Black Activism Surveillance Aff/Neg 1AC Surveillance is the means through which the expendable objects of anti-black violence are tracked- able to be disposed of at any time. To understand how this racist practice is foundational to America and its supremacy, we first look back in time.
MOVE BOMBING Why have so many people forgotten about the MOVE bombing? May 18, 2015 Written by Gene Demby http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/05/18/407665820/why-did-we-forget-the-move- bombing At first, we thought the knowledge gap might be generational. My Code Switch teammate Kat Chow, who was born years after the MOVE incident, had never heard of it. But another NPR colleague who's about a generation older hadn't either.
Maybe it was regional. On Twitter, a few people told us the bombing never landed on their radars until they moved to the Philadelphia area. But even though Tasneem Raja, my editor on Code Switch, grew up 20 minutes north of Philly and attended a "hippie" (her words) Quaker high school where events like the Kent State shootings got a lot of airtime in class, she remembers hearing about MOVE only from her dad, never in school.
I grew up in Philly during and after the bombing. My elementary school was the kind of place where we learned Afrocentric songs and teachers dressed in kente cloth, while my high school was overwhelmingly black. We never discussed it in class, either. What gives? It's seems incredible that so many people had never heard about the time American law enforcement bombed U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, which, on top of the deaths, left dozens of bystanders' homes destroyed in an uncontrolled fire that the police commissioner told firefighters not to put out right away. The details are so extreme, so over-the-top. How have we forgotten this?
I put the question to Robin Wagner-Pacifici, who teaches at the New School and has written books on MOVE and other fringe militant groups involved in bloody government standoffs, including the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, and the Weaver family in Ruby Ridge, Idaho. She has noticed that while those groups identified with each other to a degree, referring to each other in their manifestos as fellow victims of the state, they don't seem to feel the same way about MOVE. "They created this kind of genealogy," she says, "but none of them mentioned MOVE." She thinks the reason was ideological: MOVE's quasi-Rastafarian, anti-technology, pro- animal-rights worldview doesn't neatly fit on any part of the political spectrum, while other militant groups she has studied had some degree of overlap. And you can't lump MOVE in with other black power movements of the time, either; black radical groups often bristled at their tactics.
In the universe of violent fringe movements that ended in deadly mayhem, MOVE occupies a lonely branch. To some degree, maybe this helps explain why the story of MOVE isn't better known: If few people feel like your ideological kin, few people feel cause to carry your torch.
Wagner-Pacifici also traces this relative obscurity back to the players involved. Unlike other fringe groups she has studied, MOVE's final confrontation wasn't with a big federal agency like the FBI or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. They clashed with local Philly cops and some state police. So while the story of Ruby Ridge has been folded into the larger national debate on gun control and the limits of federal power, the political implications of MOVE were seen as more provincial and self- contained. And unsurprisingly, local politicians were all too eager to move on and leave those implications behind.
Of course, Ferguson protesters faced off against local law enforcement, too, and Ferguson city cops would have loved if Michael Brown's death had stayed a hyperlocal affair. But technology has changed everything in the decades since May 13, 1985. If the MOVE bombing were to happen today, bystanders would be furiously uploading videos to YouTube, spawning Twitter hashtags and interconnected protests in cities around the country. CNN would be camped out in West Philly for weeks, to say nothing of the countless think-pieces.
If MOVE happened today, it might be quickly folded into the classroom, as has happened with other recent incidents of police violence. Teachers have all the materials at their fingertips: clips from livestreams, links to mainstream news articles and personal blogs, embeddable tweets, and so on. Back in the mid-80s, you'd have to wait around for the inevitable Frontline documentary or for an academic to publish a book. History gets commodified and redistributed much more quickly today. The MOVE story faded into relative obscurity partly because no one connects with their cause today, and largely because the mechanisms to preserve the story weren't in place yet. But had it happened now, it would be much harder to forget.
Surveillance is currently harming the Black community and even more specifically, it is hurting Black activists like us.
Black Lives Matter Activists Interrupt Hillary Clinton at Private Event in South Carolina Fundraiser 02/24/2016 10:36 pm ET | http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/clinton-black-lives-matter-south- carolina_us_56ce53b1e4b03260bf7580ca
Two Black Lives Matter activists interrupted a private Hillary Clinton fundraising event Wednesday night in Charleston, South Carolina.
Youth activist Ashley Williams demanded that the Democratic presidential candidate account for inconsistencies in her record on race, specifically around comments she made about crime in 1996.
Williams said she and a colleague, whom she did not identify, contributed $500 to attend the Clinton event, which was held at a private residence and was attended by around 100 guests.
Williams said she and her colleague strategically placed themselves at the front of the crowd and waited until Clinton appeared. Speakers introducing Clinton around 9:30 p.m. Wednesday night discussed Walter Scott, the Charleston A.M.E. Church shooting and how Clinton had a strong record of racial justice.
As Clinton spoke to the crowd, Williams stood to her side and held a sign quoting controversial statements Clinton made in 1996 in reference to at-risk youth, when she said “we have to bring them to heel.”
Surveillance of Black activists inevitably turns into violence, even when activists are peaceful. http://www.theroot.com/articles/news/2016/03/trump_watch_young_black_woman_assaulted_at _kentucky_rally.html
Trump Watch: Young Black Woman Assaulted at KY Rally
TheRoot.com 2016 During his Super Tuesday rally, GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump demanded that supporters get a young black protester out of there. Watch as they yell at, curse and push the woman out of the venue.
It’s clear that Donald Trump and his followers are willing to resort to violence to “Make America great again.” During his Super Tuesday rally in Louisville, Ky., Trump stopped his speech to demand that a young black protester be thrown out. Not ones to ignore the calling of their commander, supporters of Trump began shouting at and pushing the young black woman, who can be seen telling them to stop touching her.
REGARDLESS OF WHETHER YOU ARE CONSIDERED TO BE A STEREOTYPICAL ACTIVIST, BLACK WOMEN ARE SUBJECT TO HARMFUL, ONGOING SURVEILLANCE Harry 14 (Sydette Harry is a cultural critic, troublemaker and writer from NYC. Her next project is a decidedly low/high tech response to media, age and race, also grad school. She has been published in dissent, Salon and the blogs as @blackamazon. “Everyone Watches, Nobody Sees: How Black Women Disrupt Surveillance Theory” , https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/everyone-watches-nobody-sees-how-black-women-disrupt- surveillance-theory, October 6th, 2014 TAM) What the hell is you looking for? Can’t a young man get money anymore? It kind of pains me to call Mason Betha prophetic, but 17 years ago when “Looking at Me” hit the Billboard charts, the Harlem native pretty much described the current state of surveillance and tech in America. Especially for black people and doubly so for black women. Surveillance is based on a presumption of entitlement to access, by right or by force. More importantly, it hinges on the belief that those surveilled will not be able to reject surveillance — either due to the consequences of resisting, or the stealth of the observance. They either won’t say no, or they can’t. Discussions of stolen celebrity selfies often miss the “by force” aspect of the breeches, instead focusing on salacious details. Surveillance is part of the information age, but it has always been part of abusive dynamics. As opting into surveillance becomes increasingly mandatory to participate in societies and platforms, surveillance has been woven into the fabric of our lives in ways we can not readily reject. Being watched is not just an activity of Big Brother-style surveillance, but also fannish adulation and social enmeshment. As Black women have been historically denied the ability to consent to surveillance, modern discussion of watching and observing black women needs better historical context. When I’nasah Crockett points out how black women online have constantly been portrayed as “raving amazons,” one of the unspoken through lines is how easily media, even on the left, believes dissecting black women, tracking their online habits, consuming illegally obtained images of them, and demanding education is a “right”. Black women cannot say no, and do not need to be in any way respected or fully informed about how they will be studied or used. Media collects the data of black activity and media production as a weapon, without black participation. The lack of black participation can be unintentional or intentional, but usually ends in gross appropriation, clumsy “admiration”, willful erasure or a troublesome combo of all three. Combined with historical blindness, racist condescension and content desperation, the modern surveillance of black women too often results in the same historical abuse and erasure of black women. When Patricia Garcia says the that the big booty era has finally arrived as a “high fashion” moment, but credits Jennifer Lopez and Iggy Azaelea, it erases the very real abuse that black bodies have suffered for those exact body types, that were surveilled to produce the standard that Garcia hands over to Lopez et. al. She writes: “Rihanna shows up to the CFDA Awards practically naked with her crack fully on display and walks off with a Fashion Icon Award. Perhaps we have Jennifer Lopez to thank (or blame?) for sparking the booty movement.” Suggesting the way to Rihanna’s 2014 moment was paved by Lopez shows a dangerous laziness towards the stated goal of body positivity. Rihanna’s moment was a direct tribute to Josephine Baker, another black woman often sexualized and placed under surveillance, not just for celebration of her uniquely black body but for her participation in World War II and the civil rights movement. Garcia’s “cultural surveillance” ends up being a contextless mess that insults both Rihanna and Baker. Writing for Salon, I pointed out that Media has no idea how to talk about race, and more recently I am convinced they do not actually care to learn. Unfortunately when covering Black women, this inability or unwillingness to learn defaults to common stereotypes at best and complete cultural propaganda at worst. That unwillingness create a vacuum of knowledge, as history repeats itself over and over. Take Alessandra Stanley’s profile of Shonda Rhimes in the New York Times: a cringe-worthy attempt at “complimenting” Rhimes’ stereotype-breaking television output that instead relies on empty surveillance of black characters while Stanley offers no evidence of having actually watched the shows she cites. Stanley’s descriptions of Rhimes and her work are filled with words like “angry, terrorizing and sassy,” recalling Crockett’s angry amazons perfectly while perpetuating and prolonging logic that for decades kept Viola Davis from being the leading lady Stanley describes. Her piece ignores multi-year plot developments as well as a wonderful opportunity to discuss Rhimes’ accomplishments as possibly the only non-white-male with multiple, simultaneous network TV hits. Her surveillance provides little in the way of edification and a lot in codifying uncomfortable catch 22’s for black women and privacy: visibility is part of achievement in media, but is it worth it when even at the pinnacle of your success the only thing made visible is the racism of those observing you?Even more difficult, how do you fight back? Black women’s responses to abusive surveillance has often been heart-rending accounts of personal trauma and exposure of personal networks. What goes unmentioned is that social capital and safety are often key to being able to go public with sousveillance as a strategy. Mann and Elahi – credentialed, well-known professors – have a much easier time of saying they agree to be watched than those on the margins. Stacia L. Brown offers a beautiful examination of the ramifications of ahistorical surveillance, discussing representation as well as more diverse media sources as counter-tactics. As Brown points out in response to Garcia’s flippant mess: “It isn’t about who gets credit for popularizing the ‘big booty.’ It’s about who is erased and minimized in the process.” Her recommendations are solid but also bring up a very real question: for populations whose fundamental problem under surveillance is the inability to declare privacy and boundaries, what kind of solution is being made to expose one’s self “voluntarily,” to invite more observation into one’s life? The response to these articles and continued moments of ahistorical abuse and sometimes outright violence are a version of cultural sousveillance. Black women must lay themselves bare, exposing trauma and constantly excavating painful historical memory to gain sympathy and respect. Surveillance must be used as sousveillance, with the records generated by the intrusive observation of blackness, used to bolster black testimony. Buzzfeed has an article that is a triggering reminder of the murkiness of this dilemma. While being one of the few places to acknowledge how Daniel Holtzclaw, a predatory policemen targeted black women, it also notes how he used surveillance, and even the more stringent sousveillance to track black women to abuse. To emphasize the gravity of his offense, once again black women’s trauma is made public with overly specific details on the abuse of his victims.More disturbingly have been the deaths of three black men: Eric Garner, Michael Brown and John Crawford III, all murdered by police. In all three cases there was video /photo evidence of the deaths that circulated the internet, and in Brown’s case, even AFTER the mother requested it stop. Crawford’s death is a disturbing illustration of the interplay of surveillance and sousveillance with historical discrimination. The police who ultimately ended his life were responding to a report, via citizen surveillance, that he had been observed with a gun. The surveillance video which showed him being shot? Still not enough for indictment. Why must black death be broadcast and consumed to be believe, and what is it beyond spectacle if it cannot be used to obtain justice? History Repeating When Janay Rice was assaulted by her husband, it became a rallying cry for domestic violence and resulted in job creation for white feminists. What stuck out immediately was the ease at which the surveillance aspects were skipped over. Echoing a similar leak of a private moment that targeted the Knowles-Carter family, little discussion was made of how a culture of intrusion seemed to focus on the abuse of black women as breaking news without asking about breaches of boundaries.That the same online communities that continually prodded and mocked black women are incubators for sex criminals who expose private pictures of celebrities isn’t shocking, it’s inevitable. They watched the world not care, why should they anticipate consequences now? Predators are often wrongly pictured as targeting the defenseless, when they also target the undefended. Black people, women particularly have historically been able to defend themselves, but have also been shown to be undefended. The problem is not that they can’t fight back, but that their fight and the record of what they were fighting is erased and sanitized for easier consumption.When Laurie Penny and Lola Okolosie claim a victory over racist and sexists online, they willfully erase the original problem of targeted women not wanting to be surveilled, and shut down conversations about how that issue can be addressed. If they have won already, what does the trauma of the women used in that success matter?Just recently, threats to “expose” Emma Watson’s nudes turned out to be a prank to “draw attention” to attacks on feminists. The ver y real trauma of women — who even after they were transgressed were asked to answer for it like they had committed the crime — becomes a “gotcha” moment. A time to ask what factors lead to the abuse of women and where it starts — usually with black women expressing feminist or anti-racist ideals — becomes covered in really uncomfortable racist/classist overtones, namely: “What happens if this happens to a white woman we actually care about?!” Even as women of all colors have been fighting for years to make legislation against revenge porn.When Janay Rice was assaulted by her husband, it became a rallying cry for domestic violence and resulted in job creation for white feminists. It’s a cry that does not truly encompass the necessary complexity of the problem in the NFL, or give anything at all to the attacked woman. This major step to “address issues” still hinges on making a black woman’s personal affairs heartbreakingly public and assuring that no one who represents her voice — which has asked for very different things than advocacy — will be heard.What We Call Surveillance What we have decided to call surveillance is actually a constant interplay of various forms of monitoring that have existed and focused on black people, and specifically black women, long before cameras were around, let alone ubiquitous. Surveillance technology is a dissemination of cultural standards of monitoring. Our picture of surveillance needs to factor in not just tech developments, but the cultural standards that have bred surveillance, especially towards black culture, as part and parcel in our world. Elahi can use the intrusion into his privacy to further his work. But if all you want to do is have space to mind your own business, handle your family issues in private, or exist without interference, sousveillance isn’t an answer… it’s a reminder of defeat. If what you want is representation as you are, what do you do when the reality is ignored for the easy win, even when it leaves you worse than before? What is the solution for being constantly watched, if no one sees you at all? Thus, my partner and I affirm that domestic surveillance against black women activists should be substantially curtailed. The paradox of the present is a black hole- it presents the black female body for continual surveillance while simultaneously consuming her. Voting aff is a fissure that breaks from the present and exists in a black future where our survival is possible. Cherie Ann Turpin (Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of the District of Columbia) August 2014 “Strategic Disruptions: Black Feminism and Afrofuturism” http://afrofuturismscholar.com/2014/08/24/work-in-progress-strategic-disruptions-black- feminism-and-afrofuturism-by-cherie-ann-turpin/ The beginning of the 21st century marked a shift towards a shaping and attempts at cultivating an aesthetic and critical apparatus to respond to an emerging artistic movement within literature, music, and visual art called Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism opens possibilities of developing responses to ideas about where and how people of African descent could position themselves as intricate parts of human collectives and unknown futures, especially as we move towards realizing virtual and digitalized forms of cultural expression. Further, subjectivity and taking personal agency to create imagined worlds where Black people are leaders is a strong challenge to the weakened but still existing stereotypes of Black women and men as non-intellectual or limited in technological knowledge. This performance rebukes technologies of silencing and create the conditions for political mobilization through not only a challenging of contemporary surveillance practices that enable black fugitivity Shana Redmond (Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC, Ph.D in American Studies from Yale) 2011 “This Safer Space: Janelle Monáe's “Cold War”” Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 23, Issue 4 December 2011 Pages 393–411, WileyOnline Black women's resistance efforts are a treasure trove of contemporary historical inquiry. The interdisciplinary methods that must be used to shed light on their acts can only begin a discussion, as we follow the (non)disciplin(ed/ary) women themselves who devised fantastic responses to what Stuart Hall has named the “fatal coupling of power and difference” (17), more commonly referred to as racism. Ruth Wilson Gilmore documents the responses of women environmental activists to this coupling, arguing that they “join forces not only as petitioners to the state in the name of injuries sustained but also—and more provocatively—as petitioners to communities of similar people in the name of reconstructing space so that concepts of ‘safety’ and ‘health’ cannot be realized by razor-wire fences and magic bullet cures” (15). The themes of free speech, access to community or public space, and safety from physical and psychic assault, especially white supremacist violence, scaffolds much of the efforts of black women to construct alternative worldviews during the twentieth century. The Cold War, which roughly spanned the period between the frayed ends of World War II in 1945 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, saw the rise of a second Red Scare under McCarthyism (1947–1957) as well as an intense moment of (inter)national suppression of dissent in tandem with the consolidation of an organized black political public through a broad civil rights movement. Post-Berlin Wall, this moment has been imagined by black artists as a fruitful signifying site through which to investigate and rebuke the technologies of silencing that were developed and expanded by formal political and cultural actors during the long Cold War period.1 The lived experiences of and narratives by the African-descended are often replayed and reimagined in and through performance, and black women in particular have a tradition of representing and resisting the conditions of their lives through creative uses of the black body; black women's performance traditions have centralized the body as evidence and epistemology. Daphne Brooks argues that black women “might put their own figures to work for their own aesthetic and political uses and ‘imagine their own bodies’,” thereby “invent[ing] ways to maintain the integrity of black female bodies as sites of intellectual knowledge, philosophical vision, and aesthetic worth” (8).2 Wondaland/Bad Boy recording artist Janelle Monáe offers a twenty-first century version of this practice as she uses her body to critique and to resituate history, including the identities produced from and within it. The video for her single, “Cold War,” generates a unique alchemy of (re)presentation, positionality, and performance, and in so doing, puts under stress the dichotomies of black/white, inside/outside, past/present. In this way, Monáe adds a postmodern edge to the modern performance traditions described by Jayna Brown, in which black women performers and artists of the early twentieth century “combined intense intimacy and unbrookable distance [with]… the ability to record what one saw or felt from above, below, inside or outside” (228). Self-described as a visual artist, Monáe's most prominent canvas is her body. She has garnered significant attention for her black and white wardrobe, which often takes the form of a tuxedo, presenting an androgynous aesthetic even while the high contrast color- blocking represents her belief that “there's no gray area with me” (Nylon Magazine TV).3 The stark simplicity of Monáe's wardrobe serves as a foil for a complicated gender performance, yet it clearly reflects the demarcations of her own sociopolitical investments. This is her “uniform,” as she describes it, one that she proudly wears in solidarity with the working classes she was born into in Kansas City, Kansas, and alongside whom she now labors from her base in Atlanta, Georgia. This uniform refuses periodization as it incorporates the high collars and puffed shoulders of Victorian women's wear with the saddle shoes and mod, slim-cut slacks of the 1950s, thereby demonstrating Monáe's Afro-materialist ability to blur the aesthetic conventions of history and dismiss the transhistorical expectations of the female body by commenting on multiple past moments through one ensemble. Although she eschews color in her performance wardrobe, Monáe describes her music as colorful, making an explicit connection between sight and sound within her work. She constructs what she calls an “emotion picture for the mind,” and attempts to develop a more comprehensive experience for the viewer/listener, one that engages on multiple sensory levels and that connects the mind to the body (NPR). Her explicit and rapt attention to the mind of her audience is one of her grand interventions within the pop music realm; this focus compels her to contend with historical forces within her layered productions, in the process allowing those who watch that battle to struggle alongside her, inducing a sense of identification that is based in social movement techniques as well as in the “freedom dreams” discussed by historian Robin Kelley—those maneuvers within the black radical tradition that recover historical methods to generate and mobilize futures of alternative possibilities.4 Surrealism is one such maneuver Monáe employs in her aesthetic choices and in her insistence on the mind as a site of struggle and elevation. Through this process, which fuses social and cultural movements, Monáe enters into the genealogy of what black feminist geographer Katherine McKittrick delineates as “the place of black women in relation to various scales: in their minds, in their bodies, in their homes, in urban/rural centers [sic], and in the nation” (2000a: 126).
Our affirmation of the topic represents a radical method to substantially decrease surveillance. Carruthers 2/3 (Carruthers, Charlene A. Political organizer and writer; National Director BYP100 "Black Future Month: End the Anti-Black Police State." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 03 Feb. 2015. Web.
A future for Black people in America must include full decriminalization of acts not considered to be criminal when performed in non-Black bodies. Where we go from here requires approaches to public safety that don't hinge on the control of Black people, empowerment of police and reliance on punitive measures. Our call to action must support restorative justice practices, quality public school systems and good living-wage jobs. The call for an end to mass criminalization must include a call to the end of the Anti-Black Police State. BYP100 Agenda to Keep Us Safe defines criminalization as a process in which behaviors and people are presumed criminal. Criminalization has less to do with what is actually done, and more to do with society's ideas about who is "other," whose behavior is wrongful and who should be punished. The law, media and public perception drive criminalization. Black people who fall outside of the protected norms of whiteness, gender conformity, heterosexuality, middle-class and otherwise so-called respectable appearances are routinely harassed, arrested, sexually assaulted, incarcerated and killed. No person should have to live under the threat, fear or reality of criminalization from a neighbor, police officer or teacher. However, this threat is a reality for many young Black people in the United States. Whether it is Trayvon Martin walking down the street or Renisha McBride knocking on a door for help, Black people are systemically criminalized and killed for acts generally recognized as harmless when non-Black bodies perform them. Criminalization impacts all Black people. Last year Monica Jones, a Black Trans woman and activist, was arrested for "walking while trans." Jones explains that "it's a known experience in our community of being routinely and regularly harassed and facing the threat of violence or arrest because we are Trans and therefore often assumed to be sex workers." All people should be able to walk down the street without fear of being profiled. From the local beat cop to the police chief, law enforcement agencies, have too much power over our lives. I want to live in a world where police department budgets don't take up over 20% of overall budgets while community services are allocated 6% or less, as they do in cities like Chicago and Oakland. I want to live in the world where society prioritizes quality public education, well-rounded social and mental health services and sustainable infrastructure. The officers who killed Aura Rosser in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Tanisha Anderson in Cleveland, Ohio and Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri are reflections of a broad and powerful Anti-Black Police State. Individual police officers are just one party in the breathing-while-Black-pipeline to jail, prison, sexual assault or death. I am less invested in focusing on the character of an individual police officer than the character of the entire system. The Anti-Black Police State protects elected officials who advocate for more police officers while public schools in Black communities are closed and underfunded en masse. Communities must organize against candidates who call for more police and support candidates who have commitments and records of protecting teachers, parents and the public school system. Where we go from here requires us to see that the systems that fund tear gas in Ferguson, MO, the police officers gun in Cleveland, OH, the tanks in occupied Palestine and the detention centers in Arizona are all connected. If enslaved Africans in the Americas could imagine a future where their grandchildren would not be slaves, we can imagine a future without mass criminalization, incarceration and the Anti-Black Police State. Our freedom dreams must be radical. Our way forward must be radically inclusive or it will repeat the same strategies, tactics, policies and ideas that have failed our people before. 2AC Solvency The affirmative’s criticism, and re-articulation of, contemporary government surveillance practices functions as an essential epistemology – voting aff is the basis for a pragmatic model for cooperation and change ***This is transcribed from a talk given by Simone Browne at Binghamton University. She recently released a book (October 2015, I believe) of which this talk is one of the chapters. She’s discussing the connection between contemporary biometric surveillance technology (surveillance technology, such as cameras, body scanners, or ID cards, that are meant to read, record, and/or track biological data such as facial/physical features and voice characteristics) and biometric surveillance technology employed during slavery. The link to the full talk is in the site and I will attach other pieces of the talk that I’ve transcribed into cards (I didn’t transcribe the entire talk). While she is attempting to illuminate a connection between contemporary digital biometric technology (cameras, scanners) and historical instances of biometric “technology” (lanterns, slave brands), a point that is made clear is that not all surveillance technology is digital; because of this, there are interesting ways that the surveillance of Black women can be described as biometric surveillance: white eyes and white imaginations operate as tools to profile and track Black women based on their biological characteristics.*** Browne ‘13
[Dr. Simone Browne; “Dark Sousveillance: Race, Surveillance, and Resistance,” a talk given on December 9, 2013, hosted at the Graduate Center, CUNY by the Digital Praxis Seminar and the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsMFdiLsqbg, 36:30-41:08, video published March 21, 2014; transcribed by Ameena Ruffin]
Popular cultural representations of surveillance are some of the ways in which the public comes to understand these technologies and how we come to see biometric technologies as a necessary security measure even for getting on our laptops or our phones and how they get rationalized or sold to the general public. You could call this, as I said, a popular biometrics consciousness and as a pitch-man it doesn’t get much better than Will Smith who was named one of the highest paid actors by Forbes in 2008. He’s often the star of, as I mentioned, many blockbuster films where the audience is often subject to his heroic exploits, particularly when his films become on syndicated networks every weekend. So there’re lessons about the surveillance technologies and practices are regularly broadcasted; Will Smith’s in a starring role. He’s often seen saving America, and by extension the planet, from alien others, whether it’s Independence Day or I Am Legend, Hancock, Wild Wild West. Interestingly, when he was promoting I, Robot in 2004 he was in Germany and he was asked by the German press about the effects of 9/11— and I’m going to do my German translation with Google Translate here—but his answer was “If you grew up as a Black man in America, you have a very different view of the world than white Americans. We Blacks live with a constant feeling of malaise and if you’re attacked by a racist cop now or wounded and attacked by terrorists, excuse me, it makes no difference. In the sixties, Blacks were constantly the target of terrorist attacks and while it was civil terrorism but terrorism is terrorism. We are accustomed to being attacked. As for a permanent alert, a defensive attitude with which one lives anyway has not changed since. No not for me personally. As to my everyday life the tragedy of September 11 changed nothing. I live anyway, always 100% alert. I was not even nervous, anxious, or cautious after 9/11.” So what Will Smith is articulating there is the racial terror imposed on Black life in America by an overseeing surveillance apparatus that was in effect on September 10, 2001 and long before that. And he’s giving us a bit of Black counter-framing as well too. So given this—the histories, the failure to enroll rates, the idea around prototypical whiteness, the racializing surveillance—I’m calling for a critical biometric consciousness, and this is following Eugene Thacker’s call for a critical genomic consciousness. And a critical biometric consciousness entails informed public debate around these technologies and their application. It’s a demand of accountability by the state and by private sectors who might have our data—trade it, sell it, rent it out. And a critical biometric technologies sees biometric technology and the ownership and access to one’s own body data and information that is derived or generated from one’s body data—so think about the idea of your fingerprint being turned into a code and that being your intellectual property—that must be understood as a right. And as well, importantly, this consciousness must also understand kind of the historical connections between contemporary biometric information technology and its historical antecedents, meaning here that a critical biometrics consciousness must contend with the ways in which branding and particularly racial slavery was instituted as a means of population management in the making, marking, and marketing of Blackness as visible and as commodity. I think another thing that is important here is the use of conflict minerals in these technologies to produce them or the—people have done, [?] Nakamura has done work on this—the people that produce these technologies as well, so a consciousness about the implications of those things as well too. And so, as I mentioned, a critical biometric consciousness must contend with the ways in which branding was a form of punishment and racial profiling—the idea of every body marks society, or ‘F’ for fugitive but perhaps that “F’ stood for freedom; and “R,” rather than standing for “Runaway,” could stand for “Revolt,” so a critical repurposing of that. So much of how biometrics are languaged in R and D derives from the racial thinking and assumptions around gender that were used to falsify evolutionary trajectories that rationalized violence—the violence of transatlantic slavery, colonialism, genocide, imperialism. And so the absence of a discussion of how such racial thinking shapes the research and development of contemporary biometric information technology is itself constitutive of the power relations existing in that very technology. Race domestic surveillance are linked. Browne ‘13
[Dr. Simone Browne; “Dark Sousveillance: Race, Surveillance, and Resistance,” a talk given on December 9, 2013, hosted at the Graduate Center, CUNY by the Digital Praxis Seminar and the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsMFdiLsqbg, 26:08-33:51, video published March 21, 2014; transcribed by Ameena Ruffin]
Simply put, biometrics is the idea that the body will reveal the truth about the subject despite the subject’s claim. So the idea that I might say my name is Rob Ford, but my body—whether it’s my DNA, my fingerprint, my iris scan, or some other piece or part of my body will reveal my true identity. So with the concept of digital epidermalization, I’m suggesting here that biometrics research and development continues to rely on certain practices of what I’m calling prototypical whiteness, as well as prototypical maleness, prototypical able-bodied-ness, prototypical youthness, as well. This speaks to the ways in which biometric information technologies are sometimes inscribed in racializing schemas that see certain bodies privileged, or at least whiteness might be privileged or lightness in some of these enroll measurements and enrollment processes. So I’m going to look here at a few findings in research and development coming out of the biometric industry to kind of make sense of this for you all in the audience because I think that these research and development publications tell us a lot about industry concerns and specifications and they also tell us a lot about who these technologies, or what kind of bodies these technologies, are designed to suit best. And so one such study examined how facial recognition technology could be employed in a multi-ethnic environment to classify facial features by race and also by gender—yes that’s Will Smith right there. So a technology like this could be applied, for example, in shopping malls, casinos, amusement parks, or something like the photo-tagging application that might be used in Facebook or so. So the authors of the study found that, when they programmed the gender classification system generically for “all ethnicities,” the system was “inclined to classify Africans as males and mongoloids as females.” So the racial nomenclature of “mongoloid” is seemingly archaic, I know, but not uncommon in some of the R and D coming out of this industry. With this gender classification system, what happened here is that Black women were read as male most of the time and Asian men were read as female most of the time with this particular study. In this way it mirrored earlier pseudoscientific racist and sexist discourse that sought to define racial categories and gender categories in order to regulate these artificial boundaries that can never be fully maintained. Think here of the Black woman as surrogate man or the feminized Asian man. Interestingly, in this particular study, the gender classifier was made ethnicity specific for the category African and they found that images of the African female would be classified as females 82% of the time and while that same African classifier would find images of Asian females 95% of the time and for what they call “Caucasoid” females 96% of the time. This is a study that came out around 2010. These kind of languages of “Caucasoid,” “Mongoloid” as well. So meaning that with this particular female classifier when its calibrated to detect Black women, African classifier’s better suited as classifying Asian women as well as Caucasian women or White women. So using actor Will Smith’s face as a model for generic Black masculinity, the study’s authors are left to conclude that “the accuracy of gender classifier on Africans is not as high as on ‘Mongoloid’ or ‘Caucasoid’.” Another study—I’m going to talk a little bit about failure to enroll—this came out in 2009 a Nikon camera, and the idea that some bodies fail to enroll in these technologies. And these things change once these failures reveal themselves and sometimes through twitter and public ways like this. In another study we can see how epidermalization—and what I mean by that is the imposition of race on the skin—is present, for example, in comparative testing with control groups with higher failure to enroll rates than others. The study states—I’m just going to read. This is a popular quote that’s often used in people that research biometric technologies, but it says here: “Elderly users often have very faint fingerprints and may have poorer circulation than younger users. Construction workers and artisans are more likely to have highly worn fingerprints to the point where ridges are nearly nonexistent. Users of Pacific Rim/Asian descent may have faint fingerprint ridges, especially female users.”
…there’s the notion that these technologies are infallible, that they’re objective, and that they are based on mathematical precision without error or bias on the part of the computer programmers who calibrate the search parameters of these machines or on the part of those who read these templates to make decisions.
Resistance through confrontation of surveillance is absolutely key.
3. #black mobility #surveillance gaze #performance #hip hop #resistance Browne ‘12
[Dr. Simone Browne; “Everybody's Got a Little Light Under The Sun,”12-14
Mostly, punishment for such transgression was taken into the hands of the slave owner. In 1734 a male slave of John van Zandt was found dead in his bed. The dead man was said to have ‘absented himself’ from van Zandt’s dwelling in the night-time (New York Weekly Journal CXIII, 5 January 1735). Although it was first reported that the slave was horsewhipped to death by Van Zandt for being caught on the streets after dark by watchmen, a coroner’s jury found Van Zandt not negligent in this death, finding instead that ‘the correction given by the Master was not the cause of death, but that it was by the visitation of God’ (New York Weekly Journal CXIII, 5 January 1735). Other laws put into place around light and black mobilities in New York City stipulated that at least one lantern must be carried per three negroes after sunset, more tightly regulated curfews and in 1722 the Common Council relegated burials by free and enslaved blacks to the daytime hours with attendance of no more than 12, plus the necessary pallbearers and gravediggers, as a means to reduce opportunities for assembly and to prevent conspiracy hatching. In recounting physician Alexander Hamilton’s narrative about his travels through New York City in July of 1744, Andy Doolen details that one outcome of the alleged conspiracy of 1741 was the ruining, according to Hamilton, of the traditional English cup of tea (2005). It was thought by Hamilton that: they have very bad water in the city, most of it being hard and brackish. Ever since the negroe conspiracy, certain people have been appointed to sell water in the streets, which they carry on a sledge in great casks and bring it from the best springs about the city, for it was when the negroes went for tea water that they held their caballs and consultations, and therefor they have a law now that no negroe shall be seen upon the streets without a lanthorn after dark. (Hamilton 1948, p. 88) We can think of the lantern as a prosthesis made mandatory after dark, a technology that made it possible for the black body to be constantly illuminated from dusk to dawn, made knowable, locatable and contained within the city. The black body, technologically enhanced by way of a simple device made for a visual surplus where technology met surveillance, made the business of tea a white enterprise and encoded white supremacy, as well as black luminosity, in law. Of course, unsupervised leisure, labour, travel, assembly and other forms of social networking past sunset by free and enslaved black New Yorkers continued regardless of the enforcement of codes meant to curtail such things. Oftentimes social networking by free and enslaved black New Yorkers took place right under the surveillant gazes of the white population, in markets and during Sabbath and holiday celebrations. In these spaces of sometimes interracial and cross-class commerce and socializing, black performative practices of drumming, dancing and chanting persisted. During celebrations of Pinkster marking the feast of Pentecost of the Dutch Reformed Church, amongst the rituals, free and enslaved blacks elected a governor who would serve as a symbolic leader resolving disputes and collecting tributes, making this holiday an event for white spectatorship of black cultural and political production, although for many such celebratory resistance made this ‘a festival of misrule’ (Harris 2003, p. 41). So much so that the Common Council of Albany, New York, banned Pinkster celebrations in 1811, for reasons including a resentment of the space that it opened up for unsettling exchanges between blacks and whites (Lott 1993; McAllister 2003; White 1989). The most controversial incorporation of black performativity into Pinkster was the Totau. On the Totau, McAllister writes: a man and a woman shuffle back and forth inside a ring, dancing precariously close without touching and isolating most of their sensual movement in the hip and pelvic areas. Once the couple dances to exhaustion, a fresh pair from the ring of clapping dancers relieves them and the Totau continues. (McAllister 2003, p. 112) That such a performative sensibility was engaged by black subjects in colonial New York City approximately 200 years before the emergence of hip hop in the Bronx, New York City, is of much significance. The Totau, and later, the Catharine Market breakdown reverberate in the cypher of b-boys and b-girls. In Eric Lott’s discussion of black performances he cites Thomas De Voe’s eyewitness account of the Catharine Market breakdown in the early nineteenth century New York City. De Voe writes: This board was usually about five to six feet long, of large width, with its particular spring in it, and to keep it in its place while dancing on it, it was held down by one on each end. Their music or time was usually given by one of their party, which was done by beating their hands on the sides of their legs and the noise of the heel. The favorite dancing place was a cleared spot on the east side of the fish market in front of Burnel Brown’s Ship Chandlery. (De Voe 1862, In this instance, the breakdown is performed in a market, allowing for white spectatorship and (42ﰀcited in Lott 1993, pp. 41 patronage in a space that is already overdetermined as a site of commerce within the economy of slavery. Later, DeVoe recalls ‘public negro dances’ at Catharine Market in an 1889 New York Times article where he is quoted as saying that the dancers ‘would bring roots, berries, birds, fish, clams, oysters, flowers, and anything else they could gather and sell in the market to supply themselves with pocket money’ (28 April 1889). Sylvia Wynter’s ‘provision ground ideology’ in instructive here for an understanding of solidarity, survival and the role of folk-culture as resistance to the ‘dehumanization of Man and Nature’ (1970, p. 36). Out of the provision grounds came the cultivation of ceremonial practices, including dance, that were, as Wynter tells us,
‘the cultural guerilla resistance against the Market economy’ (1970, p. 36). The remains of the Catharine Market breakdown can be found in the cardboard and turntables of the breakdancing cypher. Then and now cultural production and expressive practices offer moments of living with, refusals and alternatives to routinized surveillance within a visual surplus. In so being, they allow for us to think differently about the predicaments, policies and performances constituting surveillance. Colonial New York City was a space of both terror and promise for black life. Lantern laws, fugitive slave notices, public whippings and the discretionary uses of violence by ‘his Majesty’s subjects’ rendered the black subject as always already unfree yet acts, like the breakdown, that were constitutive of black freedom persisted. It is under this context where certain humans came to be understood by many as unfree and the property of others while at the same time creating practices that maintained their humanity by challenging the routinization of surveillance, that we should read the 1783 Board of Inquiry hearings at Fraunces Tavern.
The affirmative is a critical tool for cultural analysis – counters dehumanization NEEDS A BLACK LIVES MATTER CARD ______
Like Janelle Monae, the affirmatives performance seeks to refuse acts of dissemblance and self-imposed invisibility – creating speculative futures that recenter black women on their own terms, as subjects rather than objects REDMOND,11 ( Shana L. is Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. She received her combined Ph.D. in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale University. Her research and teaching interests include the African Diaspora, Black political cultures, music and popular culture. "Marking the Margins: Janelle Monáe's 'Cold War' Landscape":“This Safer Space: Janelle Monae’s´ "Cold War"”, Post45 Conference, Roundtable/Panel, Refereed Paper, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland, OH, Post45, Spring 2011 TAM) Monae´s performance refuses the acts of dissemblance that have long characterized black women's participation in the public sphere. Darlene Clark Hine argues that black women employed dissemblance throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a way to respond to rape, violence, and the threats thereof, thus "creat[ing] the appearance of openness and disclosure but actually shield[ing] the truth of their inner lives" (912). These refusals produced a "self- imposed invisibility" that allowed them to "accrue the psychic space and harness the resources needed to hold their own in the often one-sided and mismatched resistance struggle" (Hine 915). Mon´ae relies on invisibility in "Cold War," insisting that "Being alone's the only way to be / When you step outside / you spend life fighting for your sanity."7 Her words echo the sentiments of Mary Church Terrell, who early in the twentieth century announced to her constituency in the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs that "our peculiar status [as black women] in this country . . . seems to demand that we stand by ourselves" (Hine 917).Monae´s staging of interiority, however, is already undercut by her choice of ae' forum: it is not a platform from which she speaks only to other black women, but a music video that comprised both a sonic announcement to be replayed again and again, and a moving image that catalogs and exposes her for all time to anyone who wFATCA and the broader tax crackdownould watch/listen. There is a dramatic tension here; while Mon´ acknowledges dissemblance as a strategy, she also forestalls its efficacy through that revelation, effectively lifting the veil of secrecy that allowed for black women's sociopolitical subterfuge.
Solvency - Surveillance Our plan is rooted in resistance against surveillance studies – foundational texts challenge the futuristic means of identification and control through speculative fiction A2: Framework - Education The affirmative plan solves their education claims – research indicates it has pedagogical benefits A2: Framework - Race Black people are not the ones who need to change – white people are the driving force of racism, and must hold themselves accountable thus creating a shift from white supremacy. Chart 6/30 (Chart, Natasha. years of experience in online politics across the progressive blogosphere, works to make politics user-friendly, responsive, and accessible. RH Reality Check’s Director of Online Campaigns. "It's Not Black People Who Need to Change." RH Reality Check. N.p., 30 June 2015. Web. The white terrorist who gunned down six Black women and three Black men, peaceful worshippers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, announced his murderous intentions by first declaring, “You rape our women.” We all know that he meant white women, like me. “His” women, as a white man like him would think of us. But the thing is, white people are the ones who need to change in the United States. I read the grief-stricken request of a Black woman who asked that white women call this out and repudiate it, so that’s why I’m writing. There is something terribly, disastrously wrong with how white people tolerate racism among other whites, how we interact with people of color, how we interact with the Black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved by our ancestors. This is not something we can fix by promising to renounce racial slurs, nor even by promising to correct each other’s racist speech in private. The rot goes deeper. The tragic massacre of peaceful Black women and men at the AME church is exactly where these attitudes and behaviors were meant to lead. They are meant to produce a vicious, hateful willingness to destroy whatever a white person can’t “protect” through ownership. There’s no possible legacy for a society run with such brutality other than mass murder and wanton destruction. If we would not be held responsible for these atrocities, we must rid ourselves of the attitudes that got us there. That means much, much more than legislators agreeing to take down the idols of Confederate treason in the South. Every one of us must reject these white supremacist attitudes, these claims to ownership over other people’s lives and well-being for the gratification of our own egos… We must stop forgiving each other’s bad behavior, or asking for forgiveness, and insist on change, following the example of the dearly beloved Black women and men our nation is in mourning for right now. It’s not Black people in the United States who need to change. Every one of the AME worshippers died as a model of the kind of person all white people should strive to be. I hope my son will want to grow up to be like them. I hope he will be like the loved ones they left behind, people who showed incredible forbearance as cameras were shoved in their faces by white people who were asking for forgiveness before the bodies were even cold. In the aftermath of white supremacist terrorism, white people must absolutely listen to the requests of the Black community that we stop asking them to act like the Rev. Martin Luther King, another peaceful Black person murdered by a white supremacist. Black people, like the murdered Rev. Clementa Pinckney and Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, already knew how to act like that. The slain worshippers lived as a testament to the church’s 200-year-old legacy of standing in fellowship against white supremacist terror. They easily extended their hospitality to a complete stranger, a hateful man who would sit with them for an hour before gunning them down, just like his white supremacist idols who had murdered other Black people they could not own or control. Have Black people not been terrorized over the last few hundred years into a meekness toward white people that runs so deep, African-American men have been seen to politely ask their white attackers to stop hurting them even as they were taking their last breaths? White people would do better to start listening to King’s request of us throughout his life and works, and throughout the life and works of the other women and men in the Civil Rights Movement, that we learn to listen to and love our Black sisters and brothers. That we make white society decent and humane at long last. What is white fear of the “angry” Black person besides a worry that we will be held to account for the merciless slander and persecution of Black people by whites that each and every white person bears responsibility for tolerating as if it were not a deadly emergency? We must do everything we can to put an end to white supremacist attitudes. It should be clear by now that this ideology won’t just fade away in time with the old, it must be rejected and extinguished as a matter of deliberate intent. It helps no one to wallow in shame or guilt. Act in honor of the beloved dead. Do your part to put an end to the evil of white supremacy so that we can all live together in peace and dignity.
Instead of teaching to escape we should discuss why that escape is needed in the first place Smith, 15 (Clint Smith is a teacher, poet, and doctoral candidate in education at Harvard University with a concentration in Culture, Institutions, and Society (CIS). “Teach black students they can change communities they don't have to escape”, http://www.theguardian.com/teacher- network/2015/jul/07/teach-black-students-change-communities-not-escape?CMP=share_btn_fb, Tuesday July 7 2015 TAM) When my students and I found out about the shooting of nine black people in Charleston, South Carolina, our breath was pulled from our lungs, our minds spun with disillusionment, and our hearts filled with rage and despair. We wanted to escape. My students are black and brown, living in communities that have been subjected to generations of underinvestment and discrimination. As a teaching artist in Boston public schools and a former high school English teacher just outside Washington DC, I’ve seen how the violence against people of color in the past year has left many in fear that their lives are in perpetual danger. As it happened, we did escape. The news came on the eve of a long-planned school trip to France. Hours later, when we met at the airport, we hugged one another and exchanged words – a reminder that we mattered, if not to the rest of the world, then at least to each other. When we arrived in Paris, I was reminded of the American writer James Baldwin. His departure from Harlem in 1948, aged 24, with only $40 (£25) in his pocket was an attempt to escape the pernicious racism of the US. This decision, he claims, saved his life. “It wasn’t so much a matter of choosing France – it was a matter of getting out of America,” he said in a 1984 interview with the Paris Review. “My luck was running out. I was going to go to jail; I was going to kill somebody or be killed.” For my entire life, I have watched the realities of racism slowly kill those around me. I have watched food insecurity and unequal access to healthy meals saturate black communities with diabetes and heart disease at disproportionate rates. I have watched the residue of federally-sanctioned redlining create small apartheids in cities for decades, generating breeding grounds for crime and poverty. In Baltimore, for example, local policies have existed since 1910 to isolate the city’s black population. To the present day federal housing subsidy policies still result in low-income black families being segregated from richer neighbourhoods. With all of that said, a part of me struggles to accept that Baldwin, a literary hero of mine, felt the only thing he could do was leave. When I discuss Baldwin with my students, the questions surrounding his departure inevitably arise. It is a difficult yet necessary conversation. I tell them it is a choice he made, one he had the right to – one they have the right to as well. In the midst of these conversations, however, I do not want to suggest to my students that the only way to be successful, or to have value, is to escape. This is a message already deeply embedded in the social fabric of schools in poor communities. Teachers, administrators and others propagate a “do well so you can leave this place” narrative. I have witnessed this in the schools where I have taught and been on the receiving end of it growing up. As someone not currently living in my own hometown of New Orleans, I even wonder to what extent I internalised such a message as a child. Education, at its best, gives students the option to make a life however and wherever they choose. That is different, however, to defining one’s ambition or dreams by how far removed they are from the places of their childhood. A child in Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, or any other city across the country, should not have to dream of escaping their neighborhood to make a meaningful life for him or herself. How will our communities ever grow into their true potential if we continue to tell our most successful students to leave? And still, I am not sure anyone can be faulted for desiring to escape a paradigm in which your humanity, and your body, are both questioned and assaulted. It is not as simple as telling our students to stay. No. We, as educators, must directly address the realities that cause them to want to leave in the first place. That, in part, means we must discuss racism candidly – both the interpersonal and the systemic. This does not mean adding a perfunctory Martin Luther King Jr speech to be skimmed over during Black History Month. It does not mean reading the only writer of color in the curriculum and analyzing their work devoid of any historical context. This means holistically broadening the range of texts we expose our students to and having them interrogate why certain voices have been, and continue to be, left out of the literary and historical canons. We cannot discuss what led Dylann Roof to take the lives of nine innocent black people as they prayed inside their church with students unless we also discuss our country’s history of racial violence. We cannot discuss what the confederate flag represents without also wrestling with what it means that many of our founding fathers owned slaves. These are not loosely tied phenomena; they are intrinsically linked realities and shape the country we live in. Americans often define racism singularly as direct verbal or physical abuse. This, however, is only one way it manifests itself. As teachers, we have a responsibility to our students to provide a more holistic and honest definition of what racism is in this country, so that we might better push back against it as we move forward. While systemic injustice is suffocating and can often seem immutable, things can change. But we must engage our students honestly, and remind them that we are the architects of the world we live in. That is what I would have wanted my teachers to tell me. That is what I try to tell my students. Perhaps then we can collectively re-create our reality so that one day no one is forced to “escape”.
Surveillance Key Surveillance and Visualities Roots being in the Plantation – This discussion is key Mirzeoff ’11 (Mirzoeff, Nicholas. visual culture theorist and professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University "The Right to Look." Critical Inquiry 37.3 (2011): 473-96. University of Chicago Press, Spring 2011. Web.
NEG AFF curtailing Bad – US Focus
Aff’s unquestioning use of the United States as a central site of power reinscribes racial oppression. Surveillance is actually good and can solve racism better than AFF
Narrative of Exoneree Gerard Richardson
By Gerard Richardson New Jersey Star Ledger, June 7, 2014 http://www.nj.com/opinion/index.ssf/2014/06/wrongly_imprisoned_man_fix_new_jerseys_dna_testing_ law_opinion.html
Imagine spending 19 years in prison for a murder you did not commit. Imagine enduring the indignities of life behind bars, and missing out on the lives of your children and grandchildren, knowing that you are innocent. Imagine that while you sit in a cell, the real killer is somewhere out there, possibly destroying other lives. This is my story. In 1994, I was wrongly convicted of the murder of Monica Reyes, a 19-year-old from Elizabeth. The conviction was based largely on the testimony of a forensic dentist who claimed that my teeth matched a bite mark found on the victim’s body. I always maintained my innocence and refused to give up hope. Finally last year DNA testing on the bite mark excluded me as the perpetrator, and my conviction was overturned. I’ve officially been a free man for six months, but I find it difficult to find true closure knowing that the person who took Monica Reyes’ life has not been found. Even more frustrating is the fact that technical rules are standing in the way of detecting this person. The DNA testing in my case was conducted by a private California laboratory that specializes in getting results from old, degraded evidence. The FBI, however, will not allow test results from private accredited labs to be entered into the federal DNA database unless the facility is first reviewed by state forensics experts — either through a site visit or by obtaining a review conducted by another state. In my case, a site visit report of the California lab expired, and the New Jersey State Laboratory, likely struggling with resources, did not send an employee to conduct an in-person site visit. So while the state now has the genetic profile of the true killer from the crime scene, and it could match one of the 10 million criminal offender profiles in the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, bureaucratic rules are preventing authorities from uploading the test results into the national databank and potentially solving the crime. These bureaucratic roadblocks to the DNA dataank can have serious implications for the wrongfully convicted and for public safety in general. For every innocent person behind bars, there is a guilty person who could be committing more crimes. Of the nation’s 316 DNA exoneration cases such as mine, 153 real perpetrators have been identified. The actual offenders went on to commit — and be convicted of — more than 30 murders, 70 sexual assaults and 30 additional violent crimes while innocent people were incarcerated. Rebuilding my life has not been easy, but I am convinced that something positive can come from the two decades I undeservingly spent behind bars. I hope the Legislature and Gov. Chris Christie pass and sign this law to give victims like Monica Reyes and her family the justice and closure they deserve and to help exonerate other wrongfully convicted people like me. Gerard Richardson of Elizabeth spent nearly two decades in a New Jersey prison for a murder he did not commit. He was exonerated on Dec. 17. Solvency Take Out
States can refuse to cooperate with the federal government – empirics prove. Stein 15
(Jason Stein is a staff reporter for the Tribune News Service. Feb 19, 2015. "Scott Walker Refuses Federal Funding for Medicaid Expansion, Again," www.governing.com/topics/health-human-services/tns-scott- walker-medicaid-expansion-wisconsin.html)
The state would stay the course and turn down federal money to expand Wisconsin's health programs for the needy, under Gov. Scott Walker's budget proposal… In 2013, the Republican governor rejected taking federal incentives to expand the state's Medicaid programs… At the heart of the issue lies the question of how Wisconsin should handle the federal Affordable Care Act, often called Obamacare, which sought to persuade states to add health coverage by promising to pay all of their short-term and most of their long- term costs to do so. Walker has declined that offer, part of his strategy to limit the state's involvement in the Affordable Care Act, and his 2015-'17 budget proposal would continue that approach.
AFF Bad - Solvency
Their ideas are outdated and no longer work as a movement – it is open ended and message is ambiguous depending on the person Miller ’11 (Miller, Paul D. a Washington DC-born electronic and experimental hip hop musician whose work is often called by critics or his fans as "illbient" or "trip hop". He is a turntablist, a producer, a philosopher, and an author The Book of Ice. Brooklyn, NY: Mark Batty, 2011. Print.) Every movement has its sell-by date. I think that there were a lot of flaws in the way that Afro- Futurism unfolded, and I think it missed certain pressure points in the flow of how culture evolves in this day and age. It wasn’t digital enough, it didn’t have a core group of people with any kind of coherent message. It was conceptually open ended without any kind of narrative. People tend to like that kind of thing. I speak of Afro-Futurism in the past tense because I think that the culture at large caught up to and bypassed many of the issues it was dealing with. Forget the idea of the “permanent underclass” that people like Greg Tate (no disrespect) kept pushing. Forget the idea that blacks are outside of any system—we are the system. I guess that many people outside of the arts have awakened to the day and age and moved on. It seemed like Afrofuturism just didn’t have a cohesive situation to have music, art and literature evolve from. Sure, Afrofuturism can be used, as you put it to be a “descriptor of a body of knowledge, which does not die and outlives its progenitors (like jazz, hip-hop, deconstruction, or philosophy itself)”—but only by sleight of hand (which is sampling, anyway). It’s basically a hall of mirrors, a smoke and fog routine in a middle brow cheap magic show. But hey... even that can be interesting sometimes.
Aff = Sexist
Even if their small selection of 1AC authors cite feminist principals, the Black power Movement is overwhelmingly imagined as a male dominated space. Sexism and the alienation of black woman inevitably dooms the movement. AH 2011 (From a collection of short posts on the blog of Jakeya Caruthers, PhD Candidate in Anthropology of Education at Stanford University where she teaches courses on Black Childhood, Queer Afrofuturism and occasionally guest-lectures on representations of race, sex, and gender in popular culture. Her courses have earned her a Middlebrook Prize for Graduate Teaching and a teaching fellowship with Stanford’s Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity. June 2, 2011 http://queeringafrofuturism.tumblr.com/post/6126537901/female- presence-in-the-afro-future)
In J. Griffith Rollefson’s work “The Robot Voodoo Power Thesis: Afrofuturism and anti-anti- essentialism from Sun Ra to Kool Keith” the author argues that afrofuturism, though often viewed as a constructed fantasy and sort of post human, futurist sensibility, has “real” productive potential towards the larger project of cultural theory. He argues specifically that, “By stepping out side of the white liberal tradition and rewriting blackness in all its complexity, afrofuturism offers a novel form of revolution that is rooted in a long history of black opposition”. In his work Rollefson sites artists that while productive in their audacity to (re)envision and reproduce alter- destinies, still through practice and position reify notions of hetro-patriarchy and sexism. In all of his examples he presents male-bodied individuals as the leaders of this new wave of cultural thought and progression into the future. The first is the highly noted Sun Ra, band leader for the Arkestra. Rollefson highlights the leader’s ability to institute a new wave of futurist thought through an insistence that he was not of this planet and neither is any black person. The author notes that Sun-Ra creates a new space through which black people can begin to let go of desires towards equal citizenship through an indoctrination into an alternate world, that of the uni-verse. Rollefson, notes that Sun Ra and other noted leaders such as George Clinton and Parliament- Funkadelic, as well as MC’s such as Kool Keith “established the core tenet of anti-anti- essentialist collapsed binaries”. He continues further: “ I would like to assert that they do have real political efficacy because they problematize the rigid binary of blackness/whiteness and the matrix of binaries that are inscribed up this central set.” Such reimagining works to blur the lines of whiteness and blackness perhaps, however, they do little to renegotiate the history of sexism and erasure that these same histories present (as an opposition) to the project of feminist politics. Through Rollefson’s reading we find that the female presence is non-existent in the theorized (and thus archived) afrofuture. It is problematic to me that no space, imaginary or otherwise, has been offered with which to combat the issues of patriarchy and sexism that override our present quests for “Freedom”. Until the way we think about afro futurism is inclusive off all black bodies, the project towards liberation will continue to be stunted. -AH
The AFF empirically can’t understand or affect policy Berger 1976 – award winning science fiction author (July, Albert I., “ The Triumph of Prophecy: Science Fiction and Nuclear Power in the Post-Hiroshima Period” Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2, JSTOR) This naivete about politics and preoccupation with technological solutions was the obverse of the prevailing SF distaste for politics. Politics had always had a bad press in the science-fiction magazines, being portrayed as the captive of technologically, if not socially reactionary special interests. The appalling scientific ignorance and prejudice displayed by Congress after Hiroshima, and its general unwillingness to be educated, merely compounded the problem in the eyes of science-fiction writers and readers. This distaste for politics was testified to not only by letters-to-the-editor in Astounding and the fan magazines but also by an article by W.B. de Graeff, "Congress is too Busy" (Sept 1946), detailing with a gleeful contempt the most mundane and ridiculous chores of a member of Congress. By 1950 even an old stalwart like E.E. Smith could take up nearly a third of a novel-First Lensman (not serialized; Fantasy Press 1950)-with a detailed account of an election in which military heroes act both as police forces and as candidates arrayed against a corrupt political machine. The use of conspicuously armed poll watchers and what amounts to a military coup are justified by the criminal tactics of the opposition. Smith's villains are supposed to be the pawns of a sinister conspiracy of aliens, but their methods are described as normal American practice.
Utopianism = Passivism The affirmative is romanticizing the movement, therefore making the status quo worse. Post-colonial utopianism is bad because it makes it impossible to create coalitions or enact political change – its built on a flawed foundation Niezen, 07 (Ronald Niezen holds the Katharine A. Pearson Chair in Civil Society and Public Policy in the faculties of Law and of Arts, a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in the Anthropology of Law, and is a Professor and former Chair of the Department of Anthropology., “Postcolonialism and the Utopian Imagination”, 21 September 2007) Postcolonial futurism has no answer to the problems and paradoxes of cultural claims and collective strivings toward distinctiveness and selfdetermination other than to imagine a world in which they do not exist. Recalling that postcolonialism also encourages nationalist essentialism, this means that there are two antipathetic, mutually negating versions of postcolonial liberation: one looking toward a future of borderless global cultural liberation, another toward a more immediate, intellectuallyinspired era of cultural affirmation and autonomy. Postcolonial futurism commits the fundamental error, once widely attributed to Marxism, of anticipating a global state of collective being that underestimates the propensity toward national or minority identities based on affirmation of the rights of peoples, today often expressed in terms of cultural distinctiveness coupled with claims of political self-determination. But the national and universalist versions of postcolonial liberation are, at least in one sense, complementary. The utopian imagination is able to make particular cultural allegiances seem more palatable for global consumption, to mask the unpleasant flavours of indigenophilism and small-scale identity politics with saccharine promises of unconditional liberation from the levelling powers of nation- states. It is able to reconfigure particular cultural aspirations in a way that removes from view their tensions, contradictions and proclivities to intolerance, while leaving intact their most compelling promises of inclusion, spiritual awareness, intimacy and affirmation. This brings us to the most important question that follows from the recent resurgence of utopian visions: what is wrong with hope? Why should we deny dreamers the consolation of their fantasies? Is not the capacity to imagine a different and better world the most important component of our ability to change the world for the better? And does it POSTCOLONIALISM AND THE UTOPIAN IMAGINATION 727 Downloaded by [] at 07:10 18 July 2015 not follow that denying the possibility of imagining a radically different future might result in a crippling of the capacities to criticize present institutional injustices and dysfunctions and to create better institutions and forms of governance? There is a relatively simple answer to this: hope for the future goes astray whenever it is built upon a mistaken understanding of present conditions; and there is no definitive way to correct its errors. The utopian imagination is by its very nature free to elaborate radically different-from-the-present visions of a yet-to-be-realized society, founded on misleading, irrational understandings of the present circumstances or propensities of human social life. There is a sense in which utopianism, when tolerated as a form of intellectual discourse, can wreak havoc on recognized forms of critical etiquette. How might one, as a critic, point conclusively to a misrepresentation of the collective future? One of the appeals of utopianism is its immunity from falsification. Certain dreams are inherently adverse to the stimulants of facts, practicalities and openness to revision. The postcolonial utopian imagination is especially fraught with dilemmas and improbabilities. Although being largely premised on postmodernism’s rejection of ‘grand narratives’, and although expressing its vision of the future as one of permissiveness and cultural freedom, it indirectly possesses its own civilizing agenda to which all others are expected to conform. Insofar as it does articulate a specific vision of future change, it anticipates the dismantling of existing structures of nation-states and institutions of global governance, while maintaining a naı¨ve faith in the emergence, out of conditions of revolutionary change and insecurity, of a free-flowing global cultural ecumene. Does this mean that there is no form of utopian imagination applicable to conditions of planetary integration, one that can offer realizable inspiration without engaging in obscurantism, cultural fundamentalism or civilizing agendas? My perspective suggests that postcolonial idealism makes it almost impossible to learn from the actual disorderly processes of negotiating and overcoming differences. But perhaps it is yet possible to construct a vision of the future that acknowledges the untidiness and disarray of human identities. Whatever other qualities it might have, such futurism would begin with the following premise: we have more to learn from those who have struggled through conflict, compromise and reconciliation to achieve a condition of peace than from those who are content to imagine away the obstacles to an otherwise unachievable ideal. Utopianism = Violence
Utopianism paves the way to totalitarianism and endless violence Jacoby 2005 (Jacoby, Russell. professor of history at the University of California Los Angeles an author, and critic of academic culture Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. Print. Page 12-13) The common wisdom that utopias inexorably lead to dystopias not only derives from texts, it appeals to history to make its case. New words help make the argument. Like “dystopia,” the term “genocide” belongs to the twentieth century. Inevitably these new terms seem related; they seem to address kindred experiences. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish refugee, coined “genocide” in “to denote an old practice in its modern development”—the annihilation of a national or ethnic group. He believed the Nazi practices occasioned a new word.43 While Lemkin worked tirelessly to spread the news about genocide—with few rewards44—he did not associate it with either utopia or dystopia.45 Yet scholarly and conventional opinion today consistently links genocide and utopia and bills the blood bath of the twentieth century to “utopians” such as Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. From Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism to Martin Malia’s Soviet Tragedy—its last chapter is titled “The Perverse Logic of Utopia”—scholars have thrown communism, Nazism, and utopia into one tub. Prestigious savants like Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper have persuasively argued that utopia leads to totalitarianism and mass murder. “We must beware of Utopia,” wrote Ralf Dahrendorf. “Whoever sets out to implement Utopian plans will in the first instance have to wipe clean the canvas, on which the real world is painted. This is a brutal process of destruction;” it leads to hell on earth.46 To question this approach requires asking what utopias are actually about—and why, for instance, Nazism should not be deemed a utopian enterprise. Even the vaguest description of utopia as a society inspired by notions of happiness, fraternity, and plenty would apparently exclude Nazism with its notion of Ayrans dominating inferiors in a Thousand Year Reich. What An Anarchic Breeze JACOBY CH 01 1/24/05 9:23 PM Page 13 connects Thomas More’s Utopia and Hitler’s Mein Kampf? Virtually nothing.47 Utopianism is Tyranny disguised as ideology. Levin ’12 (Levin, Mark R. Lawyer, worked in the administration of President Ronald Reagan and was a chief of staff for Attorney General Edwin Meese. Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America. New York: Threshold Editions, 2012. Print. Page 5.) Tyranny, broadly define, is the use of power to dehumanize the individual and delegitimize his nature. Political utopianism is tyranny disguised as a desirable, workable, and even paradisiacal governing ideology. There are, of course, unlimited utopian constructs, for the mind is capable of infinite fantasies. But there are common themes. The fantasies take the form of grand social plans or experiments, the impracticability and impossibility of which, in small ways and large, lead to the individuals subjugation. Karl Popper, a philosopher who eloquently deconstructed the false assumption and scientific utopianism, arguing it is totalitarian in form and substance, observed that "[a]ny social science which does not teach the impossibility of rational social construction is entirely blind to the most important facts of social life, and must overlook the only social laws of real validity and of real importance. Social sciences seeking to provide a background for social engineering cannot, therefore, be true descriptions of social facts. They are impossible in themselves. Popper argued that unable to make detailed or precise sociological predictions, long-term forecasts it considers worth pursuing. (Although Popper differentiated between "piecemeal social engineering" and "utopian social engineering," it is an ahistorical, or at least a leap of faith, to suggest that one unleashed, the social engineers will not become addicted to their power; and Popper never could enunciate a practical solution.)
The AFF operates within the assumptions of capitalism, making liberation impossible. Greer 09 (Olivia J. Greer, MA in Performance Studies from NYU, author and contributor to HuffPo, Alternet, “Yes We Can: (President) Barack Obama and Afrofuturism,” published in Anamesa http://www.nyu.edu/pubs/anamesa/archive/fall_2009_intersections/yes_we_can_president_barac k_obama_and_afrofuturism.pdf)
Multiculturalism: Yes You Can In the 1993 article in which Dery coined the term Afrofuturism, he suggested to author Samuel Delany that “the young urban blacks responsible for vital art forms such as hip-hop live in what might be called ‘beeper culture,’ where miniatured digital technology is everywhere at hand.”19 Dery posits that technology had become omnipresent—in the United States at least—and was available now even to those members of the populace to whom access to societal advances had generally been denied. Delany took issue with Dery’s assessment, responding: I can detect the possibility of a naïve assumption that the redistribution of commodities is somehow congruent with the redistribution of wealth—which it is not. Just as seriously, I can detect an assumption that the distribution of commodities is at one with access to the formation of those commodities and the commodity system… When one talks about “black youth culture as a technological culture,” one has to specify that it’s a technological culture that’s almost entirely on the receiving end of a river of “stuff,” in which the young consumers have nowhere near what we might call equitable input.20 (emphasis in original) Delany’s critique of consumerism disguised as participation and power is at the root of Žižek’s assertion in 1997 that the “ideology of cyberspace capitalism” obliterates individuality and the “particularity of social position.” For Žižek, “cyberspace capitalism” obfuscates a crucial reality that the market— and, as he notes, the World Wide Web—relies on power relations, political decisions, and institutional conditions that necessarily remove ordinary people from proximity to power, but do so by perpetuating a fantasy of “equitable input,” to use Delany’s words. 21 “Yes We Can” operates within the fantasy of equitable input. It perpetuates a vision of solidarity and togetherness, but it is created and disseminated within a system in which will.i.am and his celebrity participants hold a rarified position. They are privileged because they have access to Delany’s “equitable input;” they are participants in the production of technology, of the market. As Ricardo Dominguez writes in Electronic Disturbance, “the celebrity acts as empirical proof positive that electronic appearance is but a record of the natural world.”22 However, without proximity, “the many” can never verify the truth of the celebrity’s manifestation. It is for this very reason that Bould cautions against viewing Afrofuturism as a pure mode of resistance. Cultural production operates increasingly within a capitalist frame that, despite best intentions, can be precipitous to navigate. Žižek, like Delany and Bould, argues against the idea that subversion could exist within the structures of the market. Against the image, all-present in cultural criticism, of a radical subversive discourse or practice “censored” by the Power, one is even tempted to claim that today, more than ever, the mechanism of censorship intervenes predominantly to enhance the efficiency of the power discourse itself…The gesture of self- censorship is co-substantial with the exercise of power.23 For Žižek, the mechanism of censorship (which upholds existing power structures) is multiculturalism, which he conceives as a destructive force born out of capitalism, operating from figures of capital (“the multiculturalist”) outwards. The multiculturalist “respects” (in Žižek’s own scare quotes) the identity of the Other, while maintaining the distance of a “privileged universal position,” and thus asserting his own superiority. In other words, multiculturalism is an invention of capitalism that encourages the separation of cultural differences as a means to uphold the homogeneity of capitalist systems. Since, as we might put it, everybody silently accepts that capitalism is here to stay—critical energy has found a substitute outlet in fighting for cultural differences which leave the basic homogeneity of the capitalist world-system intact. So we are fighting our pc battles for the rights of ethnic minorities, of gays and lesbians, of different lifestyles, and so on, while capitalism pursues its triumphant march—and today’s cultural theory, in the guise of “cultural studies,” is doing the ultimate service to the unrestrained development of capitalism by actively participating in the ideological effort to render its massive presence invisible.24 will.i.am’s “Yes We Can”—with its development out of the most commercial arms of the entertainment industry, its dependence on celebrity, and its strained reach toward multiraciality—raises important questions about the silent acceptance of systems of oppression. The video’s vision of multicultural unity, while not presenting a clear power source, operates entirely within the capitalist homogeneity Žižek outlines. Its beautiful representatives of diversity mask the capitalist ideology behind it, which goes unquestioned by anyone in the video, or by Obama himself. Bould cites Žižek’s critique, stating that science fiction’s “color-blind future is multiculturalist in this way.”25 For Bould, “Afrofuturism tends towards the typical cyberpunk acceptance of capitalism as an unquestionable universe and working for the assimilation of certain currently marginalized peoples into a global system that might, at best, tolerate some relatively minor (although not unimportant) reforms, but within which the many will still have to poach, pilfer, and hide to survive.”26 The lack of attention to “the many” who will continue to suffer under capitalism, even if a certain disrupted contemporary appearance of racism also characterizes will.i.am’s video. “Yes We Can” uses the ghosting of the past, with traces of Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy—images of liberation not achieved, but deferred— to push for a nostalgic hope. But hope for what: the present, the future, or even the past? The sections of Obama’s speech that will.i.am chooses to highlight are those that harken back to another time. “A king who took us to the mountaintop” directly conjures up images of the civil rights movement, but also harkens back to the Bible. In other parts of his full speech, Obama spoke to the challenges of the present; but these sections are not part of the video.27 The words are moving, especially when redeployed over a soundtrack of many voices, but by the end when the word “hope” turns to “vote” what is left is a sense of what DeClue calls “survival by futurity.”28 This begs the question of whether mere survival is—or should be—the end goal, or whether a more radical break for future freedom is needed. Survival, Žižek might argue, is multiculturalism. will.i.am probably does not imagine “Yes We Can” adhering to Žižek’s model of multicultural censorship. Yet, “Yes We Can” is part of what Henry Jenkins describes as “new participatory culture,” which is forming at the intersections of new tools and technologies that “enable consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate and recirculate media content,” the promotion of “do-it-yourself (DIY) media production,” and the interaction of multiple forms of media.29 Jenkins writes that these trends seem to encourage active modes of spectatorship, in which audiences gain power and autonomy in a “new knowledge culture.” However, Jenkins notes—recalling Žižek—“it is wrong to assume that we are somehow being liberated through improved media technologies.”30 We are more often being given the idea that we are being liberated, what Néstor García Canclini calls the “illusion of participation.”31 As Žižek and Bould remind us, the idea of liberation may very well be a trap. Conclusion The purpose of this study has not been to dislocate will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” video and Obama’s presidential campaign and victory from the field of Afrofuturism. It is rather to caution, as Bould does from within the field, against the dangerous assumption that Afrofuturism—or any artistic movement, for that matter—is synonymous with cultural or political resistance. DeClue’s conceptualization of Obama as Afrofuturist has a relationship with Victor Turner’s concept of an intercultural transmission of experience that consists of a “living through,” a “thinking back,” and a “willing or wishing forward.”32 While hypothetically this transmission might move a society forward progressively, that it will do so is not a forgone conclusion. Particularly in electoral politics, a symbolic system rife with shared rhetoric, poll numbers, familiar gestures, and inscribed public spaces (both offline and online) allow for the equal possibility of either reenacting our political reality and stabilizing the status quo, or of finding ways to resist. Even since the election of Barack Obama, the United States (and arguably the rest of the world) faces a discouraging political climate in which capitalism is an unchallenged omnipresence, even as it collapses before our eyes. Under such circumstances, it is tempting to find signs of resistance and change in our cultural and political production. Certainly these signs can be found readily, and are heartening and galvanizing. It is important though that we “stay awake,” as Octavia Butler would have us do, and be wary of simple answers. 33 Artistic production, technological advance, and future visioning will not take us the whole way to political transformation. This is a position that Žižek complicates: “Even when the change is not substantial but a mere semblance of a new beginning, the very fact that a situation is perceived by the majority of the population as a ‘new beginning’ opens up the space for important ideological and political rearticulations.”34 “Yes We Can” shows that the navigation between status quo and resistance is problematic; outcomes can be characterized not as good or bad, positive or negative, but more in terms of what they open up. Obama—and the cultural production that has developed with him—has certainly opened up an enormous space for possibility. But if that space is filled with a status quo that is called a new beginning, we may find ourselves in a multicultural morass of pretty pictures that ask only for complacency.