ADI 2010 1 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Critical Racial Reality -- Index

1NC...... 2 Link: Immigration Policy Generic...... 6 Link: Exclusion of the Black Immigrant...... 8 Link: Racial Profiling...... 9 Link: Work Visa...... 12 Link: High Skilled Workers...... 14 Link: H-2 Work Visa...... 16 Link: Link of Omission Key...... 18 Link: Soft Left Policies / Critical Affs...... 19 Link: Poverty Advantages...... 20 Link: Illegal Immigration Advantages...... 21 Link Magnifier: Skepticism...... 22 Internal Link: Color Blindness Bad...... 23 Impact: White Supremacy...... 26 Impact: Whiteness...... 27 Impact: Structural Racism...... 28 Impact: Empire...... 30 Impact: Environmental Destruction...... 31 Impact: Terrorism………………………………………………………………………………………...... 33 Alternative: Performative Interruption...... 34 AT: PERM- Working with in the system...... 38 AT: Capitalism...... 39 AT: Identity Politics is bad...... 40 AT: Black White Binaries...... 42 AT: We Should be Colorblind/Our Policy is Colorblind...... 43 AT: Victimization arguments...... 44 AT: Essentialism...... 45

***Affirmative Answers***...... 47 Aff Answers: Perm- Work in the System...... 48 Aff Answers: Policy Works...... 49 Aff Answers: Essentialism...... 50 Aff Answers: Colorblind Good...... 52 Aff Answers: Identity Politics Bad...... 53 Aff Answers Totalization Turn...... 55 ADI 2010 2 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality 1NC

A. Whiteness has assumed the position of an uninterrogated space leaving us unable to know what “whiteness” means. Yet we perceive whiteness as if it has a normative essence. By viewing whiteness as a rhetorical construction we expose its invisibility which has been manifested through its universality.

Nakayama & Krizak, 1995 Asst Prof, Dept of Communication @ Arizona State Univ. & Asst Prof, Dept of Communication @ St. Louis Univ. Thomas K. & Robert L.“WHITENESS: A Strategic Rhetoric”; Quarterly Journal of Speech, 81, 291-309

Historically, the development of the study of communication has followed a focus on the center. Plato and Aristotle, from a privileged class, were not interested in theorizing or empowering ways that women, slaves, or others culturally marginalized people might speak. The rhetor was always already assumed to be a member of the center. Spelman argues that “both Plato and Aristotle have a normative notion of humanness that is inseparable from a notion of masculinity (which is of course normative)” (54). Spelman’s analysis demonstrates the ways that “race” and gender get conflated in order to center male citizens. While the configuration of the racial/ethnic territory has shifted from the place of ancient Greece to contemporary North America, the assumption of centeredness has remained intact and unquestioned. As a consequence of this historical framework, in U.S. culture, whiteness has assumed the position of an uninterrogated space. In sum, we do not know what “whiteness” means. An earlier attempt to get at this problem, by a citizen of the center, underscores an important paradox and risk: When we examine ourselves as whites and all that we stand for in the world today, we find a paradox. We are not what we suppose ourselves to be. We have fancied ourselves the good guys who make a few mistakes. But that is not what we find. (Dutcher 97) The risk for critical researchers who choose to interrogate whiteness, including those in ethnography and cultural studies, is the risk of essentialism. Whatever “whiteness really means is constituted only through the rhetoric of whiteness. There is no “true essence” to “whiteness”; there are only historically contingent constructions of that social location. Foucault’s principle of “exteriority” explains the rhetorical sensibility, rather than essential nature, of discursive events: We are not to burrow into the hidden core of discourse, to the heart of thought or meaning manifested in it; instead, taking the discourse itself, its appearance and its regularity, that we should look for its external conditions of existence, for that which gives rise to the chance series of these events and fixes its limits. (“Discourse on Language” 229) Yet, the social location of “whiteness is perceived as if it had a normative essence. It is important that we acknowledge that “the radicality or conservatism of essentialism depends, to a significant degree, on who is utilizing it, how it is deployed, and where its effects are concentrated” (Fuss 20). By viewing whiteness as a rhetorical construction, we avoid searching for any essential nature to whiteness. Instead, we seek an understanding of the ways that this rhetorical construction makes itself visible and invisible, eluding analysis yet exerting influence over everyday life. The invisibility of whiteness has been manifested through its universality. The universality of whiteness resides in its already defined position as everything. Richard Dyer makes an important point:In the realm of categories, black is always marked as a colour (as the term “coloured”egregiously acknowledges), and is always particularizing: whereas white is not anythingreally, not an identity, not a particularizing quality, because it is everything-white is nocolour because it is all colours. (45)

Thus, the experiences and communication patterns of whites are taken as the norm from which Others are marked. If we take a critical perspective to whiteness, however, we can begin the process of particularizing white experience. This move displaces whites from a universal stance which has tended to normalize and to naturalize their positionality to a more specific social location in which they confront the kinds of questions and challenges facing any particular social location. As Frye underscores, “What this can mean to white people is that we are not white by nature but by political classification” (118). In light of the influential political position of whiteness, it is surprising that critical scholars have not yet scrutinized the center in the ways that they have been probing the margins. Despite the historical domination of the center and the myriad of ways it exerts its influence on the margins, our discipline has not been critical of this dominance over communication studies. In this paper we push the territory of the center in new directions, much as critical scholars have pushed the margins. By critically examining this space, it gains particularity, while losing universality. We see this conceptual move as one that is counterhegemonic, as it challenges the normalizing position of the center, whiteness. ADI 2010 3 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality B. This purported neutrality is also seen in immigration laws but also the enforcement of those laws

Hing 2009, Professor of Law at UC Davis Bill Ong “Institutional Racism ICE Raids and Immigration Reform “ University of San Francisco Law Review Fall 2009

Based on the manner in which immigration laws and enforcement policies have evolved, racism has been institutionalized in those laws and policies. However, writers such as john powell n136 urge us to do more and to examine how different institutions interrelate with one another to produce an even more sinister dynamic. n137 Thus, powell encourages us to look beyond the institutionalized racism within U.S. immigration laws and enforcement policies that has become part of the "structure" of those laws and policies, and to look at the interaction between institutions for what he terms "structural racism." n138 Whatever the terminology, powell invites us to take the institution of immigration laws and policies and see how that institution relates to other institutions that can produce racial outcomes. It does not take long to realize that while immigration laws and enforcement policies have evolved in a manner that continues to prey on Mexicans, Asians, and other Latin migrants, the relationship of those laws and policies with other racialized institutions underscores the structural challenges that immigrants of color face. Consider the NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. NAFTA has placed Mexico at such a competitive disadvantage with the United States in the production of corn that Mexico now imports most of its corn from the [*347] United States, and Mexican corn farm workers have lost their jobs. n139 The U.S.- embraced World Trade Organization, which advocates global free trade, favors lowest-bid manufacturing nations like China and India, so that manufacturers in a country like Mexico cannot compete and must lay off workers. n140 Is there little wonder that so many Mexican workers look to the United States for jobs? Think also of refugee resettlement programs as an institution. When Southeast Asian refugees are resettled in public housing or poor neighborhoods, their children find themselves in an environment that can lead to bad behavior or crime. n141 Consider U.S. involvement in wars and civil conflict abroad. Think also of U.S. involvement in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq - places that have produced involuntary migrants of color to our shores. Other racialized institutions that interact with immigration laws and enforcement also come to mind: the criminal justice system, poor neighborhoods, and inner city schools. Even coming back full circle to enslavement of people - today's human trafficking institutions - we begin to realize a sad interaction with immigration laws that requires greater attention. All of these institutions can lead to situations that spell trouble within the immigration enforcement framework. The immigration admission and enforcement regimes may appear neutral on their face, but (1) they have evolved in a racialized manner and (2) when the immigration framework interacts with other racialized institutions you realize that the structure generates racial group disparities as well. NAFTA and globalization form a big part of why many migrants of color cannot remain in their native countries. The criminal justice system and poverty prey heavily on poor communities of color, leading to deportable offenses if defendants are not U.S. citizens. ADI 2010 4 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality C. The Impact: This invisibility allows for white supremacy to be the underpinning of ALL system of domination

Mill 97, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois Charles writes in his book the Racial Contract in 1997, p.1

White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today. You will not find this term in introductory, or even advanced, texts in political theory. A standard undergraduate philosophy will start off with Plato and Aristotle, perhaps say something about Augustine, Aquinas, and Machiavelli, move on to Hobbes, Locke, Mill, and Marx, and then wind up with Rawls and Nozick. It will introduce you to notions of aristocracy, democracy, absolutism, liberalism, representative democracy, socialism, welfare capitalism, and libertarianism. But though it covers more than two thousand years of western political thought and runs the ostensible gamut of political systems, there will be no mention of the basic political system that has shaped the world for the past several hundred years. And this omission is not accidental. Rather, it reflects the fact that standard textbooks and courses have for the most part been written and designed by whites, who take their racial privilege so much for granted that they do not even see it as political, as a form of domination. Ironically, the most important political system of recent global history—the system of domination by which white people have historically ruled over and, in certain important ways, continue to rule over nonwhite people-is not seen as a political system at all. It is jus taken for granted, it is the background against which other systems, which we are to see as political, are highlighted. ADI 2010 5 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality D. Next the Alternative First the Text: We as debaters and people should engage in a constant interruption of whiteness as the dominant cultural norm. AND This is the most effective means of subverting the political system of white supremacy by approaching the transcendence of self and other

Warren and Fassett, 4, assistant professor in the School of Communication Studies at Bowling Green State University, where he teaches courses in performance, culture, identity, and assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at San José State University, where she teaches courses in instructional communication and critical, feminist, and performative pedagogies. John T. and Deanna L., Theatre Topics 14.2 (2004) 411-430 (pp. 414-415) Performative pedagogy, while still an undertheorized site of investigation (and pedagogical practice), has groundings in various fields ranging from dance and theatre to English and communication studies. Our commitment to performative pedagogy emerges from traditions of oral interpretation—a field of study where researchers and teachers feel one can develop a thoughtful and complex understanding of a literary or popular text, such as a poem, by performing that text, by reading that text through the body. Wallace A. Bacon's work on the potential of performance is indeed persuasive: "The performing act comes as close, perhaps, as we shall ever get to the transcendence of self into other. It is a form of knowing—not just a skill for knowing, but a knowing. [. . .] If the engagement is real, not simply pretended, the self grows" (73). While Bacon here discusses the transcendence of self into the other, his work is a possible way of thinking through whiteness—where whiteness is so invisible to the perceiving white subject that his own racial identity is effectively othered. Thus, the engagement with whiteness is an engagement with the other, a reconceptualization of the self as other. Certainly the work of Boal is key in this process of engagement. His work on forum theatre alone can be imagined as a productive and engaging site of understanding how power is situated in our lives, in our bodies. His work has been framed by several scholars as performative—most clearly by Elyse Lamm [End Page 414] Pineau, who, aligning her work with Boal's, argues that performative pedagogy is a trickster (that is, subversive) pedagogy. Pineau offers four ways of framing and defining performative pedagogy, noting that through this pedagogical method one might assist in challenging and subverting systems of power such as whiteness. She frames this redefinition as educational poetics, play, process, and power (15). In "Educational Poetics," the banking mode of education characterized by traditional information dispensing into waiting students is reframed into an "educational enterprise [that is] a mutable and ongoing ensemble of narratives and performances" (10). "Educational Play" resituates pedagogy in the body, asking students and teachers to engage in corporeal play—a mode of "experimentation, innovation, critique, and subversion" (15). "Educational Process," on the other hand, acknowledges that identities are always multiple, overlapping, ensembles of real and possible selves who enact themselves in direct relation to the context and communities in which they perform. ADI 2010 6 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Link: Immigration Policy Generic

Immigration enforcement has a institutional bias against people of color

Hing 9, Professor of Law @ UC Davis Bill Ong “Institutional Racism ICE Raids and Immigration Reform “ University of San Francisco Law Review Fall 2009

During their interviews with ICE agents at the plant, the alleged undocumented workers were asked if they had children, but were not told that one of the parents would be allowed to remain to care for them. ... Immigration Policy This Article contends that the evolution of immigration laws and the manner in which immigration laws operate have institutionalized bias against Latino immigrants - Mexicans in particular - and Asian immigrants. ... By the mid 1990s, eighty-eight percent of the Border Patrol's agents were stationed along the Mexican border, and southern border apprehensions accounted for ninety-eight percent of all border apprehensions. . ... The categories of deportable aliens include the following: those who are in the United States in violation of the immigration laws (e.g., entry without inspection, false claim to citizenship); those non-immigrants who overstay their visas or work without authorization; those who have helped others enter (smuggled) without inspection; and those who are parties to sham marriages. ... From Dehumanization and Demonization to Criminalization The institutionalized racism of U.S. immigration laws and enforcement policies reflects the evolution of immigration laws that grappled with constant tension over who is and who is not acceptable as a true American. ... Given what we now know about the evolution of the immigration selection system, initial attention should be paid to the number of visas that are available to Latin and Asian countries. ... They have been set up by the vestiges of blatantly racist Asian exclusion laws, a border history of labor recruitment like the Bracero Program, Supreme Court deference to enforcement, and border militarization that laid the groundwork for current laws and enforcement policies. ... Many in the immigrant rights movement argue that the appalling effects of ICE raids, deaths at the border that result from its militarization, horrible backlogs in family immigration categories, immigration detention conditions, and the lack of second chance opportunities for longtime, lawful permanent residents convicted of aggravated felonies are sufficient bases for overhauling immigration laws and enforcement policies. ... As long as we remain mired in the belief that we need to prevent undocumented workers from working in the country through an employer sanctions system, workers will continue to get deported, families will be separated, and communities will suffer damage. ADI 2010 7 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Immigration raids and how they are conducted are filled with racial overtones that hurt people of color

Hing 9, Professor of Law @ UC Davis Bill Ong, “Institutional Racism ICE Raids and Immigration Reform “ University of San Francisco Law Review Fall 2009

ON A COLD, RAW DECEMBER MORNING in Marshalltown, Iowa, Teresa Blanco woke up to go to work at the local Swift meat packing plant. Hundreds of others across the town were doing the same thing, in spite of the miserable mixture of sleet, mist, and slush that awaited them outside their front doors. As they made their way to the plant, the workers, who were from Mexico, did not mind the weather. n1 Unfortunately, the workers' day turned into a nightmare soon after they reported for work. Not long after the plant opened, heavily armed agents from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency ("ICE") stormed onto the scene. Pandemonium broke out. The workers panicked; many began to run; others tried to hide, some in dangerous and hazardous areas. n2 As the ICE agents began rounding up all the workers, they ordered those who were U.S. citizens to go to the cafeteria. Noncitizens were directed to a different section of the plant. Agents shouted out instructions: documenteds in one line, undocumenteds in another. If an agent suspected that the person in the citizens' line was undocumented, the agent would instruct the person to get into the undocumented line. More than one individual was told, "You have Mexican teeth. You need to go to that line [for undocumented persons] and get checked." n3 [*308] The nightmare was only beginning. Although supervisory ICE agents carried a civil warrant for a few individuals, the squad demanded that all plant employees be held, separated by nationality. That included U.S. citizen workers who were interrogated and detained. No one was free to leave - not even those who carried evidence of lawful status or proof they were in the process of seeking proper permission to be in this country. Each was interrogated individually. The process took the entire day, and phone calls were not permitted until later in the day. By the end of the day, ninety were arrested, but hundreds, including citizens, had been detained for hours. The entire community was shaken to its core. Although immigration raids are not a recent phenomenon, this Article focuses on a few egregious ICE raids that occurred after President Bush's push for immigration reform in 2004. n4 I had the opportunity to learn more about several such raids first hand as part of a commission that was established by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union in 2008. n5 The Commission spent more than a year holding regional hearings, interviewing witnesses, and soliciting input from a wide range of workers, elected officials, policy experts, psychologists, and religious and community leaders. Commissioners learned about the abuse that ICE officials visited upon workers, their families, and the communities. This Article's discussion of ICE raids addresses racial profiling, the trauma to children and families, the damage to communities, and some legal considerations. Descriptions of ICE raids challenge us to think more seriously about the underlying racial implications of those raids. The tragic effects on families and communities, as well as the serious constitutional violations committed by ICE agents during the raids, provide ample moral and legal justification to end the raids. The inherent racism at the center of the ICE raids and other ICE and Border Patrol operations raises further concern that receives little public attention. With few exceptions, the ICE operations targeted Latinos - usually Mexicans. The exceptions were Chinese restaurants and other businesses that relied on workers of color. That racial effect is the focus of this Article and the basis for advocating that both immigration policies and ICE enforcement need to be rethought. ADI 2010 8 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Link: Exclusion of the Black Immigrant

When Black people immigrate to the United States they are still considered the other

Lewis 9, Law Professor @ Northeastern University Hope Lewis, in “International Law Defining Race Transnational Dimensions of Race in America,” Albany Law Review 2009

Even before entry into the United States, Afro-Caribbean immigrants likely have engaged with the consciousness of race and color in many forms. Their celebrations of independence from British, French, or Spanish rule recognize the racialized character of colonial systems. Yet class and race tensions are also reflected in the phenomenon of "double-consciousness." Some aspire to neo-colonial standards and priorities perceived to be superior to those associated with African and indigenous Caribbean approaches to education, culture, religion, political organization, or resistance. n55 If the Afro- Caribbean immigrants in question have worked in island tourism industries (often a third or more of the economy), they have encountered white and Asian middle-class or wealthy tourists from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., China, and Japan. Increasingly, poor Black women and girls experience the intersection of gender and race stereotypes with the rise of sex tourism. n56 Many Black immigrants have had their fill of racist or racialized images from U.S. and British television and films; others download racial and cultural perceptions from the internet. Caribbean newspapers, radio, and television are filled with reports on the goings-on in the Big Brother countries of the North, including their racial aspirations and conflicts. n57 Some Afro-Caribbean immigrants to the U.S. might have seen their brothers, fathers, uncles, or sons incarcerated in U.S. prisons, then deported back to the islands. Dubbed "deportee violence," crime waves in Caribbean urban centers were blamed on such returnees. n58 [*1012] Ironically, U.S. prosecutors targeted "Jamaican drug posses" as particularly violent expressions of anti-social behavior among young urban Blacks. By contrast, media and politicians on the islands blamed the "taint" of violent American culture and prison life for having hardened the young Black men who returned to the islands after U.S. deportation. n59 When working-class Afro-Caribbean immigrants navigate the treacherous U.S. immigration and security terrain, they see and understand the racial differences in treatment at the airport in addition to the citizen/non-citizen divide. And when they enter the nursing homes, hospitals, day-care centers, and private homes of New York, Boston, or Miami, they see the racial, gender, and class demarcations that trace their lives. Black immigrant women see the irony of spending years caring for other people's children when their own children are being raised at home by grandparents or other relatives. n60 But Black immigrants are still placed by many American observers in an essentialized category of "foreign-born Blacks" and, therefore, exotic others. At one and the same time (and although they have far fewer economic resources than a Powell or Obama now have) they could be labeled "exceptional Blacks" - merely because of their foreign-ness, accent, or cultural differences. On the other hand, immigration or security officials might view them primarily as potential targets for racial/ethnic profiling - as undocumented workers (or visa overstays) or potential drug couriers. Others may treat them as members of the invisible underground who perform the "unskilled" labor that keeps the [*1013] country fed, clean, and cared for. n61 How Black immigrants see themselves in racial perspective is equally complicated. Some do, indeed, buy in to the exceptionalism of foreign-ness beliefs, others internalize the marginalization associated with "illegal" status, and still others identify with native-born Blacks in a complex mix of strategic, political, or cultural solidarity. ADI 2010 9 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality

Link: Racial Profiling

People of color are still discriminated against once they get into the country.

Romero 3, professor of law at Penn State University's Dickinson School of Law Victor C. Romero “Critical Race Theory in Three Acts Racial Profiling Affirmative Action and the Diversity Visa Lottery,”Albany Law Review, Accessed 7/28/09 Lexis

Whether one favors the pejorative Driving While Black (or Brown) or Flying While Arab (or Muslim), the stock liberal argument against racial and ethnic profiling in the law enforcement context is that stereotypical assumptions--that people of color are more apt to commit crime--violate the liberal tenet that each person should be treated as an individual, not as a member of a group. n7 Every innocent individual of color that is stopped on the highway or frisked at the airport is stigmatized by society's suspicion attending a police search. n8 Professor David Harris shares the story of Larry Sykes, the head of the Board of Education in Toledo, Ohio, bank vice-president, and respected civic leader, who was pulled over for no articulated reason on his drive home from an economic development conference in Cleveland. n9 Despite his having been dressed in a crisp business suit and having presented his license, registration, and insurance papers, all of which were in order, Mr. Sykes was told to get out of his car and the officer began frisking him. n10 When Mr. Sykes asked him for an explanation, the officer said, "'you can't be too careful. You might have a gun.'" n11 When Mr. Sykes asked why he would have a gun, the officer replied, "'Look, I'm just trying to get home tonight,'" n12 implying that Mr. Sykes might pull a gun out and shoot him. Embarrassment turned to humiliation when, realizing that the over six-foot tall Mr. Sykes would not fit in the patrol car, the officer ordered Mr. Sykes to stand next to the car with his legs spread and arms on the roof, palms down. n13 Just then, Mr. Sykes's conference colleagues drove by in a chartered bus and recognized him, leading some to comment that Mr. [*379] Sykes must have done something wrong for the police to have detained him. n14 Targeting individuals of color perpetuates the stereotype that minorities are more likely than whites to commit crime. Liberals would argue that even if this were true--a dubious proposition itself given enforcement biases n15--it would not excuse applying the stereotype to a particular individual, who may very well be innocent, as Mr. Sykes's story illustrates all too vividly. ADI 2010 10 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Immigration policy in the US is set up to support institutional racism and white supremacy, changing visa policy does nothing

Hing 9, Professor of Law @ UC Davis Bill Ong, “Institutional Racism ICE Raids and Immigration Reform “ University of San Francisco Law Review Fall 2009

The construction of the U.S. immigration policy and enforcement regime has resulted in a framework that victimizes Latin and Asian immigrants. These immigrants of color end up being the subject of ICE raids. They are the ones who comprise the immigration visa backlogs. They are the ones that attempt to traverse the hostile southwest border. Their victimization has been institutionalized. Any complaint about immigrants, fiscal or social, can be voiced in non-racial, rule-of-law terms because the institution has masked the racialization with laws and operations that are couched in non-racial terms. Anti-immigrant pundits are shielded from charges of racism by labeling their targets "law breakers" or "unassimilable." Deportation, detention, and exclusion at the border can be declared race-neutral by the DHS because the system has already been molded by decades of racialized refinement. Officials are simply "enforcing the laws." Like white privilege, institutionalized racism generally goes unrecognized by those who are not negatively impacted. n146 We should know better. The cards are stacked against immigrants of color. The immigration law and enforcement traps are set through a militarized border and an anachronistic visa system. It is no surprise that Latin and Asian immigrants are the victims of those traps. They have been set up by the vestiges of blatantly racist Asian exclusion laws, a border history of labor recruitment like the Bracero Program, Supreme Court deference to enforcement, and border militarization that laid the groundwork for current laws and enforcement policies. ADI 2010 11 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality This resolution does nothing to resolve the structural racism inherent in American Immigration policies and enforcement

Johnson in 2009, Dean, University of California, Davis, School of Law, and Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies [Kevin R., Law and Contemporary Problems, Fall, 72.1, pp. 15-16

Several salient aspects of immigration law have disparate racial impacts. Express bars on the admission of certain races of noncitizens mar this nation's otherwise-proud immigration history. The Chinese exclusion laws and the national-origins quota system disfavoring immigration from southern and eastern Europe, serve as striking examples that the nation today views as indefensible and embarrassing chapters of U.S. history. Racial exclusions have evolved into new and different devices that have racially disparate effects on prospective immigrants to the United States. Consequently, race remains central to the operation and enforcement of U.S. immigration law. n78 Combined with such class-based exclusions as the public-charge exclusion and per-country ceilings, many other devices serve to disproportionately deny people of color from the opportunity of lawful admission into the United States. n79 The limited opportunities for unskilled noncitizens to secure employment visas tend to disproportionately affect people from the developing world (many of whom are people of color), as well. n80[*16] Moreover, race-based enforcement historically has been endemic to U.S. immigration law. n81 This continues to be true today. People of color dominate the populations of both legal and undocumented immigrants to the United States. n82 They are disparately affected by the various exclusion grounds in the U.S. immigration laws and frequently experience roadblocks to their lawful admission to the United States. n83 Not coincidentally, people of color in recent years consistently have been disproportionately represented among the hundreds of thousands of noncitizens deported annually from the United States. n84 ADI 2010 12 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Link: Work Visa

Work Visa are used as a way to smuggle modern day black slaves into the country

Bales and Soodalter 9, President of Free the Slaves and American History Professor Kevin and Ron, The Next Door Slave: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today pg 22

Every year, foreign diplomats, as well as U.S. citizens and employees of such international agencies as the World Bank and the United Nations, legally import thousands of domestics, who are assigned work visas. Most are brought here from various parts of Africa and India; many are enslaved. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) doesn’t include household workers in its defi nition of “employees.” This, in combination with an immigration policy that ties the domestic to her employer via her visa, works in the slaveholder’s favor and places in jeopardy any domestic who tries to escape. If he abuses her and she attempts to flee, she leaves herself open to deportation— unless she can prove abuse—since she has broken her contract, which can void the provisions of her visa. Should the case become public, as with Lakshmi, a foreign diplomat can simply claim immunity. In Lakshmi’s case, the diplomat was transferred out of the country, and the Kuwaiti government stated that there would be no investigation. “I guess she just wanted to stay here in the States,” said a Kuwaiti offi cial. “You only see such cases in countries where they see a good opportunity.”4 ADI 2010 13 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Selective prosecution of visa violations leave immigrants unprotected once they are in the country

Bales and Soodalter 9, President of Free the Slaves and American History Professor Kevin and Ron, The Next Door Slave: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today pg 67

This view, say representatives of the DOJ, is unduly harsh and not very realistic. One U.S. attorney presents a practical explanation: “I think it has less to do with ‘one version of traffi cking is worse than another,’ than with what could just be a lack of resources. We have to make tough calls about the types of cases we’re going to follow through on. Because of the diffi culty in proving many of these cases, my guess is, law enforcement may be going after the worst ones.”62However, as experience has shown, in cases that the federal government chooses not to pursue, a civil suit can actually succeed. In a civil case, where the burden of proof is less rigid, the plaintiff can sue all the way up the ladder, to the CEO of the corporation that hires the contractor, as well as the contractor himself. A case currently in the Connecticut courts comes out of what had all the earmarks of a traffi cking situation. A dozen Guatemalans were given legal work visas to plant trees in North Carolina; the contractors, however, allegedly packed them into a van, drove them to a nursery in Granby, Connecticut, confi scated their papers, and threatened them with arrest and deportation. According to the civil charges, they were forced to work eighty-hour weeks for practically no pay, denied emergency medical care, and clearly kept against their will.63 U.S. attorney Kevin O’Connor maintains that this situation does not represent a traffi cking case, and the government has decided not to pursue it.64However, Yale University’s clinical professor of law Michael Wishnie and four of his students brought civil suit on behalf of the workers, against not only the labor contractor (Pro Tree Forestry Services of North Carolina) but the grower (Imperial Nurseries) and the corporation that owns them (Griffi n Land and Nurseries), personally naming the parent company’s CEO, among others. Griffi n trades on NASDAQ, and Imperial Nurseries is ened on their fi elds, and they profi ted from the fact that these workers weren’t paid.”65 Regarding Wishnie’s civil suit, U.S. attorney O’Connor says, “We’re perfectly fi ne with Mike going ahead with his suit; it’s not an issue.”66 ADI 2010 14 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Link: High Skilled Workers

Even if the number of work visa was increased low skilled people of color would still be excluded

Aoki and Johnson, 2009, Law Professors at UC Davis School of Law Keith and Kevin, “Latinos and the Law Cases and Materials The Need for Focus in Critical Analysis” Harvard Latino Law Review, vol. 12, 73

Scholars, as well as many employers, have long expressed concern with the number and type of employment visas available under the U.S. immigration laws. One common criticism is that the numerical limits and various other requirements for immigrant visas based on employment skills are not adequately calibrated to the nation's need for labor. n70 Importantly, the limited employment visas available under the Immigration & Nationality Act are much more plentiful for highly-skilled workers than for moderately-skilled and unskilled ones. Indeed, few legal avenues are open for unskilled workers without relatives in the United States to lawfully immigrate [*14] to this country. n71 To put it succinctly, "one critique of the entire [American] immigration system is ... that low-skilled workers, as a practical matter, do not have an avenue for lawful immigration to the United States, either temporarily or permanently." n72 Consequently, many low-and moderately skilled workers cannot lawfully migrate to the United States unless they are eligible for family visas (and then still must overcome the public- charge exclusion). As a result, many are tempted and in fact do enter or remain in the country in violation of the U.S. immigration laws. To make matters worse for the undocumented immigrants who circumvent the law, they often find themselves laboring in a secondary labor market - often without legal protections - for low wages and in poor conditions. n73 Even skilled workers often find it difficult to secure visas for which they are eligible under the U.S. immigration laws. n74 The complexities and delays in the process of certification by the U.S. Department of Labor - certification that granting the visa will not adversely affect American workers - necessary for a number of employment visa categories, as well as the potential for abuse, have been the subject of sustained criticism. n75 Microsoft CEO Bill Gates regularly testifies before Congress about the difficulties experienced by high tech employers seeking to bring skilled immigrant workers to the United States. n76 [*15] Even so, the bulk of the employment visas under U.S. immigration laws are for highly skilled workers; visas are also available to investors willing to make a substantial financial commitment in the United States. This disproportionately excludes low-and moderately skilled workers from the developing world, who generally are not eligible for employment visas but who nonetheless desire to pursue economic opportunities in the United States. The lack of lawful avenues for workers to migrate helps to explain the continuing flow of undocumented immigrants to this country. It also helps explain the persistent complaints by mainstream business leaders and organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, about the difficulties of bringing skilled workers to this country, as well as frequent advocacy for guest-worker programs by employers that would allow unskilled laborers to lawfully enter and temporarily work in the United States. n77 ADI 2010 15 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality

Work visa policy has structural racism embedded in its functionality

Aoki and Johnson, 2009, Law Professors at UC Davis School of Law Keith and Kevin, “Latinos and the Law Cases and Materials The Need for Focus in Critical Analysis” Harvard Latino Law Review, vol. 12, 73

For example, U.S. immigration law on its face discriminates against poor immigrants, with rarely a reservation raised; n37 in contrast, ordinary U.S. domestic law cannot infringe upon the right of poor citizens to travel (at least domestically). n38 Immigration law has permitted race and class to operate in ways that are truly extraordinary in U.S. law - almost always to the detriment of immigrants. n39 The reason is the plenary-power doctrine, which remains the law of the land even though the Supreme Court forged it out of whole cloth initially to shield blatantly discriminatory laws from judicial review. n40 The doctrine creates a deep and wide gulf between ordinary constitutional law and the constitutional law of immigration. n41 The Court continues to invoke a doctrine n42 [*8] that academics, who contend that ordinary constitutional principles should apply to the review of the U.S. immigration laws as they generally do to other bodies of law, most simply love to hate. n43 The bottom line is that the proverbial deck is stacked against potential immigrants from the developing world. U.S. immigration law presumes that "aliens" cannot enter the United States and the burden is on the noncitizen to defeat the presumption and establish that all of the eligibility requirements for a visa have been satisfied. n44 Available immigrant visas are generally directed toward noncitizens with family members in this country and toward highly skilled workers. n45 Various exclusions and other features of U.S. immigration law make it difficult for noncitizens of limited education and moderate means from the developing world - even if eligible for a family, employment, or other immigrant visa - to immigrate lawfully to the United States. n46 Due to the plenary-power doctrine, the courts let all such laws stand. ADI 2010 16 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Link: H-2 Work Visa

H-2 Visa are used as a way to oppress people of color under the guise of a government program for workers.

Bales and Soodalter, 9, President of Free the Slaves and American History Professor Kevin and Ron, The Next Door Slave: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today pg 70-71

It’s bad enough when slavery exists and the government is either unaware or unwilling to address it. But how about an ongoing federal program that makes it much too easy to bring people into the United States to be enslaved? Welcome to the “Guest Worker Program,” also known as the H-2program, after the type of visas assigned. Temporary agricultural workers from Latin America, Asia, eastern Europe, and the Caribbean are lured here by the offi cial guaranteeof good working conditions: so many hours a week at a fi xed and acceptable wage, government- inspected living conditions, and medical benefi ts, including “payment for lost time from work and for any permanent injury.” Guest workers are also entitled to “federally funded legal services for matters relating to their employment.” According to the rules, any employer who receives DOL approval to import guest workers must compensate them for their travel expenses—the plane or bus fare and food costs incurred on the way to the promised job. Finally, the worker is guaranteed three- fourths of the total hours promised in his contract for the period of employment specifi ed.71The conditions of the program also stipulate that the worker is obligated to stay with the employer who sponsored him; he cannot leave to seek a job elsewhere. Some employers adhere to the conditions of the law. But in a large number of cases, not a single one of these promises is honored because of employer abuses and government neglect. The Guest Worker Program is not a new concept: the United States has been taking in foreign workers almost since its inception. Our attitude toward them—at least over the last hundred years—has been ambivalent. America welcomed them when we needed them—during the two World Wars, for example, when most of the permanent work- force was in the service —and limited or simply ousted them when we didn’t. In 1943, to provide workers for the southern sugar cane fi elds, the government established the H-2program. From its beginning it was characterized by inequity and brutality. As recently as 1986, cane cutters who attempted a work stoppage over poor conditions were beset by armed police with dogs, acting at the employers’ behest. The incident became known as the “Dog Wars.” In that same year, the H- 2program was expanded to include nonagricultural workers, but the number of mainly Asian and Latin American guest workers arriving for farm work under the program is still signifi cant. The number of foreign workers certifi ed by DOL as agricultural—or H-2A—laborers went from forty- eight thousand in 2005to nearly seventy-seven thousand in 2007.72 The viability of a guest worker program has been endlessly debated, but one thing is clear: its lack of oversight provides a splendid opportunity for mistreatment and enslavement. In the words of Mary Bauer of the Southern Poverty Law Center, “The very structure of the program... lends itself to abuse.”73Increasingly, employers use labor contractors to recruit guest workers for them. In this way they avoid technical responsibility for the workers, legally distancing themselves from any abuses that follow. The brokers recruit the workers in their home countries. Unrestricted by law or ethics, they make promises of work and wages that far exceed the provisions of the program—so much so that the workers go into massive debt, often in excess of $10,000, to pay the recruiter’s infl ated fee. Employers often bring in more workers than they need. They exaggerate the number required, as well as the period of employment, since they know the government isn’t paying attention. Employers know they can get away with not paying the three-fourths of the wages or meeting the other conditions the contract stipulates. The worker, heavily in debt and doomed to few work hours and pay fraud, is indentured even before he leaves home. When he arrives in America, he fi nds himself at the mercy of his employer. The promised forty-hour week turns out to be only twenty-fi ve hours, and his looming debt becomes instantly insurmountable. Sometimes the workweek is eighty hours long, but the promised pay is withheld or radically reduced. The “free housing in good condition” can turn out to be a lightless, heatless shack with no bed or blankets, and sometimes no windows to keep out the cold, shared with twenty or thirty other workers. In some cases, he is locked in or kept under armed guard.74If transportation to the job is required, a travel fee is deducted from his pay. Fees are illegally charged for food and sometimes rent, both of which are guaranteed him by law. The pro- gram also promises him worker’s compensation for hospital or doctor’s costs and lost wages, but the moment he gets sick or hurt on the job he fi nds this is a lie. Ignorant of the system and the language, he has no clue how to seek medical help, and his employer, far from being solicitous in the face of losing a laborer, pushes him to keep working. To enforce control, the employer confi scates or destroys the guest worker’s passport and visa, making him an illegal alien. In this way, he faces ADI 2010 17 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality the threat of arrest and deportation should he attempt to leave or refuse to work. If he manages to escape and fi nd his way to the local police, the likelihood of the authorities taking the word of an undocumented migrant worker, with little or no English, over that of an established local grower is slim to none. Without his papers, the worker is at considerably greater risk than his employer. And once he has made waves, he runs the risk of being blacklisted and destroys any chance of coming back in the future for a decent job.75The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reported in 1999,“Blacklisting of H-2A workers appears to be widespread, is highly organized, and occurs at all stages of the recruitment and employment process.”76 The large North Carolina Growers Association has blatantly kept a blacklist, which in 1997was titled “NCGA Ineligible for Rehire Report,” listing over a thousand workers’ names.77 All in all, there is little about this that doesn’t fall under the defi nition of slavery. Workers are often kept against their will, held by the threat of violence, paid as little as their employers wish, and denied every basic right guaranteed by law. In fact, there is little to distinguish these thousands of guest workers from the crews held in slavery by Miguel Flores—except for the stunning fact that this particular form of bondage occurs within a government-sponsored program. Admittedly, this scenario doesn’t play itself out in every instance: many employers honor the conditions of the H-2A laws, providing the work promised at the agreed-upon wage. Nonetheless, this doesn’t change the fact that because of the program’s lack of oversight the result can be coercion and peonage. ADI 2010 18 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Link: Link of Omission Key

LINK OF OMISSION IS PRECISLY THE POINT

White social practice of not discussing whiteness is disturbing. Absence is as important as presence in evaluating symbolic action

NAKAYAMA & KRIZEK in 1995 Asst Prof, Dept of Communication @ Arizona State Univ. and Asst Prof, Dept of Communication @ St. Louis Univ. Thomas K. -& Robert L.“WHITENESS: A Strategic Rhetoric” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 81, 291-309

Thus, the “white” social practice of not discussing whiteness is especially disturbing. Sleeter explains: “I suspect that our privileges and silences [about whiteness] are invisible to us [whites] partly because numerically we constitute the majority of this nation and collectively control a large portion of the nation’s resources and media, which enable us to surround ourselves with our own varied experiences and to buffer ourselves from the experiences, and the pain and rage of people of color” (6). Within the context of academic writing that silences whiteness, what kinds of power relations are reproduced within our own discipline? McKerrow, in one of his principles of critical rhetoric, notes that “ absence is as important presence in understanding and evaluating symbolic action” (“Theory and Praxis” 107). In what ways and under what conditions does the silencing of whiteness, its presumed understanding, reproduce communication interactions between and among whites? Do our academic practices and publications reinforce these white communication practices by not interrogating whiteness? As we have shown above, whiteness is a complex, dynamic, and power-laden assemblage that remains elusive. And, as Volosimov has noted, the ideological sign is always already multi-accentual. To assume that readers of communication scholarship already understand the multi-accentuality of whiteness is a mistake, for it presumes a white audience. “White” here is ideological, as one must play the white game, it does not require that one be “white”-discursively or scientifically. ADI 2010 19 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Link: Soft Left Policies / Critical Affs

Critical theory is divorced from material reality – This will only maintain whiteness. Only a critique that is attentive to identity can transform social reality

Young 90, professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago (Iris Marion, Polity and Group Differences) August 17, 1990 . Rejecting a theory of justice does not entail eschewing rational discourse about justice. Some modes of reflection, analysis, and argument aim not at building a systematic theory, but at clarifying the meaning of concepts and issues, describing and explaining social relations, and articu lating and defending ideals and principles. Reflective discourse about jus - tice makes arguments, but these are not intended as definitive demonstra tions. They are addressed to others and await their response, in a situated political dialogue. In this book I engage in such situated analysis and argument in the mode of critical theory.

As I understand it, critical theory is a normative reflection that is histor ically and socially contextualized. Critical theory rejects as illusory the effort to construct a universal normative system insulated from a particular society. Normative reflection must begin from historically specific circumstances because there is nothing but what is, the given, the situated interest in justice, from which to start. Reflecting from within a particular social context, good normative theorizing cannot avoid social and political description and explanation. Without social theory, normative reflection is abstract, empty, and unable to guide criticism with a practical interest in emancipation. Unlike positivist social theory, however, which separates social facts from values, and claims to be value neutral, critical theory denies that social theory must accede to the given. Social description and explanation must be critical, that is, aim to evaluate the given in normative terms. Without such a critical stance, many questions about what occurs in a society and why, who benefits and who is harmed, will not be asked, and social theory is liable to reaffirm and reify the given social reality.

Critical theory presumes that the normative ideals used to criticize a society are rooted in experience of and reflection on that very society, and that norms can come from nowhere else. But what does this mean, and how is it possible for norms to be both socially based and measures of society? Normative reflection arises from hearing a cry of Normative reflection arises from hearing a cry of suffering or distress, or feeling distress oneself. The philosopher is always socially situ ated, and if the society is divided by oppressions, she either reinforces or struggles against them. ADI 2010 20 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Link: Poverty Advantages

Poverty Cannot Be Isolated From Race – Whiteness Structures The Spaces Impoverished People Can Live And Encourages Future Exclusions

Johnson 95, Perre Bowen Professor of Law and Thomas F. Bergin Research Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. Alex M., Jr. University of Pennsylvania Law Review, May, 1995 http://www.jstor.org/stable/3312487

In a world in which the poor have fewer choices because of their necessitous economic situation, one would expect that the socioeconomic status of the poor, both white and black, would consign them to live in relatively integrated, "poor" communities in which the only defining characteristic of the inhabitants is poverty. As Part III details, however, an examination of the data reveals that the poor are more likely to live in segregated communities than those who are economically advantaged. Indeed, it is my hypothesis that Blacks will encounter less discrimination and racism as they achieve higher degrees of economic status.'8 In this context, money or socioeconomic status has an impact on the degree of segregation experienced by Blacks . Poverty , then, serves a dual role in the maintenance of Black segregated communities . First, poverty and all that it entails'9 reinforces negative racial stereotypes of Blacks by whites and leads to efforts to exclude and separate . Second, the poverty experienced by whites causes them to value the only significant attribute they possess-the property right in their are well-known for the selectivity that they apply in approving or rejecting prospective tenants. ADI 2010 21 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Link: Illegal Immigration Advantages

Claims to solve for illegal immigration always devolve to debate about solving for Mexican migration

Hing 9, Professor of Law at UC Davis Bill Ong “Institutional Racism ICE Raids and Immigration Reform “ University of San Francisco Law Review Fall 2009

Rightly or wrongly, today the so-called "illegal immigration" problem has become synonymous with the control, or lack thereof, of the [*326] southwest border. As such, the "problem" is synonymous with Mexican migration, and Mexican immigrants have come to be regarded by many anti-immigrant voices as the enemy. The anti-immigrant activists do not regard themselves as racist; they view themselves as the voice for law and order. The history of the border, labor recruitment, and border enforcement explains how the institutionalization of anti-Mexican immigration policies have created the structure to allow these voices to claim racial and ethnic neutrality and for many Americans to accept that claim. 1. Migration Between 1848 and the 1960sGerald Lopez provides a clear picture of the historical relationship between Mexican migration and the United States. n81 Long before the North American Free Trade Agreement ("NAFTA") and terms like globalization or transnationalism were in vogue, Mexicans and Americans were living the reality of interconnected economies and societies. The southwest border essentially became an open border in 1848, when the United States forced Mexico to sign the Treaty of Guadalupe. The United States gained California and New Mexico (including present-day Nevada, Utah, and Arizona) and recognition of the Rio Grande as the southern boundary of Texas. n82 This amounted to fifty-five percent of Mexico's former territory. The treaty gave all Mexicans living in the ceded territory the option of becoming U.S. citizens or relocating within Mexican borders. In the years immediately following the treaty, many Mexicans thought of the territories as part of Mexico. n83 "Mexicans and Americans paid little heed to the newly created international border, which was unmarked and wholly unreal to most." n84 ADI 2010 22 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Link Magnifier: Skepticism

Approach Their No Link Arguments With The Highest Degree Of Skepticism – Whiteness Assures That The Critique Of Race Is Always Sidelined. History Proves That This Denial Works In Service Of White Supremacy

Wise, 2009, antiracist activist, essayist and father (Tim, Color-Blind, Power-Oblivious: Eric Holder and the Whitewashing of Racism http://www.redroom.com/blog/tim-wise/color-blind-power-oblivious-eric-holder-and-whitewashing-racism

Sadly, whites are rarely open to what black and brown folks have to say regarding their ongoing experiences with racist mistreatment. And we are especially reluctant to discuss what that mistreatment means for us as whites: namely that we end up with more and better opportunities as the flipside of discrimination. After all, there is no down without an up, no matter how much we'd like to believe otherwise.

It is white denial, as much as anything, which has allowed racial inequity to persist for so long, and it's nothing new. In the early 1960s, even before the passage of modern civil rights laws, two out of three whites said blacks were treated equally, and nearly 90 percent said black kids had equal educational opportunity. Matter of fact, white denial has a longer pedigree than that, reaching back at least as far as the 1860s, when southern slave-owners were literally stunned to see their human property abandon them after the Emancipation Proclamation. After all, to the semi-delusional white mind of the time, they had always treated their slaves "like family."

Until we address our nation's long history of white supremacy, come to terms with the legacy of that history, and confront the reality of ongoing discrimination (even in the "Age of Obama"), whatever dialogue we engage around the subject will only further confuse us, and stifle our efforts to one day emerge from the thick and oppressive fog of racism. For however much audacity may be tethered to the concept of hope, let us be mindful that truth is more audacious still. May we find the courage, some day soon, to tell it. ADI 2010 23 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Internal Link: Color Blindness Bad

Making the legal advantages of Whites seem neutral is a crucial part of interest convergence

Stec 7, J.D. expected fall 2006, University of Minnesota Law School; M.P.P. expected Spring 2007, University of Minnesota, Humphrey Institute (Justin, Northwestern Journal of Law and Social Policy, The Deconcentration of Poverty as an Example of Derrick Bell's Interest-Convergence Dilemma: White Neutrality Interests, Prisons, and Changing Inner Cities, 2007, http://www.law.northwestern.edu/journals/njlsp/v2/n1/2/)

The interest-convergences dilemma does not say that white interests, and white interests alone, will be expanded, while black interests are wholly suppressed. Instead, the phenomenon is dilemmatic because white interests will supercede black interests through time, and efforts to help blacks will also work to further solidify white interests. The process is subtle; white interests will not be adequately exposed, operating in a neutral way, through different avenues than overt racism. The important aspect of interest-convergence to apply to deconcentration policies is the exposure of white interests in the process. ¶ 27Whiteness itself is not and will not be defined in an overtly racialized manner. White posturing instead holds onto a version of color-blindness toward its own privilege. Bonnie Grover writes that "white[ness] is transparent. That's the point of being the dominant race. Sure, the whiteness is there, but you never think of it. If you're white, you never have to think of it." 44 As whiteness has been institutionalized into a means of residential success 45 it has mutated into an economic forum—it can be equated with property interests and even property itself.46 Operating as such, multiple arenas that might typically involve race stigma have been castigated or removed from racial context precisely because they are fundamentally raced as white. "Racing" as white is likewise synonymous with a de-racializing generally because it changes the way in which race is conceived. De-racing provides that one can and should come out of a group-based status and supplant it with an individual ethos that stresses merit progress toward realizable and concrete goals. This is not to deny that whites operate as a group through individual actions (nor through economic actions), but instead to say that the justificatory mechanisms available to whites rely precisely on the appeal to a non-racial standpoint. Such a non-racial standpoint is important for groups that hold power because it does not allow them to be viewed as groups but works to maintain the group-based power nevertheless. ¶ 28 In this sense, whiteness performs a rhetorical and theoretical link to an apolitical standpoint, one that can decapitate conflict and promote permanent and numerous social constructions that then work to perpetuate inequality, even when seen as a salve, and even when actually helping those upon which oppression depends. If we accept Bell's logic that races cannot operate unilaterally without affecting each other in racialized ways, it is important to expand on potential white interests in deconcentration programs. This section aims to begin that project. In Section III, I will trace the linkages of white interests and property through the contact point of the prison system. Please keep in mind that the white reasoning I am particularly concerned with relies fundamentally on a spatial disassociation—relatively rigid segregation—that was explicated in the last section. Deconcentration programs may actually prove to further this kind of exclusion, enabling justification for affluent white solidification. Like Bell's ideas in relation to Brown, these are normative and symbolic points that have material consequences. ADI 2010 24 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality

The idea of “equal” and “color-blind” law is the new era of racism evolving around past strategies to form a racial hegemony

Bond 3, Visiting Associate Professor of Law and Assistant Director, International Women's Human Rights Clinic, Georgetown University Law Center (Johanna E., Emory Law Journal, 52 Emory L.J. 71, “International Intersectionality: A Theoretical and Pragmatic Exploration of Women’s International Human Rights Violations”, Winter 2003, Lexis Nexis.)

First, it cannot grasp the processual and relational character of racial identity and racial meaning. Second, it denies the historicity and social comprehensiveness of the race concept. And third, it cannot account for the way actors, both individual and collective, have to manage incoherent and conflictual racial meanings and identities in everyday life. 206 According to Winant, the civil rights movement transformed the nature of racial subordination in the United States from "racial domination" to "racial hegemony." 207 Prior to the civil rights movement, the period of racial domination included overt and coercive racist methods such as segregation and lynching. After the civil rights era, during which the idea of equality, at least in theory, took hold, opponents were forced to find more covert ways of maintaining white supremacy. Racial hegemony emerged as a result. Conservatives accepted the notion of "equality" but co-opted it and recast it in support of a conservative, "color-blind," anti- affirmative action ideology that failed to acknowledge that a history of race-conscious discrimination [*122] necessitates race-conscious remedial measures. 208 ADI 2010 25 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Colorblindness obfuscates the racism that has disadvantaged minorities for centuries by giving the appearance that such oppression doesn’t exist

Breshears, 02, former assistant instructor, communication studies, U Texas Austin, (David, "One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: The Meaning of Equality and the Cultural Politics of Memory in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke," 2002, Journal of Law in Society 3, Winter, 67-103, Lexis)

There is a growing body of scholarship dedicated to assailing defenders of colorblindness "for their complicity in maintaining the power of an edifice known as 'whiteness.'" n29 Scholars from a variety of academic disciplines have demonstrated the connection between the principle of colorblind equality and the persistence of white privilege. Legal scholars have challenged the principle of colorblindness by reestablishing its history as the legacy of white supremacy. Colorblindness demands race-neutral criteria to determine the distribution of governmental n30 goods and services, application of legal [*76] penalties and protections, the availability of employment and educational opportunities, and the accessibility of public programs and facilities. However, the "race-neutral" legal standards that guide decision making under the regime of colorblind equality - merit and individualism - are remnants of a period of "explicit racism," and therefore are inevitably marked by the residue of racial privilege. n31 According to legal scholar Gary Peller, colorblindness is premised upon "objectivity, rationality, and neutrality," standards of judgment that "justify racial domination - if not to its victims then at least to white beneficiaries who need to believe that their social positions result from something more than the brute fact of social power and racial domination." n32 As such, exclusionary criteria masquerade as objective measures of success, and the legacy of white privilege is rendered invisible. Under the guise of these apparently race-neutral standards, the material benefits of whiteness accruing from generations of legal, political, social and economic exclusion of non-whites, continue to accumulate in the pockets of white folk. Law Professor Jody Armour refers to this invisible legacy of privilege as the "glaring lacuna in anti-affirmative action rhetoric." n33 He [*77] argues that the forms of preferential assistance that disproportionately benefit white males constitute a vast, but unacknowledged, Antarctic of white affirmative action. n34 This "old boy network" includes membership in social and fraternal organizations, practices such as nepotism and cronyism, legal institutions such as inheritance and antimiscegenation laws, as well as the more visible signs of racism, such as prejudicial stereotypes of African-American students and workers. n35 This point is significant, for as both Armour and Peller note, defenses of affirmative action are most commonly framed in the rhetoric of restitution or promotion of diversity. What Armour suggests is that affirmative action is not simply a remedy for past discrimination, or for the promotion of diverse perspectives in an otherwise racially and culturally homogenous environment (although, these goals are certainly not discounted), but is instead a mechanism by which this invisible network of white affirmative action may be disassembled. n36 Armour draws upon empirical research to prove that, "far from being color-blind, post-civil rights America is rife with discrimination against marginalized groups." n37 The empirical data shows that the concept of merit is not truly objective and can never account for the persistent effects of a legacy of cultural, economic, and political exclusion. n38 [*78] Individualism and merit are not racially neutral measures of achievement - the antitheses of (racial) collectivism and (racial) preference. Rather, individualism is an effect of the invisibility of (white) collectivism, and merit is an effect of the invisibility of (white) preference. Colorblindness, therefore, is little more than a denial of the advantages gained and maintained by these racially coded constitutive values . I place my project in the context of these scholarly investigations of the connections between colorblindness, individualism, merit, and "whiteness" to suggest that it is ADI 2010 26 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Impact: White Supremacy

White supremacy makes wars, violence, and genocides inevitable

Daniels 09, writer, for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives in American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago (Lenore Jean, PhD, U.S. Corporate-Militarist Government Motto: Oppress the Dialogue on White Supremacy - Oppress the Rage of Oppressed People Represent Our Resistance, April 2, 2009, http://www.phillyimc.org/en/us- corporate-militarist-government-motto)

White supremacy, bell hooks explains “evokes a political world that we can all frame ourselves in relationship to; the ideology of white supremacy allows for the collusion of black people with the forces of racism; it refers to an institutional structure and not individual beliefs.” White supremacy means, hooks writes in Killing Rage, “talking about imperialism, colonialism…genocide…the white colonizers’ exploitation and betrayal of Native Americans. [It’s] about ways the legal and governmental structures of this society from the Constitution on supported and upheld slavery, apartheid.” Today an “all- pervasive white supremacy,” hooks explains, is in this society an ideology and behavior. “Folks will insist that they are not racist, and then simultaneously argue that everyone knows property values will diminish if too many black people enter the neighborhood,” writes hooks in Class Matters. “Black people,” she writes in Killing Rage, “working or socializing in predominantly white settings whose very structures are informed by the principles of white supremacy who dare to affirm blackness, love of black culture and identity, do so at great risk.” White supremacy speaks to a structure of racist domination and oppression. The conservative and liberal commitment to white supremacy permits the huge discrepancies in quality of life between white and Black Americans. White supremacy is about the way foreign policy and capitalism are controlled by the fraternity of men on Wall Street and in Washington and how that policy of “free-trade,” torture, rendition, regime change, invasion for material resources builds capital for corporations which in term maintains a system dependent on oppressing the many, the majority of the Earth’s planet. ADI 2010 27 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Impact: Whiteness

Whiteness Is The Sticking Point Between Two Forms Of Oppression – It Encourages Internal Colonization In The Form Of Ghettos, Urban Spaces, And Segregation While Simultaneously Promoting External Imperialism White 7, Associate Professor of Political Science at Ohio University specializing in political theory, feminist ethics, and public policy Julie Anne,“The Hollow and the Ghetto: Space, Race, and the Politics of Poverty,” Politics and Gender 3:0202, 271-280

I begin with a piece from Charles Mills’s The Racial Contract (1997,41–42): “The norming of space is partially done in terms of the racingof space, the depiction of space as dominated by individuals of a certain race. At the same time, the norming of an individual is partially achieved by spacing it, that is, representing it as imprinted with the characteristics of a certain kind of space.” He continues, “Morally vice and virtue are spatialized” (p. 46). Mills and, more recently, Uday Mehta (1999) have noted that, historically, the contrast between civilized, white, European spaces and wild, savage spaces is used to justify imperial expansion and to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable: the humanist universalism of liberalism and liberal states, and the colonizing practices of empire. Such practices often involved forced conversion, segregation, enslavement, genocide, the dismantling of indigenous traditions, particularly family and religious institutions, and the creation and state enforcement of new or previously meaningless ethnic divides—frequently by states expressly committed to human rights and equality. In the 1960s, as former colonies were gaining their independence, there were those within both academic and activist circles who turned to internal colonialism to describe the black experience in the United States. Some focused on understanding the American ghetto as a colony chiefly in the economic sense—that is, a geographically isolated and exploited labor market. Others placed greater emphasis on colonization as the practice of shaping the consciousness and reshaping the culture of the colonized. But both approaches found sympathizers. Similar arguments were made, though almost exclusively by academics, in the Appalachian context. Certainly, where colonialism is understood spatially chiefly as a practice of exploiting natural resources and labor from one region or territory for profits to be reaped by a distantly located class of owners, the colonial model applies well. It has always been the case and it remains so that despite the tremendous market value of natural resources, particularly of coal, few in the region who mine it see the profits. Appalachia remains by virtually every measure one of the poorest regions in the country. Left unchecked, whiteness will take over every aspect of the lifeworld.

Sullivan 8, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at Penn State U (Shannon, "Whiteness as Wise Provincialism: Royce and the Rehabilitation of a Racial Category." Transactions of the Charles S. Pierce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy 44.2 (2008): 236-262. Project MUSE.)

This advice is especially appropriate for the development of a wise form of whiteness since whiteness has a long history of oppressing through exclusive possession. Analyzing the attempts of white nations [End Page 249] in World War I to divide up and exploit “darker nations,” for example, Du Bois declares that whiteness is nothing less than “ ownership of the earth.” 26 White people have appropriated the gifts of African Americans, ignoring the economic, military, political, spiritual, and other contributions that black people made to the building of the United States. They also have usurped the land of Native Americans because of Native Americans’ allegedly inappropriate use of (read: failure to appropriate) it.27 Even more to the point, whiteness has defined itself through exclusive ownership of values such as goodness, cleanliness, and beauty. Other races, by comparison, tend to be characterized as the opposite: bad, dirty, and unattractive. Whiteness’s definition through opposition to a non-white other means that if whiteness possesses a particular value, then other races cannot. ADI 2010 28 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Impact: Structural Racism

With or without visa, people of color are not protected from discrimination

Hing 9, Professor of Law at UC Davis Bill Ong, “Institutional Racism ICE Raids and Immigration Reform “ University of San Francisco Law Review Fall 2009

This Article argues that the structure of immigration laws has institutionalized a set of values that dehumanize, demonize, and criminalize immigrants of color. The result is that these victims stop being Mexicans, Latinos, or Chinese and become "illegal immigrants." We are aware of their race or ethnicity, but we believe we are acting against them because of their status, not because of their race. n6 This institutionalized racism made the Bush ICE raids natural and acceptable in the minds of the general public. Institutionalized racism allows the public to think ICE raids are freeing up jobs for native workers without recognizing the racial ramifications. n7 Objections to ICE raids and the Border Patrol's Operation Gatekeeper are debated in non-racial terms. However, not viewing these operations from an institutionalized racial perspective inhibits the total revamping of our immigration system that needs to take place.

Part I begins with a description of selected ICE raids. Part II follows with a discussion of the institutional racism that is grounded in the history of U.S. immigration laws and policies. Part III explains how [*310] the racial history of immigration policy has become institutionalized so that seemingly neutral policies actually have racial effects. Understanding the historical underpinnings of race-driven immigration policy offers a broader range of solutions to current policy and enforcement challenges. Recognizing the racist nature of the system allows for a framework to remedy a racist system. ADI 2010 29 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Structural violence is perpetuated by the racist views underlying the 1ac. This outweighs all other impacts and turns case. Aff deepens the inherent structural violence of society by partaking in racism. Mumia ’98, political prisoner who in his chosen role as a journalist has for a lifetime supported the aspirations and struggles of working class and oppressed people. (Abu-Jamal, Column Written 9/19/98 http://www.mumia.nl/TCCDMAJ/quietdv.htm)

It has often been observed that America is a truly violent nation, as shown by the thousands of cases of social and communal violence that occurs daily in the nation. Every year, some 20,000 people are killed by others, and additional 20,000 folks kill themselves. Add to this the nonlethal violence that Americans daily inflict on each other, and we begin to see the tracings of a nation immersed in a fever of violence. But, as remarkable, and harrowing as this level and degree of violence is, it is, by far, not the most violent feature of living in the midst of the American empire. We live, equally immersed, and to a deeper degree, in a nation that condones and ignores wide-ranging "structural" violence, of a kind that destroys human life with a breathtaking ruthlessness. Former Massachusetts prison official and writer, Dr. James Gilligan observes; "By `structural violence' I mean the increased rates of death and disability suffered by those who occupy the bottom rungs of society, as contrasted by those who are above them. Those excess deaths (or at least a demonstrably large proportion of them) are a function of the class structure; and that structure is itself a product of society's collective human choices, concerning how to distribute the collective wealth of the society. These are not acts of God. I am contrasting `structural' with `behavioral violence' by which I mean the non-natural deaths and injuries that are caused by specific behavioral actions of individuals against individuals, such as the deaths we attribute to homicide, suicide, soldiers in warfare, capital punishment, and so on." -- (Gilligan, J., MD, Violence: Reflections On a National Epidemic (New York: Vintage, 1996), 192.) This form of violence, not covered by any of the majoritarian, corporate, ruling-class protected media, is invisible to us and because of its invisibility, all the more insidious. How dangerous is it -- really? Gilligan notes: "[E]very fifteen years, on the average, as many people die because of relative poverty as would be killed in a nuclear war that caused 232 million deaths; and every single year, two to three times as many people die from poverty throughout the world as were killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a six-year period. This is, in effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending, in fact accelerating, thermonuclear war, or genocide on the weak and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world." [Gilligan, p. 196] Worse still, in a thoroughly capitalist society, much of that violence became internalized, turned back on the Self, because, in a society based on the priority of wealth, those who own nothing are taught to loathe themselves, as if something is inherently wrong with themselves, instead of the social order that promotes this self-loathing. This intense self-hatred was often manifested in familial violence as when the husband beats the wife, the wife smacks the son, and the kids fight each other. This vicious, circular, and invisible violence, unacknowledged by the corporate media, uncriticized in substandard educational systems, and un- understood by the very folks who suffer in its grips, feeds on the spectacular and more common forms of violence that the system makes damn sure -- that we can recognize and must react to it. This fatal and systematic violence may be called The War on the Poor. It is found in every country, submerged beneath the sands of history, buried, yet ever present, as omnipotent as death. In the struggles over the commons in Europe, when the peasants struggled and lost their battles for their communal lands (a precursor to similar struggles throughout Africa and the Americas), this violence was sanctified, by church and crown, as the "Divine Right of Kings" to the spoils of class battle. Scholars Frances Fox-Piven and Richard A Cloward wrote, in The New Class War (Pantheon, 1982/1985): "They did not lose because landowners were immune to burning and preaching and rioting. They lost because the usurpations of owners were regularly defended by the legal authority and the armed force of the state. It was the state that imposed increased taxes or enforced the payment of increased rents, and evicted or jailed those who could not pay the resulting debts. It was the state that made lawful the appropriation by landowners of the forests, streams, and commons, and imposed terrifying penalties on those who persisted in claiming the old rights to these resources. It was the state that freed serfs or emancipated sharecroppers only to leave them landless." The "Law", then, was a tool of the powerful to protect their interests, then, as now. It was a weapon against the poor and impoverished, then, as now. It punished retail violence, while turning a blind eye to the wholesale violence daily done by their class masters. The law was, and is, a tool of state power, utilized to protect the status quo, no matter how oppressive that status was, or is. Systems are essentially ways of doing things that have concretized into tradition, and custom, without regard to the rightness of those ways. No system that causes this kind of harm to people should be allowed to remain, based solely upon its time in existence. Systems must serve life, or be discarded as a threat and a danger to life. Such systems must pass away, so that their great and terrible violence passes away with them. ADI 2010 30 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Impact: Empire

Domestic white supremacy is inextricably linked to global empire. This turns case by perpetuating the influence those who oppose civil rights.

Zeleza 4, Professor of African Studies and History at Pennsylvania State University, former Director of the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois (Dr. Paul Tiyambe, The Republicanization of America: An African’s outlook on the 2004 Elections, http://www.blackcommentator.com/114/114_african_view.html, 2004)

It is hard for outsiders to understand how so many people in the world's most powerful nation with a massive media industry and intellectual resources can be so fooled. But perhaps it should not be if the astonishing monopolies of power in the U.S. political economy are understood. There is less diversity of opinion in the American media than in many African countries, for example, because of concentrations of media ownership. The sycophancy of the mainstream American media would shock many of the courageous African journalists who mercilessly attack their governments. Imperial supremacy requires the constant production of the rhetoric of righteousness and when that power is a settler society with populations from around the world such cruel fictions also serve to produce and police citizenship. The languages of empire abroad and race at home are interminably linked: Having domestic racial others who have been abused for centuries has provided the United States with the vocabulary of derision for foreigners. It is not a coincidence that the loudest supporters of white supremacy and imperial supremacy are to be found among Christian fundamentalists, a key voting bloc in the Republican Party. They would like to roll back many of the gains of civil rights and any perceived threats to American global power. ADI 2010 31 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Impact: Environmental Destruction

White supremacy is the root cause of environmental destruction

Cone 2k, Briggs Distinguished Professor at Union Theological Seminary and the author of many books on black theology of liberation, including Martin and Malcolm and America (James H. WHOSE EARTH IS IT ANYWAY?, 2000, http://www.crosscurrents.org/cone.htm) ADI 2010 32 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality

The logic that led to slavery and segregation in the Americas , colonization and Apartheid in Africa , and the rule of white supremacy throughout the world is the same one that leads to the exploitation of animals and the ravaging of nature. It is a mechanistic and instrumental logic that defines everything and everybody in terms of their contribution to white world supremacy, People who fight white racism but fail to connect it to the degradation of the earth are anti-ecological -- whether they know it or not. People who struggle against environmental degradation but do not incorporate in it a disciplined and sustained fight against white supremacy are racists -- whether they acknowledge it or not. The fight for justice cannot be segregated but must be integrated with the fight for life in all its forms. Until recently, the ecological crisis has not been a major theme in the liberation movements in the African American community. "Blacks don't care about the environment" is a typical comment by white ecologists. Racial and economic justice has been at best only a marginal concern in the mainstream environmental movement. "White people care more about the endangered whale and the spotted owl than they do about the survival of young blacks in our nation’s cities” is a well-founded belief in the African-American community. Justice fighters for blacks and the defenders of the earth have tended to ignore each other in their public discourse and practice. Their separation from each other is unfortunate because they are fighting the same enemy -- human beings' domination of each other and nature. The leaders in the mainstream environmental movement are mostly middle- and upper-class whites who are unprepared culturally and intellectually to dialogue with angry blacks. The leaders in the African American community are leery of talking about anything with whites that will distract from the menacing reality of racism. What both groups fail to realize is how much they need each other in the struggle for "justice, peace and the integrity of creation."(2) In this essay, I want to challenge the black freedom movement to take a critical look at itself through the lens of the ecological movement and also challenge the ecological movement to critique itself through a radical and ongoing engagement of racism in American history and culture. Hopefully, we can break the silence and promote genuine solidarity between the two groups and thereby enhance the quality of life for the whole inhabited earth -- humankind and otherkind. Expanding the Race Critique No threat has been more deadly and persistent for black and Indigenous peoples than the rule of white supremacy in the modern world. For over five hundred years, through the wedding of science and technology, white people have been exploiting nature and killing people of color in every nook and cranny of the planet in the name of God and democracy. According to the English historian Basil Davidson, the Atlantic slave trade "cost Africa fifty million souls."(3) Author Eduardo Galeano claims that 150 years of Spanish and Portuguese colonization in Central and South America reduced the Indigenous population from 90 million to 3.5 million.(4) During the twenty-three-year reign of terror of King Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo (1885-1908), scholarly estimates suggest that approximately 10 million Congolese met unnatural deaths -- "fully half the territory's population." (5) The tentacles of white supremacy have stretched around the globe. No people of color have been able to escape its cultural, political and economic domination. Blacks in the U.S. have been the most visible and articulate opponents of white racism. From Frederick Douglas and Sojourner Truth to Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Fannie Lou Hamer, African Americans have waged a persistent fight against white racism in all its overt and covert manifestations. White racism denied the humanity of black people, with even theologians debating whether blacks had souls. Some said blacks were subhuman "beasts."(6) Other more progressive theologians, like Union Seminary's Reinhold Niebuhr, hoped that the inferiority of the Negro was not "biological" but was due instead to "cultural backwardness," which could gradually with education be overcome.(7) Enslaved for 244 years, lynched and segregated another 100, blacks, with militant words and action, fought back in every way they could -- defending their humanity against all who had the nerve to question it. Malcolm X, perhaps the most fierce and uncompromising public defender of black humanity, expressed the raw feelings of most blacks: "We declare our right on this earth. . . to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary."(8) Whites bristled when they heard Malcolm talk like that. They not only knew Malcolm meant what he said but feared that most blacks agreed with him -- though they seldom said so publicly. Whites also knew that if they were black, they too would say a resounding "amen!" to Malcolm's blunt truth. "If you want to know what I'll do," Malcolm told whites, "figure out what you'll do."(9) White theologians thanked God for being "truly longsuffering, 'slow to anger and plenteous in mercy' (Ps. 103:8)," as Reinhold Niebuhr put it, quoting the Hebrew Scriptures. Niebuhr knew that white people did not have a leg to stand on before the bar of God's justice regarding their treatment of people of color. "If," Niebuhr wrote, "the white man were to expiate his sins committed against the darker races, few would have the right to live."(10) Black liberation theology is a product of a fighting spirituality derived from nearly four hundred years of black resistance. As one who encountered racism first as a child in Bearden, Arkansas, no day in my life has passed in which I did not have to deal with the open and hidden violence of white supremacy. Whether in the society or the churches, at Adrian College or Union Seminary, racism was always there -- often smiling and sometimes angry. Since writing my first essay on racism in the white church and its theology thirty years ago, I decided that I would never be silent about white supremacy and would oppose it with my whole being. While white racism must be opposed at all cost, our opposition will not be effective unless we expand our vision. Racism is profoundly interrelated with other evils, including the degradation of the earth. It is important for black people, therefore, to make the connection between the struggle against racism and other struggles for life. A few black leaders recognized this need and joined the nineteenth century abolitionist movement with the Suffragist movement and the 1960s civil rights movement with the second wave of the women's movement. Similar links were made with the justice struggles of other U.S. minorities, gay rights struggles, and poor peoples' fight for freedom around the world. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s idea of the "beloved community" is a potent symbol for people struggling to build one world community where life in all its forms is respected . "All life is interrelated," King said. "Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. . . There is an interrelated structure of reality." Connecting racism with the degradation of the earth is a much-needed work in the African American community, especially in black liberation theology and the black churches. Womanist theologians have already begun this important intellectual work. Delores Williams explores a "parallel between defilement of black women's bodies" and the exploitation of nature. Emilie Townes views "toxic waste landfills in African American communities" as "contemporary versions of lynching a whole people." Karen Baker-Fletcher, using prose and poetry, appropriates the biblical and literary metaphors of dust and spirit to speak about the embodiment of God in creation. "Our task," she writes, "is to grow large hearts, large minds, reconnecting with earth, Spirit, and one another. Black religion must grow ever deeper in the heart."(11) The leadership of African American churches turned its much-needed attention toward ecological issues in the early 1990s. The catalyst, as usual in the African American community, was a group of black churchwomen in Warren County, North Carolina, who in 1982 lay their bodies down on a road before dump trucks carrying soil contaminated with highly toxic PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyl) to block their progress. In two weeks, more than four hundred protesters were arrested, "the first time anyone in the United ADI 2010 33 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality

States had been jailed trying to halt a toxic waste landfill."(12) Although local residents were not successful in stopping the landfill construction, that incident sparked the attention of civil rights and black church leaders and initiated the national environmental justice movement. In 1987 the United Church of Christ Commission of Racial Justice issued its groundbreaking "Report on Race and Toxic Wastes in the United States." This study found that "among a variety of indicators race was the best predictor of the location of hazardous waste facilities in the U.S." (13) Forty percent of the nation's commercial hazardous waste landfill capacity was in three predominantly African American and Hispanic communities. The largest landfill in the nation is found in Sumter County, Alabama, where nearly 70 percent of its seventeen thousand residents are black and 96 percent are poor. ADI 2010 34 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Impact: Terrorism

The international manifestations of domestic white supremacy make terrorism inevitable

Herman 1, Professor Emeritus at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (Edward S, Folks Out There Have a "Distaste of Western Civilization and Cultural Values", Sept 14, 2001, http://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/distaste4WC.html)

The Times then goes on to blame terrorism on "religious fanaticism . . . the anger among those left behind by globalization," and the "distaste of Western civilization and cultural values" among the global dispossessed. The blinders and self-deception in such a statement are truly mind-boggling. As if corporate globalization, pushed by the U.S. government and its closest allies, with the help of the World Trade Organization, World Bank and IMF, had not unleashed a tremendous immiseration process on the Third World, with budget cuts and import devastation of artisans and small farmers. Many of these hundreds of millions of losers are quite aware of the role of the United States in this process. It is the U.S. public who by and large have been kept in the dark. Vast numbers have also suffered from U.S. policies of supporting rightwing rule and state terrorism, in the interest of combating "nationalistic regimes maintained in large part by appeals to the masses" and threatening to respond to "an increasing popular demand for immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses," as fearfully expressed in a 1954 National Security Council report, whose contents were never found to be "news fit to print." In connection with such policies, in the U.S. sphere of influence a dozen National Security States came into existence in the 1960s and 1970s, and as Noam Chomsky and I reported back in 1979, of 35 countries using torture on an administrative basis in the late 1970s, 26 were clients of the United States. The idea that many of those torture victims and their families, and the families of the thousands of "disappeared" in Latin America in the 1960s through the 1980s, may have harbored some ill-feelings toward the United States remains unthinkable to U.S. commentators. During the Vietnam war the United States used its enormous military power to try to install in South Vietnam a minority government of U.S. choice, with its military operations based on the knowledge that the people there were the enemy. This country killed millions and left Vietnam (and the rest of Indochina) devastated. A Wall Street Journal report in 1997 estimated that perhaps 500,000 children in Vietnam suffer from serious birth defects resulting from the U.S. use of chemical weapons there. Here again there could be a great many people with well- grounded hostile feelings toward the United States. The same is true of millions in southern Africa , where the United States supported Savimbi in Angola and carried out a policy of "constructive engagement" with apartheid South Africa as it carried out a huge cross-border terroristic operation against the frontline states in the 1970s and 1980s, with enormous casualties. U.S. support of "our kind of guy" Suharto as he killed and stole at home and in East Timor, and its long warm relation with Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, also may have generated a great deal of hostility toward this country among the numerous victims. Iranians may remember that the United States installed the Shah as an amenable dictator in 1953, trained his secret services in "methods of interrogation," and lauded him as he ran his regime of torture; and they surely remember that the United States supported Saddam Hussein all through the 1980s as he carried out his war with them, and turned a blind eye to his use of chemical weapons against the enemy state. Their civilian airliner 655 that was destroyed in 1988, killing 290 people, was downed by a U.S. warship engaged in helping Saddam Hussein fight his war with Iran. Many Iranians may know that the commander of that ship was given a Legion of Merit award in 1990 for his "outstanding service" (but readers of the New York Times would not know this as the paper has never mentioned this high level commendation). The unbending U.S. backing for Israel as that country has carried out a long-term policy of expropriating Palestinian land in a major ethnic cleansing process, has produced two intifadas -- uprisings reflecting the desperation of an oppressed people. But these uprisings and this fight for elementary rights have had no constructive consequences because the United States gives the ethnic cleanser arms, diplomatic protection, and carte blanche as regards policy. All of these victims may well have a distaste for "Western civilization and cultural values," but that is because they recognize that these include the ruthless imposition of a neoliberal regime that serves Western transnational corporate interests, along with a willingness to use unlimited force to achieve Western ends. This is genuine imperialism, sometimes using economic coercion alone, sometimes supplementing it with violence, but with many millions -- perhaps even billions -- of people "unworthy victims." The Times editors do not recognize this, or at least do not admit it, because they are spokespersons for an imperialism that is riding high and whose principals are unprepared to change its policies. This bodes ill for the future . But it is of great importance right now to stress the fact that imperial terrorism inevitably produces retail terrorist responses; that the urgent need is the curbing of the causal force, which is the rampaging empire. ADI 2010 35 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Alternative: Performative Interruption

Performative Pedagogy is an counter hegemonic aesthetic that interrupt the processes that hold white supremacy in its place

Warren and Fassett, 4, assistant professor in the School of Communication Studies at Bowling Green State University, where he teaches courses in performance, culture, identity, and assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at San José State University, where she teaches courses in instructional communication and critical, feminist, and performative pedagogies. John T. and Deanna L. Theatre Topics 14.2 (2004): 411-430

To do this work, we look outward from these spectacular instances of violence and examine the minute and mundane processes that make these acts possible. In our courses, we examine how instances of racism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression are generated through everyday communicative/performative acts—that is, both aesthetic and reiterative. Thus, we seek to understand difference (specifically race) as a performative construct that is always already aesthetic (that is, constructed for an audience or public) and reiterative (that is, repeated and ongoing). By focusing on race as one form of oppression, we examine whiteness as a systematic production of power—as a normative social process based upon a history of domination, recreating itself through naturalized everyday acts—much like heteronormativity or misogyny. Though in this writing we address whiteness, in particular, as a system of power and privilege, such an exploration helps mark the unmarked (Phelan)—making visible the workings of a number of oppressive social relationships. To render whiteness visible requires careful analysis and constant critique of our taken-for-granted norms. But, as our students question, to what end do we do what we do?

We both base our courses, at least in part, in critical race theory, asking how systems of power are reiterated and reaffirmed through our collective communicative, performative, and aesthetic interactions. The foundation of critical race theory and cultural studies means that we infuse all course content with issues of power, refusing to allow matters of race and difference to be [End Page 411] marginalized. These courses look at education, theatre, and everyday communication, as well as other sites such as popular culture or identity. The seemingly simple question we are often asked stands now as the premise of this essay—if these theories and critiques are useful, then where does that leave us in terms of sketching out visions of hope and change? As one student said, if you just tear down social norms, then where do we all stand? This essay is our stand—it is a documenting of how we are making a particular, ongoing research project matter in our lives (and we hope, as a result, in the lives of others). It is a documenting of performance-based research—a mode of research that asks students and other participants to enter into the space of performance and seek possibility as they are engaging in critical theory. What we document here is a problem-posing performance workshop, based in the critical work of Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal, that seeks to intervene in the reiterative process of whiteness. It is a response to bell hooks and others who have asked for a critical examination of whiteness not only through the bodies and voices of people of color, but through white experiences as well. It is, in the end, a search for new ways of engaging in a politics of hope. ADI 2010 36 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Performative pedagogy is an active process of dismantling white supremacy by interrupting its reproduction and making it visible

Warren and Fassett, 4, assistant professor in the School of Communication Studies at Bowling Green State University, where he teaches courses in performance, culture, identity, and assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at San José State University, where she teaches courses in instructional communication and critical, feminist, and performative pedagogies. John T. and Deanna L. Theatre Topics 14.2 (2004): 411-430 In the last ten years, a variety of cross-disciplinary scholars have illuminated (and, in that effort, sought to deconstruct) racial privilege and disadvantage by examining whiteness as a cultural, political location—as an identity created and maintained through our everyday communication.1 In some of these studies, whiteness is revealed as a strategic rhetoric, a means by which people, working in concert and often unreflectively, levy power and cultural influence. For example, communication and film scholars examine rhetorical constructions of whiteness (see Crenshaw; Dyer; Nakayama and Krizek; Shome). While this perspective may help us understand the role of language (and how social systems and individuals work in concert to create racial oppression) recent efforts by scholars to maintain a focus on the white subject have underscored the importance of deconstructing and challenging white subjectivity in order to promote a more equitable and socially just society. Research here has taken many forms. Critical scholars in theatre have led the way, creating critical performances of whiteness (see Jackson; O'Brien; Warren and Kilgard) that function to mirror, particularly to white audiences, the mechanisms and machinations of their oppressive actions, however unreflective. Ethnographic portraits of whiteness have given depth and immediacy to our understandings of people in lived context (Hartigan; hooks; Warren, Performing). Autoethnographers, because they plumb their lived experience for particular details and contradictions about how they create and are created by culture, have constituted a rich repository for the study of how each of us works to understand his or her own ethnic identity (Clark and O'Donnell; Pelias; Warren, "Absence"). Studies in education have also created a critical context for understanding how whiteness permeates our classrooms (see Giroux; Hytten and Adkins; McIntyre); such work functions to remind us of the power of pedagogy to help us see and re-see the actions we take, challenge, or leave unquestioned.

In an earlier essay, one of us organized, from across the variety of disciplinary perspectives, four key scholarly approaches to the study of whiteness to help create a nuanced understanding of this seemingly inescapable and overwhelming political and cultural thicket (Warren, "Whiteness"). First, scholars [End Page 412] have analyzed whiteness in order to promote antiracism. For example, Ruth Frankenberg, in her classic book White Women, Race Matters, deconstructs white women's talk in order to uncover (and to help them discover) how racism and whiteness saturate their talk. Second, many researchers have investigated how whiteness is embedded in literature, film, and scholarship. Such works explore how taken-for-granted sites, including popular cultural texts or scholarly research, are never politically neutral. For instance, in Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison uncovers how writers of American literature almost always assume a white reader to the exclusion of other ways of seeing or interpreting a text or series of events. Third, scholars who advocate an understanding of whiteness as a rhetorical construct have shifted researchers' attention from whiteness as a stable identity (i.e., this person is or is not white) to whiteness as a discursive way of levying power (i.e., whiteness as a discursive space, existing in our communicative interactions). For instance, communication scholar Christina W. Stage explores how a small-town celebration discursively invokes and rewards whiteness through a series of powerful communication strategies—that is, through the re-historicizing of the community, members recreate the past and locate that past within the discursive space of white power (e.g., settlement narratives that locate the beginnings of the town within a white subject). The fourth and final research trend involves reading whiteness as a performative construct. Judith Butler's analysis of Nella Larsen's Passing provides a thought-provoking example of how whiteness as an identity is communicatively reproduced through our everyday actions. In her analysis, white identity is considered a discursive construct that is made and remade through our reiterative patterned communication choices.

We draw strength from each of these modes of analysis as they function to call out whiteness as a political and social force. However, what is often absent from the extant literature are strategies for actively and publicly deconstructing and undermining whiteness as the cultural center. That is, these microanalyses provide hope and incisive critique, but lack sufficient theorizing to change our behavior. In this way, all the approaches here are ways of seeing and critiquing, but few are actively documenting progressive action with others. Alice McIntyre, an education scholar, perhaps comes closest with her action-research-oriented teacher groups in which she debates and teaches about whiteness as she draws her dissertation research data from them; however, the members of the ADI 2010 37 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality research team have long disbanded by the time the book is written. Thus, what we see missing is an action-oriented research project that holds accountable ourselves and the members of the community we want to inform. How do you make meaningful the critiques above in a way that experientially demands that participants put their bodies on the line? Is there a research process that could make the invisible and naturalized processes of whiteness more visible, more visceral, more present?

We begin this essay with this political and ethical claim: as researchers concerned with whiteness as a means of levying power and privilege over others, we must articulate a process for combating whiteness as a political force in our schools, in our homes, and in our communities. In this writing, we offer our own attempt to call out and combat whiteness: a series of workshops for white students (although nonwhite students were not excluded) that asked them to move past apologia and guilt for their ethnic identity, toward the development of actions that have the potential to challenge cultural oppression. For us, such a process must be both an exercise of the mind and a rethinking through the [End Page 413] body— it must hold both our everyday talk and our everyday actions accountable for the ways we each reproduce whiteness as a socially powerful, culturally centered location.

We grounded the frame and method for our workshops in Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed , employing his methodology for critical literacy groups. This participatory, ethnographic method is ideally suited for engaging and incorporating the body into theories of liberation, thus helping us to maintain our focus on the process, the performances, by which individuals come to enact and constitute oppressive social systems. In addition to articulating our use of this method for enfleshing, engaging, and challenging whiteness, our essay explores how such a mode of engagement allows for participants to see whiteness as a performative process ADI 2010 38 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Performative interruption sheds light on not only the goals but the method in which they are achieved

Warren and Fassett, 4, assistant professor in the School of Communication Studies at Bowling Green State University, where he teaches courses in performance, culture, identity, and assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at San José State University, where she teaches courses in instructional communication and critical, feminist, and performative pedagogies. John T. and Deanna L. Theatre Topics 14.2 (2004): 411-430 In the workshops, we ask each group to identify their theme and analyze the elements embedded within it; in effect, asking groups to summarize the steps they have taken thus far. From there, we move into the recodification process. That is, the facilitator asks the participants to resituate their structural analysis into a different site or different embodiment. From the elements, they must reflesh the theme as a problem, as a heightened performative question to the larger group. Here, the students must create a performance for the large group to consider, exploring not the specifics of their original generated theme, but building upon the codification work that took place in the second phase. If we return to the group who dealt with the individual in a system, we see a concrete problem posed to the group that details not only the essence of the first theme, but one that builds from the analysis in which they engaged. The performance began with a white female as the rope in a tug-of-war. On one side, an African American man gently pulled on her arm, whispering, "You can do it. Do what's right. You can do it." On the other side, another white woman pulled on her other arm and stated loudly that, "It's hard. Why bother? It's so much work. You can't change the whole world." The central figure turned her head from left to right, her face wrinkled in frustration as she got pulled from each of the competing messages. Finally, she broke out of the tug-of-war game and went up to each member of the audience who sat watching, asking them, "What should I do? Can you help me?" Finally, she went back to the tug-of-war, again getting pulled, and stated, "I don't know what to do." The performance ended, and the performers sat back down, a problem posed for our consideration rather than a ready-made solution. After each performance, we work to debrief the experience, asking the participants to critically engage what just happened. Beginning with description, the other group members begin to read the performance, asking questions of each other and pointing out the nuances of each performance. We generally have to help get conversations started, but as the process continues, the participants often become adept at deciphering the performance piece. In the above example, comments started with obvious readings, participants noting that the tug-of-war served as a metaphor for the struggle with privilege and the desire for social change. However, as we continued, they began to note the complexity of this brief performance. They noted that the voice of privilege was much more forceful than the voice of social change, suggesting that privilege is powerful. The body of the black man as the voice of resistance was significant; many asked if this performance could have been done in reverse. This raised a key question: Does the discourse of whiteness need a white body? Further, one male group member noted that when the struggling woman asked whether he would help her, he remained silent. He never interceded in her struggle, leaving her without any assistance or ally. Thus, while the performance began with internal struggle, the group member also felt implicated in the maintenance of privilege—the silence of this person as an audience member metaphorically suggests the implication of white silence in the protection of white privilege and the construction of white feelings of helplessness. Each performance is explored and treated as another text to add to our collective understandings of these issues. ADI 2010 39 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality AT: PERM- Working with in the system

No matter how powerful the system is it can be broken down, working with in is not necessary

Robinson 04, Professor of Law, Howard University Reginald Leamon “Human Agency Negated Subjectivity and White Structural Oppression An Analysis of Critical Race Practice Praxis” American University Law Review 2004, lexis

Practice and Praxis proffer antisubordination practices for subtextual victims of white structural oppression (e.g., white racism). Under these practices, Williams and Yamamoto confer great power on structural forces. n42 Yamamoto posits that structural shifts explain how and why minorities need political lawyers. n43 Structural shifts displace and disempower ordinary people, and through powerful agents like political lawyers, Williams and Yamamoto state that ordinary people can learn to engage in antisubordination practices. n44 Whether stable or shifting, structures and ordinary people work together dualistically. Broadly speaking, structural shifts evidence changing human activities and values. Changes can be welcomed or otherwise, positive or negative. Regardless, structure has no life without human activities. Structural shifts are not objective, external forces that work against ordinary people. For example, the Civil War qualifies as a structural shift. Supported by historical ambivalence, ordinary people simply confronted their activities and values. For better or worse, ordinary people simply encountered themselves. Although politicians expressed it in social and political terms, a history of human ambivalence about American slavery gave rise to this War. Like the Civil War, changing racial attitudes, social values, and political interest also qualify as structural shifts, and these attitudes flow from us. n45 Structure matters. What matters more, literally more, is the conscious mind. The conscious mind (e.g., race consciousness) has a social life, and it is through our day-to-day practices that ordinary people experience the result of the conscious mind as an apparently tangible, external, and objective reality. Yet, it is a virtual one, shifting when a critical mass of [*1371] ordinary people changes their core beliefs. n46 How we use language, and how we allow it to use us, n47 reinforces beliefs and other engines of reality creation. For example, the Ho conflict came into sharp relief when each side expressed their views. n48 Language reveals beliefs and these beliefs drove the Ho litigation. Rather than analyze this language, Yamamoto prefers to see the interracial conflict as structurally determined. n49 For ordinary people, structural properties are social realities. If this conflict serves as a blank structural canvas, n50 Asians and blacks have painted their ideas of who ought to benefit from these remedies. Structure can be the hard edges of the canvas, but human hands built it. In this way, structure works intimately with the conscious mind and human activities (e.g., race consciousness). It cannot be otherwise. Williams and Yamamoto confer too much power on structural forces, thus relegating ordinary people to mere witnesses to history. n51 In effect, they negate ordinary people's subjectivity. Yet, through their antisubordination practices, they purport to cope with these forces by giving us a classic, yet banal tale of "structure" versus "agency." With a blend of modernist hope and postmodernist surgery, they tell us that negated subjects can reclaim themselves. ADI 2010 40 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality AT: Capitalism

They call for capitalism to come first --- this is exactly the tool which entrenches racist and paternalistic dogma. Ross, 2000, Professor of English and Associate Director of the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, [Marlon, New Literary History 31.4; 827-850]

Touting class or "economic justice" as the fundamental stance for left identity is just another way of telling everybody else to shut up so I can be heard above the fray. Because of the force of "identity politics," a leftist white person would be leery of claiming to lead Blacks toward the promised land, a leftist straight man leery of claiming to lead women or queers, but, for a number of complex rationalizations, we in the middle class (where all of us writing here currently reside) still have few qualms about volunteering to lead, at least theoretically, the working class toward "economic justice." What Eric calls here "left fundamentalism," I'd call, at the risk of sounding harsh, left paternalism. Of the big identity groups articulated through "identity politics," economic class remains the only identity where a straight white middle-class man can still feel comfortable claiming himself a leading political voice, and thus he may sometimes overcompensate by screaming that this is the only identity that really matters--which is the same as claiming that class is beyond identity. Partly this is because Marxist theory and Marx himself (a bourgeois intellectual creating the theoretical practice for the workers' revolution) stage the model for working-class identity as a sort of trans-identification, a magical identity that is transferable to those outside the group who commit themselves to it wholeheartedly enough. If we look back, we realize even this magical quality is not special to a history of class struggle, as whites during the New Negro movements of the early twentieth century felt that they were vanguard race leaders because they had putatively imbibed some essential qualities of Negroness by cross-identifying with the folk and their culture. ADI 2010 41 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality AT: Identity Politics is bad

Turn: Cries about talking about identity politics being bad destroy coalitions and lead to more oppression of people of color

Alcoff, 2006, feminist philosophy professor, [Linda, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self, pp. 20-21]

Without doubt, the critique of identity has worked effectively, and justifiably, against some of the problematic interpretations of identity politics, where identity is construed in reductionist and simplistic fashion and where its link to politics is rendered overly determinist. Nonetheless, I believe the more significant effect of the critique has been a negative one, in discrediting all identity-based movements, in blaming minority movements for the demise of the left, and especially in weakening the prospects for unity between majority and minority groups, contrary to the beliefs of such theorists as Schlesinger and Gitlin. Although the critique purports to be motivated by just this desire for unity, it works to undermine the credibility of those who have "obvious" identities and significantly felt identity-attachments from being able to represent the majority, as if their very identity attachments and the political commitments that flow from these attachments will inhibit their leadership capabilities. It also inhibits their ability to participate in coalition politics as who they fully are. In this way, the critique of identity has operated to vindicate the broad white public's disinclination to accept political leadership from those whose identity is minority in any respect: Catholic or Jewish, Black or Latino, Asian or Arab American.

What matter is fighting those who suppress identity, not what the identity is Alcoff, 2006, feminist philosophy professor, [Linda, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self, pp. 22] Why is it assumed that social identities require a "solution"? This only makes sense given the liberal conception of the self as requiring autonomy from identity in order to have rationality. After all, the fact that a social identity was created under conditions of exclusion or oppression does not by itself entail that its features are pernicious: oppression can produce pathology without a doubt but it can also produce strength, perseverance, and empathy, and certainly solidarity is not an inherent evil. Moreover, the desire to be free of oppressive stereotypes does not necessarily lead to the desire to be free of all identity; it can just as easily lead to the desire to have more accurate characterizations of one's identity and to have the collective freedom to develop the identity through developing culture and community as well as the individual freedom to interpret its meaning in one's own life. ADI 2010 42 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Their arguments about how Identity politics being bad just helps to mask white supremacy hooks, 1990 bell, Black feminist theorist and Professor at Berea College, “Postmodern Blackness,” Postmodern Culture, v. 1.1, September, http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Postmodern_Blackness_18270.html

The postmodern critique of "identity," though relevant for renewed black liberation struggle, is often posed in ways that are problematic. Given a pervasive politic of white supremacy which seeks to prevent the formation of radical black subjectivity, we cannot cavalierly dismiss a concern with identity politics. Any critic exploring the radical potential of postmodernism as it relates to racial difference and racial domination would need to consider the implications of a critique of identity for oppressed groups. Many of us are struggling to find new strategies of resistance. We must engage decolonization as a critical practice if we are to have meaningful chances of survival even as we must simultaneously cope with the loss of political grounding which made radical activism more possible. I am thinking here about the postmodernist critique of essentialism as it pertains to the construction of "identity" as one example. ADI 2010 43 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality

AT: Black White Binaries

Black isn’t just skin but the use of black rhetorically is the best way to challenge white supremacy

Lewis 9 Hope Lewis, Law Professor @ Northeastern University in International Law Defining Race Transnational Dimensions of Race in America Albany Law Review 2009

This essay asserts that race, a key concept in international human rights law and policy from the beginning, should still be high on today's global priority list. However, to remain a useful concept in our increasingly complex world, race must be defined and explored as a transnational and multidimensional social construct. n17 I reflect specifically here on the complex nature of "Blackness." I suggest that international human rights law should engage intra-racial diversity among Blacks along cultural, gender, political, economic, and ethnic lines. Because "Blackness" itself is a product of popular social consciousness, I draw here on popular accounts of U.S. Black migration and stories about the Presidential candidacy of Barack Obama. Such stories reveal in stark relief how problematic an oversimplified approach to defining the borders of Blackness can be. Anecdotes can have limited application in comparison with broad-based social scientific data. But evocative [*1004] stories nevertheless can help make previously marginalized experiences and perceptions more visible. Once visible, such instructive stories and sources can then become a more legitimate focus of further legal and interdisciplinary research. Underlying my discussion is the background belief that intra-racial political and cultural strategies and analyses that are cross-cultural and multidimensional n18 remain relevant and helpful in the contemporary global economy. Such approaches, however, need not be inappropriately exclusionary or essentialist. Rather, they can contribute to cross-cultural engagement and enrich our ability to protect and fulfill human rights. II. Why Blackness? I choose to focus on the transnational and multiple dimensions of "Blackness," not because I believe that recent African-descent constructed in historical and contemporary opposition to "whiteness" or European descent constitutes the entire range of racial meaning. Many Critical Race theorists, including some of the outstanding scholars at this symposium, have already challenged and complicated an oversimplified Black-White paradigm quite effectively. n19 Rather, my long-term project is to examine the implications of "Black diversity" n20 or multidimensionality within Blackness. The [*1005] richness and depth of Black engagement with transnational contexts in pre-and post-TransAtlantic slavery is being explored by historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, but much remains to be done. n21 Specifically, I hope to examine more deeply in future work the implications of the complexity of Blackness for international human rights strategies as tools in the struggle for global social justice. ADI 2010 44 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality AT: We Should be Colorblind/Our Policy is Colorblind

FALSE and LINK: Colorblind polices not only don’t solve the alt they actually magnify the link

Hing 9, Professor of Law at UC Davis Bill Ong, “Institutional Racism ICE Raids and Immigration Reform “ University of San Francisco Law Review Fall 2009

Understanding that the nation's laws and enforcement policies resulted from institutionalized racism lends a wholly separate rationale [*348] for immigration reform. n142 Establishing a case of intentional discrimination under the challenging standards required by the Supreme Court in racial discrimination cases would be difficult. n143 Yet when serious negative racial effects of laws and policies are evident, even if unintended or unconscious, then right thinking policy makers and leaders can be motivated to do the right thing, legislatively and administratively, for moral and practical reasons. Contemplating creative ways to remedy the damage is appropriate. In facing structural racism, Anne Kubisch encourages us to be bold: "Though the structural approach may seem 'too big,' we ignore it at our peril and end up placing unrealistic expectations on narrow, programmatic, bandaid-like solutions. Instead, we must be ambitious and creative about strategies ... ." n144 The premise that reform is needed to rectify the effects of institutional racism challenges us to come up with innovative solutions. Because institutions are not race-neutral, dismantling structural racism requires us to be race-conscious in our solutions, not colorblind. In the visa context, we could take a page from the diversity program that was extended to Irish and many other western European immigrants in the 1980s and 1990s and create an affirmative action effort to finally give fair and equitable treatment to immigrants of color. Given what we now know about the evolution of the immigration selection system, initial attention should be paid to the number of visas that are available to Latin and Asian countries. ADI 2010 45 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality AT: Victimization arguments

The alternative is a pre-requisite to ending the system of victimology bell hooks 1996 , Author, Feminist, Professor at Berea College, Killing Rage: Ending Racism, pp. 57-78

The black church has always been a place in the United States where African Americans have learned oppositional ways of thinking that enhance our capacity to survive and flourish. Black liberation theology always intervened in any tendency to elevate humans to the status of all-powerful beings. This insistence on the limitations of humans was crucial for black people suffering at the hands of white oppressors and/or exploiters. The assumption that their power was limited, subject to forces beyond control, even a belief in the miraculous, was an empowering world view running counter to the teachings of white colonizing forces. As religion becomes less central to the lives of contemporary African Americans, particularly to youth, those forms of oppositional thinking are not taught. Without alternative belief systems black folks embrace the values of the existing system, which daily reinforce learned helplessness. Mass media continually bombard us with images of African Americans which spread the message that we are hopeless, trapped, and unable to change our circumstances in meaningful ways. No wonder then that a generation of blacks who learn much of their knowledge of race and struggles to end racism from movies and television see themselves as victims. Or that they see the only way out of being a victim is to assume the role of victimizer. While Shelby Steele chastised black folks for accepting the equation of blackness as victimization—“to be black is to be a victim; therefore, not to be a victim is not to be black”—he does not examine white investment in this equation. Yet those black folks who embrace victim identity do so because they find it mediates relations with whites, that it is easier to make appeals that call for sympathy rather than redress and reparations. As long as white Americans are more willing to extend concern and care to black folks who have a “victim-focused black identity,” a shift in paradigms will not take place. ADI 2010 46 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality AT: Essentialism

Essentialism of cultures allows for better understanding—it is the only way it can be grasped.

Azoulay, 1997, assistant professor of anthropology and chair of the Africana Studies Program at Grinnell College, (Katya Gibel, “Experience, empathy and strategic Essentialism,” http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713684873

Looking at culture from another perspective, literary critic Christopher Herbert argues for an analysis of the culture concept against the background of Victorian England (1991). He demonstrates that the culture concept was a counter-narrative to theological beliefs concerning original sin and its inherent existence in man, in the form of uncontrollable desire. 26 Reading the texts of Wesleyan missionaries in the South Pacific, Herbert traces the culture idea as it slides along a continuum from religion to secular science. The missionaries arrived with preconceptions and a conviction that the social lives of the dark-skinned islanders were characterized by behaviour that represented the incarnation of sin and vice. In order to carry out their religious project, the missionaries had to establish a rapport with their prospective converts. They had to learn the local language which then became a vehicle of entry into the society. Specifically, to convert the locals to Christianity, the missionaries had to become conscious of the existence of an order. Thinking in terms of culture consequently provided the key for a strategy of conversion: The missionaries' will to power leads directly in this way to the distinct formulation of the principle of the indivisible integrity of culture. (Herbert, 1991: 199) The social vocabulary of culture is thus related to policies of domestication which required knowledge of a particular group of people. Viewing 'culture' as an organizing mechanism demonstrates the process through which the existence of the alien other might be comprehended and explained. In this context, I suggest that the issue of how difference is to be 'grasped' and brought under control continues to be both an exhausting intellectual project as well as an intractable administrative problem. In the ambiguous discourse of diversity, culture is still called upon to clarify different social practices and explain social antagonisms. When cleavages in the social fabric are treated as if they were rooted in 'cultural' differences - in other words, attributed to meaning systems rather than the politics of inequality - the social vocabulary of culture is a hindrance rather than an aid to examining the relationship between the political and material conditions as they operate at local, national and global levels. ADI 2010 47 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Essentialism allows for the inclusion of the Other and grants voices.

Azoulay, 1997, assistant professor of anthropology and chair of the Africana Studies Program at Grinnell College, (Katya Gibel, “Experience, empathy and strategic Essentialism,” http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713684873

Political philosopher Seyla Benhabib draws on the insights of Hannah Arendt, the Jewish political theorist and refugee from Nazi Germany. Against a tradition of universalism which masks ethnocentrism, Benhabib proposes a model of moral conversation whose goal is the process of dialogue, conversation and mutual understanding, not consensus. A moral conversation instantiates a reversal of perspectives; 'that is, the willingness to reason from the other's point of view' (Benhabib, 1992). This formulation - thinking from the standpoint of others - accentuates the egalitarian and potentially radical possibilities for public culture. As Benhabib reminds us, the modern public sphere no longer allows a distinction between 'the social' and 'the political' precisely because the struggle to make something public is intrinsically a struggle for recognition, inclusion and justice. The public sphere, then, is the intersection of interaction, intercommunication and intercultural encounters. 27 Against this background, as Benhabib persuasively claims, 'the self-centered perspective of the individual is constantly challenged by the multiplicity and diversity of perspectives that constitute public life' (Benhabib, 1992: 141). In other words, the particularity and otherness of an individual can be known only through her selfdefinition which, in turn, requires that she have a voice. I have raised the critique of liberalism to redirect attention to the sharp contrast between inclusion and multivocality - in the first, inclusion, the Other is always the outsider, the one who is always already defined as different and therefore is responsible for accommodating to the situation in which s/he is entering. Inclusion therefore means permission to enter - a permission which can always be rescinded. The space has already been carved out by the powerful participants - members of the dominant group. Rebels and resistors are marginalized or excluded. ADI 2010 48 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality

***Affirmative Answers*** ADI 2010 49 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Aff Answers: Perm- Work in the System

Permutation solves-The alt is pure ideology. The combination is key to social change

Delgado 92, Charles Inglis Thomson Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School Richard, May 1992. California Law Review, lexis

Transformation in the Critical Vision. -- The vision of change that Critical scholars experss flows directly from their focus on ideology as the major obstacle that separates the actual from the possible. Because it is ideology that prevents people from conceiving of -- and hence from implementing -- a freer social condition, the Critics propose the exposure of ideology as the logical first step toward social transformation. Emphasizing how ideology obscures the contingency of human relations, Gordon proposes unearthing conventional thought in order to excavate the potential for change. "[The] point is to unfreeze the world as it appears to common sense as a bunch of more or less objectively determined social relations and to make it appear as . . . it really is: people acting, imagining, rationalizing, justifying." n90 Gabel, too, argues that it is necessary to reveal the ways in which "law is actually constitutive of our social existence." n91 He believes that this can best be achieved by experiencing the character of living through legal ideas, while at the same time critiquing the ways in which these phenomena "appear in our unreflective consciousness." n92 Reflecting his concern that rights discourse misdirects and abstracts our struggle for a better society, Tushnet also advocates ongoing critique, proposing that popular aspirations for change be [*1355] recast in the

Centering the discussion around policies are key to solving for racism and not identity

Eric K. Yamamoto, Professor of Law, William S. Richardson School of Law, University of Hawai'i. Michigan Law Review, 95 Mich. L. Rev. 821, February, 1997, lexis

Prominent race scholars Manning Marable and bell hooks, speaking to teachers, political lawyers, and community activists, locate the only hope for African Americans and other racial minorities in the formation of interracial alliances, whether those alliances are created to enhance cooperative working and living arrangements or to combat white racism. n208 Marable's "theory of liberation," which is built on a "transformationist redistribution of resources and the democratization of state power along more egalitarian lines," and hook's "practical model for social change," which speaks to the inducement of enlightened whites to surrender race privileges, both depend upon political power mustered through coalitions of racial groups that are, at some deep level, mutually distrustful. The problem with this vision, as George Fredrickson points out, is that neither Marable nor hooks offers a persuasive view of how to forge interracial alliances or form and maintain co- [*866] alitions at a time of "disruptive equilibrium." n209 I suggest that theorizing about and acting practically upon concrete interracial justice claims is one aspect of the "how to. " In the face of increasingly complex intergroup justice grievances and the limits of legal justice, the call for alliances and coalition- building underscores the need for development of a sophisticated interracial jurisprudence with practical implications. That jurisprudence needs to unravel the ideological strands of the Court's recognition of multiracial conflict to justify its ban of affirmative race consciousness, to interrogate the complexities of group agency and responsibility for disabling intergroup constraints, and in doing so to respond to justice grievances among communities of color that undermine alliance-forging efforts. n210 ADI 2010 50 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Aff Answers: Policy Works

Policy focus is key to challenge structures of white supremacy

Themba-Nixon 00, Executive Director of The Praxis Project, a nonprofit organization helping communities use media and policy advocacy Makani, July 31, Colorlines, Changing the Rules: What Public Policy Means for Organizing, Vol 3.2)

“This is all about policy," a woman complained to me in a recent conversation. "I'm an organizer." The flourish and passion with which she made the distinction said everything. Policy is for wonks, sell-out politicians, and ivory-tower eggheads. Organizing is what real, grassroots people do. Common as it may be, this distinction doesn't bear out in the real world. Policy is more than law. It is any written agreement (formal or informal) that specifies how an institution, governing body, or community will address shared problems or attain shared goals. It spells out the terms and the consequences of these agreements and is the codification of the body's values-as represented by those present in the policymaking process. Given who's usually present, most policies reflect the political agenda of powerful elites. Yet, policy can be a force for change-especially when we bring our base and community organizing into the process. In essence, policies are the codification of power relationships and resource allocation. Policies are the rules of the world we live in. Changing the world means changing the rules. So, if organizing is about changing the rules and building power, how can organizing be separated from policies? Can we really speak truth to power, fight the right, stop corporate abuses, or win racial justice without contesting the rules and the rulers, the policies and the policymakers? The answer is no-and double no for people of color. Today, racism subtly dominates nearly every aspect of policymaking. From ballot propositions to city funding priorities, policy is increasingly about the control, de-funding, and disfranchisement of communities of color. Take the public conversation about welfare reform, for example. Most of us know it isn't really about putting people to work. The right's message was framed around racial stereotypes of lazy, cheating "welfare queens" whose poverty was "cultural." But the new welfare policy was about moving billions of dollars in individual cash payments and direct services from welfare recipients to other, more powerful, social actors. Many of us were too busy to tune into the welfare policy drama in Washington, only to find it washed up right on our doorsteps. Our members are suffering from workfare policies, new regulations, and cutoffs. Families who were barely getting by under the old rules are being pushed over the edge by the new policies. Policy doesn't get more relevant than this. And so we got involved in policy-as defense. Yet we have to do more than block their punches. We have to start the fight with initiatives of our own. Those who do are finding offense a bit more fun than defense alone. Living wage ordinances, youth development initiatives, even gun control and alcohol and tobacco policies are finding their way onto the public agenda, thanks to focused community organizing that leverages power for community-driven initiatives. - Over 600 local policies have been passed to regulate the tobacco industry. Local coalitions have taken the lead by writing ordinances that address local problems and organizing broad support for them. - Nearly 100 gun control and violence prevention policies have been enacted since 1991. - Milwaukee, Boston, and Oakland are among the cities that have passed living wage ordinances: local laws that guarantee higher than minimum wages for workers, usually set as the minimum needed to keep a family of four above poverty. These are just a few of the examples that demonstrate how organizing for local policy advocacy has made inroads in areas where positive national policy had been stalled by conservatives. Increasingly, the local policy arena is where the action is and where activists are finding success. Of course, corporate interests-which are usually the target of these policies- are gearing up in defense. Tactics include front groups, economic pressure, and the tried and true: cold, hard cash. Despite these barriers, grassroots organizing can be very effective at the smaller scale of local politics. At the local level, we have greater access to elected officials and officials have a greater reliance on their constituents for reelection. For example, getting 400 people to show up at city hall in just about any city in the U.S. is quite impressive. On the other hand, 400 people at the state house or the Congress would have a less significant impact. Add to that the fact that all 400 people at city hall are usually constituents, and the impact is even greater. Recent trends in government underscore the importance of local policy. Congress has enacted a series of measures devolving significant power to state and local government. Welfare, health care, and the regulation of food and drinking water safety are among the areas where states and localities now have greater rule. Devolution has some negative consequences to be sure. History has taught us that, for social services and civil rights in particular, the lack of clear federal standards and mechanisms for accountability lead to uneven enforcement and even discriminatory implementation of policies. Still, there are real opportunities for advancing progressive initiatives in this more localized environment. Greater local control can mean greater community power to shape and implement important social policies that were heretofore out of reach. To do so will require careful attention to the mechanics of local policymaking and a clear blueprint of what we stand for. Much of the work of framing what we stand for takes place in the shaping of demands. By getting into the policy arena in a proactive manner, we can take our demands to the next level. Our demands can become law, with real consequences if the agreement is broken. After all the organizing, press work, and effort, a group should leave a decisionmaker with more than a handshake and his or her word. Of course, this work requires a certain amount of interaction with "the suits," as well as struggles with the bureaucracy, the technical language, and the all-too-common resistance by decisionmakers. Still, if it's worth demanding, it's worth having in writing-whether as law, regulation, or internal policy. From ballot initiatives on rent control to laws requiring worker protections, organizers are leveraging their power into written policies that are making a real difference in their communities. Of course, policy work is just one tool in our box. ADI 2010 51 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Aff Answers: Essentialism

Their essentialist identity politics inevitably silence intersectional experiences and breed the sort of fundamentalism that makes wars inevitable. The alternative ends in fragmentation which kills solvency

Letts & Aujla 96, Instructor at Humber College & Professor of Sociology and Humanities in the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning (Guy & Angela, Identity Politics, October 28, 1996, http://www.peak.sfu.ca/the-peak/96- 3/issue9/identity.html)

For those who believe that "ism's" are comprised of left- wing rhetoric, bleeding heart liberals, and politically correct nazi's, let us assure you, it is only because you have not 'experienced' an "ism" directed toward, through, or on you yet. And, given your positionality in society, may never. These "ism's" have less to do with right/left political distinctions and everything to do with "fairness." A notion that, we believe, still has some meaning in a western, hyper-individualized society. At least, it is still portrayed as such every time we go to the movies, turn on the TV, or watch a hockey game. After all, how we treat our citizenry bears directly on how we ourselves fare on the scale of compassion, understanding, and civility-qualities we still assert over the barbarous actions of "ism-ist" assholes and vacuous dielectrics. However, having said this, there remains a dark side contained within contemporary identity politics that we find disturbing. In its quest for fairness and justice, identity politics haven fragmented the emancipatory project by the construction of identities which either seek to homogenize or essentialize themselves and other groups. This has led people like Peter Emberley, in his book Zero Tolerance, to suggest that, "The cultural left errs when it seeks to immure ethnic groups into solitudes, squeeze multiculturalism's potential into the narrowest expression of uniform diversity...." While much of Emberley's criticisms are the result of his own backlash to change and threatened liberal values, the point he makes is well situated. That is, in the battle for both representation and re-presentation based on gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity, "groups" have had to define themselves, indeed their identities, as a means of legitimating their concerns. In the process of redefining a collective identity (we are this ...) there is an inherent need to homogenize or essentialize that same identity. No longer are people individuals, but rather, they become identified as part of a reductionistic category which in turn feeds the dominant stereotype of the oppositional other--male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, white/person of Colour. An example of this can be seen in the term "South Asian" whereby individuals identify themselves with a geographical location whether through birth place or ancestry. The irony here not only lies in the fact that such distinctions are often premised on the internalization of difference dictated by the dominant culture, but that the homogenous category "South Asian" reduces a magnitude of diversity into a simplistic collective identity. Thus, the term itself suggests that whether you were from India or Pakistan, or are a Hindu or Sikh, your experience, history, culture, and identity is all the same. This problem of identity and representation is not new. Feminists have struggled with the problematic of essentializing the category "woman" for decades. After sharp criticisms from women of Colour and lesbian women, the feminist movement recognized that an essential, universalizing category of "woman" was representationally problematic. That is, which "women" were actually being represented as an ideal type--merely white, heterosexual women with two breasts and two ovaries? However, what followed was the fragmentation of a collective feminist movement. White, liberal feminists no longer represented all women's experiences and concerns. In the enthusiasm for adequate representation, the feminist movement began to break apart into fragmented and specialized camps which could address specific concerns surrounding identity. The lack of a cohesive movement prompted many feminist philosophers to reconcile the chasm between individual difference and collective goals. As early as 1985, feminists, like Chantel Mouffe, had begun to produce practical theories that could resolve the ensuing conflict. The outcome was simple: women cannot be essentialized under a general category, but people, as unique individuals, are still able to pursue common goals through collectives and common practices. The solution seems easy enough: as "individuals" we should work together toward shared goals without having to reduce ourselves to this or that, black or white, or what Nietzsche called "the herd instinct." However, despite the good intentions of many feminists, the feminist movement, in part, has appropriated only half of the philosophy. That is, while women are now seen as a heterogeneic group, this heterogeneity is often at the expense of homogenizing and essentializing other groups--the very thing that marginalized groups fought against. For instance, the term "men" is synonymous with misogynist, oppressor, and patriarchy, regardless of one's values, beliefs, and relative power in society. Similarly, statements that proclaim that all whites are racists also infers a certain reductionistic essentializing. Not only are such statements superficial, but they presuppose an identity constructed around victimization. While no one is denying the existence of ADI 2010 52 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality victims in society, it is quite another matter to construct an identity around an essentialized category based solely on gender, sexuality, or race. As individuals, many of us experience marginalization based on a number of factors including our body types, our "looks," our personality types, our family histories, our experiences, and our socio-economic status. The question must be asked: at what point in history can we, as "humyn" individuals, begin to interact with one another through our similarities rather than through our differences? Campuses across Canada are currently experiencing the reductio ad absurdum of political correctness. In many cases, challenges to professors, curriculums, and universities are warranted, but in many other instances it is the result of a fanatical, fundamentalist intolerance. Such intolerance is marked through the construct of difference. When two groups become intolerant, the result can only be escalated conflict, as is the case in Bosnia. While the university is not Bosnia, identity politics continue to flourish in Canadian universities. For example, when a colleague, who defines herself as a half-breed, inquired about joining a anti-racist group on campus, she was told that whites were not allowed because they tended to dominate the conversation. When she explained that she was not simply a woman of Colour but both white and a person of Colour simultaneously, she was assured that she was in fact a woman of Colour and, presumably, they believed her "whiteness" would not assert itself and dominate the discussions. The latest SFU PIRG zine, Antithesis, has an ad for the People of Colour Discussion Group which defines a person of Colour as "people who self-identify as "non-white," whether they be African, Asian, First Nations, Latin American, mixed race, or other..." or "people of Colour (those with light skin, European features, etc. but who have significant non- white ancestry)." The absurdity of this definition not only brings together potential oppressor with potential victims (i.e. an Eastern European that goes on to work at Indian Affairs), but assumes that Northern Europeans are not the derivative of African ancestry, not to mention Celtic, Mongolian, and so on. Moreover, if one was "white" but self- identified themselves as being Indian because they were born and raised there, would they be allowed to part take in the discussion group? The discussion group ad also asserts that they provide a "safe place" for people of Colour to "talk openly without feeling censored by white people." Again, this presumes that all people of Colour share the same experiences, beliefs, and goals and thus there would be no censoring between them, or that censoring from whites is somehow worse. This does not even touch on the idea that many professors, white or otherwise, feel that they are being censored by feminists, gays and lesbians, and people of Colour. Take Back the Night is another example of exclusionary practices based on homogenous difference. The majority of violence that takes place in society is male on male. While men maybe socialized to deal with their fears differently, many do not feel safe on the streets at night. Whether you are a white male, a man of Colour, or a gay man, Take Back the Night is not for you. While there is nothing stopping each of these arbitrary groups from having their own Take Back the Night march, it would seem more practical if Take Back the Night was comprised of a citizenry that wanted to promote a society free of violence where all individuals could feel safe at night. While women's concerns may be somewhat different than those of men, the end goal, that is the similarities not the differences, is the same. These are only a few examples of many that illustrate the intolerance and essentializing nature that plagues identity politics. As a result, the crisis over representation has fragmented any true means of achieving common goals within a social justice framework. As Emberley puts it, "The cultural left's political agenda has played neatly into the hands of the corporate right [and state hegemony]... What has been lost is the humanizing force and the highest unifying purpose of the scholarly culture." It was this humanizing force and unifying purpose that made the counter culture revolution of the 1960's successful. The counter culture itself was not inherently "left" but rather, grew out of a concern over oppression, war, and environmental issues. Rather than promoting hyper-individualism, essentializing categories and us/them dichotomies, the counter culture was supported by ideals of peace, love and friendship as opposed to hatred, difference, and intolerance. Perhaps if we are to be intolerant at all, it should be directed towards intolerance. ADI 2010 53 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Aff Answers: Colorblind Good

Racial politics only help middle class Blacks which means still allows for white supremacy

Morrison 94, Assistant Professor of Law, St. Thomas University School of Law, (John E., Colorblindness, Individuality, And Merit: An Analysis Of The Rhetoric Against Affirmative Action, 1994 http://academic.udayton.edu/RACE/04NEEDS/affirm04.htm)

A pervasive argument against affirmative action is that it actually creates or exacerbates racial problems. A common version of this argument is the concern about racial politics. For example, consider Richmond v. J.A. Crosen Co. In that case Richmond, Virginia, with five of the nine city council seats held by African-Americans, enacted an affirmative action plan for city construction contacts. Justice Scalia charged that this "set-aside clearly and directly benefi[tted] the dominant political group, which happens also to be the dominant racial group." Another version of the same point is the claim that affirmative action programs injure "innocent whites," thereby encouraging the growth of white- supremacy groups. One final version argues that affirmative action is susceptible to exploitation because these programs proportedly benefit only middle-class African- Americans who do not need the help as much as those in lower socio-economic classes. ADI 2010 54 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Aff Answers: Identity Politics Bad

Identity politics causes tension within and among different groups and undermines the efforts of separate groups.

Crenshaw, 1991, Professor of Law at UCLA, Kimberle, 43 Stanford Law Review 1241-1299, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” lexis

The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite- that it frequently conflates or ignores intra group differences. In the context of violence against women, this elision of difference is problematic, fundamentally because the violence that many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class. Moreover, ignoring differences within groups frequently contributes to tension among groups, another problem of identity politics that frustrates efforts to politicize violence against women. Feminist efforts to politicize experiences of women and antiracist efforts to politicize experiences of people of color' have frequently proceeded as though the issues and experiences they each detail occur on mutually exclusive terrains. Al-though racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices. And so, when the practices expound identity as "woman" or "person of color" as an either/or proposition, they relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling.

Single-axis perspectives obstructs the ability to solve for racism and sexism

Crenshaw, 1991, Professor of Law at UCLA, Kimberle, 43 Stanford Law Review 1241-1299, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” lexis

The concept of political intersectionality highlights the fact that women of color are situated within at least two subordinated groups that frequently pursue conflicting political agendas. The need to split one's political energies between two sometimes opposing political agendas is a dimension of intersectional disempowerment that men of color and white women seldom confront. Indeed, their specific raced and gendered experiences, although intersectional, often define as well as confine the interests of the entire group. For example, racism as experienced by people of color who are of a particular gender--male--tends to deter-mine the parameters of antiracist strategies, just as sexism as experienced by women who are of a particular race-white-tends to ground the women's movement. The problem is not simply that both discourses fail women of color by not acknowledging the "additional" burden of patriarchy or of racism, but that the discourses are often inadequate even to the discrete tasks of articulating the full dimensions of racism and sexism. Because women of color experience racism in ways not always the same as those experienced by men of color, and sexism in ways not always parallel to experiences of white women, dominant conceptions of antiracism and feminism are limited, even on their own terms. ADI 2010 55 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality

The problem with identity politics is that it fails to transcend intergroup differences. Many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class. The either/or proposition demotes these women. Crenshaw, 1991, Professor of Law at UCLA, Kimberle, 43 Stanford Law Review 1241-1299, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” lexis

Over the last two decades, women have organized against the almost routine violence that shapes their lives. 1 Drawing from the strength of shared experience, women have recognized that the political demands of millions speak more powerfully than the pleas of a few isolated voices. This politicization in turn has transformed the way we understand violence against women. For example, battering and rape, once seen as private (family matters) and aberrational (errant sexual aggression), are now largely recognized as part of a broad-scale system of domination that affects women as a class. 2 This process of recognizing as social and systemic what was formerly perceived as isolated and individual has also characterized the identity politics of African Americans, other people of color, and gays and lesbians, among others. For all these groups, identity-based politics has been a source of strength, community, and intellectual development. The embrace of identity politics, however, has been in tension with dominant conceptions of social justice. Race, gender, and other identity categories are most often treated in mainstream liberal discourse as vestiges of bias or domination -- that is, as intrinsically negative frameworks in which social power works to exclude or marginalize those who are different. According to this understanding, our libratory objective should be to empty such categories of any social significance. Yet implicit in certain strands of feminist and racial liberation movements, for example is the view that the social power in delineating difference need not be the power of domination; it can instead be the source of social empowerment and reconstruction. The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite -- that it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences. In the context of violence against women, this elision of difference in identity politics is problematic, fundamentally because the violence that many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class. Moreover, ignoring difference within groups contributes to tension among groups, another problem of identity politics that bears on efforts to politicize violence against women. Feminist efforts to politicize experiences of women and antiracist efforts to politicize experiences of people of color have frequently proceeded as though the issues and experiences they each detail occur on mutually exclusive terrains. Although racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices. And so, when the practices expound identity as woman or person of color as an either/or proposition, they relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling. ADI 2010 56 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Aff Answers Totalization Turn

The idea that blackness is opposed to whiteness is based on a counter-productive distinction between identification and counter-identification. A counter-identificatory stance of blackness only cements white supremacy and eliminates those who choose to be a political subject by affirming the failure of identification.

Munoz 99, Prof of Performance Studies at NYU, Jose Esteban, “Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics” p 11-2)

The theory of disidentification that I am offering is meant to contribute to an understanding of the ways in which queers of color identify with ethnos or queerness despite the phobic charges in both fields. The French linguist Michel Pecheux extrapolated a theory of disidentification from Marxist theorist Louis Althusser’s influential theory of subject theory and interpellation. Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” was among the first articulations of the role of ideology in theorizing subject formation. For Althusser, ideology is an inescapable realm in which subjects are called into being or “hailed,” a process he calls interpellation. Ideology is the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. The location of ideology is always within an apparatus and its practices, such as the stat e apparatus. Pecheux built on this theory by describing the three modes in which a subject is constructed by ideological practices. In this schema, the first mode is understood as identification, where a “Good Subject” chooses the path of identification with discursive and ideological forms. “Bad Subjects” resist and attempt to reject the images and identificatory sites offered by dominant ideology and proceed to rebel, to “counteridentify” and turn against this symbolic system. The danger that Pecheux sees in such an operation would be the counterdetermination that such a system installs, a structure that validates by reinforcing its dominance through the controlled symmetry of “counterdetermination”. Disidentification is the third mode of dealing with dominant ideology, one that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; rather, disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology. Instead of buckling under the pressures of dominant ideology. Instead of buckling under the pressures of dominant ideology (identification, assimilation) or attempting to break free of its inescapable sphere (counteridentification, utopianism), this “working on and against” is a strategy that tries to transform cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact permanent structural change while at the same time valuing the importance of local or everyday struggles of resistance. Judith Butler gestures toward the uses of disidentification when discussing the failure of identification. She parries with Slavoj Zizek, who understands disidentification as a breaking down of political possibility, “a fictionalization to the point of political immobilization.” She counters Zizek by asking the following question of his formulations: “What are the possibilities of politicizing disidentification, this experience of misrecognition, this uneasy sense of standing under a sign to which one does not belong?” Butler answers: “it may be that the affirmation of that slippage, that the failure of identification, is itself the point of departure for a more democratizing affirmation of internal difference. Both Butler and Pecheux’s accounts of disidentification put forward an understanding of identification as never being as seamless or unilateral as the Freudian account would suggest. Both theories construct the subject as inside ideology. Their models permit one to examine theories of a subject who is neither the “Good Subject,” who has an easy or magical identification with dominant culture, or the “Bad Subject,” who imagines herself outside of ideology. Instead, they pave the way to an understanding of a “disidentificatory subject” who tactically and simultaneously works on, with, and against a cultural form. ADI 2010 57 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality

Focusing on white supremacy and marking racial spaces creates conditions for further oppression as insidious as that of unmarked cultural practices and reinforce existing hierarchies.

Robinson 2K, Professor of Law at Howard University (Reginald Leamon, 20 Boston College Third World Journal 145, The First National Meeting of the Regional People of Color Legal Scholarship Conferences: Celebrating Our Emerging Voices: People of Color Speak: "Expert" Knowledge: Introductory Comments on Race Consciousness, winter. Lexis//shree)

Perhaps I have hit on our existential difficulty. Given the manner in which we have been socially constructed through race, sex, gender, class, ethnicity, culture, or racialized experiences, we have become experts. We think through this expertise about who we must be. This thinking reinforces how we must act. Who we must love. What we must say. Where we must live. Why we must think as we do. n12 Once we acquire this expertise, especially as young children, we do not devote much time to questioning it. n13 At this point, the "beginner's mind"n14 dies. That mind knows emptiness. It fears nothing. It loves everything. It gleefully lives without habits. It readily accepts. It openly doubts. It embraces all possibilities. n15 After one becomes an expert, however, one operates within obvious boundaries and deals with "common sense." n16Life is not only three-dimensional, but it is also self-evident. Rather than strike out into the supposedly stable world, questioning all and doubting everything, the expert prefers the safety of conventions, and thus she has no inner strength. She prefers [*148] what is known and accepted, and she embraces the madness of mainstream conformity, avoiding the heresy of the wayward thinker. She lives not in the lonely place of the true artist or scientist, n17 but rather in a crowded room filled with racialized lemmings who, in mantra-like fashion, can name their race as they await the order to leap to their mainstream deaths. The expert needs no new answers because she never asks critical questions. n18 Given the foregoing thesis, I question in this essay the need for race consciousness and challenge the "expert" knowledge about what race and its consciousness mean and whether we need a racialized lens in order to operate in this country, this world. n19 As a corollary to this argument, I also ask historically marginalized people to reject using white racist behavior or racialized experiences as reasons for their current behavior. n20 I do not deny a white supremacist context exists out of which black, white, and other behavior or experiences might originate. n21 I take the position, however, that blacks, for example, [*149] must move beyond behaviors or experiences that reinforce the power of race consciousness, principally because I posit that we need not have such a consciousness in order to know who we really are. n22 If true, then I seek to empower minorities in a manner little different from the way Derrick Bell's Slave Scrolls empower the fictional blacks in his allegorical move. n23 From my perspective, however, I do not think that sinking blacks, for example, further into race consciousness moves historically marginalized people toward a self-empowerment n24 that does not depend on white recognition and acceptance of oppressed minorities and on black paralysis toward white oppression. n25 Unfortunately, this essay lacks the depth of analysis or breadth of research to alter our current course of thinking -- a lofty goal indeed. Despite this limitation and my doubts, I will continue my crusade, my mission, to destabilize race and its consciousness so that we all -- blacks, whites, and others -- can be free to know ourselves again. In so doing, I risk madness n26 and beckon professional isolation. n27 Regardless of what I might experience professionally or personally, I believe that race consciousness hinders, if not destroys, us all. We cannot liberate ourselves by using race because, by its inner logic, we must position ourselves against whites or blame others for our predominant experiences; n28 if we take Kimberle Crenshaw's argument [*150] seriously, we must assign the moment-to-moment oppression experiences not to liberal legal consciousness but to white supremacy. n29 I cannot imagine blaming white racism for the totality of such experiences. n30 Such blaming belies that experiences function dynamically. n31 I think that blacks, especially those who rely heavily on race consciousness, actively participate in creating their oppression experiences. (As a corollary, I also implicitly argue that an unconscious race identity aggregates us toward an expert knowledge of race and its consciousness in a manner little different from the legal arguments that Race Crits have leveled against white unconscious racism.) However, I cannot make these statements in polite company without committing a major intellectual faux pas. Alas, so be it. ADI 2010 58 Fellows Lab-Kirkman Critical Racial Reality Unmarked cultural spaces are not whiteness, they are a radical new imagination of how we can be in the world—only this opening of space allows us to transcend racialized violence.

Robinson 2K, Professor of Law at Howard University (Reginald Leamon, 20 Boston College Third World Journal 145, The First National Meeting of the Regional People of Color Legal Scholarship Conferences: Celebrating Our Emerging Voices: People of Color Speak: "Expert" Knowledge: Introductory Comments on Race Consciousness, winter. Lexis//shree)

Can blacks, whites, and others who have for hundreds of years immersed themselves in horror, pain, guilt, and fear of white supremacy and racial oppression transcend an expert knowledge about race and its consciousness? In order to transcend this expert knowledge, blacks must do at least two things. First, they must imagine, i.e., really visualize, a new self in a new future, one in which they operate from a spiritual, raceless center. Second, they must change how they perceive [*171] race as nature. If blacks can weaken race as nature, then they can perhaps engage race and its consciousness deconstructively, reading the text of race as nature in order to destroy race altogether, n133 thereby moving toward a human consciousness. By human consciousness, I mean an awareness of the Great Creator's expression. As such, through a long-term process of deconstructing an expert knowledge of race and its consciousness, we can choose to return to a beginner's mind and, thus, to nonsense, an era in which we live spirit- created justice because we -- all people -- believe in it as a person's "search for meaning." n134 It is not by attaining the end but by enduring the search that we again experience a beginner's mind or nonsense. Without this long-term process, we would not place such expert knowledge under erasure; nor would we deliberately reunite with our human consciousness. In order to place this expert knowledge under erasure, we -- blacks, whites, others -- must accept that our racial identity and the way we think about that identity emanate from social language and purposeful action. Such language and action lead to habitual and unconscious practices, all of which result in social conventions that undergird "all reflective or conscious thought." n135 What is most challenging is to accept that language, habits, and practices exist interdependently. If this statement is true, we must acknowledge that expert knowledge lacks an objective foundation and essential meaning. As such, an expert knowledge depends on culture and context which, like experience, function fluidly and dynamically. n136 With this fluidity, we can shift from an expert knowledge toward a human consciousness, but it requires that we begin by accepting that this expertise locates itself in unconscious, habitual practices of racism that inform how we experience others.