their efforts to deport millions, to keep people out of the country, and, ultimately, to try and remake the racial and ethnic composition of
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America." Gregory Z. Chen, director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, added to the AP: "Once again, Attorney General Sessions is scaring the public by linking immigrants to criminals despite studies showing that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than the native born." Meanwhile, CNN reports Wednesday that the Trump administration's latest immigration appointees are affiliated with far-right, anti-immigration organizations. According to CNN: Jon Feere, a former legal policy analyst for the Center for Immigration Studies, or CIS, has been hired as an adviser to Thomas D. Homan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to Homeland Security spokesman David Lapan. At Customs and Border Protection, Julie Kirchner, the former executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, has been hired as an adviser to Customs and Border Protection acting Commissioner Kevin McAleenan, said Lapan. National Immigration Law Center executive director Marielena Hincapié said the hirings "are more evidence that white supremacists are now running our country's immigration agenda." "These groups have spent 20 years looking for ways that they could hurt immigrants," Lynn Tramonte, deputy director of pro-immigration advocacy group America's Voice, told CNN, "and now they've been given the keys to the kingdom."
Backing up a bit first, the main argument this supplemental paper advances is that
racism is both a timeless and an urgent topic to be debated. It hasn’t been debated directly in a
CEDA or NDT topic despite its centrality to democracy, the United States, and policy. The most
pertinent college topics that included race simply positioned the issue peripherally within a set
of Title VII categories or within a specific SCOTUS decision (Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717
(1974)) (and we mentioned the “immigration” topic). Frankly, that’s pretty terrible and it needs
to be changed. The face of racism is always taking different forms and we have arrived at a
particularly profound and grotesque version that works alongside anti-blackness as well as fears
of a religious Other that seems to fluctuate between an “Arabic” or “Middle-Eastern” persona
(these forms of hatred are certainly not sophisticated enough to differentiate between Persian,
Kurdish, Indonesian, etc.) that, for many Americans, is assumed to be Muslim, whether accurate
or not. And, of course, compounding such an Islamic incantation is the Black Muslim in the
United States.
Emma Green, ’17 (“Muslim Americans Are United by Trump—and Divided by Race” EMMA GREEN, MARCH 11, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/muslim-americans-race/519282/)
When weary Muslims gathered in Toronto in December for an annual retreat, marking the end of a tumultuous U.S. election year, they probably didn’t expect the event to turn into a referendum on racial tensions within the American Muslim community. But it did. One session
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was led by Hamza Yusuf, a well respected white scholar who co-founded Zaytuna College, which claims to be America’s first Muslim liberal-arts college. At the end, he was asked whether Muslims should work with groups like Black Lives Matter. “The United States is probably, in terms of its laws, one of the least racist societies in the world,” he replied. “We have between 15,000 and 18,000 homicides per year. Fifty percent are black-on-black crime, literally. … There are twice as many whites that have been shot by police, but nobody ever shows those videos.” He went on. “It’s the assumption that the police are racist. It’s not always the case,” he said. “Any police now that shoots a black is immediately considered a racist.” The backlash on social media was swift and immense. “For black Muslims, hearing this from somebody we’ve all come to love and trust—it was a cold slap in the face,” said Ubaydullah Evans, the executive director of the American Learning Institute for Muslims, who is black. He said he saw Yusuf’s comments as a way of perpetuating myths about “black pathology” and blaming African Americans for violence. Yusuf’s statements were indeed somewhat misleading: While a greater number of white people have been shot by the police compared to black people, that statistic doesn’t account for population size. When that adjustment is made, historical data shows that black people are more likely to be shot by police than white people. Even though slightly less than one-third of American Muslims are black, according to Pew Research Center, American Muslims are most often represented in the media as Arab or South Asian immigrants. The distinction between the African-American Muslim experience and that of their immigrant co-religionists has long been a source of racial tension in the Muslim community, but since the election, things have gotten both better and worse. While some Muslims seem to be paying more attention to racism because of Donald Trump, others fear that any sign of internal division is dangerous for Muslims in a time of increased hostility. While the Toronto conference was upsetting, Evans said, he doesn’t think it’s representative of the biggest racial problems in the American Muslim community. White racism toward black people is “not the kind of racism that circumscribes my life as an American Muslim,” he told me. “It’s the social racism I experience from people of Arab descent, of Southeast Asian descent. This is the racism no one is talking about.” The wave of immigration that shaped today’s American Muslim population began in the 1960s, after Congress lifted previous race-based restrictions on immigration. In many ways, this surge was directly connected to the work of black Muslims and others involved in the civil-rights movement: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 allowed far greater numbers of people from Asia and Africa to emigrate to the U.S. As of 2014, an estimated 61 percent of Muslims were immigrants, according to Pew, and another 17 percent were the children of immigrants. Many of the perceived racial tensions among Muslims come from conflicts between these immigrant communities and non-immigrants, who are often black. Some Muslims say “we shouldn’t talk about anti-blackness within the community, because we’re under siege by Islamophobes.” “Immigrant Muslims had a convenient comfort zone,” said Omar Suleiman, an imam based in Dallas who serves as president of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research. As each new immigrant community established its own mosques and community centers, portions of the Muslim American population became segregated by ethnicity and income. For non-black Muslims who grew up in the suburbs, attended private schools, and rarely encountered black Muslims in their mosques, it’s easy “to internalize many of the poisonous notions about the black community that … diminish the pain of those communities,” he said. “I think a lot of African American Muslims see a hypocrisy sometimes
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with immigrant Muslims,” said Saba Maroof, a Muslim psychiatrist with a South Asian background who lives in Michigan. “We say that Muslims are all equal in the eyes of God, that racism doesn’t exist in Islam.” And yet, cases of overt racism aren’t uncommon, like when South Asian or Arab immigrant parents don’t want their kids to marry black Muslims. “That happened in my family,” she said. These stereotypes are sometimes perpetuated by leaders like Yusuf. Toward the end of the Toronto conference, he apologized for the ambiguity of his previous comments, but clarified that he believes “the biggest crisis facing the African American community in the United States is not racism. It is the breakdown of the black family.” The line won huge applause in the presentation hall where Yusuf was speaking. But online, there was yet more backlash: Kameelah Rashad, a black Muslim chaplain at the University of Pennsylvania, started tweeting out pictures under the hashtag #blackMuslimfamily, for example, to protest Yusuf’s remarks. (Yusuf declined a request for an interview.) Some Muslims believe “we shouldn’t talk about anti-blackness within the community, because we’re under siege by Islamophobes. This is not the right time to air internal laundry,” Rashad said. But “if I have to contend with anti-Muslim bigotry outside of the Muslim community, and within my own community, I’m having to push back on anti-black racism, I’m kind of fighting a war on two fronts.” Racial dynamics have long shaped Muslims’ political identities. There’s a “tendency to regard issues that impact black people—and by extension, black Muslims—as not thoroughly Islamic,” said Evans. “If we’re talking about a social issue in Palestine or Chechnya or Kashmir or Saudi Arabia or anywhere else, those things can properly be engaged as ‘Islamic issues.’ [If] we’re talk about economic injustice, or gentrification, or ex-offender re-entry, or recidivism, those things aren’t really regarded as ‘legitimately Islamic.’ It’s like, ‘Why would a Muslim of conscience be talking about that stuff?’” Media outlets typically go for “people who are ethnic, but not too much.” As Muslim leaders have taken up visible roles in anti- Trump activism, these dynamics have intensified. Progressive leaders have condemned the so-called Muslim ban—the executive order that originally affected people from seven Muslim-majority countries—putting the focus in the Muslim community on immigration. But when protesters swarmed airports in large American cities following the order’s release, some black Muslims stayed home, said Margari Hill, the co-founder of the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative, who is also a black Muslim. “They have this long-term struggle. Not much has changed—it’s always been kind of terrible,” she said. And “when it comes to the spectacle of black death, we don’t necessarily see a lot of Middle Eastern or South Asian Muslims showing up for Black Lives Matter.” In activist spaces, black Muslim leaders are sometimes discounted as well. “We’re often questioned, undermined, and asked to bring other experts as the voice of authority,” said Asha Noor, the former leader of an anti-Islamophobia campaign called Take on Hate, who is a Somali- American Muslim. “I’ve seen a lot of black Muslims retreat into our own spaces because they are safe spaces for us.” As American Muslims have dealt with everything from arson to assault because of their religious identity over the past several months, leaders have increasingly called for unity. But attempts to unify can also stifle diversity, said Hill. Even though three of the seven countries originally included in Trump’s immigration order are in Africa—Libya, Sudan, and Somalia—Hill said she rarely sees people from those countries featured in the news. Instead, media outlets typically go for “people who are ethnic, but not too much,” she said. “You have to be a little attractive.” There’s also debate within the community on the right way for Muslims to show their patriotism. The red, white, and blue hijabi was a visible symbol in the Women’s March on Washington in January, but not all Muslims think that image sends the right kind of message about the religion. “It feels like a performance,” said Rashad. “As a black American, I am fully cognizant of the fact that that kind of performance does not lead to equality.” While Muslim immigrants have often viewed America as a meritocracy, she said, “For black Muslims, our history is complicated. This hasn’t been a place of opportunity or meritocracy.” “Nobody wants to be known as a racist.” Despite these tensions, Trump’s election has inadvertently prompted some new conversations about race among Muslims. Maroof compared Muslims’ new interest in race to a recent skit on Saturday Night Live: A room full of white people watching the 2016 election results start to realize America has issues with racism, while their black friends just nod along. After the election, Maroof started a book club to learn more about political activism, and asked Rashad, who also works in mental health, for
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recommendations. She suggested The New Jim Crow, a book about racism and mass incarceration. “The awakening I see some non-black Muslims experiencing is very similar to some of the awakening I’ve seen my white friends going through,” Rashad said. Maroof said she has been aware of racial tensions among Muslims for a long time, but feels like it’s particularly important to pay attention to these issues now. “Even after 9/11, it wasn’t this bad. There was not this travel ban or things like that,” she said. But she recognizes that for a lot of Muslims—herself included—starting conversations about intra-Muslim racism will inevitably come with uncomfortable moments. “Maybe people are sometimes afraid they’re going to say the wrong thing,” she said. “Nobody wants to be known as a racist.” Meanwhile, some black Muslims are having a political awakening of their own on issues like immigration. “There wasn’t as much outrage with the Obama administration,” said Hill. Obama used less inflammatory rhetoric to talk about immigration, but his administration still removed a record-number of undocumented immigrants from the United States. “Things that were invisible to many of us who have privilege as non-immigrants—now we see it,” she said. The irony of Islamophobia is that it may eventually produce the exact cultural effect Islamophobes fear: Muslim Americans may find a newly consolidated sense of identity and unity because of their religious affiliation. If some Muslims once hoped to be fully assimilated into elite American culture—to live in nice neighborhoods, attend fancy schools, and fully blend in with white America—that’s likely impossible now, Evans said. “The first blow to that aspiration was 9/11. Then ISIS happened. The prospect began to look even farther off,” he said. “With the Trump election, I really think it was finished off. It’s over now.”
On one front, the generic “Muslim” as profiled (and increasingly excluded) by white America and
the double pincers of racism confronting Black Muslims bump up against one another, feeding a
violent white exceptionalism; while, on another front, black activists and, for better or worse,
their allies rise up against police brutality, militarization, and murder. What matters more than
BLM?
Greene-Hayes, ’17 (March 21, 2017 Ahmad Greene-Hayes is a doctoral student in the Departments of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University. “Black Lives Matter V. Trump: What’s Next?,” https://newsone.com/3693708/blacklivesmatter-v-trump/)
Donald Trump, racist, alleged child rapist, xenophobe, misogynist, sexual predator, and non-tax paying celebrity businessman, is the 45th president of the United States. Since his election, he has signed executive orders that directly target Black and brown folks, including Muslims, Mexicans and other Latinos. Other measures have been aimed at gay and transgender people, and women and children. He has even threatened to “send in the feds” to Chicago’s South Side, which only serves to punish Black people for living in under-resourced neighborhoods, and where cultural pathologies around Blackness, crime, and violence are exaggerated in the White imagination. “The Trump administration promotes personal loyalty and fidelity to an old, discriminatory social and political order,” Williams College Africana Studies professor Joy James tells NewsOne. “[Their] economic nationalism is White nationalism favored by a sizable number of Whites and wrapped in the rhetoric of racial threat[s] in which Whites are always the victims.” But who is going to stop him? Surely not the Republican Congress or defeated Democrats. Indeed, today BlackLivesMatter activists, who were once a nightly fixture on cable and network news broadcasts from 2013-2016, continue their work at the grassroots level away from the glare of the national spotlight. They are working to shield poor Black and brown folks, not only from Trump’s harmful executive orders, but also working to dismantle intraracial violence, including murder, rape, interpersonal assault and attacks on Black transgender women, leaders tell NewsOne. Nearly four years after its founding in 2013, when
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George Zimmerman escaped conviction for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, and almost three years after #BlackLivesMatter went viral when Michael Brown Jr. was slain by now ex-police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, the movement continues to grow and evolve. Today, it boasts over 26 chapters across the United States, Canada and parts of Europe. Its prominence as a Black-led organizing project is due, in part, to community events like the Labor Day Weekend 2014 Black Lives Matter freedom rides, and the organizing strategies of Ferguson and St. Louis residents Johnetta Elzie, Tef Poe, Ashley Yates, Larry Fellows, Alexis Templeton and Brittany Ferrell, among so many others. Their work continues even as some of their compatriots face political imprisonment and state surveillance. For example, California BLM activist Jasmine Abdullah has been charged with felony lynching, and Ferguson, Missouri activist Josh Williams is serving an 8-year-sentence on arson and burglary charges. “What is working in our movement, from our direct actions to marches, is shifting a large lie about America being post-racial because we elected a Black president,” Allen Frimpong, a member of Black Lives Matter NYC and Movement NetLab, tells NewsOne. “What this movement gets to shift is its capacity to support and absorb people, who are newly active as a result of the Trump presidency, to organize locally and be intergenerational in our approach.” Working at a grassroots level Source: Pacific Press / Getty For its part, BLM NYC does not need the glow of television klieg lights to do its work. The group, in partnership with the Coalition to End Broken Windows, the Black Youth Project, and the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, runs #SwipeItForward, a campaign designed to hand out free subway rides to prevent police from arresting poor people of color, especially undocumented immigrants, who cannot pay for public transportation. And NYC Shut It Down: The Grand Central Crew #BlackLivesMatter, among others, continues its efforts to draw attention to racial injustice through demonstrations. These efforts are not “spectacular” in the media gaze, but they dramatically impact the everyday realities of Black and brown people in communities that are victims of Trump’s militarized policing and ICE raids. “Real power lies in our communities, towns, cities and states,” said Charlene Carruthers, national Director of the Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), a signatory of the Movement for Black Lives policy platform. “We have to build local power. Our people can’t afford for us to cower and move to the middle. This administration won’t make any concessions just because we accommodate it.” White nationalism returned to the forefront of American politics in the wake of President Barack Obama’s two-terms in office and the people power of the Black Lives Matter Movement. To this point, BLM cofounder Patrisse Cullors urges activists and people of color to “resist, organize, resist” – words that echo the fortitude of activists like Stokely Carmichael, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Angela Davis and Malcolm X. Some argue that Black Lives Matter lost its political verve when leaders decided to not endorse a presidential candidate, while others note the hypocrisy of gesturing towards some leaders’ implicit support of former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. These political differences are significant. Movements never have singular vantage points, and there is surely a spectrum with regards to Black liberation and leftist politics. Charlene Carruthers, national Director of the Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), a signatory of the Movement for Black Lives policy platform, contends that the movement’s emphasis needs not solely rest on what happens in Washington and on Capitol Hill, but rather on what happens at the local level to people of color. “Real power lies in our communities, towns, cities and states,” said. “We have to build local power. Our people can’t afford for us to cower and move to the middle. This administration won’t make any concessions just because we accommodate it.” Resist, Organize, Resist Source: Kevin Hagen / Getty Without question, the movement’s focus has not only been on Trump and police violence, but activists stress the necessity of dismantling intraracial violence, including but not limited to rape, interpersonal assault and the brutal murders of Black trans women, who often receive no public mourning or movement outcry. “Cis[gender] folks need to be in courageous conversations with other cis folks about the ways we perpetuate transphobia,” Cullors says. Janisha Gabriel, a member of BLM NYC and the founder and director of the Speak My Name Project, says the adaptation of the movement requires internal searching and healing. “This moment necessitates that our work be intraracially intersectional. Black people must center and fight for all Black people,” says Janisha Gabriel, a member of BLM NYC and the founder and director of the Speak My Name Project. “Fighting for all Black life, as Black people, requires us to do some internal searching and healing.” “This moment necessitates that our work be intraracially intersectional. Black people must center and fight for all Black people,” Gabriel says. “Fighting for all Black life, as Black people, requires us to do some internal searching and healing.” Elle Hearns, executive director of The Marsha P. Johnson Institute and former organizing director and founding member of The Black Lives Matter Network says the power of the movement “has never been in the White House, but in each other.” “It is that power that will continue to build a movement reflective of how to address the issues affecting marginalized communities in this country and Trump’s cabinet may be filled with transantagonistic, racist, corporate elites, but our communities and our movements need not be a reflection of the administration’s anti-immigrant, anti-women, anti-Black policies. Black Lives Matter activists at the grassroots level continues to raise the mirror of
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righteous indignation toward America’s very White and angry faces. White supremacists may break the glass, reject truth, and believe in lies and alternative facts of their own making, but the shattered pieces remain with each broken piece illuminating pro-Black movements in an anti-Black world. In fact, while being ignored by the mainstream media, Black Lives Matter remains standing and active as an indictment of the status quo, including Trump and all White supremacists.
It’s always ripe, but race has become increasingly so as of late...Critical constitutionalism bridges theory and practice by asking about the context of racial discrimination and how we can strategically organize scholarship toward better policies.
Lindsay Perez Huber, Prof. Education, CSU Long Beach, ’16 (10 Charleston L. Rev. 215"MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!": DONALD TRUMP, RACIST NATIVISM AND THE VIRULENT ADHERENCE TO WHITE SUPREMACY AMID U.S. DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE)
Critical constitutionalism, as a theme of the 2015 LatCrit conference, n1 urges us to closely examine the larger sociopolitical processes and ideologies that facilitate or impede access to rights for historically marginalized groups in the U.S. As a LatCrit scholar in the field of education, this was a new, but particularly meaningful concept. Critical constitutionalism prompts not only the theorizing of contextual conditions that impact communities of color, but also the consideration to "strategically organize" our scholarship with contemporary movements that forge ahead efforts for social and racial justice. n2 In effect, critical constitutionalism attempts to bridge the theory-praxis divide often found in my own field of social science research. My participation in the 2015 LatCrit conference led me to reflect upon the ways that theorizing around issues of race and immigration can better serve the purpose of strategic advocacy for immigrant communities who are faced with increasingly explicit expressions of white supremacy within discourses of contemporary immigration. This conceptual paper analyzes recent immigration debates that illustrate articulatory practices of racist nativism in mainstream public discourse about Latina and Latino immigrants. These articulations exhibit a virulent adherence to white supremacy that opens the discursive doors of public discourse to engage in more overt and violent practices of racism that targets people of color in the U.S., and specifically Latina and Latino immigrant communities. First, I will explain the theoretical foundations of LatCrit and racist nativism that allow for an understanding of the particular forms of racism that assign non-native, subordinate values to People of Color n3 generally, and Latina and Latino undocumented immigrants in particular, as seen in these articulations. I argue that Donald Trump's presidential campaign provides a ripe opportunity to explore such articulatory practices of racist nativism and white supremacy, as he has performed thus far in his campaign for U.S. President. I suggest that the racism we see emerging in these recent political debates is a response to changing U.S. demographics that are shifting from a predominately white, to an inevitably non-white population. Finally, this paper concludes with connections back to the concept of critical constitutionalism by reflecting on why these theoretical understandings matter for the everyday strategies People of Color engage that challenge racism and white supremacy.
We can build off of the race arguments centered on the legacy of slavery and the Middle Passage for Blacks and think through the conquest and slavery (both as similarities and differences) imposed on indigenous populations, Latinx in the South and Southwest, Chinese immigrants in the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese internment through Korematsu, Muslims post
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9-11 and so forth. The reality is that California and the American South are already experiencing changes brought about by whites becoming minorities. These shifts and some of the associated backlash needs to be explored, the racism brought to light, and policy changes enacted.
Delgado & Stefancic, ’16 (Fall, 51 Wake Forest L. Rev. 745 ARTICLE: THE HOLE-IN-THE-WALL GANG VIEW OF LIFE AND AMERICA'S RACIAL FUTURE Richard Delgado* and Jean Stefancic** * John J. Sparkman Chair of Law, University of Alabama School of Law ** Professor and Clement Research Affiliate, University of Alabama School of Law.)
The Future of Civil Rights in America Butch and Sundance were unsuccessful in changing their lives. Too much stood against them. They knew only one profession - robbery - and the forces aligned against them were both expert (Lord Baltimore), and implacable and well financed (E.H. Harriman). As they say, structural conditions favored the other side. Will America be able to escape its iniquitous past, which includes the American Indian Wars, slavery, the Mexican-American War, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Jim Crow laws, lynching, Japanese internment, and other chapters almost too numerous to mention? n4 Will immigration, n5 interest convergence, n6 and the need for multicultural leadership in a globalizing world n7 prompt national self-reflection and change? Or will the United States remain stuck in old practices, with whites on top and others struggling to gain a foothold in a rich, but emotionally cold, society? n8 In some sense, the future is always open. We choose to act this way or another, to select this destiny rather than that. n9 But as with the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, we often end up the way we do as a result of habits, inertia, and circumstances that incline us, in ways we often barely know, toward one course of action rather than another. n10 Our thesis is that the country's changing demographic composition will create increasing anxieties and turmoil. Just as Butch and Sundance's return to the gang sparked a fight over leadership, whites will not readily accept second-place status in a diversifying population and economy. n11 We base our contention on evidence from two regions where something like the above-described shift has already taken place - California and the South. n12 Neither region adapted peaceably and cheerfully to the new order. As with Butch and Sundance, who missed the telltale mark on the side of their purloined burro, it is all in knowing where to look. Many scholars are in the practice of making civil rights forecasts based on extrapolation from a favorite mechanism or theme that explains ethnic relations in those terms - such as social contact, n13 nativism, n14 interest convergence, n15 a flat world, n16 or a competition-aggression model. n17 While these approaches can be helpful, in our opinion nothing beats actual experience. Studying events in California and the South can hold a mirror to America's racial future, for in those regions that future has already arrived. One need not ponder whether Lord Baltimore will miss this or that footprint in a grassy meadow. All one needs to know is that Harriman has both a large bank account and a great deal of determination. It is also helpful to realize that those in power, like Harvey, rarely relinquish leadership without a fight. This Essay proceeds as follows. We first examine recent events in California that suggest what course America's racial future is likely to take. n18 We then examine nativism against Latinos in the South for clues into what an explosive increase in Latino numbers is likely to mean for race relations in the country at large. n19 The outlook that emerges is guarded. We foresee neocolonial responses in states that resemble California. In others, we foresee a new Southern Strategy in which conservatives will play Latinos against blacks and working-class whites in an effort to retain power despite a changing electorate. n20 Finally, we outline a new theory of judicial review for discrimination that is covert and segmented. n21
From here, we take a closer look at Trump’s policies and then move into some updated work on some of the most relevant areas. The last few sections include some musings on the agent question and some final additions to some stable negative positions.
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Before continuing into the Trump section, we should pause briefly to answer the knee-jerk reaction that will certainly arise to dismiss this controversy, “No ground. You want us to argue that ‘racism is bad.’” No, we are simply advocating that the college policy debate community debate both sides of a variety of policies within a specified parameter requiring substantial reductions in racial inequality/institutional racism or both sides of a resolution specifying that the protections/reforms occur within one or more relatively well-defined policy/legal/social sectors subject to governmental action. Topical affirmatives will be susceptible to case defense focusing on solvency, case offense focusing on fractured intersectionalities, sector-specific trade-offs, politics with some very topic specific link arguments, policy-specific XO or Courts CPs (or both) based on the agent, deep method debates where one’s relationship to the topic is always already both political AND personal, ontological criticisms with built in link arguments against affirmatives that are armed with contextualized and lived optimism capable of defending particular futures, contemporary manifestations of critical whiteness that take on struggles involving solidarity, ally status, accomplices, and traitors; and some of the best debates involving the quantifiable effectivity of governmental policy vs. other forms of action. Evidence abounds that should flip the script on the “we-can’t-go- negative” complaint, generating a “Yes, it’s time, we have to go negative on this topic and we have to go affirmative as well” response.
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2. Trump
The rise of Donald Trump and his Presidency is not just about the ascendency of a
campaign, candidate, and administration attempting to subtly reach out to white voters through
vague appeals to various fears of a changing world; rather, we are embroiled in a direct political
confrontation with everything connected to President Obama, a scapegoating of Muslim
refugees and immigrants from Mexico that connects racial outsider with “criminal” or
“terrorist,” and a surge in hate groups emboldened by the visible presence of an alt-right
ideology in the President’s inner circle. It’s not a dog whistle when everyone can hear it.
The general tenor of race in the country has become more confrontational, and “(s)ince
the election of Donald Trump as president, the nation has seen a rise in hate crimes and bigotry”
(BET, “Violent Murder of Timothy Caughman by White Supremacist,” Mar 23, 2017).
Crockett, ’17 ( http://www.theroot.com/when-it-comes-to-white-supremacists-trump-you-are-the- 1792808744 When It Comes to White Supremacists, Trump, You Are the Father Stephen A. Crockett Jr. 3/02/17)
I love former President Barack Obama. I started loving him shortly after he walked offstage after making his now-historic 2004 Democratic National Convention speech. During his time as president, not only was Obama an example of class and excellence in office, but for many black men, he was also a role model for how to move in a complicated minefield of white supremacy. But my love for Obama didn’t keep me from holding him accountable. He was the president, not my cousin. So when he was critical of black protesters, even dipping low to wade in the “thug” pond, I was critical of him. When he admitted to The Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates that African Americans were due reparations but there wasn’t a practical way to administer and sustain political efforts for them to happen, I was disheartened. For years I agreed with some of the old guard who were leery of his voting record when he initially ran for office. No matter my fondness for the first black president, he was my president, and when his moves weren’t in alignment with my beliefs, or beliefs that I believed the office demanded, I had to call it what it was. In President Donald Trump, white supremacists have not found a politician whom they hold accountable; they have an ally whom they protect and defend blindly as if he’s their dad. I think that any right-minded person who is willing to look at this administration objectively would clearly describe this presidency, after less than two months in office, as “the Clampetts coming to Washington.” In less than two months, Trump sent troops into Yemen for no reason and has offended several heads of foreign states who called to congratulate him. He’s declared a full-on war against the press and has created one of the most divisive and combative administrations in recent history. He has given top appointments in his Cabinet to grossly unqualified friends. He’s spent damn near half his term on vacation and won’t even reveal his taxes. And to top if all off, he’s an online bully who goads congressmen on Twitter. And all of this bizarro behavior by the commander in chief isn’t being challenged by his staunchest supporters because they adore him and literally look up to him as a father. Trump can try all he wants to denounce the “alt-right,” but at this point he’s a Maury guest who just found out the woman he loves had a baby who isn’t his. He’s going to continue to raise the alt-right because they love him unconditionally. “Trump is a white nationalist, so to speak; he is alt-right, whether he likes it or not,” said alt-right leader and white nationalist Richard Spencer in a recent interview on The David Pakman Show. Although Trump may not have fathered the movement, they possess enough of his racist features and little hands, so no matter how many times he tries to distance himself from them, they are a part of him. He’s even moved their uncle Steve Bannon into his Cabinet. He also speaks their language and promotes their propaganda as actual journalism, and continues to feed them conspiracy theories from the highest office in the land. Earlier this year I wrote a tongue-in-cheek piece about
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Super Bowl LI. The spine of the piece was that since Trump was outwardly rooting for the New England Patriots, the Atlanta Falcons had become black America’s team by default. The piece also pointed out that Tom Brady’s cozy relationship with Trump made Brady, by default, racist adjacent. Trump supporters came for me on Twitter like babies wanting to know why I was calling their papa racist. I figured that pointing them to the thoroughly researched and well-reported New York Times deep dive into the 45-year history of Trump’s racist past would be enough to prove my point. I won’t bore you with all the tweets I received, but I think the one below pretty much sums up the response I got from the alt-right: This photo, in the eyes of Trump supporters, proves that he can’t be racist. See the kidlike logic here? A businessman wouldn’t pose for a photo with Don King and Jesse Jackson if he were a racist. It was baffling to me that an adult would feel that this was enough to clear a man of a history of racism. Trump supporters’ response to the Times article? You guessed it: “fake news.” At his core, Trump has appealed to a common thread that dates all the way back to the beginning of American civilization: hate. As long as he continues to appeal to this underbelly of America, his supporters will continue to claim to hate even policies like Obamacare and public assistance that may be in their best interests because they, too, are fueled by hate. There are still large swaths of this country where black people don’t live, travel or dare be caught after the sun goes down, and white American haters will go to great lengths to protect their white sovereignty. In Trump they have found the anti-Obama, a man motivated by hate who taps into the core values of American hatred and is willing to protect the constitutional right to hate. In two months the president has made indefensible moves of hatred toward Mexico, Muslims and the media. He has been caught spouting ignorant and unsubstantiated falsehoods ad nauseam, and his supporters find all of this justifiable. They will continue to battle for his flawed policies and word buffet of foolishness because they don’t want to admit that their dad is clearly overmatched and barely treading water in the deep end of health care that he even now admits is difficult to comprehend. But at some point, when you Trump supporters grow up a bit, you’ll have to admit that the man you’ve loved and protected like a father is not who you’ve believed him to be. The man you saw as a unifier is really a divider. The man you wanted to believe loved your mother was really out here saying, “Grab ’em by the pussy.” The man who told you he would be there to pick you up after practice is never coming. At some point you have to see the man for who he is and admit that he is hurting all of us—you included.
Yes, a number of competitive policy debates center on racial formations and the variety and
depth of race-based arguments is wide and deep. Nevertheless, there is something qualitatively
different about a resolution centered on race and a mechanism for the affirmative to center
action against the manifestations of racism. We are going to see more and more of the policies
dismantled that do attempt to protect groups that have historically experienced discrimination,
while new actions built around fears of a racial outsider as non-American will be erected. The
motivations and ideology of the President are hard to dispute:
Rubin of Wash. Post, ’16 (Jennifer, Sept. 28, 2016 Donald Trump's deep-rooted racism http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-donald-trump-blacks-racist-20160928- story.html)
Donald Trump told us last month what he thinks of African-Americans: "You're living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed — what the hell do you have to lose?" In other words, you say "African- American," he thinks poor, uneducated, violent (our cities are a war zone!) and unproductive. If that is not garden-variety racism, we are hard pressed to think that anything short of David Duke and the KKK — which support him — meets the definition. (And let's not forget that Trump accused Judge Gonzalo Curiel of not being able to do his job because he is a "Mexican." He was actually born in Indiana.) It is not surprising then that as a real estate mogul in the 1970s, Trump virtually eliminated African-Americans from
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his pool of acceptable renters. If you think African-Americans don't work, don't go to school, etc., you wouldn't want them as tenants. This is classic racism — attributing a distorted stereotype to everyone in the same racial group. And that's what happened in the 1970s. Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler — citing "Trump Revealed," by Post colleagues Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher — explains that Trump's claim that his was one of many real estate firms that were sued is false: "The Justice Department lawsuit was 'one of the most significant racial bias cases of the era.' It was based on evidence gathered by testers for the New York City Human Rights Commission, who documented that black people were told no apartments were available in Trump properties while white testers at the same time were immediately offered apartments. In a sampling of 10 Trump buildings, only 1 to 3.5 percent of the occupants were minorities, making it one of the strongest cases the Justice Department had ever seen for violations of the Fair Housing Act. …" "This was not a case brought against many real estate firms; it was brought against Trump and his father. Trump did not get a better deal; he got essentially the same deal, or possibly worse, than the deal he would have gotten if he had settled before spending legal fees for two years. He also failed to live up to the deal and found himself back in court. While Trump touts there was no admission of guilt, that's rather typical in these sorts of settlements. The Justice Department simply wanted to get the Trumps to agree to rent to African-American tenants — which they failed to do even after agreeing to settle the case." Trump is a man who navigates the world by racial and ethnic stereotyping. He speaks of "the" blacks and "the" Hispanics, a classic "tell" that the speaker considers members of a racial or ethnic group as standing apart from "us," an undifferentiated mass in which individual characteristics are subsumed under group identity. (David Graham caught it, too: "The entertainer has long spoken about minority groups with the outdated formulation involving a definite article: 'I have a great relationship with the blacks. I've always had a great relationship with the blacks,' he said in 2011, using language that undermined his claim. He's said similar things about 'the Hispanics.'") It's the very same phenomenon that was the target of the civil rights movement and efforts to root out prejudice. (You know: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.") At the Republican Jewish Coalition summit last year, Trump resorted to the anti-Semitic trope that Jews are all about money ("You're not going to support me because I don't want your money"; "I'm a negotiator — like you folks."). That plainly impacts his choice in business partners. It impacted his selection of renters: "Documents from a Justice Department discrimination case against Trump launched in 1973 quote one of his rental agents describing a racial code: 'Some blacks do live in Trump buildings,' the agent recalled in one March 6, 1974, district court filing, but 'Trump Management believes that Jewish tenants are the best tenants.' Another agent was instructed to rent only to 'Jews and executives' and to disregard the applications of blacks." In first debate, Trump loses the battle against himself It's called "affirmative prejudice" (e.g. Jews control media, Jews are all rich). It is, once again, evidence that Trump operates in the world by reducing everyone to a faceless member of a racial or ethnic classification. Since he thinks Jews are so terrific at business and make such great renters, guess whom he doesn't have in key positions and didn't like as renters? "The" blacks and "the" Hispanics. Trump considers himself heroic when he now merely complies with the law. He said in the debate, "In Palm Beach, Florida, tough community, a brilliant community, a wealthy community, probably the wealthiest community there is in the world, I opened a club, and really got great credit for it. No discrimination against African-Americans, against Muslims, against anybody. And it's a tremendously successful club. And I'm so glad I did it. And I have been given great credit for what I did. And I'm very, very proud of it. And that's the way I feel. That is the true way I feel." In other words, he wants a ticker-tape parade for not repeating his illegal practices of the 1970s. I'm a 78-year-old racist — trying to change The sad and disturbing thing is not so much that there still are people like Donald Trump (Archie Bunker with money), but that he so easily cultivated racial bias and built himself a following through stunts such as the birtherism lie and vicious anti-Hispanic rhetoric that paints millions of immigrants as criminals. If there is a silver lining somewhere (please!) to this dreadful election, it might be that we have received a potent reminder of how far we have come and the distance yet to go when it comes to bias. Washington Post
Backing up a bit from Trump and the ways we are starting to see racism govern some of his policies, there are bigger debates to be had about everything from “sympathy to solidarity”— how can groups provide support, allegiance, a stance as allies for one another? Does a celebration of difference, especially race as difference, offer space for groups to lift each other up rather than focusing more on lament or the melancholic tendency to agree with the inevitability of structural racism and withdraw?
Schraub, UC-Berkeley Law Fellow, ’16 (17 Berkeley J. Afr.-Am. L. & Pol'y 3, “Racism as Subjectification”, David)
By sending a message that White people cannot do it alone, that all of us have intrinsic and instrumental worth, the anti-subjectification critique of the anti-diversity position can help reverse the damaging sentiment that non-White lives don't matter, are worthless, and that their absence is
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not one at all. n196 That White people benefit from diversity is merely part of a larger argument being made here - that all are reliant on all, and that, far from being a patronizing indulgence, grasping our full potential as human beings is dependent on recognizing others. n197 As Audre Lorde argues: Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways to actively "be' in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are not charters. n198 When difference is necessary, those who are different become indispensable. n199 President Obama's 2013 graduation speech at Morehouse College emphasized this theme. Much of the President's speech focused on the need for the Black community, and Black men in particular, to look inward - to expect more of themselves and to serve as a role model for others. n200 But he concluded by urging the graduates to do these things "not just for yourself," and not even "just for the African American community," because "it's not just the African American community that needs you. The country needs you. The world needs you." n201 The experience of being Black men in society, people who have faced marginalization and struggle, was objectively valuable to the [*44] world at large because it "should endow you with empathy - the understanding of what it's like to walk in somebody else's shoes, to see through their eyes, to know what it's like when you're not born on 3rd base, thinking you hit a triple." n202 Such a perspective is needed not just because of what it does for any individual as a moral subject, but is valuable for what it can teach the nation and the world. And properly valuing that ability to contribute is as important as respecting the individual subjective value of the Black community. Admittedly, constructing a policy predicated on identifying non-Whites as "different" from Whites can have the effect of making White people the norm, contributing to the otherization of racial minorities. But not necessarily. Martha Minow notes that "Difference ... is a comparative term. It implies a reference: different from whom? I am no more different from you than you are from me." n203 But Lorde's point is that difference is a source of power, not weakness, and her reference to the "polarities" of difference implies that all parties in a relationship - equally different from each other - use those distinctions to spark new and creative ways of seeing the world. In the context of the American racial system, White people occupy a different space than non-White people, and non-White people occupy a different space than White people, but neither one can be dispensed with if our institutions and citizenry are to reach their full potential. The mistake occurs when certain groups are presented as normal, whole, and complete, and others as variant, exotic, and special. n204 The hope of an anti- subjectification perspective, then, is that it will convince people of all backgrounds of the benefits of a diverse and flourishing social sphere. It is this dream which the Parents Involved plurality, striking down voluntary and democratically- supported school integration efforts, might threaten most. By condemning these efforts as "racial balancing," a violation of the 14th amendment, n205 Chief Justice Roberts and his cohorts would actively hinder the emergence of a progressive consensus that sees diversity as a necessity for themselves and their children. n206 Even if this cadre is in the minority now, it is no small thing to smash its development - and furthermore, it prevents other communities from seeing and building on that progress. n207 Fortunately, Justice Kennedy's concurrence forestalls that foreboding day. And since courts tend to be responsive to majority pressure in favor of protecting minority rights, a concerted effort to create a vocal White coalition that sees integration as in its own interests could reverse the anti-integration legal trend before it is too late. n208 Conclusion People have a real and powerful need to see themselves as filling a useful role in society. They desire recognition, and "Most of our society's productive and recognized activities take place in contexts of organized social cooperation ... social structures and processes that close persons out of participation in such social cooperation are unjust." n209 Due respect for the fullness of personhood requires accounting for both one's subjectivity - as a unique human being with unconditional value and worth, and one's objectivity - as a person who has instrumental value to others and the overall functioning of society. The argument of this essay is not to "reclaim" objectification by trying to argue that what people really and solely desire is adequate respect for their objectivity. Recognizing the indispensability of certain persons, even in a positive sense, without due consideration for their subjectivity can lead to morally perilous stances as well. For example, a statement by a college that "we need Black people to function effectively - any Blacks will do" would not subjectify Blacks, but it would objectify them. This impresses the need to actively defend object-and subject-status simultaneously. Granting either one, without the other, simply switches the axis of oppression - it changes the scale, but it still prioritizes the bodies. It will be difficult to
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balance these two competing demands against each other - but acknowledging the problem is a good first step. n210 Recognizing the need to affirm the objectivity and subjectivity of all persons opens the doors to a more nuanced, complete anti-racism practice that can help restart the civil rights project in the new millennium.
It is not as if structural racism began under Trump, but he is extending a unique and dangerous form of nativism and white supremacy into governmental policy. Requiring the affirmative to tackle this tendency in a major way would be an exciting and intellectually significant form of advocacy, giving the negative the ground to make deeper claims about the sources of equality, problems with the “term of art” used to indicate structural racial inequity, attacks within the particular area of reform, and attacks on the way the affirmative chooses to enact such change.
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3. Areas
It is hard to prioritize which areas to include and there are other factors to take into
account (the high school topic is education, some of these areas have been dramatically
changed by Trump and some have not, the range of affirmatives and “best agents of action”
vary from area to area, etc.), but we believe we have isolated some that would be particularly
good debates. Our list is in rough order below, but the descriptors are not intended to be
definitive, there are no “must includes,” and the list is not exhaustive—we could all imagine
other areas to include. There are also possible topic wordings without areas at all (R: The USFG
should ((establish a comprehensive policy to)) substantially reduce structural/institutional
racism / racial inequality in the United States; to the passive voice options). Overall, though, a
sector approach for many if not all of the potential wordings would be a good direction to take
and would also ensure fairly balanced ground on both sides. Essentially, to be topical, the Aff
should defend a major social or governmental policy (or collection of policies) to
resist/challenge/eliminate institutional/structural racism or racial disparity/inequality in a
particular area of institutional influence in the United States.
Because we are supportive of an open-ended wording as an option, we would also be
supportive of an option that includes a large number of areas, even seven or more. On the
opposite of the spectrum—what would be the fewest number of areas for a good wording?—it
would be possible to have a robust season of debates on one of the areas, particularly one of
the bigger ones we have pinpointed. Ideally, though, a sector wording with 3 areas would be
outstanding.
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The particular areas determination is central and should be a focus for wording paper
research:2
* Education Voting Rights Immigration/Security Incarceration/Criminal Justice Housing/Lending
* education is the 2017-18 NSDA High School topic.
2 The list from last year’s paper:
Education higher/secondary/all academic achievement Criminal Justice criminal incarceration Housing access to affordable housing home ownership access to business/home loans Voting Rights Immigration
Other potential sectors to consider Employment / Title VII Urban Planning Labor Rights Homeland Security Anti-Islam, discrimination against Arabs and Muslims and profiles of “Middle Eastern decent” Health Care access to health care/insurance health outcomes Environmental Justice clean air safe water Welfare Forced sterilization, reproductive freedom
As well as areas such as wealth accumulation, capital/finance policy, or reparations.
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a) Education
Waldman 4-14- Annie Waldman is a reporter covering education. She recently graduated with honors from the dual masters program at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and the School of Journalism, April 14, 2017, DeVos Pick to Head Civil Rights Office Once Said She Faced Discrimination for Being White, https://www.propublica.org/article/devos- candice-jackson-civil-rights-office-education-department
The new acting head of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights once complained that she experienced discrimination because she is white. As an undergraduate studying calculus at Stanford University in the mid-1990s, Candice Jackson “gravitated” toward a section of the class that provided students with extra help on challenging problems, she wrote in a student publication. Then she learned that the section was reserved for minority students. “I am especially disappointed that the University encourages these and other discriminatory programs,” she wrote in the Stanford Review. “We need to allow each person to define his or her own achievements instead of assuming competence or incompetence based on race.” Although her limited background in civil rights law makes it difficult to infer her positions on specific issues, Jackson’s writings during and after college suggest she’s likely to steer one of the Education Department’s most important — and controversial — branches in a different direction than her predecessors. A longtime anti-Clinton activist and an outspoken conservative-turned-libertarian, she has denounced feminism and race-based preferences. She’s also written favorably about, and helped edit a book by, an economist who decried both compulsory education and the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Jackson’s inexperience, along with speculation that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos will roll back civil rights enforcement, lead some observers to wonder whether Jackson, like several other Trump administration appointees, lacks sympathy for the traditional mission of the office she’s been chosen to lead. Her appointment “doesn’t leave me with a feeling of confidence with where the administration might be going,” said Theodore Shaw, director of the Center for Civil Rights at the University of North Carolina School of Law, who led Barack Obama’s transition team for civil rights at the Department of Justice. “I hope that she’s not going to be an adversary to the civil rights community and I hope that the administration is going to enforce civil rights laws and represent the best interests of those who are affected by civil rights issues.” On Wednesday, DeVos formally announced Jackson’s position as deputy assistant secretary in the Office for Civil Rights, a role that does not require Senate confirmation. The 39-year-old attorney will act as assistant secretary in charge of the office until that position is filled. DeVos has not yet selected a nominee, who would have to receive Senate confirmation. As acting head, Jackson is in charge of about 550 full-time department staffers, who are responsible for investigating thousands of civil rights complaints each year. Jackson referred ProPublica’s interview request to the U.S. Department of Education, which did not respond to our request. Neither Jackson nor the department responded to ProPublica’s emailed questions. Jackson takes over an office that has been responsible for protecting students from racial, gender, disability and age discrimination for decades. Under the Obama administration, the office increased its caseload. It emphasized to colleges that they could give preferences to minorities and women to achieve diversity, and advised them to be more aggressive in investigating allegations of rape and sexual harassment on campus. Some of the guidance from the office provoked controversy, particularly among Republicans who have long called for the office to be scaled back. Jackson grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where her parents operate two medical practices, specializing in family and aesthetic medicine. Her father, Dr. Rick Jackson, also ran unsuccessfully for Congress and is a country music singer under the name Ricky Lee Jackson. Jackson’s brothers have acting and music careers as well. Jackson and her mother have helped provide “business and legal” management for her father and brothers, according to a biography on her website from 2016. In 2009, Jackson co-wrote a Christian country song with her father and brother, called “Freedom, Family and Faith.” The lyrics had an anti-government tinge: “Some politician wants our liberty/ They say just trust me, we’re all family/ I’ve got a family and hey, it’s not you/ Don’t need Big Brother to see us through.” While in college, Jackson joined the Stanford Review as a junior, after transferring to the university in 1996 from a community college in Los Angeles. When she arrived, according to a Review article
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she wrote during her senior year, she was “eager to carry the message of freedom to Stanford through the only conservative publication on campus.” Eric Jackson, no relation, who is Candice’s friend, former classmate and book publisher, said the conservative perspective of the Stanford Review often went against the status quo on campus. It took “courage,” he said, to write for the publication, which was co-founded in 1987 by PayPal billionaire and Donald Trump adviser Peter Thiel. “A number of us got death threats,” he recalled. One topic of heated debate on campus was affirmative action, which California banned in public institutions, such as universities, in 1996. The prohibition did not affect private universities, like Stanford, which could continue to employ preferential policies both in admissions and in special programs designed to assist minority students in college-level math and science courses. During her senior year, Candice Jackson penned her objections in an op-ed, contending the university “promotes racial discrimination” with its practices. “As with most liberal solutions to a problem, giving special assistance to minority students is a band-aid solution to a deep problem,” she wrote. “No one, least of all the minority student, is well served by receiving special treatment based on race or ethnicity.” Jackson was far from the only critic of such minority-only programs. In 2003, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology opened up similar programs to all races. In another article Jackson penned for the Review during her senior year, entitled “How I Survived Stanford Without Entering the Women’s Center,” she condemned feminism on campus. “In today’s society, women have the same opportunities as men to advance their careers, raise families, and pursue their personal goals,” she wrote. “College women who insist on banding together by gender to fight for their rights are moving backwards, not forwards.” In the article, she encouraged women to choose conservatism over feminism. “I think many women are instinctively conservative, but are guided into the folds of feminism before discovering the conservative community,” she wrote. She concluded, “[t]he real women’s issues are conservative ones.” Her former Stanford Review colleague, Eric Jackson, told ProPublica that her college writings are nearly 20 years old and that it’s important to understand the context of her commentary.
Read this section after reading the history and background on race and education from last year’s topic proposal. All the arguments there are still prevalent and have become even more pronounced in the last year. The Court is incredibly relevant here, as are the States, and the almost complete decimation of race-based affirmative action is a great demonstration of these issues. It’s unnerving to place the future of race-conscious decisions in education (admissions, hiring, otherwise) in the hands of Whites (“Can whites be persuaded that diversity is good?” “Ethnic studies and multiculturalism as instruments for White discovery?”), but the argument is emerging in the wake of equal protection’s disappearance in this sphere.
Schraub, UC-Berkeley Law Fellow, ’16 (17 Berkeley J. Afr.-Am. L. & Pol'y 3, “Racism as Subjectification”, David)
Proposition 209 was a 1996 California referendum that effectively banned affirmative action in the state. Specifically, it codified that "The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting." n59 When California voters passed Proposition 209, the number of Black students admitted to UC-Berkeley's Boalt Hall law school plummeted from seventy- seven the year before passage to eighteen the year after. Of these eighteen, none chose to enroll at Berkeley, leaving only one incoming Black student who had deferred his admission from the year before. n60 In terms of their relationship to Boalt, Black students are quite obviously being subjectified. The virtual elimination of Black law students attending Berkeley did not have any noticeable impact on Boalt's reputation or status in the legal community. Few people suggested that the law school would be hampered in its job of training new lawyers, or would be providing an inferior class environment for its students, without
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Black people present. Several people claimed the opposite, denying that the presence of Black people was required to achieve Berkeley's mission as a university. n61 What clearer message could be sent to prospective Black students that their presence is optional, unnecessary, and ultimately dispensable? In subsequent years, the legal and political standing of affirmative action has continued to deteriorate. Anyone who subscribes to Derrick Bell's interest- [*18] convergence theory could explain why. n62 While the desegregation of American schools did provide a significant boon in the educational prospects of young Black men and women, n63 it was never seen as being in the interests of White middle-class parents, who viewed integration as a burden, hardship, or even danger to their children. Though given a brief reprieve in Grutter v. Bollinger - a reprieve that came with a self-imposed time limit n64 - the addition of two conservative justices has weakened the position of race-conscious integration yet further. In Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District, n65 four justices signaled their readiness to do away with race-conscious programs in education altogether. n66 Only an expansive, yet cryptic, concurrence by Justice Kennedy staved off that outcome. n67 With the entire idea of race-conscious programs in the educational sphere in danger, it is critical for defenders of affirmative action to try and find alternative arguments that can hold together its fragile coalition on the highest court. n68 But while Professor Bell's theory closes off some avenues towards achieving racial reform (namely, those that focus on moral duty or benefits to students of color), it simultaneously opens up others. From an interest-convergence standpoint, after all, Whites should be willing to pursue diversity if they can be persuaded that it is in their interests to do so. It is unsurprising, then, that the debate over affirmative action has been waged increasingly on this battlefield. If the question is whether or not proactive diversity efforts are good for Whites as well as for racial minorities, then the answer given has profound implications (for good or ill) of how society views the objective value of people of color.
ACLU No Date- RACE AND INEQUALITY IN EDUCATION, American Civil Liberties Union, https://www.aclu.org/issues/racial-justice/race-and-inequality-education, @yangtri
The ACLU’s education work centers on a disturbing trend called the school-to-prison pipeline, a set of policies in our nation’s public schools that pushes an alarming number of kids into the juvenile and criminal justice systems when they most need support from their schools and communities. We believe that this trend is reflective of our country’s prioritization of incarceration over education. It is made worse as resources for public schools are decreased. From inadequate counseling to an overreliance on school-based police officers to enforce schools’ harsh zero-tolerance policies, many students, overwhelmingly students of color, face very adult consequences for adolescent mistakes. Through strategic litigation and advocacy campaigns, the ACLU Racial Justice Program works to promote initiatives that help ensure access to high-quality education and facilities for all students and to challenge policies that criminalize students for minor misbehavior in school. The Racial Justice Program has active cases and ongoing court-enforced settlement agreements challenging the discrimination, segregation, and criminalization of children of color in public school districts across the country, including New York City; Hartford, Connecticut; Salt Lake City, Utah; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Winner, South Dakota. We also file amicus curiae or “friend of the court” briefs in major cases that challenge affirmative action policies.
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Fryer 10- Roland G. Fryer, Jr.∗, Roland Gerhard Fryer Jr. is an American economist and the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. The Link Between Education & Inequality, http://edlabs.harvard.edu/link-between-education-inequality, @yangtri While many economic and social barriers to progress have been ameliorated over the past 50 years, racial inequality continues to be a defining feature of American life. Understanding the causes of these inequalities is a subject of intense study. However, perhaps the most influential development has been the quantification of the importance of education (see, for example, Lochner and Moretti 2002, O’Neill 2000, and Neal and Johnson 1996) in explaining differences in later life outcomes. The seminal work of Neal and Johnson (1996), which used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY 1979), showed that controlling for educational achievement shrinks–or altogether eliminates—the wage gap between blacks and whites and Hispanics and whites. Using a test score measure of basic skills that has been shown to be racially unbiased, the authors demonstrate that educational achievement among 15 – 18 year-olds explains all of the black-white gap in wages for young women and 70% of the gap for young men. The Hispanic-white gap is also eliminated. By looking at the test scores from only the younger end of the cohort, Neal and Johnson are examining pre-market skills acquisition—or, the skills and knowledge we reasonably expect children to receive in K-12 education—rather than any other investments in skills, higher education, or any work experience. Econ Outcomes Fryer (2010) extends this analysis in important ways. He examines similar outcomes for a younger cohort of the NLSY (1997) and adds unemployment as an outcome. Fryer’s extended analysis of the NLSY97 cohort reveals the following about the wage gap: The Black-white wage gap for men is reduced from 17.9% to 10.9% after controlling for test scores. For women, the gap is reduced from 15.3% to 4.4% after controlling for test scores. The Hispanic-white wage gap is statistically eliminated for both men and women after controlling for test scores. The unemployment gap is also reduced: Black men in the NLSY97 are almost three times as likely to be unemployed, which reduces to twice as likely when educational achievement is controlled for. Black women are roughly two and a half times more likely to be unemployed than white women, but controlling for test scores cuts this gap in half. The Hispanic-white unemployment gap for men and women is statistically eliminated after controlling for test scores. Fryer also examines incarceration and measures of physical health for the NLSY79 cohort. Black men are about three and half times more likely to have been incarcerated than whites. That shrinks to about 80% more likely when educational achievement is accounted for. Hispanic men are about two and half times more likely to have been incarcerated than whites. That is reduced to only about 50% more likely when test scores are controlled for. While these gaps are still concerning, the reduction in these gaps after controlling for educational achievement is no less striking. Therefore, despite these persistent disparities, there is a reason for optimism and a clear call to action. While alleviating poverty in developing countries and eradicating the ills associated with it would require massive and coordinated efforts in public health, education, and labor markets, in this country, significant steps towards reducing poverty can be made by ensuring that all K-12 students receive the same education.
Lykke at. al., ’16 (Contexts, U Maryland Grads, Lucia Lykke, Brittany Dernberger, Rose Malinowski Weingartner, Carrie Clarady, Nicole Bedera, Moriah Willow, Joey Brown, Saswathi Natta, and Philip Cohen. “how to end institutional racism,” April 7, 2016, https://contexts.org/blog/how-to-end-institutional-racism/)
Education End segregation in schools. American schools are still largely segregated by race. Even after accounting for differences in the racial composition between neighborhoods, schools remain racially segregated due to White students’ enrollment in private, magnet, and charter schools. Persistent racial segregation has a detrimental effect on the academic performance of students of color, but integration has no significant effect on the academic work of White students. Treat students of color better. In the classroom, students of color are disproportionately punished with higher severity. Recent sociological literature suggests that the problem is both more widespread than previously believed and has significant consequences that extend beyond the classroom. School suspension explains about one-fifth of disparities in academic achievement between Black and White students, limiting Black students’ opportunities after graduation. Disparate discipline in schools also contributes to Black overrepresentation in the juvenile justice system.
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b) Voting Rights
Conservative lawmakers routinely tout voter ID laws as a solution to voter fraud, but multiple investigations — including investigations conducted by Republican supporters of voter ID — confirm that those laws are a solution in search of a problem. The kind of fraud prevented by such laws is only slightly more common than elves. A new study by political scientists Zoltan L. Hajnal, Nazita Lajevardi, and Lindsay Nielson explains what these laws do accomplish, however. According to Hajnal and his co-authors, turnout among Hispanic voters is “7.1 percentage points lower in general elections and 5.3 points lower in primaries” in states with strict voter ID laws. The laws also reduce turnout among African-American and Asian-American voters. White turnout, according to their study, is “largely unaffected.”Hajnal and his co-authors also offer a possible explanation for why conservatives favor these laws. “By instituting strict voter ID laws,” they explain, “states can alter the electorate and shift outcomes toward those on the right.” In states with such laws “the influence of Democrats and liberals wanes and the power of Republicans grows.” As a result of voter ID laws’ disparate impact on people of color, such laws are illegal. The Voting Rights Act prohibits any state voting restriction “which results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen . . . to vote on account of race or color.” And indeed, some courts have struck down voter ID laws because of their disparate impact on minority voters. Most notably, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, one of the most conservative federal appeals courts in the country, held that Texas’ voter ID law violates the Voting Rights Act. Their opinion noted data indicating that “Blacks were 1.78 times more likely than Whites, and Latinos 2.42 times more likely, to lack” voter ID.” Yet, despite the racist impact of voter ID and a federal law prohibiting such impacts, it is far from clear that the Supreme Court will enforce the Voting Rights Act when it hears a challenge to voter ID. Last year, a federal appeals court struck down North Carolina’s omnibus voter suppression law, after finding that the law was intentionally designed to target black voters and to minimize its impact on whites. Yet all four conservative justices voted to reinstate this law before the 2016 election....Judge Neil Gorsuch ...will likely be the fifth vote in favor of racial voter suppression.
Millhiser, Feb 17 3
3 Ian Millhiser, Feb 17, 2017 “New study confirms that voter ID laws are very racist. But the Supreme Court probably won’t care.” https://thinkprogress.org/new-study-confirms-that-voter-id-laws-are-very-racist-c338792c3f04
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Voting Rights is an excellent area, perhaps the best area right now, and one that the community has not debated directly in decades. These debates would overlap somewhat with the Electoral Reform controversy, but not completely and these debates would be focused on the relationship between voting rights and racial inequality as opposed to a general debate over civic participation and civil society. The specific details of restrictions on the right to vote are absolutely breathtaking in the status quo as nefarious policy-making weaves its way through the legislature and the Courts designed to make it harder for minority groups to access the voting box. Moreover, if voting is the key principle guiding democracy, the ability to vote becomes the internal link to all other government policies on a local, state, and federal level. There are in- depth legal battles being waged in this area because voting sits at the intersection of federalism, equal protection, civil rights, and overall governmental legitimacy.
Ellis, ’16 (Atiba R., 104 Ky. L.J. 607, Economic Precarity, Race, and Voting Structures)
The utilitarian focus sets in arguable conflict the individual rights of voters who perceived themselves as structurally disenfranchised against the mechanisms that determine the collective good. In this light, this Article argues that legislators and courts should reconsider this underlying dynamic and align the competing principles concerning the right to vote so to maximize participation. The solutions that are possible are various. Many have argued that a revived Section 5 preclearance scheme which would restore the federal government's interpositionary power regarding direct and indirect structural voting rights changes in jurisdictions like Alabama where such history and potential for discrimination would be present. While such ideas would address the present situation, such a remedy would be insufficient to deal with the situations where this concern would manifest in other jurisdictions which may not otherwise fall under a revised Section 4(b) preclearance formula or would otherwise be subject to either a Section 2 racial discrimination suit or may fall out of coverage of the Voting Rights Act altogether. I have argued as a consistent thread in my voting rights scholarship that in a readjustment of the balance to defer to voter interests instead of state interests is necessary antecedent to addressing this problem. n157 But the Alabama voter identification-budget shortfall dilemma suggests that even this presumption should be even more nuanced.
Not surprisingly, inherency goes the way we want it to and voting rights are being taken away across the board. One of the last vestiges of enforcement coming out of the Voting Rights Aft of 1965 is being stripped away by the Courts...Gorsuch only speeds up the process. Preclearance under Section 5 of the VRA allowed the Justice Department to oversee new changes in voter registration laws in instances where those laws would result in racial bias. That preclearance is no longer imposed on the States, it has been gutted in favor of a Section 3 preclearance procedure where minority groups have to sue the government over a particular
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discriminatory law and prove that the racial boas was flagrant, significantly quantifiable, and essentially severe to the point of “being reminiscent of Jim Crow” as a Federal Court remarked regarding North Carolina’s 2013 voter laws.
Denniston, April 13 (New threat rising to Voting Rights Act, April 13, 2017 by Lyle Denniston https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/new-threat-rising-to-voting-rights-act)
About four years after the Supreme Court took away the government’s strongest authority to protect minority voters’ rights, a backup power under the federal Voting Rights Act – weaker and harder to use – is now being threatened, just as federal courts have begun applying it. At issue now, as it was when the Supreme Court decided the case of Shelby County v. Holder in June 2013, is a form of government supervision of voting rights that goes by the technical term, “pre-clearance.” When operating against a state or local government, that means that officials cannot put any new voting law or procedure – however minor – into effect without first getting approval in Washington, D.C. Three cases now developing in federal courts based in Texas are testing whether the variation of “pre-clearance” will take the place of what the Supreme Court scuttled. And there are already serious challenges facing that prospect, in each of those cases. Congress created “pre-clearance” in passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. By then, Congress had grown frustrated over a repeated cycle of passing specific new protections for minority voters, only to find that some state and local governments quickly devised new restrictions on those voters. The response that Congress chose was to streamline federal review of voting laws in areas where racial bias had stubbornly persisted. No longer would minority voters and civil rights groups have to challenge restrictions, one law at a time in one case at a time. Instead, the burden of proving that a new law was not discriminatory was imposed on the governments that planned to adopt a change in voting. Because of their record of discrimination, those jurisdictions had to ask either the Justice Department or a special federal court in Washington to decide whether to allow the new law to go into effect. Such a law might actually seem to be racially neutral, but that had to be proved. “Pre-clearance” worked exactly as Congress had hoped: over the decades that it was in operation, it had a major impact on breaking down barriers to minority voting. But the Supreme Court became convinced in recent years that this form of federal oversight was a deep intrusion into the sovereign power of the states to conduct elections and that, in any event, the formula that had put some states, counties and cities under a pre-clearance duty was found to be out of date. Finding in the Shelby County case that “times have changed,” the court in its 5-to-4 decision nullified that formula, and, with it, the duty of any jurisdiction to get pre-clearance under the law’s Section 5. The court did not say that Congress could not re-impose a pre-clearance duty under Section 5, provided it wrote a new formula on who would have to submit to that. Congress has not done so, and the political reality seems to be that it simply won’t. As soon as Section 5 became ineffective, there was a rash of new activity in many states and local jurisdictions, adopting anew or putting into effect previously-stalled restrictions that fell most heavily on minority voters – such as photo ID requirements. The Shelby County ruling did not disturb another part of the 1965 law – Section 3. That, too, involves a potential pre-clearance duty. Under Section 3, no state, county or city government is automatically required to get pre-clearance to change voting laws. Voters and their lawyers have to challenge each new provision after it was adopted, in separate lawsuits. If the challengers wanted to have a court strike down such a law under the Constitution, and not just under the Voting Rights Act, they had to prove not only that it actually discriminated against racial or ethnic minorities, but also that it was passed with the specific purpose of discriminating. If the judge found such an intent, then Section 3 gave the judge the authority to impose the Washington pre-clearance obligation for all future changes in voting in that state or locality, and to do so for a period of years. Federal judges do not appear to be eager to take that step. For example, a federal appeals court that last summer struck down a series of voting restrictions adopted by the North Carolina state legislature almost as soon as the Supreme Court decided the Shelby County case. The appeals court ruled that those laws were so severe that they brought back memories of the “Jim Crow era” of deep racial hostility. The court found that the changes were adopted with the specific intent to discriminate against black voters, but it refused to require Section 3 pre-clearance for future North Carolina voting laws. It simply blocked enforcement of the specific laws at issue. Earlier this year, however, a federal trial judge in Houston, District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal, became the first since the demise of Section 5 pre-clearance to impose Section 3 pre-clearance as a remedy for a discriminatory voting practice. That case involves a shift of the way voters in Pasadena, Texas, elect the members of the city council. Judge Rosenthal, after finding that the change discriminated intentionally against the city’s Hispanic voters, adopted a six-year period of pre-clearance for any future change in voting laws in that locality. That case has now moved on up to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. And that is where one major threat to Section 3 remedies has arisen. It came in a legal brief filed by the
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state of Texas last month, supporting an appeal by the city of Pasadena as far as the city is challenging the remedy of Section 3 pre- clearance. That remedy, the state brief asserted, “must be sparingly and cautiously applied.” The state’s filing argued that “misuse” of that mode of pre-clearance “threatens to re-impose the same unwarranted federal intrusion that Shelby County found could not be justified under the Constitution.” The brief contended that Judge Rosenthal had engaged in such a “misuse” of this provision by imposing it for only a single incident of discrimination – the one-time change in the method of electing the Pasadena city council. The only circumstance in which a Section 3 pre-clearance remedy is valid, under either the specific language of Section 3, the reasoning of the Supreme Court in 2013, or the Constitution, the Texas brief contended, is when a judge can conclude that the discrimination was “pervasive, flagrant, widespread, and rampant.” The Fifth Circuit Court has been centrally involved for years in Voting Rights Act cases, because the state of Texas (located in that Circuit) has so often been sued for discrimination in voting. If that court were to read the Section 3 pre-clearance provision in the limited way that the state seeks, that would be a major setback in this legal field. In two other Texas cases working their way through lower courts, the judges have found intentional race or ethnic bias in voting laws – one in Corpus Christi involving the state of Texas’s very strict voter photo ID requirement, the other in San Antonio involving the boundaries for several election districts for Texas members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Both of those courts are now considering pre-clearance as a possible remedy, but have not yet imposed it. Both almost certainly will be guided by what the Fifth Circuit Court decides in the Pasadena case about the scope of the Section 3 pre-clearance remedy. Another threat to the Section 3 remedy arises from the view that the new Trump Administration has already begun to take on enforcement of federal voting rights laws and on the Constitution as it applies to voting. In the voter photo ID case now before a federal trial judge in Corpus Christi, the Trump Justice Department recently dropped its claim that the law involved intentional race discrimination. Minority voters and civil rights groups are still pressing that claim on their own. Of course, the Justice Department’s view of what constitutes race discrimination in voting will be crucial when any state or local government is ordered to seek pre-clearance, and they will choose to seek it from that Department in the new Administration because that probably would enhance their chances of getting clearance. Sooner or later, a pre-clearance case under Section 3 is going to reach the Supreme Court, and the Justices would then be in a position to say what that remedy means, and whether its scope is narrowed under the reasoning of the Shelby County decision.
Ian Millhiser, April 11 (2017, “Federal court to Texas: Yup, your voter ID law is racist https://thinkprogress.org/federal-court-to-texas-yup-your-voter-id-law-is-racist-5e6ab23c3308”)
In a brief order handed down Monday evening, a federal district court held that Texas’ voter ID law was “passed, at least in part, with a discriminatory intent in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.” Voter ID laws are a common method of voter suppression that disproportionately target voters of color. According to data cited by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which will hear any appeal of Monday’s order, in Texas “Blacks were 1.78 times more likely than Whites, and Latinos 2.42 times more likely, to lack” voter ID. The Fifth Circuit previously held that Texas’ law had a greater impact on minority voters than on whites, a fact that in and of itself makes the law illegal under the Voting Rights Act. Nevertheless, the district court’s Monday order is significant for two reasons. First, as voting rights expert Rick Hasen notes, if the district court’s order is upheld on appeal, “it would be grounds for throwing out the entire law (and not just softening it though an affidavit requirement, etc.).” Additionally, while a 5–4 Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2012 — the provision requiring certain states to submit any new election procedures to federal authorities for review before those procedures can take effect — a separate provision of the Voting Rights Act permits states that engage in intentional voting discrimination to be brought back under federal supervision. Monday’s order in Veasey v. Abbott notes several factors that suggest the law was enacted for the purpose of discriminating against African Americans and Latinos, including the law’s disparate impact on these voters and the fact that state lawmakers rushed the state’s voter ID law “through the legislative process without the usual committee analysis, debate, and substantive consideration of amendments.” The court also noted that, “Texas had become a majority- minority state” with “polarized voting patterns allowing the suppression of the overwhelmingly Democratic votes of African–Americans and Latinos to provide an Anglo
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partisan advantage.” The state’s Republican legislature, in other words, could use race as a proxy for partisan affiliation. By passing a law that would disproportionately target African Americans and Latinos, lawmakers could protect Republican rule. Additionally, while Texas claimed that its law exists to prevent voter fraud, not to disenfranchise voters of color, “the evidence shows a tenuous relationship between those rationales and the actual terms of the bill.” Of the 20 million votes cast in the ten years before this law’s passage, only two people were convicted by the kind of voter fraud that is supposedly targeted by voter ID. So Monday’s order is good news for voting rights supporters, but it is also good news that is likely to be short lived. Although the Fifth Circuit held that Texas’ law violates the Voting Rights Act, it is also a very conservative court. The lawyers challenging this law have a tough road ahead of themselves before the appeals court. And even if their case survives contact with the Fifth Circuit, the case is still likely to be reviewed by a newly Gorsuched Supreme Court. Prior to the 2016 election, while the Supreme Court was still down a justice, all four of the Court’s Republicans voted to reinstate North Carolina’s omnibus voter suppression law — despite a federal appeals court’s determination that the law was intentionally designed to increase its impact on black voters and minimize its impact on white voters. With Donald Trump’s nominee now occupying the Court’s vacant seat, it is likely that there are now five votes to permit racially motivated voter suppression to move forward.
Ellis, ’16 (Atiba R., 104 Ky. L.J. 607, Economic Precarity, Race, and Voting Structures)
However, the central point of this paper is that such considerations may be--and have recently been--dominated by the state-focused utilitarian balance developed through the Crawford line of jurisprudence. From this point of view, such a law can be seen as a benefit to voters because they would have, as the state has argued, the net benefits of the voter identification scheme, i.e., the prevention of (speculative claims of) fraud and the efficiencies gained by the government in administering the right to vote. Moreover, the state could argue that these allowances would facilitate voting without added cost. And given the underlying deference to allow states discretion in innovation, and absent explicit discriminatory intent, a persuasive case could be made to the extent that Crawford-oriented thinking affects the process of analyzing these claims. This shows the possibility of different outcomes based upon the conceptual lens that the utilitarian balancing approach has imposed on modem election law thinking. Though Crawford is clearly settled law, it should not be applied uncritically or without due regard to its doctrinal limitations, especially within the context of dealing with voting claims related to race. It is this dynamic (and the underlying problem of racialized political vulnerability that drives it) to which lawmakers and judges should be sensitive in adjudicating and legislating about such issues in the foreseeable future. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS Ultimately, this Article seeks to point to a multi- layered dynamic of structural interference with the right to vote for those at the margins of the electorate--that is, those who are unable to negotiate the cumulative burdens imposed by the increase in voting regulations and thus face substantial barriers in participating in the franchise. The Crawford-dominated reasoning that spurs the utilitarian focus within Fourteenth Amendment election law privileges the interests of the state in administering election laws efficiently (that is, at heightened levels of rigor with the cost of such hyper-regulation shifted to the voters rather than borne by the state). This creates a disincentive for these structures to address concerns regarding structural disenfranchisement that prevent those at the margins form participating. This mode of thinking influences how traditional dual Crawford and VRA claims are brought, thus putting the antidiscrimination principle of election law at tension with this efficiency interest. And, as the Alabama voter identification situation suggests, failings in the economic structure directly impacts the election structure itself, thus adding another layer of structural exclusion for those unable to ultimately bear the cost of the vote. In other words, there is a possibility that the burdens on the state in administering the right to vote may become a focal point of future Crawford-style litigation. The utilitarian focus sets in arguable conflict the individual rights of voters who perceived themselves as structurally disenfranchised against the mechanisms that determine the collective good. In this light, this Article argues that legislators and courts should reconsider this underlying dynamic and align the competing principles concerning the right to vote so to maximize participation. The solutions that are possible are
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various. Many have argued that a revived Section 5 preclearance scheme which would restore the federal government's interpositionary power regarding direct and indirect structural voting rights changes in jurisdictions like Alabama where such history and potential for discrimination would be present. While such ideas would address the present situation, such a remedy would be insufficient to deal with the situations where this concern would manifest in other jurisdictions which may not otherwise fall under a revised Section 4(b) preclearance formula or would otherwise be subject to either a Section 2 racial discrimination suit or may fall out of coverage of the Voting Rights Act altogether. I have argued as a consistent thread in my voting rights scholarship that in a readjustment of the balance to defer to voter interests instead of state interests is necessary antecedent to addressing this problem. n157 But the Alabama voter identification-budget shortfall dilemma suggests that even this presumption should be even more nuanced. Perhaps the simplest solution is to reconsider how courts addressing these dual claims ought to approach them. n158 As I observed above, the Sixth Circuit, on the evidence presented to it, was clearly open to an intersectional approach by taking into account the factors of poverty, race, and history to show the precarity of minority voters in the electoral process in and of itself, while searching for rigor in analyzing the doctrinally distinct claims. This balancing stands in stark contrast with the approach of the Seventh Circuit, which apparently took as the starting premise the benefits of the choice (and the efficiency values contained therein) of a voter identification law and then summarily rejected the counterarguments thereto. This clearly shows the differences in premises, and suggests that the risk of precarity to minority poor voters (or even poor voters generally) should be the starting point of the analysis (to the extent the evidence allows). While pointing to the Sixth Circuit as a model of relative doctrinal clarity may be satisfactory, it is only so to a certain extent. What is more important is the ultimate premise espoused in the court's opinion. The Sixth Circuit's opinion comes the closest to an intersectional approach that articulates and weighs the relative dimensions of structural disenfranchisement. This is a necessary step to create an effective frame for analyzing right to vote problems and combat the efficiency interest (and its possible disregard for the effective disenfranchisement of some voters) under either a Crawford or a VRA approach. As to the VRA, an intersectional approach remains true to the "totality of the circumstances" model embedded in Section 2. Similar analysis within the Crawford model would bring more depth to the "interests of the voter" within that context and recognize that such interests are not necessarily visible in terms of ultimate effects. Ultimately, it is this reformulating of the premises that is necessary to make a more robust right to vote in this era of recalibration of the right to vote.
Lykke at. al., ’16 (Contexts, U Maryland Grads, Lucia Lykke, Brittany Dernberger, Rose Malinowski Weingartner, Carrie Clarady, Nicole Bedera, Moriah Willow, Joey Brown, Saswathi Natta, and Philip Cohen. “how to end institutional racism,” April 7, 2016, https://contexts.org/blog/how-to-end-institutional-racism/)
Voting rights Progress against institutional racism in the electoral system suffered a serious blow at the hands of the Supreme Court in 2013. There is little doubt that restrictions on voter access – especially those enacted in the last few years – are driven by Republican partisan politics and racial politics in particular. The effect is likely to be fewer minorities voting and more Republicans elected. One voter restriction that deserves special attention is the policy in many states of banning former prisoners from voting. The effects are strong and decidedly racial. One needs only look back to 2000 to see that George W. Bush wouldn’t have been elected if former felons in Florida could have voted.
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c) Immigration/Security
Let’s actually debate immigration instead of our last “immigration” topic that dodged the central issues and imposed a year of mediocre H1B debates. Immigration policy is being driven (off the cliff) by a form of racial exclusion that can be classified as white supremacy, white rage, or (perhaps most appropriately) nativist racism. This area also overlaps with the security and terrorism debates and cover the larger questions of “authenticity,” freedom of movement, and, of course, “The Wall.”
Lindsay Perez Huber, Prof. Education, CSU Long Beach, ’16 (10 Charleston L. Rev. 215"MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!": DONALD TRUMP, RACIST NATIVISM AND THE VIRULENT ADHERENCE TO WHITE SUPREMACY AMID U.S. DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE)
Shifting U.S. demographics toward an increasingly non-white majority population are a threat to a "traditional America" and the "white establishment" that has historically maintained power and status above People of Color. n129 Concerns regarding this demographic shift have been brewing for more than a decade. n130 During the same time, we have seen a shift in voter demographics. n131 There has been a "white flight" from the Democratic party, resulting in an increasingly disproportionate number of whites and People of Color representing Democratic and Republican voters. n132 This political polarization has also emerged within political parties. For example, the rise of the Tea Party movement following Barack Obama's 2008 election was created by Republicans that felt the need to "take back America" from People of Color who were perceived to be encroaching upon the power of white elites. n133 Thus, the racist nativist discourses and white supremacist ideologies we see articulated through and within Trump's presidential campaign have been building for years below a post-racial facade, and have encouraged other white conservatives to more overtly and virulently adhere to white supremacy in response to the threat of the "non-native." I began writing this paper before two horrific terrorist attacks that occurred at the end of 2015 - first in Paris, France, in November n134 and in San Bernardino, California, in December. n135 Less than a week following the Paris attack, more than half of all U.S. governors announced they would refuse to accept Syrian refugees in their states, although President Obama announced the acceptance of up to 10,000 refugees in September 2015. n136 Less than a week after the San Bernardino attack, Donald Trump announced that if elected, he would ban all Muslim immigrants from entering the U.S. n137 Following his announcement, Trump's poll numbers have risen higher than any other point during his campaign, indicating there are many who would consent to such a policy. n138 With this most recent announcement, some believe Trump challenges the contemporary boundaries of mainstream immigration discourse by targeting the exclusion of an entire immigrant group. n139 However, we quickly forget the outrage and exclusion that occurred in summer 2014, when the U.S. [*240] experienced an influx of unaccompanied Central American refugee children. n140 For example, in August 2014, Texas Governor Rick Perry deployed thousands of National Guard Troops to the Texas-Mexico border to ensure the unaccompanied Central American children where stopped from entering the U.S. n141 In Murrieta, California, buses carrying Central American immigrants, mostly children and mothers, were blocked from entering a federal processing facility and sent away by angry protestors. n142 These were Latina and Latino immigrants who had committed no crimes other than crossing a border. n143 Further back in U.S. history, the Chinese Exclusion Act deemed Chinese immigrants ineligible for U.S. citizenship; the 1907 "Gentlemen's Agreement" denied passports to Japanese immigrants; Mexican immigrants and U.S. born citizens were deported to Mexico in the 1930s; in 1942, Japanese-Americans were stripped of their American citizenship, removed from their homes, and forced into internment camps; and "Operation Wetback" was implemented in 1954 to deport Mexican immigrants and U.S. citizens (again) to Mexico. n144 Millions of People of Color have historically been excluded and expelled from the U.S. because of their race and assigned non-nativeness. Today, the exclusion of Immigrants of Color typically occurs under the guise of terrorism. n145 However, research from the public policy think tank New America reported that there have been twice as many terrorist attacks committed by white "homegrown extremists" than radical Jihadists since 9/11 in the U.S. n146 The majority of these white
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terrorists were male U.S. [*241] citizens affiliated with anti-government and/or white supremacist groups. n147 Despite the fact that U.S. terrorist attacks are more likely to be committed by whites than People of Color or immigrants, discourses of racist nativism continue to assign a subordinate, racialized non- native status to U.S. immigrants and People of Color. n148 This assignment reinforces the superiority of the native, historically perceived as white, and bolsters the perceived threat of non-white foreigners to white American natives. A pervasive "threat" narrative has always been utilized to justify the exclusion and inhumane treatment of immigrants and People of Color. n149 In 1915, the silent film "Birth of a Nation" portrayed African Americans, particularly males, as "dangerous" n150 invaders of white society that threatened the well-being of white men and forced themselves upon white women. n151 We see similar narratives today of Latina and Latino immigrants. References to Victor Martinez (such as those made by Trump) n152 instill a similar fear of the "dangerous," "sexually violent" immigrant "criminal," while those made about immigrant women and their "anchor babies" instill a fear of threatening U.S. economic stability. n153 The threat narrative, as it has historically existed, is amplified and more easily justified as a tool of exclusion in a post-9/11 era. However, this narrative is not only based on false perceptions of criminality and economic"doom," but the very real threat to the U.S. white establishment. White elites, like Trump, are reacting to the inevitability of a non-white U.S. majority where their power and status are threatened. Consequently, a virulent adherence to white supremacy has emerged, articulated by racist nativist discourses that have influenced others to engage in their own adherence. As a result, we see increased support for a presidential candidate like Donald Trump who publically performs articulations of racist nativism upheld by ideologies of white supremacy. n154 In effect, these practices lead to a discursive opening for others with similar beliefs to engage in their own articulations that reinforce racist nativism, creating a space to more comfortably perform white supremacy. A critical analysis of the Trump presidential campaign and related sociopolitical contexts point to concerning possibilities for the future of race relations in the U.S. However, there is also hope in the possibilities that concepts like critical constitutionalism prompt us to consider. How do we strategically organize our scholarship with contemporary movements that forge ahead efforts for social and racial justice, considering the national and world conditions of inequity and violence we see today? This is a tremendously broad question, but a possible beginning point is to consider how we challenge ourselves to make those connections between our scholarship and our communities, even if it may lead to more questions. For example, what will racism and white supremacy look like in a non-white majority society, particularly as whites increasingly make claims to racial discrimination (i.e. "reverse racism")? n155 Will post- racial ideologies persist, or will they be dismantled by the resurgence of overt expressions of white supremacy, like those we see in the Trump campaign? Might social justice strategies that seek to challenge racism look different from those that seek to challenge white supremacy? Although these questions will not lead to answers here, such problem-posing is important for considering how we create a counter-discourse needed to disrupt the dangerous cycle of white supremacy we see continuing today. On several occasions, I have been asked to articulate what is different about the theorizing of racist nativism. To respond, I can explain how this conceptual tool affords an understanding of the particular strategies utilized to maintain perceived superiority of whites within a U.S. racial hierarchy that has historically utilized ideologies of white supremacy to justify and reproduce this hierarchy. I can also explain how racist nativism - and the discourses it produces - creates a way to understand anti-Latina and Latino racism as more than just perceptions and beliefs about a particular group of people, but also as a systematic effort to maintain white supremacy. However, such responses may prove insufficient when positioned within the context of critical constitutionalism and the need to be more strategic in efforts to bridge the scholarship-community divide. I believe racist nativism can be used as a tool for communities to name the racism they see happening in everyday experiences. Paulo Freire explains that the practice of naming is critical to articulate the pain caused by experiences marked by oppression. n156 Thus, racist nativism is a tool that allows us to name a particular form of racism, and the precursory ideologies of white supremacy we see emerging in contemporary immigration discourses that are an extension of a much longer racist history. n157 Naming the pain, suffering, and violence committed against Communities of Color, Freire argues, is also critical for developing strategies of liberation for historically oppressed groups. n158 Continuing to theorize to provide tools to our communities to name the forms of oppression we encounter daily is perhaps one of the most important strategies we can use to bridge our scholarship with our communities. VII. EPILOGUE: MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN As this article moves toward final stages of publication, numerous events have unfolded that I would be remiss not to mention. Just last week, Donald Trump became the official Republican candidate for U.S. President at the 2016 Republican National Convention (RNC). n159 In his acceptance speech, Trump painted a dark picture of a nation in "crisis," framing himself as the "law and order" candidate that "alone" can "fix" the nation's problems. Many of the national crises he mentioned are those he has spoken about throughout his campaign - undocumented immigration, "radical Islamic" terrorism, and economic instability. He used the most recent terror attacks in Orlando, Florida and Nice, France as events to support his stance to close U.S. borders to anyone who poses a "threat" to an American "way of life." In addition, Trump framed a new "crisis" that poses a threat to his supporters - the thousands of People of Color mobilizing across the nation this summer (2016) to demand justice for the police murder and violence that targets their communities. Trump stated, "Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities." n160 In his speech, Trump framed protesters as the cause of "violence," and attributed it (he also calls it "lawlessness" later in the speech) to the recent murders of police officers in Dallas, Texas, St. Paul, Minnesota, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana in July 2016. As a result, Trump now vows to "make American safe again" with a new emphasis on the collective threat of "violent" African Americans, "dangerous" undocumented Latina and Latino immigrants, and "treacherous" Muslims. n161 In just a few short months, what was an undocumented Latina/o immigrant stance in Trump's campaign has evolved to an anti-People of Color stance. In order to frame People of Color as the threat, Trump has completely removed the context from which
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those police killings unfolded. That is, the lone assailants' attacks were presumably in response to recent police murders of unarmed African Americans by mostly white officers. n162 Since 2014, the tragic murders of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Ezell Ford, Tanisha Anderson, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile (among many others) have made national headlines and sparked outrage among Communities of Color who have taken to the streets in protest. n163 We also see a broader collective resistance with, for example, the Black Lives Matter network. Black Lives Matter has emerged as a national force in the mobilization of communities across the U.S. to respond to police murder specifically, and police violence generally. n164 These events have led me to reflect on the analysis provided in this article. First, on the significance of racist nativism. Racist nativism was used in this article to explain the racialized non-nativeness of Latinas and Latinos specifically. However, the shift in Trump's threat narrative from the undocumented to Black and Brown people generally, signals a new direction for a broader application of racist nativism beyond Latinas and Latinos in the contemporary historical moment. In this context, all Black and Brown people are a perceived threat to an "American way of life," or, white life, as more and more Communities of Color take to the streets in opposition to police murders of unarmed African Americans. Second, the resistance demonstrated by Communities of Color this summer is hopeful. n165 This has also pushed me to consider possible gaps in the analysis of articulations of white supremacy. One gap would be the examination of the reverse effects of articulatory practices of racist nativism. Specifically, an examination of how People of Color respond to these practices. This summer, for example, we have seen Communities of Color across the nation mobilize against racism and police violence (a symptom of white supremacy), and engage in transformational resistance. n166 That is, resistance motivated by a critique of oppressive systems and racial justice that has the power to make change. The resistance of thousands of People of Color is a reminder that for every action, there is an equal or greater reaction. This article sought to shed light on the articulation of a virulent adherence to white supremacy as demonstrated in Trump's presidential campaign. However, as we have seen in recent months, the resistance of Communities of Color has equally challenged that virulence by demanding justice. Thus, future research should also examine the effects of articulatory practices of racism on People of Color. n167 In my final point of reflection, I have considered how scholars have attempted to challenge the Right's attempt to frame the resistance of People of Color as "violence." For example, Carol Anderson reframes the perceived violence of African American community protests (following Michael Brown's murder in Ferguson, Missouri in 2015) from Black anger to "white rage." Anderson states, What was really at work here was white rage. With so much attention focused on the flames, everyone had ignored the logs, the kindling. White rage is not about visible violence, but rather, it works its way into the courts, the legislatures, and a range of government bureaucracies. It wreaks havoc subtly, almost imperceptibly. Too imperceptibly, certainly, for a nation consistently drawn to the spectacular - to what it can see. It's not the Klan. White rage doesn't have to wear sheets, burn crosses, or take to the streets. Working the halls of power, it can achieve its ends far more effectively, far more destructively... The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement. n168 Anderson's analysis of white rage would support the growing anger and hostility of white conservatives we have seen during the past year in our U.S. presidential campaigns, and the success of Republican candidates who exuded that anger (i.e. Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio). n169 Trump has certainly fanned the flames of that rage in his speeches and articulations of racist nativism, where he promises his constituency to protect them from the perceived "lawlessness" and "violence" of the "Other." However, I would argue, as I have in this article, that what Anderson describes as white rage, is in fact white supremacy. Rage is an emotion tied to the ideologies of white supremacy some whites consciously and/or unconsciously hold. It is white supremacy that is the imperceptible force that has worked its way into our legal, social, and economic structures (via institutional racism) wreaking havoc on Communities of Color. White rage is still a symptom of the disease of white supremacy. We must continue to explicitly call out what we know we see. n170
These debates are where it is at! Questions of “the homeland” and “security” are the current nexus of racism through nativism. We have to discuss the ways immigration restrictions, counter-terrorism, and general policies attempting to protect “America” for (white) Americans rely on racial ordering. The background and genealogy of the genocide of indigenous populations also establishes a pretext for “homeland security” as violence. Wait until you get to the bottom of this evidence!
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Brendese, ’17 Prof. Poli Sci @ Johns Hopkins, P.J. (“Worlds Neither New Nor Brave: Racial Terror in America,” P.J. Brendese (bio) A commentary on “Brave New World” by Sheldon S. Wolin, Theory & Event, Vol. 5, No. 4 (2001) P.J. Brendese is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Racism, Immigration and Citizenship Program at Johns Hopkins University. He works at the intersection of critical theory, racial politics, de-colonial theory, migration and comparative political thought. He is the author of The Politics of Memory in Democratic Politics (Rochester UP, 2014). Currently, he is completing a book manuscript entitled The Race of Segregated Time. P.J. can be reached at [email protected]; his website is http://pjbrendese.com)
The lessons of those projects have been continually reinforced since the genocide at the heart of the nation’s founding.18 Presently, Native Americans are more likely to be killed by police than any other racial group.19 As Wolin writes in Democracy Inc. the wars against the Indians were, “the first chapter in the national commitment to eradicating terrorists while extending the reach of its government.”20It is therefore appropriate to turn to King Philip’s War (1675–6) as a formative example of the spectacles that were part and parcel of the gory work of exterminating Native peoples., The New England settlers and the Wampanonoag, Nipmuck, Narragansett, Pocomtuck and Abenaki tribes engaged in a fierce contest—to put it mildly. The colonists would ultimately prevail, but barely; and with stunning fatalities. Both sides engaged in torture of the living and mutilation of the dead.21 The English colonial settlers of the time were in an uncomfortable position when it came to their participation in cruelties they derided as “savage” when undertaken by both the Indians and the Spanish colonists.22 Committing the very atrocities they had criticized rendered ever more precarious the colonists’ identity as Englishmen. To shore up their self-perception, they fashioned an intriguing economy of pain and pleasure.23 The English depicted both the Spanish and the Indians as taking savage delight in torturing their captives—but not the other way around. Colonial accounts describe Indians suffering torture in silence at the center of a circle of spectatorship. A sign of bravery in Mohegan culture, the colonists took such stoicism as evidence of the Indians’ absence of pain, and thus their inhumanity. According to Historian Jill Lepore, the very question of whether the Indians and the English were of mutual human descent was what arguably “caused King Philip’s War in the first place.”24 As the war raged on, compassion toward Indians would prove as fleeting as the colonial belief in Indian humanity. For Puritan leader Increase Mather, the conflict was nothing less than a holy war against barbarism. Without irony, he would recount his delight at seeing Philip’s dead body “hewn to pieces before the Lord.”25 When the war was finally brought to an end, its culmination did not just amount to vanquishing an Indian foe. Rather, it concluded with a scene bearing at least a passing resemblance to that with which Foucault opens Discipline and Punish.26 After he was shot dead, King Philip’s corpse was drawn and quartered, one severed hand was given to the man who shot him and the other brought to Boston—allegedly in a bucket of rum. His decapitated head was displayed prominently on a pike in Plymouth.27 Some accounts indicate that Philip’s skull remained on display for the better part of a century, with his empty eye sockets serving as a proto-panoptic spectacle looking over the colony.28 One might be tempted to surmise that King Philip’s cranium was set out just to serve as a ghastly scarecrow warning vengeful natives away from any thoughts of attack. Yet such a reading would not explain why it remained in place for so long, and would miss the disciplinary function performed by the spectacle of the skull and the memory of the war. It is difficult not to see it as a celebrated trophy convening shared pleasure as well as a reminder to the colonists of whom the enemy was and the terror that stalks those who would dare forget that Schmittian distinction. Increase Mather’s son, the famously austere Cotton Mather, certainly took a lesson from the memory, even though he was only twelve at the time of the war. Young Cotton Mather didn’t miss the opportunity to desecrate Philip’s remains one more time by removing the jawbone from his skull years later to permanently silence the man he denigrated as “that blasphemous Leviathan.” 29 Read symbolically, the move expressed a need to prevent Philip and his people from telling counter- histories and gruesome tales of European atrocity in the context of a colonial populace still haunted by the possibility that they were degenerating into Indian savages. 30 Accordingly, writings on the war justifying the colonists’ actions quickly proliferated in its wake.31 With respect to King Philip’s remains, some Native Americans prefer an oral history where his head was found and given a proper burial. Notwithstanding such conflicting memories, Lepore asks an important question that lingers still: presuming the Indians did bury Philip’s skull, did it have a jaw? Memories of King Philip’s War continued to be invoked among whites to justify Indian removals well into the 19th century. Among Native Americans, the war would also fortify Indian identity in opposition to what would be an enduring incursion of white racial terror. In 1836 William Apess, a Pequot, eulogized King Philip as the greatest of all Americans while decrying the whites as the real savages.32 Of course, the Indian wars were hardly the only front on which the 18th century precursor to America’s contemporary “war on terror” was fought. The westward expansion would happen in concert with the imperial takeover of Mexican territory and scalps of Indians and Mexican mestizos both fetched a handsome bounty.33 Indian fighters of the day were memorialized, commemorated with historical markers and celebrated. William D. Carrigan contends “[s]uch acts of celebration, and the memories they sustained, defended not only the killing that was central to the Anglo-Indian conflict but also extralegal violence in general.”34 More broadly, “[t]he rhetoric of Anglo-Indian violence influenced vigilantes and defenders of extralegal violence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”35 Carrigan is clearly alluding to the overlap between racial, biopolitical agendas that impacted a range of nonwhite populations. In the mid-twentieth century, James Baldwin expressed the failure to make the connection between the intersecting plight of people of color tragicomically. Reflecting on the rude awakening experienced by young African Americans who grew up watching nostalgic Hollywood Westerns, Baldwin exclaimed “You’re watching cowboys and Indians and you’re rooting for Gary Cooper, and suddenly you realize, the Indians are you.”36 [P]ain did not hurt as much then as it does now; at least that is the conclusion a doctor may arrive at who has treated Negroes (taken as a representative of prehistoric man—) —Nietzsche37 Since the beginning of African bondage in the 17th century, slave insurrections occasioned myriad spectacles of cruelty. Typically, any hint
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of a slave uprising was met with punishment that included disciplinary spectacles of torture and execution. When, in 1767, several slave overseers were killed under mysterious circumstances in Alexandria Va., the alleged offenders were executed and whites placed their “grinning skulls” on chimneys as a warning to blacks.38 This fear was tepid compared to the terror yet to come. The news of the successful slave revolt in the French island of Santo Domingo in the 1790’s would reach the US with grisly tales of an estimated 60,000 dead. The Haitian Revolution was a display of reason, resistance and black humanity that confounded whites who believed it altogether impossible.39 The epic revolution made the need to reinforce white supremacy increasingly urgent.40 Following David Walker’s 1829 Appeal, Nat Turner’s bloody rebellion in 1831 made Southern nightmares of slave terror a reality in their own backyard. While relatively short-lived, Turner’s band killed dozens of whites, including women and children. Many were hacked to pieces. The retribution by whites for the actions was gruesome to the extreme, claiming upward of 200 lives.41 Nat Turner was publicly hanged as a customary “form of entertainment,” then decapitated, and dissected. 42 Quoting William Sidney Drewry, historian Stephen B. Oates, notes that Turner’s body was flayed: “They skinned it…and made grease of the flesh.”43 As recent as 2003, Elizabeth Neighbors, Turner’s great-great granddaughter, recounted from oral history that his “skin was made into a change purse.”44 As it happens, her recollection is not unfounded. In 1900, Drewry himself declared “Mr. R.S. Barnam’s father owned a money purse made of [Turner’s] hide.”45 Such purses made of African American skin that were passed down as heirlooms continue to surface still.46 The indiscriminate lynching of blacks that followed (many of whom had nothing to do with the rebellion) resulted in a decapitated head being mounted on an intersection, known thenceforth as “Blackhead Sign Post.”47 A road bearing the same name still runs through the county to this day.48 There are competing accounts of what happened to Turner’s head, but among the more recent developments is that his skull was donated to former Gary, Indiana mayor Richard Hatcher for display at the National Civil Rights Hall of Fame to be built in 2017.49 Questions of the skull’s authenticity appeared poised to overshadow the debate over whether it is appropriate to display human remains to be viewed at the pleasure of museumgoers, as opposed to being given a proper burial— the stated preference of Bruce Turner, one of Turner’s descendants.50 One can surmise that, under similar circumstances, the discovery of the human remains of whites whose killings gave way to the “birth of a nation” would likely be treated much differently.51 At any rate, we know that Nat Turner’s rebellion was neither the beginning nor the end of the spectacular displays of cruelty that would be visited upon those given the label of “terrorist” for opposing white supremacy.52 Shortly thereafter, another man born in 1800 also saw himself as an instrument of divine justice. John Brown would become one of the 19th century’s most infamous terrorists and would stir controversy over terrorism and the rightful appellation of the terrorist moniker.53 As is well known, the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Emancipation gave way to a host of innovative means through which white supremacy would be upheld. Jim Crow laws and terrorist gangs like the Ku Klux Klan and the Regulators blurred the lines between legal and extra-judicial means of racial terror in the postwar era. Chronicling the economy of pain, pleasure, and studied indifference to the disciplinary spectacles of late 19th century lynching, Ida B. Wells tells of brutal scenes of torture and humiliation that were attended by thousands, many of whom responded to the suffering with glee. Pleas of dissenters to at least “send the children home” were met with objections by “a hundred maddened voices” that they should be made to stay “to learn a lesson.”54 In the years intervening between then and now that “lesson” would continue to be driven home time and again, though the take- away of such lessons would vary significantly depending on the race of the viewer. In addition to outright lynching, the racism embedded in the criminal justice system has underscored a lasting perception that black lives and black losses still do not fully count as lives.55 As foregoing examples suggest, the spatio-temporal horizon of the disciplinary spectacles as part of a biopolitical project are not limited to the antecedent conditions of the injury, the visible suffering, dying, or even the moment of death itself. These repetitive spectacles extend across time and space to also encompass the political afterlives of dead bodies. The expansive reach of these disciplinary reminders/remainders is why, for instance, the recurrent seizure of Native land and trespasses upon sacred Indigenous burial grounds are so insufferable to Aboriginal peoples. By considering the spectacular desecration of both the living and the dead across time and terrain, one can see why the repeated shootings of unarmed African Americans by police are not just offensive in and of themselves. The denial of black humanity enacted by the shootings is redoubled by the failure to provide adequate medical care for the slain. At stake politically is why and how the decision to let Michael Brown’s body lie on the street in the hot sun for four hours while crowds gather is regarded as an outrage to some, an issue of police protocol to law enforcement apologists, and simply a matter of course to others. In the public imaginary, the most iconic and memorable media image of Brown’s death and the police treatment of his body is the picture of his hat lying on the ground. Yet, taken in context with the historical examples above, this display of inhumanity seems desperately unsurprising. Brown’s hat stands in metaphorically for his head; an absence of the intellect that his mother mourned was no longer bound for college—a head cut off from his life’s prior direction. Today the capacity for average citizens to use technology to circulate videos of injuries, transgressions and losses that impacted populations have suffered for generations has expanded significantly. While such recursive images of violence help make legible the reasons for why, say, today’s protesters carry signs that read “stop police terror,” the legitimacy of those protests is far from universally acknowledged— particularly, if not exclusively, among those on the right. In fact, what remains so disturbing about Wolin’s diagnosis of citizen spectatorship is that the awareness of the offenses across levels of power and political ideology has yet to precipitate an end to the killings. By acknowledging that many Americans still refuse to see themselves as implicated in the injustice of their government, I mean to underscore, and not diminish, the importance of ongoing protest politics and radical democratic coalition building. As the grassroots organizing of Black Lives Matter has so sharply articulated, the deeper trouble is that we have no reason to presume anything near a universal acknowledgement of the injustice of extinguishing black lives in the first place. Without a widespread capacity to register these outrages as the profane transgressions that they are, it is difficult to see how a polity can find itself at fault for its active and tacit consent of African American disposability. What makes the injustices visited upon many blacks killed by police especially grotesque and inexcusable is the impunity afforded to perpetrators despite the available evidence—not the lack thereof. In the case of Eric Garner, the
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country had access to a live video feed of the killing of a man accused of selling loose cigarettes. We actually hear Garner pleading with the officers for his life, gasping “I can’t breathe.” The country saw and heard—but (arguably) did not fully feel—the police strangling him to death mercilessly. No matter. In the eyes of the nation’s criminal justice system, Eric Garner’s death was all harm and no foul. This reality has led many activists to recognize that mandatory police body and dash cameras are a necessary, but not sufficient, step toward resolving to the problem of racial terror. What remains at issue and unresolved is the depth of white supremacy in economies of pain and pleasure as they relate to spectacle, surveillance and racial terror. Of course, such inquiry would require an acknowledgement that the spectacle being witnessed is not an isolated incident or the work of a few bad apples in police uniform. The fact that the nation continually fails to connect the brutality they witness to their own consent renders the recursive images of killing as “the pornography of black death.”56 One might object that the anesthesia of spectator indifference lies outside of what I have called economies of pain and pleasure. Certainly, such an argument goes, viewers need not actively take pleasure in the suffering of another for it to persist unchallenged. Audiences need only ignore it, tune it out, or simply not care one way or the other. True enough. But such numbed (non)reactions to those scenes never remain outside the racialized affective economy. Put differently, the language of pleasure and pain seems misplaced only when we fail to register indifference as the absence of spectator displeasure, or pain. On what lies between pain and pleasure, it is helpful to recall what scholars such as Saidiya V. Hartman and Michael Rogin (among others) have long contended—albeit in different ways. Stated in the broadest of terms, Hartman and Rogin have theorized how racial legacies of domination are inextricably tied to the ways in which non-white bodies are rendered as spectral objects of property, desire and entertainment. In other words, irrespective of whether African Americans or Native Americans are represented as objects of white pity, desire, violence or sympathy, they still remain objects.57 Hence, when Rogin and Hartman offer historical analyses of black minstrelsy, film, literature and deadly racial spectacle, none are matters of esoteric antiquarianism. At the most basic level, Rogin and Hartman show how the long history of red and black bodies put to spectator “use” and consumed at the pleasure of viewers illuminates how it is that contemporary audiences can still experience scenes of racial subjection with normalized, alienated detachment. Pace Rogin, that spectacular history is part of what made it possible for the dead Indian (and not a living one) to become a key symbol of the country.58 As a demonological trope, in Rogin’s lexicon, terrorism functions as a vehicle of counter-subversion through which whites can imitate their purported enemies at, or with, pleasure.59 For sure, the outrageous scenes sketched above might occasion fleeting empathy, discomfort or guilt among whites. Yet so long as segregated perception persists whereby even “real” people of color are viewed as spectral objects, such emoting isn’t likely to translate into political change. On this score, Nietzsche’s caution about guilt keeps company with the reflections of the authors above. That is, the experience of guilt as a response of another’s injury, the self-satisfaction of a spectator’s affective reaction to her suffering, or a viewer’s empathic projection onto the sufferer, can all serve to take the place of any intervention at all.60 One can be understandably afraid that, sustained and trenchant, spectator politics could only give way to ever more spectacular suffering. That fear animates Aldous Huxley’s ironically titled Brave New World which culminates in a hellscape that, as I discuss below, isn’t entirely brave nor new. Given that Wolin invoked the Shakespearean phrase, but did not develop the connection directly, I close with brief reflections on the relays between the two as they speak to the themes at work in these pages. Huxley’s dystopia was one in which the people no longer needed to fear the enforced pain of Big Brother and mandated memory-hole of forgetting of Orwell’s 1984.61 With a people devoted to seeking media for pleasure in the form of the drug soma, or going to the “feelies” instead of the movies, social control would not need censorship since the informational content would be irrelevant to a population so disposed to seeking their own ecstatic enjoyment. In his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman maintained that Huxley had been the more prescient of the two, particularly in view of society’s technological addiction to the media of television and resolute refusal to see the medium as a form of ideology.62 While Wolin does not address Huxley’s novel explicitly, the sensibility of his essay—and, I think, his work more generally—would seem to argue against Postman’s stark opposition to Orwell in favor of a composite view that incorporates, chastens and updates their insights. After all, the most fearfully Orwellian aspects of the War on Terror is that it is perpetual, its objects and motives of the War are subject to redefinition as power sees fit, and there is precious little in the way of public memory that would measure the length of superpower transgressions between yesterday and today. The features of Brave New World’s “negative Utopia” are largely thrown into relief by the experiences of John “the Savage.” An outlier hailing from an Indigenous community—an Indian brave in the New World—the Savage is generally appalled by the sensual excesses of the eugenically engineered “civilized” society and opposed to what he views as its detached depravity. He is a walking anachronism by virtue of his outlook and, not incidentally, by his race. The Savage is offended by the anesthetic barrier of civilization that shields its inhabitants from the range of affective attachments, such as family, monogamy, grief, etc.—all of which he regards as key to a fully human life. In turn, he is disciplined for mourning his mother and thus violating the “death conditioning” that conveys the appropriate indifference toward mortality. In protest, The Savage embraces the asceticism and human pain that has become profane in the future civilization, and then accused of demanding “the right to be unhappy.”63 The novel culminates in an orgiastic media spectacle of the Savage being accosted by an intoxicated crowd that mocks him, and jeering, chants for a whipping. The book closes with the image of the Savage’s dead body hanged on a hilltop over the town, twisting in the wind like a compass needle off-course, while helicopters circle overhead. Notable in Huxley’s warning is the way the plot dramatizes as futuristic the parallels to the well-documented disciplinary spectacles of the past for an age rife with torture scenes such as those of the prisoners of Abu Ghraib. The Savage’s anachronistic status is a reminder of how the subjugation of colonialism by whites in the New World has long been understood as reproducing the “historical evolution of mankind” on a world stage.64 The novel’s dystopia is complete with how the civilizational use of pleasure has long rendered grief a hangover of a past time, and not just an experience of loss that makes the past present. Not unlike popular reactions to the grievances of racial minorities today, the Savage’s objections to the prevailing order are alternately met with indifference, mocking disdain, or plaintive questions of what there is to complain about; “why can’t you just be happy?” The latter reaction aligns with the reflections of people of color that white supremacy requires not just subjugation, but demands that the subjugated maintain the pretense of being happily grateful for their own subjection. Those daring to break this façade in the face of whiteness run the risk of prompting reactions ranging from awkwardness, social death, and outright assassination. More generally, Huxley casts an ominous pall over the local, state and nation-level investment in policing racial minorities who would claim the power to interrupt the enjoyment of the prevailing socio-temporal order. Consider the widespread outrage at the “thugs” who dare protest police killings by speaking uncomfortable truths in between commercial breaks showcasing perennially cheerful consumers to an audience ingesting their preferred media palliative. In this context, it hardly seems surprising that some of those who resent the protests of Black Lives Matter have even gone so far as to petition the White House to label it a terrorist organization.65 As I intimated above, the bleak future of Brave New World was itself not without precedent. Huxley’s novel can be read as somewhere between a parody of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (ca. 1610) and its grim sequel. Set on a remote island, The Tempest plays off the exotic tales of Edenic islands and savage cannibals that circulated in a time of expanding European colonization.
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Prospero’s exile from Naples led to his subjugation of Ariel and Caliban whom he “discovered” on the island, the latter having previously ruled the territory. Made a slave, Caliban (a virtual anagram of “Cannibal”) is depicted as closest to nature and, having learned the language of his captors, deeply resents his bondage. It is therefore a fitting irony that a mark of the Savage’s erudition is that he repeatedly quotes Shakespeare at length. He is especially fond of Miranda’s exclamation when she finally travels from the island where the play is set to Europe: “How beauteous mankind is! Oh brave new world, That has such people in’t!” The dreamlike civilization Miranda lauds upon seeing the new (Old) World turns out to be a nightmare in Huxley’s rendering, and the colonial roots of its brutality are not incidental in either drama. Nor have the relays between past and present in the play been lost on post-colonial theorists—not least among them is Aimé Césaire, who adapted the play in his Une Tempête.66 In Césaire’s version, Prospero ultimately frees Ariel, the more accommodating subject who sought independence as opposed to the violent revolt favored by Caliban. In the end, Césaire’s Prospero retains control over the island and of Caliban. Politically, the lingering tension between Ariel’s freedom and the continued servitude of Caliban (who changes his name to X), set the stage for future anti-colonial and black nationalist struggles. Theoretically, Césaire’s unresolved ending of the play anticipates Fanonian reflections on how colonialism always comes home.67 The ominous prospect of colonialism’s violent homecomings brings us back to the extent to which Wolin’s invocation of Brave New World resonates today. The occupants of Huxley’s dystopic future don’t just fail to bemoan the modes of “feeling free” and neglect to criticize the technological/pharmaceutical excess as a substitutive satisfaction for political freedom. Nor is it simply the case that they do not grieve the loss of the past and any sense of government accountability. For the most part, they quite literally don’t know what they’re missing. And, satiated by steady consumption, they don’t care. While much depends on how one reads what the drug soma could metaphorically reference today, the various intoxicants at play in Huxley’s novel ultimately subsume many of the complexities of how race functions within contemporary economies of pleasure and pain. While much more could be said on this score, the book’s powerfully suggestive narrative tropes give the text its amplitude and, arguably, some of its staying power. Yet these “drugs” come at the expense of analytic precision with respect to how the various machinations of disavowal and spectatorship function. Tempting as it is to leave it at the level of external critique, doing so would ignore what I take to be Huxley’s challenge and the choice confronting the public that the book convenes. Readers are free to ignore the history and literature the text clearly references, ride the arc of the narrative as a means of escapist entertainment and enjoy consuming the book as yet another brand of spectator soma. Blissfully unaware that the numbed minions living in a racially stratified spectator society are them, such readers are in effect, watching themselves. 68 Consumer-readers in search of escapism aren’t likely to be bothered by the fact that their enjoyment of the book entails taking pleasure in the imminence of their own demise. Alternately, readers can opt to reposition themselves in relation to the text, and intercede as coauthors of what that text “is” and investigate the extent to which today’s Alphas, Betas, Gammas and so on, have been conditioned by a disciplinary relationship to “Savage” spectacles. By my lights, Rogin offers a generative account of how the willful innocence of whiteness is leveraged upon a disavowal of the past as well as a dangerously projective, phenomenological tourism; a complex participant spectatorship whereby white viewers presume the capacity to inhabit the space, and identity, of the other. This allows whites to take what they want by way of imitation, undertake the plunder of exoticism, and assuage their consciences with paternalistic empathy—all while preserving the prerogative to withdraw anytime at will. The freedom of access and withdrawal is of supreme importance, but the prerogative of this freedom is not limited to what Rogin calls a “cultural” declaration of independence. 69 The racial population being watched, imitated and imposed upon is also always already subject to biopolitical disposal at the pleasure of the dominant race. Simply put, it is deeply significant that the recursive movements of occupation, acquisition and return at play in spectator politics are also paradigmatic maneuvers of coloniality. Colonialism comes home indeed. The racialization of spectator democracy enables whites to “care” and “empathize” rhetorically without risk, imitate the “savage” actions they associate with non-whites, always with one foot always inside an exit door that offers a safe return to whiteness–as-usual. Given the priority of spectator over participant, it logically follows that solidarity is itself at risk of becoming an object of virtual reality. Today’s incarnation of the sense of citizen powerlessness that Wolin recognized occurs in a spacetime wherein neocolonial logics of power intermingle in the conjunctive overlap between white supremacy, the War on Terror and the imperial legacies underwriting contemporary neoliberalism. Against the backdrop of the nation’s segregated memory, such continuities and innovations of power are not merely insufficiently contested. To an alarming degree, they remain unintelligible.
It is about security and the ontology of “the threat.” Let’s discuss social security as a mechanism for “the emergency,” including the social crises highlighted by the Black Panthers all the way through political “crises” in Syria, North Korea, Ukraine, etc. These crises come together through the links between social and political crisis and the ontology of security.
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Illner, ’15 Peer, PhD Fellow U. Copenhagen, “Who’s Calling the Emergency? The Black Panters, Securitisation and the Question of Identity”, Culture Unbound, Volume 7, 2015: 479-495. Published by Linköping University Electronic Press: http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se, Peer Illner is a PhD fellow at the Copenhagen Center for Disaster Research’s Changing Disasters Programme. His work uses disasters as a heuristic lens through which to view politics and aesthetics. Current research interests include political rhetoric, metapolitics, disruptive aesthetics as well as contemporary French and German thought and current social movements)
We can draw an analogy between Belgium’s behaviour in WWI and the Black Panthers’ doctrine of revolutionary suicide. While fully aware of being crushed by the U.S police in cases of armed confrontation, the Panthers still advocated this confrontational fight, not in the hope of any real political gains but in order to secure their self-identity as a combatant social group. As Steele specifies:
In such cases a state like Belgium ‘gives practical proof’ that in its consideration self- identity was ‘larger than life.’ The existential angst which befalls all social agents is therefore solved through a painful, costly, and tragic, but also emancipatory, action (Steele 2008: 113).
Through the ontological security framework, we can gain a better understanding of the Panthers’ doctrine of revolutionary suicide. Dramatizing a situation of poverty and racist marginalisation into a “civil war against Blacks” sharpened the antagonism between white hegemony and the black community and thus was likely to guarantee group cohesion among African Americans. In the words of Steele, it ensured ontological security by stabilising the black community’s sense of self. How- ever, apart from the aggressions of a racist system, the Panthers perceived another threat to their identity, coming from within the African American electorate; namely the promise of formal integration into the American mainstream, embodied by the Civil Rights Movement. For the Panthers, this threatened to assimilate Blacks and dissolve their constituency into the wider body politic. Writing on the relation between ontological security and political conflict, the po- litical scientist Bahar Rumelili has presented a binary schema of political identity that we can apply to our case of 1960’s America. For Rumelili, political identity is constructed along a twofold axis. Both inclusively, by a set of practices, behaviours and values “that can possibly be acquired by any state if it fulfils certain criteria” (2007: 38) or essentially, through traits “assumed to be based on some inherent characteristics.” (ibid.) Following this perspective, we can say that prior to desegregation, full American identity was defined in essential terms by white skin colour and in practice-based terms by a capitalist market economy and the values of democracy, individualism and liberalism. In this context, the Civil Rights Movement demanded the abolition of the essential component of American identity qua white- ness and an opening of its parameters to include black people in the practice-based performance of American citizenship. As is well known, white hegemony re- sponded by somewhat attenuating the power of its essential, race-coded identity and admitting Blacks that were capitalist, democratic and liberally oriented. While providing undeniable legal gains for African Americans in the South, from an ontological security perspective, this inclusion was at the same time threatening to black self-identity, as blackness now became integrated into the American mainstream. This inclusion diluted what had counted as black (the opposition to white privilege) and, in the words of Steele and Rumelili, it therefore enhanced black ontological insecurity by rupturing a continuous black identity. After desegregation, the Panthers took on the difficult task of mobilising politically around race issues in a situation of newly granted formal equality. This was a time when many within the black community had aligned themselves with the American mainstream in the hope of thereby reaching the end of racism. To safeguard a continuous black identity, the Panthers’ point of contention had to be that America preserved a disa- vowed core of essential whiteness that still kept Blacks in a situation of radical exclusion. It is possible that the continuous black identity the Panthers were advocating was to a large extent defined precisely by the struggle against normative whiteness. Rumelili has provided evidence of how identities become problematically attached to conflict. For her, “protracted conflicts and the habits and routines that states have formed around them generate a sense of ontological security,” (2014: 3) as the conflict becomes a narrative of the individual actors’ sense of self. The possibility of conflict resolution on the other hand induces ontological insecurity, as it involves actors giving up their well-kept narratives about themselves (as Greek over Turkish or Israeli over Palestinian in Rumelili’s examples). Rumelili’s research into onto- logical security can help explain the attachment that political actors form to certain structures of conflict. In our case, it provides an explanation of why the Panthers persisted with their radical politics especially after the pacifying gains of the Civil Rights Movement. Following Steele’s example with regard to Belgium, it becomes understandable why the Panthers indeed preferred death to the
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assimilation into an identity that went against their established sense of self. In conclusion, the ontological security framework is able to explain the dramatic early phase of the Panthers, in which the party endorsed a position of Black Nationalism and revolutionary violence. Through an aggressive and harsh political rhetoric, it performatively sharpened the identity distinctions between ‘black’ and ‘white’ as well as the ‘real’ Blacks that were opposed to the white mainstream and the ‘integrationists’ who had abandoned the struggle and assimilated to whiteness. However, the schema doesn’t offer an explanation for the Panthers’ sudden turn to community service after 1970, when all armed resistance and most overt aggression was dropped. It will now be argued that, in order to understand this political change we need to shift our gaze away from identity and onto the question of positionality.
Securitization through immigration policy generates a rhetoric of criminality that leads to structural violence
Weissman 14 – Profe of Law U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law (Deborah, “The Politics of Narrative: Law and the Representation of Mexican Criminality,”)
Not perhaps since the 1910 Mexican revolution have conditions of violence and¶ criminality in Mexico so preoccupied the United States. Pages of American newspapers fill almost daily with graphic accounts of horrific crimes throughout Mexico, each more gruesome than the other: decapitations, execution-style mass murders, corpses in barrels of lye.1 Official U.S. governmental accounts attribute these acts variously to escalating warfare among drug cartels, a militarized response by the Mexican government to drug-cartel violence, and corruption.2 In its most sensational depiction, Mexico has been portrayed as a lawless country; violence has been represented as a full-scale drug war at our “doorstep.”3 Most recently, the crisis of arriving Central American children has been attributed to Mexico’s “very porous¶ border,” its “smuggling corridors,”4 and the “widespread and well-documented involvement of Mexican authorities with human smugglers and organized crime.”5¶ Accounts of Mexico have become familiar and formulaic. Any totalizing characterization that serves to flatten the Mexican landscape is not only inaccurate, but suggests a type of “Mexico-bashing” that finds sustenance into the dark interior of American nativism and xenophobia. Reports of the threat posed by drug-related violence to national security, fear for public safety posed by Mexican migration, and the depiction of the country as a pathway for human trafficking, have assumed distorted proportions.6 Certainly, the death toll, fear, and suffering have sharply risen since the Mexican government militarized its response to drug cartel violence.7 As a matter of geography, the tens of thousands of Central Americans fleeing gang- related violence born of failed drug-war policies, trade agreements, and corruption, travel the same corridors that traffickers often use to supply the drugs to meet an almost insatiable demand in the United States. In fact, the crime rate in most of Mexico is unexceptional and the overall¶ murder rate is lower than other countries in the region, and similar to the United States.8 Moreover, the crime rate generally throughout the country has declined.9¶ Mindful of the consequences of the distortions and the misinformation that leads to the misrepresentation of a people, Mexican civil rights groups have attempted to provide a more nuanced view of conditions in Mexico.10 Paradoxically, U.S. officials repeatedly state that the border is presently as secure as it has ever been.11 FBI reports and recent data indicate that accounts of “spillover violence” are unfounded.12 The United States describes the Mexican government as cooperative and working to “‘prioritize the safe and humane treatment of individuals’” who are deported to Mexico.13 This is not to minimize the violence that has cost Mexicans dearly. Rather, the seriousness of the situation requires an analysis of the drug- related violence that goes beyond the sensationalist descriptions which may chronicle the current turmoil¶ but reveals little about the political and socio-economic circumstances that give rise to the conditions of a drug war and to the “Mexican-as-criminal” narrative that pervades social relations and legal constructions in the United States.14¶ The construct of the Mexican as a menace is not new. It is
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possessed of a proper history with origins in the nineteenth century.15 Mexicans have been described as “‘earless and heartless creatures’, ‘semi-barbarians’, who were ‘only interested in satisfying their animal wants’”16 and as “uneducated and grossly ignorant, highly excitable, and given to spasmodic outbursts of passion, outlawry and violence.”17 They have been lynched for being “‘too Mexican,’” and harassed for speaking their native language or otherwise expressing their culture.18 They have long been considered the “prototypical illegal alien.”19¶ The discourse has served to rationalize social and legal policies and practices of exclusion. However, it is important to note that the master narrative of Mexican criminality has also been adopted by well-meaning legal advocates who have availed themselves of the drug violence narrative for humanitarian purposes and deployed to enhance an immigrant’s chance of remaining lawfully in the United States through various forms of immigration relief.20 Still others have used the specter of drug cartel violence to advocate for reformed, humane drug laws throughout the hemisphere.21
The spectacle of Mexican Cartel violence collapses effective deliberation – rejection is a pre-requisite to effective border governance
Correa-Cabrera 14 – U Texas at Brownsville, Govt. Chair. Her areas of expertise are Mexico-U.S. relations, border security, immigration, and organized crime. (Guadalupe, w/ Terence Garrett, and Michelle Keck, “Administrative Surveillance and Fear: Implications for U.S.-Mexico Border Relations and Governance,” European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 96)
The media spectacle surrounding the Violence has led to a lack of public discourse useful in having deliberations for effective governance and civic understanding necessary for a healthy polis (Stone 2002) and a weakening of State Power.9 Through the corporate-owned news media, fear is promoted as a commodity through the selling of news and information sensational- izing Violence in Mexico, through U.S. media sources. The media specta- cle (Debord 1967/1995; Agamben 1993; Bauman 2010; Kellner 2003, 2007, 2008) serves as a primary source for the promotion of Violence in the region. Politics has been truncated through the mean/ends utilitarian- induced market spectacle (Debord 1967/1995; Kellner 2003, 2007, 2008; and based on Arendt 1958), which effectuates a disruption of the polis through the ravages of the market (Stone 2002). The era of the politics of fear prevails on the border of the U.S. and Mexico through government ac- tors and non-governmental personnel utilizing the spectacle for material gain at the expense of civil society....Similar to immigration, the illegal drug trade has been defined by the U.S. government as a potential terrorist threat due to the recent increase in drug violence in Mexico. The rise in violence has raised fears among U.S. policymakers regarding the Mexican government’s ability to control the drug cartels. For example, U.S. House Representative Michael McCaul, Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, has introduced legislation that would designate top Mexican TCOs, including the Sinaloa Cartel, the Gulf Cartel, the Arellano Félix Organization, Los Zetas, La Fa- milia Michoacana, the Beltrán Leyva brothers, and the Juárez Cartel as foreign terrorist organizations (Aguilar 2011b). Such a designation would give U.S. law enforcement personnel additional tools to fight Mexican originated TCOs, including the ability to freeze assets and increase penalties for certain offenses. Several lawmakers have backed McCaul’s legislation – including former U.S. Representative Silvestre Reyes whose spokesman noted in 2011 that cartels, ‘Frequently engage in brutal acts of narco- terrorism to undermine democratic institutions and the rule of law, and to incite fear among the people and law enforcement’ (Aguilar 2011b, para. 9).¶ U.S. media and the politics of fear¶ Given the wide exposure the issue has received in the media, it is evident
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that fear plays a key role in the discourse on border issues, U.S. immigration policy, and national security policy.3 Most often this fear is associated with terrorism, undocumented immigration, and with the potential spread of Mexican drug-related violence into the U.S. These purported threats to U.S. national security are almost universally said to be literally climbing over the U.S. southern border from Mexico.¶ This growing sense of fear has evolved and gotten more complex since the turn of the century. The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, and former President Felipe Calderón’s ‘war on drugs’, which began as Calde-rón began his first year in power at the end of 2006, are key events that have changed the image of Mexico in the eyes of the U.S. public. As a re- sult, fear has become an essential component of U.S. policy towards its southern neighbour. Mass media are essential to spreading this growing sense of fear. ‘The corporate media has been exploiting fear for decades in their excessive presentation of murder and violence and dramatization of a¶ wide range of threats from foreign enemies and within everyday life’ (Kellner 2003, 91). It is worth mentioning that some journalists who work for the mainstream media seem to have their own or imposed agendas, given the marketing prospects of bloody sounding headlines.¶ Nowadays, in the U.S., the idea of a terrorist threat, and the fear that it can come through the southern border has combined with the unprecedent- ed levels of drug violence in Mexico, and the possibility that this violence could also spill across the U.S.- Mexico border. The perception of a deadly threat made up of drug violence and terrorism creeping over the border and the need to combat its entrance into the U.S., has created a media spectacle (Debord 1967/1995; Edelman 1964/1985; Kellner 2003, 2007, 2008), detrimental to societies and partially responsible for the continuation of the phenomenon of what we could define as ‘the politics of fear’.¶ This media spectacle weds concepts such as ‘narco-insurgency’ and ‘narco-terrorism’, and has even brought in the possibility of an alliance of the U.S. deadliest enemy – Al Qaeda – and the brutal Zetas organized crime group. The attention such a spectacle generates has intensified fear in the U.S., especially among U.S. border residents. In turn, this growing fear is used to justify extreme border security measures, including harsh legislation against undocumented immigrants (Correa-Cabrera 2012).
Lykke at. al., ’16 (Contexts, U Maryland Grads, Lucia Lykke, Brittany Dernberger, Rose Malinowski Weingartner, Carrie Clarady, Nicole Bedera, Moriah Willow, Joey Brown, Saswathi Natta, and Philip Cohen. “how to end institutional racism,” April 7, 2016, https://contexts.org/blog/how-to-end-institutional-racism/)
Immigration If the president is going to tackle institutional racism, he or she will need to tackle immigration policy (and not by building more walls). Immigration law has historically been used to classify and exclude people on the basis of race (for example, the Chinese exclusion laws). Today’s immigration policy is no different. Federal activities have been increased in recent years to target Latinos: for example, after the fortification of the US-Mexico border in the 1990s, Mexicans are criminally prosecuted for illegally crossing the border and can face prison time and felon criminal records. Recent research has found that for Latinos, immigration law is increasingly intertwined with criminal law, resulting in greater dangers for those crossing the border and increasing fear among immigrants that family members will be deported. In the “war on terror” Muslims are targets for federal immigration policy enforcement. Although post-9/11 federal policies supposedly only target noncitizens suspected of terrorism, in practice, Arab and Muslim citizens are singled out for racial and religious profiling and denial of due process.
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d) Incarceration/Criminal Justice
Denial can be a powerful toxin on the soul of a nation. Right now, the United States of America is lost in a thick fog of denial regarding the uncomfortable truths about racialized mass incarceration. n3 The United States has only "5% of the world's population, but houses 25% of the world's prisoners." n4 Among that 25%, "Blacks and Hispanics, together account for about two thirds of the state prison population," n5 and this figure does not even include those in local jails and federal prisons. Considering the total number of the nation's incarcerated, blacks alone account for "more than 40% of the current prison population, while making up only 12% of the U.S. population." n6 The black-white disparity in imprisonment is especially large. Black men are six to eight times more likely to be in prison than whites. n7 It is clear that the practice of racialized mass incarceration has dramatically changed "the racial and economic caste of the prison population." n8 Something is wrong with this picture; and America is "just beginning to reflect upon the political and cultural meaning of this new [prison] institution, upon what it means for America to be a mass imprisonment society." Prof. C. Hunt, ‘16
This area of the debate is superb and should strongly be considered as an area in all the wordings. For more details on criminal justice reform, take a look at last year’s race paper as well as topic papers discussing that area in general. In many ways, the “race” focus (reduce institutional racism in incarceration settings/criminal justice/etc.) would set this up as a narrow version of the controversy that broadly calls for changes in criminal justice policy. Of course this topic would ostensibly include a few other areas as well so it would, in that sense, be bigger--- but the best parts of the criminal justice/policing debate would still be under consideration. In other words, the intersections of the themes of racial injustice and the enforcement of the law would make for a concentrated debate as one of a few areas linked together through racial inequality. The policy solutions are numerous, but an excellent limit would be to center on those policies that tackle structural racism directly, excluding some of the very small due process affs that we struggled with on the 1994-5 topic:
RESOLVED: "That the federal government should substantially change rules and/or statues governing criminal procedure in federal courts in one or more of the following areas: pretrial detention, sentencing."
One of the issues that will come up and will provide ground for both sides is how to determine that a particular law enforcement office is practicing racial discrimination or worse. Auditing may be a policy to examine in that context:
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Sonja Starr, ’16 (fmr Harvard debater, U Mich. Law, ’16 (2016 U Chi Legal F 485, “Testing Racial Profiling: Empirical Assessment of Disparate Treatment by Police”)
In real life, race mediates the lives people lead, but auditing measures disparate treatment of individuals who are doing the same thing in the same places. This is both a strength and a limitation. On the one hand, it enables sound causal inferences: if we eliminate differences other than race, we can more confidently attribute disparate outcomes to racial discrimination. Auditing designs would be much better tailored to isolate the effects of racial discrimination than regression studies and other observational approaches. If testers are matched and trained well, it could approximate a true experiment, but in a real- life setting, not a lab. n162 The downside is that auditing may miss dimensions of real-world racial discrimination. For example, if the police heavily target young men who dress a certain way, and virtually all such young men are black, perhaps clothing style is not a confounder that should be filtered out via the use of identically dressed testers, but rather a race proxy--a mechanism for racially disparate treatment. Similarly, most of the designs above would test disparities within neighborhoods (or at checkpoints), and would miss differences driven by neighborhood racial composition. Auditing is best designed to address intra- neighborhood disparities, which is an important limitation, although it bears emphasis that even if this were all it was good for, it would fill an important gap. As Part II illustrated, regression methods are a reasonably effective tool for estimating inter-neighborhood disparities; it is the disparate treatment of individuals within neighborhoods that is the most difficult to get at using observational methods, because of the absence of individual- level data. The auditing design could, in any event, be extended to test the effects of the neighborhood or other race-correlated variables and their interaction with individual race--for example, by changing the same testers' clothing or sending them to different neighborhoods. An advantage over observational studies of inter-neighborhood disparities is that this approach could rule out, as an explanation for those disparities, inter-neighborhood differences in the behavior of the individuals being approached. That is, if testers act the same in every neighborhood, systematic differences in their treatment across neighborhoods would provide strong evidence that it is not the testers, but an actual difference in police approaches. Still, even if auditing reveals inter-neighborhood disparities, it would not necessarily mean that that difference is because of neighborhood racial composition. n163 Similarly, evidence that the police disfavor some characteristic like a clothing style would not definitively prove that they are using it as a race proxy. Auditing would produce context-specific estimates, not an overall measure of racial discrimination in stops or arrests. n164 These estimates will be more informative if the test is similar to some class of activity that produces a reasonable share of the department's stops or arrests. Loitering and minor-in-possession are good examples. E. Implementation Given its longstanding role in civil rights enforcement, federal or state agencies' use of auditing to assess police disparities is plausible. Tester programs in other areas have sometimes been controversial, n165 [*527] and certainly may be in this context as well, but there are countervailing political pressures. In surveys, large majorities oppose racial profiling. n166 The Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice has a strong interest in the issue and in police abuses generally, n167 and the issue has been a high overall priority following recent events. n168 Outside-agency auditing would lose some of the advantages of police-department self-monitoring (for example, access to internal data), but outside auditors could still employ trained undercover officers and protect them from physical or legal harm. The outside-enforcement approach would face less risk of being compromised by leaks or internal resistance. It is the most plausible strategy when a police department is hostile to scrutiny. Auditing could also be required by court order or settlement in civil rights litigation. Analogously, the New Jersey Attorney General's office carried out a major benchmarking study under a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice. n169 Outside monitors have been appointed for numerous police departments, often under consent decrees. n170 Voluntary self-auditing by police departments is promising, but is it realistic? After all, adverse findings could be embarrassing and invite litigation. Moreover, the studies could be resource-intensive and risk angering officers and unions. Still, while many departments would doubtless reject the idea, the 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the U.S. are not monolithic. Typically, agency heads are political appointees, and there is no reason to assume that all cities' political [*528] leaders would be primarily interested in hiding racial discrimination rather than eliminating it. Hundreds of police departments have already invested considerable resources in collecting racial disparity data, and many have carried out ambitious studies. n171 Some police departments have "early warning" programs to identify individual problem officers. n172 Any of these programs risk litigation or officer backlash--indeed, programs that risk getting individual officers in trouble may raise a worse risk of backlash than auditing does. n173 These risks have not precluded these programs' adoption. There is substantial precedent for using undercover police work to help departments self-diagnose problems. Some departments use a practice called "red teaming" to test police responses to security threats and emergency situations. n174 Undercover agents are also often employed in police corruption investigations. n175 Several police departments (including New York and Los Angeles) regularly conduct "random integrity tests"--exposing officers to random stings. n176 Corruption is likely as embarrassing to police departments as racial discrimination is--yet these departments have carried out the corruption equivalent of auditing. Even if departments can be persuaded to undertake auditing studies, can they be trusted not to undermine their accuracy? Internal affairs divisions and police leadership have often been sharply [*529] criticized for papering over police misconduct and corruption. n177 Under the right conditions, however, the prospects for effectiveness are reasonable. Self-studies will be more credible if undertaken together with outside watchdog organizations or academic researchers who have control over data collection and analysis n178 --provided those outside actors are truly independent. n179 Undercover agents, presumably borrowed from other departments, would have to be carefully chosen, because they would have to be trusted not to tip off other officers or to try to manipulate the study's findings. n180 If police departments are reluctant to expose themselves to liability or criticism, they could conduct internal auditing programs without publicizing results, or ask academic collaborators to publish anonymized results. To
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encourage self-studies, legislatures could consider creating evidentiary privileges. Congress has enacted just such "self-testing" privileges for mortgage lenders and creditors in the Fair Housing Act and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. n181 The privileges apply only if, upon discovering evidence of discrimination, the lender undertakes "appropriate corrective action." n182 If legislatures applied similar privileges to police self-testing, they would be modest extensions of the "self-criticism privileges" that law enforcement agencies already often invoke (which cover subjective analyses but not underlying facts). n183 If government involvement proves impracticable, academic researchers might be able to carry out some of the designs on their own, [*530] although this would entail greater challenges. Academic research is governed by Institutional Review Board (IRB) oversight, n184 but IRBs generally focus on harms to subjects (here, police) and perhaps third parties. Here, essentially all the risk is on the research staff (the testers). n185 Even if an IRB decides such risks are outside its purview, ethical researchers should consider them. While well-informed research staff should be free to take on projects carrying non-zero risk (as much research entails), supervisors should aim to minimize the risk to research staffers, especially if they are students who may be reluctant to refuse. Designs such as passing through security checkpoints, for instance, may satisfy this requirement, at least if the researchers breach no laws (such as prohibitions of recording devices). Overall, while auditing designs could face serious practical and political hurdles, their use is plausible. They offer a potentially valuable new addition to the toolkit of researchers, civil rights agencies, and police departments. While what they measure is limited, it is exactly the thing that observational tools have in most contexts been unable to measure effectively: disparate treatment among similarly situated individuals, rather than neighborhoods. IV. CONCLUSION Empirical research on race and policing poses many challenges, but it is worth trying to overcome these challenges because the stakes of the legal and policy debates such research seeks to inform are high. In many communities of color, intensive police presence fundamentally shapes daily life. Racial disparities in policing have recently come to the forefront of the national conversation, but they are not new; despite decades of research, we still do not have a clear picture of the reasons for them. Constitutional litigation can be a valuable tool for redressing disparities, and constitutional doctrine specifically asks us to identify whether racially disparate outcomes are the result of disparate treatment by the police. Many police departments themselves care about this question, having committed to the elimination of racial profiling. But in most contexts, we simply do not have the data and the statistical tools to engage in this kind of causal analysis, and we may need to turn to new ways of generating new kinds of data that allow more rigorous analyses. The use of testers is one approach worth considering seriously. There are multiple promising empirical strategies for analyzing racial disparities, and I do not suggest that the use of field experiments is likely to displace the need for careful observational analyses. Such analyses have already provided useful insights on some questions, and I have suggested some ways to push observational research further, such as the creation of more ambitious surveys about behavior and police-citizen contacts. But such research will always face omitted-variable and causal-inference challenges, and experimental work can be a very useful supplement. Current research has, in substantial ways, fallen short, despite decades of serious and resource-intensive efforts. It is time to think creatively about new solutions.
If debating this topic leads a few more students to pursue criminal justice reform as a career, it will be worth it.
Hunt, ’16 (Prof. Cecil J. Hunt, 29 J. Civ. Rts. & Econ. Dev. 15, THE JIM CROW EFFECT: DENIAL, DIGNITY, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND RACIALIZED MASS INCARCERATION)
It is way past time for the American public and political elite to stop looking the other way denying the human rights plague of racialized mass incarceration and acknowledge its insidious and destructive effects on the dignity and human rights of millions of its black and brown citizens. As a nation, America must, "come to terms with its past' n162 and its present social, political, and economic sin of racialized mass incarceration. For too long it has, "circumvented the issue with the narrative skills befitting a psychopath." n163 America's mass denial of this terrible reality clearly has not worked as either a political or social strategy and has only exacerbated an already destructive, insidious, and distressing reality. This in turn incurs another great cost of this terrible domestic policy against its racial minorities, in the form of the disapproval and disrespect of the rest of the civilized industrial world for whom respect for the human rights of a nation's ethnic minorities has become an increasingly categorical imperative. This widespread and massive national denial regarding the reality and social costs of racialized mass incarceration, has already cost America a generation of young Black and Brown men, and the destruction of countless Black and Brown families and communities. It now threatens to destroy yet another generation of young Black and Brown men, their families and communities with little or no hope for any relief in the foreseeable future. If
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America is to make any headway in even beginning to solve this problem, it must first open its collective social, political, and societal eyes and free itself from its willful racial blindness, and from what Stanley Cohen describes as "the mass denial so characteristic of repressive, racist ... states.' n164 Founding father, former President of the United States, and author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, while contemplating the state of slavery in America, is apocryphally known to have said, "when I consider that God is just, I weep for my country." n165 Until America, as a people and as a nation, ceases to engage in deliberate indifference, willful callousness, and denial of the reality of racialized mass incarceration and the vastness of its destructive power to human lives and human rights, we should all weep for the human rights nightmare that is occurring in America. n166
Michelle Alexander links the War on Drugs to a devastation of the black community
Alexander 10 (“The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness” New York: The New Press. 2010 http://www.kropfpolisci.com/racial.justice.alexander.pdf )
Racially biased police discretion is key to understanding how the overwhelming majority of people who get swept into the criminal justice system in the War on Drugs turn out to be black or brown, even though the police adamantly deny that they engage in racial profiling. In the drug war, police have discretion regarding whom to target (which individuals), as well as where to target (which neighborhoods or communities). As noted earlier, at least 10 percent of Americans violate drug laws every year, and people of all races engage in illegal drug activity at similar rates. With such an extraordinarily large population of offenders to choose from, decisions must be made regarding who should be targeted and where the drug war should be waged. From the outset, the drug war could have been waged primarily in overwhelmingly white suburbs or on college campuses. SWAT teams could have rappelled from helicopters in gated suburban communities and raided the homes of high school lacrosse players known for hosting coke and ecstasy parties after their games. The police could have seized televisions, furniture, and cash from fraternity houses based on an anonymous tip that a few joints or a stash of cocaine could be found hidden in someone's dresser drawer. Suburban homemakers could have been placed under surveillance and subjected to undercover operations designed to catch them violating laws regulating the use and sale of prescription "uppers." All of this could have happened as a matter of routine in white communities, but it did not. Instead, when police go looking for drugs, they look in the 'hood. Tactics that would be political suicide in an upscale white suburb are not even newsworthy in poor black and brown communities. So long as mass drug arrests are concentrated in impoverished urban areas, police chiefs have little reason to fear a political backlash, no matter how aggressive and warlike the efforts may be. And so long as the number of drug arrests increases or at least remains high, federal dollars continue to flow in and fill the department's coffers. As one former prosecutor put it, "It's a lot easier to go out to the 'hood, so to speak, and pick somebody than to put your resources in an undercover [operation in a] community where there are potentially politically powerful people."85 The hypersegregation of the black poor in ghetto communities has made the roundup easy. Confined to ghetto areas and lacking political power, the black poor are convenient targets. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton's book, American Apartheid, documents how racially segregated ghettos were deliberately created by federal policy, not impersonal market forces or private housing choices.86 The enduring racial isolation of the ghetto poor has made them uniquely vulnerable in the War on Drugs. What happens to them does not directly affect—and is scarcely noticed by—the privileged beyond the ghetto's invisible walls. Thus it is here, in the poverty-stricken, racially segregated ghettos, where the War on Poverty has been abandoned and factories have disappeared, that the drug war has been waged with the greatest ferocity. SWAT teams are deployed here; buy-and-bust operations are concentrated here; drug raids of apartment buildings occur here; stop-and-frisk operations occur on the streets here. Black and brown youth are the primary targets. It is not uncommon for a young black teenager living in a ghetto community to be stopped, interrogated, and frisked numerous times in
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the course of a month, or even a single week, often by paramilitary units. Studies of racial profiling typically report the total number of people stopped and searched, disaggregated by race. These studies have led some policing experts to conclude that racial profiling is actually "worse" in white communities, because the racial disparities in stop and search rates are much greater there. What these studies do not reveal, however, is the frequency with which any given individual is likely to be stopped in specific, racially defined neighborhoods. The militarized nature of law enforcement in ghetto communities has inspired rap artists and black youth to refer to the police presence in black communities as "The Occupation." In these occupied territories, many black youth automatically "assume the position" when a patrol car pulls up, knowing full well that they will be detained and frisked no matter what. This dynamic often comes as a surprise to those who have spent little time in ghettos. Craig Futterman, a law professor at the University of Chicago, reports that his students frequently express shock and dismay when they venture into those communities for the first time and witness the distance between abstract legal principles and actual practice. One student reported, following her ridealong with Chicago police: "Each time we drove into a public housing project and stopped the car, every young black man in the area would almost reflexively place his hands up against the car and spread his legs to be searched. And the officers would search them. The officers would then get back in the car and stop in another project, and this would happen again. This repeated itself throughout the entire day. I couldn't believe it. This was nothing like we learned in law school. But it just seemed so normal—for the police and the young men." Numerous scholars (and many law enforcement officials) attempt to justify the concentration of drug law enforcement resources in ghetto communities on the grounds that it is easier for the police to combat illegal drug activity there. The theory is that black and Latino drug users are more likely than white users to obtain illegal drugs in public spaces that are visible to the police, and therefore it is more efficient and convenient for the police to concentrate their efforts on open-air drug markets in ghetto communities. Sociologists have been major proponents of this line of reasoning, pointing out that differential access to private space influences the likelihood that criminal behavior will be detected. Because poor people lack access to private space (often sharing small apartments with numerous family members or relatives), their criminal activity is more likely to be conducted outdoors. Concentrating law enforcement efforts in locations where drug activity will be more easily detected is viewed as a race-neutral organizational necessity. This argument is often buttressed by claims that most citizen complaints about illegal drug activity come from ghetto areas, and that the violence associated with the drug trade occurs in inner cities. These facts, drug war defenders claim, make the decision to wage the drug war almost exclusively in poor communities of color an easy and logical choice. This line of reasoning is weaker than it initially appears. Many law enforcement officials acknowledge that the demand for illegal drugs is so great—and the lack of alternative sources of income so few in ghetto communities—that "if you take one dealer off the street, he'll be replaced within an hour." Many also admit that a predictable consequence of breaking up one drug ring is a slew of violence as others fight for control of the previously stabilized market.87 These realities suggest—if the past two decades of endless war somehow did not—that the drug war is doomed to fail. They also call into question the legitimacy of "convenience" as an excuse for the mass imprisonment of black and brown men in ghetto communities. Even putting aside such concerns, though, recent research indicates that the basic assumptions upon which drug war defenses typically rest are simply wrong. The conventional wisdom—that "get tough" tactics are a regrettable necessity in poor communities of color and that efficiency requires the drug war to be waged in the most vulnerable neighborhoods—turns out to be, as many have long suspected, nothing more than wartime propaganda, not sound policy.
Stop and Frisk
Garrison, ’14 (Arthur H. Garrison, LP.D. - Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Kutztown University, “NYPD Stop and Frisk, Perceptions of Criminals, Race and the Meaning of Terry v Ohio: A Content Analysis of Floyd, et al. v City of New York” February 2014, Rutgers Race & the Law Review, 15 Rutgers Race & L. Rev. 65)
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Both plaintiffs and the NYPD introduced evidence from liability experts n51 on the results of analysis of data available. The court held, in regard to the data, that it was uncontested that¶ . Between January 2004 and June 2012, the NYPD conducted over 4.4 million Terry stops.¶ . The number of stops per year rose sharply from 314,000 in 2004 to a high of 686,000 in 2011.¶ . 52% of all stops were followed by a protective frisk for weapons. A weapon was found after 1.5% of these frisks. In other words, in 98.5% of the 2.3 million frisks, no weapon was found.¶ . 8% of all stops led to a search into the stopped person's clothing, ostensibly based on the officer feeling an object during the frisk that he suspected to be a weapon, or immediately perceived to be contraband other than a weapon. In 9% of these searches, the felt object was in fact a weapon. 91% of the time, it was not. [*82] In 14% of these searches, the felt object was in fact contraband. 86% of the time it was not.¶ . 6% of all stops resulted in an arrest, and 6% resulted in a summons. The remaining 88% of the 4.4 mil-lion stops resulted in no further law enforcement action.¶ . In 52% of the 4.4 million stops, the person stopped was black.¶ . In 31% of the stops, the person stopped was Hispanic.¶ . In 10% of the stops, the person stopped was white.¶ . In 2010, New York City's resident population was roughly 23% black, 29% Hispanic, and 33% white.¶ . In 23% of the stops of blacks, and 24% of the stops of Hispanics, the officer recorded using force. The number for whites was 17%.¶ . Weapons were seized in 1.0% of the stops of blacks, 1.1% of the stops of Hispanics, and 1.4% of the stops of whites.¶ . Contraband other than weapons was seized in 1.8% of the stops of blacks, 1.7% of the stops of His-panics, and 2.3% of the stops of whites.¶ . For the years 2004 to 2009, the two most commonly checked boxes indicating the reasons for a stop were "Furtive Movements" and "Area Has Incidence Of Reported Offense Of Type Under Investigation" ("High Crime Area"). Setting aside stops based on radio runs, officers marked "Furtive Movements" as a basis for the stop on 42% of the forms, and "High Crime Area" on 55% of the forms. In 2009, officers indicated "Furtive Movements" as a basis for the stop nearly 60% of the time.¶ . Both "Furtive Movements" and "High Crime Area" are weak indicators of criminal activity. For the years 2004 to 2009, stops were 22% more likely to result in arrest if "High Crime Area" was not checked, and 18% more likely to result in arrest if "Furtive Movements" was not checked.¶ . Between 2004 and 2009, as the number of stops per year soared from 314,000 to 576,000, the percent-age of UF-250s on which the officer failed to state a specific suspected crime rose from 1% to 36%. n52¶ Thus, the data showed that 52% of the stops were black while blacks made up only 23% of the total New York City ("NYC") population. Hispanics accounted for 31% of the stops but [*83] only 20% of the NYC population and whites accounted for only 10% of the stops while making up 33% of the total population. As discussed later in this arti-cle, the main justification for the disproportionate stop and frisk results made by the Mayor and Police Commissioner was that the program reduced the number of gun homicides and other types of gun violence. But the data showed that only 0.1% of stops resulted in gun seizures n53 and more whites (1.4%) were found with weapons during a stop than blacks (1%) or Hispanics (1.1%). More interesting, more contraband was secured from seized whites (2.3%) than Blacks (1.8%) or Hispanics (1.7%). Looking at what explanations were used to justify the Terry stops in the first place, not counting radio calls, "Furtive Movements" (sudden movements or suspicious movements) was the basis of 42% of the stops and "High Crime Area" was the basis for 55% of the stops.¶ Placing this data together suggests that while whites are more likely to be armed and have some type of contraband, blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be stopped and searched. Further, the single most used excuse (outside of fur-tive movements) is the location of high crime area. But the NYPD, as the Mayor and Police Commission publically assert, focus intensive law enforcement activity in high crime Black and Hispanic communities and specifically target crime in those neighborhoods only. The NYPD asserted that stops were the result of radio calls, it is significant that the 78% of all stops between 2004 and 2009 were self-initiated, n54 in other words stops were not as a result of service calls in which a victim give a description that includes race which can justify a stop using race. This is important be-cause public statements by the Mayor and Police Commissioner would leave a person with the impression that the stops were the result [*84] of radio calls or information provided by a victim regarding a specific incident. n55 The data showed that only 22% of the stops resulted from radio calls. Thus it is the perception of the police about the neighbor-hood and not actual calls for aid that explain the primary use of "Furtive Movements" in a "High Crime Area" to justify a Terry stop and frisk.¶ The NYPD tried to justify the disproportionate stopping of blacks and Hispanics as well as justify the low rate of arrests (6%) and summonses (6%) resulting from stops because, as the former Chief of the Department Joseph Esposito testified, "many stops interrupt a crime from occurring." n56 The court was not convinced, n57 but what is more im-portant is that stop and frisk is not a preventive tool, it is an investigatory tool to determine if "criminal activity may be afoot." n58 Stop and frisk is not a crime suppression tool. The reason this is significant is that stop and frisk interferes with an individual's constitutional right to walk down the street without police obstruction, intimidation, or interference. The constitution allows for the interference when the police have a specific and justifiable reason for that interference. General crime suppression and prevention is not a specific and justifiable reason for that interference. This is all the more significant when "at least 88% of the NYPD's 4.4 million stops" did not result in any formal police action (arrest or summons). n59 Thus, 3.872 million people had their constitutional right to be left alone interfered with (if not un-lawfully violated) on the say so of the police but afterwards were released with nothing to show for the interference.
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Police training
Garrison, ’14 (Arthur H. Garrison, LP.D. - Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Kutztown University, “NYPD Stop and Frisk, Perceptions of Criminals, Race and the Meaning of Terry v Ohio: A Content Analysis of Floyd, et al. v City of New York” February 2014, Rutgers Race & the Law Review, 15 Rutgers Race & L. Rev. 65)
The source of the racial bias and unconstitutional policy, practice, and custom is clear. First, the NYPD patrol officers are instructed to secure members of UF-250s as a tool of crime suppression and police activity, in which the constitutionality of the activity is of no account. Second, the NYPD instructs its officers that since most of the criminals are black, it makes sense that the right people stopped are black. The fact that most blacks stopped are not all criminals is of little account. The district court observed that the "NYPD maintains two different policies related to racial profiling . . . a written policy that prohibits racial profiling . . . and another, unwritten policy that encourages officers to focus their reasonable- suspicion-based stops on 'the right people, the right time, the right location,'" which in fact focuses police stops on the race of those who they perceive as criminals as a group. n123 The court dedicated eight pages of its opinion on the issue of "the right people" recounting testimony of Chief Esposito as well as recordings of [*102] a police investigator and the testimony of New York State Senator Eric Adams who testified that Commissioner Kelly said to him in a meeting in the Governor's office that stops focused on blacks and Hispanics, "because he wanted to instill fear in them, every time they leave their home, they could be stopped by the police." n124 As discussed in section two, Commissioner Kelly said as much in his op-ed. n125 As to the credibility of Senator Adams, the court observed that the city "did not object to this out of court statement," which was pure hearsay, and did not "offer any rebuttal evidence regarding Commissioner Kelly's statement at this meeting." n126 In context with a speech that Mayor Bloomberg gave to a meeting of the top NYPD leadership n127 - in which he made clear that stop and frisk was designed to "deter" people from carrying guns and according to crime statistics blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately the perpetrators and victims of crime n128 - who the "right people" are is evident. As the court observed¶ When these premises are combined -- that the purpose of stop and frisk is to deter people from carrying guns and that blacks and Hispanics are a disproportionate source of violent crime -- it is only a short leap to the conclusion that blacks and Hispanics should be targeted for stops in order to deter gun violence, regardless of whether they appear objectively suspicious. Commissioner Kelly simply made explicit what is readily inferrable from the City's public positions. n129¶ As such,¶ I find that the NYPD's policy of targeting "the right people" encourages the disproportionate stopping of the members of any racial group that is heavily represented in the NYPD's crime suspect data. This is an indirect form of racial [*103] profiling. In practice, it leads NYPD officers to stop blacks and Hispanics who would not have been stopped if they were white. There is no question that a person's race, like a person's height or weight, is a permissible consideration where a stop is based on a specific description of a suspect. But it is equally clear that it is impermissible to subject all members of a racially defined group to heightened police enforcement because some members of that group appear more frequently in criminal complaints. The Equal Protection Clause does not permit race-based suspicion. n130
Lykke at. al., ’16 (Contexts, U Maryland Grads, Lucia Lykke, Brittany Dernberger, Rose Malinowski Weingartner, Carrie Clarady, Nicole Bedera, Moriah Willow, Joey Brown, Saswathi Natta, and Philip Cohen. “how to end institutional racism,” April 7, 2016, https://contexts.org/blog/how-to-end-institutional-racism/)
Race and the criminal justice system As Bernie suggests, a good place to start. When people of color are disproportionately targeted by police and incarcerated, this leads to disadvantages in other arenas of life, such as health, family life, employment, and political power. Here are four targets for policy change: Police stops and arrests. Controlling for suspect demeanor, offense severity, presence of witnesses, evidence at the scene, prior record of the suspect, and other factors, minority suspects in one study had a 30% higher chance of being arrested than white suspects. In predominantly White neighborhoods in St. Louis, traffic stops were more likely to include a search in stops of Black drivers than of White drivers, especially by White police officers, controlling for characteristics of the officer, driver, and stop. Punishment outcomes. A study using data
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from New York, found that Black and Latino (but not Asian) defendants are disadvantaged compared to Whites when it comes to pretrial detention, plea offers, and sentences of incarceration. This effect is particularly strong for Blacks charged with felony violent crimes and drug crimes. Disproportionate incarceration of men of color. Of African American young men who dropped out of high school, 37% were incarcerated in 2008, compared to less than 1% of the general population. Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab and Justice Mapping Center have mapped “million dollar blocks:” neighborhood blocks that have such a high concentration of residents incarcerated that states are spending over a million dollars a year to incarcerate residents from a single block. (On average it costs $28,000 a year to incarcerate someone in state prison). Innovate policy solutions post-release. Post-incarceration, employment is a major determinant of whether people end up back in prison. One policy solution that has been getting a lot of traction in select states is “banning the box.” This would allow prospective employees to make it beyond the initial application without having to disclose felonies or misdemeanors, reducing discrimination based on prior offense history. Check out this resource for more information on the banning the box campaign.
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e) Housing/Lending
Last year’s paper has a solid section on this area—it hasn’t changed a lot but would make a really good area to include in most, if not all, of the wording options.
Lykke at. al., ’16 (Contexts, U Maryland Grads, Lucia Lykke, Brittany Dernberger, Rose Malinowski Weingartner, Carrie Clarady, Nicole Bedera, Moriah Willow, Joey Brown, Saswathi Natta, and Philip Cohen. “how to end institutional racism,” April 7, 2016, https://contexts.org/blog/how-to-end-institutional-racism/)
Housing US lending practices in the mid-20th century built a problem we’re still living with. In 1935, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board commissioned the creation of a set of maps to guide investment opportunities for housing in the coming years. The maps that emerged separated 239 American cities into 4 types of areas, ranked from most- to least-desirable for development opportunities. The least desirable of those areas, outlined in red, were overwhelmingly the sites of historically Black neighborhoods. Those within those “redlined” areas found it difficult or impossible to secure loans or mortgages for housing and development. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 aimed to correct this. But that fell far short of solving the problem; recent court cases continue to confront discriminatory development policies. One potential solution is mobility vouchers. The Clinton-era Mobility to Opportunity (MTO) program, which provided vouchers enabling low-income families (most of them headed by Hispanic or Black single mothers) to move to low-poverty areas, has long been considered a net failure, at least in terms of economic and performance gains. Kids who moved didn’t have significantly greater school performance, and their parents didn’t see a lot of growth in their incomes. A recent study, however, uses a newly available outcome measure to probe success – the earned adult incomes of those kids who moved, versus those who didn’t – and finds that in this longer view, the program was more successful than originally thought. Kids who moved to low-poverty areas before the age of 13 earned 31% more as adults than those who didn’t. Housing segregation is both a class and race issue, and this new evidence suggests that this approach shouldn’t be dropped too quickly. More broadly, sociologist Matthew Desmond, author of the new book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, has suggested expanding housing vouchers to all families below the 30th percentile of in their areas – allowing them to spend no more than 30 percent of their income on rent – which would be “an anti-poverty effort, human capital investment, community improvement plan and public health initiative all rolled into one.” The cost of such a program, which would disproportionately help racial and ethnic minorities still paying the price for housing segregation and exploitation, would be small compared with the massive annual tax subsidy for middle-class and rich homeowners.
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f) other
Ahlers, ’16 (Christopher, Prof. Law Vermont, 46 Envtl. L. 713, ARTICLE: RACE, ETHNICITY, AND AIR POLLUTION: NEW DIRECTIONS IN ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE)
Environmental justice recognizes that low-income, minority communities are disproportionately affected by air pollution, and that this problem should be addressed through environmental law and policy. While it is easy to identify general relationships between poverty, demographic patterns, and air pollution, it is far more difficult to demonstrate that companies build industrial facilities at particular sites based on the racial or ethnic composition of the neighboring community, or even that a minority community would be subject to disproportionate health and welfare impacts from a particular facility. It is even more difficult to prohibit the construction of industrial facilities based on a disproportionate impact on low income, minority communities. This Article reviews the reported cases considering the discrimination-based claims of the environmental justice movement, in the context of permitting and environmental reviews for industrial facilities. It concludes that this approach has not been successful in limiting their construction and operation. Finally, the Article suggests that land use planning restrictions on industrial development based on air pollution loading would provide a more direct and viable means of protecting low income, minority communities.
Lykke at. al., ’16 (Contexts, U Maryland Grads, Lucia Lykke, Brittany Dernberger, Rose Malinowski Weingartner, Carrie Clarady, Nicole Bedera, Moriah Willow, Joey Brown, Saswathi Natta, and Philip Cohen. “how to end institutional racism,” April 7, 2016, https://contexts.org/blog/how-to-end-institutional-racism/)
Health and healthcare Institutional racism in American health care results in racial and ethnic minorities facing disproportionate barriers to care as well as lower quality of care. Cost barriers have a greater effect on communities of color than on Whites. Closures of hospital trauma centers increased travel time for emergency care in areas with large Black populations more than other areas, during a time when trauma-related mortality increased for this population. Counties with a higher proportion of Black residents are less likely than other counties to have substance abuse treatment facilities that accept public insurance. While a greater proportion of Black patients live near high-quality hospitals than white patients, Black patients are more likely than Whites to have surgery in lower quality hospitals. Majority Black zip codes are also more likely than other zip codes to have a shortage of primary care physicians. Black, Latina, and Native-American mothers may be more likely to have unnecessary caesarian deliveries, racial and ethnic minorities are underrepresented in clinical trials, resulting in treatments that have not been proven effective for non-White patients. When healthcare providers hold implicit biases, Black patients rate their physicians lower on measures of patient-centered care and communication than do White patients. The locations of providers, cost of care, implicit racial bias in medical school graduates and exclusion from treatment research all contribute to inequities in health outcomes for people of color.
Lykke at. al., ’16 (Contexts, U Maryland Grads, Lucia Lykke, Brittany Dernberger, Rose Malinowski Weingartner, Carrie Clarady, Nicole Bedera, Moriah Willow, Joey Brown, Saswathi Natta, and Philip Cohen. “how to end institutional racism,” April 7, 2016, https://contexts.org/blog/how-to-end-institutional-racism/)
Employment Blacks are twice as likely to be unemployed as Whites, and the earnings of both Blacks and Hispanics continue to lag well behind those of Whites. While employment discrimination on the basis of race was outlawed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, experimental audit studies focusing on hiring decisions have consistently found strong evidence of racial discrimination, with estimates of White preference ranging from 50% to 240%. Discrimination plays a part in explaining the Black-White
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wage gap, and recent studies have shown that racial discrimination affects college educated Blacks – regardless of what school they graduated from. Unsurprisingly, racial discrimination has an even greater impact on Blacks without a college degree and those with a criminal record. Discrimination even affects workers in the same job, in the same company, and with equal scores on performance evaluations. There are a number of steps that can be taken to reduce racial discrimination in the U.S. labor market. For example, the Fair Employment Protection Act, which was introduced in 2012 but not enacted, would remove barriers to workers seeking to file class action lawsuits. Similarly, the Fair Pay Act, which was introduced in 2013 and referred to committee in 2015, would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to prohibit discrimination in the payment of wages on account of sex, race, or national origin. Finally, we could combat racial discrimination in employment by increasing punitive monetary fines against discriminatory employers and increasing funding and enforcement power for the under-resourced U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in order to more effectively enforce the anti-discrimination laws already on the books.
Lykke at. al., ’16 (Contexts, U Maryland Grads, Lucia Lykke, Brittany Dernberger, Rose Malinowski Weingartner, Carrie Clarady, Nicole Bedera, Moriah Willow, Joey Brown, Saswathi Natta, and Philip Cohen. “how to end institutional racism,” April 7, 2016, https://contexts.org/blog/how-to-end-institutional-racism/)
Credit and debt Ending institutional racism requires attention to reducing racial wealth inequality while also monitoring and working to end discrimination in credit markets. Reducing wealth inequality requires tackling debt problems. Predatory lending and unequal credit costs and debt collection patterns are pillars of institutional racism in credit markets. While credit access has increased for everyone, minorities pay higher interest rates than Whites for housing and have been subject to abuse from predatory lenders. We also see that lawsuits for the repayment of consumer debt are clustered in black neighborhoods. Tackling student loan debt is also important. More students of color have to borrow money to attend college than Whites, are less likely to finish, and are more likely to default. Black wealth does not protect Black students from student loan debt in the same way it does for Whites. (For more comprehensive policy recommendations on ending racial wealth inequality, see work done by the researchers at the Center for Global Policy Solutions.)
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4. By Whom?
This case is not about how the debate about racial preferences is resolved. It is about who may resolve it.
- Justice Anthony Kennedy (Schuette v. Coal. to Defend Affirmative Action, 134 S. Ct. 1623, 1638 (2014)).
Today's decision eviscerates an important strand of our equal protection jurisprudence. For members of historically marginalized groups, which rely on the federal courts to protect their constitutional rights, the decision can hardly bolster hope for a vision of democracy that preserves for all the right to participate meaningfully and equally in self-government.
- Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting in Schuette
Agency is a wide-open variable and it might even be possible to vary the slate by
changing up the agent. Have a passive voice version, a USFG version, a SCOTUS version, a
version with an international agent like the UN, and then have two different lists of areas for
each agent. There’s a slate with 8 options. Most likely the narrow one wins, giving us a SCOTUS
race topic with the smaller of two lists—great, it could be much worse (visas, for example).
When talking about racial inequality or structural and institutional racism, the Court is a
good place to start, whether as the affirmative agent of change or as a counterplan. In the
arena of education, race-conscious policy is being weakened as arguments in favor of equal
protection fall to the side in favor of neutrality. The door may be open, even if slightly;
however, for a liberty argument (general human rights) rooted in the 1st amendment as opposed
to a combination of the 5th and 14th. Bear with the argument until the end of the card...
Barnes, Prof. Law U. Akron, ’17 (12 Duke J. Const. Law & Pub. Pol'y 123, “Breaking the Cycle: COUNTERING VOTER INITIATIVES AND THE UNDERREPRESENTATION OF RACIAL MINORITIES IN THE POLITICAL PROCESS, Kristen)
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The cycle that the fight for educational equality is enmeshed in can be broken by exposing the perils voter initiatives pose to a well-functioning representative republican government, by limiting their use, by challenging the rhetoric that casts direct democracy as the ultimate fulfillment of egalitarian objectives, by holding courts accountable for fulfilling their constitutional duties, and by positing an alternative vision of participatory democracy that aims at substantive equality. This Article's recommendations are developed in three parts. One part pertains specifically to courts and their responsibilities in reviewing direct democracy instruments that infringe upon constitutional rights. The second part refers to voter initiatives. The third part concerns the public officials and administrators charged with the formulation of school policies. 1. The Court's Role in Achieving Substantive Equality in Education and the Participation of Racial Minorities in Public Policy Decisionmaking Courts have an instrumental role to play in achieving substantive equality in education and in voting. The American legal regime permits individuals to craft initiatives on a wide range of issues that implicate federal constitutional principles and guarantees, n260 but when those issues pertain to racial equality, the Court must treat them with circumspection, not deference. As Schuette demonstrates, voter initiatives can be structured and wielded in ways that limit the ability of marginalized racial minorities to fully participate in the democratic process and that effectively deny them political representation. If left unchecked, such mechanisms have the potential to undermine the Supreme Court's interpretations of the Constitution and statutory laws regarding equality principles. The Court in Reynolds v. Sims, emphasized that, "a denial of constitutionally protected rights demands judicial protection; our oath and our office require no less of us." n261 An informed judiciary that is versed in the Constitution and relevant state constitutions will render better decisions and engage in the proper balancing analysis as compared to the electorate. The arguments that litigants present to the court will be framed in terms of constitutional principles and other legal sources. By way of written opinion, courts will offer their reasoning in those terms or by reference to precedent. The exercise of judicial reasoning within this framework of legal doctrines, laws, and constitutional principles provides for a more thorough consideration of contested laws than voters who must decide on an initiative. When confronted with a voter initiative, like Proposal 2, that seeks to undo Supreme Court precedent within a particular state, precedent should prevail because of the federal constitutional interests at stake. As the Court's recognized in Gomillion v. Lightfoot, "when a State exercises power wholly within the domain of state interest, it is insulated from federal judicial review. But such insulation is not carried [*171] over when state power is used as an instrument for circumventing a federally protected right." n262 The right at stake is the ability of racial minorities to engage in meaningful political participation without being subjected to disenfranchising barriers that assume the shape of formal equality. While it is important not to rely solely on courts for solutions, courts are an integral part of ensuring that representative government functions effectively for all. Exacting judicial review supported by state laws is necessary to strike down initiatives that have a disenfranchising effect or that are tainted by fraud. n263 Courts are particularly important where there are no designated local or state agencies in place to counter the possibility that individual constitutional rights did not get fair and due consideration. The Schuette case highlights the significance of the political process argument as a tool to ensure the equal representation of disfavored minority political interests. The plurality's decision was seriously deficient in its treatment of this theory and left unresolved many questions regarding: the standard of judicial review when racial classifications are involved, federalism and the Court's precedents and authority relative to state powers, and the political process doctrine. n264 While the Court may be resistant to this theory in part because it entails disparate impact analysis, accomplishing substantive equality requires an examination of the effects of laws rather than merely looking to how they are facially characterized. n265 It is necessary for the Court to affirm its power and authority to undertake the relevant analysis. Political process theory is an essential mechanism to counter majoritarian actions that subordinate the federal constitutional rights of racial minorities to the political will of the majority. For this reason, courts [*172] should be receptive to the argument if it is presented in future cases. n266 2. Restricting and Reforming Voter Initiatives The next set of recommendations primarily pertains to voter initiatives. Direct democracy, without judicial review, is not the appropriate vehicle to decide matters concerning equal protection and voting rights guarantees. Due to the patriotic, idealistic, and nostalgic sentiments of the electorate, revising voter initiatives may prove to be taxing. n267 Nonetheless, reform is desperately needed. The empirical evidence identifying the costs they inflict on the stability and proper functioning of the political system should provide substantial fuel for any reform campaign. n268 Since it will be difficult to persuade states to reconfigure the parameters of ballot initiatives according to the recommendations herein, courts should be prepared to deter their use for the aforementioned purposes by invalidating them where it can be demonstrated that the burdens they place on federally protected rights are greater than the state interest advanced and any asserted interest in preserving direct democracy. Despite the challenging aspects of reforming voter initiatives, states should make an effort
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to do so, consulting the best practices and recommendations of the National Conference of State Legislatures Initiative and Referendum Task Force and other useful empirical studies. n269 The Task Force makes thirty-four recommendations that address many deficiencies of direct democracy. n270 The recommendations cover the areas of the role of the legislature, the substance of the initiative, the "drafting and certification phase," "the signature gathering phase," "voter education," "financial disclosure," and "voting on initiatives." n271 As its beginning point, the Task Force counsels against implementing voter initiative procedures in states that do not presently provide for them because of the threats they pose to fair and meaningful representation of the citizenry and to constitutional freedoms. In making this recommendation, the Task Force notes that voter initiatives often operate without adequate safeguards to ensure against voter manipulation and fraud and, furthermore, allow political interest groups to bypass the protections built into the political structure (e.g. legislative debate and hearings). n272 Although the Task Force proposes some sound strategies, n273 notably the recommendation that states should not adopt a "constitutional amendment initiative process," n274 even with the proposed reforms, direct democracy poses significant risks to constitutional rights and exceptional risks for minorities that must be mitigated by judicial intervention. It is the duty of all states to make a conscientious effort to structure democracy so that it is representative of and responsive to the whole polity. One step in that direction is ensuring that the instruments of political participation are properly used and designed to accurately register rather than impede the political interests of discrete and insular minorities. The following suggestions are offered with those objectives in mind. States should place restrictions on the subject matter of voter initiatives to remove from their purview issues concerning fundamental federal constitutional guarantees. This is necessary given the substantial scholarship demonstrating that voters are either woefully uninformed of the implications of their votes, misled by the presentation of the issues, or acting out of negative stereotypes to the detriment of marginalized minorities. n275 Further, states should restrict initiatives to being legislative proposals rather than permitting their use as direct vehicles for constitutional amendment. State governments should be required to have clear procedures for investigating complaints of voter fraud and deceptive practices associated with voter initiatives. The agencies charged with the task of investigation and enforcement should be identified and held accountable. Where an agency fails to appropriately fulfill its duty, the challenged initiative should not be certified. When substantial abuses of the system occur, like those leading to the certification of Proposal 2, the petition should be invalidated and penalties imposed on those committing and orchestrating the fraud. Courts should act with the necessary speed to resolve an issue before it is presented to the electorate. Where timing is an issue, the court should issue an injunction even if this means that consideration of the matter by the electorate is delayed for several months. As the OKD case illustrates, not only can voter initiative review procedures be deficient at the early phases of signature gathering and certification, but also the process for constitutional amendment may be severely lacking in terms of the requirements for passage. For example, in many states, including Michigan, the ballot initiative only requires a simple majority. n276 If states are resistant to restricting the subject matter of voter initiatives, at a minimum the correctives should include a supermajority requirement and legislative review and approval. n277 3. The Role of Governing Boards, Public School Officials and Administrators in the Decisionmaking Process Governing boards, public school officials, and administrators are integral to the decisionmaking that determines the content of the policies, such as whether to adopt legacy preferences, n278 for public academic institutions. Boards also appoint university presidents, establish budgets, approve curriculum changes and university [*175] contracts. n279 While their actions are also appropriately subject to judicial review, their positioning as entities that have extensive insight into the goals of institutions, the educational needs of their state, the demographics of their region, and the educational goals of society, mean that their decisionmaking power should not be so easily supplanted by the process of direct democracy. They are engaged in ongoing reflection on these matters in ways that differ from the larger electorate and courts. The decision to include race-conscious measures like affirmative action into admissions policies was the product of dialogue and consideration of the aforementioned factors. n280 Affirmative action in this context is geared towards educational enrichment and equality, and decisions about that, when race is involved, must be made by educational authorities with appropriate judicial oversight, not popular votes. Schuette demonstrates that the popular vote suppresses the voices of racial minorities, whereas decisions by the educators enhance those voices. n281 B. Whether Formulating Arguments According to Yoshino's Vision of "The New Equal Protection" Offers A Viable Alternative Strategy for Achieving the Equal Access of Racial Minorities to the Political Process in Public Universities Kenji Yoshino poses the provocative question of whether this moment in the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court marks "the end of constitutional civil rights in this country." n282 He posits that the Court has turned its judicial frame away from equality-based arguments of the Fourteenth Amendment to liberty-based claims of the First Amendment. n283 If his assessment is accurate, then groups, such as civil rights advocates, who traditionally relied upon equal protection arguments to achieve substantive gains need to find alternative [*176] approaches to accomplish their objectives. As a way of compensating for the paradigm shift in thinking, Yoshino argues that the "liberty- based dignity claim" may be a way to respond to the Court's rejection of disparate impact claims. n284 By moving the claim to what he describes as a "high enough level of generality" those who are
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not advancing it can nonetheless relate to it and envision themselves in terms of it. n285 But Yoshino's proposition should include an important caveat. If the claim is too general, it will not fully explain the problem and account for why the claim is being made in the first instance. Yoshino maintains that the liberty-based dignity claim is likely to garner widespread support and to be accepted by the Court. n286 Under his approach, this type of claim should be brought rather than one, for example, asserting that Proposal 2 constitutes direct discrimination in violation of the Equal Protection Clause. Yoshino equates this "high level of generality" with universal human rights. n287 He predicts that the Court's current analytical framework for addressing equal protection claims brought by minorities is likely to result in their failure. The Court's posture towards arguments asserted by racial minorities in support of affirmative action bears out his thesis. Yoshino writes:
State action that seeks to help historically disadvantaged groups - "affirmative action" programs - are the governmental programs most likely to remain facially discriminatory... . In contrast, state action that perpetuates the subordination of historically disadvantaged groups will tend to express itself in facially neutral terms... . For this reason equal protection jurisprudence that turns formalistically on facial discrimination will, from an antisubordination perspective, get it exactly backward. On the one hand, this jurisprudence invalidates affirmative action programs seeking to aid historically subordinated groups... . On the other hand, it upholds second-generation discrimination that continues to subordinate groups. n288
If one takes Yoshino's arguments to heart and attempts to make inroads relying upon liberties arguments, it is not clear that they would fare any better. BAMN already tried this strategy, albeit at the district court level, and it did not work. n289 Drawing from cases like Grutter, which contained aspects of the argument that universities have the freedom to make decisions about whom to admit and the substance of their curricula, n290 BAMN argued that as "beneficiaries" of university policies that took into account diversity, Proposal 2 infringed upon their First Amendment right to academic freedom. n291 The district court rejected this argument, concluding that BAMN lacked standing in that the First Amendment right belonged to the universities rather than to them. n292 The challenge to properly frame a cognizable liberty-style argument is evident. If courts are resistant to recognizing BAMN's interests and the impact of a restrictive initiative, like Proposal 2, on the lived experiences of those represented, then regardless of how the argument is framed, courts will not act in a protective manner. n293 While the academic freedom argument was persuasive in Grutter, it is not clear that even if the universities had been in a position to make this argument rather than the plaintiffs, that it would have changed the outcome of the case at the district court level or ultimately at the Supreme Court level. n294 In fact, in a later moment in the litigation it is interesting that the Schuette Court articulated a liberty-based argument not in support of BAMN but rather as a rationale for its holding that the Court lacked the power to prohibit Michigan voters from deciding the question of the constitutional validity of race-conscious admissions. n295 The question then for civil rights activists who seek to have the promise of the reconstruction amendments fulfilled and to see the fruition of the work of their campaigns is: Can they repackage their objectives as liberty-based arguments? The challenge is a daunting one. Conclusion There are long-term implications to the Schuette decision that extend beyond the realm of education. The success of voter initiatives such as Proposal 2 result in unequal political processes that give a permanency to majoritarian political advantages. Ballot initiatives distort the democratic process and undermine equality principles. For these reasons, severe restrictions should be placed on them where they seek to override fundamental equal protection and voting rights constitutional guarantees involving racial minorities. It is critically important for courts to intervene in the wake of disabling majoritarian political action in order to achieve the "representation reinforcing approach to judicial review" n296 that functions to facilitate the effective participation and representation of racial minorities in the political process. Finally, the political process doctrine should be available to racial minorities who seek to protect their right to fully participate in democracy and influence the decisions that impact them.
Last year’s paper discusses a number of possibilities for agents, including social movements, state and local governments, corporate entities, local and embodied advocacy, and so forth. Given the fact that the areas themselves are loosely defined in legal terms, the ability to transform racism through the law is probably an effective way to limit the affirmative. This evidence is important, even if older, about the ways a race- conscious approach to law and jurisprudence can transform law
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Hutchinson 2 – (Darren L. Professor of Constitutional Law, Remedies, Race and the Law, and Civil Rights Seminar at the University of Florida Levin College of Law “Progressive Race Blindness?: Individual Identity, Group Politics, and Reform” 6-2002 scholarship.law.ufl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1399&context=facultypub )
Political resistance is perhaps the most positive usage of race by persons of color. Persons of color utilize racial identity to respond to racial subjugation. Race serves as an organizational instrument for challenging racial oppression.52 Furthermore, in the context of law and policy, persons of color and progressive scholars have advocated the implementation of race-conscious policies that seek to remedy social inequality1 3 Supreme Court opposition to remedial race consciousness has sparked a generous amount of criticism from progressive scholars.54 The arguments of proponents of progressive race blindness threaten to legitimize this conservative jurisprudence that neutralizes governmental efforts to combat racial injustice.55 The abolition of race-a position advanced in varying degrees in progressive race blindness scholarship-would make it difficult for persons of color to resist oppression and to demand race-conscious remedies for racial oppression.56 In an apparent effort to avoid complicating racial justice efforts, some proponents of progressive race blindness have qualified their claims: They have crafted their arguments to accommodate the usage of race as an antisubordination tool. Cunningham, for example, wants to maintain "race as a cause of action" for racial injustice, while extricating it from notions of individual identity. 7 Even Appiah, who has been quite vigilant in his deconstruction of and opposition to racial categorization, now recognizes (at least in passing) the political significance of race to persons of color.58 Appiah, nevertheless, qualifies his observation that race can serve as a site of resistance by cautioning advocates of race consciousness against "let[ting] our racial identities subject us to new tyrannies."5 9 This analytical compromise, which would keep race as a source of political resistance while abandoning or tentatively embracing it as an aspect of identity, obscures the connections between racial identity and resistance. This blurring of identity and politics occurs because progressive race blindness theorists overlook two important factors related to identity and resistance. First, progressive race blindness theorists disregard the fact that racial resistance strengthens an individual's racial identity or race consciousness. Furthermore, these theorists do not recognize that some level of race consciousness, or racial identity, serves as a prerequisite or catalyst for racial resistance. In sum, the proponents of progressive race blindness do not acknowledge that there is a symbiotic relationship between racial resistance and identity formation; the two processes are mutually reinforcing. [. . .] The progressive race blindness scholarship also blurs the reality that racial consciousness or identity serves as a prerequisite or catalyst for racial resistance. Persons of color have written extensively on how their racial identity- shaped by experiences with subordination-gives them valuable "experiential knowledge" for challenging racial injustice. 6 Similarly, progressive whites have persuasively argued that white obliviousness to race and racial identity impedes whites' understanding and appreciation of racial oppression. 63 For whites or persons of color, race consciousness and identity help create the circumstances for meaningful racial resistance. Accordingly, the progressive race blindness compromise, which seeks to maintain political race but to extricate race from identity and culture, presents an unworkable position. Political resistance to racial subordination constructs and reinforces racial identity and consciousness; racial identity and consciousness are prerequisites for racial resistance. By opposing or questioning racial identity, proponents of progressive race blindness offer a theory that renders racial resistance an extraordinarily difficult or even impossible proposition.
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5. Beyond and Spectral Race
Is the performative always less disruptive than the ontological?
Sexton, 11 (Jared Sexton, University of California, Irvine (School of Humanities) “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro- Pessimism and Black Optimism,” http://www.yorku.ca/intent/issue5/articles/jaredsexton.php, InTensions JournalCopyright ©2011 by York University (Toronto, Canada) Issue 5 (Fall/Winter 2011) )
[29] As a way of stepping into it, again, and of concluding with anticipation, I’ll ask directly: Are the epigraphs in contradiction? Do we have here two incommensurable approaches to black studies, or perhaps some other relation? Let us assume, with Wilderson, it is the case that every gesture, every performance of blackness, every act or action, critical or creative, rhetorical or aesthetic, is haunted by this sense of grammar and ghosts, of a structure and a memory of its (still) coming into being through and as violence. Does this haunting imply, much less ensure, that there is not and can be no fugitive movement of escape, as Moten has it? Does afro-pessimism fail to hear the resonance of black optimism? Or might something else be at work. Of course, when Wilderson writes that “performance meets ontology,” he is saying quite a bit more than that. Though he is attempting to think the two registers together—the performative and the ontological—he is indicating not so much that ontology is not performative, but rather more so that performativity does not, in fact, have disruptive power at the level or in the way that it has been theorized to date. More radically still, he is suggesting that this theorization remains insufficiently elaborated. That, at least, is how I read the animating gesture of the intervention and interlocution.
Latinx is a growing term...it takes into account a fluid notion of gender and that all genders cannot fit under ‘Latino.’
Ramirez & Blay, ’16 (07/05/2016 Why People Are Using The Term ‘Latinx’ Do you identify as “Latinx”? By Tanisha Love Ramirez , Zeba Blay http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-people-are-using-the-term- latinx_us_57753328e4b0cc0fa136a159)
Latinx is the gender-neutral alternative to Latino, Latina and even Latin@. Used by scholars, activists and an increasing number of journalists, Latinx is quickly gaining popularity among the general public. It’s part of a “linguistic revolution” that aims to move beyond gender binaries and is inclusive of the intersecting identities of Latin American descendants. In addition to men and women from all racial backgrounds, Latinx also makes room for people who are trans, queer, agender, non-binary, gender non-conforming or gender fluid. “In Spanish, the masculinized version of words is considered gender neutral. But that obviously doesn’t work for some of us because I don’t think it’s appropriate to assign masculinity as gender neutral when it isn’t,” explains queer, non-binary femme writer Jack Qu’emi Gutiérrez in an interview with PRI. “The ‘x,’ in a lot of ways, is a way of rejecting the gendering of words to begin with, especially since Spanish is such a gendered language.” Latinx is also, as pointed out by writer Gabe Gonzalez, a way to reclaim identity, a form of rebellion against “the language and legacy of European traditions that were imposed on the Americas.” Here’s why people are using the term “Latinx:” Languages change in order to accommodate the times in which it’s used, and in a year where discussions about trans and non-binary identity are at the forefront, it makes sense for “Latino” to evolve. Though it is understood that many people may not identify as Latinx for various reasons, we feel it is important that we respect others who do and who want to be referred to as such. For what it’s worth, using Latinx in general is a way to be more inclusive of identities that go beyond the every day gender and racial norms that are rapidly shifting and being redefined in today’s culture. It’s not a perfect term, but for many people out there, it’s the beginning of a linguistic revolution. “[Latinx] is just one word,” explains Gutiérrez. “We adapt to survive in this kind of environment, you know, we also adapt our language. It’s vital to just expressing who we are and being able to explain to others in our own community, ‘Hey, we’re here. This is how you can be respectful of us. Acknowledge us.’” Where did the term originate? Latinx first began to emerge within queer
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communities on the internet in 2004, and saw a rise in popularity in late 2014, according to Complex. By 2015, Google searches for the term began to increase (see the graph below) and Latinx became a widely-used identifier both on social media platforms like Tumblr and in scholarly work. Many scholars and activists praise the term’s ability to better include many groups of people while challenging cultural and norms. Why not everyone is on board Despite the growing popularity of the term, Latinx has been faced with criticism. Many opponents of the term have suggested that using an un-gendered noun like Latinx is disrespectful to the Spanish language and some have even called the term “a blatant form of linguistic imperialism.” However, in defense of the term, Brooklyn College professors María R. Scharrón-del Río and Alan A. Aja argue that the Spanish language itself is a form of linguistic imperialism for Latin Americans. “Are we not aware that upon the arrival of the conquistadores and subsequent acts of genocide, a few thousand indigenous languages existed in the Americas, and a few resilient hundred continue to be spoken today?” they explain in a piece on LatinoRebels.com. “Not to mention the attempted erasure of African languages via the violence of slavery and colonialism.” They go on to point out that many of the indigenous languages throughout Latin America and the world range from genderless to multi-gendered. However, writer Monse Arce argues that Latinx is just as problematic as Latino and Latina. “They’re blanket terms that were invented to group us all under one common colonized identity,” she writes in Affinity Magazine. Then, there are individuals who say they have chosen not to adopt the term because “Latinx doesn’t roll off the tongue when you’re speaking Spanish.” As Complex points out, “‘Latinx’ is not the perfect identifying term, so it shouldn’t be treated as the answer in the ongoing quest to develop a cohesive postcolonial identity.” But it’s usage has been gaining traction, and people are taking notice. It’s with this in mind that Latino Voices is incorporating the term Latinx into our coverage. We believe every individual’s identity is complicated and nuanced ― and deserves to be acknowledged and respected. Does the term Latinx resonate with you? Let us know, why or why not in the comment section below. Want to learn more? Below are links to several people breaking down their own Latinx identity: Writer Jack Qu’emi Explains The Meaning Of ‘Latinx’ I Am A Latinx Transgender Woman With HIV And I’m Still Standing Dear Latinx, Let’s Check Our Privilege Here’s How Queer Latinx People Are Reacting To The Orlando Shooting
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Ontology
This is primarily negative ground, although ontological impact claims could help the
affirmative outweigh some of the petty disadvantages and net benefits. When good, debates
about ontology are quite sophisticated and require debaters to relate the evidence to analogies
that fit the specific debate, always an invaluable skill to have because it allows students to take
the question of “root cause” and compare it to something like the inevitability of being “bought
off” in the name of change. In terms of how ontology and social death play out in terms of
theory (and our ability to debate about critical theory), the more relevant notice on the map of
Critical Race Theory is that the standpoint or ideology of Afropessimism as theory loses its ability
to offer a useful tool of analysis when it becomes more of an identity. This is not to say that
such an identity, the “Afropessimist,” is a futile or meaningless social category; hardly, but that
its function as an argument changes in such a place, kicking in the concern that there really are
no such people and thus emasculating the radical potential the theory has in combinations with
other forms of advocacy.
Brady, ’15 UC-Irvine Phd Candidate (Johns Hopkins debater, “A Few Notes to the Intramural on Afropessimism,” July 31, 2015, Nicholas Brady, https://outofnowhereblog.wordpress.com/2015/07/31/a-few-notes-to- the-intramural-on-afropessimism/)
I once was told in a conversation, “I just don’t buy that black people are socially dead.” In another situation, a friend of mine was asked a similar question centered about belief. The bottom line seems to come down to whether or not you “buy” that social death is real, whether it has capital “T” truth behind it. Is the sky blue? Can black people be socially dead? In certain people’s attitudes social death seems to have the intellectual weight of Dragons and Unicorns. Somewhere behind these conversations Jay Z raps “We don’t believe you, you need more people.” Such engagement, while understandable at a certain level, can be put in the same intellectual trash bin as “I’m black and I have seen reverse racism” or “Work is not exploitative, I like my work.” All can be true at the level of one’s perception, while one’s personal feelings do not necessarily translate into an accurate or even desirable political analysis. Theories of social death, political ontology, and libidinal economy are concepts produced in a political analysis of many different fields, such as race and psychoanalysis, the forever growing historical literature on slavery and capitalism, the black radical tradition, black feminist and black queer interventions into theory and politics, etc. This is to say, it is making an argument and one must engage the actual substance of the argument. As a writer, I employ concepts such as social death, political ontology, and libidinal economy as critical terms of study. These concepts enable me to do both political and intellectual work that speaks directly to the pervasive nature of black suffering across time and space. They are not the only concepts nor are they original, the novelty lies in how the concept allows certain work to be done. So when one says thinking of race as ontology destroys our agency and destroys the possibility of possibility itself, locking us into a
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self-defeating logic, I always wonder what they mean. Do they mean the theory of social death or political ontology has a material history that has locked us out of possibility? The obvious answer to this is, the theory did not do that, the world did that and the theory describes the violence of the world. Afropessimism does not posit a death sentence to what blackness could be, but recognizes the world’s death sentence as a structuring condition for black life. This theory embraces the unembraceable aspect of blackness as a mode of theorizing: the question of suffering and how to name the violence that causes it. This is not a reduction of black people to suffering, but a desire to speak to the unimaginable aspects of our suffering — to see black suffering as a profound site of interrogation. Race operates through ontology because race is a socially produced belief about the being of collectivities. This ontology may be what we call a fantasy, but fantasies obtain material force through the political acts of bodies. This ontology can also be said to never accomplish itself, so duration brings about mutation and perfection. Killing gets more efficient, forms of subjection become more sophisticated or stagnate, collapse, only to become fertile soil for another position. This is to say, this ontology is produced through fundamentally, perhaps tragically, political processes. The modern world is politically structured according to racist ontology via at least 500 years of slavery, genocide, colonization, racial capital, and white supremacist gender and sexual normativity. Therefore, race is the political ontology of the world not in spite of history, but through the force of actions accumulated across a span of time. This politically reproduced and inhabited fantasy is certainly not stable, but why would it have to be? Groundlessness would seem to be the obvious fact and precondition, not the logical antithesis that defeats the argument. Slaughtering black flesh produces ground, meaning, value, wealth, way-making, motivation, solidarity, “heritage” as Coates puts it. Lowering scales of abstraction one can see this violence operating in political processes and social dynamics. See how that is not saying blackness is metaphysical or that ontology is the truth behind all truths or that everything is unchanging or that history does not matter? Theory is not produced without a reading, it is a strategy of reading a body of literature. Therefore theory is one of the greatest tools we have in our arsenal. In the enemy territory of knowledge production in a plantation nation, one needs a strategy to maneuver through word mines. The world is a ghetto, I’m just trying not to inhale words that will choke my throat from the inside. To me, theory is different from a manifesto in that it does not demand us to pronounce a political program, movement, or moment. Theory is not a necessarily (anti-)positivist research method either. Theory is a tool, it is not the entire toolbox. Theory assumes an audience that either has already or is actively reading a certain body of literature. This is why “high theory” can seem elitist, it oftentimes is by its very definition. Given where theory is produced, oftentimes the audience assumed is one that can or is required to read a certain set of texts, aka academics. Yet, theory can be and is produced everywhere. Wherever you are making a reading of a body of texts — be they songs, gestures, slang, poems, academic articles, novels — one is producing theory. The terrible rap beef between Meek and Drake has produced much theorizing about the meaning of hip hop, rap, authenticity, and quality. Ultimately, the question of theory is still the same as the question of writing — who are you writing to/for/from and how much do you want to push? So a term like “political ontology” is produced from a reading of interdisciplinary texts and is given as a strategy for future reading, not a fact. The question is not “is ontology real,” instead it is “what does the concept of political ontology enable and what does it hinder us from seeing?” From there you add the tool to your tool box and keep it moving. Afropessimism may be useful depending on the question you are asking and what you need to explain. This is to say, in spite of what many people seem to whisper in hallways and bars, and increasingly are putting on paper and presentation: afropessimism deserves to be read. Not because it is right, not because it has truth, but because we cannot afford to throw any tool away. Our work, black work, has to be done by any means necessary. If it is dull, sharpen it. If it ain’t working, holster it and pull out something different. Or get creative. Interesting combinations are possible. Polemically I might add, there are no afropessimists. You can stop looking for them, they don’t exist. We need to end this academic witch hunt wherein any indication that one uses afropessimist theory is met with a cold shoulder, laughter, and even the loss of a job or a grant. If you find yourself talking shit about afropessimism without engaging it in good faith, you are a coward and a part of the problem. The pettiness many academics are employing right now has material impacts on black life — you are pushing folks out of job security and health care, causing stress and harm. It would be funny that many of those who desire to talk about the beauty of black life can work so hard to destroy black folk on the margins of the academy if it were not so normal. So, if one calls themselves an afropessimist that is also fine, but it is not an identity. At best, it might be a certain affective orientation that congeals into a research agenda and political movement, but ultimately it is a theory, which is to say a strategy of reading. There is afropessimist theory and whatever we do with it. We make it do what it do, not the other way around. The tool doesn’t possess me, unless that’s what is called for.
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Alternatively...
Marriott, 16 (Corpsing; or, The Matter of Black Life, David M., Cultural Critique, N. 94, Fall 2016, pp. 32-64)
We shall see that black social life is not disfigured by its corpsing. Corpsings are merely blunders indifferent in themselves and are infectious only by convention or those rules that represent the performance of authority. For black life to live itself beyond a form of death requires nothing but that it perform itself differently; it requires only what carries the clearest evidence of life’s affirmation. For black life to go beyond the command of a tradition that relies on its symbolic representation-as-disfiguration, it must change the understanding of what it means to be black and living; it must change the way that it is seen as an infection whose dispatch produces intense enjoyment, so to speak, of body and mind. This also implies that it is in principle impossible to make sense of black life unless we posit what makes it unlivable, even though what gets corpsed is in a certain sense what keeps on living. We need not demonstrate all this here at greater length. Finally, we see that the supreme reward of social death is to know the black law of fungibility—that is, to know that one’s role can be endlessly impersonated whatever the complexity of the situation; the penalty of not knowing this is as fatal now as it ever was, especially when the gap that opens up between the ego and its enslavement by racist codes can legally be named as dying while black.
In terms of encountering the binary between ontology and epistemology (as well as pessimism
and optimism), there is a debate here about the “aftermath” and how to respond to claims of
utter annihilation with a response that is not dismissive—that says, “That is terrible. I am
listening.” So if an argument taking some distance from social death theory advances a claim
that racial objectification is the core of racial violence, but that it is changing form and we must
also consider “racial subjectivication” in order to say, “let’s go somewhere.”
Schraub, UC-Berkeley Law Fellow, ’16 (17 Berkeley J. Afr.-Am. L. & Pol'y 3, “Racism as Subjectification”, David)
Racism as traditionally understood objectified its victims - it saw them merely as tools or resources to be used for the benefits of White power-brokers. The slave system was a clear instance of at least six of Nussbaum's seven categories of objectification (inertness is the possible exception). Instrumentality is one of the more important factors. Linking value to what one can do for others imperils a great number of the basic entitlements liberal society grants to individuals as part of our inherent human dignity. Once something (or someone) has been identified as a valuable tool, people will desire to
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own and control it (ownership, denial of autonomy). That which is owned can normally be treated or abused however the owner chooses (violation), and the reduction of person to property undoubtedly weakens the perception that they have a morally relevant perspective or experience (denial of subjectivity). Finally, because an instrument is valued only with regard to its function, it can be replaced by any object that replicates that function (fungibility). n19 Overall, since objectified individuals are not seen as having intrinsic moral worth, it is easy to deny them political and legal rights. Persons whose value is perceived only in terms of what they can provide to others are not well- positioned to claim rights premised on inherent - and therefore "unearned" - human dignity. This form of racism has not completely been eliminated today. However, the passage of various civil rights acts, the formal bar against de jure legal discrimination, and other such advances have sent the signal that racial minorities are subjects for the purpose of voting, political participation, and other metrics of societal inclusion. Much of the functional exclusion of racial minorities today comes not through a formalized commitment to exclusion, but rather from claims that it is morally irrelevant whether they are included or not.
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