For many in this space we come to understand debate as a persuasive, communicative

activity but in order for that to be true we must FIRST disavow the truth about a
particular form of violence that not only strips Blackness of its ability to SPEAK its
suffering which is integral for the ability of persuasion but also its ontological integrity to
exist on an equal playing field for its true metaphysical injury to be recognized, symbolized,
or COMMUNICATED, or be healed. As we plunge into this Black abyss we have three
immediate questions: 1. Can you hear a Black shadow? 2. How can the shadow speak
back? 3. How can the shadow know about itself? While we may never create a complete
grammar of suffering-- the shadow of Anna Brown--a shadow that doesn’t care about the
uniqueness of a name but the (non)uniqueness of Black fresh as its shade reverberates in
society like an orchestra’s sound in a room. This incoherent shadow—of Black life within-
death—is where we choose to descend when posed with the task of responding to the
affirmative
Brady 12 Louder Than the Dark: Toward an Acoustics of Suffering By Guest Contributor on October 11, 2012. Nicholas Brady is an
activist-scholar from Baltimore, Maryland. He is an executive board member of Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, a community-based think tank
focused on empowering youth in the political process. Through the organization, he has helped to produce policy and critical intervention papers,
organize efforts in Baltimore against the prison industrial complex, lead educational forums on a myriad of community-oriented projects, and use
debate as a critical pedagogical tool to activate the voices of young people from ages 10 to 25. He is a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins
University with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and is currently a doctoral student in the University of California-Irvine Culture and Theory
program. http://www.thefeministwire.com/2012/10/louder-than-the-dark-towards-an-acoustics-of-suffering/ dx/////
Can you hear a shadow? The more enlightened, the deeper the shadows, but can the shadow enunciate the depth of
its sorrow back to the world it is invariably bound to? A silhouette is wheeled to the corner of a
hallway, its face obscured. The nurse has demanded that she leave the hospital. Unbeknownst to the
shadow, the police happen to be in the building at the same time and are asked to remove her from
the premises. They drag her out of the wheelchair and handcuff her, leaving her slouched on the ground. A few more cops come and they
cart her away to literally rot in a jail cell. The shadow’s name is Anna Brown. She has also been named “the
homeless lady,” as well as “the crackhead” or “drug sick” individual by the officers that arrested
her. She went to the hospital after spraining her ankle, was arrested because she refused to leave
due to continued pain, and was found dead on the prison floor because her sprain produced blood
clots that lodged into her lungs. Due to medical malpractice and the police officers’ violence, Anna
passed away alone on the floor of a prison cell. Yet, that last sentence was entirely too nice, for in
truth Anna Brown was murdered. The hesitation to describe this as a “murder” is because that
implies an event, a narrative, a “when,” “where,” and “who” (as in “who done it?”). Yet this was
not an event with an acting subject; she was instead murdered by subjectivity itself : a
series of incidents centered on her body, each reverberating off each other into an orchestra of
death. Each proceeding was an echo of the one preceding it: waves of suffering reflecting off each action through time. Her death was
caused by the incoherence of her voice, her calls for care, her screams of agony. Put another way,
she was murdered by civil society’s inability-–and lack of desire-–to hear her being. Discourse on
race normally focuses on the material and the visual, but the video of Anna Brown’s death points us
less to the images and more to the centrality of aurality to black suffering. The first part of the video is without
audio, but this does not mean sound is absent per se. That the video lacks audio in the beginning says more than perhaps the soundtrack itself
could, for it makes explicit the inaudibility of black suffering. We know that Anna Brown had expressed her lasting pain, in spite of the doctor’s
opinion that she was fine. The hospital then ordered her to leave and she protested, saying that she was still in pain. She was forcibly wheeled to
the hallway and eventually arrested by the police. Her vocal protests, critiques of inadequate service and expression
of her persistent pain, fell on deaf ears. She spoke the knowledge of her body, but her voice was
muted and over-dubbed by the knowledge of the professionals. How can the black know about
itself? How can the shadow speak back? The violence that produces the subject (in this case, the
doctor) robs Anna Brown of vocality, not so much literally as ontologically. Insofar as an object (a commodity,
a slave) can speak, it cannot be said that it can communicate. At the etymological root of “communicate” is the logic of
the commons or community: informing to participate in the world, sharing one’s utterance(s) to
join the community. Communication, not even to imply anything as serious as the ethics of
dialogue, requires an equal ontological status amongst the communicators. That several titles of the video
online have called her the “homeless woman” evidences one singular truth (the desire to insult her notwithstanding ): Anna Brown, as
the descendent of slaves, has no home while the doctors are in their own dominion. In a public
lecture titled “People-of-Color-Blindness,” Jared Sexton describes an experience at a jazz club
where the microphones go off, but the band continues to play. Even though the sociality between
the band and the audience has been shut down, the band still plays on. Sexton uses this example to
dramatize how even though the black is socially dead, that does not signify that black life is non-
existent. Instead, our social death signifies that black life is sealed off from the world and happens
elsewhere: “underground or in outer space.” In this way Anna speaks, but the microphone that would project her subjectivity
to the world has been turned off. Her suffering has been rendered unreal while her voice is heard as
incoherent and dangerous. If Anna Brown’s suffering is inaudible, the second half of the video speaks to how her voice and pain are
criminalized. When the police arrive, they surround Anna and then drag her out of the wheelchair,
handcuff her, and leave her on the hospital floor. She is given two different charges: her protests
for better service are charged as “trespassing” and her inability to walk due to her injury is
charged as “resisting arrest.” When she is in the police car, the camera in the vehicle has a microphone. When they arrive at the
prison, Anna continues to tell them she can’t walk and that she needs to be in a hospital. The police officers ignore her statements and instead
oscillate between asking her “are you going to get out” and threatening her; “you have two seconds to [swing your legs out]…” Each implies that
she can move her legs and she is choosing not to.
As Saidiya Hartman writes in Scenes of Subjection, “the slave
was recognized as a reasoning subject who possessed intent and rationality solely in the context of
criminal liability.” Her suffering remains inaudible, but her voice can only be heard by the police as
her voice can only be
challenging the law, resisting arrest, disrespecting their authority;
heard as a legitimizing force for their violence . As they drag her out of the car, she screams
out in pain before the door is shut and her voice becomes muffled. They carried Anna Brown to the cell and laid her body on the ground as if she
were already a corpse; they even refused her the dignity of lying on the bed. As they stepped around her body and closed the cell door, the only
sign she was still alive were her wordless screams.
Her screams pierce through my speakers, haunting my mind
but they seem to have no effect on the prison workers. She was clearly not the first screaming body
they had carried into a cell, for they did not even take time to stop their chatter. There is no
passion, intimacy, or perverse enjoyment, just a multicultural group of men doing their job. Anna’s
death is not the “primal scene” that the beating of Aunt Hester (Frederick Douglass’s Aunt) was.
These two black women’s screams are connected by the paradigm of anti-blackness, yet their
screams terrify for different reasons. The beating of Aunt Hester is a spectacular example of the
“blood-stained gate” of the slave’s subjection. While the circulation of the Anna Brown video has
given me pause, her death is more an example of the “mundane and quotidian” terror that
Hartman focuses on in her text. Brown’s death was a (non)event, concealed from the world by the
walls of the prison cell. Without this video, only those on the inside would have heard her screams.
Anna Brown didn’t simply pass away, she was killed, but who did it? Douglass’s Aunt Hester was beaten by
Captain Anthony, a man who wanted her and was jealous of her relationship to another slave. Anna Brown was murdered by a
disparate set of (non)events where her body shuttled between a hospital and a prison, doctors and
nurses, police officers and prison officials. There is no one person who killed her; instead, a
structure of violence murdered her. No intimacy, just cold efficiency. Her scream was less of a
sorrow song than the sharp pitch of nu-bluez: an impossible scream to be heard from the depths of
incarceration and incapacity. Anna Brown’s death was neither an event nor a spectacle. An event
signifies presence, but Anna’s death is an ethereal absence, a spirit’s wail fading away like one’s
warm breath on a cold day. If the beating of Aunt Hester demands that one meditate on the spectacle of black suffering, Anna
Brown’s screams call for us to think of the aurality of agony, the acoustics of suffering. What are
the aural mechanisms that made it impossible for civil society to hear Anna Brown’s pain? What
are the technologies that remix the tonalities of black people into criminalized speech? These thoughts on
the acoustics of suffering are not to displace the visual for the aural, but instead to theorize how they form and invigorate each other. Put another
way, anti-blackness is a structure where (black) skin speaks for itself and the body it encompasses, even when the black’s subjecthood is muted.
In the darkness of space, one cannot hear you scream. Focusing on acoustics can offer a different
sharpening of the cutting edge, a modality that allows us to tune into the unimaginable frequency of
black thought. If it is impossible to hear the black (aurality) and for the black to speak on its own
terms (orality), then to be heard in this world, we would have to break the laws of physics–
ontologically speaking. This is another way of saying that the acoustics of suffering forces us to
think of the impossibilities of harmony and, perhaps, the terrifying beauty of cacophony. In this
way, the enlightenment of the ignorant shadows would not be the key to the future, but instead the
reverberation of our revolutionary racket that clangs through civil society. From the black hole of
our subjectivity and into the screeching noise of this parasitic world, we scream that our lives, black
life, matters until the final, paradigmatic quiet comes.

The 1AC is premised upon a ruse of analogy – their refusal of ableism is merely the
upending of a conflict within civil society which mystifies the fundamental
antagonism which structures America and the World: the absolute non-being of
blackness – anti-blackness provides ontological and conceptual coherence to any
notion of a “human” subject which means the 1AC’s affirmation of cripping of
surveillance crowds out the slave’s grammar of suffering
Kim 13 (Hyo Kim, assistant professor of English at Medgar Evers College, City University of New York, PhD from Stony Brook
University, Fall 2013, ““The Ruse of Analogy”: Blackness in Asian American and Disability Studies,” Penumbra: An Interdisciplinary Journal
of Critical and Creative Inquiry Volume 1) gz

The problematic model of civil society as constituent of undifferentiated humans aside (a point to which I will return later), Davis’s
critique of identity works to consolidate the idea of liberal political subject that is ideally
unmarked by embodied difference such as race and gender. According to Chris Bell, it is
precisely such flattening of racial difference in Disability studies that helps

to authorize uncritical analogies such as: “Being disabled is just like

being black … ” (277). Bell’s critique of Disability studies is far-reaching in its consequences not
simply because it points to the structural and ontological differences between
being “disabled” and being Black in the U.S., but because it undercuts the
assumptive logic that universalizes the concept of the “human”
itself , without which civil society would be bereft of it moral/ethical coherence. For what Bell takes
issue with is the tendency in Disability studies to displace race as a social factor that
impinges in the materialization of identities in contemporary United States. Put otherwise, an effect
made evident in and through Davis’s call for a dismondernist/cosmopolitan ethics is the
displacement, if not making light, of cultural (historical)
particularity . Indeed, recognizing that race and by extension gender are mere fictions of social construction does not, for example,
contradict Manalansan’s insight that: “While race is established through numerous institutional, cultural, quotidian practices, in all of these arenas
the racialized subject’s body filters, absorbs, and deflects various interpolating forces and practices” (182). In this, the corporeality of the body
(and not simply its metaphorical substitute) is imbricated in production of racialized meanings. Crucial here is how Bell’s and Manalansan’s
attempts to illumine embodied realities do not necessarily result in the production of reified, transcendent forms of knowledge. Yet by

attending to how blackness structurally differentiates the disabled body ,

Bell’s critique does localize the disabled body vis-à-vis the social, frustrating, no matter how well
intended, Davis’s search for the universal or more precisely, a point of analogy .
Upon closer observation, Davis’s desire for the cosmopolitan body—the universally “wounded”

body that resists localization enables the return of what he fears —the able-
bodied white male subject as the proxy for normalcy. Incidentally, in a slightly different but
nevertheless relevant context, Julia Kristeva’s ethico-political orientation toward the “stranger” has come under similar criticism. As Sara Ahmed
queries, does not the model of “call[ing] ourselves (i.e. all human subjects) strangers … perform the gesture of killing the strangers it
simultaneously creates, by rendering them universal: [as] a new community of the ‘we’ is implicitly
created. If we are all strangers (to ourselves), then nobody is” (73).5 Or in Bell’s more scathing critique: “Far from excluding
treats people of color as if they were
people of color, White Disability Studies
white people , as if there are no critical exigencies involved in being people of color
that might necessitate these individuals understanding and negotiating disability in a different way
from their white counterparts” (282). Though Bell does not go on to explore what specific “critical exigencies” differentiate how
“people of color” embody disability or suffering, it is clear from his critique that he intuits a certain “grammar” to suffering

which Davis’s “Dismodernism” cannot accommodate . For instance, what at first glance seems
merely naïve―that is the observation that in the U.S. “[b]eing disabled is just like being
black”―actually does index how disability cannot be synonymous with
Whiteness . For what is suggested through the forced parity between the construction of blackness and disability is that the disabled
body or mind cannot properly embody Whiteness in toto. And that is what Anna Stubblefield demonstrates in “‘Beyond the Pale’: Tainted
Whiteness, Cognitive Disability and Eugenic Sterilization,” which iterates how disabled white persons have historically been categorized as
embodying a tainted form of whiteness. She convincingly argues that beginning from the 1800s in the U.S. those who were considered
feebleminded, a form of cognitive disability, lost the full privileges attendant with white citizenship. As she writes, “ … to grasp
feeblemindedness fully as a signifier of tainted whiteness, it is important to understand that the state-sponsored, involuntary sterilization of
tainted whites meant that they had, in effect, lost the full protection that whiteness conferred in a white supremacist society” (178; emphasis
added). Not only did the so-called feebleminded whites come to embody a compromised form of whiteness but also the “ … white men [and
women] labeled as criminal, sexually deviate, homosexual, … or insane … ” (Stubblefield 178). What Stubblefield emphasizes is that disability
as a social construct cannot easily be detached from its imbricated positioning within a network of material forces that include not only race but
sexuality, class, and gender. Her study foregrounds the need for Disability studies to attend to racialization as not a tangential focus but central to
its overall theoretical and political project. Interestingly Stubblefield’s
study of how disability can dispossess whites of
their “full personhood” under U.S. law seemingly lends support to what “Dismodernism”
authorizes, which is the idea that the suffering of blacks can be made equivalent to not only
what disabled whites come to embody but also to all those other Others represented under the
category of “people of color.” In short, disability has the potential to democratize civil society by
recalling how all citizens are common in their humanity―that is, equally exposed to
disability . Yet, if we read between the lines of Stubblefield’s summary of how “feebleminded
whites” can become “tainted,” the singularity of “blackness’s grammar of
suffering” emerges. For what distinguishes “blackness grammar of suffering” is how it does
not operate according to the assumptive logic of capability . In other words, to
approach “blackness’s grammar of suffering,” Wilderson insists that one must be able to imagine
“anethicality … so terrifying that, as a space to be inhabited and terror to
be embraced ” (41), it resists language . It is a “grammar of suffering” based not
upon the logic of a “lost” capacity but that of a deontologized property ,
the Slave that is not “exploited and alienated” but rather “ accumulated and fungible .”
The effect of this singular grammar on Asian American and Disability studies is significant, but the impact
of Wilderson’s critique on the “scholarly and aesthetic production” of the “Black theorist” is
radical by comparison. As he writes: This [“blackness’s grammar suffering”] makes the labor of
disavowal in Black scholarly and aesthetic production doubly burdensome, for it is triggered by a
ontological incapacity .
dread of both being ‘discovered,’ and of discovering oneself, as
Thus, through borrowed institutionality ―the feigned capacity to be essentially

exploited and alienated (rather than accumulated and fungible) in the first ontological
instance (in other words, a fantasy to be just like everyone else , which is a
fantasy to be )―the work of Black film theory [and by extension Black studies] operates
through a myriad of compensatory gestures in which the Black theorists assumes

subjective capacity to be universal and thus ‘ finds’ it everywhere . (42) Placed

within the frame of “blackness’s grammar of suffering,” I want to examine the consequences of Davis’s attempt to render disability cosmopolitan.
While the move has the virtual effect of equalizing all bodies around human capacity to
disavowal of how concepts
suffer―such an ethical cum political strategy requires the
such as “human” and “civil society” in the U.S. have structurally depended
on the production of social death , i.e. the Black (and the Red). As it should be obvious by now,
what is therefore unthinkable in Davis’s attempt to make civil society cohere around the
universality of human suffering is the contingent nature of the term human
itself . This in fact is what Bells intuits but cannot name in his influential essay entitled “Introducing White Disability Studies: A Modest
Proposal.” Bell’s hesitation is partly attributable to how pain or suffering is both social (that is communicable, sharable by all humans in equal
measure) and incommunicable within Disability studies. That is, Disability studies’ uneven attention to the
incommunicability of suffering is seemingly capable of accommodating the unrepresentability
that is constituent of “blackness’s grammar of suffering.” As Siebers insists, “[i]ndividuality derived from the
incommunicability of pain easily enforces a myth of hyperindividuality, a sense that each individual is locked in solitary confinement where
suffering is the only object of contemplation. People with disabilities are already too politically isolated for this myth to be attractive” (176). Yet
in an attempt to intervene in the poststructuralist tendency to idealize “physical pain” as site of either transcendent power or pleasure, Siebers also
adds, “… [p]hysical pain is [at once] highly individualistic, unpredictable, and raw as reality. Pain is not a resource of political change. It is not a
well of delight for the individual” (178). What is directly pertinent to the present essay is how the
universal figure of the
“individual”- human marks the critical horizon of Disability theory. Or, to put a finer point to it via Widerson’s
reading of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Mask, “… the Negro … ‘is comparison,’ nothing more and certainly nothing less, for what is less
than comparison? … [And as such] ‘No one knows yet who [the Negro] is, but he knows that fear will fill the world when the world finds out’”
(42). We find in the most sophisticated Asian Americanist deployment of poststructuralist strategies of reading―such as the one advanced in the
influential work by Kandice Chuh―a similar call to abandon politics based on social identity.6 While I am in agreement with both Davis’s and
Chuh’s overarching critique of uniform identity, I
find troubling their wholesale critique of all identity formation
as a priori essentialist. For such framing of social identity as necessarily restrictive can only lead to
the return of the repressed in our present era of colorblindness ―the
ideal of abstract citizenship . As she writes: “‘Asian American’ … connotes the violence, exclusion, dislocation, and
disenfranchisement that has attended the codification of certain bodies as variously, Oriental, yellow, sometimes brown, inscrutable, devious,
always alien. It speaks to the active denial of personhood to the individuals inhabiting those bodies” (Chuh 27). In this, Chuh―along with
Davis and Siebers―unwittingly announces the displacement and the erasure of
“blackness’s grammar of suffering ,” as their strategies of reading the presence or
absence of justice within U.S. civil society is predicated upon exploitation and
alienation of the a priori human subject . Nevertheless, by embodying the self―Disability studies
helps to shift (though only slightly) critical theory toward an alternative ethicality that does not programmatically endorse the idea and ideals of
abstract citizenship. For contrary to the liberal model of the political subject that achieves “hyperindividuality” through social and material
detachment, the alternative model of subjectivity that is afforded through the disabled body is a self that is always already in the process of
negotiating complex relations to the materiality of the social. Thus, the embodied model of subjectivity helps to re-imagine “personhood” as
relation itself, leading not to the reification or essentialization of self, this relational model of subjectivity demands that any identity whatsoever
be thought not as autonomous substance but rather as a site, comprising of unfinished, mobile, heterogeneously constituted relations across an
embodied hermeneutic horizon. It bears mentioning here that it is this interconnected and radically open vision of “personhood” as relation that is
foreclosed in the liberal model of abstract citizenship. For in the liberal model of the self, the ideal is to attain singular indeterminacy through the
negation of such social relations, without which no self can hope to attain intelligibility. As Alcoff’s important work suggests: Social identities …
are more properly understood as sites from which we perceive, act, and engage with others. These sites are not simply locations or positions, but
also hermeneutic horizons comprised of experiences, basic beliefs, and communal values […] . We are not boxed in by them, constrained,
restricted, or held captive―unless … it makes sense to say that we are boxed in by the fact that we have bodies . … (287) Interestingly it is by
the radical singularity of the Black’s
attending to how the self is embodied and embedded in social reality that clarifies
structural non-relationality, which in turn helps to bring into focus not only what Wilderson calls the
“structural antagonisms” that contour U.S. civil society but also unexplored ethico-
political limits and possibilities of sub-fields such as Disability and Asian American
studies. For according to Wilderson’s Red, White & Black what gives internal coherence to such terms
as “human” and “civil society” in the U.S. is the disavowal of the structural (historical) relation
blacks have with what is essentially non-human , a form of social death known as
slavery . As he summarizes: During the emergence of new ontological relations in the
modern world, from the late Middle Ages through the 1500s, many different kinds of people experienced slavery.
… But Blackness , refers to an individual who is by definition always
African, or more precisely
already void of relationality . Thus modernity marks the emergence of a new
ontology because it is an era in which an entire race appears , people who, a priori,
that is prior to the contingency of the ‘transgressive act’ (such as losing a war or being convicted of
a crime), stand as socially dead in relation to the rest of the world . (17-8)
Wilderson’s intervention therefore hinges on isolating and exposing this dual operation

by which civil society makes sense of itself to itself―the simultaneous disavowal of and
parasitic dependency on the Black . In other words, the desire to make blackness
an analogue of disability amounts to denying the structural relevancy of
slavery to the formation of U.S. civil society. Wilderson’s reading of Fanon helps to articulate
the radical singularity of “blackness’s grammar of suffering,” as it emphasizes how “… the
gratuitous violence of the Black’s first ontological instance, the Middle Passage, ‘wiped
out [his or her] metaphysics … his [or her] customs and sources on
which they are based .’ Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews. Africans
went into the ships and came out as Blacks ” (38). What Wilderson calls the
“blackness’s grammar of suffering,” consequently, has no analogue in either the

assumptive figure of the “individual” that subtends Disability

studies and those other Others within U.S. civil society that have become included within the
frame known as “people of color.” In this, “blackness’s grammar of suffering” gestures toward what is
unnamable , a form of suffering that is in excess of any ethical language which
is based upon the universal figure of the human. This is how Wilderson radically undermines
the desire to transpose “blackness’s grammar of suffering” into the
ethico-political language upon which civil society’s depends to make suffering (physical,
psychic or otherwise) intelligible . As he writes: The ruse of analogy erroneously
locates Blacks in the world ―a place where they have not been since
the dawn of Blackness . This attempt to position the Black in the world by way of analogy
is not only a mystification , and often erasure , of Blackness’s grammar of suffering
(accumulation and fungibility or the status of being non-Human) but simultaneously also a
provision for civil society , promising an enabling modality for Human
ethical dilemmas . It is a mystification and an erasure because … their grammars
of suffering are irreconcilable . (37) Such is the logic that animates Bell’s critique of Disability studies but it
does not, cannot obtain the force of Wilderson’s intervention because Bell cannot or dare not disarticulate the Black from the world. Nevertheless

both Wilderson and Bell help foreground the important fact that even suffering obtains a “grammar,”
that is, has a way of indexing ―whether positively in the form of identification or negatively
through dis- or even through non-identification, the presence or absence of a world .
What Bell’s and especially Wilderson’s critique bring into sharp relief is that anti-blackness is part and parcel of

the episteme that gives internal coherence to U.S. civil society . To approach
“blackness’s grammar suffering” is therefore to contemplate , albeit always indirectly, not
the paradigm of disability which is always already predicated on
agency but a radical non-capacity. Wilderson’s illumination of how the “antagonism”
that obtains around blackness is structural to the formation of U.S. civil society has the effect of
clarifying the positioning of sub-fields such as Disability and Asian
American studies , especially when their protocols aim toward establishing some form of
political justice based upon “exploitation and alienation,” which is at
odds with “blackness’s grammar of suffering .” As previously mentioned, Wilderson
draws a sharp distinction between “conflict” and “antagonism.” And this is
key, as it is only when anti-blackness is positioned as an “antagonism” that the residual and
structural effects of the Slave (the non-human) can be allowed to erupt into the living
present of U.S. civil society . As such, though by comparison far more optimistic than Wilderson’s study,
Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010) gives powerful evidence to Wilderson’s theory of the “structural antagonisms” that contour U.S. civil
society. This is how a critical theory based upon advancing a colorblind world or an ethicality based upon
the universal human effectively silences the suffering of the Black . As Alexander argues: Far
from being a worthy goal … colorblindness has proved catastrophic for African Americans. It is not an

overstatement to say that the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in

the United States would not have been possible in the post-civil rights era if the nation
had not fallen under the spell of a callous colorblindness . … Saying that one does not care
about race is offered as an exculpatory virtue, when in fact it can be a form of cruelty . … Our
blindness also prevents us from seeing the racial and structural divisions that persist in society: the segregated, unequal schools, the segregated,
jobless ghettos, and the segregated public discourse―a public conversation that excludes the current pariah of caste [the incarcerated black males
in U.S. civil society]. (228) In this, Wilderson’s Red, White, & Black and Alexander’s The New Jim Crow bring into sharp focus why the

cannot do without the ruse of

framing of blackness within U.S. civil society
analogy which effectively puts under erasure a “… violence which turns a body
into flesh , ripped apart literally and imaginatively, destroy[ing] the
possibility of ontology because it positions the Black in an infinite and
indeterminately horrifying and open vulnerability , an object made
available (which is to say fungible ) for any subject ” (Wilderson, 38). Put otherwise, this
“violence” which is in excess of that ideologically saturated term called
Humanity demands the infinitely difficult yet necessary encountering with what
gives U.S. civil society the simulacrum of ethical and political
decency
It has become impossible imagine a world without Black suffering, a world that
doesn’t need Black suffering. Transversing such a fantasy through a in genuine line
of flight would only sustain black suffering. From Black bodies have died all along
the way, every dead body an indictment of the analyst, an indictment which asks:
How many more have die before we give up?
Wilderson 11 (Frank, PhD, Associate Professor, African American Studies Dept., UC Irvine, “The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection
in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents”, InTensions, Vol 5, Acc: 02/03/12, )
Ritual murders which purge White aggressivity subtend Bukhari’s impeded mourning and my
dissembling scholarship, despite the fact that the filial cleansing and affilial stability proffered by
the Black imago’s intrusion as a phobic object does not cut both ways. The Black psyche
emerges within a context of force, or structural violence, which is not analogous to the
emergence of White or non-Black psyches. The upshot of this emergence is that the Black
psyche is in a perpetual war with itself because it is usurped by a White gaze that hates the Black
imago and wants to destroy it. The Black self is a divided self or, better, it is a juxtaposition of
hatred projected toward a Black imago and love for a White ideal: hence the state of war
(Marriott, “Fanon’s War”). This state of being at war forecloses upon the possession of elements
constitutive of psychic integration: bearing witness (to suffering), atonement, naming and
recognition, representation. As such, one cannot represent oneself, even to oneself as a bona fide
political subject, as a subject of redress. Black political ontology is foreclosed in the unconscious
just as it is foreclosed in the court. “[I]t may not be too fanciful to suggest,” Marriott writes, “that
the black ego, far from being too immature or weak to integrate, is an absence haunted by its and
others’ negativity. In this respect the memory of loss is its only possible communication” (425).
It is important to note that loss is an effect of temporality; it implies a syntagmatic chain that
absence cannot apprehend. Marriott’s psychoanalytic inquiries work through the word “loss” in
order to demonstrate the paucity of its explanatory power. Again, loss indicates a prior plenitude,
absence does not. [29] Marriott explains how we all work together, how we all bond over the
Black imago as phobic object, that we might form a psychic community even though we cannot
form political community. He does so by recalling that exemplary moment in Black Skin, White
Masks, when Fanon sees himself through the eyes of a White boy who cries in terror, “Look a
Negro!” Symbolically, Fanon knows that any black man could have triggered the child’s
fantasy of being devoured that attaches itself to a fear of blackness, for this fear signifies the
“racial epidermal schema” of Western culture—the unconscious fear of being literally consumed
by the black other. Neither the boy nor Fanon seems able to avoid this schema, moreover, for
culture determines and maintains the imago associated with blackness; cultural fantasy allows
Fanon and the boy to form a bond through racial antagonism (“Bonding over Phobia” 420). [30]
This phobia is comprised of affective responses, sensory reactions or presubjective constellations
of intensities, as well as representational responses, such as the threatening imago of a fecal body
which portends contamination. And this affective/representational performance is underwritten
by paradigmatic violence; which is to say the fantasy secures what Marriott calls “its objective
value” because it lives within violence too pervasive to describe.xvi “The picture of the black
psyche that emerges from” this intrusion “is one that is always late, never on time, violently
presented and fractured by these moments of specular intrusion” (“Bonding over Phobia” 420).
The overwhelming psychic alienation that emerges from the literal fear and trembling of the
White boy when Fanon appears, accompanied by “the foul language that despoils…is traumatic
for” the Black psyche. One comes to learn that when one appears, one brings with one the threat
of cannibalism. “What a thing,” writes Fanon, “to have eaten one’s father!” (Black Skin, White
Masks)And the Black psyche retains the memory of that eternal White “fear of being eaten …
[and] turned into shit by an organic communion with the black body … [This] is one of the most
depressing and melancholic fantasies ensuing from the psychodynamics of intrusion” (“Bonding
over Phobia” 421). [31] Again, though this is a bond between Blacks and Whites, it is produced
by a violent intrusion that does not cut both ways. Whereas the phobic bond is an injunction
against Black psychic integration and Black filial and affilial relations, it is the life blood of
White psychic integration and filial (which is to say domestic) and affilial (or institutional)
relations. [32] To add to this horror, when we scale up from the cartography of the mind to the
terrain of armed struggle and the political trials, we may be faced with a situation in which the
eradication of the generative mechanism of Black suffering is something that is not in anyone’s
interest. Eradication of the generative mechanisms of Black suffering explored in this article, is
not in the interest of the court, as Justice Taney demonstrates as his ruling mobilizes the fantasy
of immigration to situate the Native American within political community and to insure the
African’s standing as a genealogical isolate. Taney’s majority decision suggests that juridical and
political standing, like subjectivity itself, are not constituted by positive attributes but by their
capacity to sidestep niggerization. Nor is the eradication of the generative mechanisms of Black
suffering in the interests of the White political prisoners such a David Gilbert and Judith Clark,
Kuwasi Balagoon’s codefendants—their ideological opposition to the court, capitalism, and
imperialism notwithstanding, because such ideological oppositions mark conflicts within the
world rather than an antagonism to the world. Eradication of the generative mechanisms of Black
suffering would mean the end of the world and they would find themselves peering into an abyss
(or incomprehensible transition) between epistemes; between, that is, the body of ideas that
determine that knowledge that is intellectually certain at any particular time. In other words, they
would find themselves suspended between worlds. This trajectory is too iconoclastic for working
class, post-colonial, and/or radical feminist conceptual frameworks. The Human need to be
liberated in the world is not the same as the Black need to be liberated from the world; which is
why even their most radical cognitive maps draw borders between the living and the dead.
Finally, if we push Marriott’s findings to the wall, it becomes clear that eradication of the
generative mechanisms of Black suffering is also not in the interests of Black revolutionaries.
For how can we disimbricate Black juridical and political desire from the Black psyche’s desire
to destroy the Black imago, a desire which constitutes the psyche? In short, bonding with Whites
and non-Blacks over phobic reactions to the Black imago provides the Black psyche with the
only semblance of psychic integration it is likely to have: the need to destroy a Black imago and
love a White ideal. “In these circumstances, having a ‘white’ unconscious may be the only way
to connect with—or even contain—the overwhelming and irreparable sense of loss. The
intruding fantasy offers the medium to connect with the lost internal object, the ego, but there is
also no ‘outside’ to this ‘real fantasy’ and the effects of intrusion are irreparable” (“Bonding over
Phobia” 426). This raises the question, who is the speaking subject of Black insurgent testimony?
Who bears witness when the Black insurgent takes the stand? Black political horizons are
singularly constrained, because the process through which the Black unconscious emerges and
through which Black people form psychic community with Humans is the very process which
bars Black people from political community.
The Aff’s claim to the mantle of anti-Racism within the zero-sum setting of a debate
round literally supplants people of color in the name of fighting Racism – Don’t
reward them for "cyber activism" when the real damage done is to shut down more
meaningful change and coddle the very beneficiaries of a way of life that denies the
Black lived experience
Osayande ’10 ~Ewuare, political activist, poet, and author of several books including Misogyny and the Emcee: Sex, Race and Hip
Hop; co-founder and director of POWER (People Organized Working to Eradicate Racism), a liberatory learning initiative that educates and
empowers persons and organizations interested in and involved in anti-racist social justice movements, Dec 22,
http://www.peopleofcolororganize.com/analysis/word-wise-unpacking-white-privilege-tim-wise/-
http://www.peopleofcolororganize.com/analysis/word-wise-unpacking-white-privilege-tim-wise/~~
One way that whites can be accountable is to stop being enablers to white supremacy by
supplanting the voice of people of color with their own. We do not need white people speaking for
people of color. Such talk is crass paternalism. My words do not need to be placed through a white filter in
order for them to be understandable. Besides, there are some things that get lost in “translation.” If
there is work for whites to do on this issue, then let it be work that addresses this deaf ear of white
denial. This is a question of power. Whites that do not listen to people of color do not have a
“hearing problem.” They fail to hear and to listen because they can. Those that promote the claim
that white people speaking for people of color is a positive only coddle such whites in the comfort of
their conformity to a way of life that denies, not just the voices of people of color, but our lives as
well. All of the aforementioned privileges taken together provide Wise a pretty formidable platform from which to attract the support of those
of us who seek an end to racism. By supporting him, such persons are made to feel as if they are fighting racism. In
this vein, he is able to make use of such support from those who will rally to his rescue when he calls on them to defend him with a bevy of “like”
button clicks or a hail of 5-star reviews when he has occasioned a derisive remark made by the usual suspect – an avowed white supremacist.
Really? Has this become the epitome of anti-racist activism? This would be laughable if we weren’t
discussing something as deadly serious as racism. Such “cyber activism” is just another form of
white diversion from engaging in actual activist work.

The aff’s struggle in the debate space rebels in the face of this divine racism,
claiming to “one day get there” while ignoring the demand for evidence of the
efficacy of this struggle. The logic of struggle perpetuates black suffering by placing
relief in an unattainable future, a future that offers nothing more than an
exploitative reproduction of its own means of existence.
Warren 15 (Calvin, Assistant Professor of American Studies at George Washington University “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope”
Ill-Will Editions, June 2015 pg. 19-21) NIJ

this atheism entails

The atheism that Carter proffers, however, is entangled in the metaphysical bind that sustains the very violence his atheism is designed to dismantle. For him,

“social, political, and intellectual struggle... struggle in solidarity with others, the struggle to be for
and with others, the struggle of the multitude, the struggle that is blackness [as] the new ecclesiology ” (4) The
term “struggle” here presents political metaphysics as a solution to the problem of anti-blackness—
through labor, travail, and commitment one embraces progress and linearity as social goods. With this
metaphysics, according to Carter, we can “struggle to get rid of these ‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws that are in place in many states besides Florida, struggle against state legislatures (such as North
Carolina’s) that are enacting draconian laws of various sorts, struggle in the name of the protection of women’s agency about their own bodies—in short, struggle to imagine a new politics of

This struggle contains the promise of overcoming anti-blackness to usher in a “not-yet-

belonging.” (4)

social-order.” Again, the trick of time is deployed to protect “struggle” from the rigorous historical
analysis that would demand evidence of its efficacy. The “not-yet-social-order,” situated in an
irreproachable future (a political prolepsis), can only promise this overcoming against a history and historicity
of brutal anti-black social organization. Carter is looking for a political theology—although we’ve always had one under the guise of democratic
liberalism—that will provide conditions of life by mobilizing the discourses of hope and future temporality. The problem that this theology encircles, and evades, is the failure of “social justice”
and “liberation theology” to dismantle the structure of anti-black violence; this brings us full circle to the problem that Dr. William R. Jones brilliantly articulated. Are we hoping for a new

strategy, something completely novel and unique, that will resolve all the problems of the Political once and for all? If the Political itself is the “temple” of
the idolatrous god—the sphere within which it is worshipped and preserved—can we discard the idol and purify the temple? Does
this theology offer a political philosophy of purification that will sustain the “progress” that struggle is purported to achieve? In short, how does one translate the spiritual principle of hope into a
political program—a political theology? The problem of translation haunts this theology and the looking-forward stance of the political theologian cannot avoid the rupture between the spiritual

Can we reject this racist god and, at the same time, support the political structure that affirms this
and the Political.

idol? Can we be “partial” atheists? This becomes a problem for Carter when he suggests that we abandon this idol, but fails to critique the structure of political
existence, which sustains the power of this idol.” Atheism as imagined here would entail rejecting the racist- white-god, or a racist political theology, and replacing it with a just God, or an
equitable political theology. Will replacing the idol with a more just God transform the political into a life- affirming structure for blackness? Unless we advocate for a theocracy, which is not
what I believe Carter would propose, we need an answer to this question of translation. The answer to this question is glaringly absent in the text, but I read this absence as an attempt to avoid the
nihilistic conclusion that his argument would naturally reach. We might even suggest that one must assume a nihilistic disposition toward the Political if justice, redress, and righteousness are the

aims.The problem with atheism, then, is that it relies on the Political as the sphere of redemption and hope,
when the Political is part of the idolatrous structure that it seeks to dismantle. In this sense. Dr. William R. Jones
becomes an aporia for Dr. Kameron Carter’s text, if we read Jones as suggesting that black theology offers no cogent

political philosophy, or political program, that would successfully rid the Political of its anti-black
foundation. The Political and anti-blackness are inseparable and mutually constitutive. The utopian
vision of a “not-yet-social order” that purges anti-blackness from its core provides a promise
without relief—its only answer to the immediacy of black suffering is to keep struggling. The logic
of struggle, then, perpetuates black suffering by placing relief in an unattainable future, a future that
offers nothing more than an exploitative reproduction of its own means of existence. Struggle,
action, work, and labor are caught in a political metaphysics that depends on black- death.

But who takes care of us while we are dying? From taking care of white
children to healing black families Black queer women occupy the position of
the unthought and the placeholder for the signifier Nurse for their notions of
care
Hartman 16 Saidiya Hartman is the author of Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
2007) and Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford, 1997). She has published several
articles on slavery, including “Venus in Two Acts” and “The Time of Slavery.” She is completing a book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful
Experiments, which examines the sexual upheaval and radical transformation of everyday life that took place in the slums in the early decades of
the 20th century. Souls A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society ISSN: 1099-9949 (Print) 1548-3843 (Online) Journal
homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/usou20 The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors

The systematic violence needed to conscript black women’s domestic labor after slavery
required locking them out of all other sectors of the labor market, a condition William Patterson described
as economic genocide. Race riots, the enclosure of the ghetto, the vertical order of human life, and the forms of value and debt
promulgated through emergent forms of racism, what Sarah Haley terms “Jim Crow modernity,” made it impossible for black women to escape
the white household. As domestic workers, black women were conscripted to a role that required them to care for and
replenish the needs of the white household, and tend to the daily activities necessary for its maintenance. They were forced to
perform the affective and communicative labor necessary for the sustenance of
white[Bp1] families at the expense of their own; as surrogates, they were required to
mother children who held their children in contempt; to cook, clean, and comfort white
men enabling them to go out into the world as productive laborers; and submit to intimate
relations with husbands and sons and brothers or be raped by them—you cannot choose
what you cannot refuse. In this labor of service to the white household, the domestic worker struggled to enable the survival of her
own. Her lover, her spouse, and her kin depend on this labor for their subsistence, as does
her community. As a consequence, she comes to enjoy a position that is revered and reviled,
essential to the endurance of black social life and, at the same time, blamed for its
destruction. The care extracted from her to tend the white household is taken at the cost of
her own. She is the best nanny and the worst mother. Yet this labor remains marginal or neglected in the
narratives of black insurgency, resistance, and refusal. Where does theimpossible domestic fit into the general
strike? 12 What is the text of her insurgency and the genre of her refusal? What visions of
the future world encourage her to run, or propel her flight? Or is she, as Spillers
observes, a subject still awaiting her verb? Strategies of endurance and subsistence do not
yield easily to the grand narrative of revolution, nor has a space been cleared for the sex
worker, welfare mother, and domestic laborer in the annals of the black radical tradition. 13
Perhaps understandable, even if unacceptable, when the costs of enduring are so great. Mere survival is an achievement in a context so brutal. If
we intend to do more than make the recalcitrant domestic, the outcast, and insurrectionist
a figure for our revolutionary longing, or impose yet another burden on black female flesh
by making it “a placeholder for freedom,” 14 then we must never lose sight of the material
conditions of her existence or how much she has been required to give for our
survival. [Bp2] Those of us who have been “touched by the mother” need acknowledge that
her ability to provide care, food, and refuge often has placed her in great jeopardy and, above all,
required her to give with no expectation of reciprocity or return. All we have is what she
holds in her outstretched hands.15 There is no getting around this. Yet, her freedom struggle remains
opaque, untranslatable into the lexicon of the political. She provides so much, yet rarely
does she thrive. It seems that her role has been fixed and that her role is as a provider of care, which is
the very mode of her exploitation and indifferent use by the world, a world blind to her
gifts, her intellect, her talents. This brilliant and formidable labor of care, paradoxically, has been produced through violent
structures of slavery, anti-black racism, virulent sexism, and disposability.16 The forms of care, intimacy, and
sustenance exploited by racial capitalism, most importantly, are not reducible to or
exhausted by it. These labors cannot be assimilated to the template or grid of the black
worker, but instead nourish the latent text of the fugitive. They enable those “who were
never meant to survive” to sometimes do just that. This care, which is coerced and freely
given, is the black heart of our social poesis, of making and relation.
But How do Darius and I live? Vote neg as the alternative reject libidinal investment
in anti-blackness and to remember that this fantasy or as you would say Joe, reject
their simulation within the simulacra of debate
Hartman 16
Hartman, Saidiya. "The Dead Book Revisited." History of the Present 6, no. 2 (2016): 208-15. doi:10.5406/historypresent.6.2.0208. Pg. 213
In the wake of the recent onslaught of black death at the hands of the police, the murders of black
men, women and children have been recorded, documented, widely circulated and witnessed by
millions. Yet this ever-growing archive of black death has produced an outcome no different than the
decision made in the case of the two girls: no one would ever be convicted or held responsible for
these murders either. These circumstances have led me to revisit again what happened on the Recovery and what
was possible more generally (care, grief, regard) on board a slave ship. As our present makes all too
apparent, there is no space outside the threat of death in which black mourning can or could take
place. So we make a place, we take space, make the outside while we are still being held captive on
the inside; we hold these deaths in our bodies and in our songs, create a way to celebrate the lives
and memorialize the deaths of those we loved and those we never knew, the deaths of strangers we
claim as kin. These practices did not and do not occur outside the zones of anticipated and
premature death. They do not happen in safe spaces, but in the here and now, where we are, in a
time and a place where all refuge is temporary. We are murdered where we pray; sleeping in bed
with our grandmothers; chilling on the front steps with our friends; playing at the park; in the
company of our children; and with the whole block watching. Our mourning will not wait and
cannot be deferred. By not expounding earlier on this capacity to mourn for one another, or to create sociality through grief or find
companions among the shipped, I did not intend to minimize or deny such possibility. Rather, I sought to underscore the structures of violence
and dispossession that made death not-much noticed, effaced murder in columns of debits and loss, and conscripted our future for the master’s
wealth and security. There
is a great paradox at play here: how is it possible to entertain ideas of care,
love and regard in the confines of the extreme and normative violence of slavery? This question
required me to recalibrate the terms and imagine differently the collectivity that emerged from the
hold, and to follow a line of thought that made it possible to discern the potentialities and capacities
residing among the shipped: the contours of struggle and the shape of thought under extreme
domination; the poetics of a free state engendered by the slave quarters; and the forms of life that
emerge under the sentence of death.18 How does one conceive the possibility, chance and contingency of life as it is structured
by death? What is the imagination and practice of freedom in the belly of the ship or on the plantation? What are the dimensions of refusal that
arise in captivity—no matter how many are murdered, beaten, raped and tortured? The
first girl who died refused to eat,
intent on ending the terror by embracing death. It is unclear if Venus also refused to eat, or if she
pursued another line of flight. Others vowed never to become habituated to this violence, never to
believe that they were the property of white men, always insisting that they were human flesh. How
does one account for the state of extreme domination and the possibilities seized in practice? How does time unfold in the confines of expected
death? And does this negate or destabilize the very idea of the everyday or the ordinary? At the very least, would this suggest that time is lived in
multiple and simultaneous registers that trouble discrete notions of the beginning and end of captivity, the before and after of slavery?19 How
does one comprehend the routine struggle to endcure together with the state of emergency? Is it possible to hold the disaster and the everyday in
the same frame of reference? Is this what is entailed in living in the wake?20 This
task (of fathoming existence in the hold)
is made even more difficult given the character of slavery’s archive, which provides such a meager
picture of the life and thought of the enslaved. How do we apprehend the philosophy of those inside
the circle of slavery, as Frederick Douglass would say, from the outside? Or is the very notion of being outside the hold a kind
of fiction, a myth of progress, the price of admission to the welcome table? If the matrix of death and dispossession constitute the black ordinary,
even if not solely or exclusively, then how are we to think about practice in the hold? I
believe it requires us to rethink the
meaning of abolition, not only as the not-yet, not simply as the event for which we are waiting, but
as the daily practice of refusal and waywardness and care in the space of captivity, enclosure, and
incarceration. How does the song inside the circle go? We are the ones we have been waiting for. What is
impossible to bear is that the hold is the black ordinary and, at the same, it is what we seek to
escape. How can we live? There is no question more enduring and uncertain than this one. The life
of the enslaved, and, more generally, black social life, has never been a matter of facts or crude
plots of when, where and how. What could be of greater critical and philosophical import than the
matter of black life in a context of anticipated death, brutal violence, and enduring dispossession? If
they take you in the morning, they will come for us at night. When they come for you, I will shield
your name.21 We grieve and make life with one another. The space for our love, our care, and our
dreams will have to be taken like everything else.