AT Antiblackness

Generic
 AT Discourse
Violence should be remedied on a material plane.
Naomi Zack 16. professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon. She is author and editor of
a dozen books, including White Privilege and Black Rights: The Injustice of U.S. Police Racial
Profiling and Homicide (2015); The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality after the History of
Philosophy (2011); Ethics for Disaster (2009). Applicative Justice: A Pragmatic Empirical
Approach to Racial Injustice. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated. Pages 125-134.

ACADEMIC INJUSTICE DISCOURSE Just law can coexist with unjust practice and both are parts of
“empirical law” or what Bendey called “the process of government.” Empirical law is constantly
changing and some theorists are optimistic that verbal discourse has the ability to make written law more just, even though the
same unjust practices recur or new ones emerge. These theorists, some of whom are or may aspire to become public
intellectuals, hope that someday public political discourse on behalf of those who are treated
unjustly will have the power to interrupt a cycle of just written law accompanied by continued
unjust practice. That is, the “right” discourse perennially holds the promise of changing the
beliefs, values, and goals of everyone in the public auditorium, so that the same kind of unjust
practices do not perpetually chase the same kinds of just laws .11 This search for “magic words” is
futile for academics who are professionally confined to dry and abstract prose . Our verbiage
does not have the power to move the multitudes who do not read or listen to it anyway. But
even when multitudes are inspired and emotionally stirred by great orators, action that follows
is unlikely to result in lasting change, without the support of powerful interests . After the 1960s,
academics began a robust practice of liberatory discourse about injustice that seems to grow more impassioned and intense each
year. The quest for demographic diversity among students and faculty in higher education has weathered judicial defeat of explicit
affirmative action policies, but only partly for the sake of justice. There are pragmatic prizes if the academy can justify itself by
producing a racially integrated leadership and managerial class for business, politics, and the military. Top leaders throughout
society realize that they need such racial diversity for broad consumption, voter support, and boots on the ground, and the
expression of that need is evident in amicus curiae briefs submitted to the US Supreme Court as it has been torturously dismantling
affirmative action, piece by piece, since Bakke in 1978.12 Academic political discourse has been deeper than polemics and
debate, exactly because of its disciplined intellectual origins in different fields of study (i.e., discipline imposed by distinct
“disciplines”). But it has been swimming upstream against a more rarefied and older academic tradition,
particularly among many philosophers and their gate keepers outside of the profession. Even Hannah Arendt (see chapter 2) spoke
approvingly of the life of the mind as cut off from real political activity that occurred in the realm of “opinion.” In her 1970 interview
with Adelbert Reif, Arendt addressed the phenomenon of college-stu-dent protestors, noting that they had brought social change
through optimistic belief in their ability to make a better world, while at the same time discovering joy in civic participation. Arendt
credited such protests with the success of the civil rights movement and progress toward ending the Vietnam War.13 As discussed in
chapter 4, it is doubtful that Arendt was correct that student protests caused the success of the civil rights movement. A historical
analysis of the end to the Vietnam War is beyond the present scope, but what we already know about empirical Bentleyan analyses
would warrant skepticism about Arendt’s causal thesis there as well. In the same interview, Arendt warned that demonstrations by
student activists could be self-defeating in democratic Euro-American contexts, because in attacking their universities, they were
attacking the very entities that made their protests possible, American universities, especially large state schools that were the sites
of the protests Arendt had in mind, have perforce developed very different financial structures since 1970. These schools have
become increasingly dependent on private corporate and philanthropic funding, with state government funds now a much reduced
part of their budget. While this structural change is not generally viewed as an incursion on academic freedom, it has been
coincident with a very flat era of student protest and activism. Still, Arendt's notion of the "life of the mind” remains useful if we
consider that the progressive/change-seeking output of professional academics since 1970 has been professionally accepted in the
institutions that employ its participants. Also, much of today’s liberatory academic discourse can be viewed as the legacy of earlier
student protest, furthering a tradition that may have been founded when some of the 1960s student radicals became professors.
This indicates that the connection between academic radicals and the hands that feed them is not as simple as Arendt thought. In
the United States, everything now points to both the existence of real academic freedom and its
real ineffectiveness. Progressive academic writers ply a craft of formal speech that deals with
contemporary injustice through complex theoretical frameworks , with requisite scholarly
apparatuses and without translation into more simple views of the world; there is often also a
lack of translation from one discipline to another or between subdisciplines in the same field. The audience is
other academics and students. Neither specialization nor the limited and partly captive audience should be viewed as
problematic because that is the nature of academic work, given broad social divisions of labor. But there is a problem with
the delusional nature of so much of this work. The delusion consists of a naive view of the
power of academic speech to directly change reality. The rhetorical mode of address used by
academics writing cultural criticism, political philosophy, social philosophy, or what is now called social-political
philosophy (which combines the other subfield approaches), often proceeds as though its authors are making
grand entries in a planetary cabala, where words have the immediate power to become their
intended referents. Those who do not write and speak cabalistically may subscribe to the Trickle-Down Good
Ideas Theory that can be traced from Plato to John Stuart Mill to John Rawls. Subscription to that theory is immediately
self-flattering, but it lacks reliable empirical support.16 Although, after the US civil rights movement, there has
been an uncanny coincidence of race-blind formal racial equality with the hegemony in political philosophy of Rawls’s requirement
that those who plan fundamental social institutions do so in ignorance of their own societal environments. As we saw in chapter 1,
Rawls was quite explicit about this: I assume that the parties do not know the particular circumstances of their own society. That is,
they do not know its economic or political situation, or the level of civilization and culture it has been able to achieve. The persons in
the original position have no information as to which generation they belong.17 Both race-blind racial equality and Rawlsian ideals
are compatible with race-based real inequality. There are, of course, counter-examples, such as Katherine MacKinnon’s work on
sexual harassment in the workplace as expressed in current law and institutional policy.18 Nevertheless even
very good
academic political discourse about justice and injustice cannot be relied upon to attract
implementation or application in real life. This may be because there has not been sufficient
time for the development of training programs for a new profession of “bridgers,” who could
translate good ideas in the academy for those who govern and make policy. An internal problem for
such translators would be to decide where to anchor their bridges in fields—every humanistic field—where experts disagree.
However, the current tradition of progressive academic writing and speech is less than half a century old and if and when such
translators emerge, they will develop their own professional criteria for choosing among contending experts. Public
media, as
a democratic analogue to disagreement within academic discourse, supports the idea that
expressing and airing views in day-to-day practices or special “national conversations” also have immediate practical
results. It is not evident how there could be such results, when opposing views and opinions are
treated with the same respect and have equal access to the same mass auditorium that lacks
rules for evidence or valid argument. As with academic discourse, there is no structured
connection to official decision processes. The only reliable result of participation in such
unbinding referenda is that those who participate are able to express themselves and get attention
that may benefit them in the marketplace of their related endeavors. Public expression also serves to, represent and create
collective atmospheres of belief, attitude, and opinion. These atmospheres are implicitly known by a majority of people in the
culture, even though such knowledge is difficult to validate. Ambiguities cannot be resolved by recourse to public opinion polls,
because understanding the results of those polls requires creative interpretive skills that draw on what is already known about
relevant atmospheres. For example, suppose that more blacks than whites believe that white privilege is real and that O.J. Simpson
was innocent, or that more whites than blacks believe that white American police officers are not, in general, racially biased. Are the
views of whites evidence of racial bias or racial oblivion? Are the views of blacks evidence of racial preference or paranoia?
Moreover, such polls almost always have a large racial overlap of opinion: If 29 percent of blacks compared to 71 percent of whites
believe X, then 71 percent of blacks and 29 percent of whites do not believe X. Does this mean that the percentages of each group
that does not contribute to the discrepancy in belief recorded in the polls are in some degree of agreement? Experiments in social
psychology could be designed to answer such questions and others like them, but it is important to decide beforehand why the data
is important and what it does and does not indicate. For instance, testing the claim that white privilege is a reality of contemporary
life requires some prior definition of what is meant by “white privilege,” which can range from injustice to social courtesies. In a
widely discussed 2013 experiment conducted in Queensland, Australia, economists Redzo Mujcic and Paul Frijters found that the
majority of free bus rides, based on conductor generosity, were dispensed to whites, with blacks least likely to receive this courtesy,
compared to all other racial groups among commuters. Journalist Britni Danielle, writing for a general audience on Yahoo News,
touted this study as evidence that “white privilege is real,” without distinguishing between an amenity such as a free bus ride and
recognition of one’s rights by not being subject to arbitrary stops and frisks by police officers.19 Conservatives reading Mujcic and
Frijter’s study might say that the bus driver may have been acting rationally based on past experience with unruly black passengers.
From a progressive perspective, more specifics would need to be introduced to defend the claim that this study revealed white
privilege, such as controls for the apparent social class and gender of passengers, as well as the preexisting racial climate among bus
commuters in Queensland, as well as the broader racial atmosphere throughout Australia in 2013. The 2015 Academy Awards What
is racial atmosphere and climate? A US example that is also global could help clarify these vague ideas, provided that it is understood
beforehand that in this context, as in most public references to "race," ‘racial” means “pertaining to racism.” From beginning to end,
the 2015 Academy Awards ceremony hit racist notes that slid by unchecked, because it was an occasion of celebration. Neil Patrick
Harris, the host, began with what might have been a critical remark about the lack of racial diversity among audience members and
award winners: “Tonight we honor Hollywood’s best and whitest, sorry, bright est.” For those who were uncomfortable with the lack
of robust racial diversity among audience members and award winners, his remark might have validated their unease. But those
who would have been uncomfortable with more racial diversity may have been heard “best and whitest” as support for their social
values. (The discourse of white privilege as a critique of contemporary anti-nonwhite racism is, as indicated, that kind of double-
edged sword.) Midway through the ceremony, Patricia Arquette called for people of color and members of the lesbian, bisexual, gay,
and transgender (LBGT) community to support legislation for equal pay for women and to commit themselves to supporting women,
thereby overlooking the women who were either or both people of color and members of the LGВТ community. This kind of
oversight may perhaps be excused by Arquette’s ignorance of what academics have been for decades analyzing as
“intersectionality.” But Sean Penn’s remark at the grand finale awarding for Best Picture to Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the Mexican
director of Birdman, was simply, explicitly, racist: "Who gave this son of a bitch a green card?” Inarritu later brushed off the insult by
saying he found it "hilarious,” because “Sean and I have that kind of brutal relationship. I think it was very funny.”20 Inarritu attempt
at a “save” for Penn does not address the impact of Penn’s insult on other Mexicans and Mexican Americans, including those
without green cards who struggle to remain employed in the face of anti-immigrant prejudice and discrimination. (That such a
moment of maximum recognition was brought so low by a racist crack is not unusual in US culture, where the nastiest forms of racist
insult are often let loose on people of color who have succeeded.) As a spectacle watched by almost thirty-four million, the 2015
Oscars, despite ratings lower than recent years, was a global public event.21 Symbolically, it has no peer for the display of beauty,
talent, and artistic creativity. Its subtext inevitably has implications about current American race relations, which influence their
future. The racial implications of the Oscars replays in millions of minds at countless other public celebrations and entertainment
venues, as well as in private interactions (for a year at least). Such spectacles are forms of public discourse and what they represent
or fail to represent about US racial demographics and the attitude of the dominant white group creates or augments a specific racial
climate that in 2015 is part of a more general racial atmosphere of ambiguity and indeterminacy. At the 2015 Academy Awards, for
many critical observers, the issue or subject pertaining to race (insofar as it is understood that subjects of race are subjects of
racism), was recognition.22 The beauty, talent, and artistic creativity of people of color was not fully recognized. Some people of
color did get awards and some audience members were people of color, so recognition, along with diversity, was not completely
absent. But there appeared to be insufficient racial diversity for audience and award winners to be considered racially integrated.
And that appearance was symbolic. However, the symbolic meaning is ambiguous: Were there people of color who were deserving
of awards but did not get them because they were people of color? Is race a factor in who I becomes a member of the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences? In the future, will the racial makeup of award winners become more or less representative of
their proportions in the motion picture industry? If the proportion of people of color in the motion picture industry is not
proportional to their presence in the population at large, why is that? The answers to these questions are undetermined in the
symbolic spectacle of the 2015 Academy Awards. The observer does not know if recognition of the achievements of people of color
in the movie industry will improve, stay the same, or get worse, and she does not know how to find out. The racial (i.e., in regards to
racism) climate of the Academy Awards is cloudy, subject to many different interpretations, some of them conflicting. It is an
epistemologically unstable racial climate, because people of color do not know what the weather is in that climate, as a basis for
prediction, and neither do they know how to find out. The
shared judgment throughout the American
atmosphere of race in the early twenty-first century is that racism is morally bad . This judgment
is a general principle that leaves the nature of racism undefined throughout the atmosphere and most of
the climates and subclimates of race. The overriding shared judgment is a bitter and ineffective refuge for
nonwhites, because it does not protect them from either First Amendment-protected racist expressions or actions that turn out to
be indirectly racist. Energetic self-aware racist whites can try to evade the judgment that they are racist through coded language for
racial difference, and the use of intermediate activities and traits as subjects of direct action. That is, something other than race,
which nonetheless does a good job of picking out members of a specific racial group, can be used instead of the race of that group to
maintain prejudice and legitimize discrimination. The term “racial
climate” has a history of meaning “micro-
aggressions” based on race, small cuts, insults, and slights that can have a cumulative effect of individual harm.24 In
using the term “racial atmosphere,” reference may be made to other issues of harm to people
of color, such as ignorance of black history and contemporary racism or discrimination in career advancement.25
The implication of these meanings is that the micro-aggressions add up to what is perceived as a
general predisposition of white people to treat people of color in unjust ways. But, at this time,
ideas of racial atmosphere and climate also work as metaphors for what is unknown about race relations and
attitudes; they capture the vagueness and unpredictability of racial prejudice and discrimination that occur in a society where
nonwhites remain disadvantaged, even though there is formal equality. This “vague weather” aspect of atmosphere and climate is
an epistemological condition of indecision that may or may not constitute a lasting crisis, although some syndromes of political
injustice should be viewed as crises. A crisis is a period of indecision and uncertainty that requires a resolution before life can go on.
Will blacks and other people of color achieve more equality with whites, or is the United States—and with it the world, because US
racism is exported with business practices, tour-ism, and entertainment products—on the brink of a new era of explicitlу direct
oppression of people of color? Are most white Americans, whose race-neutral economic and social activities have racist effects on
nonwhites, genuinely ignorant of how the system in which they operate works, or are they secretly but knowingly hearts-and-minds
not clear that this indeterminate aspect of present racial atmosphere and climates must be resolved now. We do not know if life can
go on if it is not resolved or what it means for life to go on, or not. We do not even know if the putative crisis can be resolved at this
time, because there is as yet no systematic and sustained, impassioned, liberatory dis- course for our condition of ambiguity, a time
with a black president and police killing with impunity of unarmed black youth, a time of voting rights for everyone but new
restrictions and requirements that disproportionately affect African Americans.26 Except
for what academics write
and say and how important they think their discourse is (among themselves), American discourse of
racial liberation is at a standstill. And insofar as academic discourse is uttered and received in a
closed system, with a semicaptive audience and no reliable means for it to affect the real
world, that standstill remains at the disposal of history, where history is understood to be the unpredictable
result of contingent events. However, if academic oppositional political discourse can be related to a longer historical trend, a
more coherent and optimistic picture might emerge. Cornel West's ideas about the American black prophetic tradition appears to be
a relation to such a trend.
 AT Liberalism
Reject their simplistic understanding that liberalism as an all-pervasive force---
default to particularity
Pappas 17—Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas A& M University [Gregory Fernando,
2017, “The Limitations and Dangers of Decolonial Philosophies: Lessons from Zapatista Luis
Villoro”, Radical Philosophy Review, DOI: 10.5840/radphilrev201732768] AMarb

For Villoro a seriousstudy of ideologies has to be as specific to time and place as possible. The quest
for theoretical barometers of good and evil at a global level and across history should be
subject to critical suspicion and may be futile since the present ideological function of a
concept/category is not always determined by its past use or the original purpose for which it was
created. A distinction created to oppress may play a different function or have different functions
in different social contexts. Modernity and liberalism have not always functioned as ideologies
or to the same degree, nor does it make sense to claim that they always will. Even native
thought (indigenismo) can become an ideology if adopted to keep the oppressed in their place , i.e., if
it perpetuates subordination or oppression.39 If Villoro is correct in the above analysis then decolonial views
are vulnerable to inaccuracy and insensitivity, especially those that wish to trace back to 1492 and across different
countries the ideologies that have supported coloniality—such as modernity, capitalism, or liberalism. Villoro did not ignore how
historically similar colonial structures were throughout the Americas, but for him ideologies and the logicof domination
that operate in one particular place and time may not operate in the exact same way in
another, especially in such a complex and diverse region as the whole of Latin America. If domination and exclusion
via ideologies are local, its diagnosis and remedies must also have to be local. We need to be careful
when we extrapolate from one context to another. Villoro raised a similar criticism of leftist reactions to the problem of
Eurocentrism that relies on simple formulas that state we just need to embrace what is “ours”
and reject what is European. Although Villoro was a critic of Eurocentrism and admirer of indigenous thought, he warned
Zea and the Latin Americanist or indigenismos movement to not react to Eurocentrism and the colonial Manichaean ideas, where
what is “ours” or indigenous is denigrated, with a mere inversion of the Manicheanism. For Villoro the Left
must resist the
temptation to rely on lazy theoretical barometers of good and evil. It must be able to provide a
basis for being critical of Western ideas beyond the fact that they are Western or come from
the oppressor. Not all Western concepts, standards, and categories are oppressive even to the
most non-Western people. To decide between good and evil requires intelligent discriminative
judgment and not easy theoretical formulas according to geopolitical coordinates or cultural origins.
Again, even native thought (indigenismo) can become an ideology. He expected the Left to be sensitive to this, but
what he actually experienced was a Left slipping dangerously toward subtle Manichaean assumptions, i.e., simplistic barometers
about the boundaries between good and evil. This, I am afraid, is
a danger in decolonial thought, one that seems
unavoidable as long as they make central to their project the coloniality axis that relies on
binaries to determine the direction of good and evil. I am aware that it is not easy to oppose a binary without
just inverting it, but we must be careful. To be fair, decolonial thought has been critical of Manichaeism as part of the colonial legacy
and there is no doubt about their good intentions to move in a pluralistic direction where there
is no one central epistemology. However, this center-versus-periphery framework is easily
susceptible to slipping into the simplistic view that all evil comes from what is at the center—
Europe, the West, modernity, liberalism, capitalism. For instance, Mignolo describes the decolonial
project as “delinking” from the West and recovery of the indigenous as if this determines what
is the right path from evil toward the good. 40 This smells like a subtle Manichaeism or at least a
position that does not permit inquiry that is sensitive to historical context. The decolonialists’ criticism of the hegemony of the West
is warranted and important, but for it to continue as a growing project that does not succumb to the excesses (vices) of the Left that
Villoro diagnosed it must be careful to not slip into any of the following assumptions : • Modernity and
liberalism were and are totally bad; they are ideologies for dominating, colonizing, and
oppressing or only have a darker side. • Eurocentrism (interpretation, standpoint) is bad, but philosophy from the periphery is
good. • Western concepts have been used to distort or occlude indigenous (non-Western) ones
therefore all or most Western concepts distort or contaminate, or are tools of domination. • Western epistemologies are
imperialistic; the epistemologies of each of the colonialized regions are good.
 AT Libidinal Economy
Unconscious bias exists, but it is NOT a libidinal economy---psychoanalytic
explanations ignore specific social and cultural value systems and confuses
habit with instinct
Peter Hudis 15, Professor of English and History @ Queens College, 2015, “Frantz Fanon:
Philosopher of the Barricades,” Pg. 35-37
Fanon’s vantage point upon the world is his situated experience. He is trying to understand the inner psychic life of racism, not
provide an account of the structure of human existence as a whole. Racism
is not, of course, an integral part of the
human psyche; it is a Social construct that has a psychic impact. Any effort to comprehend
social distress that accompanies racism by reference to some a priori structure- be it the Oedipal
Complex or the Collective Unconscious- is doomed to failure.
Carl Jung sought to deepen and go beyond Freud's approach by arguing that the subconscious is grounded in a universal layer of the
psyche- which he called "the
collective unconscious:' This refers to inherited patterns of thought that
exist in all human minds, regardless of specific culture or upbringing, and which manifest themselves in
dreams, fairy tales, and myths. Jung referred to these universal patterns as "archetypes:' It may seem, on a superficial reading, that 1
Fanon is drawing from Jung, since he discusses how white people tend to unconsciously assimilate views of blacks that are based on
negative stereotypes. Even the most "progressive" white tends to think of blacks a certain way (such as "emotional;' "physical," or /
"aggressive"), even as they disavow any racist animus on their part. However, Fanon
denies that such collective
delusions are part of a psychic structure; they are not permanent features of the mind. They are
habits acquired from a series of social and cultural impositions. While they constitute a kind a
collective unconscious on the part of many white people, they are not grounded in any universal
"archetype." The unconscious prejudices of whites do not derive from genes or nature, nor do they derive from some form
independent of culture or upbringing. Fanon contends that Jung "confuses habit with instinct."

Fanon objects to Jung's "collective unconscious" for the same reason that he rejects the notion of a black ontology. His
phenomenological approach brackets out ontological claims on both a social and psychological level insofar as the examination of
race and racism is concerned. He writes, "Neither Freud nor Adler nor even the cosmic Jung took the black man into consideration in
the course of his research.”

This does not mean that Fanon rejects their contributions tout court. He does not deny the existence of the unconscious. He only
denies that the inferiority complex of blacks operates on an unconscious level. He
does not reject the Oedipal
Complex. He only denies that it explains (especially in the West Indies) the proclivity of the black
"slave" to mimic the values of the white "master." And as seen from his positive remarks on Lacan's theory of the
mirror stage, he does not reject the idea of psychic structure. He only denies that it can substitute for an historical understanding of
the origin of neuroses .23 Fanon adopts a socio-genetic approach to a study of the psyche because that is what is adequate for the
object of his analysis.

For Fanon, it
is the relationship between the socio-economic and psychological that is of critical
import. He makes it clear, insofar as the subject matter of his study is concerned, that the socio-
economic is first of all responsible for affective disorders: "First, economic. Then, internalization or rather
epidermalization of this inferiority."24 Fanon never misses an opportunity to remind us that racism owes its origin to specific
economic relations of domination- such as slavery, colonialism, and the effort to coopt sections of the working class into serving the
needs of capital. It is hard to mistake the Marxist influence here. It does not follow, however, that what comes first in the order of
time has conceptual or strategic priority. The inferiority complex is originally born from economic subjugation, but it takes on a life
of its own and expresses itself in terms that surpass the economic. Both sides of the problem-the socio-economic and psychological-
must be combatted in tandem: "The black man must wage the struggle on two levels; whereas historically these levels are mutually
dependent, any unilateral liberation is flawed, and the worst mistake would be to believe their mutual dependence
automatic:''5
On these grounds he argues that the problem of racism cannot be solved on a psychological level. It is not an
"individual" problem; it is a social one. But neither can it be solved on a social level that ores the psychological. It is small
wonder that although his name never appears in the book, Fanon was enamored of the work of Wilhelm Reich. This important
Freudian-Marxist would no doubt feel affinity with Fanon's comment, "Genuine disalienation
will have been achieved
only when things, in the most materialist sense, have resumed their rightful place:'27

That drives exist doesn’t imply that they are totalizing---psychological processes
are internally diffuse and contradictory
Adrian Johnston 5, Philosophy Professor @ University of New Mexico, Time Driven:
Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive, Northwestern University Press, Jul 27, 2005, pg.
340-341

In terms of the basic framework of metapsychology, Freud delineates two fundamental types of conflict
disturbing yet organizing mental life—the conflict between drives and reality (as, most notably, the struggle In-tween
the id and civilization) and the conflict between the drives themselves in la the story of Eros against the
Todrstrieb). In both cases, the individual lends lo be portrayed as the overdetermined play-thing of
powerful forces fighting semi-covert wars with each other just out of the ego's sight . However,
Freud fails to discover a third dimension of conflict in relation to the libidinal economy—the conflict within
each and every drive. The theoretical contribution of this project could easily be summarized as the identification of this
distinct type of conflict and the explication of its sobering consequences for an understanding of the psyche. Despite the
apparent bleakness and antiutopianism of an assessment of human nature as being perturbed
by an irreducible inner antagonism, there is. surprisingly, what might be described as a
liberating aspect to this splitting of the drives. Since drives are essentially dysfunctional,
subjects are able to act otherwise than as would be dictated by in-stinctually compelled pursuits
of gratification, satisfaction, and pleasure. In fact, subjects are forced to be free, since, for such beings, the
mandate of nature is forever missing. Severed from a strictly biological master-program and
saddled with a conflict-ridden, heterogeneous jumble of contradictory impulses—impulses
mediated by an inconsistent, unstable web of multiple representations, indicated by Lacan's "barring" of
the Symbolic Other—the parletre has no choice but to bump up against the unnatural void of its
autonomy. The confrontation with this raid is frequently avoided. The true extent of one's
autonomy is, due to its sometimes-frightening implications, just as often relegated to the shadows of the
unconscious as those heteronomous factors secretly shaping conscious thought and behavior.
The contradictions arising from the conflicts internal to the libidi-nal economy mark the precise
places where a freedom transcending mundane materiality has a chance to briefly flash into
effective existence; such points of breakdown in the deterministic nexus of the drives clear the
space for the sudden emergence of something other than the smooth continuation of the
default physical and sociopsychical "run of things." Moreover, if the drives were fully functional—and. hence,
would not prompt a mobilization of a series of defensive distancing mechanisms struggling to transcend this threatening corpo-Real
—humans would be animalistic automatons, namely, creatures of nature. The
pain of a malfunctioning, internally
conflicted libidinal economy is a discomfort signaling a capacity to be an autonomous subject.
This is a pain even more essential to human autonomy than what Kant identifies .is the guilt-inducing
burden of duty and its corresponding pangs of anxious, awe-inspiring respect. Whereas Kant treats the discomfort associated with
duty as a symptom-effect of a transcendental freedom inherent to rational beings, the reverse might (also) be the case: Such
freedom is the symptom-effect of a discomfort inherent to libidinal beings. Completely "curing"
individuals of this discomfort, even if it were possible, would be tantamount to divesting them,
whether they realize it or not, of an essential feature of their dignity as subjects . As Lacan might phrase
it, the split Trieb is the sinthome of subjectivity proper, the source of a suffering that, were it to be entirely
eliminated, would entail the utter dissolution of subjectivity itself. Humanity is free precisely
insofar as its pleasures are far from perfection, insofar as its enjoyment is never absolute.

Behaviors are socially constructed

Brad Evans 15, senior lecturer in international relations at the School of Sociology, Politics &
International Studies (SPAIS), University of Bristol, Intolerable Violence, symploke Volume 23,
Numbers 1-2, p. muse
If the second order of politics in the age of the spectacle is to harvest our attention and seduce us into desiring our own oppression, our task is to [End
Page 220] recognize our own shameful compromises with the spectacle. This requires modes of critical reflection which not only forces us to be alert to
the ways in which our attentions might be harvested by the seduction of violent images, but how we might be co-opted by forms of depraved
aesthetics that debase the political subject. We need to learn to live with violence less through the modality of the sacred than through the critical lens
of the profane. By this we mean that we
need to appreciate our violent histories and how our subjectivities
have been formed through a history of physical bloodshed. This requires more of a willingness
to interrogate violence in a variety of registers (ranging from the historical and concrete
[registers] to the abstract and symbolic) than it does a bending to the neoliberal discourses of fate
and normalization. We need to acknowledge our own seductions with the varied forces of violence. And we need to accept that
intellectualism and the ideas it generates, the imaginaries it creates, and the visions of the world it endorses shares an intimate relationship with
violence both in its complicity with violence and as an act of violence. Having said this, we cannot divorce here the idea of the desiring subject of
violence from wider systemic relations and historical configurations. Too
often, the mediation of suffering through the formal
qualities of tolerability and design are presented as matter of personal pleasure and taste rather than part of

a broader engaged social-political discourse. This all too easily leads to questions of individual
pathology altogether removed from any sense of the conditions that give rise to libidinal
investments. If we are to have a better picture of the debasement of the human subject, we need to address the
relationships between individual desires, representations of human suffering, humiliation and death as part of a
wider economy of pleasure that is collectively indulged. As decadence and despair are normalised in the wider culture—though this is very
different from accomplished in the goal to remove all dissent—people are increasingly exploited for their pleasure quotient while any viable notion of
the social is subordinated to the violence of a deregulated market economy and its production of cultures of cruelty.
 AT Ontology
Afropessimism mistakes “an” anti-black world, characterized by anti-black
instructions that deny Black freedom, for the antiblack world---both pessimism
and optimism fail to take political responsibility for political actions, a
conception of blacks as human reframes “so-called” failures as actions that
alter the possibilities of change
Lewis R. Gordon 17, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies, with affiliations in
Judaic Studies and Caribbean, Latino/a, and Latin American Studies, University of Connecticut at
Storrs, Visiting Europhilosophy Professor at Toulouse University, 12-7-17, “Thoughts on
Afropessimism,” Critical Political Theory (2017), p. 1-8
‘‘Afropessimism’’ came out of ‘‘Afro-pessimism.’’ The elimination of the hyphen is an important development, since it dispels
ambiguity and in effect announces a specific mode of thought. Should the hyphen remain, the ambiguity would be between
pessimistic people of African descent and theoretical pessimism. The conjoined, theoretical term is what proponents often have in
mind in their diagnosis of what I shall call ‘‘the black condition.’’ The
appeal to a black condition is peculiarly
existential. Existentialists reject notions of human ‘‘nature’’ on the grounds that human beings
live in worlds they also construct; they produce their socalled essence. That does not mean,
however, human beings lack anchorage. Everyone has to start from somewhere. Existentialists
call that somewhere a condition or conditions for these reasons, and the world human beings
produce or through which we live is sometimes called ‘‘human reality. ’’ Critics of existentialism
often reject its human formulation. Heidegger, for instance, in his ‘‘Letter on Humanism,’’ lambasted Sartre for
supposedly in effect subordinating Being to a philosophical anthropology with dangers of anthropocentrism (Heidegger, 1971). Yet
a philosophical understanding of culture raises the problem of the conditions through which
philosophical reflections could emerge as meaningful. Although a human activity, a more radical
understanding of culture raises the question of the human being as the producer of an open
reality. If the human being is in the making, then ‘‘human reality’’ is never complet e and is more
the relations in which such thought takes place than a claim about the thought . The etymology of
existence already points to these elements. From the Latin ex sistere, ‘‘to stand out,’’ it also means to appear; against invisibility in
the stream of effects through which the human world appears, much appears through the creative and at times alchemic force of
human thought and deed. Quarrels with and against existential thought are many. In more recent times, they’ve emerged primarily
from Marxists, structuralists, and poststructuralists, even though there were, and continue to be, many existential Marxists and even
existentialists with structuralist and poststructuralist leanings. I
begin with this tale of philosophical abstraction to
contextualize Afropessimism. Its main exemplars, such as Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson III,
emerged from academic literary theory, an area dominated by poststructuralism even in many
cases that avow ‘‘Marxism.’’ Sexton (2010) and Wilderson (2007) divert from a reductive poststructuralism, however,
through examining important existential moves inaugurated, as Daniel McNeil (2011, 2012) observed, by Fanon and his intellectual
heirs. The
critical question that Afropessimism addresses in this fusion is the viability of posed
strategies of Black liberation. (I’m using the capital ‘‘B’’ here to point not only to the racial designation ‘‘black’’ but also to
the nationalist one ‘‘Black.’’ Afropessimists often mean both, since blacks and Blacks have a central and centered role in their
thought.) The
world that produced blacks and in consequence Blacks is, for Afropessimists, a
crushing, historical one whose Manichaean divide is sustained contraries best kept segregated.
Worse, any effort of mediation leads to confirmed black subordination . Overcoming this requires
purging the world of antiblackness. Where cleansing the world is unachievable, an alternative is
to disarm the force of antiblack racism. Where whites lack power over blacks, they lose
relevance – at least politically and at levels of cultural and racial capital or hegemony . Wilderson
(2008), for instance, explores my concept of ‘‘an antiblack world’’ to build similar arguments. Sexton
(2011) makes similar moves in his discussions of ‘‘social death. ’’ As this forum doesn’t afford space for a long
critique, I’ll offer several, non-exhaustive criticisms. The first is that ‘‘an antiblack world’’ is not identical with
‘‘the world is antiblack.’’ My argument is that such a world is an antiblack racist project. It is not
the historical achievement. Its limitations emerge from a basic fact: Black people and other
opponents of such a project fought, and continue to fight, as we see today in the
#BlackLivesMatter movement and many others, against it . The same argument applies to the
argument about social death. Such an achievement would have rendered even these reflections
stillborn. The basic premises of the Afropessimistic argument are, then, locked in performative
contradictions. Yet, they have rhetorical force. This is evident through the continued growth of its proponents and forums
(such as this one) devoted to it. In Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, I argued that there are forms of antiblack racism offered under
the guise of love, though I was writing about whites who exoticize blacks while offering themselves as white sources of black value.
Analyzed in terms of bad faith, where one lies to oneself in an attempt to flee displeasing truths for pleasing falsehoods, exoticists
romanticize blacks while affirming white normativity, and thus themselves, as principals of reality. These ironic, performative
contradictions are features of all forms of racism, where one group is elevated to godlike status
and another is pushed below that of human despite both claiming to be human . Antiblack racism
offers whites self-other relations (necessary for ethics) with each other but not so for groups forced in
a ‘‘zone of nonbeing’’ below them. There is asymmetry where whites stand as others who look downward to those who
are not their others or their analogues. Antiblack racism is thus not a problem of blacks being ‘‘others .’’ It’s
a problem of their not-being-analogical-selves-and-not-evenbeing- others . Fanon, in Black Skin, White
Masks (1952), reminds us that Blacks among each other live in a world of selves and others. It is in
attempted relations with whites that these problems occur. Reason in such contexts has a bad habit of
walking out when Blacks enter. What are Blacks to do? As reason cannot be forced, because that would be ‘‘violence,’’ they must
ironically reason reasonably with forms of unreasonable reason. Contradictions loom .
Racism is, given these arguments, a
project of imposing non-relations as the model of dealing with people designated ‘‘black. ’’ In Les
Damne´ de la terre (‘‘Damned of the Earth’’), Fanon goes further and argues that colonialism is an attempt to impose a Manichean
structure of contraries instead of a dialectical one of ongoing, human negotiation of contradictions. The former segregates the
groups; the latter emerges from interaction. The police, he observes, are the mediator in such a situation, as their role is
force/violence instead of the human, discursive one of politics and civility (Fanon, 1991). Such societies draw legitimacy from Black
non-existence or invisibility. Black appearance, in other words, would be a violation of those systems. Think of the continued blight
of police, extra-judicial killings of Blacks in those countries. An
immediate observation of many postcolonies is
that antiblack attitudes, practices, and institutions aren’t exclusively white. Black antiblack
dispositions make this clear. Black antiblackness entails Black exoticism . Where this exists, Blacks
simultaneously receive Black love alongside Black rejection of agency. Many problems follow.
The absence of agency bars maturation, which would reinforce the racial logic of Blacks as in
effect wards of whites. Without agency, ethics, liberation, maturation, politics, and responsibility
could not be possible. Afropessimism faces the problem of a hidden premise of white agency versus Black incapacity.
Proponents of Afropessimism would no doubt respond that the theory itself is a form of agency reminiscent of Fanon’s famous
remark that though whites created le Ne`gre it was les Ne`gres who created Ne´gritude. Whites
clearly did not create
Afropessimism, which Black liberationists should celebrate. We should avoid the fallacy, however,
of confusing source with outcome. History is not short of bad ideas from good people . If
intrinsically good, however, each person of African descent would become ethically and
epistemologically a switching of the Manichean contraries, which means only changing players
instead of the game. We come, then, to the crux of the matter. If the goal of Afropessimism is
Afropessimism, its achievement would be attitudinal and, in the language of old, stoic – in short,
a symptom of antiblack society. At this point, there are several observations that follow. The first is
a diagnosis of the implications of Afropessimism as symptom. The second examines the
epistemological implications of Afropessimism. The third is whether a disposition counts as a
political act and, if so, is it sufficient for its avowed aims . There are more, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll simply
focus on these. An ironic dimension of pessimism is that it is the other side of optimism. Oddly
enough, both are connected to nihilism, which is, as Nietzsche (1968) showed, a decline of values during
periods of social decay. It emerges when people no longer want to be responsible for their
actions. Optimists expect intervention from beyond. Pessimists declare relief is not forthcoming .
Neither takes responsibility for what is valued. The valuing, however, is what leads to the
second, epistemic point. The presumption that what is at stake is what can be known to
determine what can be done is the problem. If such knowledge were possible, the debate would
be about who is reading the evidence correctly. Such judgment would be a priori – that is, prior
to events actually unfolding. The future, unlike transcendental conditions such as language,
signs, and reality, is, however, ex post facto: It is yet to come. Facing the future, the question
isn’t what will be or how do we know what will be but instead the realization that whatever is
done will be that on which the future will depend. Rejecting optimism and pessimism, there is a
supervening alternative: political commitment. The appeal to political commitment is not only in stream with what
French existentialists call l’intellectuel engage´ (committed intellectual) but also reaches back through the history and existential
situation of enslaved, racialized ancestors. Many were, in truth, an existential paradox: commitment to action without guarantees.
The slave revolts, micro and macro acts of resistance, escapes, and returns help others do the same; the cultivated instability of
plantations and other forms of enslavement, and countless other actions, were waged against a gauntlet of forces designed to
eliminate any hope of success. The claim of colonialists and enslavers was that the future belonged to them, not to the enslaved and
the indigenous. A result of more than 500 years of conquest and 300 years of enslavement was also a (white) rewriting of history in
which African and First Nations’ agency was, at least at the level of scholarship, nearly erased. Yet there was resistance even in that
realm, as Africana and First Nation intellectual history and scholarship attest. Such actions set the course for different kinds of
struggle today. Such reflections occasion meditations on the concept of failure. Afropessimism,
the existential critique
suggests, suffers from a failure to understand failure. Consider Fanon’s notion of constructive failure, where
what doesn’t initially work transforms conditions for something new to emerge . To understand this
argument, one must rethink the philosophical anthropology at the heart of a specific line of Euromodern thought on what it means
to be human. Atomistic and individual substance- based, this model, articulated by Hobbes, Locke,
and many others, is of a non-relational being that thinks, acts, and moves along a course in
which continued movement depends on not colliding with others . Under that model, the human
being is a thing that enters a system that facilitates or obstructs its movement. An alternative
model, shared by many groups across southern Africa, is a relational version of the human being
as part of a larger system of meaning. Actions, from that perspective, are not about whether ‘‘I’’
succeed but instead about ‘‘our’’ story across time . As relational, it means that each human being is
a constant negotiation of ongoing efforts to build relationships with others, which means no
one actually enters a situation without establishing new situations of action and meaning.
Instead of entering a game, their participation requires a different kind of project – especially
where the ‘‘game’’ was premised on their exclusion . Thus, where the system or game repels
initial participation, such repulsion is a shift in the grammar of how the system functions ,
especially its dependence on obsequious subjects . Shifted energy affords emergence of
alternatives. Kinds cannot be known before the actions that birthed them . Abstract as this
sounds, it has much historical support. Evelyn Simien (2016), in her insightful political study Historic Firsts, examines
the new set of relations established by Shirley Chisholm’s and Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns. There could be no
Barack Obama without such important predecessors affecting the demographics of voter
participation. Simien intentionally focused on the most mainstream example of political life to illustrate this point. Although
no exemplar of radicalism, Obama’s ‘‘success’’ emerged from Chisholm and Jackson’s (and many
others’) so-called ‘‘failure.’’ Beyond presidential electoral politics, there are numerous examples
of how prior, radical so-called ‘‘failures’’ transformed relationships that facilitated other kinds of
outcome. The trail goes back to the Haitian Revolution and back to every act of resistance from
Nat Turner’s Rebellion in the USA, Sharpe’s in Jamaica, or Tula’s in Curac¸ao and so many other
efforts for social transformation to come. In existential terms, then, many ancestors of the
African diaspora embodied what Søren Kierkegaard (1983) calls an existential paradox. All the evidence
around them suggested failure and the futility of hope . They first had to make a movement of
infinite resignation – that is, resigning themselves to their situation . Yet they must
simultaneously act against that situation. Kierkegaard called this seemingly contradictory
phenomenon ‘‘faith,’’ but that concept relates more to a relationship with a transcendent,
absolute being, which could only be established by a ‘‘leap, ’’ as there are no mediations or bridge.
Ironically, if Afropessimism appeals to transcendent intervention, it would collapse into faith. If ,
however, the argument rejects transcendent intervention and focuses on committed political
action, of taking responsibility for a future that offers no guarantees, then the movement from
infinite resignation becomes existential political action. At this point, the crucial meditation
would be on politics and political action. An attitude of infinite resignation to the world without
the leap of committed action would simply be pessimistic or nihilistic. Similarly, an attitude of hope
or optimism about the future would lack infinite resignation. We see here the underlying failure
of the two approaches. Yet ironically, there is a form of failure at failing in the pessimistic turn
versus the optimistic one, since if focused exclusively on resignation as the goal, then the ‘‘act’’
of resignation would have been achieved, which, paradoxically, would be a success; it would be
a successful failing of failure. For politics to emerge, however, there are two missing elements in
inward pessimistic resignation. The first is that politics is a social phenomenon, which means it
requires the expanding options of a social world. Turning away from the social world, though a
statement about politics, is not, however, in and of itself political. The ancients from whom much
western political theory or philosophy claimed affinity had a disparaging term for individuals
who resigned themselves from political life : idio¯te¯s, a private person, one not concerned with
public affairs, in a word – an idiot. I mention western political theory because that is the
hegemonic intellectual context of Afropessimism . We don’t, however, have to end our etymological journey in
ancient Greek. Extending our linguistic archaeology back a few thousand years, we could examine the Middle Kingdom Egyptian
word idi (deaf). The presumption, later taken on by the ancient Athenians and Macedonians, was that a lack of hearing entailed
isolation, at least in terms of audio speech. The
contemporary inward resignation of seeking a form of purity
from the loathsome historical reality of racial oppression, in this reading, collapses ultimately
into a form of moralism (private, normative satisfaction) instead of public responsibility born of and
borne by action. The second is the importance of power. Politics makes no sense without it. But
what is power? Eurocentric etymology points to the Latin word potis as its source, from which came the word ‘‘potent’’ as in an
omnipotent god. If we again look back further, we will notice the Middle Kingdom (2000 BCE–1700 BCE) KMT/ Egyptian word pHty,
which refers to godlike strength. Yet for those ancient Northeast Africans, even the gods’ abilities came from a source: In the Coffin
Texts, HqAw or heka activates the ka (sometimes translated as soul, spirit, or, in a word, ‘‘magic’’), which makes reality. All this
amounts to a straightforward thesis on power as the ability with the means to make things
happen. There is an alchemical quality to power. The human world, premised on symbolic
communication, brings many forms of meaning into being, and those new meanings afford
relationships that build institutions through a world of culture, a phenomenon that Freud (1989) rightly
described as ‘‘a prosthetic god.’’ It is godlike because it addresses what humanity historically sought from the gods: protection from
the elements, physical maledictions, and social forms of misery. Such
power clearly can be abused. It is where
those enabling capacities (empowerment) are pushed to the wayside in the hording of social
resources into propping up some people as gods that the legitimating practices of cultural cum
political institutions decline and stimulate pessimism and nihilism. That institutions in the
Americas very rarely attempt establishing positive relations to Blacks is the subtext of
Afropessimism and this entire meditation. The discussion points, however, to a demand for
political commitment. Politics itself emerges under different names throughout the history of
our species, but the one occasioning the word ‘‘politics’’ is from the Greek po´lis, which refers to ancient
Hellenic city-states. It identifies specific kinds of activities conducted inside the city-state, where
order necessitated the resolution of conflicts through rules of discourse the violation of which
could lead to (civil) war, a breaking down of relations appropriate for ‘‘outsiders.’’ Returning to the
Fanonian observation of selves and others, it is clear that imposed limitations on certain groups amounts to
impeding or blocking the option of politics. Yet, as a problem occurring within the polity, the
problem short of war becomes a political one . Returning to Afropessimistic challenges, the
question becomes this: If the problem of antiblack racism is conceded as political, where
antiblack institutions of power have, as their project, the impeding of Black power , which in
effect requires barring Black access to political institutions, then antiblack societies are
ultimately threats also to politics defined as the human negotiation of the expansion of
human capabilities or more to the point: freedom. Anti-politics is one of the reasons why
societies in which antiblack racism is hegemonic are also those in which racial moralizing
dominates: moralizing stops at individuals at the expense of addressing institutions the
transformation of which would make immoral individuals irrelevant. As a political problem, it
demands a political solution. It is not accidental that Blacks continue to be the continued
exemplars of unrealized freedom. As so many from Ida B. Wells-Barnett to Angela Davis (2003) and Michelle Alexander
(2010) have shown, the expansion of privatization and incarceration is squarely placed in a structure
of states and civil societies premised on the limitations of freedom (Blacks) – ironically, as seen in
countries such as South Africa and the United States, in the name of freedom. That power is a
facilitating or enabling phenomenon, a functional element of the human world, a viable
response must be the establishing of relations that reach beyond the singularity of the body. I
bring this up because proponents of Afropessimism might object to this analysis because of its
appeal to a human world. If that world is abrogated, the site of struggle becomes that which is
patently not human. It is not accidental that popular race discourse refers today to ‘‘black bodies,’’ for instance, instead of
‘‘black people.’’ As the human world is discursive, social, and relational, this abandonment amounts
to an appeal to the non-relational, the incommunicability of singularity, and appeals to the body
and its reach. At that point, it’s perhaps the psychologist, psychiatrist, or psychoanalyst who would be helpful, as turning
radically inward offers the promise of despair, narcissistic delusions of godliness, and, as Fanon also observed, madness. Even if
that slippery slope were rejected, the performative contradiction of attempting to communicate
such singularity or absence thereof requires, at least for consistency, the appropriate course of
action: silence. The remaining question for Afropessimism, especially those who are primarily academics,
becomes this: Why write? It’s a question for which, in both existential and political terms, I don’t
see how an answer could be given from an Afropessimistic perspective without the unfortunate revelation of cynicism. The
marketability of Afropessimism is no doubt in the immediate and paradoxical satisfaction in
dissatisfaction it offers. We are at this point on familiar terrain. As with ancient logical
paradoxes denying the viability of time and motion, the best option, after a moment of
immobilized reflection, is, eventually, to move on, even where the pause is itself significant as an
encomium of thought.
Their theory of blackness creates a false dichotomy between ending the world
or being subjected to it, which homogenizes the lived experiences of 35 million
black folks and takes away any potentiality for pragmatism.
Kline ’17 (David; 2017; Ph.D. candidate at Rice University; Critical Philosophy of Race, Vol. 5,
Issue 1 “The Pragmatics of Resistance: Framing Anti-Blackness and the Limits of Political
Ontology,” https://muse.jhu.edu/article/645848, accessed on 7/13/18, AB)

Wilderson’s critique of Agamben is certainly correct within the specific framework of a political ontology of racial positioning.
His description of anti-Black antagonism shows a powerful macropolitical sedimentation of [End
Page 56] Black suffering in which Black bodies are ontologically frozen into (non-) beings that stand in
absolute political distinction from those “who do not magnetize bullets” (Wilderson 2010, 80). In the same framework, Jared Sexton,
whose work is very close to Wilderson’s, is also right when he shows how biopolitical thought—specifically the Agambenian form
centered on questions of sovereignty—and its variant of “necropolitics” found in Mbembe has so often run aground on the figure of
the slave (see Sexton 2010).5 Locating
the reality of anti-Blackness wholly within this account of political
ontology does provide an undeniably effective analysis of its violence and sedimentation over the modern world
as a whole. However, in terms of a general structure , I understand Wilderson’s (and Sexton’s) political
ontology to remain tied in form to Agamben’s even as it seemingly discounts it and therefore
remains bound to some of the problems and limitations that beset such a formal structure , as I’ll discuss in
a moment. Despite the critique of Agamben’s ontological blind spots regarding the extent to which Black suffering is non-analogous
to non-black suffering, as I’ve tried to show, Wilderson
keeps the basic contours of Agamben’s ontological
structure in place, maintaining a formal political ontology that expands the bottom end of the binary
structure so as to locate an absolute zero-point of political abjection within Black social death . To
be clear, this is not to say that the difference between the content and historicity of Wilderson’s social death and Agamben’s bare
life does not have profound implications for how political ontology is conceived or how questions of suffering and freedom are
posed. Nor is it to say that a congruence of formal structure linking Agamben and Wilderson should mean that their respective
projects are not radically differentiated and perhaps even opposed in terms of their broader implications and revelations. Rather,
what I want to focus on is how the
absolute prioritization of a formal ontological framework of
autonomous and irreconcilable spheres of positionality —however descriptively or epistemologically accurate in
terms of a regime of ontology and its corresponding macropolitics of anti-Blackness—ends up limiting a
whole range of possible avenues of analysis that have their proper site within what Deleuze and Guattari describe as
the micropolitical. The issue here is the distinction between the macropolitical (molar) and the micropolitical (molecular) fields of
organization and becoming. Wilderson
and Afro-pessimism in general privilege the macropolitical field in
which Blackness is always already sedimented and rigidified into a political onto-logical position
that prohibits movement and the possibility of what Fred Moten calls “fugitivity.” The absolute
privileging of the macropolitical as [End Page 57] the frame of analysis tends to bracket or overshadow the fact
that “every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics (Deleuze and Guattari 1987,
213). Where the macropolitical is structured around a politics of molarisation that immunizes itself from the threat of contingency
and disruption, the micropolitical names the field in which local and singular points of connection produce the conditions for “lines
of flight, which are molecular” (ibid., 216). The
micropolitical field is where movement and resistance
happens against or in excess of the macropolitical in ways not reducible to the kind of formal
binary organization that Agamben and Wilderson’s political ontology prioritizes . Such resistance is not
necessarily positive or emancipatory, as lines of flight name a contingency that always poses the risk that whatever develops can
become “capable of the worst” (ibid., 205). However, within this contingency is also the possibility of creative
lines and deterritorializations that provide possible means of positive escape from
macropolitical molarisations. Focusing on Wilderson, his absolute prioritization of a political onto-logical
structure in which the law relegates Black being into the singular position of social death
happens, I contend, at the expense of two significant things that I am hesitant to bracket for the sake of prioritizing political
ontology as the sole frame of reference for both analyzing anti-Black racism and thinking resistance within the racialized world. First,
it short-circuits an analysis of power that might reveal not only how the practices, forms, and
apparatuses of anti-Black racism have historically developed, changed, and
reassembled/reterritorialized in relation to state power, national identity, philosophical discourse,
biological discourse, political discourse, and so on—changes that, despite Wilderson’s claim that focusing on these
things only “mystify” the question of ontology (Wilderson 2010, 10), surely have implications for how racial
positioning is both thought and resisted in differing historical and socio-political contexts. To the
extent that Blackness equals a singular ontological position within a macropolitical structure of
antagonism, there is almost no room to bring in the spectrum and flow of social difference and
contingency that no doubt spans across Black identity as a legitimate issue of analysis and as a
site/sight for the possibility of a range of resisting practices. This bracketing of difference leads him to make
some rather sweeping and opaquely abstract claims. For example, discussing a main character’s abortion in a prison cell in the 1976
film Bush Mama, Wilderson says, “Dorothy will abort her baby at the clinic or on the floor of her prison cell, not because she fights
for—and either wins [End Page 58] or loses—the right to do so, but because she is one of 35 million accumulated and fungible
(owned and exchangeable) objects living among 230 million subjects—which is to say, her will is always already subsumed by the will
of civil society” (Wilderson 2010, 128, italics mine). What I want to press here is how Wilderson’s statement, made in the sole
frame of a totalizing political ontology overshadowing all other levels of sociality, flattens
out the social difference
within, and even the possibility of, a micropolitical social field of 35 million Black people living in
the United States. Such a flattening reduces the optic of anti-Black racism as well as Black sociality
to the frame of political ontology where Blackness remains stuck in a singular position of
abjection. The result is a severe analytical limitation in terms of the way Blackness (as well as other racial
positions) exists across an extremely wide field of sociality that is comprised of differing intensities of
forces and relational modes between various institutional , political, socio-economic, religious, sexual, and
other social conjunctures. Within Wilderson’s political ontological frame , it seems that these
conjunctures are excluded—or at least bracketed—as having any bearing at all on how anti-Black power functions and is
resisted across highly differentiated contexts. There is only the binary ontological distinction of Black and
Human being; only a macropolitics of sedimented abjection . Furthermore, arriving at the second analytical
expense of Wilderson’s prioritization of political ontology, I suggest that such a flattening of the social field of
Blackness rigidly delimits what counts as legitimate political resistance. If the framework for
thinking resistance and the possibility of creating another world is reduced to rigid ontological
positions defined by the absolute power of the law, and if Black existence is understood only as ontologically
fixed at the extreme zero point of social death without recourse to anything within its own position qua Blackness, then
there is not much room for strategizing or even imagining resistance to anti-Blackness that is not
wholly limited to expressions and events of radically apocalyptic political violence: the law is
either destroyed entirely, or there is no freedom . This is not to say that I am necessarily against radical political
violence or its use as an effective tactic. Nor is to say that I think the law should be left unchallenged in its total operation, but rather
that there might be other and more pragmatically oriented practices of resistance that do not
necessarily have the absolute destruction of the law as their immediate aim that should count
as genuine resistance to anti-Blackness. For Wilderson, like Agamben, anything less than an absolute
overturning [End Page 59] of the order of things, the violent destruction and annihilation of the full
structure of antagonisms, is deemed as “[having nothing] to do with Black liberation” (quoted in Zug
2010). Of course, the desire for the absolute overturning of the currently existing world, the decisive end of the existing world
and the arrival of a new world in which “Blacks do not magnetize bullets” should be absolutely
affirmed. Further, the severity and gratuitous nature of the macropolitics of anti-Blackness in relation to the possibility of a
movement towards freedom should not be bracketed or displaced for the sake of appealing to any non-Black grammar of
exploitation or alienation (Wilderson 2010, 142). The
question I want to pose, however, is how the insistence on
the absolute priority of framing this world within a rigid structure of formal ontological positions
can only revert to what amounts to a kind of negative theological and eschatological blank horizon
in which actually existing social sites and modes of resisting praxis are displaced and devalued
by notions of whatever it is that might arrive from beyond. It seems that Wilderson, again, is close to Agamben
on this point, whose ontological structure also severely delimits what might count as genuine resistance to the regime of
sovereignty. As Dominick LaCapra points out regarding the possibility of liberation outside of Agamben’s formal ontological
structure of bare life and sovereignty, A further enigmatic conjunction in Agamben is between pure possibility and the reduction of
being to mere or naked life, for it is the emergence of mere naked life in accomplished nihilism that simultaneously generates,
as a kind of miraculous antibody or creation ex nihilo, pure possibility or utterly
blank utopianism not limited by the
constraints of the past or by normative structures of any sort . (LaCapra 2009, 168) With life’s
ontological reduction to the abjection of bare life or social death, the only possible way out, it seems, is
the impossible possibility of what Agamben refers to as the “suspension of the suspension,” the laying aside of the distinction
between bare life and political life, the “Shabbat of both animal and man” (Agamben 2003, 92). It is in this sense that Agamben
offers, again in the words of LaCapra, a “negative theology in extremis . . . an
empty utopianism of pure, unlimited
possibility” (LaCapra 2009, 166). The result is a discounting and devaluing of other , perhaps more
pragmatic and less eschatological, practices of resistance. With the “all or nothing” [End Page 60]
approach that posits anything less than the absolute suspension of the current state of things as
unable to address the violence and abjection of bare life, there is not much left in which to appeal than
a kind of apocalyptic, messianic, and contentless eschatological future space defined by whatever this
world is not.

Pragmatism is the only option to combat biopolitical forms of governance and

the political ontology of blackness – that includes gathering in communal sites
to work within and against the world and structures that shape social locations
of blackness.
Kline ’17 (David; 2017; Ph.D. candidate at Rice University; Critical Philosophy of Race, Vol. 5,
Issue 1 “The Pragmatics of Resistance: Framing Anti-Blackness and the Limits of Political
Ontology,” https://muse.jhu.edu/article/645848, accessed on 7/13/18, AB)
As I’ve argued, Wilderson’s flattening of Black social heterogeneity and the narrowing of any possibility of resistance outside the total apocalyptic destruction of the existing world is a result of his political ontology

and macropolitics of racial positions revolving around the formal poles of Master/Human and social death. The delimitation of social and political
possibility happens both in terms of Black and non-Black resistance to the structure of the
racialized world. Of course, I do not want to argue for a coalition politics or any kind of reconciliatory framework that would find a solution to anti-Blackness in some form of liberal
multiculturalism or “colorblindness” that ignores the real and particular violence of white antagonism. I do, however, want to argue for the sheer possibility of

opening or breaking through the closure (s), of lines of flight that mark a multiplicity of encounters
and possibilities between forces, technologies, bodies , and what Foucault calls dispositifs that run across varying
positions and social sites that are not wholly reducible to fixed ontological positions and which
potentially provide connections and flows that break through to an outside of political
ontological sedimentation. Focusing on how the dispositifs of biopolitical forms of governance —as
opposed to the legal and formal ontological structure of sovereignty—take into account
“processes of life” as the basis for governance , Foucault theorizes what he calls the “aleatory” body that is the target of biopower and exists prior to any
imposition of governance or domination. Appealing to the “freedom” of the aleatory body is not some kind of idealized notion of the body that ignores the macropolitical fact of Black suffering’s undeniable

This is not an appeal to what Sexton calls the “in spite of the terror” argument, where notions of Black freedom
gratuitous nature.

are understood merely as a kind of concession to the deeper realities at hand (Sexton 2010, 35). Rather, it is to start with the basic fact of the

material body in space and time and the idea that “resistance comes first” (Foucault 1997, 167). [End Page 61] This
point is particularly salient within the biopolitical frame because , as Deleuze puts it, “when power becomes
biopower resistance becomes the power of life , a vital power that cannot be confined within
species, environment or the paths of a particular diagram ” (Deleuze 1988, 92). In other words, resistance is the
micropolitical force of life that can never be fully confined or contained within a political
ontological frame (or diagram) of antagonisms .6 In terms of Wilderson’s ontology of social positioning, we might say, following Foucault and Deleuze into
Fred Moten’s Black optimism,7 that Black (aleatory) life always already precedes the gratuitous violence of an antagonism. Blackness, then, is not wholly reducible to a political ontological position, but rather is

Even
the movement prior to and against the imposing force of any violent constitution—or, as Nathanial Mackey says, that “insistent previousness evading each and every natal occasion” (Mackey 1986, 34).

though an antagonism functions as the political ontological constitution of a Black being as

socially dead in relation to civil society, there is still an even deeper level that precedes
ontological constitution itself: the movement and resistance of Black life .8 In In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical
Tradition, Moten makes inseparable Blackness and resistance with this provocative opening sentence: “ the history of blackness is a testament to the fact

that objects can and do resist” (Moten 2003, 1). Flowing in the vein of Adorno’s anti-identitarian negative dialectics and its prioritization of the object, Moten reads the history of
Blackness, which for him is nothing other than a history of certain performativity as improvisation, as a history of the object’s absolute objection to the capture of identity, the fugitive drive towards freedom

Not ignoring or bracketing the problem

where an untraceable, stateless, and ungoverned life of “improvisational immanence” is always becoming (ibid., 255n1).

of political ontological antagonism (although he does reject describing it in terms of social death), he nevertheless opens the frame
of analysis and social possibility to the aleatory field of life itself, or, micropolitics . Tracing the
Black radical tradition through everything from its poetry to its music to its banal everydayness,
Moten shows Blackness as a counter-force sparked into movement by the imposing and
regulating force of anti-Black power. In critical yet sympathetic opposition to Wilderson and other Afro-
pessimists, Moten rejects the notion that a full analysis of Blackness should be reduced to the
imposition of social death. Or, to put it another way, Moten rejects the notion that Blackness is reduced to a fixed ontological position within a macropolitics that has no recourse to
[End Page 62] forms of life that might resist and evade the imposition of an antagonism. Rather, Blackness is a counter-force to ontology itself . As he puts it,

blackness [is not (just)] ontologically prior to the logistic and regulative power that is supposed
to have brought it into existence but . . . blackness is prior to ontology; or in a slight variation of what [Nahum] Chandler would say,
blackness is the anoriginal displacement of ontology, that it is ontology’s anti- and ante-foundation, ontology’s underground, the irreparable disturbance of ontology’s time and space. (Moten 2014, 739) Here,
Moten is riffing on Chandler’s idea of “paraontology,” which is in specific distinction from political ontology. Paraontology, as Moten describes it, is “the transformative pressure blackness puts on philosophical

Rather than an account of being that seeks to uncover an essence or

concepts, categories, and methods” (Moten 2008, 215n3).

totalizing account of a particular social or political position , paraontology describes the mode of being that is always already resisting the
imposing logic of (political) ontology. Chandler articulates this phenomenon through Du Bois’ double consciousness, honing in on the “in between” of its double identity. As he says, ”between” would delimit any
simple notion of its spatiality or presupposed relationality. It would instead accede to the most general disruption of boundaries. . . . “[B]etween” dissipates any simple notion of inside and outside, of above and

below. . . . Du Bois’s inscription may be understood to name the opening of the sense of space, of spaciality, rather than confirm it. (Chandler 2014, 6–7) Chandler is describing the way Blackness—
in all of its social scope and complexity—overflows or breaks open the boundaries of any formal
imposition, the way Blackness cannot be reduced to a frame of abjection or the irreconcilable
position of an antagonism. From this perspective, Blackness is a rhizome, a dynamic, creative, and desiring
counter-force in which lines of flight present possible modes of freedom and sociality in excess
to political ontological positioning. As a paraontological phenomenon, Chandler and Moten understand Blackness as a unique and specific exertion within modernity—
which might also be called the historical regime of racial political ontology—that challenges every schema of formalization and [End Page 63] positional fixity. In this way, from this vantage, the history

of Blackness is read as a history of a certain performativity of the drive towards a freedom not
determined by the terms or boundaries of ontology, as a history of the object’s absolute
objection to the macropolitical capture of identity . This paraontological movement of Black fugitivity, as Moten has coined it, calls into question the
framing of Blackness wholly within a political ontology that seeks to index and describe Black life in terms of pure abjection. Again, Moten and Chandler do not in any way downplay the abjection to which
Blackness is given in the modern world. Indeed, Moten considers his project and that of Afro-pessimism as two sides of a mutual project where “Black optimism and Afro-pessimism are asymptotic” (Moten 2014,

778). Yet,by insisting on the possibilities of Black life within an immanent and micropolitical field of
becoming that moves in resistance to a rigid political ontology of social death, Moten taps into
something vital that precedes the force of imposition, the force of law, or the force of the
structure of White supremacy and its sedimented political ontological order . In this way, he also expands the frame of
analysis and praxis so that a much wider field of resources and possibilities are available in terms of a project of liberation that goes beyond the political ontological frame. This is where I suggest the

decentering of political ontology and the inclusion of the Black aleatory body as the site of
struggle, evasion, and creation becomes a pragmatic mode of framing the problem and
thinking a purely practical politics of both spontaneous creation and a calculated movement
against the political ontological regime of anti-Blackness. Although Moten would certainly object to describing this turn by way of a
 his “Black optimism” and Chandler’s paraontology find congruence with a kind of Foucaultian-
“pragmatic politics,” I suggest that

Deleuzian pragmatics which, as Paul Patton describes Deleuze’s philosophy, “[enables] a form of description which is immediately practical” and

an “ethico-political conception of philosophy as oriented towards the possibility of change ” (Patton

2003, 16, 17). From this angle, the accurate representation of an ontological reality , while certainly necessary

and crucial to the task of naming the full scope of the problem and thinking a way forward, does
not take precedence over the task of creating new concepts and lines of flight that should be
judged on their effectiveness not in terms of properly representing an ontological problem, but
in terms of their concrete effects within a wide field of contexts, specific socio-political
problems, and conjunctures. As Deleuze and Guattari describe how pragmatics marks a study attuned to the complexity, [End Page 64] contingency, and potential danger that
defines the micropolitical, “the study of the dangers of each line is the object of pragmatics or schizoanalysis, to the extent that it undertakes not to represent, interpret, or symbolize, but only to make maps and

Pragmatics, in this way, is all about drawing lines

draw lines, marking their mixtures as well as their distinctions” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 227).

and making maps against macropolitical sedimentations that lead somewhere, that create
something new. Such pragmatic orientation is especially pertinent in the contemporary
biopolitical frame as Foucault understands it. As I’ve already described, Foucault’s biopolitics is premised on the idea that when politics takes the biological body as its primary aim and object,
as opposed to sovereign power’s object of the legal subject and its constitutive negative, then there is introduced into politics the possibility, as Cary Wolfe notes, “for life to burst through power’s systematic

The increasing complexity of bodily knowledge and the

operations in ways that are more and more difficult to anticipate” (Wolfe 2014, 158).

power that takes this knowledge as its operating principle means that both risk and possibility
increase in terms of what the body can do and what can be done to the body . The pragmatic
thrust of this emerges when situating it at the level of micropolitics , where, as I’ve been describing, Deleuze and Guattari locate the
conditions for lines of flight and where “there is always something that flows or flees, that escapes the binary organizations, the resonance apparatus, and the overcoding machine” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987,

The pragmatic possibility or potential , then, is that

216). Out of any sedimentation there will always be deterritorialization and reterritorialization.

there is always a simultaneity of the micropolitical and the macropolitical that provides the
conditions for an ongoing search for new tactics , orientations, assemblages, vocabularies, and
processes of becoming that are aimed practically towards change : “What matters is to break through the wall, even if one has to
become-black like John Brown. George Jackson. ‘I may take flight, but all the while I am fleeing, I will be looking for a weapon!” (Deleuze and Guattari 2009, 277). This emphasis on pragmatics and lines of flight—
both in potentially negative and positive terms (i.e. in terms of pure contingency)—provides a much more expansive level for framing the problem of anti-Blackness that is not reducible to fixed political ontological
positions and the macropolitical plane. Finally, I suggest this kind of pragmatics is what Moten and Harney describe as “fugitive planning and Black study,” what Jack Halberstam [End Page 65] characterizes simply

reaching out to find connection” (Moten and Harney 2013, 5). Pragmatics finds a footing in the highly dynamic
as “

and shifting terrain of power relations and its multiplicity of conjunctures that signal the
condition of movement and connection. It finds its enactment in sites such as “the little Negro’s church
and logos and gathering, this gathering in and against the word, alongside and through the word and the world as hold, manger, wilderness, tomb, upper
room, and cell” (Moten 2014, 775). Within these and other sites of micropolitical connection and the practices that take place in them, there is flight, resistance, and the

creation of something new and productive. The inclusion of these sites and practices within the
analytical frame and critique of anti-Blackness provide a much wider set of resources for
thinking the complexity of the full scope of the political field that exists in excess to the political
ontological frame, and, in the same way, orients the fight against anti-Blackness in practical (though potentially no less
revolutionary), rather than apocalyptic, terms . This, I argue, does not have to mitigate or pass over Sexton’s call that “slavery must be theorized maximally if its abolition is to

reach the proper level” (Sexton 2011, 33). The maximum theorization of slavery and anti-Blackness does not need be

completely hedged in by a political ontological frame. However, analytical expansion beyond the
political ontological frame does mean locating a positive emphasis on what Sexton disparagingly
identifies as a tendency towards “forces of mitigation that would transform the world through a
coalition of a thousand tiny causes” (ibid.). Taking Sexton’s (and Wilderson’s) call of a maximum theorization of slavery/anti-Blackness with full seriousness, I wonder
what the proper level of abolition could possibly mean other than a pragmatic coalition—or a micropolitics—of a thousand tiny causes. As I’ve argued, thinking what this might mean

would certainly necessitate an expansive analytics of power relations flowing over a highly
complex field of forces, intensities, technologies, and dispositifs that together form a micropolitical field far in excess of sovereign
power and the political ontological frame. Out of such an analytics , a pragmatics that finds its possibility in the

micropolitical field of movement and flight emerges as the condition for an ongoing life of
resistance, connection, and a movement toward freedom . [End Page 66]
Antiblackness is not ontological, but rather is predicated off of a multitude of
contingencies. Policy action is not only possible but imperative to dismantle
structures that maintain white supremacy and antiblackness.
Bouie 13 (Jamelle Bouie, Jamelle Bouie is chief political correspondent for Slate Magazine, and
a political analyst for CBS News. He covers campaigns, elections, and national affairs., 3/11/13,
“Making (and Dismantling) Racism,” The American Prospect, http://prospect.org/article/making-
and-dismantling-racism, accessed on 7/16/18, AB)
Over at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates has been exploring the intersection of race and public policy, with a focus on white supremacy
as a driving force in political decisions at all levels of government. This has led him to two conclusions: First, that anti-black
racism as we understand it is a creation of explicit policy choices—the decision to exclude,
marginalize, and stigmatize Africans and their descendants has as much to do with racial
prejudice as does any intrinsic tribalism . And second, that it's possible to dismantle this prejudice
using public policy. Here is Coates in his own words: Last night I had the luxury of sitting and talking with the brilliant historian
Barbara Fields. One point she makes that very few Americans understand is that racism is a creation. You read Edmund Morgan’s
work and actually see racism being inscribed in the law and the country changing as a result. If
we accept that racism is a
creation, then we must then accept that it can be destroyed . And if we accept that it can be
destroyed, we must then accept that it can be destroyed by us and that it likely must be
destroyed by methods kin to creation. Racism was created by policy. It will likely only be
ultimately destroyed by policy. Over at his blog, Andrew Sullivan offers a reply: I don’t believe the law created racism any
more than it can create lust or greed or envy or hatred. It can encourage or mitigate these profound aspects of human psychology –
it can create racist structures as in the Jim Crow South or Greater Israel. But it can no more end these things that it can create them.
A complementary strategy is finding ways for the targets of such hatred to become inured to them, to let the slurs sting less until
they sting not at all. Not easy. But a more manageable goal than TNC’s utopianism. I can appreciate the point Sullivan is making, but
I'm not sure it's relevant to Coates' argument. It is absolutely true that "Group loyalty is deep in our DNA," as Sullivan writes. And if
you define racism as an overly aggressive form of group loyalty—basically just prejudice—then Sullivan is right to throw water on the
idea that the law can "create racism any more than it can create lust or greed or envy or hatred." But Coates
is making a
more precise claim: That there's nothing natural about the black/white divide that has defined
American history. White Europeans had contact with black Africans well before the trans-
Atlantic slave trade without the emergence of an anti-black racism. It took particular choices
made by particular people—in this case, plantation owners in colonial Virginia—to make black
skin a stigma, to make the "one drop rule" a defining feature of American life for more than a
hundred years. By enslaving African indentured servants and allowing their white counterparts a
chance for upward mobility, colonial landowners began the process that would make white
supremacy the ideology of America. The position of slavery generated a stigma that then
justified continued enslavement—blacks are lowly, therefore we must keep them as slaves. Slavery (and later, Jim
Crow) wasn't built to reflect racism as much as it was built in tandem with it. And later policy, in the late 19th and
20th centuries, further entrenched white supremacist attitudes . Block black people from owning homes, and
they're forced to reside in crowded slums. Onlookers then use the reality of slums to deny homeownership to blacks, under the view
that they're unfit for suburbs.

Ontology doesn’t come first – the opposite is apathy. Fighting for systematically
excluded folks isn’t optimism, but rather creates new forms of protection that
prevents the devaluation of life. Perm solves
Gordon et. all 17 (Lewis R. Gordon @University of Connecticut, Annie Menzel @ University of
Wisconsin-Madison, George Shulman @ New York University and Jasmine Syedullah @Vassar
College, “Afro pessimism,” Critical Exchange, Macmillan Publishers Ltd, Contemporary Political
Theory, Springer Nature. 1470-8914, pg. 1-33, accessed on 7/17/18, AB)
Prophetic despair, such as that which Baldwin expresses in an often quoted interview between James Baldwin Dr. Kenneth Clark in May of 1963, presses on the material cohesion of our moral infrastructure. In the
interview Baldwin professes to remaining pessimistic with regard to his own life when he says, ‘‘It doesn’t matter any longer what you do to me; you can put me in jail, you can kill me. By the time I was 17, you’d
done everything that you could do to me. The problem now is, how are you going to save yourselves?’’ He goes on a bit later to refuse, in no uncertain term, pessimism as a politics of the future. When Clark asks,

I
‘‘Jim, what do you see deep in the recesses of your own mind as the future of our nation, ... I think that the future of the Negro and the future of the nation are linked ... What do you see?,’’ Baldwin replies, ‘‘

can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that
human life is an academic matter, so I’m forced to be an optimist. I’m forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive.
But the future of the Negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country (Clark et al., 1963). I want to savor the tensions of Baldwin’s response. I want to hold them, not resolve them,
and observe how they situate pedestrian personal pessimism outside the movement for black life, while calling out the limits of a political process propelled and legitimated by white supremacy. Even insofar as
pessimism is a social expression of the affective limits of social death, a feeling that brings us back to life, out of isolation, and into conversation with each other the promise of pessimism is clearly far more than an

The antithesis of pessimism in this instance is not optimism but apathy, willful passive
academic matter.

acceptance of the untenable conditions of a people systemically and forcibly made to

understand that there are some whose existence is at best immaterial and at worst a clear and
present danger and then there are those lives that do matter we have been witnessing in the
, . What

activist and academic movements for black life is the implosion of identity politics and the
failure of its possessive claims to liberal demands for rights and protection . The abolition of whiteness demands a kind of justice the
state may not yet know how to sanction. As Patrisse Cullors (2015), one of three original founders of #BLM, argues, ‘‘I believe we can’t wait on the State to take care of our Black lives. We have to show up now to build the world we want to see.’’ Thinking the
purchase of the pessimistic prophetically then, as a residual, inevitable, yet generative practice of the black prophetic tradition with reparative properties that precede and exceed Afro-pessimism’s formal incorporation into scholarly journals and conferences, I find

while we can take the analysis of power Afro-pessimism offers and run with
myself constantly reminding my students that

it, academic enunciations of pessimism run the risk of remaining loyal to the limits of legibility
and respectability of politics as usual. When the intellectual becomes As Nick Mitchell (forthcoming, p. 10) writes: ‘‘

interchangeable with the slave it is too easy to smooth over the fact that black intellectuals
, perhaps ...

have interests as intellectuals that can and do diverge from those of the people for whom they
might want justice the project of race theorization risks deploying the
. Without an acknowledgement (not a confession) of this divergence ...

generalizing force of theory and the moralizing tendency of critique to generalize a class
perspective .’’ What we are dealing with here is more than occidental anxiety of ontological uncertainty. It is an ethical imperative to engage in a struggle to change the meaning of rights and protection from the ground up (or suffer senselessly at

the pessimism of antiblack racism is not

the altar of the state’s right to defend itself by any means necessary). As Baldwin (in Clark et al., 1963) suggested in the interview with Kenneth Clark,

just a black problem, it presses on the condition of whites and upon the country as a whole: ‘‘These

The predicament of
people have deluded themselves for so long, that they really don’t think I’m human. I base this on their conduct, not on what they say, and this means that they have become, in themselves, moral monsters.’’

the pessimist presses upon the body, moving it to unrest, unleashing a rage
is not a personal problem that is easily self- contained. It

that cannot stand to be at home in moral monstrosity It just wants to burn it all down . . ‘‘Now, we are talking about
human beings, there’s not such a thing as a monolithic wall or some abstraction called the Negro problem, these are Negro boys and girls, who at 16 and 17 don’t believe the country means anything that it says and don’t feel they have any place here, on the basis of

The question Afro-pessimism poses as a practice of prophetic desire then, turns

the performance of the entire country.’’

away from a politics of recognition and respectability toward an abolitionist praxis of fugitive
reparation to ask , ‘‘Will you run with me?’’ Does my pessimism press on your sense of superiority, exception, perfection enough for you to forfeit your status and help us move the country, force the nation to believe there is freedom
beyond this world, a more prophetic imagination of difference, identity, and inclusion? ‘‘What white people have to do,’’ Baldwin (in Clark et al., 1963) reminds us, ‘‘is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, because

BLM is advancing the cause for the abolition of

I’m not a nigger, I’m a man, but if you think I’m a nigger, it means you need it.’’ In the present moment Black Lives Matter ( )

white supremacy in local ways in chapters throughout the world. They call us to account for the material
consequences of the unfinished work of antislavery abolition and reconstruction . They are part of an underground
lineage of fugitive communities that emerged from the marshes, swamps, and hiding spaces of the plantation South. Their message is decentralized. It is not uniform. It does not reproduce old antagonisms. It

does not pit moral suasion against direct confronta- tion. It does not ask that we choose to
remain either optimistic or pessimistic. It exercises a practice of the political that harnesses both. In this last section then I turn to a speech against apathy by Patrisse
Cullors, a beacon in a leader-full movement who has been animating pessimism as a protocol of self-care and prophetic political organizing powerful enough to propel activist and intellectual movements from
isolated places of loss into collective liberation, out of abstractions into objections, subjecting the logics of antiblack racism to the collective force of intersecting fugitive communities of abolitionist movement
against nihilism and toward an affirmation of life. We Can Survive? At age 25 on 19 April 2015 Freddie Gray died from injuries sustained while shackled by his feet in a Baltimore Police Department van where he
was being held in custody following his arrest. Baltimore stood up, rose up, died in, and rolled out. We all bore witness. His death was deemed a murder by the medical examiner a few weeks later. That Sunday
morning, May 3, 2015, I, a Buddhist, found my way to church, to All Saints in Pasadena, CA, into the strikingly upper-class congregation of post-service attendees who piled in along with an unlikely mix of young
greater Los Angeles activists-of-color and their white hipster allies. It would be my first time hearing our speaker in person. The whole room stood and cheered as she entered – the woman who helped coin the

Her voice was clear

hashtag, the longtime activist organizer, Patrisse Cullors greeted us like family, all knowing eyes, bright smiles, and then began a talk she called ‘‘Abolition Theology.’’

and certain, free of the cross-bearing affect of black suffering that often accompanies talk of
state-sponsored antiblack violence in predominately white spaces . Cullors gave us a speech that touched us, that
moved us – mourning, rage and all – into a mood for collective action. She impressed upon us the fact that the movement for black lives was a call to action for all
black life, not just the names we could recite, not just cisgendered young men, not just ‘‘innocent’’ ‘‘children,’’ not just Americans. She let us know there had been recent formations of #Black Lives Matter

the concept of blackness that

chapters beyond U.S. borders. There were Afro-Latino chapters, chapters forming in Haiti, and in Ghana. She reminded us that

resonates across the globe called on us to broaden the scope of our movements and to build
alliances, to build with Latino communities in particular. It was a call for #BLM without borders. We were being enlisted in a movement that began, she reminded us, with the movement to abolish the
institution of slavery. We were being reeducated as she drew connection between the hard-won efforts of formerly fugitive abolitionists to build resilient communities out of the so-called contraband during and
following the Civil War through to the present-day ‘‘leader-full’’ movement of #BLM. ‘‘Isn’t this a great time to be alive?’’ Cullors asked in closing. Is she joking I wondered? I found not one drop of cynicism in her
question. Without missing a beat, she proceeded to relay the names, the facts, the numbers, the bodies felled by police, by gun, by force. As she listed the lives taken a wave of loss flooded the room and we were

reconstruction, in a fight for food, for

still, breathless. ‘‘Protest is about disrupting apathy,’’ she continued. She left us eager to join her in this twenty-first century revival of

access to housing, for access to education, and for a kind of justice for black lives that will not come without our willingness
to show up, stand up, and throw down. In the streets, in solidarity, we will find the power to change people, she said, to change policy. She echoed the words
of civil rights organizer Ella Baker, ‘‘the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed... It means facing a system that does not lend itself

to your needs and devising means by which you change that system .’’ For Cullors that ‘‘means’’ came by way of waves grief,
rage, despair, the loss of family, the loss of hope, bearing witness, heartbreak, and the will to return to face it all again. She closed us out with the rallying chant of the movement for black lives, the recitation of a
prayer by Twentieth century fugitive slave Assata Shakur, ‘‘It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and protect each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.’’
The congregation’s joy burst through the siren of her words and bound us toward another way of sitting with the litany of loss. We Must Survive What Baldwin and Cullors make clear is that pessimism is most

What my students who are taking up the work

powerful as an unrelenting political process of coming back to life, beginning to feel one another’s humanity.

of Afro-pessimism are in most need of are new ways to put their pessimism to work, to come
together and collectively counteract the mind-numbing soul-crushing isolation centuries of
antiblack racism have waged on our humanity . We need not fear falling short. The more we ‘‘fail,’’ the stronger we rise to try again armed with the alchemy
of despair. What we need are stories and speeches, and spaces that moves us from abjection toward that fertile ground of self-transformation one can only find in the witness of another. What might we give up in
a move from critique to healing and reparation, generative of the choice to be fearless in the face of the impossibilities of freedom? What might the audacity to ‘‘lean on each other,’’ as Jasmine Abdullah Richards
says in the epigraph, and imagine a future for black life otherwise, add to the pursuits of the pessimist?
 Antiblackness not inevitable
Characterizing race solely on the basis of phenotypic difference is what sustains
its symbolic significance
George 2016 (Sheldon G. teaches courses in both literature and theory. Concentrating
primarily on American and African-American literature, his courses explore literary
representations of American identity, as they are expressed in the writings of authors spanning
from antebellum to contemporary America. His literary and cultural theory courses are aimed at
granting students more nuanced and complex understandings of the interplay between
literature, culture and identity. With a particular focus on psychoanalytic theory, Professor
George's research and published work use Lacanian psychoanalysis to investigate the effects of
slavery and racism on American racial identity. Some of his courses include the graduate
seminar in Contemporary Critical Theory, Toni Morrison and American Literature, Modernism
and the Harlem Renaissance, and Race and Gender in Psychoanalytic Theory. “Trauma and Race:
A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity,” pgs. 39-40, Baylor University Press, Waco,
OCR’d, https://muse.jhu.edu/book/44556 -CR)

The debate that has developed between Appiah and Outlaw over Du Bois' relationship to race allows us
some insight into how both Du Bois and contemporary African Americans like Outlaw seek to
conserve the jouissance of the traumatic past. The debate centers on what Appiah identifies as Du Bois'
irrational inability to give up the socially accepted biological conception of race in spite of Du Bois'
avowed efforts to replace it with a sociohistorical conception . Outlaw responds to Appiah in defense of Du Bois,
arguing that, whereas Appiah reads Du Bois as essentially presenting a biological definition of race, Bois is more properly read as
combining both a sociohistorical and a biological conception. Outlaw
allies Du Bois with "natural philosophers of
the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries" who define race as a concept that draws together
under a single word" references to "biological, cultural and geographical factors "; the properties this
concept describes are to be taken "disjunctively," says Outlaw, so that possession of "at Ieast one of the properties" identifies an
individual as a member of the race." Outlaw echoes Du Bois in acknowledging the inability of race to define precisely its referent, but
for Outlaw this does not imply that "all racial classification is thereby inappropriate." Where race fails to serve the purpose of
"characterizing persons into or in terms of biologically constituted groupings," Outlaw argues, "it might well just mean that an
additional racial or sub-racial category may be needed for such persons."' What we find in both Du Bois and Outlaw, I suggest,
is an effort to conserve race beyond its referential value and an attachment to race that extends
beyond the logic of these individuals' arguments . Part of the reason for this adherence to race is a
dogged belief that, despite the conceded lack of scientific basis for race, this concept does indeed have some
perceivable referential value. Du Bois himself argues that a "scientific definition of race is impossible," for "physical
characteristics are not inherited as to make it possible to divide the world into races." But race asserts its existential
veracity through appeal to the eyes, through assertion of a natural and visible difference,
marked in skin color, that helps to seduce equally Du Bois and Outlaw into compliance with racial
thinking. It is this seductive visibility of race , this "common sense" evidence from "everyday life," as Outlaw puts it,
that we must first come to terms with in understanding the compelling attachment to race maintained by African
Americans like Outlaw and Du Bois. Though race is a discursive construct , one that I argue is inspired by psychic
urgencies, race remains compelling to the eyes because racial references emerge from a grafting of the
meanings of the Symbolic onto biology. It is this propensity of race to conflate the Symbolic's
discourses with biology that Du Bois and Outlaw promote in clustering race as both
sociohistorical and biological. Emerging from the intersection of biology and the Symbolic, race does not
manufacture difference but instead structures a prescribed mode of interpretation that grants
forms of existent biological difference more critical Symbolic value. The biological fact of
phenotypic variations functions in racial discourse as race's alibi, masking the inherent arbitrariness
of racial distinction by internalizing and eternalizing difference as an embodied permanency.
Because phenotypic differences in pigmentation and morphological variations in bone and hair are
often traceable through ancestral lines, these visible differences provide an ostensive basis for a biological
notion of race as defined by inheritable characteristics. However, as the history of racial passing
in this country attests, such characteristics do not always correlate in predictable ways with racial
identity. Though, by grounding itself in the biology of phenotype, race comes to imply deeper
dissimilarities in such things as morality, intellect, degrees of licentiousness, violent proclivities, and so on, it
is the system of the Symbolic itself that grants race and these implied dissimilarities their value,
establishing a differential status that has meaning only within a chain where black adopts its
Symbolic significance through its interrelation with and distinction from white. Precisely by
grafting itself onto biology, however, race presents itself as pre-dating the system of the Symbolic ,
masquerading as an inherent component of nature indicative of visible, natural variations in
groups of humans.

Conceptualizing blackness as an ultimate structure of sociality contributes to its

permanence and objectification – Instead, we should refuse to invest in its
signifying chain at all
George 2016 (Sheldon G. teaches courses in both literature and theory. Concentrating
primarily on American and African-American literature, his courses explore literary
representations of American identity, as they are expressed in the writings of authors spanning
from antebellum to contemporary America. His literary and cultural theory courses are aimed at
granting students more nuanced and complex understandings of the interplay between
literature, culture and identity. With a particular focus on psychoanalytic theory, Professor
George's research and published work use Lacanian psychoanalysis to investigate the effects of
slavery and racism on American racial identity. Some of his courses include the graduate
seminar in Contemporary Critical Theory, Toni Morrison and American Literature, Modernism
and the Harlem Renaissance, and Race and Gender in Psychoanalytic Theory. “Trauma and Race:
A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity,” pgs. 30-36, Baylor University Press, Waco,
OCR’d https://muse.jhu.edu/book/44556 -CR)

It may be argued that central to the discursive efforts of African Americans, from ex-slaves to later
social activists and scholars, is an attempt to establish firmly a shaming gaze that does not merely
wince at the spectacles of white transgressions. But given the continued power of the master
signifier whiteness to define the discursive field of race and restrict the agency of African
Americans, not just racism but also the concept of race itself carries over into the present a
signifying chain, founded in the past, that enables both an assault on African Americans' fantasies of
being and a possible confrontation with lack. Here we may conjoin the signifiers of race with the scars of
the slave master's whip in the formation of Spillers terms a "phenomenon of marking and
branding [that] actually 'transfers' from one generation to another, finding its various symbolic
substitutions in an efficacy of meanings that repeat the initiating moments. Lacan speaks of "the glory of the
mark," the "mark on the skin" inscribed through such acts as "flagellation"; he points to this mark as
producing the subject's body as an "object of is flagellation is tied to what Spillers describes as a
translation of "the captive body" into a "potential for pornotroping ," a process of objectification
that we see in the actions of the slave master described by the ex-slaves. Lacan states that it is "irrefutable" that
this objectification is "one of the ways in which the Other enters one's world," functioning as an
apparatus of jouissance in the manners we have already described. But what is suggested most radically in Lacan's work is
also a process by which this objectification may become the grounds of identify for the abjected
subject. Lacan's theory helps us identify the markings of the master's whip and the jouissance they produce as a very source of
African American identity. Lacan associates jouissance with excess, not just an excess of pleasure but also an
excess that turns to "displeasure," an excess that leaves one in a state of "suffering . " Particularly in his
reading of the fort-da game played by Freud's grandson, however, Lacan emphasis that it is only through the suffering of
jouissance that the kind of narcissism found in the mirror stage's conflation of mother and child is replaced by an
independent subjectivity built on lack. Lacan reads the toy reel that the child of the fort-da game throws over the edge
of his crib when the mother leaves the room not just as a signifier but as the object a, that which, in signifying an unsignifable toss,
allows the subject to jump "ditch," the central lack that the mother's disappearance creates "on the frontier of his domain." This
object a, Lacan says, is "a small part of the subject that detaches itself from him" to symbolize some act
of "self-mutilation" or other cruel loss through which the subject finds the means to his or her
own self-designation. This object a, this symbol of the lost part of the self, Lacan says, is "what in the end gives
the specular image of the apparatus of the ego its real support , its consistency, sustained within by
this lost object." 96 Lacan states that it is through this object that "jouissance is introduced into the dimension of the subject's
being." This lost object is the means through which the subject's self-identification compulsively
masks and concurrently establishes resonance with the unsymbolized trauma of the Real. Race, I propose, is an
object a established around lack as much for African Americans as it is for whites. The function of the object a Lacan
outlines in his reading of the fort-da is not only to signify loss but also to displace it through acts of
repetition, to reassociate traumatic entrance into the Symbolic with a temporally and qualitatively distinct moment of trauma
later experienced in the Symbolic. In place of the subject's traumatic division in language, the mother's departure from the room
becomes temporally defined as the cause of the split or "Spaltung in the subject," which is then repetitively represented as the true
source of loss that is also "overcome by the alternating game, fort-da." I read slaveryas serving the function of
repetition for African Americans that Lacan here assigns to the mother's departure, as the Symbolic and
temporal signifier of a traumatic loss that is more deeply psychic. Slavery comes to serve this function
because it eruptively displays psychic lack. Lacan defines repetition as "the commemoration of an eruption of
jouissance." Where this irruption designates a breach inward and a splitting of the subject, I identify in slavery a
simultaneous eruption or outpouring of jouissance that finds its Symbolic representatives across
distances of time through the signifiers of race . I suggest that both these residual signifiers (even when
redefined by African Americans) and the acts of racism that may grow out of them are
repetitions that function in relation to the jouissance of this past that both displaces and displays
psychic lack. Slavery's exhibition of the slave's lack and its insistence upon the master's exultant and autonomous
being produced within the Symbolic a certain excess or surplus of jouissance, enabling discursive and power structures
through which access to jouissance became unusually open to manipulation. Slavery thus marks a
traumatic moment in which jouissance as both lack and excess is localized. This eruption of jouissance
thereby positions slavery as a temporal representative of the lack that is the Lacanian Real. It is the
signifiers of race that help to both localize this lack temporally and bind it to the identity of
those subjects who come to be called African Americans. The concept of race came to center
African American identity because it not only augmented the signifier's essential function of striking
being from the subject, actively restricting the slave's access to fantasies of self, but also presented itself as an
object of contention that promised to re-establish the illusory existence of this being. As is true in the case
of the child of the fort-da, the signifier, as designator of the object a, is ever a protective source of identity, and
so race is often exceedingly empowering for African Americans . In slavery and beyond, it offers subjects a sense
of direction, belonging, and self-worth. But race alone could guarantee neither community nor being for
enslaved blacks. To truly understand the notion of being that slaves were able to construct for themselves and to appreciate
the jouissance of suffering to which this being yet binds contemporary African Americans, we must look to the function of religion in
slavery. Because efforts during slavery to resignify race were especially open to contention , blacks
were slow to embrace race truly as a source of being. And so, in truth, the nascent African American identity that
began to cohere in times of slavery more often employed religion both to contend against and to positively signify
race in an effort to constitute this being, thus setting the stage for an emphasis on religion in African American culture
that is yet present today. What we find in slavery is that the unity developed by enslaved blacks emerged not
primarily because of a sense of their "racial" commonality but because blacks were bound
together by a common circumstance that both accentuated existing similarities across the group and demanded this
unification as a source Of resistance and a means Of survival .100 More likely to recognize differences within the
racial group than the masters who asserted the power to define the group, individual slaves
formed alliances and group affiliations that were more nuanced than any allowed by the category
of race. The slave narrative of James Albert U kawsaw Gronniosaw, who spends much Of his enslavement on a merchant ship
before landing in New York City, supports this point, displaying the internal differences among slaves that
prevented their easy unification around race as a source of being . Gronniosaws inability to identify With the
Other slaves in his new master's household not only leads to his conviction that the "servants were all jealous, and envied [him] the
regard, and favour, shewn [him] by [his] master" but also facilitates his construction of a narrative that asserts God will not save
Gronniosaw's fellow blacks or "those born under every Outward Disadvantage, and in Regions Of the Grossest Darkness and
Ignorance" if they lack "knowledge of the [biblical) Truth." 101 Written after he is freed and no longer has even the common
circumstance of a mutual enslavement to link him to the larger Slave community, Gronniosaw's narrative seeks support not for
members of this community but for his own starving family in dire need of money. Gronniosaw's narrative maintains that through
the bondage under which members of his race still exist, the "Lord undertook to bring" Gronniosaw "out of Darkness into His
marvelous light."'02 What Gronniosaw's
religious rhetoric shows is that race by itself could not unify
slaves to fully promise them being; functioning at times in direct opposition to race , within and
beyond slave communities, it was primarily religion that made this promise. Such a focus by slaves like
Gronniosaw on religion as the source of the object a that grounded being must be read within the context of a broader slaveholding
society that celebrated the Christian view Of God as the Supreme Being, a view expressed in the biblical scatcmenr "I am the One
Who is," by Which, Lacan notes, "God asserts his identity with Being. "'03 The Object a, Lacan shows, is that which presents it*lf as
just a semblance Of being but also being's From chis Lacanian perspective, we may read the a as the source Of the soul that, for
Christians to Whom Gtonniosaw addresses his narrative, links mankind to the true Supreme Being; this a functions as the divine
remnant at the core Of man, the spiritual essence, shaped by Godk own hands, chat transcends man's earthly existence. Both within
man and external to man, this extimate core as object a is what sets man on the path of a true love Of his neighbor as the self. It is
the source of a kind of love that Lacan calls “soul loving," whereby subjects “love each other as the same in the Other,” aiming this
love at the extimate Object a that is both absent from the self and illusorily present in the ocher.'" Where Gronniosaw wishes to
establish the similarity Of his soul to that of his White reader's through of his religious rhetoric, he struggles against a racism that
functions to define his core self as blackened by the absence of God's light, as devoid of the divine spark. This struggle emerges
because the soul loving he beseeches of the white Other is equally, I would argue, the root of race love, whereby individuals of the
same race come to love each Other as mirrored images of the self, finding in each Other the same Object the self pursues, the
Object belonging to the self that is absent from the self. This absence
fuels a desire for racial unification and
solidarity that stands at Odds with universalism ostensibly glorified by religious soul loving of the
neighbor. I will show in chapters 2 and 3 how race comes to supplant religion as a source of this core object a that offers African
Americans a semblance of being, but what we find in Gronniosaw’s narrative is race
as an impediment to any loving of
the neighbor's soul. Within slavery, race both obscured cross-racial unity and impaired creation
of an extimate Object a capable of blacks intersubjectively into a group identity. Because race was the
root of slavery's assertion of the nonbeing of the slave, race had to be redefined and buttressed by religion for it to function as a
source of being. Not only religion but also communal activities like group worship or singing and working
together all helped to create the unified group to which this being could be assigned . Establishing unity
through communal activity, religion and spiritual slave songs were especially important to both the
reformation of slave identity and the gradual development of notions of race as possible sources of being. Emblematic of
this fact is Lawrence Levine’s Observation that "the single most persistent image of the slave songs is that of
[African Americans as] the chosen people. ” Through attempting to supplant the authority Of the slave mas- with chat
of God, slaves ought to recast the veil Of fantasy over the psychic place of lack uncovered by the institution Of slavery. Religion
became source Of a grounded more in the patriarchs Of the Old Testament than in race, allowing for identification With heroes like
Moses, Joshua, Jonah, and Noah, who were delivered from their own suffering and that of the world around them. Through
such fantasies the slave's suffering could be contextualized as proof of a unique access to being ,
as proof of one's divine selection for salvation . This is precisely what we see in Gronniosaw, who asserts, "l am Willing,
and even desirous of being counted as nothing," for "l know that every trial and trouble that I've met with... (has) been sanctified to
me."'08 Gronniosaw takes the concept of the chosen to its extreme, articulating his worthiness of financial aid from
others through a demonstration of his position of distinction from all sinners, white and black. Seeking to constitute himself as a
chosen one rhetorically severing this religiously sanctified self from established notions of race .
Gronniosaw simultaneously distances himself particularly from other blacks because he
realizes that as race augments
the notion itself of a group identity it also implicitly contests the fantasies religion allows. Through these
revivifying religious fantasies of being often promised salvation in this world, and not just the next, the limits of the agency they
covenanted were displayed in the ability of slave masters to themselves bind race to religion in order to justify notions of white
supremacy. Such biblical events as Noah's cursing of the descendants Of his son Ham to forever become the ervants of all Other men
were significant to this pro- cess. Through this Story, whites could not only promote che association of blacks With Ham, whose
name "is a vulgarization of Cham," or ch'm, the Hebrew word black, bur also present black skin as the sign Of a servi- tudc and cursd
suffering that was divinely sanctioned. 109 This suffering, to race, is merely the obverse of that constructed in rhetoric of
Gronniosaw. What we see through such contention over racc and suffering is that African Americans encounter continuous obstacles
in the construc- tian Of their fantasy of being through iancc upon the apparatus of race. Because racc as Object a today still remains
discursively tied to the trauma attempted to Compensate in slavery, African American identity ever Grcles chis traumatic past,
defined by a suffering that the concept Of racial Identity alternately attempts to alleviate and traumatically unfurls. As Lacan notes,
"There is nothing more difficult than separating a word from discourse …. As soon as you begin at
this level, the whole discourse comes running after you. ” Still able to function as a stigma for African Americans,
what the word "race" marks is a fantasy difference that not only discursively justified the master's brutal and traumatic scarring of
the slave's flesh and psyche but also still today repeats its long historical function of signifying the lack of some quality needed to
make African Americans the equals of whites. It is therefore no surprise that the process initiated by slaves
of forming for blacks a protective group identity demanded the unifying function of music and
communal activities like religious worship, and could not rely solely upon the efforts to resignify race
that we see praised by African American academics like Gates and Baker. As scholars such as Ron Eyerman have
demonstrated, African American racial identity could only be truly solidified as a discursive concept
after slavery ended, at the moment post-Reconstruction when an emerging black middle class
and intelligentsia had finally attained sufficient levels of agency over discourse to employ race in calls for
political unity. While most African American scholarship repeats endlessly this early attempt by the
intelligentsia and the slaves themselves to resignify and politically redeploy race , Trauma and Race suggests a
need finally to advance beyond mere resignification. What resignification today entails is an ambivalent
scholarly desire to maintain race that is actively facilitated by conceptualizations of agency and identity
as discursive, a desire to uphold race while also depriving it of a lethal essentialism that is often
the core of racism, ambivalence suggests race's position not only as a fantasy Object, or Object a,
but also as a Symbolic remnant, as a link— often willfully preserved by scholars—to the traumatic
Real of slavery’s jouissance. By contrast, Trauma and Race seeks to articulate a notion agency and
identity that distances itself from both race and the traumatic past it incorporates.

Turn – Blackness is not an inevitable position outside of the symbolic, rather it

is a contingent signifier that is sustained by affective and discursive investments
George 2016 (Sheldon G. teaches courses in both literature and theory. Concentrating
primarily on American and African-American literature, his courses explore literary
representations of American identity, as they are expressed in the writings of authors spanning
from antebellum to contemporary America. His literary and cultural theory courses are aimed at
granting students more nuanced and complex understandings of the interplay between
literature, culture and identity. With a particular focus on psychoanalytic theory, Professor
George's research and published work use Lacanian psychoanalysis to investigate the effects of
slavery and racism on American racial identity. Some of his courses include the graduate
seminar in Contemporary Critical Theory, Toni Morrison and American Literature, Modernism
and the Harlem Renaissance, and Race and Gender in Psychoanalytic Theory. “Trauma and Race:
A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity,” pgs. 13-19, Baylor University Press, Waco,
OCR’d, https://muse.jhu.edu/book/44556 -CR)

The traumatic past of slavery has rooted African American identity in contradiction. Where this identity is
tasked with representing a people engaged in an ongoing struggle for social equality, the concept of
race itself, which grounds this identity, leaves open the African American subject to both the racism and the
trauma that issues from this past. What I would like to begin to articulate in this first chapter of Trauma and Race is the argument
that race has emerged as a precarious apparatus of being for African Americans. The central charge of
race in American culture is to mediate a relation to what we may view as a trans-historical jouissance of the
past, a traumatic excess of pleasure and pain that emanates from slavery to organize both subjective
identity and the broader American social sphere. This past of slavery has produced both race and
racism as modes of jouissance, as methods of accessing being. Jouissance, I would suggest, is in the
signifiers of race themselves, which enable remanifestation of structures of enjoyment that bind
subjects equally to concepts of race and to practices of racism. It is therefore a focus on the function of the signifier
that must contextualize this study. While I most specifically address the effects of the racial signifier upon contemporary
African Americans in chapter 2, what I would like to delineate here, through reference to both the history of slavery and narratives
by ex-slaves themselves, is a core relation among the signifier, jouissance, and the past of slavery that is
missed by much of the contemporary scholarship on race. The limitation of most African American
scholarly investigations of race, I argue, is their allegiance to conceptions of discourse, race, and
agency that are framed not by psychoanalysis but by poststructuralist criticism. Jacques Derrida's
poststructuralist argument that "centers" of meaning have "no natural [or] fixed locus" but are secured
instead by discourse provides for the scholarship on race an anxiously alluring appeal. The anxiety associated
with this theory emerges because poststructuralism poses a challenge to the very concept of race itself,
which for many African American scholars provides both a sense of identity and a route toward agency .
As early as 1987 Barbara Christian, a pioneer of African American studies, articulated the rationale for resisting
this theory, observing that poststructuralist critique of the center emerged "just when the literature
of peoples of color began to move to 'the center. ' "2 But, even when not explicitly employing poststructuralist
theory, African American scholars nevertheless mirror its signature processes of decentering and
discursively resignifying identity in their efforts to establish race as a "social construct ." We see
this, for example, in the assertion of leading African American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. that "precisely because
‘blackness' is a socially constructed category , it must be learned through imitation,” and, most important for Gates,
it is therefore also open to "repetition and revision.” This attempt to revise race discursively is essential to
African American theoretical conceptions of agency; but, like poststructuralist models, it is limited by its frequent failure to
acknowledge and account for influences upon race and the racial subject that lie outside of the
structure imposed by discourse. While this focus upon discourse directs much of contemporary race theory toward
analyses of what we may call after Jacques Lacan the social Symbolic, Trauma and Race is an attempt not only to articulate the
impact of the discursive signifiers of race on the unconscious of African Americans but also to circumscribe a traumatic
Real
that escapes and indeed structures the agency of the signifiers of the Symbolic . Lacan speaks of
the Real as the excluded center of the subject . Coining the term "extimate," Lacan defines the Real as that which
simultaneously is most intimate, or internal to the subject, and excluded from symbolization . This
extimate Real, I suggest, is what a theoretical focus solely upon discourse misses. My work links this
Real to slavery as an exclusion within the social Symbolic that yet shapes discourse of race and
indeed founds central aspects of African American and American identity. However, my interest is not so much in the
history of slavery as in the ineffable experience of jouissance—or excessive, traumatizing pain and pleasure—that issues out of this
Real past to fuel the psychic desires and fantasies of Americans. Tying this trauma to the fundamental trauma of
subject formation, the traumatic elision of being that occurs with the onset of subjectivity, I read slavery as marking
an upsurge of jouissance, such that slavery comes to signify a moment in time when the
pleasures and pains associated with being are open to manipulation by White Americans . What
enables such manipulation is the concept of race itself, thus constituted by slavery as an apparatus of jouissance
that African Americans today still struggle to control and manipulate. But this precarious source of jouissance and
being remains for African Americans an illusory object of attachment that binds them to the unbearable
past. Through the function of the signifier, I argue, race enables a psychoanalytic process of repetition that
once again produces for African Americans the psychic trauma of the Real . Maintaining, therefore, that slavery has
produced a historical legacy that is both discursive and psychical, I turn to Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory because his
fundamental assertion that the "unconscious is constituted by the effects of speech on the subject"
offers a more expansive understanding of the workings of the signifier than is available in other
theoretical models.' Though indebted to Freud for his ideas on the unconscious, much of Lacan's thinking on the signifier emerges
from a rereading of the seminal work in linguistics and semiotics produced by Ferdinand de Saussure, a theorist whose thinking also
influenced Derrida. However, the divergences between Lacan's and Derrida's theories offer radical
implications both for how we understand the effects of the past upon African Americans and for how we
conceptualize an African American agency meant to resist this past and its continuing legacy. Both Lacan and
Derrida derive from Saussure the notion that signifiers have no inherent meaning but instead produce
meaning by operating through what Lacan calls "themes of opposition" and "functions of contrast and
similitude.” Derrida advances this Saussurian reading by reducing signification to "absolute chance " and
the "genetic indetermination" of the signifier, arguing that meaning only ever accumulates as a "trace," as the by-
product of differential relations established between signifiers in their “movement [along] a chain." Where Lacan
differs from both Saussure and Derrida is in his understanding of the signifier as not arbitrary or
indeterminate but contingent upon causation that is external to the Symbolic. The concept of
contingency is what brings Lacan to a notion of trauma as structural to the functioning of the
unconscious and conscious. Lacan explains this contingency by linking it to what he calls "cause,"
which involves "impediment, failure, split." Cause is the traumatic and eruptive core around which the
signifiers of consciousness ever assemble themselves, if only in the defensive act of establishing for the subject a
protective distance from this core. In tying cause to both failure and split, Lacan points to its extimate
relation to the subject, its internal externality . Cause, as trauma, may manifest itself in a movement
outward, through the failures, slips, and stumbles of the subject as she or he unknowingly charts a
repetitive path toward a traumatic past that remains internally salient, simultaneously enticing and terrifying;
but cause manifests, finally, as an intrusion external to the system of signifiers that structure
meaning for the subject, as an experience that splits the subject between meaning and nonmeaning. Emerging as that
which traumatically defies meaning, cause always "something anti-conceptual" and thus is inevitably bound to the Real as that
register of the psyche that is removed from symbolization. Tbe
cause that Trauma and Race demarcates is what I call the
jouissance of slavery, a psychic experience of trauma that emerges from the past and repeats
itself in the present through the agency of the signifier. It is the signifier that establishes the link
through which this traumatic cause, germane to the slave's experience and not to that of his or her
descendant, intrusively establishes its place in the internal lives of African Americans . The signifier
defines the category of race, allowing for a conscious association of African Americans with a
chain of signifiers that links them to the brutal historical past. This linkage confronts African Americans not
only with the terrible history itself but also with a traumatic lack that, I will argue, was made manifest by
slavery. What the signifiers of race do, therefore, whether emanating from the racist other or
whether willfully embraced as a source of identity, is rearticulate the subject's sense of self
around an unveiled lack once defined in the racist past. Thus, I maintain, the discursive linking of African American
identity to this past becomes the means through which the trauma of slavery is repeated in the
experiences of African Americans. From Resignification to the Barred Subject The anti-conceptual cause of which I speak,
this more than historical jouissance of slavery, is precisely what is ignored by both Derridean poststructuralism
and leading African Amcrican scholars like Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Houston Baker. At the heart of these scholars'
work is a focus on the Symbolic that actively limits African American agency and identity to what
we may call after Judith Butler "resignification," the effort "to lay claim" to the terms that define us "precisely because of the
way these terms, as it were, lay their claim on us prior to our full knowledge.” Butler's Derridean approach to agency and
the challenges she recognizes in it are useful for shedding light on the mirroring route embraced by
African American scholars. Working, like Butler, with a conceptualization of the Symbolic as a closed
system in which existent signifiers can only be resignified and recirculated, these scholars confront a
particular problematic that can be articulated as the prospect of "forging a future from resources
inevitably impure."12 Without a viable methodology by which newness can enter into the Symbolic, by
which something alien to the system can either be introduced into it or act upon it, the challenge these
scholars come to embrace is how to rearticulate the terms of race "that [once] signaled
degradation" so that they can now “signify a new and affirmative set of meanings," so that this "reversal"
is not one that "retains and reiterates 'he abjected history of the term." It is this focus on resignification
that we see, for example, in Gates' famous theory of "the signifying monkey," which defines a discursive practice of resistance that is
grounded in a "formal revision" that "turns on repetition of structures, and their difference."' 4 Disregarding the psychoanalytic
notion of repetition as tied to the unconscious and Real, Gates
views African American culture as involved in
continual efforts to produce a "chiasmus," or what Gares articulates as a process of "repeating and
simultaneously revising in one deft, discursive act. " Gates relies , ultimately, on a model of agency
that Derrida calls after Levi-Strauss "bricolage": the process of making use of "the instruments [one] finds
at [one's] disposition around [oneself], those which are already there," in one's attempt to, by "trial and error, adapt
them" to a use for "which [they] had not been especially conceived." Though Gates seeks to imagine a beyond of
this bricolage and reach outside of the American Symbolic by asserting that African Americans must turn to their
own "black vernacular tradition" itself in their efforts to " 'deconstruct,' if you will, the ideas of difference inscribed in the trope of
race," Gateslimits agency to language, arguing that we must "take discourse itself as our common
subject. " Both Gates and Baker bind African American political resistance to language and thus also to
the Symbolic, with Baker viewing the slave narrative and historical figures like Booker T. Washington as embracing a politics of
"liberating manipulation" and "revolutionary renaming' that employs language as a black defense against and revision of ancient
terrors, mistaken identities, dread losses." In the view of an African American theory of race shaped by the work of thinkers like
Gates and Baker, this revisionary repetition has been and continues to be a means for blacks to alter the social Structure of a racist
Symbolic. This effort at resignification is laudable and indeed necessary. But the
problem with a theoretical focus on
the Symbolic is that it does not acknowledge how what is extimate may impact upon the Symbolic
and the discursive activities of the subject beyond his or her conscious volition , and neither does
it offer a direct means to address the scars that may be left on the subject's psyche through the
operations of racism within this Symbolic. Indeed, it may be argued that what is missed in such a focus on the Symbolic
is the very psychoanalytic subject him- or herself . As Lacan states, "the subject is not the one who
thinks" or speaks through discourse. Lacan's work continually returns to a critique of what he calls "the I-
cracy,' or "myth" of "the I that masters" discourse, the myth of the "speaker" that "is identical to itsclf."20 Known for his focus on
the split subject, Lacan counters the I-cracy by asserting that "the point" is "to know whether, when I speak of
myself, I am the same as the self of whom speak." In opposition to the speaking subject of the I-cracy,
Lacan "identifies the subject with that which is originally subverted by the system of the
signifier."22 What Lacan points to is "the function of barring, the striking out of another thing" that his theory
establishes as inherent in the subject's relation to the Other’s signifiers. It is this process by which
something essential to the subject is stricken from him or her that I propose enables an understanding of the effects
of slavery upon both the slave and contemporary African Americans . Lacanian theory shows that all
subjects are constituted through the Other's signifiers . More precisely, the subject, Lacan argues, can
only emerge as a signifier. Lacan notes that because language "exists prior to each entry into it," the
subject is "the slave of a discourse" in which "his place is already inscribed at his [or her] birth." 24 Gaining subjectivity
and meaning through those "themes of opposition" and "functions of contrast and similitude" that we have already seen are
essential to the operations of the signifier, "this subject," Lacan asserts, "which, was previously nothing if not a subject coming
into being—solidifies into a signifier." The function Lacan ascribes to the Symbolic and its signifiers is that of producing the
aphanisis of the subject, her or his "fading" or "disappearance" under the signifier’s ageney. Subjectivity not only restricts
the subject to the Other's pre- existent universe of meaning; it also deprives the subject of
access to those essential components of the self that cannot be circumscribed by signification, the
unconscious and Real as the barred or stricken portions of the self that constitute the fundamental
lack of subjectivity. Where Lacan's work is particularly useful is in providing a comparative
framework through which we may distinguish a heightened aphanisic effect of the signifier upon
the slave, a barring that often is again manifested for African Americans as an internal lack when accosted by
acts of racism. Lacan argues that what each "subject has to free himself [or herself] of th[is] aphanisic
effect of the signifier.” This ethical stance fundamental to Lacanian theory coincides with my own efforts in Trauma and
Race to imagine an agency beyond the Symbolic.
 Contingency
Contingency’s true for anti-blackness. Neg authors ignore history and argue
from premise-to-conclusion.
Thomas ‘18
Dr. Greg Thomas is an Associate Professor and teaches global Black Studies texts out of the English Department at
Tufts University. The author holds a Ph.D. in Rhetoric from The University of California, Berkeley – Thomas is the
author of three published books – including The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power: Pan-African Embodiment and Erotic
Schemes of Empire; Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh: Power, Knowledge & Pleasure in Lil' Kim's Lyricism; and Word
Hustle: Critical Essays and Reflections on the Work of Donald Goines, a collection co-edited with L.H. Stallings. From
the Article: “Afro-Blue Notes: The Death of Afro-pessimism (2.0) ?” – From the Journal: Theory & Event, Volume 21,
Number 1, January 2018 – p. 282-317 - Published by Johns Hopkins University Press- obtained via the Project MUSE -
#CutWithRJ - Premium Collection Database.

There is here a general critical erasure of the massive tradition of Black anti-colonialism —or anti-colonial Black resistance to
“anti-Black-ness” and anti-Black colonialism , which transcends nationalization. Wilderson’s “Afro-pessimist” rejects the anti-
colonialist paradigms of supposedly “other” peoples, and yet in a manner that reinstates US or Western coloniality nonetheless—a white colonialism
that oppresses “the Black” inside and outside the United States’s official geopolitical limits. This position can thus
make a virtue out of
automatic and abso-lute anti-alliance postures with no further, actual political action then required for Black people,
“the Black critic,” or any Black liberation struggle on this view. Such chauvinism without political commitment or engagement

beyond critique is logically consistent, for pessimism, where mere resentment or ressentiment can masquerade as
resistance or “pro-Black” “radicalism.” After all, Afro-pessimism ( 2.0 ) begins with a proud suspicion of
Black liberation or Black liberation move- ment, itself, no less than of its potentially “anti-racist” or “anti-Black” political alliances. This
provincial “American” pessimism reveals more affinities with Créolite in the Caribbean than Césaire’s anti-colonialist eruption of Pan-African Négritude ,
in reality, its narrowly and nega- tively delimited rhetoric of the “Blackness” of “the Black” (as “Slave,” of course) notwithstanding. As
if this too is
a virtue, pessimism is not just suspicious of power but possibility —while, upholding dystopia, it is
casually dismissive of all historical actuality that does not support a pessimist paradigm ,
orientation or sensibility. Analytically, moreover, there is somehow no white colonialism for Blacks to fight in Africa or Black countries of Black people
anywhere and no terrible landlessness that afflicts the African diasporas of Blackness captive within white settler and/or imperial state formations, for
Wilderson and Afro- pessimism ( 2.0 ) The pessimist rejection of anti-colonialism goes particularly awry with Fanon. The institution of academia came to
Fanon late with great selectivity. It isolates him from the whole tradition of Black anti-colonialism (or anti-colonialist Blackness) so that he becomes a
cipher, a sort of color-blinding Rorschach test even. In fact, Fanon is isolated from himself. The Fanon taken up like a weapon by the Black liberation
movement of the 1960s and '70s with the "African Revolution" at large was a militant practitioner and is the author of an extant four-volume body of
work recently even collected in the form of a hefty oeuvre complète by French as well as Arabic world publishers(i.e., La Découverte and Al Hibr). The
Fanon examined in academia got reduced to a very few pages of Black Skin, White Masks, which was written when Fanon still thought he could be
"French" and faithful to French colonial empire while opposing physiognomic but not cultural or "civilizational" racism. That text of the middle-class
assimilé is of two minds—ambivalent with its currents of brilliance. Yet this [End Page 295] Fanon becomes "post-colonialist" for US academia when
truthfully he becomes "anti-colonialist" and only later both in battle and in the related texts likewise disregarded by Afro-pessimism (2.0): Wilderson
privileges the colonized Fanon rather than A Dying Colonialism and Toward the African Revolution as well as The Wretched of the Earth. The standard
suppression of The Wretched of the Earth cannot succeed in Red, White & Black. Wilderson tries to dichotomize Fanon so that Black Skin, White Masks
(1952) is cast as a text about "race" and "slavery," and thereby "Blackness": The Wretched of the Earth is by contrast cast as a "post-colonial's" text
primarily about "land restoration," or "settler colonialism," as if they can be cast apart from "Blackness" and Black struggles.32 This is a false dichotomy.
Fanon's corpus does not yield this schism. It should go without saying that Black Skin, White Masks is itself a text of colonialism. It is often and falsely
read as an exclusively "Caribbean" text, inapplicable to Afro-North America or even non-French colonies in the Caribbean, despite its central references
to Chester Himes and Richard Wright as well as "Brer Rabbit" folklore; and even though this Fanon had written, "I come back to one fact: Wherever he
goes, the Negro remains a Negro."33 The Wretched of the Earth is often and falsely read as an exclusively "Algerian" text, inapplicable to North
America, despite its numerous references to "niggers" as well as Négritude or "Negro-African" culture—Blackness, especially for the Second Congress
of Black Writers and Artists in Rome; despite its global "Third World" politics; and despite Fanon's aggressively militant Pan-Africanism. It remains easy
for some to ignore Fanon's insistent categorization of the Algerian revolution as an African revolution as well as how "anti-Black racism" along with anti-
Black slavery has lived on the African continent, not exclusively in Africa's Black diaspora. Curiously, Wilderson's Incognegro would expose the counter-
insurgent canonization of Black Skin, White Masks in certain quarters, thanks to his youthful contact with the Black Panther Party, which did not
dichotomize Blackness or anti-Blackness and colonialism or anti-colonialism in its own revolutionary Fanonism. It trafficked mostly in Les damnés de la
terre: "…my father had caught me with it last night and beat the living daylights out of me—so I knew it must be good. That had never happened with
Invisible Man. Then, using one of my old cocktail party gimmicks, I quoted a passage of Fanon from memory: 'From birth, I began,' it is clear to him that
this narrow world, strewn with prohibition, can only be called into question by absolute violence.' I told Darnell that for some strange reason that had
made me think about Kenwood, but why, I didn't know; nor did I know why my father had beaten me when Fanon's other book, Black Skin, White
Masks, was nestled on his bookshelf beside the works of Sigmund Freud" (Wilderson 2008, 247).34 While Sexton counts the sum total of references to
"Fanon" in Red, White & Black, as if this datum [End Page 296] alone should impress critical audiences, his tabulation begs the question of which Fanon
is referenced and how in a manner all too faithful to the white academic management of Fanon and Fanonism as a crisis to be contained by whatever
means:35 Red, White & Black seeks to quarantine The Wretched of the Earth from Kenwood or Minnesota, and all settler sites of US colonialism,
conceding it away from "Blackness" in an ongoing quarrel with Native American, post-colonialist, and sometimes Palestinian "analogy," even though
Wilderson needs to mine its rhetoric at key moments—to speak of putting the enemy "out of the picture" and bringing about "the end of the world" via
"absolute violence," for example, when narratively these words then become the words of "Fanon" rather than those of The Wretched of the Earth
specifically, given Wilderson's conventional academic preference for a colonially decontextualized Black Skin, White Masks. No antithesis of "slavery,"
colonialism becomes unrecognizable as colonialism in Wilderson in ways sacrificial of the Blacks and Blackness subject to it—on and off official
plantations. Firstly, colonialism cannot be granted as an object of study to "postcolonial" theory in US or Western academia. It can only appropriate the
matter or study of colonialism—from the long history of anti-colonialist theory and praxes preceding it and persisting in spite of it—as a colonizing
political act itself, an arrogant critical appropriation that Wilderson routinely accepts without question. What's more, slavery in "Plantation America" is
colonial slavery, just as colonialism is a slaveocratic mode of colonialism in the Western Hemisphere. Walter Rodney was sure to note as much explicitly
in articles such as "Slavery and Underdevelopment" (1979) as well as "Plantation Society in Guyana" (1981). There is no system of slavery in any part of
these Americas that is not still settler colonial slavery; no settler colonialism without chattel slavery or racial slavery and their neo-slaveries. Finally in
this regard, colonialism is not reducible to a simple matter of cartography—or "the postcolonial's capacity for cartographic restoration."36 The likes of
C.A. Diop and Césaire aside, this is why Amilcar Cabral could write Our People Are Our Mountains (1972); and why Sylvia Wynter would engage Anibal
Quijano's "coloniality of power" framework with "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom" (2003); and why one apparently
disappeared Black radical tradition would theorize "internal colonialism" or "domestic colonialism" along with "eternal colonialism" and "neo-
colonialism," from within the US imperial colony, long before the commercialization of "postcolonialism" or "postcolonial theory" in Western academia.
This is further why Fanon himself would write in A Dying Colonialism: "It is not the soil that is occupied. It is not the ports or the airdromes. French
colonialism has settled itself in the very center of the Algerian individual and has undertaken a sustained work of cleanup, of expulsion of self, of
rationally pursued mutilation" (Fanon 1965, 65).37 This [End Page 297] is why Fanon himself would write for an El Moujahid article now in Toward the
African Revolution: "True liberation is not that pseudo-independence in which ministers having a limited responsibility hobnob with an economy
dominated by the colonial pact. Liberation is the total destruction of the colonial system, from the pre-eminence of the language of the oppressor and
'departmentalization,' to the customs union that in reality maintains the former colonized in the meshes of the culture, of the fashion, and of the
images of the colonialist."38 This is also why it is important to recall that it was never a strictly cartographic colonialism bereft of slavery and Blackness
that led Fanon to promulgate his vision of "new humanity" so fully and graphically in The Wretched of the Earth after A Dying Colonialism beyond Black
Skin, White Masks. Fanon's
"Worlds," Revisited Thus there is the serious problem of elliptical truncation in
Wilderson's repeated quotation of the "end of the world" line taken from Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. The
"world" is never so generic and singular as pessimism would have it , whether in or outside this or that Fanon
—whether it is the critical but "French" colonial Fanon or the radically decolonizing Fanon who wages pan-African revolt against the French and all
colonialism. The younger Fanon wrote, "The Martinican is a man crucified. …[M]y friend had fulfilled in a dream his wish to become white—that is, to
be man. …I will tell him, 'The environment, society are responsible for your delusion.' Once that has been said, the rest will follow of itself, and what
that is we know. The end of the world."39 The "world" in question is quite a specific one. It is not the only world that is, or ever was, before another
must be created into being out of necessity. It is the white world that represents itself "as if" (to borrow a turn of phrase from Wynter here) it were the
only world in truth.

Our historically contingent approach lessens the pornotropic gaze. They are
more parasitic. (AT Lomax)
Tamura A. Lomax 11. Doctoral Student in Religion, Vanderbilt. Hortense Spillers served on
Lomax’s doctoral committee. “Changing the Letter: Theorizing Race and Gender in Pop Cultural
‘Media’ Through a Less Pornotropic Lens.” Dissertation. May.
http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-03282011-
101108/unrestricted/LomaxDissertatonFull.pdf.

However, it is important to note that while

black women and girls are impacted by superimposed pornotropic
ways of being seen, a distinction is to be drawn between identities as produced by others and
identities as appropriated and performed by black women and girls themselves. Therefore, although identities are
superimposed onto black women and girls’ bodies, they are always contested and appropriated. Despite contestation
and appropriation, culturally produced and maintained ideas about identities are also so hegemonicly determined that they appear normative and are
thus internalized. Although
the pornotropic gaze may be internalized, simultaneously operating may
also be their contestations, notwithstanding how difficult resistance to pornotropic gazing may
be, particularly as they are intermeshed with reality and as such, difficult to resist altogether .¶
Exploring the pornotropic gaze and its determinacy within contemporary black religion 12 and cultural media 13 is the major aim of this dissertation.
Womanist theologians and ethicists created a cross-pollinated theo-ethical trajectory that demarginalized and re-presented North American black
women as thinking and feeling moral agents with experiences worthy of academic inquiry. Pivotal to their discourse is demythologizing black
womanhood and its variety of cultural representations. However, a major proposition circulating throughout this dissertation is that, while womanist
theoethical discourse opens space for examining North American black women’s experiences and representations, what is needed to move that
discourse forward in African American Religion14 from its dependencies on restricted analyses of black women’s experiences, methodological
limitations and normative conceptual restrictions, is an examination of the manner in which the force of representational epistemes operate in black
religion and culture to over-determine contemporary black women and girls’ experiences within a pornotropic gaze. ¶ This dissertation argues that
religious and cultural media are socially organized technologies of power that reproduce, maintain, circulate, and exchange historical myths on black
womanhood, which black women and girls both resist and appropriate. 15 Notwithstanding how they may be resisted or appropriated, operative
historical myths need to be deconstructed and, in many cases, disoriented. This dissertation achieves this by “changing the letter.” “Changing the
letter,” which refers to the essay, “Changing the Letter: The Yokes, the Jokes of Discourse, or, Mrs. Stowe, Mr. Reed,” written by Spillers, frames both
my theory and strategy for reading (deconstruction) and writing (retheorizing). It holds that words
(“letters”) can be manipulated
(“changed”) in a variety of ways to tell a story that may be either liberative or oppressive
(“yoke”). Therefore, meanings are not fixed, 16 but are constantly influx, although sometimes
appearing stabilized.¶ This dissertation takes issue with the latter perception: the ways that cultural
meanings are stabilized over time and presented as “truth.” 17 Pornotropia 18 thrives off of
controlling ideas that are stabilized and taken for granted. The phrase, “taken for granted,”
highlights what Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann refer to as un-reflected inclinations toward certain actions
developed in the ‘natural attitude’, which presume inter-subjective realities of the life-world to
be similarly experienced or imagined, for example, the idea that there was a world prior to our
existence, made up of subjects, objects and nature, the former of which (human subjects) are endowed with consciousnesses that interpret
meanings amongst themselves in horizontal and cognitive ways. However, “reality,” the conditions that we encounter,

is mediated through interpretation, which gives rise to certain kinds of conduct (over others),
given our stock of previous experiences, either our own or inherited . Previous experiences frame
our “stocks of knowledge” and motivate our attitudes and actions toward certain ends, given
the anticipation of what is believed to be both conventional and probable . 19¶ The “taken for
granted” within the ‘natural attitude’ neglects critical queries that might take up how
relationships between the subject and representation might be situated , or, as interpreters, how
we may be positioned towards either (or both), given attitudes . This kind of thinking leads to
reductive practices such as reading one’s identity in light of the appearance of a (projected)
profile such as the taken for granted “black-female-aswhore” stereotype, as opposed to her
complex subjectivity. The latter enables a variety of readings, thus “lessening” pornotropia,
which depends on the rigidity of a closed script .¶ This dissertation highlights a struggle for truth that is
inextricably linked to lived experiences , that is, social-cultural-historical-political conditions. One aim of
this dissertation is to confuse previous readings of “black womanhood” by blasting the habits of language, linguistic and representational, its internal
signals, inferred ideologies, encodings, and operation. These strategies enable the mass-reproduction and continued circulation and closure of the
script of black womanhood. Circulating
myths of black womanhood need to be taken up . However, they also
need to be taken up differently than they have been previously in African American religion, culture, and womanist theoethical
scholarship. This dissertation explores their deployment in religion and culture and the critiques thereof. Both deployment and criticisms produce
layers of meanings that are reproduced and circulated. I will examine the strategies by which myths of black womanhood travel, getting realigned and
re-appropriated from generation to generation.¶ These
moves “loosen the yoke” and decrease the jolts of
“America’s Grammar Book” on race and gender. The following chapters emphasize loosening the yoke, while the overall aim
of this dissertation is significantly inspired by the reality of the jolt. “The jolt” refers to the ongoing threat of symbolic and material violence caused by
day-to-day representational terror, which is mass-produced in and transmitted through media that “projects”20 and inform certain opinions and
attitudes regarding ‘normativity’ and ‘difference’.
 AT Social Death
Social death is wrong---on an ontological level slaves were never stripped of
their humanity
Mbembe 17 – Research Professor in History and Politics at the Wits Institute for Social and
Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg [Achilles, 2017, Critique of
Black Reason, Chapter Two: The Well of Fantasies, Translated by Laurent Dubois, pg 46, Duke
University Press] AMarb

**gender edited – change denoted by brackets

Through the triple mechanism of capture, removal, and objectification, the

slave was forcibly locked within a
system that prevented him [them] from freely making of his [their] life—and from his life—
something true, something with its own consistency that could stand on its own. Everything produced by the slave
was taken from him: the products of his labor, offspring, the work of his mind. He authored nothing that fully belonged to
him. Slaves were considered mere merchandise, objects of luxury or utility to be bought and sold
to others. At the same time, however, they were human beings endowed with the ability to
speak, capable of creating and using tools. Often deprived of family ties, they were deprived as well of inheritance
and of the enjoyment of the fruits of their own labor. Those to whom they belonged, and who extracted their unpaid labor, denied
them their full humanity. Yet,
on a purely ontological level at least, their humanity was never entirely
erased. They constituted, by the force of things, a supplemental humanity engaged in constant
struggle to escape imprisonment and repetition, and driven by a desire to return to the place
where autonomous creation had once been possible. The suspended humanity of the slave was
defined by the fact that he was [they were] condemned to reconstitute himself [themselves]
perpetually, to announce his [their] radical, unsinkable desire, and to seek liberty or vengeance.
This was especially true when the enslaved refused the radical abdication of the subject that
was demanded of them. Although legally defined as movable property, slaves always remained human,
despite the cruelty, degradation, and dehumanization directed at them. Through their labor in
service of the master, they continued to create a world. Through gesture and speech, they
wove relationships and a universe of meaning, inventing languages, religions, dances, and
rituals and creating “community.”18 Their destitution and the abjection to which they were
subjected never entirely eliminated their capacity to create symbols. By its very existence, the
community of the enslaved constantly tore at the veil of hypocrisy and lies in which slave-
owning societies clothed themselves. The slaves were capable of rebellion and at times disposed
of their own lives through suicide, thus dispossessing their masters of their so-called property
and de facto abolishing the link of servitude. Those who were burdened with the name “Black”
were forcibly placed in a world apart, yet they retained the characteristics that made them
human beyond subjection. Over time they produced ways of thinking and languages that were
truly their own. They invented their own literatures, music, and ways of celebrating the divine.
They were forced to found their own institutions—schools, newspapers, political organizations,
a public sphere different from the official public sphere. To a large extent, the term “Black” is the sign
of minoritization and confinement. It is an island of repose in the midst of racial oppression and objective
dehumanization.
Reducing black people to fungible bodies and reading their experiences through
pain creates the worst form of depoliticization – not only do they disregard
black agency and resistance, they further perpetuate a narrative of white
domination
Kelley 16, Robin D.G. Kelley is one of the most distinguished experts on African American studies and
a celebrated professor who has lectured at some of America’s highest learning institutions. He is
currently Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. 3/22/16,
“Black Study, Black Struggle,” http://www.blackagendareport.com/black_study_black_struggle, NN
Second only to a desire for increased diversity, better mental health services were a chief priority for student protesters. Activists framed their concerns and grievances in the
language of personal trauma. We shouldn’t be surprised. While every generation of black Americans has experienced unrelenting violence, this is the first one compelled to

We are also
witness virtually all of it, to endure the snuffing out of black lives in real time, looped over and over again, until the next murder knocks it off the news.

talking about a generation that has lived through two of the longest wars in U.S. history, raised
on a culture of spectacle where horrific acts of violence are readily available on their smartphones. What Henry
Giroux insightfully identifies as an addiction does nothing to inure or desensitize young people
to violence. On the contrary, it anchors violence in their collective consciousness, produces fear and paranoia – wrapped elegantly in thrill – and shrouds the many ways
capitalism, militarism, and racism are killing black and brown people. So one can easily see why the language of trauma might

appeal to black students. Trauma is real; it is no joke . Mental health services and counseling are urgently needed. But
reading black experience through trauma can easily slip into thinking of ourselves as victims
and objects rather than agents, subjected to centuries of gratuitous violence that have
structured and overdetermined our very being. In the argot of our day, “bodies” – vulnerable and
threatening bodies – increasingly stand in for actual people with names, experiences, dreams,
and desires. I suspect that the popularity of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015), especially among black college students, rests on his singular
emphasis on fear, trauma, and the black body. He writes: “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic
borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random
manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. . . . The spirit and soul are the

Coates
body and brain, which are destructible—that is precisely why they are so precious. And the soul did not escape. The spirit did not steal away on gospel wings.”

makes the startling

implies that the person is the brain, and the brain just another organ to be crushed with the rest of the body’s parts. Earlier in the book, he

declaration that enslaved people “knew nothing but chains. ” I do not deny the violence Coates so
eloquently describes here, and I am sympathetic to his atheistic skepticism. But what sustained enslaved African people
was a memory of freedom, dreams of seizing it, and conspiracies to enact it – fugitive planning, if you will. If
we reduce the enslaved to mere fungible bodies, we cannot possibly understand how they
created families, communities, sociality; how they fled and loved and worshiped and
defended themselves; how they created the world’s first social democracy . “Trauma is real.
But reading black experience through trauma can lead to thinking of ourselves as victims
rather than agents.” Moreover, to identify anti-black violence as heritage may be true in a general
sense, but it obscures the dialectic that produced and reproduced the violence of a regime
dependent on black life for its profitability. It was, after all, the resisting black body that needed
“correction.” Violence was used not only to break bodies but to discipline people who refused enslavement. And the impulse to resist is neither involuntary nor
solitary. It is a choice made in community, made possible by community, and informed by memory,

tradition, and witness. If Africans were entirely compliant and docile, there would have been no
need for vast expenditures on corrections, security, and violence. Resistance is our heritage. And
resistance is our healing. Through collective struggle, we alter our circumstances; contain, escape, or possibly
eviscerate the source of trauma; recover our bodies; reclaim and redeem our dead; and make
ourselves whole. It is difficult to see this in a world where words such as trauma, PTSD, micro-aggression, and triggers have virtually replaced oppression,
repression, and subjugation. Naomi Wallace, a brilliant playwright whose work explores trauma in the context of race, sexuality, class, war, and empire, muses: “Mainstream
America is less threatened by the ‘trauma’ theory because it doesn’t place economic justice at its core and takes the focus out of the realm of justice and into psychology; out of
 emphasizing
the streets, communities, into the singular experience (even if experienced in common) of the individual.” Similarly, George Lipsitz observes that

“interiority,” personal pain, and feeling elevates “the cultivation of sympathy over the creation
of social justice.” This is partly why demands for reparations to address historical and ongoing
racism are so antithetical to modern liberalism. “Through collective struggle, we alter our
circumstances; contain, escape, or possibly eviscerate the source of trauma .” Managing trauma
does not require dismantling structural racism , which is why university administrators focus on avoiding triggers rather than
implementing zero-tolerance policies for racism or sexual assault. Buildings will be renamed and safe spaces for people of color will be created out of a sliver of university real
estate, but proposals to eliminate tuition and forgive student debt for the descendants of the dispossessed and the enslaved will be derided as absurd. This is also why diversity
and cultural-competency training are the most popular strategies for addressing campus racism. As if racism were a manifestation of our “incompetent” handling of “difference.”
If we cannot love the other, we can at least learn to hear, respect, understand, and “tolerate” her. Cultural competency also means reckoning with white privilege, coming to
terms with unconscious bias and the myriad ways white folks benefit from current racial arrangements. Powerful as this might be, the solution to racism still is shifted to the
realm of self-help and human resources, resting on self-improvement or the hiring of a consultant or trainer to help us reach our goal. Cultural-competency training, greater
diversity, and demands for multicultural curricula represent both a resistance to and manifestation of our current “postracial” moment. In Are We All Postracial Yet? (2015),
David Theo Goldberg correctly sees postracialism as a neoliberal revision of multicultural discourse, whose proposed remedies to address racism would in fact resuscitate late-
century multiculturalism. But why hold on to the policies and promises of multiculturalism and diversity, especially since they have done nothing to dislodge white supremacy?
Indeed I want to suggest that the triumph of multiculturalism marked a defeat for a radical anti-racist vision. True, multiculturalism emerged in response to struggles waged by
the Black Freedom movement and other oppressed groups in the 1960s and ’70s. But the programmatic adoption of diversity, inclusion, and multiculturalism vampirized the
energy of a radical movement that began by demanding the complete transformation of the social order and the eradication of all forms of racial, gender, sexual, and class
hierarchy. The point of liberal multiculturalism was not to address the historical legacies of racism, dispossession, and injustice but rather to bring some people into the fold of a
“society no longer seen as racially unjust.” What did it bring us? Black elected officials and black CEOs who helped manage the greatest transfer of wealth to the rich and oversee
the continued erosion of the welfare state; the displacement, deportation, and deterioration of black and brown communities; mass incarceration; and planetary war. We talk
about breaking glass ceilings in corporate America while building more jail cells for the rest. The triumph of liberal multiculturalism also meant a shift from a radical anti-
capitalist critique to a politics of recognition. This means, for example, that we now embrace the right of same-sex couples to marry so long as they do not challenge the
institution itself, which is still modeled upon the exchanging of property; likewise we accept the right of people of color, women, and queer people to serve in the military, killing
and torturing around the world. “I want to suggest that the triumph of multiculturalism marked a defeat for a radical anti-racist vision.” At the same time, contemporary calls for
cultural competence and tolerance reflect neoliberal logic by emphasizing individual responsibility and suffering, shifting race from the public sphere to the psyche. The
postracial, Goldberg writes, “renders individuals solely accountable for their own actions and expressions, not for their group’s.” Tolerance in its multicultural guise, as Wendy
Brown taught us, is the liberal answer to managing difference but with no corresponding transformation in the conditions that, in the first place, marked certain bodies as

Depoliticization involves
suspicious, deviant, abject, or illegible. Tolerance, therefore, depoliticizes genuine struggles for justice and power:

construing inequality, subordination, marginalization, and social conflict, which all require
political analysis and political solutions, as personal and individual, on the one hand, or as
natural, religious, or cultural on the other. Tolerance works along both vectors of depoliticization – it personalizes and it naturalizes or
culturalizes – and sometimes it intertwines them. But how can we embrace our students and acknowledge their pain

while remaining wary of a culture that reduces structural oppression to misunderstanding and
psychology? Love, Study, Struggle Taped inside the top drawer of my desk is a small scrap of paper with three words scrawled across it: “ Love, Study,
Struggle.” It serves as a daily reminder of what I am supposed to be doing. Black study and resistance must begin with love. James
Baldwin understood love-as-agency probably better than anyone. For him it meant to love ourselves as black people; it meant making love the motivation for making revolution;

envisioning a society where everyone is embraced, where there is no oppression, where

it meant

every life is valued – even those who may once have been our oppressors. It did not mean seeking white
people’s love and acceptance or seeking belonging in the world created by our oppressor. In The Fire Next Time (1963), he is unequivocal: “I do not know many Negroes who are
eager to be ‘accepted’ by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief
passage on this planet.” But here is the catch: if we are committed to genuine freedom, we have no choice but to love all. To love all is to fight relentlessly to end exploitation

To love this
and oppression everywhere, even on behalf of those who think they hate us. This was Baldwin’s point – perhaps his most misunderstood and reviled point.

way requires relentless struggle, deep study, and critique . Limiting our ambit to suffering,
resistance, and achievement is not enough. We must go to the root – the historical, political,
social, cultural, ideological, material, economic root – of oppression in order to understand its
negation, the prospect of our liberation. Going to the root illuminates what is hidden from us, largely because most structures of oppression
and all of their various entanglements are simply not visible and not felt. For example, if we argue that state violence is merely a

manifestation of anti-blackness because that is what we see and feel, we are left with no
theory of the state and have no way of understanding racialized police violence in places such
as Atlanta and Detroit, where most cops are black, unless we turn to some metaphysical
explanation. For my generation, the formal classroom was never the space for deep critique precisely because it was not a place of love. The classroom was – and still
is – a performative space, where faculty and students compete with each other. Through study groups, we created our own intellectual communities held together by principle
and love, though the specters of sectarianism, ego, and just-plain childishness blurred our vision and threatened our camaraderie. Still, the political study group was our
lifeblood – both on and off campus. We lived by Karl Marx’s pithy 1844 statement: “But if the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions for all time is
not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly what we have to accomplish in the present – I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything existing, ruthless in two senses:
The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be.” “If we argue that state violence is merely a manifestation of anti-blackness
because that is what we see and feel, we are left with no theory of the state and have no way of understanding racialized police violence.” Study groups introduced me to C. L. R.
James, Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, Barbara Smith, Angela Davis, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Chancellor Williams, George E. M. James, Shulamith Firestone,
Kwame Nkrumah, Kwame Turé, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, Chinweizu Ibekwe, Amílcar Cabral, and others. These texts were our sources of social critique and weapons in
our class war on the bourgeois canon. As self-styled activist-intellectuals, it never occurred to us to refuse to read a text simply because it validated the racism, sexism, free-
market ideology, and bourgeois liberalism against which we railed. Nothing was off limits. On the contrary, delving into these works only sharpened our critical faculties. Love
and study cannot exist without struggle, and struggle cannot occur solely inside the refuge we call the university. Being grounded in the world we wish to make is fundamental.

The most radical ideas

As I argued in Freedom Dreams nearly fifteen years ago, “Social movements generate new knowledge, new theories, new questions.

often grow out of a concrete intellectual engagement with the problems of aggrieved
populations confronting systems of oppression.” Ironically I wrote these words with my students in mind, many of whom were involved
in campus struggles, feeling a bit rudderless but believing that the only way to make themselves into authentic activists was to leave the books and radical theories at home or in
their dorms. The undercommons offers students a valuable model of study that takes for granted the indivisibility of thought and struggle, not unlike its antecedent, the
Mississippi Freedom Schools.

Their interpretation of Social Death is a bad standard for measuring internal

liberation and reduces the significance of Afropess
Barlow 16 (Michael Barlow has a Bachelors degree in Sociology from United States Military
Academy; “Addressing Shortcomings in Afro-
Pessimism”,7/13/18, http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1435/2/addressing-
shortcomings-in-afro-pessimism, DMW)
While the ontological state of Black
social death is an important concept  for resistance scholars to understand, the
typical advocacy of complete societal pessimism in response to that ontological arrangement is
incomplete at best. Many in Afro-Pessimism use the basis of social death to determine the
question of Black political orientation in a way that is problematic. This is not to say that social death
theorization is not important, but that there is a vital distinction that needs to be made both in terms of its application toward
traditional political processes and ensembles of Blackness. Frank Wilderson, Associated Professor of African-American Studies
and Drama at the University of California-Irvine, is quite possibly the leading Afro-Pessimist scholar. He concludes his discussion
of social death by advocating for one to “embrace its disorder, its incoherence, and allow oneself to be
elaborated by it if, indeed, ones politics are to be underwritten by a desire to take down this
country” (2007). In summary, his application of social death is used as a reason why Black life cannot
be oriented at any level of meaningful production within society . While Wilderson is correct that the
material labor and symbolic currency born out of Blackness will always be consumed by whiteness, his conclusion is
paradoxical at some level. If humanism isthe grammar by which civil society determines the
register of subjectivity, why then is that matrix appropriate in determining the state of Black
life, if Black life isinherently the position of what is incommunicable? If social death theory’s
application is one that concludes an impossibility of meaningful Black productivity, then Afro-
Pessimism becomes nothing but a body of literature that echoes the same sentiments  as those
who would understand Black life as a state of nothingness in plain racist terms. Understanding Black
ontology should definitely involve an understanding of the social deadness of the Black subject in relation to society, but
it should not be used as the standard to measure internal liberation . The distinction here is important
because too often Afro-Pessimists scholars like Wilderson conceptualize Black resistance as a singular
orientation toward society. Indeed their work is important to understand the manner in which society operates upon Black
subjects, but it is insufficient to describe an ethic that allows for the pursuit of meaning within
Blackness itself.
 AT: Hannabach
Their only other warrant is the libidinal economy---that’s a bad lens
Adrian Johnston 5, Philosophy Professor @ University of New Mexico, Time Driven:
Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive, Northwestern University Press, Jul 27, 2005, pg.
340-341

In terms of the basic framework of metapsychology, Freuddelineates two fundamental types of conflict
disturbing yet organizing mental life—the conflict between drives and reality (as, most notably, the struggle In-tween
the id and civilization) and the conflict between the drives themselves in la the story of Eros against the
Todrstrieb). In both cases, the individual lends lo be portrayed as the overdetermined play-thing of
powerful forces fighting semi-covert wars with each other just out of the ego's sight . However,
Freud fails to discover a third dimension of conflict in relation to the libidinal economy—the conflict within
each and every drive . The theoretical contribution of this project could easily be summarized as the identification of this
distinct type of conflict and the explication of its sobering consequences for an understanding of the psyche. Despite
the
apparent bleakness and antiutopianism of an assessment of human nature as being perturbed
by an irreducible inner antagonism , there is. surprisingly, what might be described as a
liberating aspect to this splitting of the drives . Since drives are essentially dysfunctional ,
subjects are able to act otherwise than as would be dictated by in-stinctually compelled pursuits
of gratification, satisfaction, and pleasure. In fact, subjects are forced to be free, since, for such beings, the
mandate of nature is forever missing. Severed from a strictly biological master-program and
saddled with a conflict-ridden, heterogeneous jumble of contradictory impulses —impulses
mediated by an inconsistent , unstable web of multiple representations , indicated by Lacan's
"barring" of the Symbolic Other—the parletre has no choice but to bump up against the unnatural void
of its autonomy . The confrontation with this raid is frequently avoided . The true extent of
one's autonomy is, due to its sometimes-frightening implications, just as often relegated to the shadows of
the unconscious as those heteronomous factors secretly shaping conscious thought and
behavior. The contradictions arising from the conflicts internal to the libidi-nal economy mark
the precise places where a freedom transcending mundane materiality has a chance to
briefly flash into effective existence ; such points of breakdown in the deterministic nexus of
the drives clear the space for the sudden emergence of something other than the smooth
continuation of the default physical and sociopsychical "run of things." Moreover, if the drives were fully
functional—and. hence, would not prompt a mobilization of a series of defensive distancing mechanisms struggling to transcend this
threatening corpo-Real—humans would be animalistic automatons, namely, creatures of nature. The pain of a
malfunctioning, internally conflicted libidinal economy is a discomfort signaling a capacity to be an
autonomous subject. This is a pain even more essential to human autonomy than what Kant
identifies .is the guilt-inducing burden of duty and its corresponding pangs of anxious, awe-inspiring respect. Whereas Kant treats
the discomfort associated with duty as a symptom-effect of a transcendental freedom inherent to rational beings, the reverse might
(also) be the case: Such
freedom is the symptom-effect of a discomfort inherent to libidinal beings.
Completely "curing" individuals of this discomfort , even if it were possible , would be
tantamount to divesting them, whether they realize it or not, of an essential feature of their
dignity as subjects. As Lacan might phrase it, the split Trieb is the sinthome of subjectivity proper, the source of a
suffering that, were it to be entirely eliminated, would entail the utter dissolution of
subjectivity itself . Humanity is free precisely insofar as its pleasures are far from perfection,
insofar as its enjoyment is never absolute.
 AT Blackening Debate Good
The debate space only serves to deradicalize and coopt their theory – A prior
question to voting [Affirmative] is whether the interest convergence between
black theory, thought, and a white judge can ever be ethical – Turns case
Curry 13 (Tommy, Texas A&M Philosophy Prof, “Dr. Tommy Curry on the importance of debate for blacks”,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMmkPhvDK2E#t=174 (transcribed), Oct 3)

However, with the lure of progress, more black people are participating in debate, more black judges, more
conceptual debates about blackness. There comes a deradicalization of what black theory and
what black people are supposed to do and represent. Despite our pretense, debate is still a very
privileged world. It’s a pretend world where black people can have their queerness, their feebleness,
their faux radicality recognized. For actual oppressed people, people who can’t afford debate,
who have no knowledge of debate, who fight against actual mechanisms of state, who are not
recognized, these very same qualities mean death. So in debate rounds we get to act, we’re the conduits of this
black suffering. The demographic increase in the black population in debate, however, it’s kind of brought
about a new morality that’s committed to fighting for inclusion, intellectual space, our expanded ideas of
home. But in this I think we miss the extent of our dependency on white recognition. That white judge in the
back of the room that’s comprehending and assimilating our goals with their own liberal and
progressive existence. In other words, it’s through our appeal to white men and women, our need for
their recognition, for their ballot, that frames the ultimate message of our pessimism, our gender
critiques, our colonial analysis. We’re fundamentally dependent on how the white mind situates itself
conceptually to the project of diversification . We appeal to their sympathy, or worse yet, to the intersectional
empathies of whites as the gauge of the transformative potentialities of black theory and historic black thought. So in these spaces
real radicality does not come from an appeal to white recognition, but the rejection of it. In the
declaration that black knowledge or black theory or black accounts of existence in all of the
economic and sexual plurality of our thought is the radicality comes from the idea that we think that those
questions can be answered in the annals of how black people have historically thought about themselves. It need not
depend on our alliances or allegiances with white liberals rationalizing their own existence as
justifiable through their endorsement or alliances with what we think about ourselves or black people’s situation
in the world. Black debate should ultimately move to the rejection of white education – adjudication if
black theory is about the liberation of black people and a move to definitions of knowledge or cells
or concepts that don’t currently exist then how can we expect the dilapidated ideas of white sentimentality projected
from an archaic and racialized whiteness to understand or even comprehend the interrelatedness of propositions that are beyond
their present being. How they understand something that is beyond their very own existence the true
radicality of black people debating points to the negation of white comprehension of black ideas
of liberation not their assimilation or recognition of them . So these ideas of us saying we have progressed
fundamentally rooted in how white people see us is a problem.
 Progress Possible
Progress is possible through legal change – even if the state has the potential to
roll back some policies, antiblackness can be deconstructed via policy changes.
Omi & Winant 12 (Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Michael Omi is an American sociologist,
Howard Winant is an American sociologist and race theorist, “Resistance is futile?: a response to
Feagin and Elias,” SYMPOSIUM ON RETHINKING RACIAL FORMATION THEORY, Ethnic and Racial
Studies, Volume 36, 2013, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2012.715177, accessed on
7/17/18, AB)

white racist rule

In Feagin and Elias’s account,appears unalterable and permanent in the USA . There is little sense that the ‘white racial frame’ evoked by systemic racism

They dismiss important rearrangements and reforms as merely ‘a distraction

theory changes in significant ways over historical time.

from more ingrained structural oppressions and deep lying inequalities that continue to define
US society’ (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21). Feagin and Elias use a concept they call ‘surface flexibility’ to argue that white elites frame racial realities in ways that suggest change, but are merely engineered to reinforce the underlying structure of
racial oppression. Feagin and Elias say the phrase ‘racial democracy’ is an oxymoron a word defined in the dictionary as a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms. If they mean the USA is a contradictory and incomplete democracy in respect to race and

The USA is a racially despotic country in many

racism issues, we agree. If they mean that people of colour have no democratic rights or political power in the USA, we disagree.

ways, but in our view it is also in many respects a racial democracy, capable of being influenced
towards more or less inclusive and redistributive economic policies, social policies, or for that
matter, imperial policies . What is distinctive about our own epoch in the USA (post-Second World War to the present) with respect to race and racism? Over the past decades there has been a steady drumbeat of efforts to
contain and neutralize civil rights, to restrict racial democracy, and to maintain or even increase racial inequality. Racial disparities in different institutional sites employment, health, education persist and in many cases have increased. Indeed, the post-2008 period
has seen a dramatic increase in racial inequality. The subprime home mortgage crisis, for example, was a major racial event. Black and brown people were disproportionately affected by predatory lending practices; many lost their homes as a result; race-based

It would be easy to conclude

wealth disparities widened tremendously. that white racial dominance has been , as Feagin and Elias do,

continuous and unchanging throughout US history such a perspective misses the dramatic . But

twists and turns in racial politics that have occurred since the Second World War and the civil
rights era. claim that we overly inflate the significance of the changes wrought by the civil
Feagin and Elias

rights movement, and that we ‘overlook the serious reversals of racial justice and persistence of
huge racial inequalities’ (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21) that followed in its wake. We do not. In Racial Formation we wrote about ‘racial reaction’ in a chapter of that name, and elsewhere in the book as well. Feagin and Elias

While we argue that the right wing was able to

devote little attention to our arguments there; perhaps because they are in substantial agreement with us.

‘rearticulate’ race and racism issues to roll back some of the gains of the civil rights movement,
we also believe that there are limits to what the right could achieve in the post-civil rights
political landscape. US racial conditions have
So we agree that the present prospects for racial justice are demoralizing at best. But we do not think that is the whole story.

changed over the post-Second World War period Some of the major , in ways that Feagin and Elias tend to downplay or neglect.

reforms of the 1960s have proved irreversible; they have set powerful democratic forces in
motion. the desegregation of the
These racial (trans)formations were the results of unprecedented political mobilizations, led by the black movement, but not confined to blacks alone. Consider

armed forces key civil rights movement victories of the 1960s: the Voting Rights Act, the
, as well as

Immigration and Naturalization Act Loving v. Virginia (Hart- Celler), as well as important court decisions like that declared antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional. While we
have the greatest respect for the late Derrick Bell, we do not believe that his ‘interest convergence hypothesis’ effectively explains all these developments. How does Lyndon Johnson’s famous (and possibly apocryphal) lament upon signing the Civil Rights Act on 2

July 1964 ‘We have lost the South for a generation’ count as ‘convergence’? The US racial regime has been transformed in significant ways . As Antonio

The civil rights reforms can be seen as a classic

Gramsci argues, hegemony proceeds through the incorporation of opposition (Gramsci 1971, p. 182). example of this process; here the
US racial regime under movement pressure was exercising its hegemony. But Gramsci insists that such reforms which he calls ‘passive revolutions’ cannot be merely symbolic if they are to be effective: oppositions must win real gains in the process. Once again, we

there were important if partial victories that shifted the racial state and
are in the realm of politics, not absolute rule. So yes, we think

transformed the significance of race in everyday life further victories can take place . And yes, we think that

both on the broad terrain of the state and on the more immediate level of social interaction: in daily

the most important accomplishment of the anti-racist

interaction, in the human psyche and across civil society. Indeed we have argued that in many ways

movement of the 1960s in the USA was the politicization of the social race-based . In the USA and indeed around the globe,

movements demanded not only the inclusion of racially defined ‘others’ and the
democratization of structurally racist societies, but also the recognition and validation by both
the state and civil society of racially-defined experience and identity . These demands broadened and deepened democracy itself. They facilitated
not only the democratic gains made in the USA by the black movement and its allies, but also the political advances towards equality, social justice and inclusion accomplished by other ‘new social movements’: secondwave feminism, gay liberation, and the
environmentalist and anti-war movements among others. By no means do we think that the post-war movement upsurge was an unmitigated success. Far from it: all the new social movements were subject to the same ‘rearticulation’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, p. xii)
that produced the racial ideology of ‘colourblindness’ and its variants; indeed all these movements confronted their mirror images in the mobilizations that arose from the political right to counter them. Yet even their incorporation and containment, even their
confrontations with the various ‘backlash’ phenomena of the past few decades, even the need to develop the highly contradictory ideology of ‘colourblindness’, reveal the transformative character of the ‘politicization of the social’. While it is not possible here to
explore so extensive a subject, it is worth noting that it was the long-delayed eruption of racial subjectivity and self-awareness into the mainstream political arena that set off this transformation, shaping both the democratic and antidemocratic social movements
that are evident in US politics today. What are the political implications of contemporary racial trends? Feagin and Elias’s use of racial categories can be imprecise. This is not their problem alone; anyone writing about race and racism needs to frame terms with care
and precision, and we undoubtedly get fuzzy too from time to time. The absence of a careful approach leads to ‘racial lumping’ and essentialisms of various kinds. This imprecision is heightened in polemic. In the Feagin and Elias essay the term ‘whites’ at times refers
to all whites, white elites, ‘dominant white actors’ and very exceptionally, anti-racist whites, a category in which we presume they would place themselves. Although the terms ‘black’, ‘African American’ and ‘Latino’ appear, the term ‘people of colour’ is emphasized,

The black/white paradigm made more sense in the

often in direct substitution for black reference points. In the USA today it is important not to frame race in a bipolar manner.

past than it does in the twenty-first century The racial make-up of the nation has now changed .

dramatically . Since the passage of the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, the USA has become more ‘coloured’. A ‘majorityminority’ national demographic shift is well underway. Predicted to arrive by the mid-twenty-first century, the numerical
eclipse of the white population is already in evidence locally and regionally. In California, for example, non-Hispanic whites constitute only 39.7 per cent of the state’s population. While the decline in the white population cannot be correlated with any decline of
white racial dominance, the dawning and deepening of racial multipolarity calls into question a sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit black/white racial framework that is evident in Feagin and Elias’s essay. Shifting racial demographics and identities also raise
general questions of race and racism in new ways that the ‘systemic racism’ approach is not prepared to explain.3 Class questions and issues of panethnicizing trends, for example, call into question what we mean by race, racial identity and race consciousness. No
racially defined group is even remotely uniform; groups that we so glibly refer to as Asian American or Latino are particularly heterogeneous. Some have achieved or exceeded socioeconomic parity with whites, while others are subject to what we might call
‘engineered poverty’ in sweatshops, dirty and dangerous labour settings, or prisons. Tensions within panethnicized racial groups are notably present, and conflicts between racially defined groups (‘black/ brown’ conflict, for example) are evident in both urban and
rural settings. A substantial current of social scientific analysis now argues that Asians and Latinos are the ‘new white ethnics’, able to ‘work toward whiteness’ 4 at least in part, and that the black/white bipolarity retains its distinct and foundational qualities as the
mainstay of US racism (Alba and Nee 2005; Perlmann 2005; Portes and Rumbaut 2006; Waters, Ueda and Marrow 2007). We question that argument in light of the massive demographic shifts taking place in the USA. Globalization, climate change and above all
neoliberalism on a global scale, all drive migration. The country’s economic capacity to absorb enormous numbers of immigrants, low-wage workers and their families (including a new, globally based and very female, servant class) without generating the sort of
established subaltern groups we associate with the terms race and racism, may be more limited than it was when the ‘whitening’ of Europeans took place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In other words this argument’s key precedent, the absorption of
white immigrants ‘of a different color’ (Jacobson 1998), may no longer apply. Indeed, we might think of the assimilationist model itself as a general theory of immigrant incorporation that was based on a historically specific case study one that might not hold for, or
be replicated by, subsequent big waves of immigration. Feagin and Elias’s systemic racism model, while offering numerous important insights, does not inform concrete analysis of these issues. It is important going forward to understand how groups are differentially
racialized and relatively positioned in the US racial hierarchy: once again racism must be seen as a shifting racial project. This has important consequences, not only with respect to emerging patterns of inequality, but also in regard to the degree of power available to
different racial actors to define, shape or contest the existing racial landscape. Attention to such matters is largely absent in Feagin and Elias’s account. In their view racially identified groups are located in strict reference to the dominant ‘white racial frame’,
hammered into place, so to speak. As a consequence, they fail to examine how racially subordinate groups interact and influence each others’ boundaries, conditions and practices. Because they offer so little specific analysis of Asian American, Latino or Native
American racial issues, the reader finds her/himself once again in the land (real or imaginary, depending on your racial politics) of bipolar US racial dynamics, in which whites and blacks play the leading roles, and other racially identified groups as well as those

We still want to acknowledge

ambiguously identified, such as Middle Eastern and South Asian Americans (MEASA) play at best supporting roles, and are sometimes cast as extras or left out of the picture entirely.

that blacks have been catching hell and have borne the brunt of the racist reaction of the past
several decades. For example, we agree with Feagin and Elias’s critique of the reactionary politics of incarceration in the USA. The ‘new Jim Crow’ (Alexander 2012) or even the ‘new slavery’ that the present system practises is something
that was just in its beginning stages when we were writing Racial Formation. It is now recognized as a national and indeed global scandal. How is it to be understood? Of course there are substantial debates on this topic, notably about the nature of the ‘prison-

industrial complex’ (Davis 2003, p. 3) and the social and cultural effects of mass incarceration along racial lines. But beyond Feagin and Elias’s denunciation of the ferocious white racism that is operating here, deeper political
implications are worth considering . As Alexander (2012), Mauer (2006), Manza and Uggen (2008) and movement groups like Critical Resistance and the Ella Baker Center argue, the upsurge over recent
decades in incarceration rates for black (and brown) men expresses the fear-based, law-and-order appeals that have shaped US racial politics since the rise of Nixonland (Perlstein 2008) and the ‘Southern strategy’. Perhaps even more central, racial repression aims
at restricting the increasing impact of voters of colour in a demographically shifting electorate. There is a lot more to say about this, but for the present two key points stand out: first, it is not an area where Feagin and Elias and we have any sharp disagreement, and

for all the horrors and injustices that the ‘new Jim Crow’ represents, incarceration, profiling
second,

and similar practices remain political issues. These practices and policies are not ineluctable and
unalterable dimensions of the US racial regime There have been previous waves of reform in .

these areas. They can be transformed again by mass mobilization, electoral shifts and so on. In other
words, resistance is not futile

This is a negative argument—if the state is bad, DO something about it—

progress is possible and movements are coming now
Kennedy 17 (Randall Kennedy, 9/20/17, Michael R. Klein professor at Harvard Law School,
Rhodes Scholar, served law clerk for Supreme Court of appeals and Thurgood Marshall, author
of several books on race, civil rights, and law “Despair Is Not an Option”,
http://prospect.org/article/despair-not-option )//SJK
Devotees of racial justice continue to be appalled by the Trump administration. Heather Heyer, the anti-racist demonstrator
murdered in Charlottesville, was right: “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention .”¶ A great many
Americans, especially African Americans, are in a mood of despair upon witnessing a president of the United States winking at neo-
Confederates, neo-Nazis, and Ku Klux Klansmen, and doing everything in his power to expunge the achievements of his predecessor,
a man who came to be known less for his race than for his decency, dignity, and honor. ¶ Yet despair
is not an option. And
in fact, good people of all races are putting their anger to good use through activism on the ground.
Sometimes, though, their efforts are taken for granted and receive too little praise even within their own
camp.¶ Far too little notice, for example, was given to the remarkable May 19 speech by Mayor Mitch Landrieu
explaining the decision of the New Orleans municipal government to remove from places of public honor
three monuments celebrating Confederate generals and one celebrating the violent overthrow of the state’s
multiracial Reconstruction government. To prevail, Landrieu and his allies had to overcome a fervent and well-
organized opposition. But prevail they did with a campaign that was punctuated by a speech that belongs in
anthologies of great American oratory.¶ I know of no speech on racial conflict and reconciliation by an elected official that is more
candid, more inspiring, more soulful. New Orleans, he observed, “was America’s largest slave market : a port where
hundreds of thousands of souls were brought, sold, and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of forced labor, of misery, of rape,
of torture.”¶ Answering oft-heard apologies for Confederate “heroes,” Landrieu observed that “these men did not fight for the
United States of America. They fought against it. They may have been warriors but in this cause they were not patriots.” The
monuments, Landrieu declared, “purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the
enslavement and the terror that it actually stood for.Ӧ Landrieu praised black leaders and colleagues for prompting him to see a
problem he had previously unwittingly ignored, confessing, “I must have passed by those monuments a million times without giving
them a second thought.”¶ He also acknowledged the educative power of trying to see things from another’s viewpoint, recalling that
a friend asked him to consider the monuments from “the perspective of an African American mother or father trying to explain to
their fifth-grade daughter who Robert E. Lee is and why he stands atop our beautiful city. Can you do it? Can you look into that
young girl’s eyes and convince her that Robert E. Lee is there to encourage her? … Do these monuments help her to see a future
with limitless potential? Have you ever thought that if her potential is limited, yours and mine are too?” ¶ Answering charges of racial
pandering, Landrieu maintained that reformers
were simply engaged in “righting the wrong images these
monuments represent and crafting a better, more complete future for all our children and for future
generations.” Contrasting the movement to remove the iconography as against that which established it, Landrieu declared: “Unlike
when those Confederate monuments were first erected as symbols of white supremacy, we
now have a chance to
create not only new symbols, but to do it together, as one people. In our blessed land, we all come to the table of
democracy as equals.”¶ The spirit of Landrieu’s speech is, thankfully, more widespread than is often recognized by observers whose
understandable disgust with Trumpism misleads them into underestimating the growing anti-racist opposition. Folks numbering in
the millions and of all complexions are self-consciously engaging in countless acts of protest:
marching, organizing study groups, volunteering legal expertise, donating money to institutions
dedicated to the preservation of threatened values— the NAACP, the ACLU, the Southern Coalition for Social
Justice—and resolving in numberless diverse ways to become more active, informed, influential. ¶ This
outpouring of indignation, alarm, and affirmation should not be taken for granted . It should be
recognized and encouraged. It reflects underestimated stores of idealism and compassion. These
sorts of grassroots interventions alone are insufficient to turn the tide. That will require ongoing,
organized political mobilizations that can win elections at every level—local, statewide, and
national. But even modest, episodic acts of protest are worth heralding. They provide
essential sustenance in this harsh season in which meanness and chauvinism are riding all too
high.¶ Liberals ought to be realists. They should eschew spurious sentimentality . They should certainly
avoid denying the presence of bigotry and indifference to suffering—ugly features of our political culture that are all too evident.
Realism, however, entails attentiveness to strengths as well as weaknesses, an appreciation of progress as well as stagnation or
retrogression.¶ Ihad thought that sufficient racial progress had been made in the United States to preclude
the successful candidacy of someone like Trump who openly—openly!—traffics in racial and other sorts of prejudice . I was
obviously wrong. The country has not progressed as much as I thought that it had .¶ That does
not mean, however, that there has been no progress. To the contrary, in many spheres—not all, but
many—there has been dramatic change for the better . This is what makes Trump’s victory so
disappointing. But disappointment—the hurt experienced upon witnessing a failure to meet
expectations—is better than the sulky, despairing “What do you expect from white folks?”
attitude that one encounters in some quarters.¶ After all, the American electorate did twice elect a liberal black man to the
presidency. That should provide a source of encouragement and a basis for believing that progressive
change, albeit fragmentary and difficult to hold, can nonetheless be attained through
continued struggle. I am well aware that Obama never won a majority of white voters. I am aware, too, that his elections
clearly unleashed a whirlwind of racist derangement. But twice, a sufficient number of whites joined an aroused
electorate of people of color to carry Obama into the White House. ¶ The Trump camp wants to
vilify or obliterate the memory of those exhilarating events. Liberals should cherish those victories and the intelligent,
dignified, compassionate, presidential stewardship that followed. I am not urging anyone to forgo criticizing the
Obama presidency or the ruthless opposition to it. I am urging observers to acknowledge that, viewed
against the backdrop of American history, the Obama ascendancy was a major step forward on a path that has
been and will continue to be strewn with impediments which, to be overcome, will require all sorts of fancy footwork,
including steps sideways.¶ Liberals must, of course, avoid underestimating the popularity and
resourcefulness of the Trump forces (as was done so negligently in 2016). But it is also important to avoid
overestimating their support and thus their mandate. Trump won the White House but with only a minority of the electorate. Do not
forget that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by at least two million ballots. This is clearly a sore point with Trump, which is why
he persists in making the laughable claim that he won the majority of legitimate ballots cast. Not only did he come into office with
barely a razor-thin victory, but since taking power he has been losing support. ¶ The prestige of the presidency
usually attracts voters. Trump has been alienating them with, among other things, his abhorrent racial sallies. In the urge
to curse out the army of voters that continues to back Trump, liberals ought to avoid exaggerating its number or giving up on its
susceptibility, over time, to persuasion.¶ The
Trump presidency is an alarming, appalling disgrace. It will be
destructive, sometimes in ways that will be irremediable. But it does not constitute the end of the
story. Racial liberalism can overcome racial reaction. Progress is by no means inevitable. But
under the sway of intelligent, brave, ethical, and persistent collective struggle, continued
racial progress is surely possible.

Living standards are proof—progress is progress, even if unequal—prefer data

Samuels 16 (Robert J. Samuels, 7/14/2016, journalist for Washington Post specializing in
economics, BA in PoliSci at Harvard, “Commentary: Black progress surrounds us, even as we
struggle with the racial divide”, Press Herald,
https://www.pressherald.com/2016/07/14/commentary-black-progress-surrounds-us-even-as-
we-struggle-with-the-racial-divide/) //SJK

Whatever happens – and urban riots cannot be excluded – President Obama is correct on one thing: This is not the
1960s. Since then, we have become a far more open and tolerant society . African-Americans have
made significant economic and social advances, even if almost every gain is qualified by some
glaring inequity or shortcoming.¶ Consider:¶ • Poverty: Black poverty, as measured by the government official poverty
line (a pretax income now of $24,230 for a family of four), has dropped sharply . In 1967, the black poverty rate was 39.3
percent. By 2000, it was 22.5 percent; the great recession pushed it up to 26.2 percent in 2014, which was double the
white rate of 12.7 percent.¶ • Education: As with other Americans, blacks have received more schooling. In 1950, only 13.7
percent of African-Americans age 25 or older had completed high school or more; by 2014, this was 86.7 percent, says the
Department of Education. Over the same period, the share of African-Americans with a bachelor’s degree or higher
went from 2.2 percent to 22.8 percent. But 35.6 percent of whites have at least a bachelor’s degree, and among high
school graduates, there are stubborn achievement gaps between blacks and whites.¶ • Upward mobility: The black upper
middle class – defined here as households with incomes of at least $100,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars – has grown
impressively, from 2.8 percent of households in 1967 to 13 percent (one in eight) in 2014. But gains have stalled
since 2000, when the rate was also 13 percent. Although the white rate has stalled too, it was 26 percent. Moreover, a Pew
Research Center study finds that blacks own fewer stocks and bonds than whites with similar incomes. ¶ • Politics: Black
elected officials have made huge gains, reports the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. When the Voting
Rights Act was passed in 1965, five African-Americans served in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate; now
there are 44 House members and two senators (43 Democrats, three Republicans). Over a similar period, the number
of black state legislators grew from about 200 to 700.¶ Black officials represent 9.9 percent of U.S. House
members and 8.5 percent of state legislators. But that’s lower than their share of the voting age population (12.5 percent), the
report notes.¶ Racial stereotypes also seem to have softened. NORC at the University of Chicago, a respected academic
polling organization, periodically explores intermarriage in its surveys. One question asks whites and blacks whether they’d favor or
oppose a marriage of “a close relative” to a person of the other race. In
1990, only 5 percent of whites favored
interracial marriage; 30 percent were neutral, and 65 percent opposed. By 2014, only 16 percent opposed.
Blacks have been even more open to interracial marriage; since 2000, roughly 90 percent either approved or didn’t object. ¶ What
emerges is a portrait of imperfect progress. By many measures, blacks are better off than they
were a half-century ago, and many are much better off. But as a group, the gaps with whites remain appallingly large. Society’s
frame of reference is shifting. The people who watched or (for a minority) participated in the ’60s civil rights movement
are aging. What they fought for and often achieved is the new norm: things taken for granted by their children and grandchildren. ¶
Much needs to be done. Clearly, relations are strained between police and many minority
communities. Schools in minority neighborhoods have struggled to raise achievement.¶ Private behavior also matters. That about 70
percent of black births involve unmarried mothers is ominous, because these children tend to face “instable living arrangements, live
in poverty and … have low educational achievement,” as Child Trends, a research group, puts it. (The implications for Hispanics, with
single mothers representing 50 percent of births, and non-Hispanic whites – almost 30 percent – are also troubling.) ¶ The
real
question is whether we continue along the messy path of imperfect progress or whether we slide
into a paralyzing round of recriminations. Either way, we cannot escape what the president rightly calls “the difficult legacy
of race.

we should exploit strategic alignments

Shannon Sullivan 17, Chair and Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at
Charlotte, Setting Aside Hope: A Pragmatist Approach to Racial Justice, Chapter 13 in
Pragmatism and Justice, Edited by Susan Dieleman, David Rondel, and Christopher Voparil
https://www.academia.edu/27794394/Setting_Aside_Hope_A_Pragmatist_Approach_to_Racial
_Justice_2017

What might black communities that cope look like? For starters, “coping” as used here does not mean
surrendering, selling out, or merely getting by. Communities that cope would be communities that recognize that “nothing
has worked” against antiblack racism and that black people “have exhausted the discourses of humanism and the strategies of
equality” (Warren 2015, 228). I want to underscore the pragmatic significance of this recognition. Pragmatically understood, the
value of things is found in their effects—including the ultimate effect of whether they enable flourishing (Sullivan 2001)——and the
effect of humanism hasn’t been the flourishing of black people. Pursuing strategies of racial equality hasn’t worked. These
realizations are important for the effects they can have: they allow a very different set of strategies in relationship to antiblack
racism to emerge. Rather
than defeatist, letting go of the goal of racial equality can be liber- ating and
invigorating for black people. It can free them up to envision new goals , to develop new truths about
how best to respond to racism, and thus to stop banging their heads against a wall that will not budge. “Casting off the
equality ideology,” Bell urges, “will lift the sights. . .. From this broadened perspective on events and problems, [black people] can
better appreciate and COpe with racial "subordination” (1992b, 378). For
example, Bell claims that rather than
Spend energy and time trying to fully integrate American schools —which still has nothappened sixty years
after Brown v. Board of Education and has been reversed in some- major cities (see, e.g., Michelson, Smith, and Nelson 2015)-—
black people should work on raising money for and strengthening all-black schools (1992a, 63). More
generally, racial realism would urge that black people devise strategies that acknowledge the
“white self-interest principle”: white people will never do anything to improve the lives of
black people unless it first and foremost benefits themselves as well, particularly economically
(Bell 1992a, 54). In many ways, then, successfully fighting white racism is a very crude, nonsophisticated
business. It isn’t about devising fancy moral arguments or ideal forms of jurisprudence; it instead
involves “making a shameless appeal to the predictable self-interest of 'whites” and their wallets
(1992a, 107). One could add that it also relies on the predictable self-delusion, self- grandeur, and racial
ignorance of' white people. Bell (1992a, 62) argues that black people—both individuals and
communities—need to be like Brer Rabbit of the Uncle Remus stories, who tricks Brer Fox into setting
him free by convincing Brer Fox that throwing Brer Rabbit into the briar patch 18 the worst thing
that Brer Fox could ever do to him. Brer Fox acts in what he thinks is his own best interest—an interest in harming Brer
Rabbit by keeping him captive—and in so doing, he does the very thing that enables Brer Rabbit to escape. A masterful tactician at
manipulating the canine ignorance and solipsistic focus of Brer Fox, Brer
Rabbit doesn’t‘ rely on rational
argumentation, nor does he depend onthe law or any uni- versal rights of animal kind to obtain
his freedom. He instead is ruthlessly realistic about the malicious self-interest that motivates
Brer Fox, and for that reason he is able to devise an effective strategy for getting Out of his
clutches. Brer Rabbit doesn’t succeed in making any sort of large-scale or structural change in the relationship between foxes and
rabbits, n0r does he particularly hope to. He instead focuses practically on how to save his life in the midst of a particular
strugglewith Brer Fox, and through his struggle, he is able to flourish even if the overarching tyranny of foxes has not been
eliminated. Because struggle is central to racial realism, racial realism is neither passive nor apathetic . It is not
nihilist in the sense that West uses the term. But neither is it hopeful. Even though they might bear a superficial similar- ity, the
struggle involved in racial realism isn’t the same struggle encour- aged by West’s politics of hope. The struggle of political hope is for
the fantastical object of a future without antiblack racism. It insists-that “1e- gitimate action takes place in the political” and that “a
refusal to ‘do poli- tics" is equivalent to ‘doing nothing’ ” (Warren 2015, 223). The struggle of racial realism, in contrast, doesn’t
involve believing that the right thing will win out Bell’s racial realism invokes a different kind of existentialism than that of West,
appealing to Camus (Bell 1992a, x). As Camus’s main character from The Plague (1991) understands, one resists and must
resist the plague whether in the form of mass death, the Nazi Holocaust, or in this case white class privilege and
white supremacy—even though, or per- haps precisely because, one cannot conquer it. There is no ultimate
prog- ress or victory to anticipate, no matter whether human struggle is assisted by the divine. The plague might be
beaten back for a while, but it always will return. Fighting it is absurd if the goal of the fight is to
eliminate it. On Camus’s view, one fights the plague for different reasons,,ones that have to do with affirming the dignity and
value of humanity. Likewise, on Bell’s View, black people’s “struggle for freedom, is bottom, a manifestation of our humanity that
survives and grows stronger through resistance to op- pression, even if that'oppression is never overcome” (1992b, 378). If this is a
kind of humanism, it is absurd rather than progressive. ' Bell implicitly develops this point in connection with black personhood when
he tells the story of Mrs. MacDonald, an older black woman living ‘ in rural Mississippi in 1964 who was fighting white hostility and
violent‘. intimidation. When Bell asked her how she found the strength to carry on, she replied, "‘ ‘Derrick, I am an old woman. I lives
to harass white folks’ ” (quoted in Bell 1992b, 378). As Bell points out, Mrs. MacDonald didn’t I claim or even suggest that she
thought she could eliminate white oppres- sion with her harassment. Her spirited refusal to be beaten down by white domination
was itself the point. It was how she triumphed against white racism, and even though her son lost his job, the bank tried to foreclose
on her mortgage, and shots were fired through her living room window, “nothing the all-powerful whites could do would diminish
her triump ” (1992b, 379). Bell concludes, “if you remember her story, you will under- stand my message” (1992b, 379). The
message is that Mrs. MacDonald’s rebellious spirit was the most important element of her successful fight against white oppression,
not whether she hopefully believed that racism could be ended or engaged in recognizable political action against it. I am not
interested in settling the question of Whether Bell and Warren are right that racism is permanent in the United States. For starters, I
think that the effects of this claim can change significantly when a white perSOn makes it instead of a black one. The different
subject positions that Bell and Warren, as black men, and I, a white woman, occupy are relevant, and a white person’s declaration
that white racism will never end probably isn’t likely to help people of color fight it. Aside from that issue, I also am not sure how
anyone, of any race, could ever know the Truth about racism or dis- cern what the future holds for white-dominated nations such as
the United States. What is more useful than an epistemological claim of certainty is a pragmatic claim about the permanence of
racism. Acknowledging that the truth of a claim is found—or rather, made—not in whether it mirrors the way that the world “really”
is but in the practical effects that it has in the world, we should ask: what personal and institutional practices, habits, and behaviors
would result if black people engaged in the world knowing that racism isn’t going away? What strategies for black flourishing might
emerge if black people acted on the hypothesis that, beneath a thin veneer of wanting to appear nonracist, most white people do
not really want to abolish white class privilege and white domination? On this score, I would wager that Bell and Warren are right:
hoping and struggling politically for the end of racism is less advantageous to black people than approaching racism as permanent.
Black people are more. likely to develop strategies for surviving and thriving if they give up on political hope. If that pragmatic
hypothesis bears fruit—and it needs to be tested- in the lives and experiences of black people to know if it does— then black people
should relinquish hepe for racial equality and instead creatively tap into and devise other strategies to help black people thrive.
More so than West’s progressive hope, Bell’s and Warren’s provocative gambles concerning the permanence of antiblack racism
could open up practical possibilities for America’s future that step outside the civil rights box in Which it largely has been contained
for the past sixty years. A related reason Bell’s and Warren’s positions are pragmatically prefer- able to that of West is that they are
likely to do a better job of protecting a black people from the weathering effects of racial microaggressions and . other forms of
racial discriminatibn. Low-hope black people do not experi- ence the same psychophysiological effects of stress from white racism as
‘7 high-hope black people do. This means that they will tend to be more psy- chosomatically resilient in order to withstand and
struggle against white domination, and resilience, which should not be confused withhope, has been empirically linked with low
levels of cortisol in response to stressful or negative events (Groopman 2005, 204—205). The physical health of low- hope black
people—rates of hypertension and cardiovascular disease, for example—should tend to be better than those whose stress hormone
levels ' spike out of surprised disappointment when their expectations of racial , equality are disappointed. And thus their spiritual
health—their emotional strength and creative energy—also should be better than that of high hope individuals. I am not arguing
against the importance of black communities or black solidarity (or cross-racial solidarity, which is a story for another time) to deal
with racism and 'white supremacy. I instead am questioning whether hope is a crucial or even a helpful component of black
communities that are effective at building up their members’ resistance to the harmful ef- fects of racial injustice. Viable alternatives
to black hope exist, and thus black Americans perhaps could do without hope. Their physical resilience, their spiritual and emotional
fortitude, and their psychosomatic ability to fight white racism might be better off without it. I also am not suggesting that
the United States should return to the days of de jure Jim Crow or that the current political and
civil rights gained by black Americans should be rolled back .'Instead, I am asking: rather than spend more
energy and time hoping that additional legal remedies will solve its postsegregation injustices, could black Americans benefit from
Warren’s and Bell’s analyses, jettison hope for racial equality, and create 'more racially realistic ways to withstand white class
privilege and white supremacy and to promote black well-being? As difficult as this question is, Bell’s and Warren’s work rightly
suggests that it needs to be confronted. In the wake of the Ferguson shooting and acquittal, some journalists outside the United
States have argued “America is but a matchstick away” (Poplack 2014). The country could explode because it has achieved racial
“reconciliation without actually reconciling . . . hugging and making up without addressing the structurally ingrained disparities that
keep old leg- acies alive” (Poplack 2014). While I don’t purport to know what the future holds, the possibility of a great conflagration
in the United States——literal or figurative—cannot be easily dismissed. In the face of relentless racial inequality
and violence, hope and despair need to be recognized as flip sides of the same coin. Both are
minted out of a liberal faith in civil rights and white goodwill, and both are highly problematic as a result. Workable
alternatives to hope and despair are needed if the United States is to avoid striking the match.
 Political Engagement Not Mutually Exclusive
Solves their offense---political engagement’s not an opportunity cost with
thinking and practicing epistemological pessimism.
George Shulman 17. Professor of European and American social thought at NYU’s Gallatin
school. 12/2017. “Theorizing Life Against Death.” Contemporary Political Theory, pp. 1–33.

My goal in these reflections is to assess the characteristic arguments of scholars associated

under the sign of ‘‘Afro-Pessimism.’’ They are typically identified as Saidiya Hartman, Frank
Wilderson, and Jared Sexton. In my view, this work tells an essential, dark truth about race and Euro-
Atlantic modernity, but by a problematic form of argument and affect; the work is a profound
explanation of our current racial impasse but in troubling ways it also is a symptom of that
impasse and risks reifying it. To explore these ambiguities, I will situate this work in several contexts.6 The first, obvious,
context is the canon of Black political thought and literature. Using the idea of ‘‘problem-space’’ I take from David Scott (2004) and
the idea of ‘‘argumentative tradition’’ I take from Alisdair MacIntyre (1977), I would ask: what constitutive questions (and answers)
do these thinkers inherit, but also revise? First, by what concepts and narratives do we understand and represent our condition?
(We thus contrast arguments about slavery and its after-life, race and race-making, as well as white supremacy, anti-blackness,
‘‘social death,’’ and ‘‘political ontology.’’) A second question concerns political subjectivity: how should a racially marked people
conceive the ‘‘we’’ shape themselves into a collective political subject? (Are we a ‘‘minority’’ needing allies to democratize the civic
identity [and civil society] of a nation professing universalism, a ‘‘nation’’ based in ethnicity or common interest, a ‘‘colony’’ seeking
transnational affiliations against empire?) Relatedly, third, how do we understand (say diagnose) those who constitute themselves as
white? (Answers to this question signal if or how their identity, conduct, and norms of citizenship can be changed decisively.) Implicit
in these is a fourth question: how do we narrate the relation between present and past, to dramatize the after-life of slavery and
what is damaging and valuable in a legacy of domination and struggle? Hartman thus asks Nietzsche’s question: ‘‘what is the story
about the slave we ought to tell out of the present we ourselves inhabit?’’ (Hartman and Best, 2005) That story must also judge if, as
Hannah Arendt argued, the concepts we inherit can(not) illuminate what is novel or unprecedented in our circumstances. Because I
situate ‘‘Afro-pessimism’’ in the argumentative tradition of black political thought, I will foreground Sexton’s and Wilderson’s view
that modern/ western/liberal (Euro-Atlantic) society is founded on a ‘‘political ontology’’ of ‘‘anti-blackness,’’ by which the ‘‘social
death’’ of those racially marked as ‘‘nonbeings’’ is the condition of human being and life for others. By making antiblackness and
social death foundational to liberal modernity, Afro-Pessimist work depicts the persistence of gross inequality, segregation, and
gratuitous violence as the undying ‘‘after-life’’ of slavery, which liberal society never consigned to the past. As this argument explains
the failures of civil rights reform and narratives of progress, though, a second obvious context becomes visible: Afro-Pessimism
is not only a theory to juxtapose to a canon of theories, but a speech-act that bespeaks the
impasse it would address and enter. It intervenes intentionally in a problem-space of questions
and answers, but is also symptomatic of the context it claims to explain. Its rhetoric manifests
what Raymond Williams called a structure of feeling, whose character and impact requires
interpretation. On the one hand, I am inclined to say of Afro-Pessimism what Adorno said of psychoanalysis – only its
exaggerations are true – because otherwise we readily disavow a truth about our history and circumstances that is hard to
acknowledge let alone bear. Theorizing
– bearing witness to – ‘‘structural positionality’’ is crucial to
explaining persisting racial domination. But on the other hand, their rhetoric is a symptom of
impasse. The work of Sexton and Wilderson, in particular, sustains the critical, systemic, and
internationalist frame of Fanon and American advocates of black power, but it lacks their
animating sense of possibility. It sustains the black radical tradition by identifying what is
distinctive in black positionality in liberal modernity, but in the way it claims exceptionality in
relation to other forms of oppression, Afro-Pessimism also enacts a defensive status politics. In turn,
this articulation of blackness in terms of death and life suggest a third context, at once theological and psychoanalytical. First Context: Black Political Thought and Intractability Afro-Pessimists draw their central –
both diagnostic and generative – claim from Orlando Patterson (1982): slavery is distinguished not by intensified exploitation of labor, but by a ‘‘social death’’ he defines as natal alienation, generalized dishonor,
and violent domination. Modernity emerges in the equation of slavery as social death with blackness, whereby only those marked as black are consigned to these conditions. Hartman has condensed and updated
the idea of social death by the concept of ‘‘fungibility,’’ to denote how slavery has an after-life because blacks do not become human subjects, but remain objects of (material, accumulative, sexual, symbolic) use,
including subjection to gratuitous violence and disposability (Patterson, 1982). At the same time, the production of this social death for those marked black is the disavowed condition of possibility for the economy
and culture of those defining themselves as human, or non-black. As Hartman (1997, 2003) showed in Scenes of Subjection and interviews, even though chattel slavery was officially ended, a racializing regime
instantiating devaluation has remained foundational to the material life and symbolic order of liberal civil society. These arguments thus explain – and make meaningful – the intractability of racialized inequality
and violence despite the purported displacement of overt white supremacy by civil rights and multi-culturalism. Wilderson and Sexton, building on Fanon and Hartman, thus argue that ‘‘Blackness’’ denotes a
position not an identity. Wilderson says, ‘‘Afro-pessimists are theorists of black positionality who share Fanon’s insistence that, though Blacks are…sentient beings, the structure of the entire world’s semantic
field…is sutured by anti-black solidarity…Afro-pessimism explores the meaning of Blackness not – in the first instance – as a variously interpellated identity or conscious social actor, but as a structural position of
non-communicability in the face of all other positions.’’ A position of ‘‘absolute dereliction’’ marks the non-being that cannot signify but can be made to signify, as well as accumulated, exploited, killed (Wilderson,
2010, pp. 58–59). In Wilderson’s narrative, then, ‘‘modernity marks the emergence of a new ontology because it is an era in which an entire race appears, people who, prior to any transgressive act or losing a war,
stand as socially dead in relation to the rest of the world’’ (Wilderson, 2010, p. 18). Modern liberal ‘‘civil society is held together by a structural prohibition against recognizing and incorporating a being that is
dead, despite the fact that this being is sentient and appears very much alive.’’ Civil society, wage relations, and constitutionalism among rights-bearing subjects are underwritten by generalized dishonor and
violent domination of those marked black, but also by ‘‘a libidinal economy of enjoyment,’’ because ‘‘fantasies of murderous hatred and unlimited destruction, of sexual consumption and social availability
animate’’ such violence and ‘‘the psychic life of culture as well’’ (Wilderson, 2010, p. 27). Jared Sexton (2008, 2016) calls Afro-pessimism a ‘‘critique’’ of ‘‘political ontology,’’ but why use this locution? The middle
passage inaugurated a ‘‘condition of ontology and not just an event of experience’’ because chattel slavery founded (conditions of) non-being and being (Wilderson, 2010, p. 14). If ontology is the study of how we
define the general conditions of possibility for human being, then political ontology denotes how politics founds what Fred Moten calls ‘‘the nonrelationality that structures all relationality,’’ the denial of being
that structures symbolic order and material reality in modernity (Moten, 2013). ‘‘Anti-blackness’’ is ‘‘ontological’’ as an unthought, foundational (and so intractable) condition framing human being, but ‘‘political’’
because conventional, historical, potentially changeable. In turn, to theorize ‘‘structural positionality’’ ‘‘is to be Afro-Pessimist, not Afrocentric,’’ because ‘‘blackness’’ denotes a condition (of non-being) to refuse,
and neither a (prior, African) identity to retrieve, nor a ‘‘cultural identity’’ to assert (Wilderson, 2010, p. 58). Wilderson thus posits ‘‘the inaugural difference’’ that instituted the modern and its defining ‘‘genre of
the human’’ as Sylvia Wynter (2003) puts it. Marxian and Lacanian structuralism also originate human society and culture in the structure of (class or gender) positions into which people are interpellated. But
Wilderson depicts ‘‘gender or economic oppression’’ as ‘‘contingent riders’’ limiting ‘‘the freedom of human subjects’’; ‘‘exploited humans in conflict with unexploited humans,’’ or women dominated by men,
remain within human being, not set off ontologically from it. He insists on this ‘‘unbridgeable gap’’ between the ‘‘suffering dynamics of the ontologically alive,’’ and black positionality. ‘‘Deep within civil society’s
collective unconscious is the knowledge that the black position is indeed a position, not an identity, and…inextricably bound to the constituent elements of social death.’’ By this categorical difference ‘‘gratuitous
violence’’ and ‘‘exchange’’ can ‘‘mark everyone experientially’’ but ‘‘mark blacks ontologically’’ (Wilderson, 2003). This structuralism parallels Althusser and Lacan, but it posits black positionality as exceptional,
both in its equation with non-being, and as the inaugurating foundation of modernity. In turn, Sexton draws two implications. ‘‘Whatever else there may be in black culture or cultures – in the most capacious,
differentiated, global sense – a narrative of antagonism is inscribed there, powerfully and profoundly. To ‘‘inhabit’’ the ‘‘destruction’’ mandated by an ‘‘anti-black world that shapes and structures every aspect of
black existence’’ is to face the challenge of ‘‘how to stay within the anxiety of antagonism…to be guided by it, and again, even to will it?’’ (Sexton, 2016, p. 4). As if to disarm any reduction of militancy to
masculinism, Sexton quotes the martial language of Hortense Spillers: ‘‘My anxiety was finding a way to actually be in battle…to go to war.’’ He credits black feminism with linking ‘‘rage to hope’’ and forging ‘‘a
non-compliant but nonviolent alloy’’ to oppose what Spillers calls ‘‘long centuries of unregulated violence’’ (Spillers et al., 2007; Sexton, 2016, pp. 9–10). But he asks: ‘‘is there such a thing as black feminist
violence?’’ Not ‘‘to elevate violence to the level of principle,’’ he avers, but ‘‘to include it as one tactic among others’’ in a structure of antagonism. As if to disarm critics he quotes Spillers again: ‘‘the day that the
enslaved decides to act out the threat of death that hangs over her, by risking her life, is the first day of wisdom. And whether or not one survives is perhaps less important than the recognition that, unless one is
free, love cannot and will not matter’’ (Spillers et al., 2007; Sexton, 2016, p. 10). In this passage, we hear Antigone and Audre Lorde, who would risk their own lives but not another’s life, but also Frederick
Douglass’ Nietzschean violence as well as Huey Newton’s ‘‘revolutionary suicide,’’ when risking life and taking life entwine. If Sexton’s first conclusion moves from political ontology to inescapable antagonism and
so to a Fanonian view of violence as a condition of freedom, his second conclusion returns to the premise shared with Wilderson, who says, ‘‘black freedom is an ontological’’ not ‘‘experiential’’ issue. ‘‘Black
freedom’’ is not repeated action to contest or interrupt social death, or fugitive forms of slipping the yoke, but ‘‘an event of epic and revolutionary proportions’’ that is ‘‘the end of both blackness and humanness,’’
the ‘‘emergence of new ontological relations’’ (Wilderson, 2010, p. 27). Critics object that arguments about social death deny both the ‘‘agency’’ of blacks and the ‘‘hope’’ political resistance requires (Brown,
2009). Sexton denies any ‘‘rejection of the notion of agency in advance,’’ but instead depicts an ‘‘endeavor to think rigorously about its conditions of possibility.’’ Likewise, theory must face the position of the ‘‘ex-
slave without recourse to the consolations of transcendence.’’ Rather than ‘‘blaming pessimism,’’ he quotes Joshua Foa Dienstag to say, ‘‘perhaps we can learn from it. Rather than hiding from the ugliness of the
world, perhaps we can discover how best to withstand it.’’ Depicting the false solace sought by those who cannot abide the twinned truths of destruction and antagonism, Sexton (2016) enacts a pointedly
dismissive ‘‘intramural’’ critique of Black political thought. Speaking in the mode of realism to advance the ‘‘pessimistic’’ claim that the modern world is organized to negate and annihilate black agency, he
practices a kind of radical negativity. Does this view blind us to or even foreclose the ‘‘life’’ of black agency in conditions of social death, or, does it stipulate what would count as fundamental change? Does this
view preclude hope for a different future, or, stipulate its threshold, to open a possibility we cannot know or depict in advance? Here is theory as speech-act, my second context, but also, his idiom of false solace
or real transcendence signals my third context, political theology. Second Context: From Theory to Speech-Act Gayle Rubin (1975) once joined Engels and Levi-Strauss to theorize what Sexton calls the ‘‘structural
positionality’’ of women in patriarchy, whereby the exchange of women (as quasi-human objects) became the condition of ‘‘human’’ life and culture, and by using Freud and Lacan to theorize the ‘‘libidinal
economy’’ tied to this exchange, she depicted how those marked as women internalized and reproduced their position. But feminism, she argued, sought a ‘‘radical’’ reimagination of patriarchal kinship conceived
as a conventional not natural condition of human being. It must be said that Rubin herself, and feminism more broadly, did not theorize the differences slavery instituted. It took Hortense Spillers to show how the
modern form of gender was produced by white supremacy, as enslaved women were denied the status of gender as a form of being, and reduced to mere ‘‘flesh.’’ The modern sex-gender system, and its feminist
critics, rested on disavowal (or unthinking presumption) of this prior denial of being (Spillers, 1987; Broeck, 2008). If this insight vindicates the structuralist ambition of ‘‘Afro- Pessimist’’ argument, however, the
animating sense of possibility that living insurgency imparted to the structuralism of radical feminist theorizing remains absent. Its avowed ‘‘pessimism’’ is partly a symptom of our own moment of impasse, but it
also minimizes the current forms of insurgency surrounding it, and in these regards it performs a black radicalism that can seem defensive, even bullying, and ‘‘academic’’ in its distance from insurgent politics. At
issue for me, then, is not the idea of a structural positionality that is both foundational and distinctive, but the motives and idioms that give it a troubling form and affect. Wilderson and Sexton rightly claim that
neither legal enfranchisement nor material assets secure immunity from vulnerability as a fungible object; they rightly see the depth and scope of the change needed to achieve equality. But they posit a
categorical and absolute (not historical or contingent) difference: between ex-slaves, as non-human beings subject to gratuitous violence; indigenous people, as ‘‘almost-human’’ subjects, who retain forms of
sovereignty; and white women and workers ‘‘whose humanity is a given.’’ They do not depict the mutual imbrication of race, class, and gender, the braiding of native dispossession and slavery, the ratio of violence
or fungibility in other forms of domination, or how political economy and culture is underwritten, especially, by women positioned as objects of available for use (and violence.) They refuse what Wilderson calls
‘‘the ruse of analogy,’’ whereby accounts of domination as being (like) slavery deny a categorical difference in ‘‘ontological’’ positionality (Wilderson, 2010). A ‘‘political ontology of race’’ is thus tailored to address
post-civil rights fragmentation in the black world, post-1965 immigration and neoliberal multiculturalism, as well as multiplying varieties of oppression. Partly, Afro-Pessimism uses abundant evidence of fungibility
and violence to posit and defend black commonality against forms of upward mobility it credibly casts as a deceptive appearance, but it also ignores or devalues the reality of appearances, that is, the real
complexity of a black world increasingly differentiated and divided. Likewise, Afro-Pessimism correctly situates recent versions of ethnic pluralism and class/gender radicalism within an unchanged black/white

rather than highlighting the intractable grip

racial grid, to credibly mark how coalition/reform politics continue to evade the distinctive grip of antiblackness. But

of antiblack specificity amid multi-dimensional intersectionality, and rather than tracing how
antiblackness has entwined with settler colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism, Sexton and
Wilderson depict black exceptionality.7 Understandably foregrounding how analogy is typically used
to (trade on but) evade what is distinctive in racial domination, they seem unable to admit let alone
credit complexities and confusions in the gray zone of intersectionality. As a result, they create
a black radicalism that categorically separates not only itself from other constituencies, but also
the truly revolutionary from the mere ‘‘consolation’’ of other forms of organized black
insurgency. These versions of what I am calling exceptionality suggest my third context, because, in its very critiques of
false transcendence, Afro-Pessimism repeats the idioms of political theology . Third Context: From
Political Theology to Psychoanalysis Sexton and Wilderson seem to mean political ontology as a philosophical/political alternative to
political theology. Like Marx they criticize other-worldly forms of redemption for the sake of ‘‘soberly’’ facing our ‘‘true conditions’’;
like Marx on class, they depict blackness as a non-cultural positionality, not an identity; and like Marx, they project the necessity for,
but do not depict, a world beyond this one. They also echo the revolutionary paradigm of Fanon, which depicts consignment to non-
being, narrates polarized antagonism, and without substantializing blackness, seeks an epochal movement from social death to life.
Surely, then, the emphasis on positionality, antagonism, and eschatology evokes Carl Schmitt’s ‘‘political theology’’ as well as his
‘‘concept of the political.’’ For if American liberal nationalism is constituted by the sovereign violence that establishes social death
for some as the condition of (access to) life for others, then those positioned as Black are thrown across a theological frontier that
differentiates the damned to produce the saved. Those marked by non-being are thus called to ‘‘decision,’’ to take exception to
social death as a state of exception. Even if Wilderson and Sexton invoke insurrection but not resurrection, can they escape
entanglement in political theology? At the same time, we should recall Nietzsche’s ‘‘analysis’’ of the grip of the ascetic ideal among
those – especially democrats, abolitionists, and atheist leftists – who renounced literal theism and other-worldly forms of
redemption. For they sustain ‘‘faith in truth’’ and in its name devalue plurality,perspective, and contingency, as
well as the unavoidably constitutive impact of the drives and fantasies that motivate our
thought and action. Interpreting our will to truth as itself a motivated faith and perspective on life, Nietzsche makes faith
ubiquitous by placing an act of faith beneath every perspective or optic. He then weighs the ‘‘value’’ of contrasting faiths in terms of
their motivation on one side and their worldly consequences on the other side. In this way, he discovered the rancor driving his own
faith in critical negativity, and he thus fashioned a ‘‘gay science’’ to mitigate it. How might his model of a counter-political theology
help us interpret and engage a theory focused on the grim truth of social death? Because modernity premises life for
some on consigning others to social death, Hartman claims, deliverance is the master trope of Black
culture. But how to seek life against death is contestable. Wilderson and Sexton depict the
unbearable truth of social death and unremitting antagonism between master and slave, in
contrast to which they depict our seduction by (our wish for) narrative and the redemption it
offers. They speak not to whites, whose narrative of modernity, nationhood, and progress is premised on black non-being, but
‘‘intramurally’’ to those marked as black, who are drawn to narratives that promise to overcome white innocence (in Baldwin’s
sense) by civic integration, or that promise the redemption of black suffering by de-colonization, nation-building, or fugitive
creativity. Against
seduction by narrative, Afro-pessimist structuralism is presented as the essential
and all-controlling truth of black experience; it gives off the scent of the ascetic ideal not only
because it disavows its own fictionality as an optic, genre, or organizing fantasy, but also because of
its categorical juxtaposition of friend and enemy, its heroized but abstract radicalism, and its dismissal of any other
position as a demeaned form of solace. Especially if we credit the truth to which Afro-Pessimism
bears witness, including the likelihood of white resistance to or disavowal of its validity, we may
well feel pressured to assent to it. We are pressed by the form or logic of the argument, which
signifies any doubt or question as objectionable whiteness or pathetic black acquiescence. As a
white man trying to make this argument, I am struggling to articulate both its crucial truth, and my sense, politically and
theoretically, that it should be presented or inflected otherwise, with different affective tonality and political bearing. For on the one
hand, it seems to me that ‘‘social death’’ is totalized as the truth that must be faced without
consolation, while on the other hand, the only valid response is depicted as revolutionary
(perhaps violent) refusal. We are driven toward helplessness and despair by an annihilating
structure that seems impossible to change, but also, if we ask, what can be done, we receive
images of revolutionary suicide. The systematic character of critique offers a clarity that is
appealing; we also may be tempted by the appearance of heroic radicalism – and by an
unavowed solace we may derive from the form of ‘‘election’’ it offers. But we may be better
served by questioning the either-or structure of exceptionality, which juxtaposes social death
in/as the ordinary to metaphors of radical refusal . By that structure, Schmitt distinguished ordinary existence as
deadening repetition, and miracle as the decision to take exception to it; for Wilderson and Sexton ‘‘life’’ thus seems
to require the decisive, unequivocal ‘‘event’’ of overcoming an ordinary life ruled – indeed emptied out,
negated, or literally killed – by inescapably gripping social death. But what kind of life or politics is this? Might
the ‘‘fact’’ or ‘‘lived experience’’ of blackness as social death be metabolized, transfigured,
resisted, or dramatized in other ways? Rather than radically juxtapose awful truth and
demeaned consolation, could we rework the relationship of critique and repair? Or is the
impossibility of repair in its usual senses – because only a revolution would be truly reparative –
the necessary assumption for rightly seeing the conditions of black agency? Rather than respond to
their critique by asking, what radical action could possibly suffice to change this world, could we ask instead, what is
already being done?8 If we grasp the truth signified by a ‘‘political ontology of anti-blackness,’’
we should and will doubt the sufficiency of civil rights and coalition politics, but couldn’t we still
value rhizomatic practices of protest, prosaic efforts at legal redress or self-defense, local
experiments in counter-sovereignty, forms of black nationalism, or diasporic cultural politics
that poeticize black creativity? These are ongoing all around us, but virtually unremarked by
Wilderson or Sexton, who focus on the unbearable truth disavowed by most whites, and whose
radical implications are evaded by many blacks. But we should not demonize this focus as
simply a fault, either.9 In addition, if I focus on the ‘‘lived truth’’ (the affective bearing and prosaic meaning, not the
referential accuracy) of Afro-Pessimism as an organizing optic, I recall how Nietzsche focused on the rancor we must feel over our
inability to will backward, and by focusing on our resentment, he foregrounded our affective orientation toward our suffering and its
injustice. In this spirit, in turn, Eve Sedgwick (2003, 2007) used Melanie Klein’s contrast of paranoid and reparative positions to
‘‘analyze’’ the ‘‘hermeneutic of suspicion’’ in critical and queer theorizing, in ways that may help us creatively engage Afro-
pessimism. On the one hand, anti-blackness and homophobia manifest paranoid splitting, as desire and
aggression – what Phillip Roth tellingly calls ‘‘human stain’’ – are projected into objects rather than acknowledged.
Through what Eric Lott called ‘‘love and theft’’ (unintentionally echoing Klein’s ‘‘envy and gratitude’’ toward the mother), the
enfranchised and normal enact a paranoid structure that produces demonized objects but that
also loves – and so cannibalizes- what it repudiates. On the other hand, Sedgwick argued, queer theory itself inhabits a
‘‘paranoid position’’ by a systemic explanation that ‘‘anticipates’’ injury and humiliation, precludes surprise, polarizes friend and
enemy, and denies value to reparative action. Might
theoretical and political practice repair rather than
repeat the aggressive splitting, disavowal, and longing for innocence (or purity) that characterizes the object
of critique? In regard to white supremacy, can we devise what New Lefties called prefigurative
practices, to anticipate and embody in our means the revolutionary ends we posit? Of course,
Sedgwick is often read in a ‘‘paranoid’’ way, as if she posed an either-or between the paranoid and reparative positions, partly
because at moments she herself does this splitting. But a
truly ‘‘reparative’’ view of paranoid theory or radical
politics would have to value and sustain ambivalence, a tension between the hermeneutic of
suspicion and quest for deep truth that characterizes ‘‘critique,’’ and a generosity that seeks and
welcomes possibility, in the form of unexpected changes, actions, attunements. If anti-
blackness is a paranoid onto-theology in Klein’s sense, what would a reparative alternative feel
like and do? Like Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, Wilderson and Sexton place blackness in the position of the unconscious – and
in the position of maternity. Under the bar, these signify abjection, excess, and nonsense, the threatening non-being against which
subjectivity, rationality, and the human is defined in phobic, violent ways. But they do not affirm let alone explore the life made by
people positioned ‘‘in the hold,’’ under the bar – and because they are positioned there. No more than Lacan on maternity do they
substantialize blackness as a heritage to retrieve or an identity to make and assert. But critical
negativity, focused on
social death and invested in the paradoxical purity of asceticism, risks becoming death-like;
moreover, radical politics fails unless it bears witness to life against death. What this might mean once
appeared in feminist theories that risked exploring the ubiquitous but disavowed meanings of maternity, whether as the creative
genius of the ‘‘semiotic’’ juxtaposed to the symbolic, or as an ethic of care contrasted with Kantian autonomy. In
that feminist
spirit, Spillers in fact discerned opportunity hidden in conditions of social death : because enslaved
women were reduced to ‘‘flesh’’ and denied the status of gender, she argued, their children inherit the
chance to do gender and kinship otherwise (Spillers, 1987). In the essay Sexton quotes, she also says: ‘‘Men of
the black diaspora are the only men who had the opportunity to understand something about
the female [and vice versa] that no other community’’ could . Indeed, ‘‘I used to think that black culture was
on the verge of creating…a kind of democratic form…in relationship to being human. That people did whatever work was to be done,
whether ‘men’s work’ or ‘women’s work’’’ (Spillers et al., 2007). Spillers never makes an ethnic claim about blackness, but she
does show catastrophe and positionality conferring ‘‘intramural’’ gifts , as well as an art and politics that
disturb what Jacques Rancie`re calls the partition of the sensible. In turn, Fred Moten uses her feminism to create an
exemplary agon with Afro- Pessimism. On the one hand, he endorses its fealty to Fanon’s basic
insight: ‘‘he fully accepts the definition of himself as pathological as it is imposed by a world that
knows itself through that imposition …This affirmation…is a willing or willingness to pay whatever
social costs accrue to being black, to inhabiting blackness, to living black social life under the
shadow of social death.’’ But on the other hand, just as ‘‘blackness is not reducible to its social
costs,’’ so ‘‘there is a relation between nothing and something or…between death and life.’’ If
‘‘pessimism’’ allows us to ‘‘discern that we are nothing,’’ he calls ‘‘optimism’’ the recognition
that ‘‘nothing is not absence…Poverty in the world is manifest in poetic access to what it is of the other world that
remains unheard, unnoted, unrecognized in this one. [Whatever]you call these resources…it remains to
consider precisely what is it that the ones who have nothing have …or to which they have access? What
comes of it?’’ Here, social death does not preclude agency; agency means occupying ‘‘nothingness
itself in its fullness,’’ and identifying with those ‘‘who have nothing and who, in having nothing,
have everything’’ (Moten, 2013). In encouraging us to look and ask what this everything might be, Moten honors the radical
idiom relating Jesus, William Blake, and young Karl Marx, the dionysian Christianity of Norman O. Brown, the messianism of Walter
Benjamin, the aesthetic of John Coltrane. In
this dark time, it seems crucial to bear witness against violent
repetition and against all the structural reasons we should anticipate it, but it seems as crucial
to model a politics that struggles against death by remembering the aporetic and excessive,
the improvisatory and the unexpected, as elements of our democratic faith.
 Optimism
Try or die for racial optimism—the state isn’t universally anti-black, progress
has been made, hope inspires change and even if reforms are imperfect they
materially improve the condition of black lives
Kennedy 14 (Randall Kennedy, 11/10/14, Michael R. Klein professor at Harvard Law School,
Rhodes Scholar, served law clerk for Supreme Court of appeals and Thurgood Marshall, author
of several books on race, civil rights, and law “Black America's Promised Land: Why I Am Still a
Racial Optimist”, http://prospect.org/article/black-americas-promised-land-why-i-am-still-racial-
optimist) //SJK

I am hopeful first and foremost because of the predominant trajectory of African Americans—a history that
John Hope Franklin framed with the apt title From Slavery to Freedom. In 1860, four million African Americans were enslaved while
another half-million were free but devoid of fundamental rights in many of the jurisdictions where they lived. In 1860, the very
term “African American” was something of an oxymoron because the Supreme Court had ruled in Dred Scott v.
Sandford that no black, free or enslaved, could be a citizen of the United States. But within a decade, the Thirteenth
Amendment (1865) abolished slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) established birthright
citizenship and required all states to accord all persons due process and equal protection of the
laws, and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) prohibited states from withholding the right to vote
on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude . People who had been sold on the
auction block as youngsters helped to govern their locales as public officials when they were adults. In 1861,
Jefferson Davis of Mississippi resigned from the United States Senate to join the Confederate States of America, which he led as
president. In 1870, Hiram Revels, the first black member of Congress, occupied the seat that Davis abandoned. ¶ The First
Reconstruction was overwhelmed by a devastating white supremacist reaction. But the most
fundamental reforms it established proved resilient, providing the basis for a Second
Reconstruction from the 1950s to the 1970s. During that period, too, the distance traveled by blacks was
astonishing. In 1950, segregation was deemed to be consistent with federal constitutional equal protection. No federal law
prevented proprietors of hotels, restaurants, and other privately owned public accommodations from engaging in racial
discrimination. No federal law prohibited private employers from discriminating on a racial basis against applicants for jobs or
current employees. No federal law effectively counteracted racial disenfranchisement. No federal law outlawed racial discrimination
in private housing transactions. In contrast, by 1970 federal constitutional law thoroughly repudiated the lie of separate but equal.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act forbade racial discrimination in privately owned places of public accommodation
and many areas of private employment. The 1965 Voting Rights Act provided the basis for strong prophylactic
action against racial exclusion at the ballot box . The 1968 Fair Housing Act addressed racial
exclusion in a market that had been zealously insulated against federal regulation. None of these
interventions were wholly successful. All were compromised. All occasioned backlash. But the
racial situation in 1970 and afterwards was dramatically better than what it had been in 1950
and before.¶ Today, at a moment when progress has stalled, we need to recall how dramatically
and unexpectedly conditions sometimes change . Until recently who’d-a thunk it possible for the
president to be an African American? In the 1980s, I used to ask law students how long affirmative action programs
ought to last. Champions of such programs, seeking to ensure their longevity, would say that affirmative action would be needed
until the country elected a black president. That reply would elicit appreciative laughter as listeners supposed that that formula
would preserve affirmative action for at least a century. But then along came Barack Obama and with him the remark that soon
became a cliché: “I never thought that I’d live to see a black president.” ¶ Obama’s
election is much more than a
monument to one politician’s talent and good fortune. Changes in public attitudes, law, and custom
have clearly elevated the fortunes of African Americans as individuals and black America as a
collectivity. Hard facts may give plausibility to the pessimistic tradition, but they make the
optimistic tradition compelling. Despite the many wrongs that remain to be righted, blacks in
America confront fewer racist impediments now than ever before in the history of the United States. The
courage, intelligence, persistence, idealism, and sacrifice of Fannie Lou Hamer and Rosa Parks, Julian Bond and Bob Moses, Medgar
Evers and Bayard Rustin, Viola Liuzzo and Vernon Dahmer—and countless other tribunes for racial justice—have not been expended
for naught. The facts of day-to-day life allow blacks to sing more confidently than ever before James Weldon Johnson’s magnificent
hymn “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often referred to as the Black National Anthem: ¶ Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past¶
has taught us¶ Sing a song full of the hope that the present¶ has brought us¶ Facing the rising sun of our new day begun¶ Let us
march on till victory is won.¶ My optimism involves more than a sociological prediction. I am also swayed by
my intuition regarding which of these hypotheses—the pessimistic or the optimistic—will do the most good. Hope is a vital
nutrient for effort; without it, there is no prospect for achievement. The belief that we can
overcome makes more realistic the possibility that we shall overcome. Optimism gives buoyancy to
thinking that might otherwise degenerate into nihilism, encourages solidarity in those who might otherwise be satisfied
by purely selfish indulgence, invites strategic planning that can usefully harness what might otherwise be impotent
indignation, and inspires efforts that might otherwise be avoided due to fatalism.
 AT Time K
Fails to produce emancipatory political change and reifies the squo.
Bevernage 15 – (October 2015, Berber, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Ghent,
“The Past is Evil/Evil is Past: On Retrospective Politics, Philosophy of History, and Temporal
Manichaeism,” History and Theory Volume 54, Issue 3, pages 333–352)

Torpey is certainly not the only intellectual expressing these worries. According to historian Pieter Lagrou ,
“our contemporary
societies, for lack of future projects, shrink into a ‘passeist’ culture.” 12 In European public discourse, he argues,
the focus on crimes of the distant past has become so strong that it tends to marginalize claims of victims of
contemporary crimes and human rights violations. Therefore, Lagrou argues, “a commemorative discourse of victimhood is very much the
opposite of a constructive and dynamic engagement with the present, but rather a paralyzing regression of democratic debate.”13 Lagrou's argument
closely resembles many others that turn against retrospective politics and “victim culture” such as Ian Buruma's warning about the peril of minorities
defining themselves exclusively as historical victims and engaging in an “Olympics of suffering”14 and Charles Maier's claims about a “surfeit of
memory.”15 These warnings about the perils of a retrospective politics outweighing or even banning politics directed at contemporary injustices

or striving for a more just future should be taken seriously . Yet the alternative of an exclusively present- or future-oriented politics
disregarding all historical injustice is not desirable either. Contemporary injustice often manifests itself in the form of structural repetition or continuity
of injustices with a long history. Moreover, totalitarian versions of progressivist politics have frequently abused the idea of a struggle for a more just
future in order to justify past and present suffering. It could even be argued that the rise of dominant restrospective politics has been initiated partly on
the basis of disillusionment with the exculpatory mechanisms of progressivist ideology.16 Some indeed claim that much of present-day retrospective
politics and the “setting straight” of historical injustices would be unnecessary had totalitarian progressivist politics focused less exclusively on the
bright future and shown more sensitivity to the contemporary suffering of its day. This claim certainly makes sense if one thinks of extreme examples
such as Stalin's five-year plans and Mao's Great Leap Forward. Yet, as Matthias Frisch rightly argues, the risk of the justification of past and present
suffering lurks around the corner wherever progressive logics of history or promises of bright and just futures are not counterbalanced by reflective
forms of remembrance.17 Therefore, we
should resist dualist thinking that forces us to choose between
restitution for historical injustice es and struggle for justice in the present or the future .
Rather, we should look for types of retrospective politics that do not oppose but complement or
reinforce the emancipatory and utopian elements in present- and future-directed politics —and the

other way around: present- and future-oriented politics that do not forget about historical injustices . In
this paper I want to contribute to this goal by focusing on the issue of retrospective politics and by analyzing how one can differentiate emancipatory or
even utopian types of retrospective politics from retrospective politics that I classify here as anti-utopian. I argue that the currently

dominant strands of retrospective politics indeed do tend to be anti-utopian and have a very limited
emancipatory potential. Moreover, I claim that currently dominant retrospective politics do not radically break with
several of the exculpatory intellectual mechanisms that are typically associated with progressivist politics

but actually modify and sometimes even radicalize them . In that restricted sense, and only in this sense, it can be
argued that currently dominant retrospective politics do not represent a fundamentally new way of

dealing with historical evil and the ethics of responsibility . My perspective is not a pessimistic one, however. Besides
the currently dominant retrospective politics, there exist other strands of retrospective politics that do have

emancipatory or even utopian features and that do not force us to choose between restitution for historical injustices and struggle for
justice in the present or the future. Anti-utopianism and ethical “passeism,” I argue, are not inherent or necessary

features of all retrospective politics but rather result from a specific, underlying type of historical thought or philosophy of history18 that treats the
relation between past, present, and future in antinomic terms and prevents us from understanding “transtemporal” injustices and responsibilities.
Sometimes this type of historical thought indeed stimulates a moralistic stance in which the past is charged with the worst of all evil, while the present
becomes morally discharged by simple comparison. The latter type of“temporal Manichaeism” can be highly
problematic, I argue, because it not only posits that the “past is evil” but also tends to turn this reasoning around and stimulates the wishful
thought that “evil is past.”
 AT Middle Passage
Historicizing blackness through the Middle Passage is based on a flawed
concept of spacetime – the aff staticizes agency and ignores the dimensions of
identity that are accumulated. This indicts their theory of tidalectical
materialism and impact turns their starting point.
Wright 15 – (Michelle, professor of African American Studies and Comparative Literature
Studies @ Northwestern University, "Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage
Epistemology," p. 11-20) kb

This conundrum that accompanies all attempts to inclusively represent Blackness is not merely abstract; it
affects which groups become forgotten in history when we historicize Blackness (as historians are
always so painfully aware), and it affects the ability of county, state, federal, and private non profits to
draw attention to, accurately represent, and effectively advocate for Black populations that are either
passively or actively disqualified from city, county, state, or federal support; educational grants; and health studies-to
mention just a few of the resources that Black communities struggle to access. As the Middle Passage epistemology itself attests,
there is something truly soul-destroying in the repeated discursive erasure from or
marginalization of vulnerable identities, whether in the media, on the street, in the classroom,
or in the legislative chamber. The only way to produce a definition of Blackness that is wholly inclusive
and nonhierarchical is to understand Blackness as the intersection of constructs that locate the Black
collective in history and in the specific moment in which Blackness is being imagined-the
"now" through which all imaginings of Blackness will be mediated . Constructs of Blackness are produced
through history, culture, and ancestry, which are predicated on a notion of time and space that is linear and driven by progress (with
setbacks along the way); however, this linear spacetime, while offering the necessary "weight" of a material Blackness, at times
excludes those who, in the contemporary moment, perceive and perform themselves as Black but do not share that linear timeline.
As the linear spacetime that dominates the academic canon on Black diasporic identities , the
Middle Passage epistemology is a commanding one: it negotiates the complexity of the origins
of Blackness in the West by stressing the process of being ripped from one existence and brutally
thrust into another; it forces us to question the very heart and intention of white Western democratic
discourses by presenting centuries of the moral and ethical corruption of chattel slavery and the equally corrupt logic that
attended its constant justification; it belies those anti-Black discourses of African inferiority by presenting an endless fountain of
thinkers, warriors, scientists, politicians, activists, artists, and entrepreneurs who achieved far more than the supposedly superior
white majority. Intellectually,
its counternarrative to Western claims of Enlightenment and
modernity do not erase but complicate our understanding of those claims . Morally, it has not only
been invoked and successfully used to critique older and contemporary forms of slavery but also been borrowed by Western
women's movements and LGBTTQ movements to locate these identities within Western history writ large and assert their
progressive nature. In other words, those scholars who have toiled in previous centuries and decades to bring the Black experience
to light have inspired and driven not only Black studies but also a host of other disciplines such as sociology, history, literature,
psychology, education, and so on. Western physics and philosophy
define in large part the linear spacetime that
shapes and informs the Middle Passage Epistemology . Newtonian laws of motion and gravity, a hallmark of the
European Scientific revolution, reveal, as Newton himself asserted, that "absolute, true and mathematical time, in and of itself and
of its own nature, without reference to anything external, flows uniformly:' Nevertheless, as Dan Falk's In Search of Time suggests,
"Newton's view of time built on-but also departed from-the recent work of Galileo and Descartes. Galileo had envisioned time
geometrically as a line marked off at regular intervals .... Newton went further by envisioning both time and space as geometrical
structures that had a real existence:'12 Indeed, this "real existence" therefore rendered them, as Newton also asserted
according to Brian Greene in The Fabric of the Cosmos, "absolute
and immutable entities that provided the
universe with a rigid, unchangeable arena. According to Newton, space and time supplied an invisible
scaffolding that gave the universe shape and structure :'13 While Falk and Greene add "space" to their
discussion of Newton's theories of time, not all physicists or Newton scholars agree that. Newton did indeed understand his theories
as implicitly applying to space. This is where the
humanities offers its own distinctive lay discourses on time;
borrowing from my own fields of postcolonial studies and poststructuralist theory, which argue
that time and space are inextricable from one another because each informs the other in our
discourses (i.e., not the physical world), this book uses the term spacetime. "Newtonian spacetime" is not equivalent to
Newton's theories but rather is how philosophy and political science-as well as nearly all Western discourses, really, academic and
lay-have (mis)translated Newton's concept of linear time into a linear spacetime or progress narrative. Newton's laws, with the
addition of Einstein's argument that time is complemented by rather than wholly separate from space, operate quite well in the
observable physical world and related technological applications. The problem arises with the translation of this concept of linear
spacetime into the humanities and social sciences. The idea that time, as we experience it, only moves forward became popular
among eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury European philosophers and political scientists who increasingly came to argue that if we
do not already see the evidence borne out by science (we see the young only growing old, not the other way around; an egg
hatching, not reassembling), we can see it in the progress of "mankind" from huts, villages, and tribal chiefs to buildings, cities,
machines, and "more advanced" forms of government.14 Given the immediate cogency it provides in presenting information and
knowledge, it is no surprise that the linear progress narrative is what organizes most of our
knowledge and knowledge production in the West . Today across the natural sciences, social sciences, and
humanities, we organize most of our epistemologies according to this spacetime , teaching and arguing
that our current knowledge is the result of or based on previous achievements and that we are
more "advanced" than previous generations of scholars and practitioners-that word itself presuming a linear movement
forward. Sometimes we use post to further indicate how far we have come-as in postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism,
postlapsarian, the postwar era, postfeminist, even "postBlack" -even though scholars who work with all these ideologies point to the
illogic of claiming to be "past" that which one still needs to define oneself (post-Blackness
defines itself through
Blackness, not outside of it, and so forth). In physics, Newton's assertions that linear time provides the
"scaffolding" of the universe no longer monopolize all theories of spacetime . Einstein's equations-later
demonstrated to be true-revealed that time does not move uniformly but in fact can speed up or slow down. In particle physics,
experiments on subatomic matter, most famously Wheeler's 1980 "which path" experiment, demonstrated that subatomic particles
travel haphazardly through space and can even exist in two places at the same time. This means that one cannot attempt to track a
particle though linear space or time; one can only use the present moment, more specifically, the now, to determine the location of
an object. In philosophy, the "now" moment is understood roughly as epiphenomenal time. As noted before, because my own
deployment of Epiphenomenal time is not tripartite but consists of one moment, it is not based in a
linear relation between cause and effect; that is, as in the history of collectives, causalities
abound in physics, but it is always impossible to assert convincingly that there is one single
reason for any effect. No moment one experiences depends directly on a previous moment in
order to come into being. We do not come from the past but exist only in the now, and we are
repeatedly mediating that now with recollections, readings of, discussions on, and experiments
about the past. This idea that time does not flow forward in a linear fashion-that is, as a progress narrative-has also achieved
some popularity in lay and academic discourses outside of the natural sciences. Performance studies and poststructuralist
arguments (in gender and sexuality studies especially) have introduced arguments that social identities are performed and, as such,
are at least partially phenomenological. Religious studies scholars are very familiar with epiphenomenal time as an enduring
conceptual touchstone that has been adopted by theologians in various centuries to explicate some of the more preternatural
aspects of religious dogma concerning embodiment. Unsurprisingly, theories of embodiment also explore the "now" of
performance. Exploring identities through intersecting spacetimes can produce a diverse but coherent narrative.
When applied to an exploration of Blackness in the African Diaspora, we can not only produce Blackness as a
"when" (rather than as a "what" or "thing") that is richly incorporative of a diversity of identities but also bring to light Black
identities that had been erased, marginalized, or forgotten until our postwar moment of interpretation. At the same time, as all
these readings of postwar. Blackness show, we
cannot find these moments until we first locate them on a
linear timeline. That timeline is most often the Middle Passage Epistemology in academic
discourses in Black studies, but it can also be a postcolonial or Afrocentric spacetime, both of
which locate Africa as an origin but differ at times regarding the events, personalities, and ideas
that mark the advance or block the progress of the collective. Blackness is well suited to a
progress narrative. Its linear structure offers immediate clarity and representation; its dynamic
of cause and effect appear rather self-evident in our lived experiences scientifically, physically,
and psychologically; and the progress narrative's philosophical tenet that knowledge can be
accumulated and we can progress to a greater state of understanding offers an almost
altruistic and thus worthy goal: to improve the lived experiences of the Black collective but also
humanity at large. One can understand why so many scholars try so hard to cram the dizzying
diversity of Blackness into this particular notion of spacetime. Just as the microcosmos, which resists
Newtonian behavior, has created a Holy Grail in physics, the Grand Unified Theory (GUT) ,IS so do our most traditional theorists
struggle to reconcile Blackness, in all its diversity, with our most dominant notion of a linear Black "spacetime:' In their authoritative
anthology Black Imagination and the Middle Passage, leading scholars Henry Louis Gates Jr., Maria Diedrich, and Carl Pedersen
wrestle with these limitations of Newtonian spacetime. Seeking to encompass the global diversity of the African Diaspora produced
through the Atlantic slave trade (a.k.a. the Middle Passage), they argue that the linear can in fact encompass all forms of Middle
Passage Blackness: In arguing for a spatial and temporal continuum of a Middle Passage sensibility , the
editors and contributors of this volume define a topography that extends from the interior of Africa across the Atlantic and into the
interior of the Americas .... Several intermeshing elements constitute this new conceptualization. Instead of looking at the Middle
Passage as a phenomenon of constricted space and limited time, the essays collected here extend its meaning in time and space
from the particularities of internal African migration to current meditations on the relationship of African Americans to their past,
from the hierarchical spatial relationships of above/below (the deck of the slave ship and its hold) and center/periphery (e.g., the
Great House and its slave quarters ... ) to the syncretic notion of a space in-between that links geographical
and cultural regions.16 The "spatial and temporal continuum of a Middle Passage sensibility ;' as
the authors put it (or the linear progress narrative that comprises the Middle Passage epistemology) addresses that key
element that is so desired by discourses defining collective identities: a "continuum" or historical
continuity for any given group. Yet that continuum, that unbroken continuous line, no matter how far one stretches it,
cannot encompass all the Black Africans directly impacted by the slave trade, nor all the African descended Black communities in the
Americas (or South Asia or, in a few cases, Europe) over the centuries. The editors acknowledge the reality of spatiotemporal "gaps''
by filling them with a "syncretic notion of space in between that links:' Yet they
leave the "notion" as a placeholder
and do not define its nature or full function. In order to enjoy continuity (and this is true of all collective
identities), one must sacrifice diversity-after all , human beings are like cats (perhaps a bit more diverse) and have the
"bad habit" of wandering off from the group, weaving in and out, or disappearing entirely from the linear progress narrative of
history. To date, discourses on Middle Passage Blackness that account for its formation through this
spacetime are stuck in this baffling state of affairs : how can one retain the historical continuity
(and thus be able to point to the existence and pedigree of Black culture , Black politics, Black music,
Black literature, etc.) of Middle Passage Blackness and accurately represent all its many
manifestations? It is the continuity that is the problem, the linking of events through a logic
bound by cause and effect that ties the past to the present and provides direction for the
future-in short, it is the very basis of this timeline's continuity that is preventing all Black peoples
from being represented within the "when" of Middle Passage Blackness . In Warped Passages: Unraveling
the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, Harvard physicist Lisa Randall discusses resolving this contradiction: "In
theoretical particle physics ... an object of study increasingly appears to possess a phenomenon
that cannot be synchronized with the dominant phenomena observed .... Selecting relevant
information and suppressing details is the sort of pragmatic fudging everyone does every day.
It's a way of coping with too much information .... When appropriate, you ignore some details so that you can focus
on the issue of interest, and not obscure it with inessential details:'17 Understanding Randall's "dominant" phenomena observed as
Middle Passage Blackness, we can equate this "pragmatic fudging" to our current treatment of Black identiti'es that do not adhere to
the linear timeline of the collective (whether it be postcolonial, Afrocentric, or Middle Passage in its history). Rather than highlight
this contradiction, our discourses "ignore some details" so we can "focus on the issue of interest" -that is, select those Black
collective identities that adhere to the Middle Passage collective identity we are interested in exploring. There is a cost to this, as
Randall explains, because those "inessential" details that stubbornly refuse to adhere to the timeline do not go away-or else they
disappear and others arrive. In discourses seeking to accurately represent Blackness through not just the Middle Passage but the
entire African Diaspora (such as postcolonial theory writ large), "pragmatic fudging" only puts off or delays the problem. Randall
explains that "multiverse" theorists such as herself (i.e., those who believe that we exist in one of many universes, most of which we
cannot perceive or experience with the naked eye) understand these diverse phenomena as distinct "dimensions": distinct
spacetimes that exist all around us and produce the phenomena that we observe and struggle to integrate into the laws of our
"Newtonian" spacetime. Without committing to the multi verse theory, I find Randall's
explanation of dimensions for
her lay reader especially informative because she likens them to social identities. Her comparison
helps this project to make a more cogent argument in discussing the difficulty involved in integrating more Black identities into our
discussion, lectures, interpretations, and scholarly studies. The Middle Passage epistemology operates as a formidably successful
structure in analyses in the social sciences or humanities of Black identity because it provides us with the basic dimensions of
Blackness-(threedimensional) space with the added dimension of time to form a linear progress narrative. Nonetheless, Physics of
Blackness shows how Black discourses can endlessly expand the dimensions of our analyses and
intersect with a wider range of identities by deploying an Epiphenomenal concept of spacetime
that takes into account all the multifarious dimensions of Blackness that exist in any one
moment, or "now" -not "just" class, gender, and sexuality, but all collective combinations
imagined in that moment. If the spacetime of the Middle Passage Epistemology can be
represented by a line (or an arrow), then the postwar epistemology (a more convenient form of the more
properly named World War II/postwar epistemology) should be represented as a circle with many arrows pointing
outward in all directions. This nicely sums up the argument of Physics of Blackness: in any moment in which we are
reading/analyzing Blackness, we should assume· that its valences will likely vary from those of a
previous moment.
 State Inevitable/Warming
The state is inevitable and key to warming—bottom up movements fail and lack
the power to change social realities
Eckersley 4 (Robyn Eckersley, 3/5/04, Professor and Head of PoliSci at University of
Melbourne, “The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty”, MIT Press, p.5-7) //SJK

While acknowledging the basis for this antipathy toward the nationstate, and the limitations of state-centric
analyses of global ecological degradation, I seek to draw attention to the positive role that states have played ,
and might increasingly play, in global and domestic politics . Writing more than twenty years ago, Hedley Bull (a proto-
constructivist and leading writer in the English school) outlined the state’s positive role in world affairs, and his arguments continue
to provide a powerful challenge to those who somehow seek to “get beyond the state,” as if such a move would
provide a more lasting solution to the threat of armed conflict or nuclear war, social and economic
injustice, or environmental degradation.10 As Bull argued, given that the state is here to stay whether
we like it or not, then the call to get “beyond the state is a counsel of despair , at all events if it
means that we have to begin by abolishing or subverting the state, rather than that there is a
need to build upon it.”11 In any event, rejecting the “statist frame” of world politics ought not
prohibit an inquiry into the emancipatory potential of the state as a crucial “node” in any
future network of global ecological governance. This is especially so, given that one can expect states to
persist as major sites of social and political power for at least the foreseeable future and that
any green transformations of the present political order will, short of revolution, necessarily be
state-dependent. Thus, like it or not, those concerned about ecological destruction must contend
with existing institutions and, where possible, seek to “rebuild the ship while still at sea.” And if states are so
implicated in ecological destruction, then an inquiry into the potential for their transformation or even their
modest reform into something that is at least more conducive to ecological sustainability would seem to be
compelling. Of course, it would be unhelpful to become singularly fixated on the redesign of the state at the expense of other
institutions of governance.¶ States are not the only institutions that limit , condition, shape, and direct
political power, and it is necessary to keep in view the broader spectrum of formal and informal
institutions of governance (e.g., local, national, regional, and international) that are implicated in
global environmental change. Nonetheless, while the state constitutes only one modality of political
power, it is an especially significant one because of its historical claims to exclusive rule over
territory and peoples—as expressed in the principle of state sovereignty. As Gianfranco Poggi explains, the political
power concentrated in the state “is a momentous, pervasive, critical phenomenon. Together with other forms of social power, it
constitutes an indispensable medium for constructing and shaping larger social realities, for
establishing, shaping and maintaining all broader and more durable collectivities.”12 States play, in varying
degrees, significant roles in structuring life chances, in distributing wealth, privilege, information,
and risks, in upholding civil and political rights, and in securing private property rights and
providing the legal/regulatory framework for capitalism. Every one of these dimensions of state activity
has, for good or ill, a significant bearing on the global environmental crisis. Given that the green
political project is one that demands far-reaching changes to both economies and societies, it is
difficult to imagine how such changes might occur on the kind of scale that is needed without the active
support of states. While it is often observed that states are too big to deal with local ecological
problems and too small to deal with global ones, the state nonetheless holds, as Lennart Lundqvist puts
it, “a unique position in the constitutive hierarchy from individuals through villages, regions and
nations all the way to global organizations. The state is inclusive of lower political and administrative levels, and
exclusive in speaking for its whole territory and population in relation to the outside world.”13 In short, it seems to me
inconceivable to advance ecological emancipation without also engaging with and seeking to
transform state power. Of course, not all states are democratic states, and the green movement has long been
wary of the coercive powers that all states reputedly enjoy. Coercion (and not democracy) is also central to Max Weber’s classic
sociological understanding of the state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of
physical force within a given territory.”14 Weber believed that the
state could not be defined sociologically in
terms of its ends, only formally as an organization in terms of the particular means that are peculiar
to it.15 Moreover his concept of legitimacy was merely concerned with whether rules were accepted by subjects as valid (for
whatever reason); he did not offer a normative theory as to the circumstances when particular rules ought to be accepted or
whether beliefs about the validity of rules were justified. Legitimacy was a contingent fact, and in view of his understanding of
politics as a struggle for power in the context of an increasingly disenchanted world, likely to become an increasingly unstable
achievement.16 In contrast to Weber, my approach to the state is explicitly normative and explicitly concerned with the purpose of
states, and the democratic basis of their legitimacy. It focuses on the limitations of liberal normative theories of the state (and
associated ideals of a just constitutional arrangement), and it proposes instead an alternative green theory that seeks to redress the
deficiencies in liberal theory. Nor is my account as bleak as Weber’s. The
fact that states possess a monopoly of
control over the means of coercion is a most serious matter, but it does not necessarily imply
that they must have frequent recourse to that power . In any event, whether the use of the state’s
coercive powers is to be deplored or welcomed turns on the purposes for which that power is
exercised, the manner in which it is exercised, and whether it is managed in public,
transparent, and accountable ways—a judgment that must be made against a background of changing problems,
practices, and understandings. The coercive arm of the state can be used to “bust” political
demonstrations and invade privacy. It can also be used to prevent human rights abuses, curb the
excesses of corporate power, and protect the environment. In short, although the political autonomy of states
is widely believed to be in decline, there are still few social institution that can match the same degree of
capacity and potential legitimacy that states have to redirect societies and economies along
more ecologically sustainable lines to address ecological problems such as global warming and
pollution, the buildup of toxic and nuclear wastes and the rapid erosion of the earth’s
biodiversity. States—particularly when they act collectively—have the capacity to curb the socially and ecologically harmful
consequences of capitalism. They are also more amenable to democratization than corporations, notwithstanding the ascendancy of
the neoliberal state in the increasingly competitive global economy. There are therefore many good reasons why green political
theorists need to think not only critically but also constructively about the state and the state system. While the state is certainly not
“healthy” at the present historical juncture, in this book I nonetheless join Poggi by offering “a timid two cheers for the old beast,” at
least as a potentially more significant ally in the green cause.17
 Redefine political/Eckersley
We should imagine a future state that extends care to all entities, human and
non-human, present and future—this imagination is a necessary transformation
to resist oppression and ecological destruction. Don’t accept failure—rather
imagine that we can transform democracy so radically that violent exclusion is
Eckersley 4 (Robyn Eckersley, 3/5/04, Professor and Head of PoliSci at University of
Melbourne, “The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty”, MIT Press, p.118-
119) //SJK
It was the bourgeoisie who in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries served as the vanguard for the creation of the liberal
democratic state while the labor movement was in the forefront of the social forces that created the social democratic state (or
welfare state) in the twentieth century. If a more democratic and outward-looking state—the green democratic state—is ever to
emerge in the new millennium, then the environment movement and the broader green movement will most likely be its
harbingers. This is unlikely to occur without a protracted struggle. In view of the intensification of economic globalization and the
ascendancy of neoliberal economic policy, the challenges are considerable. This inquiry seeks to confront these challenges and to
develop a normative theory of the transnational, green democratic state out of this critical encounter. In developing and
defending new regulatory ideals of the green democratic state, and the practice of what might be called
“ecologically responsible statehood ,” this book seeks to connect the moral and practical concerns
of the green movement with contemporary debates about the state, democracy, law, justice,
and difference. In particular, I seek to outline the constitutional structures of a green democratic state that might be more
amenable to protecting nature than the liberal democratic state while maintaining legitimacy in the face of cultural diversity and
increasing transboundary and sometimes global ecological problems. I hope to show how a
rethinking of the principles of
ecological democracy might ultimately serve to cast the state in a new role: that of an ecological
steward and facilitator of transboundary democracy rather than a selfish actor jealously
protecting its territory and ignoring or discounting the needs of foreign lands. Such a normative
ideal poses a fundamental challenge to traditional notions of the nation , of national
sovereignty, and the organization of democracy in terms of an enclosed territorial space and
polity. It requires new democratic procedures, new decision rules, new forms of political
representation and participation, and a more fluid set of relationships and understandings
among states and peoples. My project, then, is clearly to re-invent states rather than to reject or
circumvent them. In this respect my inquiry swims against the strong current of scepticism by pluralists, pragmatists, and
realists toward “attempts to invest the state with normative qualities , or higher responsibilities to safeguard
the public interest, or articulate and uphold a framework of moral rules, or a distinctive sphere of
justice.”2 Although historical and critical sociological inquiries into state formation and state practices
continue apace, it has become increasingly unfashionable to defend normative theories of the state.
Yet these two different approaches cannot be wholly dissociated. As Andrew Vincent reminds us, historical and sociological
description and explanation are unavoidably saturated with normative preconceptions, even if they are not always made explicit.3
And if the traditional repertoire of normative preconceptions about the purposes of the state and the state system is inadequate
when it comes to representing ecological interests and concerns, then I believe it has become necessary to invent a new one.
However, any attempt to develop a green theory about the proper role and purpose of the state
in relation to domestic and global societies and their environments must take, as its starting
point, the current structures of state governance, and the ways in which such structures are
implicated in either producing and/or ameliorating ecological problems. This recognition of the important
linkages between historical/sociological explanation and normative theory has been one of the hallmarks of Marxist-inspired critical
social theory. Accordingly it
has sought to avoid the inherent conservatism of purely positivistic
sociological explanation, on the one hand, while avoiding merely wishful utopian dreaming , on the
other.4 Throughout this inquiry, I build on both the method and normative orientation of critical theory. Specifically, I look for
emancipatory opportunities that are immanent in contemporary processes and developments and
suggest how they might be goaded and sharpened in ways that might bring about deeper political
and structural transformations toward a more ecologically responsive system of governance at
the national and international levels. This requires “disciplined imagination ,” that is, drawing
out a normative vision that has some points of engagement with emerging understandings
and practices. Nonetheless, the role of imagination—thinking what “could be otherwise”—should
not be discounted. As Vincent also points out, “We should also realise that to innovate in State theory is potentially to
change the character of our social existence.”5

Even if certain bodies like the undocumented are excluded from the political
now, acting like they aren’t by representing their interests redefines the moral
calculus of inside and outside
Eckersley 4 (Robyn Eckersley, 3/5/04, Professor and Head of PoliSci at University of
Melbourne, “The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty”, MIT Press, p.111-
113) //SJK

Now, at first, there may appear to be nothing new or ecological about this
formulation of democracy, as it resonates
with those deliberative and cosmopolitan ideals of democracy that seek to incorporate into risk
assessment the entire universe of those potentially affected (notably,¶ Jürgen Habermas’s ideal communication
community and David Held’s cosmopolitan democracy).1 However, what makes this formulation both new and ecological is the
accompanying argument that the opportunity to participate or otherwise be represented in the
making of risk generating decisions should literally be extended to all those potentially affected,
regardless of social class, geographic location, nationality, generation, or species . This ecological
extension of the familiar idea of a democracy of the affected is intended to be inclusive and ecumenical,
incorporating the concerns of environmental justice advocates, risk society sociologists, and ecocentric green theorists. Indeed,
ecological democracy may be best understood not so much as a democracy of the affected but
rather as a democracy for the affected, since the class of beings entitled to have their interests
considered in democratic deliberation and decision making (whether young children, the
infirm, the yet to be born, or nonhuman species) will invariably be wider than the class of
actual deliberators and decision makers.2 As an ideal ecological democracy must necessarily always contain this
representative dimension, which poses a direct challenge to Habermas’s procedural account of normative
validity, which runs as follows: “According to the discourse principle, just those norms deserve to be valid that could meet with
the approval of those potentially affected, insofar as the latter participate in rational discourses.”3 In relation to all those subjects
lacking communicative competence, my ecological formulation replaces the words insofar as with as if. Habermas’s procedural
account of moral validity rests on the moral principle that ideally persons
should not be bound by norms to
which they have not given their free and informed consent —a principle that rests on the bedrock Kantian ideal
that all individuals ought to be respected as ends in themselves. My ecological account rests on the post-Kantian and postliberal
ideal of respect for differently situated others as ends in themselves, and is suitably adjusted to reflect this wider moral
constituency. Of
course, many nonhuman others are not capable of giving approval or consent to
proposed norms; however, proceeding as if they were is one mechanism that enables human
agents to consider the well-being of nonhuman interests in ways that go beyond their service
to humans. Unlike Habermas’s formulation, the critical ecological formulation acknowledges the very important role of
representation in the democratic process. Indeed, this will be the primary basis of my critique of Habermas. And unlike liberalism,
my critique also seeks to avoid a purely instrumental posture toward others (whether human or nonhuman) in its extension of the
moral principle of “live and let live” to all inhabitants in the wider ecological community, which is understood as an unbounded
continuum in space and time. This
reconceptualization of the demos as no longer fixed in terms of
people and territory provides a challenge to traditional conceptions of democracy that have
presupposed some form of fixed enclosure, in terms of territory and/or people. The ambit claim argues that in
relation to the making of any decision entailing potential risk , the relevant moral community
must be understood as the affected community or community at risk, tied together not by
common passports, nationality, blood line, ethnicity, or religion but by the potential to be
harmed by the particular proposal, and not necessarily all in the same way or to the same degree.4 For example, for a
proposal to build a large dam, the community at risk might be all ecological communities in the relevant watershed regardless of the
location of state territorial boundaries. For a proposal to build a nuclear reactor, the spatial community at risk might be half a
hemisphere, spanning continents and oceans. Temporally this community at risk would extend almost indefinitely into the future,
encompassing countless generations. For a proposal to release genetically modified organisms into the environment, the relevant
communities at risk might be variable and not contiguous in space or contemporaneous in time. In each case the affected
community would typically include both present and future human populations and the ecosystems in which they are embedded.
Moreover the boundaries of such communities would rarely be determinate or fixed but instead have more of the character of
spatialtemporal zones with nebulous and/or fading edges.

XT—Representing those who lack agency is what prevents the exclusion of the
nonhuman and redefines deliberative democracys
Eckersley 4 (Robyn Eckersley, 3/5/04, Professor and Head of PoliSci at University of
Melbourne, “The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty”, MIT Press, p.118-
119) //SJK

In the terms of the double challenge of ecological democracy, then, deliberative democracy, prima facie, appears promising.
Not only is it likely to generate a risk-averse orientation , it is also likely to guard against unfair
displacement of risks onto innocent third partie s. Such an orientation provides a welcome move
away from the utilitarian framework of trading-off (which permits the sacrifice of the interests
of minorities, those lacking preferences, and the discounted future in favor of present
majorities) toward a more inclusive orientation that at least strives to find ways of mutually
accommodating (rather than trading off) the needs of the present and the future , the human and the
nonhuman. In short, a case can be made that deliberative democracy is especially suited to making
collective decisions about long-range, generalizable interests, such as environmental protection
and sustainable development. It thus provides a fair process that is likely to move societies toward more reflexive
ecological modernization of the kind discussed in chapter 3. Moreover, because it does not confine its moral
horizons to the citizens and territory of a particular polity, it may be understood as a
transnational form of democracy that is able to cope with fluid boundaries.10 It also has the capacity
to accommodate the complexities and uncertainties associated with ecological problems , include
and evaluate both expert scientific and vernacular understandings of ecological problems, and identify and
evaluate risks in socially and ecologically inclusive ways. Above all, deliberative democracy may be defended as the
best model for reaching mutual understandings about common norms, and the quest to create
an ecologically sustainable society is fundamentally a normative concern and only secondarily a
technical matter. As John Barry has put it, the concept of sustainability “needs to be understood as a
discursively created rather than an authoritatively given product. ”11
AT Alts
 Essentialism DA
The alt fails to account for international dynamics and essentializes blackness.
Wright 15 – (2015, Michelle, PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan,
Professor of African American Studies and Comparative Literature Studies at Northwestern
University, “Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology,” pp. 147-55,
endnote on p. 188)
When interpellated through the Middle Passage epistemology, Blackness has a limited set of qualitative values or denotations that link it to the events in that epistemology such as the commitment to collective and individual struggle, “racial uplift,” and the

generally, the Middle Passage epistemology like

maintenance of strong communities through “traditional” or heteropatriarchal family structures. More ( other

established Black linear progress or antiprogress narratives e.g. Afropessimism — , Afrocentrism, PanAfricanism, Negritude, )10

links all Black collectives across the Diaspora to the experience of racism
also and the need to overcome it—so how can Ramses II be
“Black”? Even further, what does it mean for us to claim him as “Black”? It is hard to interpellate Ramses (or any of the other African kings, queens, leaders, intellectuals, politicians, scientists, etc., whose physiognomy we would acknowledge as stereotypically
“Black”) within the qualitative definition of Middle Passage Blackness as making common cause with African Americans—or any other “Black” community fighting racism and seeking socioeconomic and political equality in the African Diaspora. In attempting to

interpellate Ramses within this definition, we produce Blackness as a fixed identity that transcends time and space
must ; through this,
Ramses no longer belongs to his own spacetime but retroactively becomes a denigrated “Negro” who must combat his oppression. A paradox or—as Massey terms it, “a dichotomous result”—now confronts us: was Ramses II a Black freedom fighter or a ruler of

It is the qualitative definition of Black progress that

extraordinary and largely unquestioned power, one of the greatest and most oppressive in the history of Egyptian pharaohs?

creates this dichotomy, a paradox that then “empties out” all meaning in qualitative collapse . The
attempt to interpellate Ramses II through a Black progress narrative exposes the continuing attempt and subsequent failure of the progress narrative to interpellate Ramses. He is Black because he is a Black African, but he is not Black, because neither “Black” nor
“African” operated as identities in Ramses’s spacetime. Ramses II’s life speaks to the greatness of African empires, but his unapologetic use of massive slave labor should “expel” him from Black progressive membership, the same way in which some discourses

While we should not lose sleep over the “odd individual” whose
attempt to expel Blacks whose actions deliberately harmed other Blacks. perhaps terrible

behaviors bar them from a Black progress narrative

him, her, or full or perhaps even partial mention in , there are other Black individuals who are barred from mention who have

This dichotomy threatens to create interpellative problems for Blacks

not acted against the principle of striving for collective progress. also

who move across the Atlantic at the same time as millions of Black Africans are being
, unlike the Egyptian pharaoh,

sailed to and sold into the Americas but not in the same directions Black slaves , , veering away from our progress narrative.

transported outside of the Americas to Europe, India, and elsewhere do not retain a collective
identity They .disappear into households factories, fields
are sold individually and roads and city streets , perhaps , or country ,

From the point of view of Black linear narratives

intersecting with populations at large. progress , progress has not been achieved because the collective has evanesced (and is

their histories have become irrelevant to the collective historical

therefore unable to achieve its goal of overcoming racism), or read another way,

theme of overcoming racism Qualitatively speaking, it appears difficult if not impossible to

.

interpellate Blackness using a Black Atlantic linear narrative in a significant and lasting way progress . In “The
World Is All of One Piece: The African Diaspora and Transportation to Australia,” which is included in Ruth Simms Hamilton’s book Routes of Passage, Cassandra Pybus reprises a version of Sidney Mintz’s question about the qualitative limits of Black Atlantic studies:

A transnational historical consciousness and a capacity to encompass experience in disparate

time and space are great strengths of African diaspora studies In so far as there is a weakness, it .

is that the Atlantic world remains the locus of discussion While some attention has begun to .

drift toward the Indian Ocean, less has been directed toward the distant Pacific scholarship . . . . In the diaspora at the detailed
penal transportation records we can find information about the African end of the eighteenth century that is very hard to come by elsewhere and that points in directions in which historians may not otherwise look.11 Pybus understands that her topic is framed by
African Diaspora studies yet constrained by its “Atlantic focus”; she then observes that despite this swirl of scholarly activity in the Atlantic, there is a “drift” and “direction” toward the Indian Ocean and the “distant Pacific.” This passage draws a connecting line
moving horizontally (well, south by southeast) from the moment of the American Revolution in the Middle Passage timeline to other moments in those kingdoms and empires that border the Indian Ocean and, more specifically, to the moment of the British penal
colony of Australia. By moving us horizontally into the Pacific, Pybus traces the journey of those (primarily) U.S. Blacks who allied with the defeated British and accompanied them on their return to England. Once there, the promised support from the Crown never
materialized, and many of these former soldiers, spies, and support staff found themselves on the London streets. These (primarily) men would have been in competition with an already burgeoning class of the dispossessed filling the streets of London and other
industrial centers. As Robert Hughes argues in his monumental history of the settling of white Australia, The Fatal Shore, land grabs by the aristocracy and the replacement of cottage industries with large industrialized factories deprived farmers, laborers, and urban
workers of their former careers as well as prospects for new ones (many machines, such as looms, required fewer adult workers). Theft, especially with the poor now rubbing shoulders with the wealthy in crowded urban centers, skyrocketed, and Parliament
responded with deeply punitive measures; to steal a bit of ribbon or bread could send you to prison or heavy labor or, most fearful of all, condemn you to “transport” (to a British penal colony). With the American colonies no longer available for convicts, Britain
turned to its recently neglected “discovery” of Australia as a convenient replacement, and so white and Black Britons, along with a few U.S. and Caribbean Blacks, found themselves transported as part of the First Fleet settlers. Pybus’s second horizontal reading
comes, counterintuitively, mostly through records created by hierarchies such as court, maritime, colonial, and penal records, due to the paucity of “horizontal” archives (correspondence between peers, diaries, etc.). Pybus, not unlike Hughes in The Fatal Shore,
constructs a horizontal narrative of these Black convicts and settlers through (unavoidably) mostly vertical archival sources: state, judicial, colonial, and penal records that read these human beings as mere numbers filling ships, accepting punishment, and perhaps
enriching the Crown through forced labor. To an even greater extent than Hughes, Pybus works to retrieve the very multivalent human experiences behind these records of discipline and punishment, to see the interactions denoted, denounced, and pronounced

Yet despite two horizontal readings

through their eyes, so to speak, looking out horizontally rather than down from the (at least figurative) heights of the judge’s bench and foreman’s lash. these ,

qualitative collapse looms because Pybus has framed this history as a horizontal connection to
here

what is ultimately a vertical framework that finds meaning in the struggle against racism . Pybus’s Black
Founders offers us a notable exception to our assumptions about Blackness, but in her work, as in other histories she mentions, Blackness evanesces as the convicts and settlers perhaps married, procreated, and most certainly died without moving a coherent Black
Atlantic collective forward in its quest for equality in a majority white society. Or, rather more complicatedly, in Black Founders Blackness evanesces into either the white Australian population or the Australian Aboriginal population, in the latter case an indigenous
Blackness. Most likely reflecting on this, Pybus herself does not think that this discovery of Australia’s “Black founders” radically changes the history of the African Diaspora or Australia: “My point is not that this cohort of convicts is especially significant to the history
of Australia—though it certainly challenges the conventional reading of the colonial experience—but to examine what it can tell us about the wider world.”12 If we add Epiphenomenal time to our Black Atlantic frame, however, we can avoid the qualitative collapse
that (re)produces these histories as interesting in their own right but marginal to our understanding of Black Atlantic history. Interpellated through Epiphenomenal time, the Blackness in Black Founders first changes a person’s relationship to Blackness and
indigeneity. Rather than simply “losing” indigenous status once captured and then sold, Blackness intersects twice more with indigeneity, and on two continents: North America and Australia. In both cases, indigenous peoples sometimes helped Black slaves escape,
the latter often marrying into specific American Indian nations. Middle Passage U.S. Blackness now shares a spacetime through indigeneity and raises questions about Central and South American intersections (such as the Garifunas of Nicaragua).13 One might also
see a third, more controversial intersection, between U.S. Blacks who “returned” to establish the free state of Liberia and the indigenous populations who found themselves oppressed in the resulting socioeconomic and political hierarchy. The qualitative value of
Pybus’s Blackness now meaningfully intersects with the Americas but is not swallowed by it, because the frame is horizontally comparative rather than vertically subordinating. The intersection of Blackness with indigeneity in the Americas, Australia, and Africa also
subverts the notion of a “purely” diasporic Blackness, even within the progress narrative itself, because the latter honors indigeneity as the “origin” to which the collective must eventually return. In this moment of interpellation, origin/home is achieved not
necessarily through return but through intersections with other “first nations” in the Atlantic and Pacific. Even further, we can see how Blackness, in intersecting with indigeneity when (formally) seeking “return,” as in Liberia, might produce not egalitarian unity but
instead oppressive hierarchy. Black Founders also provides us with perhaps unheard of dimensions of Blackness that, once recognized, might usefully connect to other possible spacetimes that share this dimension. As noted before, the “Atlantic Blacks” who arrived
with the First Fleet and on subsequent convict ships experienced a range of lives or careers that cannot be summed up through one collective trajectory, especially that of the progress narrative. Pybus shows that in our present moment of reading, Blackness
becomes ambiguous in its meaning in these early colonies. On the one hand, racial designations are clearly marked in the official records, but unlike in the Americas, socioeconomic and political castes are not created to wholly segregate them. There are many
marriages one would designate as “interracial,” but even if one could access some understanding of how “interracial marriage” would translate in this spacetime, marriage is rarely an ideal that denotes the cessation of difficulties over differences. As more than one
wag has pointed out, the dominance of heterosexual marriage certainly does not reflect an egalitarian harmony of relations between the sexes. The marriages in question are thus racialized outside of social racializations, meaning that to be Black in these colonies
does not automatically designate a subaltern status below that of whites. In cases where Black convicts were executed or subjected to physical punishment (whipping was the most common), we might see racially motivated causes, but in the brutal tide of regular
executions and torturous punishment, it is difficult to extrapolate consistently a narrative in which this Blackness can be separated from the brutal imperial and capitalist caste system that ruled all British subjects, including the white working poor. Blacks intermixing
with the white working poor populations in England and Australia intersect with similar interactions during the earlier spacetime of indentured servitude in the United States and the later one of late nineteenth-century Irish immigration to northeastern urban
centers of the United States. If we step back from Pybus’s initial frame, which connects the history of the Black Atlantic in Australia horizontally, and instead honor the horizontality of her interpellations of Black individuals and their intersections (through marriage,
penal life, executions, manumission, etc.), one can read this history as a series of moments that intersect not only with Black Atlantic histories in the Americas but also with histories in Europe, Africa, and perhaps India. It should be noted that, while we are
discovering intersections of collectives, we do so wholly within idealist frameworks that can be further interpellated only through individuals who make up those collectives; beneficially, however, the collective identities that intersect with these individuals produce
yet more collectives in more spacetimes—more dimensions of Blackness across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. While the era of the Middle Passage produces many and varied kinds of Blackness through the intersection of linear and Epiphenomenal time, the
conflated eras of World War II and the postwar era offer yet more. I understand World War II and the postwar period as a conflation of eras because it is impossible to pinpoint where one ends and the other begins; however, when we are operating with
Epiphenomenal time, this ambiguity is productive rather than restrictive. Indeed, breadth, depth, ambiguity, ambivalence, and dominance are the strengths contributed by these overlapping eras: breadth because World War II involved almost the majority of Black
Africans and Black Diasporans across the globe, whereas slavery—which forms the cornerstone of the Middle Passage epistemology—did not; depth because the various narratives, such as that of Black African men attempting to resist forcible conscription by French
and British colonial forces, or that of African American men and women who fought for the right to be drafted, require explanation and further research; ambiguity because we find Blackness where we do not expect it and struggle to interpret it, such as Black
German individuals who served in Hitler’s army and Black Brazilian troops tasked with defending Italy; ambivalence because it is a war and its equally destructive aftermath ironically connects the African Diaspora many times over with ease and diversity; and finally,
dominance because World War II and the postwar era constructed an interpellative frame that has been used by so many across the globe, a frame that highlights the contemporary and global importance of Blackness far more frequently than themes of the Middle
Passage ever do. While the rise of the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), the Arab Spring, and other sociopolitical and economic events seem to signal the framing of a new era, journalists, pundits, and politicians alike still interpret many of these events as
effects of the World War II/postwar era. Even the most rigid histories cannot sustain a completely linear Second World War narrative. For example, the invasion of Poland in 1939 must be explained by the rise of Nazism, which perhaps requires a notation about the
Versailles Treaty. Likewise, the bombing of Pearl Harbor is necessary to explain the entrance of the United States into the war as a direct combatant. The Second World War, therefore, has at least two beginnings and, even by conservative estimates, at least two
endings: the surrender of the Nazis in Berlin and the signed surrender by the Japanese on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. This gives us a war with at least two timelines to which there correspond two themes, two notions of progress, and many ways in which
occupied nations must be understood: as collaborators, as wholly oppressed, as underground resisters, and so on. This nonlinear set of peoples, places, and events forces anyone seeking interpellations through World War II to accept all the exceptions to its linear
progress narrative—that is, it forces researchers to incorporate great nuance into their interpellations (in asking when the Second World War ended, for example, we have to amend the question to reflect all the surrenders and dates that dominant discourses on
World War II cite in response because, whether there were multiple wars or one great war may be a matter of definition, but there is no question that there were multiple narratives that intersected). This means that qualitative collapse will occur less frequently in
interpellations made through a wholly linear progress narrative on the war (because dominant discourses do not offer, really, any wholly linear narratives of it), but when it does, the effect is almost always “deafening,” as if it were drowning out alternative
interpellations.14 Blackness can manifest through this multidimensionality, in most cases quite easily. In contrast to the difficulty involved in explaining how Blacks from the Atlantic found themselves in Australia, the global reach of the Second World War makes it
easy to explain how Blackness has spread almost everywhere. When using both Epiphenomenal and linear spacetimes to interpellate Blackness in these eras, no long, creative narratives are needed to explain the presence of West Africans under British rule, East
Africans under Italian Fascist rule, or the fight for equality both at home and abroad that was the self-appointed task of many an African American man or woman in uniform; moreover, using both spacetimes enables Black European studies to explain without much
difficulty how Blacks of African descent came to fight under Hitler. We can arrive at these explanations by starting with the individual, rather than the collective, as a point of interpellation. We can then link such an individual to his, her, or their variously realized
collective identities (understanding that we should never claim that an individual is fully realized, as we can work within distinct spacetimes only as they are imagined in the now, not in both the present and the past). Unfortunately, many of these dimensions as
interpellated through the postwar epistemology are easily achieved through vertical structures: we need only locate (in ascending order) a military battalion, a regiment, or a division that would contain Black soldiers and its encampments and headquarters. Vertical
readings alone can often interpellate an agential and diverse Blackness: Black soldiers and field nurses with agency, Black civilians with choices, and a whole roster of intersections with a broad variety of peers (soldiers and civilians) across vast geographies. At first
glance, performing vertical interpellations through linear narratives appears to bear the same fruit as a horizontal reading: Blackness with agency and diversity. This might explain why so many Black collective progress narratives of World War II use this
multidimensionality to produce hierarchical, or vertical, interpellations for the collective. The “Windrush narrative” of Black Britain, for example, readily narrates the contributions of Black British Caribbeans in the Second World War, yet uses a progress narrative to
interpellate this Blackness. Like the histories of African American men who fought for the United States during World War I, the “Windrush” narrative underscores the painful hypocrisy of serving the British Crown only to be treated as an undesirable emigrant in the
postwar era.15 Drawing on oral histories of service in the war and archival records from the British War Office, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (1999) interpellates Black Britishness as agential and diverse, a proud component of the history of
World War II but of official British histories of the war more particularly.16 To be sure, even when operating within World War II/postwar frameworks, we encounter obstacles. Hierarchies of power are not (unfortunately) wholly erased, and they can be complicated
by the complexities of global alliances and rivalries (no matter how easily they are manifested in the postwar epistemology). The postwar epistemology’s emphasis on the “now,” in the absence of a geographical center (a component of even the most traditional
narratives of the Second World War/postwar era),17 allows, say, Samoan warriors aiding the Allies to be interpellated through collective identities that certainly include hierarchal structures (e.g., the military command structure) but also relationships whereby
power must constantly be negotiated (e.g., in relationships between soldiers or between soldiers and civilians). The “now” complicates power, meaning that while an Epiphenomenal interpellation enables agency, it will also reflect those vertical hierarchies that

***BEGIN ENDNOTE*** One could read

inevitably accompany so many moments of interpellation in every individual life across the globe.18 18. Smith’s first novel as interpellating

Blackness through U.S. versions of Afropessimism but this is a distinction lacking meaningful ,

difference While it eschews the Middle Passage Epistemology’s progress narrative Blacks are
. (

destined to always be oppressed it needs this linear progress narrative to argue against ),

progress While claiming to be static, U.S. versions of Afropessimism nonetheless doggedly

.

track each moment of the Middle Passage Epistemology to state yet again that no progress
has been made ***END ENDNOTE*** .
 Fetishization DA
Their fetishization of whiteness as a pervasive force legitimizes it as such and
dooms any alternative conception of the world
Chatterton Williams 17 – African American author of the memoir Losing My Cool: Love,
Literature and a Black Man’s Escape from the Crowd [Thomas, 10/6/2017, “How Ta-Nehisi
Coates Gives Whiteness Power”, New York Times,
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/opinion/ta-nehisi-coates-whiteness-power.html] AMarb

For having the temerity to defend himself, Mr. Packer was accused on social media of "excusing racism" and
"whitesplaining." Such logic extends a disturbing trend in left-of-center public thinking: identity epistemology,
or knowing-through-being, somewhere along the line became identity ethics, or morality-through-being. Accordingly,
whiteness and wrongness have become interchangeable — the high ground is now accessible
only by way of "allyship," which is to say silence and total repentance. The upside to this new white
burden, of course, is that whichever way they may choose, those deemed white remain this nation's
primary actors. Given the genuine severity of the Trump threat, some readers of this essay may
wonder, why devote energy to picking over the virtue and solidarity signaling of the left? Quite
simply because getting this kind of thinking wrong exacerbates the very inequality it seeks to
counteract. In the most memorable sentence in "The First White President," Mr. Coates declares, "Whereas his forebears
carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies." I have spent
the past six months poring over the literature of European and American white nationalism, in the process interviewing noxious
identitarians like the alt-right founder Richard Spencer. The most shocking aspect of Mr. Coates's wording here is the extent
to which it mirrors ideas of race — specifically the specialness of whiteness — that white
supremacist thinkers cherish. This, more than anything, is what is so unsettling about Mr. Coates's recent
writing and the tenor of the leftist "woke" discourse he epitomizes. Though it is not at all morally equivalent, it is
nonetheless in sync with the toxic premises of white supremacism. Both sides eagerly reduce
people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other,
while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice. Both sides
mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed, determinative and almost
supernatural. For Mr. Coates, whiteness is a "talisman," an "amulet" of "eldritch energies" that explains all
injustice; for the abysmal early- 20th-century Italian fascist and racist icon Julius Evola, it was a "meta- biological
force," a collective mind-spirit that justifies all inequality. In either case, whites are preordained to walk that
special path. It is a dangerous vision of life we should refuse no matter who is doing the conjuring .
This summer, I spent an hour on the phone with Richard Spencer. It was an exchange that left me feeling physically sickened. Toward
the end of the interview, he said one thing that I still think about often. He referred to the all-encompassing sense of white power so
many liberals now also attribute to whiteness as a profound opportunity. "This is the photographic negative of a white supremacist,"
he told me gleefully. "This is why I'm actually very confident, because maybe those leftists will be the easiest ones to flip. However
far-fetched that may sound, what identitarians like Mr. Spencer have grasped, and what ostensibly anti-racist thinkers like Mr.
Coates have lost sight of, is the
fact that so long as we fetishize race, we ensure that we will never be
rid of the hierarchies it imposes. We will all be doomed to stalk our separate paths.
 AT Identity Politics – Generic
They misread history—identity politics should not be reduced to a single issue
but a starting point for autonomous politics that engages in coalition building
Haider 18 (Asad Haider, 1/7/18, Founding Editor of Viewpoint Magazine, PhD candidate in
History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz and member of UAW-2865, the Student-Workers
Union at the UCal, “Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump”, Verso Books, p. 11-
12)//SJK

In 1977, the term identity politics in its contemporary form was introduced into political discourse by the Combahee
River Collective (CRC), a group of black lesbian militants that had formed in Boston three years earlier. In their
influential collective text “A Black Feminist Statement ,” founding members Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita
Frazier argued that the project of revolutionary socialism had been undermined by racism and sexism in the

movement. They wrote: We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the

collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources
must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. We are not convinced, however, that a socialist

revolution that is not also a feminist and antiracist revolution will guarantee our liberation . The
statement brilliantly demonstrated that “the major systems of oppression are interlocking” and proclaimed the

necessity of articulating “the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless
workers.”1 Black women, whose specific social position had been neglected by both the black
liberation movement and the women’s liberation movement, could challenge this kind of empty
class reductionism simply by asserting their own autonomous politics. As a way of conceptualizing this
important aspect of their political practice, the CRC presented the hypothesis that the most radical politics emerged

from placing their own experience at the center of their analysis and rooting their politics in their own particular
identities: This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politic s. We believe that
the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s
oppression.2 Now this did not mean, for the CRC, that politics should be reduced to the specific identities
of the individuals engaged in it. As Barbara Smith has recently reflected: What we were saying is that we have
a right as people who are not just female, who are not solely Black, who are not just lesbians,
who are not just working class, or workers—that we are people who embody all of these
identities, and we have a right to build and define political theory and practice based upon that
reality … That’s what we meant by identity politics. We didn’t mean that if you’re not the
same as us, you’re nothing. We were not saying that we didn’t care about anybody who wasn’t exactly like us.3 Indeed, the CRC
demonstrated this perspective in its actual political practice. Demita Frazier recalls the emphasis the organization placed on coalitions: I never

believed that Combahee, or other Black feminist groups I have participated in, should focus only on issues of
concern for us as Black women, or that, as lesbian/bisexual women, we should only focus on lesbian
issues. It’s really important to note that Combahee was instrumental in founding a local battered women’s
shelter. We worked in coalition with community activists, women and men, lesbians and
straight folks. We were very active in the reproductive rights movement , even though, at the time,
most of us were lesbians. We found ourselves involved in coalition with the labor movement because we believed
in the importance of supporting other groups even if the individuals in that group weren’t all feminist. We understood that coalition building

was crucial to our own survival.4

Identity fails as a politics—individualization is what denies agency and reifies
power structures
-case arg, more strategic as an answer to their answers to framework where they say the state makes us so sad, or
our identities are inevitably excluded

-Any organization that privileges identity links to the same offense that you discussed, if you think the state is bad for
identity and the way in which identity works w the state is bad, the same thing would apply to the alt

Haider 18 (Asad Haider, 1/7/18, Founding Editor of Viewpoint Magazine, PhD candidate in
History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz and member of UAW-2865, the Student-Workers
Union at the UCal, “Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump”, Verso Books, p. 12-
13)//SJK
To be fair, Palmieri is not solely to blame for this error in judgment. In fact, she was really just expressing a classical and inescapable tenet of liberalism.
Judith Butler has explained that “identities are formed within contemporary political arrangements in
relation to certain requirements of the liberal state .” In liberal political discourse, power relations
are equated with the law, but as Michel Foucault demonstrated, they are actually produced and exercised in a range of
social practices: the division of labor in the factory , the spatial organization of the classroom , and, of course,

the disciplinary procedures of the prison. In these institutions, collectivities of people are separated into individuals

who are subordinated to a dominating power. But this “individualization” also constitutes them as
political subjects—the basic political unit of liberalism, after all, is the individual. Within this framework, Butler
argues, “the assertion of rights and claims to entitlement can only be made on the basis of a

singular and injured identity.”7 The word subject, Butler points out, has a peculiar double meaning: it means
having agency, being able to exert power, but also being subordinated, under the control of an external
power. The liberal form of politics is one in which we become subjects who participate in politics through our
subjection to power. So Butler suggests that “what we call identity politics is produced by a state which can only allocate recognition and
rights to subjects totalized by the particularity that constitutes their plaintiff status.” If we can claim to be somehow injured on

the basis of our identity, as though presenting a grievance in a court of law, we can demand
recognition from the state on that basis—and since identities are the condition of liberal
politics, they become more and more totalizing and reductive. Our political agency through
identity is exactly what locks us into the state, what ensures our continued subjection. The
pressing task, then, as Butler puts it, is to come up with ways of “refusing the type of individuality correlated
with the disciplinary apparatus of the modern state.”8 But we can’t possibly achieve this if we take these forms of individuality

for granted—if we accept them as the starting point of our analysis and our politics. Clearly “identity”

is a real phenomenon: it corresponds to the way the state parcels us out into individuals , and the way we
form our selfhood in response to a wide range of social relations. But it is nevertheless an abstraction, one
that doesn’t tell us about the specific social relations that have constituted it. A materialist mode of investigation has to go

from the abstract to the concrete—it has to bring this abstraction back to earth by moving through all the
historical specificities and material relations that have put it in our heads. In order to do that, we have to reject
“identity” as a foundation for thinking about identity politics . For this reason, I don’t accept the Holy Trinity of
“race, gender, and class” as identity categories. This idea of the Holy Spirit of Identity, which takes three consubstantial divine forms, has

no place in materialist analysis. Race, gender, and class name entirely different social relations, and they
themselves are abstractions that have to be explained in terms of specific material histories. For
precisely that reason, this book is entirely focused on race. That is partly because my own personal experience has forced me to think of race beyond
the easy theological abstraction of identity. But it is also because the hypotheses presented here are based on research into the history of race, racism,
and antiracist movements. Of
course, studying any concrete history necessarily requires us to deal with all
the relations constitutive of it, and thus we will encounter the effects of gender relations and
movements against gender-related oppression . But I make no claim to offer a comprehensive analysis of gender as such; to
do so would require a distinct course of research, and to simply treat gender as a subsidiary question to race would be entirely unacceptable. There is
already much work along these lines to consider. Butler’s Gender Trouble is itself one of the most prescient and profound critiques of identity politics as
it exists within the specific discourse of feminist theory. In Butler’s own words, her critique “brings
into question the
foundationalist frame in which feminism as an identity politics has been articulated . The internal
paradox of this foundationalism is that it presumes, fixes, and constrains the very ‘subjects’ that it hopes to
represent and liberate.”9 But here I focus on race, and I will be primarily concerned with the history of black movements, not only
because I believe these movements have fundamentally shaped the political parameters of our current historical moment, but because the figures to
whom these movements gave rise are at the apex of thinking on the concept of race. There is also the matter of my personal contact with black
revolutionary theory, which first exposed me to Malcolm X and Huey Newton’s critiques of the precursors of identity politics. Following their practice, I

define identity politics as the neutralization of movements against racial oppression . It is the ideology
that emerged to appropriate this emancipatory legacy in service of the advancement of political and economic elites. In order to theorize and criticize
it, it is necessary to apply the framework of the black revolutionary struggle, including the Combahee River Collective itself. These

movements should not be considered deviations from a universal, but rather the basis for
unsettling the category of identity and criticizing the contemporary forms of identity politics —a
phenomenon whose specific historical form the black revolutionary struggle could not have predicted or anticipated, but whose precursors it identified
and opposed.
 AT Afropessimism - Generic
Afropessimism only serves to sustain the power structures it critiques
-essentializes history, misreads Patterson, irresponsible author

-rejecting reformis

-sounds like racist rejection of integration

-destroys unity that could prevent marginalization

-Rejects coalitions like Ferguson and Palestine, which worked together and prove solidarity

-metaphysical explanation is oddly convenient, defangs radicalism, “destroy the world rather than build a better one”

-only thing they destroy is potential for activism

-subdivides opposition and prevents more than entire resistance

Haider 18 (Asad Haider, 1/7/18, Founding Editor of Viewpoint Magazine, PhD candidate in
History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz and member of UAW-2865, the Student-Workers
Union at the UCal, “Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump”, Verso Books, p. 25-
28)//SJK

The assumption that only black-led organizations could organize around “their” issues , despite the
deep political divergences among these organizations—some of which represented the elite interests of a black
bourgeoisie and explicitly sought to suppress grassroots militancy—would come to have a deeply
damaging effect. Among intellectuals, the most reactionary separatist tendencies were granted the
status of a pseudo-philosophy with the ascendance of Frank Wilderson’s so-called Afropessimism. A fundamental

symptom of this trend was the proliferation of the term antiblackness in the place of racism. The
latter, more quotidian term implies an antiracist struggle that unites oppressed groups . The
“antiblackness” problematic radicalizes and ontologizes a separatist, blackexceptionalist

perspective, rejecting even the minimal gesture toward coalitions implied by the term people of
color. It claims, on the basis of dubious interpretations of Gramsci and the historiography of
slavery, that “blackness” is founded on “social death ,” the loss of identity and total
domination imposed upon slaves at birth—despite the fact that the source of this term, sociologist
Orlando Patterson, used it to define all forms of slavery, including nonracialized ones.7 It follows
from Wilderson’s reasoning that the whole of “white” civil society is founded on this absolute violence,

the entire history of which is reduced to an effect of a purported white enjoyment of black
suffering —“as though the chief business of slavery,” in the inimitable words of historian Barbara Fields, “were the
production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco.”8
With ideologies of racial unity functioning as a clear block to the development of mass antagonistic politics, it
is no wonder that the seemingly extremist languages of blackness and antiblackness seduced

intellectuals into reconciliation with the status quo. Of course, when Afropessimist discourse
occasionally did discuss the black political class, its tone was one of severe criticism. But this
criticism reproduced the political dynamics that led to its rise in the first plac e: black leaders
were castigated for their coalitionism, thus reinforcing the ideology of racial unity that obscured their
class positions; their reformist program of bringing black people greater citizenship rights was
rejected in language reminiscent of earlier critiques of integration, obscuring the political
incorporation of the black elite that has been taking place since the end of segregation .9 The ideology
of blackness in Wilderson’s Afro-pessimism functions as a disavowal of the real integration of black

elites into “civil society,” now hardly a “white” thing. When the lethal effects of white supremacy are
exerted by a racially integrated ruling class , blackness as an antipolitical void becomes a
convenient subject position for the performance of marginality . Separatist ideology prevents
the construction of unity among the marginalized, the kind of unity that could actually
overcome their marginalization. In a 2014 radio interview, Wilderson attacked the view that the experience of
black people in Ferguson was in any way comparable to that of Palestinians. Attributing this view to
“right reactionary white civil society and so-called progressive colored civil society,” he
proclaimed: “That’s just bullshit. First, there’s no time period in which black policing and slave
domination have ever ended. Second, the Arabs and the Jews are as much a part of the black
slave trade—the creation of blackness as social death—as anyone else … Antiblackness is as
important and necessary to the formation of Arab psychic life as it is to the formation of Jewish
psychic life.”10 Listening to Wilderson’s bewildering repetitions of neoconservative Orientalist
tropes, you wouldn’t know that activists in Ferguson had been in close contact with
Palestinians, who pointed out that the same tear-gas canisters were being fired at them and
shared street-fighting tactics learned from bitter experience. A solidarity statement signed by a
range of Palestinian activists and organizations declared: “With a Black Power fist in the air, we salute the

people of Ferguson and join in your demands for justice.” This solidarity was returned in January
when a group of movement activists visited Palestine. During the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement,
Afro-pessimist language spread rapidly on Twitter and Tumblr, encouraging a wide range of activists to
describe police violence in terms of the suffering imposed upon “black bodies” and to try to
monopolize the very category of death. It was a somewhat stupefying [ridiculous] choice of words at
a time when black people in Ferguson were constituting part of a global struggle to refuse to
accept suffering, to refuse to die. As Robin D. G. Kelley has pointed out, reading black experience through
trauma can easily slip into thinking of ourselves as victims and objects rather than agents,
subjected to centuries of gratuitous violence that have structured and overdetermined our
very being. In the argot of our day, “bodies”—vulnerable and threatening bodies—increasingly stand in for
actual people with names, experiences, dreams, and desires . But in fact, Kelley points out, “what
sustained enslaved African people was a memory of freedom, dreams of seizing it, and
conspiracies to enact it”—a heritage of resistance that is erased by the rhetoric of “black
bodies.” Furthermore, Kelley argues, if we argue that state violence is merely a manifestation of antiblackness
because that is what we see and feel, we are left with no theory of the state and have no way of
understanding racialized police violence in places such as Atlanta and Detroit, where most
cops are black, unless we turn to some metaphysical explanation .11 Here we get to the crux of the
problem. The “metaphysical explanation”—the classic mode of ideological superstition—
obscures not only the social relations of the state, but also the contradiction between mass
insurgency and the rising black elite that claimed to represent it. Wilderson claims that Afro-pessimism
seeks to “destroy the world” rather than build a better one, since the world is irredeemably founded on
“antiblackness.” In reality, Afro-pessimism has served as an ideological ballast for the emergent

bureaucracies in Ferguson and beyond, since the supposedly radical rhetoric of separatism and the
reformism of the elite leadership have converged to foreclose the possibilities of building a mass
movement. The “representatives” of the Black Lives Matter movement who got the most media play
included the executive director of Saint Louis Teach for America, an organization that has played a driving role in the
privatization of education and the assault on teachers’ unions. In fact, a group of these “representatives”
enthusiastically met with the aggressively pro-charter and pro-testing secretary of education Arne
Duncan during his visit to Ferguson —white civil society or not . If such tendencies continue

unchecked, the only world that will be destroyed is the one in which poor black students can
attend public school or expect to get a job with benefits . In Santa Cruz, the ideology of identity took
us further and further away from a genuinely emancipatory project . Its consequences were not only
the demobilization of the movement but also a degrading political parcelization. In the absence
of a credible identitarian claim, anti-neoliberal struggles, like the movement against tuition hikes,
were artificially separated from “race” issues. “POC” activists would focus on police brutality,
ethnic studies, and postcolonial theory; the increasing cost of living, the privatization of
education, and job insecurity became “white” issues . I began to realize what a drastic mistake it was
when anxious white commentators represented identity politics as an extremist form of

opposition to the status quo. This experience showed me that identity politics is, on the contrary, an integral part
of the dominant ideology; it makes opposition impossible . We are susceptible to it when we fail to
recognize that the racial integration of the ruling class and political elites has irrevocably changed the field of
political action. During a weekend of political discussion among the most dedicated activists, we collectively read and discussed the interview
“Black Editor,” with John Watson, who explains the organizing function of the League of Revolutionary Black

Workers’ newspaper. While printing and selling newspapers is no longer an up-to-date tactic, the problem it set out to address seemed
quite contemporary: As far back as 1960 or 1959 there were people involved in various organizations that were single issue

oriented, they had some particular object such as a sit-in campaign, police brutality, war, the
peace movement, etc. These organizations had a life of their own—internal organizational activity, with lots of people doing
concrete work against the system. But they could not sustain themselves, they would fall apart . Then there

would be a new upsurge, a new organization. There was a wave-like character of the movement, it had its ebb and flow, and

because it had single issues it had no clear ideology. 12 It was impossible to put off the task of
rethinking everything, learning how we got here, trying to recover our history, and finding
alternate approaches. How could we understand the distance of our contemporary situation
from the mass mobilizations of the past when a grassroots movement against racism was
being undermined by the very language of antiracism? We organized a study group on the history of antiracist
movements, reading selections from a wide swath of historical texts that eventually formed the basis of a Black Radical Tradition Reader that spawned
reading groups in Oakland, Philadelphia, New York, and elsewhere.13 The problem we encountered was that forming a new ideology
would have to confront the tenacity of the existing ideology . And “race” is one of the most tenacious ideologies of all.
 AT Wake Work
“Wake work” alone is necessary but insufficient – demanding institutional gains
is key
Bickerstaff 17 (Jovonne Bickerstaff is a Post-Doctoral Associate, “Of Wake Work and We Who
Would Build: Centralizing Blackness in Digital Work”, February 2017,
http://aadhum.umd.edu/2017/02/centralizing-blackness-digital-work/ ///ghs-sc)

, I am drawn to Christina Sharpe’s conception of “wake work.” Wake work does not
In my own research

seek to amend Black suffering through the frames of juridical, philosophical, or historical
solutions. Wake work theorizes Black life in both the “wake” and the “hold” of the slave ship ,
requiring recognition “of the ways that we are constituted through and by vulnerability to overwhelming force, though not only known to ourselves and to each other by that
force.” This is critical Black study that does not seek to make room for the full scope of Black humanity to be recognized by the white consciousness. Rather, it works to “defend
the dead” through the cultivation of a ‘blackened consciousness’ that would inhabit the ways that we are both living and dying in the wake. In my own digital humanities work
centered in New Orleans, 11 years after the storm, this means staring unflinchingly at the political, economic, and intellectual assemblages that over-determine Black life/death,
while simultaneously understanding how insurgent Black social life can undermine these over-determinations. Is digital wake work possible? If so, what can it look like? That is
the question that I intend to work through as a researcher within the AADHum Initiative. If it is indeed true that, as Moya Z. Bailey says, “All the Digital Humanists Are White, All
the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave,” then it’s time to say—in the words of Jonathan P. Jackson—“Gentlemen, we will be taking over from here.” In our work, how can
we discover and further develop digital lines of escape, made possible by the apertures that emerge at the collision of Black Studies and the digital humanities? We who would
build: Re-visioning resistance & theorizing beyond the gaze —Jovonne Bickerstaff, Ph.D. We have two hands: one is to battle, one is to build. We battle. We resist by calling out
threats to our dignity by name. We build. We actively protect our dignity by creating what works. Those two hands may be on one person, one organization may be set up to do
both. For others, they are the battling or the building kind. Either way, the battlers need the builders. The builders need the battlers. This is a discipline of resistance. —Brittany
Packnett, activist Outlining her concept of “Black studies in the wake,” Christina Sharpe emphasizes its call “to be at the intellectual work of a continued reckoning the longue of
Atlantic chattel slavery, with black fungibility, antiblackness… accounting for the narrative, historical, structural, and other positions black people are forced to occupy.” Drawing
on Alexander Weheliye, Kim Gallon, by contrast, characterizes Black Studies as “a mode of knowledge production” that “investigates processes of racialization with a particular
emphasis on the shifting configurations of black life.” Building on the Duboisian tradition of intellectual activism that advances scholarship while furthering social justice, both

I can
suggest that the real and vital work on black people necessarily speaks to race—that is, analyzing the consequences of and resistance to the project of racialization.

see how interrogating the racial project of whiteness that shapes black folks’ lives can be a way
of speaking truth to power for African Americanist scholars. Still, focusing so acutely on
unpacking racism and racialization as sole or primary path of resistance gives me pause . I
wonder if we’ve framed what Black Studies does—and more importantly can do—too narrowly.
Might our pre-occupation with black struggle , whether in the conditions of or resistance to
oppression, make us complicit in the diminishing the fullness of black humanity and what we
might explore in it? Can we imagine examining black experience without making America’s
racialization project the dominant idiom? Recently, activist Brittany Packnett developed a Twitter thread which began, “We have
two hands: one is to battle, one is to build.” Certainly, we African Americanists know how to battle. So much of our training as scholars
prepares us for it; we’re socialized to privilege the work of critique and deconstruction. Given how black folk have been conceptualized or written out of cannons, our

proclivity towards confrontational debate may be more pronounced. We feel the pulse of that
resistance when Gallon characterizes Black Studies as “the comparative study of the black
cultural and social experiences under white Eurocentric systems of power.” But… is that
enough? Is our conception of black scholarly resistance too narrow? Taking Packnett’s call for a multifaceted strategy of
resistance to heart, I must ask, when do we build? These questions are central to who I’ve become as a scholar. Surely, I do my share of confrontational resistance, interrogating

problematic paradigms, particularly when I teach. Still, as my research agenda solidifies, I’m more compelled by that call to build. Centering
black experience has been my entry point for moving beyond critique to imagine new narratives and inquiry to engage in what I term theorizing beyond gaze—orienting my own
work and my hopes for the AADHum Initiative. “From my perspective there are only black people. When I say “people”, that’s what I mean… No African American writer had
ever done what I did… even the ones I admired… I have had reviews in the past that have accused me of not writing about white people… As though our lives have no meaning
and no depth without the white gaze. And I have spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one … I didn’t have to be consumed
by or concerned by the white gaze… The problem of being free to write the way you wish to without this other racialized gaze is a serious one for an African American writer”
[emphasis added]. —Toni Morrison Freedom for her, Nina Simone once quipped, was the absence of fear. As a scholar and writer, my vision of freedom is more akin to Toni
Morrison’s and begins with one radical tool: choice. I name, frame, and lay claim to different terrains: examining understudied populations (couples in enduring relationships),
raising novel questions (how emotional strategies for resilience impact intimacy), and situating my research in unorthodox literatures (sociology of emotions vs. “the black
family”). In every case, each she/he/they that I describe is, by default, black. Refusing to explicitly qualify race in work on black people can be jarring because having non-white

In addition to disturbing notions of black folks as the perpetual other,

experiences centered is so rare.

theorizing beyond the gaze forces us to recognize how failing to fully account for positionality
undermines our theorizing. If we uphold confrontation as the primary or most effective tool of
resistance, I fear we risk neglecting how resistance requires and has always relied as much on
subversive tactics like theorizing beyond the gaze as on direct action . In the AADHUM initiative, I hope that helps us
think through how can we begin to construct a “meaningful intellectual and activist challenge that circumvents the analyses of injustice that re-isolate the dispossessed, à la
McKittrick’s invocation of Gilmore. It’d be easy (and reductive) to see black Twitter simply as an offshoot of mainstream Twitter use. But what if we saw it instead as innovation
narrative, à la Steve Jobs and iPods and iPhones, whereby they’re responsible for optimizing technology use in ways that reveal its fullest potential? Or conversely, could we
invert the arrows of co-optation, which typically focuses on stolen African American products, to reveal how communities of color used Twitter and Vine towards subversive

Ultimately, how, when and why

ends of mobilizing social change (i.e. BLM), celebrating black joy in the mannequin challenge or viral memes on Vine?

we enter as African Americanists, seems to turn largely on who we are working for and what we
are working towards. The aim is not to abandon the battle, but simply to recognize that , while
necessary, it is insufficient.
 AT Redaction
the alt alone fails---overvalues discursive approaches at the expense of material
ones
Naomi Zack 16. professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon. She is author and editor of
a dozen books, including White Privilege and Black Rights: The Injustice of U.S. Police Racial
Profiling and Homicide (2015); The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality after the History of
Philosophy (2011); Ethics for Disaster (2009). Applicative Justice: A Pragmatic Empirical
Approach to Racial Injustice. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated. Pages 125-134.

ACADEMIC INJUSTICE DISCOURSE Just law can coexist with unjust practice and both are parts of
“empirical law” or what Bendey called “the process of government.” Empirical law is constantly
changing and some theorists are optimistic that verbal discourse has the ability to make written law more just, even though the
same unjust practices recur or new ones emerge. These theorists, some of whom are or may aspire to become public
intellectuals, hope that someday public political discourse on behalf of those who are treated
unjustly will have the power to interrupt a cycle of just written law accompanied by continued
unjust practice. That is, the “right” discourse perennially holds the promise of changing the
beliefs, values, and goals of everyone in the public auditorium, so that the same kind of unjust
practices do not perpetually chase the same kinds of just laws .11 This search for “magic words” is
futile for academics who are professionally confined to dry and abstract prose . Our verbiage
does not have the power to move the multitudes who do not read or listen to it anyway. But
even when multitudes are inspired and emotionally stirred by great orators, action that follows
is unlikely to result in lasting change, without the support of powerful interests . After the 1960s,
academics began a robust practice of liberatory discourse about injustice that seems to grow more impassioned and intense each
year. The quest for demographic diversity among students and faculty in higher education has weathered judicial defeat of explicit
affirmative action policies, but only partly for the sake of justice. There are pragmatic prizes if the academy can justify itself by
producing a racially integrated leadership and managerial class for business, politics, and the military. Top leaders throughout
society realize that they need such racial diversity for broad consumption, voter support, and boots on the ground, and the
expression of that need is evident in amicus curiae briefs submitted to the US Supreme Court as it has been torturously dismantling
affirmative action, piece by piece, since Bakke in 1978.12 Academic political discourse has been deeper than polemics and
debate, exactly because of its disciplined intellectual origins in different fields of study (i.e., discipline imposed by distinct
“disciplines”). But it has been swimming upstream against a more rarefied and older academic tradition,
particularly among many philosophers and their gate keepers outside of the profession. Even Hannah Arendt (see chapter 2) spoke
approvingly of the life of the mind as cut off from real political activity that occurred in the realm of “opinion.” In her 1970 interview
with Adelbert Reif, Arendt addressed the phenomenon of college-stu-dent protestors, noting that they had brought social change
through optimistic belief in their ability to make a better world, while at the same time discovering joy in civic participation. Arendt
credited such protests with the success of the civil rights movement and progress toward ending the Vietnam War.13 As discussed in
chapter 4, it is doubtful that Arendt was correct that student protests caused the success of the civil rights movement. A historical
analysis of the end to the Vietnam War is beyond the present scope, but what we already know about empirical Bentleyan analyses
would warrant skepticism about Arendt’s causal thesis there as well. In the same interview, Arendt warned that demonstrations by
student activists could be self-defeating in democratic Euro-American contexts, because in attacking their universities, they were
attacking the very entities that made their protests possible, American universities, especially large state schools that were the sites
of the protests Arendt had in mind, have perforce developed very different financial structures since 1970. These schools have
become increasingly dependent on private corporate and philanthropic funding, with state government funds now a much reduced
part of their budget. While this structural change is not generally viewed as an incursion on academic freedom, it has been
coincident with a very flat era of student protest and activism. Still, Arendt's notion of the "life of the mind” remains useful if we
consider that the progressive/change-seeking output of professional academics since 1970 has been professionally accepted in the
institutions that employ its participants. Also, much of today’s liberatory academic discourse can be viewed as the legacy of earlier
student protest, furthering a tradition that may have been founded when some of the 1960s student radicals became professors.
This indicates that the connection between academic radicals and the hands that feed them is not as simple as Arendt thought. In
the United States, everything now points to both the existence of real academic freedom and its
real ineffectiveness. Progressive academic writers ply a craft of formal speech that deals with
contemporary injustice through complex theoretical frameworks , with requisite scholarly
apparatuses and without translation into more simple views of the world; there is often also a
lack of translation from one discipline to another or between subdisciplines in the same field. The audience is
other academics and students. Neither specialization nor the limited and partly captive audience should be viewed as
problematic because that is the nature of academic work, given broad social divisions of labor. But there is a problem with
the delusional nature of so much of this work. The delusion consists of a naive view of the
power of academic speech to directly change reality. The rhetorical mode of address used by
academics writing cultural criticism, political philosophy, social philosophy, or what is now called social-political
philosophy (which combines the other subfield approaches), often proceeds as though its authors are making
grand entries in a planetary cabala, where words have the immediate power to become their
intended referents. Those who do not write and speak cabalistically may subscribe to the Trickle-Down Good
Ideas Theory that can be traced from Plato to John Stuart Mill to John Rawls. Subscription to that theory is immediately
self-flattering, but it lacks reliable empirical support.16 Although, after the US civil rights movement, there has
been an uncanny coincidence of race-blind formal racial equality with the hegemony in political philosophy of Rawls’s requirement
that those who plan fundamental social institutions do so in ignorance of their own societal environments. As we saw in chapter 1,
Rawls was quite explicit about this: I assume that the parties do not know the particular circumstances of their own society. That is,
they do not know its economic or political situation, or the level of civilization and culture it has been able to achieve. The persons in
the original position have no information as to which generation they belong.17 Both race-blind racial equality and Rawlsian ideals
are compatible with race-based real inequality. There are, of course, counter-examples, such as Katherine MacKinnon’s work on
sexual harassment in the workplace as expressed in current law and institutional policy.18 Nevertheless even
very good
academic political discourse about justice and injustice cannot be relied upon to attract
implementation or application in real life. This may be because there has not been sufficient
time for the development of training programs for a new profession of “bridgers,” who could
translate good ideas in the academy for those who govern and make policy. An internal problem for
such translators would be to decide where to anchor their bridges in fields—every humanistic field—where experts disagree.
However, the current tradition of progressive academic writing and speech is less than half a century old and if and when such
translators emerge, they will develop their own professional criteria for choosing among contending experts. Public
media, as
a democratic analogue to disagreement within academic discourse, supports the idea that
expressing and airing views in day-to-day practices or special “national conversations” also have immediate practical
results. It is not evident how there could be such results, when opposing views and opinions are
treated with the same respect and have equal access to the same mass auditorium that lacks
rules for evidence or valid argument. As with academic discourse, there is no structured
connection to official decision processes. The only reliable result of participation in such
unbinding referenda is that those who participate are able to express themselves and get attention
that may benefit them in the marketplace of their related endeavors. Public expression also serves to, represent and create
collective atmospheres of belief, attitude, and opinion. These atmospheres are implicitly known by a majority of people in the
culture, even though such knowledge is difficult to validate. Ambiguities cannot be resolved by recourse to public opinion polls,
because understanding the results of those polls requires creative interpretive skills that draw on what is already known about
relevant atmospheres. For example, suppose that more blacks than whites believe that white privilege is real and that O.J. Simpson
was innocent, or that more whites than blacks believe that white American police officers are not, in general, racially biased. Are the
views of whites evidence of racial bias or racial oblivion? Are the views of blacks evidence of racial preference or paranoia?
Moreover, such polls almost always have a large racial overlap of opinion: If 29 percent of blacks compared to 71 percent of whites
believe X, then 71 percent of blacks and 29 percent of whites do not believe X. Does this mean that the percentages of each group
that does not contribute to the discrepancy in belief recorded in the polls are in some degree of agreement? Experiments in social
psychology could be designed to answer such questions and others like them, but it is important to decide beforehand why the data
is important and what it does and does not indicate. For instance, testing the claim that white privilege is a reality of contemporary
life requires some prior definition of what is meant by “white privilege,” which can range from injustice to social courtesies. In a
widely discussed 2013 experiment conducted in Queensland, Australia, economists Redzo Mujcic and Paul Frijters found that the
majority of free bus rides, based on conductor generosity, were dispensed to whites, with blacks least likely to receive this courtesy,
compared to all other racial groups among commuters. Journalist Britni Danielle, writing for a general audience on Yahoo News,
touted this study as evidence that “white privilege is real,” without distinguishing between an amenity such as a free bus ride and
recognition of one’s rights by not being subject to arbitrary stops and frisks by police officers.19 Conservatives reading Mujcic and
Frijter’s study might say that the bus driver may have been acting rationally based on past experience with unruly black passengers.
From a progressive perspective, more specifics would need to be introduced to defend the claim that this study revealed white
privilege, such as controls for the apparent social class and gender of passengers, as well as the preexisting racial climate among bus
commuters in Queensland, as well as the broader racial atmosphere throughout Australia in 2013. The 2015 Academy Awards What
is racial atmosphere and climate? A US example that is also global could help clarify these vague ideas, provided that it is understood
beforehand that in this context, as in most public references to "race," ‘racial” means “pertaining to racism.” From beginning to end,
the 2015 Academy Awards ceremony hit racist notes that slid by unchecked, because it was an occasion of celebration. Neil Patrick
Harris, the host, began with what might have been a critical remark about the lack of racial diversity among audience members and
award winners: “Tonight we honor Hollywood’s best and whitest, sorry, bright est.” For those who were uncomfortable with the lack
of robust racial diversity among audience members and award winners, his remark might have validated their unease. But those
who would have been uncomfortable with more racial diversity may have been heard “best and whitest” as support for their social
values. (The discourse of white privilege as a critique of contemporary anti-nonwhite racism is, as indicated, that kind of double-
edged sword.) Midway through the ceremony, Patricia Arquette called for people of color and members of the lesbian, bisexual, gay,
and transgender (LBGT) community to support legislation for equal pay for women and to commit themselves to supporting women,
thereby overlooking the women who were either or both people of color and members of the LGВТ community. This kind of
oversight may perhaps be excused by Arquette’s ignorance of what academics have been for decades analyzing as
“intersectionality.” But Sean Penn’s remark at the grand finale awarding for Best Picture to Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the Mexican
director of Birdman, was simply, explicitly, racist: "Who gave this son of a bitch a green card?” Inarritu later brushed off the insult by
saying he found it "hilarious,” because “Sean and I have that kind of brutal relationship. I think it was very funny.”20 Inarritu attempt
at a “save” for Penn does not address the impact of Penn’s insult on other Mexicans and Mexican Americans, including those
without green cards who struggle to remain employed in the face of anti-immigrant prejudice and discrimination. (That such a
moment of maximum recognition was brought so low by a racist crack is not unusual in US culture, where the nastiest forms of racist
insult are often let loose on people of color who have succeeded.) As a spectacle watched by almost thirty-four million, the 2015
Oscars, despite ratings lower than recent years, was a global public event.21 Symbolically, it has no peer for the display of beauty,
talent, and artistic creativity. Its subtext inevitably has implications about current American race relations, which influence their
future. The racial implications of the Oscars replays in millions of minds at countless other public celebrations and entertainment
venues, as well as in private interactions (for a year at least). Such spectacles are forms of public discourse and what they represent
or fail to represent about US racial demographics and the attitude of the dominant white group creates or augments a specific racial
climate that in 2015 is part of a more general racial atmosphere of ambiguity and indeterminacy. At the 2015 Academy Awards, for
many critical observers, the issue or subject pertaining to race (insofar as it is understood that subjects of race are subjects of
racism), was recognition.22 The beauty, talent, and artistic creativity of people of color was not fully recognized. Some people of
color did get awards and some audience members were people of color, so recognition, along with diversity, was not completely
absent. But there appeared to be insufficient racial diversity for audience and award winners to be considered racially integrated.
And that appearance was symbolic. However, the symbolic meaning is ambiguous: Were there people of color who were deserving
of awards but did not get them because they were people of color? Is race a factor in who I becomes a member of the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences? In the future, will the racial makeup of award winners become more or less representative of
their proportions in the motion picture industry? If the proportion of people of color in the motion picture industry is not
proportional to their presence in the population at large, why is that? The answers to these questions are undetermined in the
symbolic spectacle of the 2015 Academy Awards. The observer does not know if recognition of the achievements of people of color
in the movie industry will improve, stay the same, or get worse, and she does not know how to find out. The racial (i.e., in regards to
racism) climate of the Academy Awards is cloudy, subject to many different interpretations, some of them conflicting. It is an
epistemologically unstable racial climate, because people of color do not know what the weather is in that climate, as a basis for
prediction, and neither do they know how to find out. The
shared judgment throughout the American
atmosphere of race in the early twenty-first century is that racism is morally bad . This judgment
is a general principle that leaves the nature of racism undefined throughout the atmosphere and most of
the climates and subclimates of race. The overriding shared judgment is a bitter and ineffective refuge for
nonwhites, because it does not protect them from either First Amendment-protected racist expressions or actions that turn out to
be indirectly racist. Energetic self-aware racist whites can try to evade the judgment that they are racist through coded language for
racial difference, and the use of intermediate activities and traits as subjects of direct action. That is, something other than race,
which nonetheless does a good job of picking out members of a specific racial group, can be used instead of the race of that group to
maintain prejudice and legitimize discrimination. The term “racial
climate” has a history of meaning “micro-
aggressions” based on race, small cuts, insults, and slights that can have a cumulative effect of individual harm.24 In
using the term “racial atmosphere,” reference may be made to other issues of harm to people
of color, such as ignorance of black history and contemporary racism or discrimination in career advancement.25
The implication of these meanings is that the micro-aggressions add up to what is perceived as a
general predisposition of white people to treat people of color in unjust ways. But, at this time,
ideas of racial atmosphere and climate also work as metaphors for what is unknown about race relations and
attitudes; they capture the vagueness and unpredictability of racial prejudice and discrimination that occur in a society where
nonwhites remain disadvantaged, even though there is formal equality. This “vague weather” aspect of atmosphere and climate is
an epistemological condition of indecision that may or may not constitute a lasting crisis, although some syndromes of political
injustice should be viewed as crises. A crisis is a period of indecision and uncertainty that requires a resolution before life can go on.
Will blacks and other people of color achieve more equality with whites, or is the United States—and with it the world, because US
racism is exported with business practices, tour-ism, and entertainment products—on the brink of a new era of explicitlу direct
oppression of people of color? Are most white Americans, whose race-neutral economic and social activities have racist effects on
nonwhites, genuinely ignorant of how the system in which they operate works, or are they secretly but knowingly hearts-and-minds
not clear that this indeterminate aspect of present racial atmosphere and climates must be resolved now. We do not know if life can
go on if it is not resolved or what it means for life to go on, or not. We do not even know if the putative crisis can be resolved at this
time, because there is as yet no systematic and sustained, impassioned, liberatory dis- course for our condition of ambiguity, a time
with a black president and police killing with impunity of unarmed black youth, a time of voting rights for everyone but new
restrictions and requirements that disproportionately affect African Americans.26 Except
for what academics write
and say and how important they think their discourse is (among themselves), American discourse of
racial liberation is at a standstill. And insofar as academic discourse is uttered and received in a
closed system, with a semicaptive audience and no reliable means for it to affect the real
world, that standstill remains at the disposal of history, where history is understood to be the unpredictable
result of contingent events. However, if academic oppositional political discourse can be related to a longer historical trend, a
more coherent and optimistic picture might emerge. Cornel West's ideas about the American black prophetic tradition appears to be
a relation to such a trend.
 AT Winters
Perm do both – their answers are entrenched in misconceptions and Winters
draws a distinction between our hope and the notion of progress he criticizes –
he specifically indicates movements that call for reform like BLM fall within his
framing of hope
Winters 16 (Joseph Winters is an assistant professor of Religious Studies with a secondary
position in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University, “THE
AUDACITY OF MELANCHOLY: RACE, TRAGEDY, AND THE ANGUISH OF PROGRESS,” interview with
Winters, October 28 2016, http://religiondispatches.org/the-audacity-of-melancholy-race-
tragedy-and-the-anguish-of-progress/ ///ghs-sc)

What’s the most important take-home message for readers? The

most important message is that progress and hope
are not synonymous in the context of black literature and aesthetics. Writers like Du Bois,
Ellison and Morrison, and filmmakers like Charles Burnett show us that a different kind of hope
(not optimism, not progress) is opened up. This isn’t necessarily by trying to overcome the tragic
but by contemplating the affinities between pleasure and anguish, intimacy and violence, the
tragic and the comic, and remembrance and moving forward/backward . Similarly, readers should take home
from the book a sense that melancholy and remembrance are ethical dispositions, ways of being receptive and vulnerable to temporal and spatial
others. Is there anything you had to leave out? I
lament leaving out a discussion about Black Lives Matter and
recent struggles against state surveillance of, and violence against, blackness . Part of this omission has to
do with the timeline and process of publishing. While the book was released in June of this year, I was finishing up some of the final edits at end of 2014
when the second Ferguson uprising was underway. While I briefly address Trayvon Martin’s death and President Obama’s response to George
Zimmerman’s acquittal, more time and space would have allowed me to think seriously about BLM and how this emerging
movement accords with my understanding of melancholic hope. In addition, I left out an explicit engagement
with recent discussions in black studies—particularly between the Afro-optimists (Fred Moten) and the Afro-pessimists (Frank Wilderson III). While I
certainly engage and cite these authors in the book, I can imagine a different conclusion to my book that situated my project in these debates and
discussions. What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic? The
biggest misconception about my topic is
that melancholy and hope are incompatible desires and attachments. In other words, people
tend to associate melancholy with simple pessimism and despair and hope with optimism and a
sense that everything is going to work out. My sense is that we can redefine hope as a desire for
something better—a prospect informed and traversed by melancholy, vulnerability, and difficult
forms of remembrance.
Humanism and Futurism
 Humanism Good
A positive orientation towards history and the ideals of radical humanist
freedom are key to global liberationist struggles. Only this can avert every
major existential crisis of our times.
Karenga 6—Professor and Chair Department of Africa Studies at Cal State University and a
major figure in the Black Power movement [Maulana, Philosophy in the African Tradition of
Resistance: Issues or Human Freedom and Human Flourishing in Not Only The Master’s Tools,
2006, p. 242-5]

Surely, we are at a moment of history fraught with new and old fOnTIS of anxiety, alienation, and
antagonism; deepening poverty in the midst of increasing wealth; proposals and practices of ethnic
cleansing and genocide; pandemic diseases; increased plunder; pollution and depletion of the
environment; constant conflicts, large and small; and world-threatening delusions on the part of a
superpower aspiring to a return to empire, with spurious claims of the right to preemptive
aggression, to openly attack and overthrow nonfavored and fragile governments openly, and to seize
the lands and resources of vulnerable peoples and establish "democracy" through military
dictatorship abroad, all the while suppressing political dissent at home (Chang 2002; Cole et at. 2002). These
anxieties are undergirded by racist and religious chauvinism, by the self-righteous and veiled references of these rulers
to themselves as a kind of terrible and terrorizing hand of God, appointed to rid the world of evil (Ahmad 2002; Arnin 2001; Blum1995). At
the same time, in this context of turmoil and terror and the use and threatened use of catastrophic
weapons, there is the irrational and arrogant expectation that the oppressed will acquiesce,
abandon resistance, and accept the disruptive and devastating consequences of globalization, along
with the global hegemony it implies (Martin and Schumann 1997). There is great alarm among the white-supremicist rulers of
these globalizing nations, given the metical resistance rising up against them, even as globalization’s technological,
organizational, and economic capacity continues to expand (Barber 1996; Karenga 2002e, 2003a; Lusane
1997). There is great alarm when people who should "know" when they are defeated ridicule the assessment, refuse to be
defeated or dispirited, and, on the contrary, intensify and diversify their struggles (Zepezauer 2002).
Certainly the battlefields of Palestine, Venezuela, long suffering Haiti, and Chiapas, Mexico, along with other
continuing emancipatory struggles everywhere, reaffirm the indomitable character of the
human spirit and the durability and adaptive vitality of a people determined to be free,
regardless of the odds and assessments against them. Indeed, they remind us that the motive force of
history is struggle, informed by the ongoing quest for freedom, justice, power of the masses,
and peace in the world. Despite "end of history" claims and single-super- power resolve and resolutions, these struggles
continue. For still the oppressed want freedom , the wronged and injured want justice, the people want power over their
destiny and daily lives, and the world wants peace. And all over the world-especially in this U.S. citadel of aging capitalism
with its archaic dreams of empire-clarity in the analysis of issues, and in the critical determination of tasks and prospects, requires the
deep and disciplined reflection characteristic of the personal and social practice we call philosophy. But this
sense of added urgency for effective intervention is prompted not only by the critical juncture at which we stand
but also by an awareness of our long history of resistance as a people, because in our collective
strivings and social struggles we seek a new future for our people, our descendants, and the world. Joined also to
these conditions and considerations is the compelling character of our self-understanding as a people, as a moral vanguard in this
country and the world. For we
have launched, fought, and won with our allies struggles that not only
have expanded the realm of freedom in this country and the world but also have served as an ongoing
inspiration and a model of liberation struggles for other marginalized and oppressed peoples
and groups throughout the world. Indeed, they have borrowed from and built on our moral vocabulary and moral vision, sung
our songs of freedom, and held up our struggle for liberation as a model to emulate. Now, self-understanding and self-
assertion are dialectically linked. In other words, how we understand ourselves in the world
determines how we assert ourselves in the world . Thus, an expansive concept of ourselves as
Africans-continental and diasporan-and as Africana philosophers forms an essential component
of our sense of mission and the urgency with which we approach it. It is important to note that I have conceived and
written this chapter within the framework of Kausaida philosophy (Karenga 1978, 1980, 1997) Kawaida is a philosophic initiative
that was forged in the crucible of ideological and practical struggles around issues of freedom,
justice, equalitys, self-determination, conullunal power, self-defense, pan~African- ism, coalition
and alliance, Black Studies, intellectual emancipation, and cultural recovery and reconstlouction .
It continued to develop in the midst of these ongoing struggies within the life of the mind and stmggles iottbtn the life of the people,
as well as within the context of the conditions of the world. Kawaida is defined as an ongoing synthesis of the best of xAfrican
thought and practice in constant exchange tuttb tl3e 'U)()ltd. It
characterizes culture as a unique, instructive and
valuable way of being human in the world-as a foundation and framework for self-
understanding and self-assertion. As a philosophy of culture and struggle, Kawaida maintains that our intellectual
and social practice as Nricana activist scholars must be undergirded and informed by ongoing efforts to (1) ground our-
selves in our own culture; (2) constantly recover, reconstruct, .and bring forth from our culture the best
of what it means to be African and human in the fullest sense; (3) speak this special cultural truth to the
world and (4) use our culture to constantly make our own unique contribution to the reconception and reconstruction of this
country, and to the forward flow of human history .

[New Humanism] The Haitian Revolution and other anti-colonial struggles

prove that alternative forms of humanism are not only proof of the possibilities
of reform, but also proof that the aff gives up on any paths of resistance that
could materially benefit black folks.
Deumert, 21/11/2017 (Ana Deumert is an academic at the University of Cape Town where she
teaches socio-cultural linguistics, “On the dangers of single stories: from the Haitian revolution
to Ubuntu humanism,” Diggit Magazine, https://www.diggitmagazine.com/column/dangers-
single-stories-haitian-revolution-ubuntu-humanism, accessed on 7/13/18, AB)

The Haitian revolution challenged Europe by demanding ‘universal emancipation’, an idea that has its
foundations in thirteenth century Mali, and that – at the time – was impossible to contemplate for even the most

enlightened French humanists (Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation, 2008). And in doing so Haiti developed its own
version of humanism: the Kreyol concept of libete was not just a translation of liberté, but spoke directly to the lived
experience of slavery, and as such redefined one’s relationship to land and labour (celebrating self-
sufficiency rather than any form of labour-for-others). Here we see a humanist political project that is inherently anti-capitalist. Maybe Europe can
learn? On the African continent, and in the African diaspora, négritude, ujamaa, ubuntu, black consciousness and
quilombismo are humanist philosophies. Indeed, the articulation of an alternative humanism has been central to

anti-colonial struggles. African humanist philosophies differ from European humanism in one
fundamental respect: there is a distinct focus on relations, on the inter-personal and communal, rather

than on the individual (which reigns supreme in most European accounts). This emphasis on relation, on seeing the other – including the
non-human world – and recognizing them permeates traditional ubuntu philosophy; it is central to Fanon’s ‘new humanism’ as well as to Es’kia
Mphahlele’s African humanism. In an interview with the psychologist-philosopher Chabani Manganyi, Mphahlele comments as follows: ‘ to
want
to reach out, outward, out of themselves … This is what African humanism is about: you are
enlarged and increased when you go out of yourself .’ (Manganyi, Looking Through the Keyhole, 1977). This is not simply
an African version of Christian Nächstenliebe, the love of those who stand next to us (and are recognizably like us), but reflects what Friedrich Nietzsche
calls Fernstenliebe, the
love of the most distant. This sounds and feels quite different from most versions of Western
humanism, which stand in an intellectual tradition that is permeated by a fundamental unease
about the presence of the other as other . Thus, writing about the United Kingdom, Sarah Ahmed (2000, Strange Encounters)
comments on pervasive discourses that position outsiders as ‘dangerous’, as a figure who threatens community and who needs to be either removed or
absorbed. Not as someone to whom we reach out in order to become ourselves. It is here too that Europe might be able to learn
from the majority world. Assimilation and integration – key words in the context of contemporary European migration policies – make no
sense from the perspective of Mphahlele’s humanism: relation means the acceptance of difference, not its

elimination. Umntu ngumtu ngabantu, ‘a person is a person because of others’ ; this is the essence of ubuntu philosophy.
 AT Humanism Bad
The alt’s hunt for a new world comes at the expense of changing this one ---
that cedes control to the colonizer and reinforces binaries that justified
colonialism in the first place. Recognizing the multi-faceted nature of this world
allows solidarity to enact a concretely cosmopolitan politics.
Gary WILDER 16, Associate Professor of Anthropology at The Graduate Center of the City
University of New York [“Here/Hear Now Aimé Césaire!” The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 115,
No. 3, July 2016, p. 585-604, Accessed Online through Emory Libraries]
These key terms illuminate crucial aspects of what made Césaire a distinctive thinker whose critical voice may continue to resonate
for us today. But in order to attend to Césaire as he did his predecessors—as a contemporary— we should recognize how his
intellectual orientation and insights brush
against the grain of many current theoretical tendencies. In
both critical theory and postcolonial studies, the standard operation is to unmask purportedly
universal categories as socially constructed, culturally particular, and implicated in practices, systems,
and logics of domination. These are indispensable critical moves. But this approach often devolves into a
hunt for traces of universalism or humanism, whether in textual artifacts or political projects, in order to
reveal the regressive or oppressive essence of the object. This “aha” moment thus becomes the
punch line of the discussion rather than the starting point for analysis. Such fears of complicity
with power do not only belie a longing for intellectual and political purity. They also make it
difficult to think dialectically, to identify aspects of given arrangements that may point beyond
their actually existing forms. The current insistence on negative critique also makes scholars
reluctant to identify desirable alternatives and specify the kind of world they might want to
create. But what do we concede if we are unable or unwilling to risk affirming more just, more
human, ways of being to which we can say “yes”? It is not easy for radical thinkers to reconcile a
nonprescriptive orientation to a radically open future with the imperative to envision more
desirable arrangements (Coronil 2011). But ignoring or deferring the challenge does not make it
disappear. Following anticolonial thinkers like Césaire, especially those located within the black
Atlantic critical tradition, may remind us not to forfeit categories such as freedom, justice,
democracy, solidarity, and humanity to the dominant actors who have instrumentalized and
degraded them. Given this dilemma, the attention paid to Vivek Chibber’s recent polemic against subaltern studies is not
surprising. Such attention, however, seems to be less about the merits of his universalist Marxism than about a sense of some of the
limitations and impasses into which certain currents of postcolonial thinking have led (Chibber 2013).7 Partha Chatterjee himself has
recently written, “The task, as it now stands, cannot . . . be taken forward within the framework of the concepts and methods
mobilized in Subaltern Studies . . . what is needed are new projects” (2012a: 44). He suggests that such projects should probably
focus on “cultural history” and “popular culture” with a renewed focus on visual materials and embodied practices rather than
written texts and on ethnography rather than intellectual history. Moreover, he links this invitation to study “the ethnographic, the
practical, the everyday and the local” to a focus on subnational “regional formations” and “minority cultures” and languages whose
specificities, he observes, had not been sufficiently engaged by earlier subaltern studies research on “India,” “Pakistan,” or
“Bangladesh” (47–49). Valuable as such studies would surely be, it is not clear how a renewed focus on locality, with place-based
assumptions about territory, consciousness, and categories, could do the kind of critical work necessary to grasp the deep shifts in
political logics, structures, and practices that characterize the world-historical present. On the contrary, such approaches risk
reproducing precisely the culturalist and territorialist assumptions about political identification and affiliation that need to be
rethought in light of contemporary conditions.8 Chatterjee’s surprising emphasis
on local ethnography seems
consistent with one trend in postcolonial thinking that risks reviving the types of civilizational
thinking, and associated assumptions about origins and authenticity, that it had earlier set out
to dismantle (Chakrabarty 2007; Mah- mood 2005; Mignolo 2011). Consider the important ways that Talal Asad has invited us
to rethink liberal assumptions about “tradition,” with respect to liberal and nonliberal forms of life. In dialogue with Ludwig
Wittgenstein and Alasdair MacIntyre, Asad (1986) has developed a powerful critique of liberal secularism—and the secularist logic
that subtends many modern liberal states—from the standpoint of embodied and discursive traditions. On the one hand, he reminds
us that “Islamic tradition” is neither singular nor unchanging; it is a structured and dynamic space for reasoned argument. On the
other hand, he reminds us that despite liberalism’s claims to post- traditional neutrality, it too
constitutes a particular tradition (albeit one that defines itself in opposition to inherited, embodied, and practice-
oriented forms of tradition-based reasoning). Asad’s genealogical insights have rightly informed recent critiques of
Western liberal ideologies, states, and politics especially regarding their arrogant, condescending, and violent responses to tradition-
rooted practices and practitioners, whether outside or inside the West. But his interventions, however unintentionally,
have
also led scholars to establish dubious chains of equivalence between modernity, the West, and
liberalism. Such operations seem to disregard Asad’s important invitation to understand
traditions as capacious, heterogeneous, and dynamic spaces of inquiry , disputation, and revision, not
simply as a set of rigid behavioral scripts, unchanging cultural formulas, or dogmatic ideological
precepts. This reduction of political modernity to a one-dimensional liberalism obscures, for
example, the many currents of progressive antiliberalism within the tradition of modern Western
political thought. It fails to recognize the significant number of non-European colonial
intellectuals engaged in anti-imperial struggles who were active participants in such “traditions
within traditions.” It also disregards the contradictions within and redeemable fragments of even
liberal political thinking, fragments that, if realized, might point far beyond, and possibly explode,
liberalism itself. To reify modern or Western politics into a static and stereotypical liberalism is
to risk practicing an unfortunate form of “Occidentalism” that would reinforce archaic civilizational
assumptions about incommensurable and unrelated worlds (and worldviews) and disregard the
actual history and open possibilities for practices of cross-cultural solidarity whereby anti-
imperial actors outside Europe could enter into dialogue or affiliate with, or even discover ways
that they are already situated within, counterhegemonic “Western” political traditions . Critics have
rightly mobilized singularity, incommensurability, or untranslatability against liberal attempts to discover an abstract humanity and
thereby discount situated and embodied forms of life. But the question is whether we treat incommensurability or untranslatability
as an epistemological or political limit or as an always imperfect starting point for practices of dialogue, coordination, affiliation,
reciprocity, solidarity. For isn’t the impossibility of full transparency or undifferentiated unity simply the unavoidable condition
within which all communication, sociality, and politics must be attempted?9 My point is not to congratulate dissident currents
within the West, let alone to recuperate liberalism. It is rather to approach radical and emancipatory
politics from a place of not-already-knowing , of not presuming to know a priori which aspects of
a tradition are irredeemable, which traditions may become allies or habitations, what the boundaries of
(thoroughly plastic) traditions must be. This nondogmatic and experimental orientation to politics ,
traditions, and concepts is one of the most precious and timely gifts that Césaire may offer to us
now. He practiced a concrete cosmopolitan relationship to modern traditions of philosophy,
aesthetics, and politics, one that was highly developed by the robust tradition of black Atlantic criticism within which he was
firmly rooted along with predecessors (e.g., Toussaint and W. E. B. DuBois), contemporaries (e.g., C. L. R. James, James Baldwin,
Suzanne Césaire, Senghor), and descendants (e.g., Fanon, Edouard Glissant, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Achille Mbembe, David Scott).
Understandable concerns about totalizing explanation and Eurocentric evaluation have led a
generation of scholars to insist on the incommensurable alterity of non-European forms of
thought. But perhaps we should be concerned less exclusively with unmasking universalisms as
covert European particularism than with also challenging the assumption that the universal is
European property. I read Césaire not in order to provincialize European concepts but to deprovincialize
Antillean thinking. Césaire’s critical reworkings remind us that the supposedly European
categories of political modernity properly belong as much to the African and Caribbean actors
who coproduced them as to the inhabitants of continental Europe . Similarly, African and Caribbean
thinkers, no less than their continental counterparts, produced abstract and general
propositions about “humanity,” “history,” and “the world.” In contrast to invocations of multiple
modernities, Césaire never granted to Europe possession of a modernity or universality or
humanity that was always already translocal and fundamentally Caribbean. He never treated
self-determination, emancipation, freedom, equality, or justice as essentially European and foreign.
Césaire’s intellectual and political interventions radically challenged reductive territorialist approaches to social thought. He refused
to concede that “France” was an ethnic or continental entity, that Martinique was not in some real way internal to “French” society
and politics, or that he was situated outside of modern critical traditions. Thus his ongoing and unapologetic engagements with
Hegel, Marx, Proudhon, Nietzsche, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Bergson, Freud, Breton, Frobenius, and Lenin, alongside his
many African, Antillean, and African American interlocutors. The sonic blurring between “here” and “hear” in the title of this essay is
meant to signal not only the contemporaneity of Césaire’s thought for us here now but the imperative that we open ourselves to his
presence and recognize his actuality across the epochal divide by hearing what he actually said. This gesture builds on Walter
Benjamin’s insight that every now is a “now of recognizability” whereby “what has been comes together in a flash with the now to
form a constellation” through which past epochs become newly legible (1999: 462). I also follow Césaire himself, who engaged in
dialogue with predecessors as if they were contemporaries and who addressed future interlocutors directly as if they were already
present. Like Benjamin, Césaire
practiced a form of radical remembrance that connected outmoded
pasts to charged presents. This attention to vital histories was bound up with a poetic politics
that identified transformative possibilities dwelling within existing arrangements and a proleptic
politics that anticipated seemingly impossible futures by trying to enact them concretely in the here and now. But Césaire can only
speak to us now if we listen rather than presume to know what someone like him in his situation must have, or should have, been
saying. Until very recently, scholarship on his work has been overdetermined by methodological nationalism (that puzzles over his
refusal to pursue state sovereignty), identitarian culturalism (that debates how adequately Césaire expressed Antillean lived
experience and whether or not he was an essentialist), and a disciplinary division of labor (that too often splits his poetry, criticism,
and politics into separate domains). Generally, Cold War scholarship was shaped by a need to evaluate him in relation to canonical
anticolonial nationalists and fit him into a narrative of decolonization-as-national-independence. This has made it difficult to
recognize the epochal character, world-making ambition, and global sensibility of his political reflections. Faced with the promise of
decolonization, Césaire conjugated concrete acts with political imagination in ways that displaced
conventional oppositions between aesthetics and politics, realism and utopia, pragmatism and principle. Such efforts were animated
by what I have been calling radical literalism and utopian realism and which he called inflection and poetic knowledge. He regarded
freedom as a problem whose institutional solution was not self-evident and could only be situational. His interventions
demonstrated the nonnecessary relationship between colonial emancipation, popular sovereignty, and self-determination, on the
one hand, and territorial state sovereignty and national liberation, on the other. He
pursued cosmopolitan aims
concretely through transcultural practices and by attempting to invent new political forms
through which to ground plural and postnational democratic arrangements . We should recognize that
Césaire formulated a critique not of Western civilization from the standpoint of African or Antillean culture but of modern Western
racism, imperialism, and capitalism from the standpoint of Antillean and African historical situations and experiences. More
generally, it was a critique of an alienated and alienating modernity from the standpoint of embodied and poetic ways of being,
knowing, and relating (to self, others, and world). Above all, Césaire
recognized residues of, and resources for,
more just, human, and integrated ways of living together within Antillean, African, and
European texts, traditions, forms, histories, and conditions. In his view, Antilleans—as culturally
particular actors, imperial subjects, New World denizens, moderns, and humans—were their
rightful heirs. He was concerned less with defining culturally authentic concepts , spaces, and
arrangements for Antilleans (apart from Europe or uncontaminated by modernity) than with overcoming
imperialism, in solidarity with other struggling peoples, in order to establish less alienated forms
of human life globally. Remembering Césaire’s insistence that modern currents of radicalism
were shared legacies and common property may help us to rethink inherited assumptions
about the relation between territory, ethnicity, consciousness, and interest (Buck-Morss 2009, 2010).
They invite us to deterritorialize social thought and to decolonize intellectual history. This is a
matter not of valorizing non-European forms of knowledge , as important as such a move certainly is, but of
questioning the presumptive boundaries of “Europe” itself—by recognizing the larger scales on
which modern social thought was forged and of appreciating that colonial societies produced
self-reflexive thinkers concerned with large-scale processes and future prospects. We can thereby
recognize Césaire as a situated postwar thinker of the postwar world, one of whose primary
aims was to place into question the very categories “France,” “Europe,” and “the West” by way
of an immanent critique of late imperial politics. He envisioned postnational arrangements
through which humanity could attempt to overcome the alienating antinomies that had
impoverished the quality of life in overseas colonies and European metropoles. His situated
humanism and concrete cosmopolitanism should thus be placed in a constellation of modern
emancipatory thinking oriented toward worldwide human freedom that included antiracist,
anti-imperial, internationalist, and socialist thinkers from a range of traditions : black Atlantic,
First Internationalist, global anarchist, Western Marxist, Marxist humanist, Third Worldist .
Césaire believed that the future of humanity depended in some sense on its recovering a lost
poetic relation to “the throbbing newness of the world.” Why not regard Césaire’s “humanism
made to the measure of the world” as a starting point for our critical thinking about the
contemporary situation and the kind of world we would like to create . Césaire, like Toussaint before him,
addressed future interlocutors directly. At the same time, his thinking about future possibilities was refracted through dialogue with
predecessors like Toussaint. This is how I understand what one of his heirs, Glissant, means by “a prophetic vision of the past” based
on “the identification of a painful notion of time and its full projection forward into the future” (1989: 64; see also Glissant 2005: 15,
16). Césaire once wrote of Schoelcher, the socialist republican architect of the 1848 abolition of slavery in France, that it would be
“useless to commemorate him if we had not decided to imitate his politics” (1948a: 28). In this spirit I
hope that the recent
resurgence of interest in Césaire is not only treated as an occasion to honor his memory but is seized as an
opportunity to hear his transgenerational address. We can thus think with Césaire about the
relation between existing theoretical frameworks, the world we are confronting, and urgent
political desires— especially with regard to the history of empire and the role of colonial
intellectuals as modern thinkers of global processes .

Anti-humanism is just as bad as humanism and humanism isn’t always bad –

context is always key and narratives of humanity are contingent.
Lester 12 – (January 2012, Alan, Director of Interdisciplinary Research, Professor of Historical
Geography, and Co-Director of the Colonial and Postcolonial Studies Network, University of
Sussex, “Humanism, race and the colonial frontier,” Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers, Volume 37, Issue 1, pages 132–148)

Anderson argues that it is not an issue of extending humanity to … negatively racialised people, but of
putting into question that from which such people have been excluded – that which, for liberal discourse, remains unproblematised. (2007, 199) I fear, however,
that if we direct attention away from histories of humanism’s failure to deal with difference and to
render that difference compatible with its fundamental universalism, and if we overlook its proponents’ failed attempts to combat dispossession,

murder and oppression; if our history of race is instead understood through a critique of humanity ’s conceptual separation
from nature, we dilute the political potency of universalism . Historically, it was not humanism that gave rise to

racial innatism, it was the specifically anti-humanist politics of settlers forging new social assemblages through

relations of violence on colonial frontiers. Settler communities became established social

assemblages in their own right specifically through the rejection of humanist interventions . Perhaps, as Edward
Said suggested, we can learn from the implementation of humanist universalism in practice ,
and insist on its potential to combat racism , and perhaps we can insist on the contemporary conceptual hybridisation of human–non-human entities too,
without necessarily abandoning all the precepts of humanism (Said 2004; Todorov 2002). We do not necessarily need to accord a specific value to the
human, separate from and above nature, in order to make a moral and political case for a fundamental human universalism that can be wielded

strategically against racial violence. Nineteenth century humanitarians’ universalism was fundamentally
conditioned by their belief that British culture stood at the apex of a hierarchical order of
civilisations. From the mid-nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century, this ethnocentrism produced what Lyotard describes as ‘the
flattening of differences, or the demand for a norm (“human nature”)’, that ‘carries with it its own forms of terror’ (cited Braun 2004, 1352). The intervention of Aboriginal Protection
demonstrates that humanist universalism has the potential to inflict such terror (it was the Protectorate of Aborigines Office reincarnated that was responsible, later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for

But we must not

Aboriginal Australia’s Stolen Generation, and it was the assimilationist vision of the Protectors’ equivalents in Canada that led to the abuses of the Residential Schools system).

forget that humanism’s alternatives, founded upon principles of difference rather than
commonality, have the potential to do the same and even worse. In the nineteenth century,
Caribbean planters and then emigrant British settlers emphasised the multiplicity of the human
species, the absence of any universal ‘human nature’ , the incorrigibility of difference, in their
upholding of biological determinism. Their assault on any notion of a fundamental commonality
among human beings has disconcerting points of intersection with the radical critique of
humanism today. The scientific argument of the nineteenth century that came closest to post-humanism’s insistence on the hybridity of humanity, promising to ‘close the
ontological gap between human and non-human animals’ (Day 2008, 49), was the evolutionary theory of biological descent associated with Darwin, and yet this theory was adopted in Aotearoa

New Zealand and other colonial sites precisely to legitimate the potential extinction of other, ‘weaker’ races in the

face of British colonisation on the grounds of the natural law of a struggle for survival (Stenhouse 1999). Both the upholding and the
rejection of human–nature binaries can thus result in racially oppressive actions, depending on the
contingent politics of specific social assemblages . Nineteenth century colonial humanitarians, inspired as they were by an irredeemably ethnocentric and religiously exclusive
form of universalism, at least combatted exterminatory settler discourses and practices at multiple sites of empire, and provided spaces on mission and protectorate stations in which indigenous peoples could be shielded to a very limited extent from dispossession
and murder. They also, unintentionally, reproduced discourses of a civilising mission and of a universal humanity that could be deployed by anticolonial nationalists in other sites of empire that were never invaded to the same extent by settlers, in independence
struggles from the mid-twentieth century. Finally, as Whatmore’s (2002) analysis of the Select Committee on Aborigines reveals, they provided juridical narratives that are part of the arsenal of weapons that indigenous peoples can wield in attempts to claim redress

The politics of humanism in practice, then, was riddled with contradiction,

and recompense in a postcolonial world.

fraught with particularity and latent with varying possibilities. It could be relatively progressive and
liberatory; it could be dispossessive and culturally genocidal. Within its repertoire lay potential to combat environmental and biological
determinism and innatism, however, and this should not be forgotten in a rush to condemn humanism’s universalism

as well as its anthropocentrism. It is in the tensions within universalism that the ongoing potential of an always

provisional, self-conscious, flexible and strategic humanism – one that now recognises the continuity
between the human and the non-human as well as the power-laden particularities of the male,
middle class, Western human subject – resides.

Radical rejection of the humanist subject is an endless repetition that goes

nowhere
Ruti 17
Mari Ruti (Distinguished Professor of critical theory and of gender and sexuality studies at the University of Toronto in Toronto,
Canada). Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s Defiant Subjects. Columbia University Press, March 7th, 2017. Google Books, p. 5-7.

This is a politics of negativity devoid of any clear political or ethical vision: it wants to destroy
what exists without giving us much of a sense of what should exist. It may of course be that offering an
alternative politico-ethical vision is more or less impossible. Perhaps it is not the task of theory to define the future but merely to
critique the present. In principle, I do not have a problem with the idea that the purpose of theory is to show us what is wrong rather
than to tell us what to do. At the same time, I am more inclined to look for "real-life" referents for my theoretical paradigms than
those who believe that theory is—or should be—an imaginative activity wholly divorced from the exigencies of lived reality. On the
one hand, the latter attitude is freeing in the sense that suddenly anything is possible, including the idea that stupidity represents a
But on the other, it can lead to what Lacan calls "empty" speech, speech
radical politico-ethical project.
devoid of any meaning (pure rhetoric). It is from this partly unconvinced perspective that I would like to start putting
pressure on three interrelated tendencies within recent queer theory. I will return to each of these tendencies in greater detail in
later chapters. Here let me merely name them briefly. First, I do not think that the celebration of negativity for its own sake that
characterizes some versions of queer theory amounts to much (besides explosive rhetoric). I prefer to work with negativity, to see
what negativity can do for us. In the next two chapters, I will try to illustrate that this is what Lacan sought to do, despite Edelman's
efforts to tell us otherwise. Second, I think that the semiautomatic—and therefore no longer honestly critical— attempt
to
annihilate "the subject" that runs through much of progressive theory, including queer theory, is
a theoretical and politico-ethical dead end. Though I understand the historical reasons for the
assault on the humanist subject, I wonder about the almost ritualistic manner in which the
slaughter of "the subject" gets undertaken from text to text, as if thinkers such as Lacan, Derrida, Foucault,
and Deleuze somehow botched the job back in the 1960s and 1970s. It seems to me that this all-too-predictable
battering of the subject represents a theoretical repetition compulsion in the strictly Freudian
sense, indicating, among other things, a traumatic fixation that keeps us from moving to new
conceptual terrains, including the question of what it might mean to be a subject after the
collapse of the unified, arrogant, and self-mastering subject of humanist metaphysics. Of all the
recurring themes of queer theory, the assault on the subject is what, for me, gives the strongest
impression of empty speech, for it seems to have virtually nothing to do with the personal
realities of those who advocate it, most of whom live semicoherent, semicontinous lives in
semiconsistent (usually tenured) lifeworlds.
 Futurism Good
The trajectory of blackness is forward toward the future – taking the Middle
Passage as the essential fact of black identity destroys agency
Kearse 16, Stephen Kearse is a freelance writer and critic. He has previously written for Seven Scribes,
Paste magazine, and the Toast. 2/2/16, “Quantum Black History: A Review of ‘Physics of Blackness’,”
http://sevenscribes.com/quantum-black-history-a-review-of-physics-of-blackness/ NN

The trajectory of blackness is always forward, up, away. On and on, on to the next, next 15 one coming, we
shall overcome, move bitch, I’m not gon’ stop, I’m not gon’ give up, ain’t no mountain high
enough, I’mma touch the sky— blackness doesn’t just orient itself toward the future, it
accelerates toward it, fast and furious. Almost instinctively, blackness wills itself into an eternal
procession toward inevitably better days, progress incarnate . Confronting this will, in Physics of Blackness:
Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology Michelle Wright traces the trajectory of blackness to its point of origin, profoundly
transforming blackness in the process. Written as a critique of the metanarrative of blackness, and its tendency to privilege straight,
American black men, the book is necessarily confrontational. Wright begins by immediately sidestepping the question of what
blackness is. Wright takes the nebulousness of blackness as a given. For her, the
question isn’t what is blackness: the
question is what makes blackness? What holds it together so that it doesn’t seem so nebulous
despite stretching out across nations and centuries and peoples ? What are its fundamental forces? Using
physics as a grand metaphor, Wright pinpoints space and time as the forces underlying blackness, arguing that the geography and
temporality of the Middle Passage fundamentally define blackness. For Wright, the Middle Passage is treated as the Big Bang of
blackness, the sole point from which blackness expands outward, forming the beautiful nebulas of blackness that we recognize
today. This cosmology of blackness – Wright dubs it the “Middle Passage epistemology,” following Annette Henry – is firmly
accepted within black studies and at large, but Wright isn’t a stargazer. In her eyes, the blackness that stems from the Middle
Passage is destructive. Rather than linking black people, it creates hierarchies that tend to privilege straight black men. The book’s
first two chapters confront the Middle Passage epistemology head-on, using Newtonian physics to explain how and why the Middle
Passage orients blackness by anchoring it to a single event. Newton’s laws of motions, Wright shows, are loaded with assumptions
about time and space, namely that time always moves forward, linearly, and that this forward motion is
inherently good, progressive. The notion that time is progressive preexisted Newton, Wright notes, but the laws of
motion naturalized this assumption, making it fact rather than worldview. Wright highlights how this worldview of
constant progress works for blackness, noting that it threads a compelling linear narrative that
moves “from slavery to rebellions to civil disobedience” in a way that “underscores Black
achievement and drive” and “allows us to cogently and compellingly graph the antiprogressive
thrust of white Western politics and practices, all the while documenting a history of defiance
and collective uplift.” In other words, “Murder to Excellence” is a damn good story. But is it a story that we should continue
to tell? According to Wright, the answer is no. Though the Middle Passage epistemology is deeply uplifting
and encouraging, if it is taken as fact, it has three troubling consequences. First, it undermines
the work of struggle by making success inevitable rather than bitterly fought for, flattening the
uphill and toiling battle of procuring (and losing) rights into a treadmill of fated, easy victories.
Second, if the Middle Passage is the origin of blackness, then from its birth blackness has never
been determined by black people; it is just a n ongoing series of chain reactions to white racism.
The lack of agency in such a narrative is condescending at best . Finally, and most important for Wright,
because the Middle Passage tends to prioritize the experiences of straight black men (e.g., Amistad,
12 Years a Slave, Roots), if it is used as the defining event of blackness, the experiences of black
women, LGBTQ black people, and black people from outside the Americas and the Caribbean
are never mentioned. In other words, there are entire constellations of blackness between murder and excellence, but when
seen through the rigid telescope of the Middle Passage, they can only be faint blips, trifling cosmic dust. To counter the Middle
Passage epistemology, Wright turns to quantum physics, which unites space and time as spacetime
and allows spacetime to curve, bend and stretch in multiple directions . Quantum physics holds promise
for Wright because blackness can become multidimensional, arcing along multiple timelines instead
of one. The solution that emerges from this turn to quantum physics is “epiphenomenal spacetime,” a way of thinking
about space and time in the moment that moves beyond rigid cause and effect and considers
causes and effects, probabilities and possibilities, blackness as multitude rather than
singularity. The centerpiece of this quantum blackness is the chapter “Quantum Baldwin,” in which Wright critiques James
Baldwin’s essay “Encounter on the Seine.” In Baldwin’s essay, he roams Paris, coming across the Eiffel Tower and reflecting on what
France variously represents for black Americans, African immigrants, and white Americans. Rather than finding common ground with
African immigrants, Baldwin sees a 300-year gulf between black Americans and Africans and shirks away, lonely. The black American
experience is uniquely alienating, he concludes. Wright challenges Baldwin, criticizing him for using black American men as a stand-
in for all black people, and arguing that the
gulf between Africans and black Americans only exists if you
follow the logic of a timeline that allows just one narrative of blackness . If Baldwin had actually spoken
with some French African immigrants in epiphenomenal spacetime, outside of a timeline in which Africans and black Americans are
distant relatives, he could have discovered – or created – other points of proximity: shared education, shared occupation, shared
sexuality (Baldwin was gay), shared alienation from home. After all, how did he know he was staring across a 300-year gulf? The
French African could have been a second-generation immigrant to France, or a worker from a Caribbean colony, or even an
American tourist from Louisiana. None of these alternatives are implausible and each could have complicated Baldwin’s encounter
on the Seine. But Baldwin
could never know because he stuck to what he knew, blackness from one
source, one dimension, one trajectory . Wright concludes the book by detailing some of the black experiences that
have been lost because of the dominance of the Middle Passage epistemology. Slaves that were traded across the Indian and Pacific
Oceans, black soldiers who fought for the German army in World War II, African women who were displaced by battles in Africa
during World War II, and African immigrants to Europe and Asia are just a few of the vast collectives of black people who aren’t
accounted for by the Middle Passage epistemology. Many of these groups might not even identify as black, but perhaps they don’t
identify as black because they haven’t been given a chance, because their stories are seen as deviations from the timeline rather
than enrichments, footnotes rather than headers. There are clear benefits to sticking to the familiar,
chanting “We gon’ be alright” and marching forward, a million strong, propelled by the jet fuel
potential that is blackness – forged under pressure, distilled, refined, flammable, hurtling
along. The past and the present often seem to justify this breakneck speed. Slavery, Jim Crow, new slaves, the New
Jim Crow, the Scottsboro Nine, Emmitt Till, the Jena Six , Trayvon Martin — life tends to feel
frustratingly cyclical for blackness. Accordingly, the speeding straight arrow of the future holds
particular promise, offering a chance to slash through the cycles of misery like Alexander
through the Gordian knot. Perhaps Kanye West puts it most concisely: “from the bottom so the top’s the
only place to go now.” But what if blackness can be more than a million black men? Physics of Blackness takes the inherent
collectivity of blackness seriously, embracing a multiverse of black experiences that includes the descendents of the Middle Passage
and all other routes. This
view of blackness transforms it into a relation among people rather just
than a relation to a fixed point. The trajectory of blackness can still be forward, up, and away,
but now it is also across, down, between, through: murder to excellence to beyond and back .
AT Ontological Terror
 Ontology Bad
Reject the contradictory scholarship of the 1NC – Warren explicitly criticizes
framing blackness as ontological yet they read authors who defend it like x –
Warren defends blackness as existing in a state of nonontology
Warren 18 (Calvin Warren is an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
at Emory University, “Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation,” ///ghs-sc)

Ontology provides intelligibility and understanding for the human being because this being is
embedded in a primordial relation with Being (as freedom and care). We can describe the entire field of
ontology as the history, evolution, and maintenance of the various customs and resources that
the human being needs to secure this relation. But “ontology . . . does not permit us to
understand the being of the black man” because ontology is intended to preserve the customs
and resources of human beingness and not black being. We will always experience tensions, contradictions, and
impasses if we attempt to gain intelligibility for black being from a field that excludes it by necessity—because blackness is outside

ontology as this nothing but most intimately situated within ontology as its condition of possibility (its inclusive exclusion). Ontology,
then, does not provide the resources to understand this paradoxical thing—blackness is the
abyss of ontology.30 But what is worse is that the customs and resources that once served as grounding for African existence were wiped
out. This wiping out of the ontological resources to ground this primordial relation is the

thanatology or onticide of African being.31 This metaphysical holocaust is the execration of Being—it is a particular process of
producing black being through the murder of African existence.32

Ontologizing blackness is a pugnacious enterprise

Warren 18 (Calvin Warren is an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
at Emory University, “Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation,” ///ghs-sc)

29 Nelson Maldonado Torres, Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity. He reads the destructive strategies of
antiblackness through Levinas’s critique of ontology— ontology as war. I agree with both Torres
and Levinas that ontology is a pugnacious enterprise , but I don’t think that ethics is any less violent. In fact, ethics is
probably more violent, since it disavows the antiblack violence that sustains it. In other words, antiblackness enables both

ontology and ethics. Neither discourse is clean.

 Perm
Perm do both – it allows us to do the aff and focus on ontology, avoiding the
humanist fantasy they criticize – Warren only criticizes avoiding ontology,
which the perm solves
Warren 18 (Calvin Warren is an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
at Emory University, “Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation,” ///ghs-sc)
26 Again, this is to reiterate that I am not suggesting the voices or opinions of free blacks do not matter. This is to say, however, that we want to interrogate the ontological
ground and presumptions from which that voice emerges. There are many contemporary historiographies that grapple with the concepts of freedom and free blacks. In Forging
Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston, for example, Amrita Chakrabarti Myers uncovers archival material of free black women in

Charleston, South Carolina. She presents freedom as an experience, one that depends on resources and opportunity. The ground of ontology,
however, is never broached; thus, freedom is removed from ontology and relegated to sociolegal context. The problem with this is that ontology is not
reducible to experience, and the author proceeds as if free black experience is an ontological claim of freedom—however fickle it was or how tenuously the freedom might be
experienced. I focus on the conflation of experience with (human) ontology because the problems that orient the text—systemic terror, risk of reenslavement, routinized

problems persist after

violation—are ontological problems. Experience cannot eradicate these problems, no matter how free someone feels. These

sociolegal freedom because they are symptoms of the ontological condition of nonfreedom .
Sociolegal and affective experiences leave the fundamental problem unresolved. There is a
tendency in historiography to neglect the ontological foundation of the systemic violence it
uncovers, since avoiding ontology and focusing on affect and experience allow us to
incorporate blacks into a humanist fantasy (with synonyms like agency, liberty, voice, power). My issue is, then, that
assuming human freedom is precisely the problem, which free blacks experienced as tension
between a legal status and a nonplace in an antiblack world. This tension is an ontological
violence, which neither labor, family, resources, wealth, nor community can rectify. A nonmetaphysical historiography would proceed from the lack of ontological ground
and read the archive through this violence. My hope is that historiography will begin to question and challenge the

humanism upon which it is predicated to understand the capaciousness of antiblackness . For similar
elisions of ontology in historiography, see Max Grivno’s Gleanings of Freedom: Free and Slave Labor Along the Mason-Dixon Line, and Damian Alan Pargas’s The Quarters and
the Fields: Slave Families in the Non-Cotton South.
 Identity Politics Bad
They link to themselves – Warren explicitly criticizes identity politics – you
should’ve read the footnotes smh
Warren 18 (Calvin Warren is an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
at Emory University, “Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation,” ///ghs-sc)

27. I
do not have the space to delve into the problem of identity within the continental philosophical tradition, but
this “problem” seems, at least in my mind, to reach a standstill concerning blackness. If the
great problem of identity is metaphysical unity, or grounded sameness, according to Heidegger
and Deleuze, Lin then it seems that black being is a doubling or fracturing that displaces the logic
of identity. Black being can never attain adequacy, as self-sameness—it is always being for
another. Split between being for another and the form of formlessness, blackness is not identity
(which is the error of black identity politics). Our task is to present black existence without the
grammar of identity, unity, adequation, and metaphysics. This, perhaps, is an impossible task, but the presentation of
Lin the impossible is all one can do with a catachresis. Given this difficulty, we must be weary of appropriating the terms and concepts of metaphysics
and Lin ontological imaginations, as tempting as they might seem. Gavin Rae provides Lin an exquisite analysis of the way Heidegger and Deleuze
approach the problem of identity (ultimately reformulating the philosophy of becoming as difference or groundlessness). Neither of these strategies
account for blackness. Please see Lin his Ontology in Heidegger and Deleuze: A Comparative Analysis.
 Pornotroping DA
Their reading and commodification of black scholarship within this space is a
form of pornotroping that sexualizes the black body and recreates anti-
blackness – they rely on unchecked gratification through the ballot and attempt
to impose meaning onto the black body – turns case/the alt
Warren 18 (Calvin Warren is an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
at Emory University, “Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation,” ///ghs-sc)

10 I interpret Hortense Spillers’s term pornotroping as the appropriation and use of the black
body as a text, a sexualized text for fantasy, prurient othering, and unchecked gratification.
Within an antiblack grammatical context, black bodies are pressed into the service of a
sexualized semiotic and hermeneutic procedure or, as Spillers describes it, “externally imposed
meanings and uses.” How one interprets and makes meaning of the black body as a sexual sign
in an antiblack grammar is the function of pornotroping . Alexander Weheliye understands
pornotroping as translating into a scopic economy, where the hieroglyphics of the flesh are
sexualized through vision. Although I am in full agreement with his presentation of the scopic dimensions of pornotroping,
I depart from his diacritical analysis as it concerns the productive potential of it. I understand pornotroping as an
antiblack strategy in the metaphysical holocaust and not as a site for self-making or freedom;
see Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human.

There’s a pretty strong link to their commodification of black suffering within

this space
Warren 18 (Calvin Warren is an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
at Emory University, “Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation,” ///ghs-sc)

10 ToniMorrison also suggests that the Negro is a plaything for the literary imagination, a
putative object for the human; see her Playing in the Dark: White- ness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1992).
 Psychoanalysis Solves
Psychoanalysis solves and can explain the condition of anti-blackness – Warren
concedes
Warren 18 (Calvin Warren is an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
at Emory University, “Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation,” ///ghs-sc)

62 The Lacanian drive serves as a productive heuristic device to understand antiblackness and
its objective. For Lacan, the drive relentlessly pursues an impossible object, which commences as a
destructive repetition and surplus enjoyment of this repetition— the ultimate result is a form of
extinction. Anti- blackness pursues nothing as its impossible drive, but the destructive pleasure
is projected onto black bodies (“interpassivity,” as Slavoj Žižek would call it); see Jacques Lacan’s Écrits: A Selection.

In fact, he says so twice about two different principles

Warren 18 (Calvin Warren is an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
at Emory University, “Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation,” ///ghs-sc)

8 It is also important to note that nothing

also terrorizes the Lacanian subject with the threat of aphanisis
(the disintegration of the symbolic covering over of this nothing). In fantasies of the body in bits
and pieces and other ruptures of the real, the subject tries its best to avoid this nothing at the
core of its being. Through repression and disavowal, the subject tries to eliminate nothing, but
is, of course, unsuccessful. I use this as a heuristic frame for understanding the way the human
being hates (and is fascinated by) this nothing and projects this hatred onto black being; see
Lacan, “Some Re ections on the Ego,” in e International Journal of Psycho-Analysis.
 Alt doesn’t solve
They definitely can’t solve, and especially not in this space
Warren 18 (Calvin Warren is an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
at Emory University, “Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation,” ///ghs-sc)

it doesn’t matter whether black

We might answer Spivak’s provocative query “Can the Subaltern Speak?, in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial eory: A Reader by saying that

being can speak or be heard—given that language and discourse will not end the metaphysical
holocaust. So even if black being can speak, write, and be heard, onticidal destruction will
continue. The black nihilist must write, speak, and broach the metaphysical question to illumine the process of destruction. To say that the enterprise is
meaningless is only potent if such a thing as meaning can be recuperated for black being.
Meaning is lost along with the flesh. This is the crux of black suffering in an antiblack world .
 Nazism DA
Warren cites Heidegger and relies on his scholarship for the writing of
Ontological Terror, index proves
Warren 18 (Calvin L. Warren, Assistant Professor in WGSS. He received his B.A. in Rhetoric/Philosophy
(College Scholar) from Cornell University and his MA and Ph.D. in African American/American Studies
from Yale University “Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation”, p. 4, 5) //zuga
Heidegger, Martin, 10; Bildwesen and, 149; death and, 159-60, the decision and, 94; equipmentality and,
45-46; metaphysics and, 7-10, 12-13, 15, 20, 28-37, 173, 179, 184, 187, 190, 191; occularcentrism and, 195; post-
metaphysician, 31, 40, 60, 63-64, 66, 171-72; scientific thinking and, 110-12; Spillers and, 22, 28-29, 31;
suspension and, 94; Vattimo on, 10-11; the way and, 27-28, 99, 151

Heidegger was a nazi, reject his scholarship

Zielinski 16 (Luisa Zielinski, The Paris Review, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/10/18/in-his-own-words/) //zuga
Martin Heidegger never apologized for his support of the Nazis. He joined the party in 1933
and remained a member until the bitter end, in 1945. First, he spoke out enthusiastically in favor
of a conservative revolution with Hitler at its helm. From about 1935, he found his own ambitions disappointed,
and grew more silent. Yet, when he called his dalliance with National Socialism his greatest mistake after the war, he was upset not
at his crime, but at the fact that he got caught. Not that Heidegger has had to apologize, either. For the past seventy years, his many
apologists and acolytes have gone to astounding lengths in trying to prove that his philosophical oeuvre exists independent of what
was, they avowed, a mere weakness of character, an instance of momentary opportunism. In
2014, a group of French
philosophers even tried to halt the publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, his
philosophical diaries. But if antisemitic references in his philosophy are oblique and, as some
would have it, coincidental to his critique of modernity, the Notebooks leave little room for
such charitable reading. Even after the war he would bemoan the Jewish “drive for revenge,” with their aim consisting in
“obliterating the Germans in spirit and history.” And yet, the Black Notebooks haven’t lain to rest one of the more irksome debates
around continental philosophy. Perhaps that’s what the release of Heidegger’s correspondence with his lifelong confidante, his
brother Fritz, will achieve. His heirs, having held back these letters for many years, have finally caved to the pressure that began to
mount following the release of the Black Notebooks. The excerpts released in advance by Die Zeit and Le Monde last weekend show
Heidegger for what, apparently, he was the real deal, a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi who bought into Hitler’s
ideology wholesale. And he wasn’t a particularly sophisticated one. In his letters, the forefather of deconstruction voices his
impassioned belief in Volk and Führer, perpetual German victimhood, “world Jewry,” the threat of Bolshevism, and American
decadence. Perhaps it’s inconvenient, but it’s hardly shocking: Heidegger was not just a member of the Nazi
party, but also a Nazi. Nor was he just a “metaphysical antisemite”—he also just really disliked Jews. Let’s hope this settles
the matter.

Heidegger’s anti-semitism is deeply tied to his philosophical ideas, he sought

nothing less than to redefine what it meant to be human, arguing that jews
belonged nowhere
Fried 14 (Gregory Fried, What Heidegger was Hiding, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/what-heidegger-
was-hiding) //zuga

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger died in 1976, yet scholars are still plowing through his life’s work today -- some of it for
the very first time. Indeed, few modern thinkers have been as productive: once published in their entirety, his complete works will
comprise over 100 volumes. Fewer still have rivaled his reach: Heidegger deeply influenced some of the twentieth century’s most
important philosophers, among them Leo Strauss, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida. And although Heidegger’s
work is most firmly entrenched in the Western tradition, his readership is global, with serious followings in Latin America, China,
Japan, and even Iran. But Heidegger’s legacy also bears a dark stain, one that his influence has never
quite managed to wash out. Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in the spring of 1933 , ran the
University of Freiburg on behalf of the regime, and gave impassioned speeches in support of
Adolf Hitler at key moments , including during the plebiscites in the fall of 1933, which solidified popular
support for Nazi policies. Nevertheless, Heidegger managed to emerge from World War II with his reputation mostly
intact. The Allies’ denazification program, which aimed to rid German society of Nazi ideology, targeted regime
supporters just like him. Freiburg came under French control, and the new authorities there forced Heidegger into
retirement and forbade him from teaching. But in 1950, the now-independent university
revoked the ban. This resulted in large part from Heidegger’s outreach campaign to French intellectuals with anti-Nazi
credentials, including Sartre and the resistance fighter Jean Beaufret. In short order, Heidegger won over a wide following in France.
Once his international reputation was secure, the university gave him emeritus status and
allowed him to resume teaching. To his new champions, Heidegger portrayed himself as the
typical unworldly philosopher, claiming that he had joined the Nazi Party and accepted Freiburg’s
rectorate primarily to defend higher education from the worst excesses of the regime. He insisted that he had quickly
realized his mistake, which led him to resign as rector less than a year into his term and start including veiled critiques of the
Nazis in his subsequent lectures and writings. Among European and American intellectuals friendly to Heidegger, this exculpatory
narrative quickly became the conventional wisdom. If the philosopher had betrayed a touch of anti-Semitism, the logic went, it was
only of the kind that had been ubiquitous in Germany (and most of Europe) before the war: a conservative, cultural reflex that was
nothing like Hitler’s viciously ideological racism. Moreover, Heidegger had many Jewish students, one of whom, Arendt, was also his
lover. After the war and long after their passions had waned, Arendt resumed contact with Heidegger and helped get his work
translated into English. Would an inveterate opponent of the Nazis really have assisted an unrepentant anti-Semite? Not
everyone was convinced of Heidegger’s innocence, but his defenders worked hard to protect the philosophical
work from its author’s scandal. And until recently, the strategy largely worked. The official story began to wear thin
in the 1980s, however, when two scholars , Hugo Ott and Victor Farías, using newly uncovered documents, each
challenged Heidegger’s claim that his brush with Nazism had been a form of reluctant
accommodation. More recently, in 2005, the French philosopher Emmanuel Faye drew on newly discovered seminar
transcripts from the Nazi period to argue that Heidegger’s thinking was inherently fascist even before
Hitler’s rise to power. Faye accused the French Heideggerians of having orchestrated a cover-up of Heidegger’s political
extremism and advocated banishing Heidegger’s work from the field of philosophy; no one, Faye said, should associate the greatest
barbarism of the twentieth century with the West’s most exalted tradition of reason and enlightenment. In response, Heidegger’s
defenders labeled Faye’s textual interpretations tendentious and resorted to a variation on Heidegger’s old argument: that he had
quickly grasped his error and realized that Nazism was nothing more than hubristic nihilism. Still, it was hard to explain away the
depth of commitment that Faye had uncovered. Now, Peter Trawny, the director of the Martin Heidegger Institute at the University
of Wuppertal, in Germany, has waded into this long-running controversy with a short but incisive new book, recently published in
German. Trawny’s meticulous and sober work introduces an entirely new set of sources: a collection of black notebooks in which
Heidegger regularly jotted down his thoughts, a practice he began in the early 1930s and continued into the 1970s. Trawny, who is
also the editor of the published notebooks, calls them “fully developed philosophical writings.” That’s a bit strong for a collection of
notes, but Heidegger clearly intended them to serve as the capstone to his published works, and they contain his unexpurgated
reflections on this key period. Shortly before his death, Heidegger wrote up a schedule stipulating that the notebooks be published
only after all his other writings were. That condition having been met, Trawny has so far released three volumes (totaling roughly
1,200 pages), with five more planned. Trawny’s new book caused a sensation among Heidegger scholars even before it appeared in
print, in large part because several
inflammatory passages quoted from the notebooks, previously
unpublished and containing clearly anti-Semitic content, were leaked from the page proofs . But
with the book now released, Trawny’s novel line of analysis is creating its own stir. Drawing on the new material, Trawny makes two
related arguments: first, that Heidegger’s anti-Semitism was deeply entwined with his philosophical
ideas and, second, that it was distinct from that of the Nazis. Trawny deals with the notebooks that Heidegger composed in 1931–
41, which include the years after he resigned as rector of the University of Freiburg, in 1934. As the notebooks make clear,
Heidegger was far from an unthinking Nazi sympathizer. Rather, he was deeply committed to his own
philosophical form of anti-Semitism -- one he felt the Nazis failed to live up to. It is hard to exaggerate just how
ambitious Heidegger was in publishing his breakout work, Being and Time, in 1927. In that book, he sought nothing less
than a redefinition of what it meant to be human , which amounted to declaring war on the entire philosophical
tradition that preceded him. Western thought, Heidegger argued, had taken a wrong turn beginning with Plato, who had located the
meaning of being in the timeless, unchanging realm of ideas. In Plato’s view, the world as humans knew it was like a cave; its human
inhabitants could perceive only the shadows of true ideals that lay beyond. Plato was thus responsible for liberalism in the broadest
sense: the notion that transcendent, eternal norms gave meaning to the mutable realm of human affairs. Today, modern liberals call
those rules universal values, natural laws, or human rights. But for Heidegger, there was no transcendence and no Platonic God -- no
escape, in effect, from the cave. Meaning lay not in serving abstract ideals but in confronting one’s place within the cave itself: in
how individuals and peoples inhabited their finite existence through time. Heidegger’s conception of human being required
belonging to a specific, shared historical context or national identity. Platonic universalism undermined such collective forms of
contingent, historical identity. In the eyes of a transcendent God or natural law, all people -- whether Germans, Russians, or Jews --
were essentially the same. As Heidegger put it in a 1933 lecture at Freiburg: “If one interprets [Plato’s] ideas as representations and
thoughts that contain a value, a norm, a law, a rule, such that ideas then become conceived of as norms, then the one subject to
these norms is the human being -- not the historical human being, but rather the human being in general.” It was against this
rootless, “general” conception of humanity, Heidegger told his students, that “we must struggle.” By “we,” Heidegger meant
Germany under Hitler’s National Socialist regime, which he hoped would play a central role in such an effort. Heidegger followed in a
long line of German intellectuals, going as far back as the eighteenth century, who believed that the country was destined to play a
transformative role in human history -- a kind of modern rejoinder to the creative glory of ancient Greece. For Heidegger, this meant
replacing the old, Platonic order with one grounded in his vision of historical being. In the early 1930s, he
came to see
Hitler’s National Socialist movement, with its emphasis on German identity, as the best
chance of bringing about such a revolutionary change. And in the Jews, he saw a shared enemy. As Trawny’s
title suggests, both Hitler’s and Heidegger’s view of the Jews grew out of a particular form of
German anti-Semitism that was rampant after World War I. This strain of thinking, which saw Jews as part of a monolithic,
transnational conspiracy, was crystallized in “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a forged document that first appeared in Russia in
1903 and made its way to Germany in 1920. Originally published by Russian monarchists to scapegoat the Jews for the tsar’s military
defeats and the subsequent upheaval, the protocols purported to be minutes from a series of meetings held by Jewish leaders bent
on world domination. According to the alleged transcript, the plotters sought to manipulate international finance, culture, and
media; promote extreme ideas and radical political movements; and foment war to destabilize existing powers. Hitler devoured the
tract, which he swiftly employed as Nazi propaganda. It hit a nerve in Germany, still traumatized by World War I, beset by economic
chaos, and subject to extreme political instability -- all of which could now be attributed to the Jews. Trawny does not argue that
Heidegger read the protocols or agreed with all their contentions. Rather, he suggests that like so many other Germans, Heidegger
accepted their basic premise, which Hitler hammered home in his speeches and in Nazi propaganda. As evidence, Trawny cites the
German philosopher and Heidegger colleague Karl Jaspers, who recalled in his memoir a conversation he had with Heidegger in
1933. When Jaspers brought up “the vicious nonsense about the Elders of Zion,” Heidegger reportedly expressed his genuine
concern: “But there is a dangerous international alliance of the Jews,” he replied. Yet Hitler and Heidegger embraced anti-Semitic
conspiracy theories for different reasons. Whereas the former argued that the Jews posed a racial threat (a fear for which the
protocols offered evidence), the latter saw them as a philosophical one. The Jews, as uprooted nomads serving a transcendent God
-- albeit sometimes through their secular activities -- embodied the very tradition that Heidegger wanted to overturn. Moreover, as
Trawny points out, Heidegger found race deeply problematic. He did not dismiss the concept altogether; if understood as a
biological feature of a particular people, race might well inform that people’s historical trajectory. But he rejected using race as the
primary determinant of identity. For Heidegger, racism was itself a function of misguided metaphysical thinking, because it
presumed a biological, rather than historical, interpretation of what it meant to be human. By “fastening” people into “equally
divided arrangement,” he wrote in the notebooks, racism went “hand in hand with a self-alienation of peoples -- the loss of history.”
Instead of obsessing over racial distinctions, Germans needed to confront their identity as an ongoing philosophical question.
Heidegger overtly criticized the Nazis for their fixation on biological identity, but he also lambasted the Jews for the same sin. “The
Jews,” he wrote in the notebooks, “have already been ‘living’ for the longest time according to the principle of race.” Heidegger’s
anti-Semitism differed from that of the typical Nazi in other important ways. To many of Hitler’s supporters, for example, the
protocols reinforced the view that the Jews were essentially un-German, incapable of properly integrating with Germany’s way of
life or even understanding its spirit. But Heidegger took this notion further, arguing that the Jews
belonged truly nowhere. “For a Slavic people, the nature of our German space would definitely be revealed differently
from the way it is revealed to us,” Heidegger told his students in a 1934 seminar. “To Semitic nomads, it will perhaps never be
revealed at all.” Moreover, Heidegger said, history had shown that “nomads have also often left wastelands behind them where they
found fruitful and cultivated land.” By this logic, the Jews were rootless; lacking a proper home, all they had was allegiance to one
another. Another anxiety reflected in the protocols and in Hitler’s propaganda concerned the perceived power of this stateless,
conspiratorial Jewry -- be it in banking, finance, or academia. But for Heidegger, the success of Europe’s Jews was a symptom of a
broader philosophical problem. Playing on the tired cliché of Jews as clever with abstractions and calculation, the notebooks make a
more general critique of modern society: “The temporary increase in the power of Jewry has its basis in the fact that the
metaphysics of the West, especially in its modern development, served as the hub for the spread of an otherwise empty rationality
and calculative skill, which in this way lodged itself in the 'spirit.'” In forgetting what it meant to be finite and historical, in other
words, the West had become obsessed with mastering and controlling beings -- a tendency Heidegger called “machination,” or the
will to dominate nature in all its forms, ranging from raw materials to human beings themselves. And with their “calculative skill,”
the Jews had thrived in this distorted “spirit” of the modern age. At the same time, the Jews were not, in Heidegger’s view, merely
passive beneficiaries of Western society’s “empty rationality” and liberal ideology; they were active proponents of them. “The role
of world Jewry,” Heidegger wrote in the notebooks, was a “metaphysical question about the kind of humanity that, without any
restraints, can take over the uprooting of all beings from Being as its world-historical ‘task.’” Even if the Jews could not be blamed
for the introduction of Platonism or for its hold over Western society, they were the chief carriers of its “task.” By asserting liberal
rights to demand inclusion in such nations as Germany, the Jews were estranging those countries’ citizens from their humanity -- the
shared historical identity that made them distinct from other peoples. This reasoning formed the basis for a truly poisonous hostility
toward the Jews, and it was perhaps Heidegger’s most damning judgment of them. Now that the notebooks have come into the
light, however, such passages constitute the most damning evidence against the philosopher himself. So what did Heidegger think
should be done about the Jews? Did he agree with the Nazi policies? The notebooks give readers little to go on; Heidegger seems to
have had no taste for detailed policy discussions. Nevertheless, the philosopher spoke through his silence. Despite his criticism of the
Nazis and their crude biological racism, he wrote nothing against Hitler’s laws targeting the Jews. Although
Heidegger resigned as rector of Freiburg before Hitler passed the Nuremberg Laws, which classified German citizens according to
race, he
had assumed the role in 1933, just after the Nazis enacted their first anti-Jewish codes,
which excluded Jews from civil service and university posts (and which Heidegger helped implement).
During a lecture in the winter of 1933–34, he warned a hall full of students that “the enemy
can have attached itself to the innermost roots” of the people and that they, the German
students, must be prepared to attack such an enemy “with the goal of total annihilation.”
Heidegger did not specify “the enemy,” but for the Nazis, they included Germany’s communists; its Roma, or Gypsies; and, above all,
its Jews. This chilling prefiguration of Hitler’s Final Solution is unmistakable , and Heidegger never
explained, let alone apologized for, such horrendous statements.
 AT Wipeout
Uh no – this is not what Warren means – death won’t stop black suffering
because black being can’t die
Warren 18 (Calvin Warren is an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
at Emory University, “Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation,” ///ghs-sc)

5 Please see Heidegger’s Being and Time on the distinction between perishing, demise, and death. I have been arguing that black
being can lay no claim to ontological grounds, and this includes the existential meaning of
death. Thus, within this ontometaphysical schema, Joe would simply perish —much like any
biological organism. Only the human experiences authentic death or inauthentic dying. Black
being cannot die, since this death assumes an inauthentic relation to being that can be
corrected (through anxiety).

Like this really is not what he means at all

Warren 18 (Calvin Warren is an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
at Emory University, “Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation,” ///ghs-sc)
38 Darieck Scott also argues for the agential potential of subjection and fantasy in his Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination. Amber Jamilla Musser
suggests that maso- chism as a set of relations, converging on the site of freedom and agency, in Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism. Both Scott and Musser suggest that masochism can serve as a

strategy or tactic of resistance to domination— by undermining the terms of subjection and pleasure. I , however, do not find agency within masochism
—pleasure is no more a strategy against antiblackness than voting or metaphysical romance . Pleasure
reaches its limit when the body is literally destroyed, and pleasure in destruction just produces a dead black body. Antiblackness is not moved by black death

or deterred through black pleasure.

 AT Performance
Don’t give them any offense on the performance – it can’t change the
ontological positioning of blackness
Warren 18 (Calvin Warren is an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
at Emory University, “Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation,” ///ghs-sc)

1 InTroubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness, Nicole Fleetwood understands the
black body as troubling scopic regimes through performativity . The idea of troubling, then,
indicates a certain resistance to antiblackness through the visual. I agree that the black body
troubles but part ways with Fleetwood’s iteration of resistance and agency . In other words,
troubling does not yield ontological or transformative results—rather, it translates into an
incorrigibility that antiblack violence works to subdue . Michael Chaney also offers a reading of the visual and the
“alternate field of vision” fugitivity engenders in Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative.
 AT Middle Passage
Warren disagrees – the Middle Passage was only one signifier of anti-blackness
(proves perfcon)
Warren 18 (Calvin Warren is an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
at Emory University, “Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation,” ///ghs-sc)

7I use the signpost of the transatlantic slave trade to indicate an emergence or event of
metaphysical horror. Michelle Wright cautions against “Middle Passage Epistemology” in which
other spatial formations (i.e., other oceans) are excluded from the narrative of African slavery. I
certainly agree that antiblackness is a global event and that multiple oceans transported black
commodities. My use of transatlantic slave trade here is not to posit it as the only passage- way, but to provide a signi er for
metaphysical holocaust and its commencement. Please see Michelle M. Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage
Epistemology.
Miscellaneous
 Slavery Metaphors
Using slavery as a metaphor to describe the current racial nomos obscures the
material operations that make white supremacy a reality. Manichean
dichotomies aren’t useful
Paul GILROY, professor of American and English literature at King’s College London, interview
with George Yancy, professor of philosophy at Duquesne University, 15 [“What ‘Black Lives’
Means in Britain,” The New York Times, October 1, 2015,
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/paul-gilroy-what-black-means-in-britain/]
G.Y.: You’ve written about the Middle Passage, about that tragic transportation of African bodies across the Atlantic. Violent
disciplining of the black body, rendering it docile, was one mechanism at work during that passage. What
ways to do think
contemporary black people in the United States or in Britain continue to undergo forms of violent
discipline?

P.G.: There are many connections between the ways that we inhabit and reproduce the
contemporary racial order and the period of slavery. However, we are not slaves. It’s important
not to let slavery slip into being a metaphor and blur the difference between our condition and
the predicament of the slaves. The racial nomos has changed since the 18th century. How racial
hierarchy and the exploitation it sanctions and the terror it requires link the past to the present
needs to be understood very carefully. I know I am stepping away from the political liturgy or code used in American
discussions of race and politics, but I don’t care for Manichaean styles of thought. Abstract and reified
magnitudes like “whiteness” aren’t, in my view, very helpful in interpreting what is now going on
around us. Racial categories have to be denatured. We have to see, for example, how that whiteness is
assembled and brought to actual and virtual life. What are its historical, economic and social
conditions of existence? How does it become articulated to juridical , scientific, medical, aesthetic,
military and technological forms of expertise? These are concrete problems that open
whiteness up to multilayered struggle.
G.Y.: I certainly understand your point. Yet black people in America understand that, in so many instances, they are being shot and
killed by white police officers who are sworn to protect them. They understand how white life matters differently. And even if that
life is poor, it is still white. And they understand the reality of white privilege. Isn’t there a way in which this is a real phenomenon to
be reckoned with? Black people, it seems to me are not responsible for creating a racial Manichaean
reality of “us” (blacks) versus “them” (whites).

P.G.: In “Wretched of the Earth,” Frantz Fanon

speaks powerfully about the need and the difficulty of
getting beyond this Manichaean perspective . He describes how the Manichaeism of the colonizer
creates the Manichaeism of the colonized. That reaction cannot be avoided but it is also a bad
place to get stuck. You speak of privilege here. I know this is now the language many people use to talk about racial hierarchy
but I’m not comfortable with that as a shorthand term for capturing the complex machinery of inequality. It makes power simply a
possession rather than a relationship.
 Not Mutually Exclusive from Cap
Socialist movements are not only feasible but desirable for black movements—
ignoring solidarity leads to cooption and repression of black politics
Haider 18 (Asad Haider, 1/7/18, Founding Editor of Viewpoint Magazine, PhD candidate in
History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz and member of UAW-2865, the Student-Workers
Union at the UCal, “Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump”, Verso Books, p. 14-
15)//SJK

The Black Panther Party followed through on Malcolm’s growing practice of revolutionary solidarity
and his critique of the Nation of Islam’s cultural nationalism, which they called “pork-chop nationalism.” The pork-
chop nationalists, Huey Newton argued in a 1968 interview, were “concerned with returning to the old
African culture and thereby regaining their identity and freedom,” but ultimately erased the political and
economic contradictions within the black community. The inevitable result of pork-chop nationalism
was a figure like “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who used racial and cultural identity as the ideological
support for his brutally repressive and corrupt dictatorship of Haiti. Newton argued that it was necessary
to draw a “line of demarcation” between this kind of nationalism and the kind that the Panthers espoused: There are two kinds of
nationalism, revolutionary nationalism and reactionary nationalism. Revolutionary nationalism is first dependent upon a people’s
to be a revolutionary nationalist you would by
revolution with the end goal being the people in power. Therefore
necessity have to be a socialist. If you are a reactionary nationalist you are not a socialist and your end goal
is the oppression of the people.12 Another leader of the Black Panther Party, Kathleen Cleaver, has reflected on how
the revolutionary nationalism of the Panthers led them to understand the revolutionary struggle as a
specifically crossracial one: In a world of racist polarization, we sought solidarity … We organized the
Rainbow Coalition, pulled together our allies, including not only the Puerto Rican Young Lords, the youth
gang called Black P. Stone Rangers, the Chicano Brown Berets, and the Asian I Wor Kuen (Red
Guards), but also the predominantly white Peace and Freedom Party and the Appalachian
Young Patriots Party. We posed not only a theoretical but a practical challenge to the way our
world was organized. And we were men and women working together .13 That’s an obvious conclusion
when you understand socialism the way Huey Newton did: as “the people in power.” It can’t be reduced to the
redistribution of wealth or the defense of the welfare state—socialism is defined in terms of the political
power of the people as such. So not only is socialism an indispensable component of the black
struggle against white supremacy, the anticapitalist struggle has to incorporate the struggle for
black self-determination. Any doubt about this, Newton pointed out, could be dispelled by studying American history and
seeing that the two structures were inextricably linked: The Black Panther Party is a revolutionary nationalist group and we see a
major contradiction between capitalism in this country and our interests. We realize that this country became very rich upon slavery
and that slavery is capitalism in the extreme. We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both racism and
capitalism.14 This was not, however, a new insight of the Black Panthers. While I was growing up, the civil rights movement had
been rendered palatable for mainstream audiences, and I had sought out the more militant-seeming legacy of Black Power. But
thanks to the work of scholars and activists who have practiced fidelity to the revolutionary content of the civil rights movement, it is
becoming evident that recognition for an injured identity cannot possibly describe this movement’s
scope and aspirations. Nikhil Pal Singh writes in his important book Black Is a Country that the reigning narrative of the civil
rights movement “fails to recognize the historical depth and heterogeneity of black struggles
against racism, narrowing the political scope of black agency and reinforcing a formal, legalistic
view of black equality.”15 As the historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall elaborates in her analysis of the “long civil rights
movement,” Martin Luther King Jr. has been rendered an empty symbol , “frozen in 1963.” Through selective
quotation, Hall observes, the uplifting rhetoric of his speeches has been stripped of its content: his opposition to the
Vietnam War, through an analysis linking segregation to imperialism ; his democratic socialist
commitment to unionization; his orchestration of the Poor People’s Campaign ; and his support for a
sanitation workers’ strike when he was assassinated in Memphis.16 When we move past the misleading and restrictive
dominant narrative, it becomes clear that the civil rights movement was in fact the closest US equivalent to the mass workers’
movements in postwar Europe. Those European movements structured the revolutionary project and the development of Marxist
theory.17 But the development of such a movement was blocked in the United States—and, as we will see, many militants came to
the conclusion that the primary obstacle to its development was white supremacy. However, what makes a movement
anticapitalist is not always the issue it mobilizes around. What is more important is whether it
is able to draw in a wide spectrum of the masses and enable their selforganization, seeking to
build a society in which people govern themselves and control their own lives , a possibility
that is fundamentally blocked by capitalism. So the black freedom struggle is what most closely approached a
socialist movement—as the Trinidadian intellectual and militant C.L.R. James put it, the movements for black self-
determination were “independent struggles” that represented the self-mobilization and self-
organization of the masses and were thus at the leading edge of any socialist project.18 Autoworker and labor organizer James
Boggs took this argument even further, suggesting in The American Revolution: At this point in American history when the labor
movement is on the decline, the Negro movement is on the upsurge. The fact has to be faced that since 1955 the development and
momentum of the Negro struggle have made the Negroes the one revolutionary force dominating the American scene … The goal of
the classless society is precisely what has been and is today at the heart of the Negro struggle. It is the Negroes who represent the
revolutionary struggle for a classless society.19

Racial politics have always function in conjunction with anti-capitalist

organization
Haider 18 (Asad Haider, 1/7/18, Founding Editor of Viewpoint Magazine, PhD candidate in
History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz and member of UAW-2865, the Student-Workers
Union at the UCal, “Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump”, Verso Books, p. 15-
17)//SJK

There were also direct connections to a specifically anticapitalist history, because in the 1930s the
Communist Party (CP) had trained
many of the organizers and established many of the organizational networks that became part of the civil rights
movement. As Robin D.G. Kelley, whose book Hammer and Hoe is a major history of the Communist Party USA’s antiracist work, has put it, the
CP helped lay “the infrastructure that … becomes the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama.”20 Rosa Parks, for example, got
involved in politics through the Communist-organized defense of the “Scottsboro Boys ,” nine black
teenagers falsely accused in Alabama of raping two white women and convicted by an allwhite jury. In the 1940s, a coalition of black

radicals and union leaders, including figures who played a major role in the 1960s like A. Philip Randolph, formed a “civil
rights unionism.” Jacquelyn Dowd Hall points out that their actions were founded on “the assumption tha t, from
the founding of the Republic, racism has been bound up with economic exploitation .” In response, civil rights unionists

carried out a political program in which “protection from discrimination” was matched with “universalistic

social welfare policies.” Their demands encompassed not only workplace democracy, union
wages, and fair and full employment but also affordable housing, political enfranchisement,
educational equity, and universal healthcare.21 This was the first phase of the civil rights
movement. As the movement developed into its most famous, “classical” period, it responded to changing circumstances and confronted
strategic and organizational limits. Racial oppression was tied up not only with legal segregation but also

with the organization of urban space, hierarchies of political representation, the violence of
the repressive state apparatus, and economic exclusion and marginalization.22 The extraordinary
victories of the 1950s and 1960s civil rights mobilizations, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, did not
transform these fundamental structures. After 1965, mass mobilizations would have to incorporate
different strategies and different demands, and the languages of Black Power and black nationalism
responded to this need. The earlier struggles had always been complex and variegated, going beyond the now celebrated nonviolent
protests of the South. Armed resistance had played a vital role in enabling the use of nonviolent tactics, and movements in the North ran parallel to
their equivalents below the MasonDixon line. But organizations like the
NAACP, led by the elites of the black community, had tried
to distance themselves from the revolutionary possibilities of the struggle, shifting funding and resources
away from economic issues and toward the battle against Southern legal segregation. As time went on, this became a significant limit on the scope of
mass mobilization. But throughout the 1960s, the epicenter of the struggle began to shift to the urban rebellions of the Northern inner cities, which
broke forcefully outside this bureaucratic containment. The movement was in search of new forms of self-
organization that could overcome the obstacles the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act had been unable to address, and black nationalism
provided a promising approach. What nationalism meant was a political perspective: black activists organizing themselves rather

than following the lead of white organizations, building new institutions instead of seeking entry into white

society. The contradiction of the nationalist mobilizations, however, came in the form of what Huey Newton described as “reactionary
nationalism,” represented by groups like Ron Karenga’s US Organization, with which the Panthers would later violently clash. As Newton pointed out,
reactionary nationalism put forth an ideology of racial identity, but it was also based on a material phenomenon. Desegregation had made

it possible for black businessmen and politicians to enter into the American power structure on a scale that had not been
possible before, and these elites were able to use racial solidarity as a means of covering up their class positions .
If they claimed to represent a unitary racial community with a unified interest, they could suppress the demands of black working people whose
interests were, in reality, entirely different from theirs. So the Black Panther Party had to navigate between two concerns. They recognized that black
people had been oppressed on a specifically racial basis, and so they had to organize autonomously. But at the same time, if
you talked
about racism without talking about capitalism, you weren’t talking about getting power in the hands
of the people. You were setting up a situation in which the white cop would be replaced by a
black cop. For the Panthers, this was not liberation. But that was clearly the situation we were getting into in the United States, as
optimistic liberals celebrated the replacement of mass movements, riots, and armed cells with a placid multiculturalism. Over the
course of several decades, the legacy of antiracist movements was channeled toward the economic and political

advancement of individuals like Barack Obama and Bill Cosby who would go on to lead the attack against social

movements and marginalized communities. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls attention to this phenomenon in From
#BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation: “The most significant transformation in all of Black life over the last fifty years has been the emergence of a Black
elite, bolstered by the Black political class, that has been responsible for administering cuts and managing meager budgets on the backs of Black
constituents.”23 Of course, the existence of elites within the black community was not new in itself. Despite their differences, both the
entrepreneurialism of Booker T. Washington and the “Talented Tenth” of W .E.B. Du Bois were early investments in the political potential of the black
elite. However, as Taylor recounts, the ensuing history of American politics and the development of the black freedom struggle have transformed the
structural role of the black elite. As she points out in an analysis of the murder of Freddie Gray and the ensuing uprising in Baltimore, we have broken in
a fundamental way from the context that produced the classical vocabulary of the antiracist struggle: There have always been class differences among
African Americans, but this is the first time those class differences have been expressed in the form of a minority of Blacks wielding significant political
power and authority over the majority of Black lives. This raises critical questions about the role of the Black elite in the continuing freedom struggle—
and about what side are they on. This is not an overstatement. When a Black mayor, governing a largely Black city, aids in the mobilization of a military
unit led by a Black woman to suppress a Black rebellion, we are in a new period of the Black freedom struggle.24
 Academy/Cooption Link
Academy/cooption link
Haider 18 (Asad Haider, 1/7/18, Founding Editor of Viewpoint Magazine, PhD candidate in
History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz and member of UAW-2865, the Student-Workers
Union at the UCal, “Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump”, Verso Books, p. 15-
19)//SJK
It is the haziness of our contemporary category of identity that has blurred the boundaries. Its political pitfalls have been forcefully
demonstrated by Wendy Brown, who argues that “what we have come to call identity politics is partly dependent upon the demise
of a critique of capitalism and of bourgeois cultural and economic values.” When identity claims are put forth without a grounding in
a critique of capitalism, Brown suggests, identity politics concerned with race, sexuality, and gender will
appear not as a supplement to class politics, not as an expansion of left categories of oppression
and emancipation, not as an enriching augmentation of progressive formulations of power and
persons—all of which they also are—but as tethered to a formulation of justice that reinscribes a
bourgeois (masculinist) ideal as its measure.26 In other words, by coding demands that come from
marginal or subordinate groups as identity politics, the white male identity is enshrined with the
status of the neutral, general, and universal. We know that this is false—in fact, there is a white
identity politics, a white nationalism—and, as we shall see, whiteness is the prototypical form of racial ideology itself.
Antiracist struggles like those of the CRC reveal the false universality of this hegemonic identity .
However, when identity claims lose their grounding in mass movements, the bourgeois masculinist
ideal rushes to fill the void. This ideal, Brown writes, “signifies educational and vocational opportunity, upward mobility,
relative protection against arbitrary violence, and reward in proportion to effort.” If it is not questioned, people of color,
along with other oppressed groups, have no choice but to articulate their political demands in
terms of inclusion in the bourgeois masculinist ideal. To demand inclusion in the structure of
society as it is means forfeiting the possibility of structural change . As Brown points out, this means that
the enabling condition of politics is the “renaturalization of capitalism that can be said to have marked
progressive discourse since the 1970s.”27 It is the equation of political agency with membership in a mythical “middle
class,” which is supposed to characterize everyone in American society. The middle class itself, Brown argues, is “a
conservative identity,” one that refers to “a phantasmic past, an imagined idyllic, unfettered, and
uncorrupted historical moment (implicitly located around 1955) when life was good.” This was a historical
moment ideologically centered on the nuclear family, with the white male breadwinner at its head. Yet it paradoxically comes to
embody, Brown points out, “the ideal to which nonclass identities refer for proof of their exclusion or injury.” Of course, the
injury of exclusion from the benefits extended to the white heterosexual middle class is a real
injury. Job security, freedom from harassment, access to housing—all of these are meaningful
demands. But the problem is that “politicized identities” do not pose these demands in the context of
an insurgency from below. The very structure of the politicized identity is to make a demand
for restitution and inclusion; as Brown points out, “Without recourse to the white masculine middle-class ideal,
politicized identities would forfeit a good deal of their claims to injury and exclusion, their claims to the political significance of their
difference.”28 I grew up in
a world entirely shaped by this renaturalization of capitalism. I sensed that there
was something unsatisfactory about politicized identity but could not quite find a way to deal with it, beyond
a sort of weak dialectical ambivalence. After all, I couldn’t possibly dismiss the fact that while “black faces in high
places” might not mean liberation, seeing them was still profoundly meaningful for those who
had suffered the psychological traumas of a racist society . In my formative years, everyone I saw on TV who
looked like me was a cab driver or an Arab terrorist. (I still don’t understand why they have Indians play Arab terrorists. Why not at
least a Pakistani terrorist?) Every president had been white and, despite my lack of interest in Obama, his electoral victory
made me think of the black people who had died fighting for just the right to vote ; the thought moved
me to tears. Was the multicultural bourgeoisie with its ideology of identity a necessary evil—a component of the
cross-class alliance that would be required to fight racism?
 Cap Individualism Link
Cap individualism link
Haider 18 (Asad Haider, 1/7/18, Founding Editor of Viewpoint Magazine, PhD candidate in
History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz and member of UAW-2865, the Student-Workers
Union at the UCal, “Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump”, Verso Books, p. 19-
20)//SJK

In its contemporary ideological form, rather than its initial form as a theorization of a revolutionary political
practice, identity politics is an individualist method. It is based on the individual’s demand for
recognition, and it takes that individual’s identity as its starting point. It takes this identity for granted and suppresses the
fact that all identities are socially constructed. And because all of us necessarily have an identity that
is different from everyone else’s, it undermines the possibility of collective self-organization. The
framework of identity reduces politics to who you are as an individual and to gaining recognition as
an individual, rather than your membership in a collectivity and the collective struggle against
an oppressive social structure. As a result, identity politics paradoxically ends up reinforcing the
very norms it set out to criticize. While this redefinition may seem drastic, this kind of shift in meaning is
typical of political language, which does not always clearly align with political practice. A word like nationalism, for
example, ends up revealing irreconcilable divisions. It eventually requires modification, and we may end up deciding that it has to be
abandoned in favor of new and more adequate terms. Indeed, nationalism was precisely the epistemological obstacle that drove
Barbara Smith to the kind of politics that would frame the CRC. She recalled: I went to a major antiwar mobilization in
Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1969 … I thought it was the last demonstration I’d ever go to; one of the reasons being black
people back at Pitt had so many nasty things to say about the fact that I was involved in what they say was a “white”
entity, namely, the antiwar movement … it was a very hard time to be a politically active black woman, who did not
want to be a pawn … I actually imagined that I would never be politically active again because nationalism and patriarchal attitudes
within black organizing was so strong.29 The
CRC’s initiating purpose was precisely to overcome these
degrading and depoliticizing divisions. “I firmly believe there has to be space for us all in our myriad
identities and dimensions,” Demita Frazier would later reflect. “You run the risk of having an identity become
crystallized and contained and requiring everyone to be conformists.” This tension also existed within
the CRC. Class differences internal to the group were a challenge in maintaining democratic forms of organization, Frazier recalls:
Class was another huge issue that we looked at and yet in some way could not come to grips with. We had an analysis based on our
own socialist leanings and a socialist democratic view of the world, and yet, when it came right down to it, we had many women
who felt excluded because they felt they didn’t have the educational background and privilege of the leadership. Just as significant
was the question of relating to other groups, especially other feminist groups. The women’s
liberation movement had
been perceived as white from the outset, and part of the purpose of the CRC was to insist that black
women could articulate their own feminism . But this did not necessarily mean maintaining rigid
divisions from white feminists, or indeed forming a crystallized black identity. In Frazier’s own words:
One of the things that has always troubled me is that I wanted to be part of a multicultural feminist
organization, a multicultural feminist movement, and I never felt that the feminist movement became fully integrated … It isn’t
that Combahee didn’t work in coalition with other groups, but we weren’t able to make those linkages across
culture and make them as firm as I hoped they could be.30 The problem of coalitions is felt acutely by
anyone who has experienced the trials and tribulations of political practice . My own experiences with
the rise and fall of coalitions convinced me of the perspective of the scholar of black British culture Paul Gilroy: “Action against racial
hierarchies can proceed more effectively when it has been purged of any lingering respect for the idea of ‘race. ’ ”31