K

Their infatuation with materialism and radical lefitism prioritizes

becoming over blackness. This puts the cart in front of the horse, as it
requires a perpetual restaging of anti-black violence in order to initiate
lines of flight.
Leong 2016 – PhD UC Irvine - Assistant Professor, English, University of Utah - Assistant
Professor, Environmental Humanities Graduate Program, University of Utah (Diana, “The
Mattering of Black Lives: Octavia Butler’s Hyperempathy and the Promise of the New
Materialisms,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2(2), 1-35) bhb

The new materialisms are drawn from a long genealogy of philosophical materialism, in which
Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, Marx, and Deleuze are cited as major touchstones . In recognition of this legacy,
Coole and Frost (2010) assert that the interventions loosely gathered by the term “new materialisms” are better “categorized as
renewed materialisms,” with the qualifier “new” acknowledging the “unprecedented” ecological, biological, and technological
conditions under which we currently live and labor (p. 4, italics in original). Although their specific objects of analysis are
appropriately diverse, the
new materialisms collectively insist on a post-humanist matter that is
lively, self-directed, agential, creative, and always in the process of becoming . In this regard, matter
is better thought of as materialization, or the process by which complex phenomena are temporarily and contingently stabilized to
varying degrees. The ontological shift entailed here is towards a philosophical monism , inspired most
notably by the work of Deleuze. Following Spinoza and Bergson, Deleuze (1994) develops a notion of the virtual
as a generative field of difference, or a “plane of immanence,” where “all the varieties of
differential relations and all the distributions of singular points [coexist] in diverse orders
‘perplicated’ in one another” (p. 206). These differences are then formatted into distinct phenomena or entities by
processes of actualization that “[bring] the object back into relation with the field of differential relations in which it can always be
dissolved and become actualized otherwise, as something else, by being linked through other differential relations to other
particles” (Cheah, 2010, pp. 85-86). While
not all new materialist theories cleave to a strictly Deleuzian
philosophy, there is general agreement that the dynamic interactions among objects, bodies,
and phenomena turn us away from the Anthropocene’s “billiard ball model” of causality , and
more significantly, away from some of poststructuralism’s critical trends.

According to the new materialisms, the linguistic and cultural turns of the last half century have resulted in both an
intellectual and a political poverty. Specifically, social constructivism (Coole & Frost, 2010) and cultural
representationalism (Barad, 2007) have overdetermined matter to the extent that it appears as a passive
product made meaningful only through cultural and discursive practice. Coole and Frost (2010) even write of a
theoretical “exhaustion,” claiming that they “share the feeling current among many researchers that the dominant
constructivist orientation to social analysis is inadequate for thinking about matter, materiality, and politics in ways that do justice to
the contemporary context of biopolitics and global political economy” (p. 6). Somewhere
and sometime during the
rise of the Anthropocene, cultural theory, broadly conceived, lost its explanatory power. This
assessment of inadequacy repeats across much of the recent new materialist scholarship,
condensing the cultural turn into a discursive reductionism that rebuffs the empirical for the
ideal, or the material for the symbolic. Elizabeth Grosz’s (2004) The Nick of Time opens with a telling “reminder to
social, political, and cultural theorists, particularly those interested in feminism, antiracism, and questions of the politics of
globalization, that they have forgotten a crucial dimension of research…not just the body, but that which makes it possible and
which limits its actions: the precarious, accidental, contingent, expedient, striving, dynamic status of life in a messy, complicated,
resistant, brute world of materiality” (p. 2). Social, political, and cultural theory, in other words, have overlooked the material
conditions of life that render the body available for inscription and enculturation in the first instance. So too in the recently
published Gut Feminism does Elizabeth Wilson (2015) rebuke “social constructionism” for “[tending] not to be very curious about
the details of empirical claims in genetics, neurophysiology, evolutionary biology, pharmacology or biochemistry” (p. 3). Her ensuing
conclusion is that focusing on how social structures produce and discipline bodies comes at the expense of recognizing the ways
bodies radically alter and organize social structures themselves. It
appears that cultural theory harbors an
“allergy to ‘the real’” that dissuades “critical inquirers from the more empirical kinds of
investigation that material processes and structures require” (Coole & Frost, 2010, p. 6). However,
the very aspects that would make matter more “real” than language or culture are the same
aspects that restrict its ethical potential and facilitate a conceptual rejection of race.

In line with their post-humanist agenda, the

new materialisms evoke matter and materiality as existing in
excess of human subjectivity and its attendant domains. Mechanistic theories of causality hold that objects
are composed of inert matter acted upon by external forces, which presumes that an object’s potential or possible capabilities are
already present and fixed in some initial moment of creation. But, as the new materialisms emphasize, the virtual field of differential
relations is immanent to matter in such a way that it is impossible to anticipate all of the effects a material configuration may have,
or the organizational forms it may take. This
ability to act independently of the subject’s will and desire is
variously construed as “impersonal and preindividual forces,” an alterity that “comes from
outside the capability or power of the subject” (Cheah, 2010, p. 80, 89), “degrees of indetermination” that
represent the “‘true principle of life’” (Grosz, 2010, p. 149), and a “powerful reminder…that life will always exceed our knowledge
and control” (Bennett, 2010, p.14). Differences in terminology aside, the
new materialisms are united by an
understanding of materiality as a spectral, impersonal force with material effects, one that
escapes reason and disrupts systems of meaning, including modernist binaries like
mind/body, culture/nature, and inside/outside (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012). The latter aspect is key because,
while matter can frustrate representation, its “excessive” properties do not mean that it exists “outside” of the subject. Rather,
matter and materiality are “real” because they actively produce reality in unpredictable ways
(Cheah, 2010).

It is here that the ethical impetus of the new materialist project is located. If
we accept our embeddedness in
mutually transformative, nonhuman networks , the ground of ethics shifts accordingly. First, a
responsibility to an externalized other gives way to an accountability for the many relations
that constitute becoming. And second, ethics are no longer reducible to the decisions or
actions of individuals that are initiated by a properly historical judgment. In Rosi Braidotti’s (2010)
terms, “Accepting the impossibility of mutual recognition and replacing it with one of mutual specification and mutual
codependence is what is at stake in postsecular affirmative ethics” (p. 214). I find nothing immediately problematic with an ethics
that aspires to keep pace with advancements in science, philosophy, and technology. What I find troublesome is how
our acquiescence to these ethics is solicited.

New materialist ethics necessarily manifest as affective encounters that operate best on
micropolitical scales. Because materiality is figured as an impersonal force of the real, it runs the risk of becoming a
transcendental signified that merely replaces language or culture as an organizing principle. Doing so would severely diminish its
To circumvent the “tension between universalistic theory
import as an inducement to a posthumanist ethics.

and specific mode of inquiry,” chance , contingency , and creativity in micro-level encounters
are prioritized over more obstinate assemblages that congeal at the global or macro-levels
(Zhan, 2016, p. 26). Further, as the nucleus of the new materialisms, the embodied subject or
material body compels an ethics that unfolds on a parallel plane, meaning between and
within bodies. “This implies,” Rosi Braidotti (2010) proposes, “approaching the world through
affectivity and not cognition: as singularity, force, movement, through assemblages or webs of
interconnections with all that lives,” and “accepting the impossibility of mutual recognition
and replacing it with one of mutual specification and mutual codependence” (p. 214).
In the quotation above, Braidotti invokes an ethics of relation, in which sensation and perception comprise the “zone of [ethical]
effectivity,” and attunement and affirmation take precedence over social transformation (Tumino, 2011, p. 555). Because
material inter- and intraactions are preconscious and multisensorial, ethical practice is based
not on the ability to evaluate right from wrong, but on a commitment to feeling right . We can
observe this adjustment in appeals to “an ongoing responsiveness to… entanglement ” (Barad,
2007, p. 394), “a heightened sensitivity to the agency of assemblages ” (Bennett, 2010b), a “wakefulness” to
the “feel [of] what makes us laugh, lament, and curse” (Orlie, 2007, p. 127) and an “experience of the vitality of being” (Connolly,
2010, pp. 196-197). As a consequence, the experiences of living under conditions of crisis are
fetishized at the expense of addressing the causes of these conditions themselves. The
imperative to “[live] with the open wound...through a sort of depersonalization of the event ”
(Braidotti, 2010, p. 213), for example, not only depoliticizes the claims of historically oppressed

communities , but also flattens distinctions between traumas inflicted through happenstance
and persistent intergenerational harm . How else could one, as Braidotti does, list as equivalent examples: those
who survived the Holocaust, Frida Kahlo’s deadly tram ride, and missing the train to the World Trade Center on September 11th (p.
214)?

The limits of a new materialist ethics appear most forcefully, then, as we attempt to move from an embodied “responsiveness” to
the dislocation of structures. When patterns of materialization are addressed, it is generally as the amalgamation of “perpetual
circuits of exchange, feedback, and reentry” that thereby “[inflect] the shape of political experience” (Connolly, 2010, pp. 190-191).
On the one hand, there is nothing innately objectionable about attributing the creation and transformation of political structures to
any number of quotidian, embodied experiences. This is in fact common in political theory and historiography.8 On the other hand,
it becomes more difficult to reconcile the effects of chance, unpredictability, and
indeterminacy with the endurance and repetition of something like antiblack violence. 9 The
new materialisms are therefore at pains to clarify why the structures of global antiblackness
continue to function as if “neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, show movement, as the human subject
is ‘murdered’ over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise”
(Spillers, 2003, p. 208). Interpreting and describing our entanglements with non-human, materialist
forces are not enough to account for, much less dislodge attachments to, social categories
and representational arrangements . By this I mean that becoming more aware of material forces will not inevitably
reduce the weight of discursive or psychic formations. It
could even obstruct change by making forms of
affect and sensation newly available for inscription. As Timothy Morton (2007) states, when
“contact becomes content,” perceptions of difference collapse into identity (p. 37). Granted, these
complications are not unique to the new materialisms as changes in scale almost always require a re-calibration of ethics. The point
is, however, that the
framing of the new materialisms as inherently more ethical generates , and is
generated by, a disavowal or misreading of race as a stagnant analytical framework.
Creation and affirmation of different modes of subjectivity are attached to
the violence of modernity – only the demand of absolute negativity has
the potential to analyze blackness as perpetually unhinged in objective
vertigo.
Barber 16, Daniel Colucciello Barber is a Researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin. Nearest date
given is 2016, Rhizomes Issue 29: Black Holes: Afro-Pessimism, blackness and the discourses of Modernity,
“The Creation of Non-Being,” http://www.rhizomes.net/issue29/barber.html NN

[9] My argument, drawing on Deleuze, is that the

logic of possibility actually serves to modulatively
reproduce the anti-black grammar of the world . Creation, defined as a break with the
presently given world, is not a possibility . It is rather immanent with an axiomatic No to such
possibility, with habits of negativity. [10] This thesis concerns a key problematic that stems from the Afro-Pessimist
analysis of anti-blackness: if blackness stands both within the habitus of modernity, as an organizing
principle, and without this habitus, as a perpetually banished subjectivity, then the very
articulation of blackness would seem to depend on and reproduce such a habitus . In other words,
both being-within and being-without are possibilities governed by modernity's dominative
positioning of blackness. The articulation of blackness is in fact bound by this problematic
insofar as one remains within the ambit of habits of affirmation . In other words, the presumption
of affirmation is co-extensive with the reproduction of the habitus of modernity : that which is
presently available for affirmation is already governed by modernity and its articulation of blackness, and so habits of affirmation
inevitably participate in and reproduce the double-bind in which modernity positions blackness. [11] Against such reproduction, it
is essential to insist on habits of negativity. Such insistence is total: since it is affirmation as
such that entails participation in the being here indexed by modernity, even a modicum of
affirmation mitigates the force enacted by negativity . The power of creation therefore resides
entirely and essentially on the side of negativity—and not at all on the side of affirmation.
Concomitantly, to invoke such power actually entails an unmitigated refusal of habits of affirmation; affirmation does not
name or support, but on the contrary denies, the power of creation. Given the double-bind in which
modernity positions blackness, this is to say that the negativity of the non, in virtue of its immanence with a force of creation,
indexes blackness as a power of non-being, as that which is without need of—and in fact opposed to—reliance on the affirmative.
[12] It remains necessary to outline the articulation of this immanence of creation and non-being—that is, to theoretically express
how an unmitigated insistence on habits of negativity can be both a refusal of affirmation and an enactment of power. This warrants
a return to Deleuze's thought by way of some questions: How can habits of negativity, articulated via Deleuze's insistence on the
non, gain theoretical consistency with his conceptual refusal of negative being? If negative being is refused, then in what sense can
there be insistence on the non? [13] Deleuze argues that "being is difference itself. Being is also non-being, but non-being is not the
being of the negative . . . non-being is Difference" (Deleuze 1994: 76-77). This makes clear that negative being is refused
in virtue of difference; what is essential is difference in itself . Hence difference is articulated not
as the affirmation of affirmative being, nor even as the affirmation of being as such . On the
contrary, difference is articulated as "non-being": negative being is refused, but it is refused in
favor of non-being. Difference antecedes both positive being and negative being, thereby displacing their dialectical or
conflictual relation. In other words, difference is not between opposed beings but in itself, autonomous
from and antecedent to every being or thing; difference is real, but precisely as a matter of
non-being. Its reality is not the being of a thing, it is no-thing. [14] Such theorization enables the delinking of creation (as force
of non-being, or no-thing) from affirmation (as possibility of being). Difference, or non-being, marks a real force of creation that is
without, and incommensurable with, being. In virtue of this unanalogizability of non-being with being, creation is
articulated as a force stemming from negativity , and not at all from affirmation: affirmation
is said of being and its possibilization, whereas creation is said of non-being . Habits of
negativity, which antagonize every (positively or negatively described) being, or being as such, are thus
coeval with an insistence on the real force of non-being. [15] This argument can be used to negotiate a
tension between the Afro-Pessimist emphasis on irresolvable negativity and the concern of Black Optimism to emphasize a power
named by blackness: while the former's emphasis on negativity extends to habits of affirmation as such, this negativity immanently
involves—and thus does not abandon—an insistence on the power of creation. Consequently, the Black Op concern to speak of the
power of blackness may be satisfied entirely within the space of negativity, or social death, on which Afro-Pessimism insists. Such
satisfaction does not then require recourse to qualifications that would mitigate the negativity of this space, On the contrary,
power is immanent to a redoubled negativity, or a negativity toward both being and the
affirmation of the possibility of being-otherwise. [16] Yet even as Deleuze's philosophical efforts may be
deployed by and for the articulation of Afro-Pessimist claims, these claims vertiginously intensify Deleuze's
theorization of non-being: Deleuze theorizes non-being in terms of a "vertigo" of immanence
(Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 48), yet blackness is the historical, material experience of such vertigo .

Drawing on a distinction made by Wilderson, this is to say that for Deleuze non-being is a "subjective vertigo ," or a

vertigo into which Deleuze's thought makes an entrance, while blackness is experienced as "objective vertigo ,"

meaning that vertigo is—historically or materially—always already there (Wilderson 2011: 3).
Immanence, or the vertigo of non-being, remains an object for the thought of Deleuze; blackness is historically or materially the
objective reality of non-being—the very reality of the vertigo of immanence. Consequently, to
think non-being according
to blackness entails the reading of Deleuze's theoretical articulation in terms of the operations
by which historical, material power is enacted.

The cultivation of agency does nothing—it is not subversive—it is

complicit—the 1AC only displaces the organized violence of captivity
Sexton 8 (Jared Sexton, Director of African American Studies at UC Irvine, 2008,
“Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism”, pages 111-114)

FYI: Randall Kennedy is “one of the first black scholars in this generation to pen a sustained
argument advocating what he terms ‘a cosmopolitan ethos that welcomes the prospect of
genuine, loving interracial intimacy’ ” (page 107-108)
In response to the last question, we examine several comments from Kennedy’s opening chapter, “In the Age of Slavery.” As noted,
Kennedy is at pains to counter the claims of a certain black feminist history regarding the
“extremity of power” exercised by the slaveholder and “the absolute submission required of the slave ” (Hartman,
quoted in Kennedy 2003, 532fn11). He is, in other words, attempting to demonstrate , or at least to speculate upon,
the limits of the slave system’s power of domination. Beyond this limit—whose locus proves
frustratingly obscure—the agency of the slave herself was, we are told, able to affect
significantly the conditions of captivity to alternate ends. Kennedy , in other words, proffers a
narrative in which evidence of agency (evidence, that is, confirming an assumption of agency ), however
circumscribed or practically ineffective, is taken as a sign of resistance . More properly, this is a
narrative of resistant affection, an insistence that the dehumanizing social order of racial
slavery was unable to achieve its ultimate goal—“the absolute submission of the slave”—
because it could not overcome the irresistible force of affection between men and women,
“regardless of color.” When all is said and done, a human is still a human, as it were, and the family
romance of normative heterosexuality persists “even within” hierarchies that preclude for the
captive all of the recognizable (social, political, economic, cultural, legal) trappings of “human being” in the
modern sense. Here is Kennedy: The slave system failed, however, to perfect the domination that [ Judge
Thomas] Ruffin envisioned. It failed to bind the slaves so tightly as to deprive them of all room to
maneuver. It failed to wring from them all prohibited yearnings. Slavery was, to be sure, a horribly oppressive system that
severely restricted the ambit within which its victims could make decisions. But slavery did not extinguish altogether the possibility
of choice. (43) We might ask, what is the minimum ambit of decision making ? What sort of
system, if not slavery, would bind one so tightly as to deprive one of all “room to maneuver ”?
Need a system of domination be “perfect” in order for it to be legally binding or socially
effective or politically determinant ? Need the captive body be deprived of all room to
maneuver for the situation to be considered one of extremity ? Need the yearnings of slaves
be wrung entirely from them for their prohibition to be considered a constitutive element of
life ? At what point does the quantitative measure of the slave’s bondage become difference
of a qualitative sort ? What precisely is the “choice” available under slavery, and is it one
worthy of belaboring, one whose sphere of influence is to be considered newsworthy ? To put a
finer point on it, why is the categorical discrepancy refused between the free and the enslaved, or more

specifically, between the slave and the slaveholder? Is such refusal not tantamount to denying the very
existence of slavery as a system that produced slaves rather than free people whose freedom
was simply “severely restricted” or whose power was simply “severely limited” or who
simply faced “difficult situations ”? Kennedy continues: Bondage severely limited the power—including the sexual
power—of slaves. But it did not wholly erase their capacity to attract and shape affectionate, erotic attachments of all sorts,
including interracial ones. In a hard-to-quantify but substantial number of cases, feelings of affection and attachment between white
male masters and their black female slaves somehow survived slavery’s deadening influence. The great difficulty, in any particular
instance, lies in determining whether sex between a male master and a female slave was an expression of sexual autonomy or an act
of unwanted sex. The truth is that most often we cannot know for sure, since there exists little direct testimony from those involved,
especially the enslaved women. (44) The inability to quantify the “number of cases” or, indeed, to “know for sure”
anything about them does not prevent the author from considering them nonetheless “substantial,” and the paucity
of direct testimony,6 “especially [from] the enslaved women,” does not stop the author from
extrapolating wildly about said “feelings of affection and attachment” between them and their “white male masters.” In
fact, it is the void in its place—the great historic silence—that enables both the reiteration of longstanding
alibis for white male sexual violence—what Hartman (1997) discusses skillfully as the “ruses of seduction”—and
the projection of this newfangled, though no less menacing, story about a maverick
interracial intimacy that , almost undetectably, undermines the injunctions of white
supremacy, serving not only as a sign of agency for enslaved women but a moment of their
resistance as well . Their “sexual power” is expressed as the “capacity to attract”—and
“somehow” to manipulate—the erotic attachments of white male slaveholders. There is here
an unsubtle shift in terms: agency is not in itself subversive; indeed, the entire slave system derives, in large
part, from the agency of the enslaved (its capture, manipulation, redeployment, etc.) (Chandler 2000). Agency may be

resistant or complicit or both, and it may or may not have practical effects in the world ; all of
this can only be determined contextually . Much more troubling than Kennedy’s imprecision here,
however, is his entirely uncritical suggestion about the “sexual power” of slaves . Is not one of the
principal conceits of power to suggest that though the dominant may monopolize power
political, economic, and social, the dominated nonetheless enjoy a wily aptitude for “getting their
way” by other means, namely , the ars erotica of seduction ? Is not one of the most pernicious
elements of the proslavery discourse that the “attractiveness” of enslaved black women
presents a threat of corruption to civilized white manhood and /or an internal guarantee
against the excesses of state-sanctioned violence reserved for white slaveholders ? The same
quality that served as temptation was also , or alternately, taken to be that which would forestall the descent of
slaveholding into unrestrained brutality, an essential rationalization for the upholding of white (male)
impunity toward blacks , whether enslaved or nominally “free” (Hartman 1997).7 Finally, was not the
suggestion that enslaved black men might have the power to seduce white women (whether free

or, in earlier periods, indentured) one of the prime alibis for the construction of regulatory or
prohibitory statutes around interracial marriage and sexual relations from the seventeenth
century onward (Bardaglio 1999)? In each case, the focus on the “sexual power” of slaves was
undoubtedly a displacement of the organized violence consistently required of captivity and ,
further, a dissimulation of the institutionalized sexual power of slaveholders in particular
(whose authority not only foreclosed the possibility of prosecution and militated against the extralegal reprisals but also contributed
immeasurably to their “capacity to attract and shape affectionate, erotic attachments of all kinds.” The asymmetry here
approaches the incommensurable—how, after all, would a slave go on to “court” a master?
How would such an exercise in self-objectification, supplementing structural availability with
an affirmation of “willingness,” rightly be called power?). This is no less the case simply
because for Kennedy the “sexual power” of slaves is something to honor or celebrate rather
than to fear.

Their theory of racialization and alternative to it can only encapsulate the

violence of colonialism which is a move towards a coherent subject that
can enact agency that intrinsically distances itself from blackness and
incoherency. Their desire for brujeria to be represented as proper politics
is a move that only works at the level of representation that both in and
outside of debate destroys any possibility for a structural analytic of anti-
blackness.
Brough 17 [Taylor, University of Vermont, B.A., 2016 CEDA Nationals Champion, “Open letter
to non-Black Native people in debate,”
https://resistanceanddebate.wordpress.com/2017/03/23/open-letter-to-non-black-native-
people-in-debate/] DOA:11/9/18 WAKE SHC

I should start by saying that I think Frank Wilderson

is right about the position of Native people in the US racial schema.
In Red, White, and Black, he argues compellingly that Native
people are situated in a liminal space between life
and death—that we are haunted by the dual specters of sovereignty and genocide; that our demands occur simultaneously in
a coherent register of land repatriation, land theft, and treaty rights and in an incoherent register of an incomprehensible and
ongoing magnitude of massacres, rape, starvation, boarding schools, and smallpox. Wilderson’s work has provided me with some of the tools to
describe the gap between coherence and incoherence, a gap which is made especially evident in debate rounds. And particularly clear is that Native
debate[1] is inclined towards talking in the grammar of sovereignty rather than genocide. I am here
preoccupied with our enunciative capacities in debate—with what I perceive “Native debate,” and specifically non-Black Native

debaters, to be doing in service of Settler/Master (mis)recognition, what the consequences of such doing might be,
and what it might mean to push against the disciplining force of recognition in debate. The ontological fact of genocide/sovereignty as a dual
positioning for Native people, coupled with academia’s push to identify ourselves at the site of (coherent and recognizable) trauma (what Wilderson
terms “intra-human conflicts”), has led Native thought in debate, broadly, to do three related things: 1) prioritize the
coherent discussion of sovereign loss over one of genocide and its incoherence , 2) articulate
ourselves as always in conversation with (read: traumatized by) the Settler, 3) distance ourselves from a

Black/Red conversation or from Black/Red theorizing. These three moves are all antiblack in addition to being an
insidious manifestation of the genocide that structures half of our (non?)being. Depressingly, if we were to historicize “ Native debate,” we

would have to begin with a litany of non-Native debaters reading “Give Back the Land,” offering sovereignty as a

solution to a tragic history of genocide that relegates Native people to phobic/phillic objects of the past whose futures are in the
hands of those Settlers who bravely dare to talk about them. The terrain in which everyone can become Native —or at

least become an advocate for Natives—is a cleared landscape produced by genocide but also , significantly,

produced by antiblack slavery.[2] This history of non-Native debaters’ representations of sovereignty, land repatriation, and treaty
rights as the only solution to genocide also reaches into the present. What is most disturbing to me about this ongoing history is that

we have yet to tie virtually any debate round to actual, material land repatriation, sovereign gains,
or the upholding of treaty rights. These material gains involve labor from Native people
organizing at the grassroots level, not an academic labor from Settlers. Debate arguments do
not facilitate sovereign benefits for Native peoples. Further, the struggle for sovereignty itself
does not overcome or solve genocide. The removal of the Hunkpapa Lakota Oyate and their relatives at the Oceti Sakowin camp
at Standing Rock should be proof enough of this—sovereignty as a politic is often met with, rather than resolving,

genocidal violence. Non-Black Native people in debate have performed a similar land-based politic. Native debate has
become so associated with words like “land,” “sovereignty,” “space,” “place,” “treaty rights,” and others, that it
is almost impossible to theorize Native debate absent sovereignty as a grammar that marks our existence. So both
non-Native debaters (who claim to advocate for Native peoples’ sovereignty) and Native debaters (who claim to advocate for something that usually
falls into the grammar of sovereignty) are talking in essentially the same register, with incredibly limited slippage towards genocide as a vector of
violence. And, for Native people, like non-Natives, debate
arguments do not and cannot facilitate the material
elements of decolonization that these land-based arguments frequently rely upon.[3] [Footnote 3: There are clearly significant
differences between Native people’s arguments in favor of sovereignty and those of Settlers. But the Native debaters who claim to solve sovereignty or
material decolonization are also often misrepresenting and misrecognizing the history of struggle for sovereignty or treaty rights within our various
nations. It is, in fact, the similarity in these misrepresentations and misrecognitions between Settlers and Native people that is disturbing to me here,
and worthy of theorizing.] Sovereign gains don’t happen in debate rounds, but for some reason the (mis)recognition of Native enunciation as
sovereignty persists, in that the word “land” harkens to Native debate in almost every instance, that almost every debate involving Native people
reading perceptibly “Native” arguments includes a discussion of “treaties” or “sovereignty” or “land-based pedagogy” or “spatiality.” What other
reason could this be than a structure of desire around recognition from the Settler/Master? If we really follow the history of how “Nativeness” has been
misrepresented in debate by Settlers, it becomes clear that much of contemporary Native debate, strangely (or as I argue, not so strangely), mimics
these misrepresentations. Of course, debate is an economy of (mis)recognition. That “Native” becomes coextensive with “land” in debate is no
accident. It is an enunciation that has been evoked prior to the involvement of any Native debaters or coaches. And it is reiterated by non-Black Native
debaters with increasing certainty about the truthiness of Native relationships to the land. Systematically absent from this conversation, of course, is a
discussion of genocide. I have gestured above towards the ways that the desire for recognition from the Settler/Master motivates this conceptual move
towards the register of sovereignty. As Wilderson writes, “The
crowding out, or disavowal, of the genocide modality [by the
sovereign modality] allows
the Settler/’Savage’ struggle to appear as a conflict rather than as an
antagonism. This has therapeutic value for both the ‘Savage’ and the Settler : the mind can
grasp the fight, conceptually put it into words. To say, ‘You stole my land and pilfered and appropriated my culture’ and then
produce books, articles, and films that travel back and forth along the vectors of those conceptually coherent accusations is less threatening to the
integrity of the ego, than to say, ‘You culled me down from 19 million to 250,000.’”[4] This gesture towards conceptual coherence and therapeutic
value is why there is a celebrated and ongoing association between “land” and “Native” in both non-Native argumentation and in arguments made by
Native people. It is why we cannot theorize about Native debate absent the contingent register of sovereignty. I am hesitant to claim that sovereignty
should be completely abandoned as an analytic for obvious reasons—I think Wilderson also gives credit to indigenous conceptions of sovereignty, what
it unseats, and how it operates, while still articulating a critique of sovereignty unrivaled by much of Native studies. I am not interested in suggesting
that all Native people ignore our peoples’ land relationships or histories of broken treaties as politic throughout the United States or the world. I agree
with Qwo-Li Driskill’s suggestion, alongside similar ones from other Native theorists, that sovereignty must be re-theorized significantly rather than
echoing the propertied enterprise that confers legibility to state formations. Regardless of my reluctance to disavow the potential for sovereignty as a
politic outside debate rounds, I think it is obvious that sovereignty in its terms in debate—as a recognized and fundamentally “Native” utterance

—is genocidal and anti-Black. Broadly, my argument is that genocide is an undertheorized arm of an antagonism that halfway positions
Native people, and that the basis of such undertheorization is the desire to be (mis)recognized as nearly-Human by the Settler. This claim invites an
investigation of the context of (mis)recognition in debate and what is particular about debate itself with regard to Wilderson’s theory of position.
Debate is inevitably a space of recognition, coherence, and transparency. It seeks to uncover, make clear, and expand consciousness more than it
promises to occlude, hide, or make incoherent. This condition of debate is significant not because that makes it different from the rest of the academy,
or the rest of civil society, but because it offers a specific situation from which to apply the critique of recognition. In the age of academic identity
politics, the identification of the self as a subject of trauma has emerged as the primary locus of (recognizable) enunciation. Many who are familiar with
Eve Tuck’s work have read her critical analysis on the academy’s demand for damage-centered narratives and the kinds of traumatized neoliberal
subjectivity they produce—as those who are continually indebted to a parasitic regime of recognition. When this critique is applied in debate, it
frequently targets identity-politics models of intervention in academia which posit the traumatized subject as a primary locus of critique. For example,
the traumatized subject is itself
many of the ableism debates I’ve judged contained arguments locked entirely in this register—where

offered as a structural analytic in a manner that is always parasitic on Blackness. Teams who read arguments
that they refer to as “disability pessimism” and describe disability as a form of “ontological death” often go on to claim that no change has come from
reading critical arguments in debate and that we should be pessimistic about the ability for debate to become more inclusive of disabled people. This is,
at best, an appropriation of Afropessimism based on a reductive reading of Black debate. Significantly, the misrecognition of Black debate that is
rearticulated through “disability pessimism” also includes the secondary claim that critical argumentation has not produced shifts in the institutional
schema of debate. But “disability pessimism” would not exist without Black debate. You can’t bite Afropessimism and then disavow the intellectual
labor of Black people as the condition of possibility for your argument. Worse still, “things have never changed in debate for disabled people,” is not an
advocacy.It is just a recognized enunciation of the trauma of degraded subjectivity. In this example, the degraded subject
masquerades trauma as analysis while occluding structural phenomena. They merely say, “The world is a horrible and
traumatizing place for me, therefore listen to me reiterate my trauma.” And more often than not, as Eve Tuck writes, “All we are left with is the
damage.”[5] These so-called interventions posited by identity politicians are ineffective in that they fail to provide a solution to a problem that they
have misidentified because of their own egoistic (contingent) investments. In other words, identity
politics doesn’t work because
it is antiblack. Identity politics is only interested in iterating a degraded subject as fundamentally
innocent of violence, ethical, and on the right side of history at all times, because of that person’s experience of a

(contingent, as opposed to gratuitous) violence. Identity politics that have pushed us all to identify ourselves based on our traumas accrue,
for Native people, in intra-communal policing strategies that use trauma as a site of authenticity—and authenticity as a foundational, genocidal gloss
for identification. In many ways, this conversation about position begs a question of indigenous authenticity in debate—who is and is not really Native
is a question fraught with centuries of historical baggage. And it carries weight in debate because the epistemic terrain of “indigenous scholarship” or
“Native thought” demands a conversation about embodiment and experience as instantiations of the ontological. For Native people, the debate around
authenticity is structured by a debate about blood quantum—or more accurately, blood quantum is one of the many genocidal registers through which
we can understand the subject/object formation of the Native. Genocide and sovereignty are the co-constitutive registers determining Native position
as being in/out of the world in the first instance. As Eve Tuck describes, those who are traumatized are seen as having truly lived. Trauma and
authenticity slip between each other as discourses which authorize us to enunciate a “Native” experience, one that is apparently generalizable to
experiences far beyond our own, and one that tends to be used in service of the land-based arguments about sovereignty that I have thoroughly
critiqued above. The competitive space of debate exacerbates such trends. The slippage between trauma and authenticity is so real for us (perhaps
because of the depth of genocide as a specter and its haunting gratuitous continuance) that it has become an easy disciplinary mechanism for creating
affective investments in white racial kinship. In other words, Native people are still relying on Settler/Master regimes of recognition that can confer
validation for certain (coherent) traumas. So you have a few Native people who are already insecure about whether or not we are indigenous enough,
who seek to prove our authenticity by articulating it in the terms of trauma. But, under the structure I’ve described above, such trauma can only
authorize our authenticity insofar as it can be made coherent to white judges in order to receive their validation and value! For many non-Black Native
people in debate, this apparently justifies
the slippage away from Blackness and the prioritizing of
antiblack racial anxieties over an actual conversation about ontology and modernity. In other words,
in an instance of identity politics, where trauma must be isolable, human, subjectified, and coherent in order to be validated as authenticity by the
Settler/Master, sovereignty gets the job done in a way genocide does not. Again, it is the assumption that recognition by the Settler/Master is
favorable, or even necessary, that motivates Native people’s investments in arguments about land, space, place, sovereignty, and treaties. It is also this
assumption that facilitates the false move to authenticity (false in that it is only given coherence by a genocidal and antiblack apparatus of recognition).
Native people have been (mis)recognized by the Settler/Master since Taino peoples were met with Columbus’ genocidal misrecognitions in 1492. Much
of this (mis)recognition rests on the incoherence of genocide. “Genocide is not a name for violence in the way that ‘arson’ is; genocide is a linguistic
placeholder connoting that violence which out-strips the power of connotation. To represent it we have to dismantle it, pretend that we can identify its
component parts, force a name into its hole—macrocytes, spur cells, kidneys at half-throttle, a thoroughly ulcerated stomach, Wounded Knee, Sand
Creek—and make it what it is not, the way one fills the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy. But these fillers, these phantom limbs of connotation, can
only be imagined separately, and as such they take on the ruse of items that science, love, aesthetics, or justice—some form of symbolic intervention—
can attend to and set right. They become treatable, much like the massacre at Wounded Knee were it not for the fact that to comprehend Wounded
Knee, three hundred-plus men, women, and children in a snow-filled ravine, one must comprehend those three hundred synchronically over three
thousand miles (the forty-eight contiguous states) and diachronically over five hundred years. Here, madness sets in and the promises of symbolic
intervention turn to dust. We are returned to the time and space of no time and space, the ‘terminal.’”[6] The magnitude of this hole—the impossibility
of representing or narrativizing how genocide as a modality continues to position not just Native peoples but the extent to which it is a structural
principle of modernity itself—is not easy. It is certainly not as easy to articulate in a debate round as sovereign loss is, nor is it as easy for Settlers to
hear. In order to no longer occlude the emergence of Red/Black theorizing in debate, non-Black Native people in debate must
begin speaking in the register of incoherence , which demands engaging conceptually and
argumentatively with Black people in debate. The avoidance of such a conversation (or series of
conversations) can only be rooted in antiblackness and will only reproduce antiblackness. While Native
people can be recognized by the Settlers we are talking to in the register of sovereignty, structurally, Black people (including people who are Black and
Native) have no such register at the level of ontology. “Whereas Humans exist on some plane of being and thus can become existentially present
through some struggle for, of, or through recognition, Blacks cannot reach this plane.”[7] The simultaneous coherence and incoherence of the “Savage”
position has thus
far led non-Black Native people collectively to invest ourselves in antiblack kinship
relations in debate that refuse to speak to or with Black people except when using them as a
scapegoat to gain recognition from the Settler/Master institution of debate. This is because, more often than
not, non-Black Native debaters are only tasked with talking to Settlers. I don’t mean this in terms of whether we have white friends—I mean
argumentatively and conceptually, our work is creating a
Settler/Native binary that conspicuously erases and
systematically under-theorizes Blackness, antiblackness , slavery/prison, and Black people. Too many non-
Black Native debaters don’t even have an answer to the question of whether Black people are Settlers. That there are Native debaters who feel
ambiguous about this question at all suggests the rootedness of Native debate in antiblackness. It is beyond the scope of this letter to offer specific
critiques of the myriad of (inadequate) ways that many non-Black Native scholars claim to “position” “Blackness,” but it is overwhelmingly true that
their discussion of antiblackness consistently describes it as a system of racial identification subservient to settler colonialism. In debate, however, this
neglects the indebtedness of non-Black Native debaters to the intellectual and argumentative labor of Black debaters, coaches, and judges. In other
words, to reduce antiblackness in debate to a system of racial identification subsumed structurally by settler colonialism is ahistorical, given that it has
been the work of Black people in debate that has made Native debate possible at all, as tenuous and numerically small as we are. Why, then, are non-
Black Native people in debate so invested in describing settler colonialism as the sole matrix of power under which violence operates? Much of this
scholarship (Eve Tuck’s work, Jodie Byrd’s, and other similar texts from Native studies) critiques integrationist elements of Black studies as seeking
inclusion in the national project—but Afropessimism broadly, and Wilderson’s work specifically, is far from integrationist. To my knowledge (which is
extensive but obviously not exhaustive when it comes to Native debate), non-Black Native debaters have been largely unwilling to contend with the
thesis of Wilderson’s book, even when reading other scholars who allege disagreement with him, as most of these scholars do, from the vantage point
of sovereignty. A
coherent conversation with the Settler about sovereignty in debate is unlikely to
challenge the (mis)recognition that leads to the high level of politicization around who is really Native and who is not.
Similarly, the numeric lack of Native people in debate, as a function of genocide itself, makes it difficult to articulate what Native resistance has been, is
going to be, or even what it is doing right now. Rather than an aspirational politic that suggests we should culturally infuse debate with indigeneity (the
implicit endpoint of many of these conversations about “decolonization” which are ultimately revivalist and inclusionist attempts related to Native
spiritual or cultural practices), there is an (under-theorized) incoherence to our position that I believe should motivate us to enter into the fraught
terrain of Red/Black theorizing. Nothing
Native is happening in debate—not that there are not Native people in debate, but I
do not believe debate is a space that we should aspire to “indigenize,” “decolonize,” or
anything in that register. In debate, Native people are misrecognized, whether through technologies of capture like blood
quantum mythologies, misreadings of indigenous cosmologies, or genocidal imaginations of Noble Savages. Fuck non-Black
non-Native people who are structurally responsible for those misrecognitions . To the degree that
recognition is inevitable in debate, I think many of us are pushed by our coaches, debate partners, by those who judge us, and by
civil society more broadly, to articulate ourselves within those frames in order to authenticate ourselves. This is my analysis of
trauma politics above. How does the register of authenticity change when we are talking to someone other than the Settler/Master
and their junior partners? I believe it changes significantly. I believe that for Native debate to a) increase meaningful Native
participation in debate,[8] b) attend to the irreconcilable genocidal question that for us always undergirds sovereignty but can never
be coherent in the way that sovereignty and land loss can, and c) attend to social death and the non-position of the Black, it is
imperative that we stop talking to and for white people argumentatively. (Mis)recognition is inevitable in a communicative and
performative space like debate. Therefore, we have to make decisions about whose recognitions we will orient ourselves towards,
how we want to be recognized, and by whom. Structurally, non-Black Native people have not been talking to Black people because
many of us refuse to be authorized by the ethical dilemmas of accumulation and fungibility that attend Blackness.[9] There are, for
example, many non-Black Native people who express ressentiment about Black debate—that Black debate
has not made space for Native debate, as if that was the obligation of Black debaters and
coaches, or as if Black debate by virtue of its very existence has not made space for Native
debate, or as if Settler/Master debate does not owe argumentative space to Native people. It is disturbing that non-Black Native
people tend to express major grievances with Black debate, or with Resistance or Wilderson or Afropessimism (all coded as Black
debate), rather than with Settler/Master debate, including the debaters, coaches, judges, and practices that attend to its
institutional form. Further, it is clear from the argumentative content of much of Native debate— not merely the systematic
absencing and/or undertheorizing of Black people from those theoretical angles, which itself should disprove them, but also the
primary focus being sovereign restoration, treaty reconciliation, or the return of indigenous lands (usually meaning all of Turtle
Island)—that antiblackness is endemic to its ongoing function. That so many
people reading arguments about treaty rights,
land repatriation, or decolonization have not found an answer to the question “What happens to Black
people when the land is returned?” is very telling about the anti-Black investments that attend enunciations of
sovereignty in debate. That there are Native people in debate who continue to insist that Black people are positioned as Settlers
when all evidence points to the contrary (though this is not to suggest that individual Black people cannot invest themselves in
settlerist nation-building projects), is antiblack and inadequate scholarship that cannot forefront a
theory of position.

Tying brujería to speech genres feeds into a spiritual economy of affect

hinges spirituality to charisma that assumes access to spirituality means
you have transcended the status quo which only feeds a fall sense of
security that allows you to instantly vote on presumption.
Romberg 12 (Raquel Romberg, Sociology and Anthropology Department, Tel Aviv University.
“Sensing the Spirits: The Healing Dramas and Poetics of Brujería Rituals” Anthropologica, Vol.
54, No. 2 (2012), pp. 211-225. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/24467403.pdf?
refreqid=excelsior%3A00bbb08957c5651d8fc9d11dd6e0099a
Even though magic and healing rituals appeal' as the easiest ethnographic materials to document empirically because of their visible
gestures, palpable substances and audible sounds, these very qualities are also at the root of the challenges they pose for
ethnographic textual authority, representation and theorizing (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Hazan 1995; Marcus and Cushman 1983;
Stoller 1994). How do these essentially sensorial and grounded acts accomplish anything beyond the manifestly visceral? The words
uttered during divination and healing are meant to be sensed, pot just listened to, embodied, and not just understood. The extended
ethnographic case presented here has shown the complexities ofmagic, divination and healing rituals that merge various speaking
voicesand registers, that encompass the shifting between several speech genres and non-linguistic sounds produced by clapping,
banging and bell-ringing.s'' In addition to integrating several speech genres- personal narratives ,
aphorisms , proverbs , magic recipes, each of which defines a particular temporal perspective-
when linguistic registers of Catholic priests, Protestant pastors, Black-Church and charismatic
media preachers, and santeros are intertwined, a trans-religious spiritual experience is thus
generated. Such totalizing ritual events may transport participants into a unique "spiritual time" that contravenes conventional,
every day forms of communication, perception and feeling."

Within this spiritual economy of affect , indeterminacy is key (Romberg 2012a). The spiritual
world has its own logic and sensuous modes of working. Within this spiritual economy, clients
can hardly expect a usual course of action, which makes the sensing of the spirits open to both
long-term and new clients, and believers and non-believers in Spiritism and brujeria .
Expectations are almost always upset in these open-ended, anxiety-producing events, opening
the possibilities of experiencing a truly universal spiritual lingua franca as well as a mystical, awe
producing disorientation and puzzlement ." I have argued here that healing works for participants in rituals regardless
of belief; when the indeterminacy of brujeria rituals provokes an outburst of affect , and their

uncertainty stirs a flickering sense of transcendence. When the charisma and artifice of brujos
are such that they are not sensed, they both reinforce the sensing of the emergent presence
ofthe spirits and dispel any remaining skepticism of their true presence, even for a flash.

Performativity can’t account for the structural positioning of blackness—

affect is structured by an antiblack violence that forecloses the
recuperative possibility of performing identity
Aranke 13
(Sampada, PhD Candidate in Performance Studies at University of California at Davis, “Fred
Hampton's Murder and the Coming Revolution”, Trans-Scripts?,
http://www.humanities.uci.edu/collective/hctr/trans-scripts/2013/2013_03_09.pdf)
Whereas Phelan insists that performance is excessive expenditure that "saves nothing", for Roach, this excessive expenditure is not
the nature of performance, but in fact the nature of violence. He insists that "violence is the performance of waste"— excessive,
"because to be fully demonstrative, to make its point, it must spend things". This spending is "never senseless but always
meaningful" (41). At first glance, it is almost as if Roach replaced Phelan's definition of "performance" with the word "violence"; but
the theoretical implications of Roach's argument leads us to new understandings of how race
and affect are produced by violence. If we take that which is excessive as constitutive of how we conceptualize both
performance and violence, then the indication that some subjects come into being precisely through
violent acts has striking theoretical implications , especially for black subjects, which is of main concern
for both Roach's analysis and mine. Both aesthetics and violence "exist as forms of cultural expression "

wherein the question of blackness is the auction block of the world (41). This is where Roach's
definition of race occurs at a structural level , rather than that of identity. For Phelan, identity is
marked by and through performance. Whether in their ephemerality or their repetition, representational
strategies (performance's excessive expenditure) charge affect in the service of performatively
engaging bodies. This affective charge mobilizes that which is not fully redeemable,
understandable, legible, or visible as an indication of how bodies are marked through
performance. What I find most generative in Roach's work is his insistence that some bodies — in his case and in mine, black
bodies — are not marked, they are structurally positioned as affect is structured by that very
antiblack violence that forecloses the recuperative possibility of performing identities and
instead circulates performance as violent affirmation of the structural captivity of blackness.that
which is always already saturated with violent meaning. Affect , here, takes an unprecedented
turn away from that which has potential for either hegemonic or performative rupture , toward a
more striking accusation: that affect is structured by that very antiblack violence that forecloses
the recuperative possibility of performing identities and instead circulates performance as
violent affirmation of the structural captivity of blackness .

The affirmative’s trope of the MAGICAL body justifies violence against

black bodies
McKay 14 (White People Think Black People Are 'Magic' By Tom McKay November 14, 2014,
http://mic.com/articles/104298/white-people-think-black-people-are-magical#.HWe8m5YdL.
Edited for the white dude to read.

The news: The stereotype of the "magical Negro [black person]" didn't vanish with the
Antebellum South. New research published in Social Psychological and Personality Science has found that whites continue to
hold superstitious beliefs about black people. In America. In 2014. A series of studies found that white people look
upon blacks with a "superhumanization bias," or the idea that black people have
preternatural or otherwise uncommon abilities . This is may sound like good news, but it's not. Those
stereotypes are part of the way whites have historically justified the domination of black
people. Source: Giphy The study: In one experiment, 30 white volunteers were taken to a private lab room and completed an
implicit association test that attempted to determine which race they associated more with seven "superhuman words" (ghost,
paranormal, spirit, wizard, supernatural, magic and mystical). Whites tended to associate black faces with the far-out word group,
suggesting that "whites appear to superhumanize blacks implicitly." In another test, white Internet users were explicitly asked to
match up either a white or black face to the following questions: 1) Which person "is more likely to have superhuman skin that is
thick enough that it can withstand the pain of burning hot coals?" 2) Which person "is more capable of using their supernatural
powers to suppress hunger and thirst?" 3) Which person "is more capable of using supernatural powers to read a person's mind by
touching the person's head?" 4) Which person "is more capable of surviving a fall from an airplane without breaking a bone through
the use of supernatural powers?" 5) Which person "has supernatural quickness that makes them capable of running faster than a
fighter jet?" 6) Which person "has supernatural strength that makes them capable of lifting up a tank?" The white respondents
associated black people with the superhuman abilities about 63.5% of the time, with whites coming close only in the mind-reading
category (52% black) and falling from a plane (54% black). "In all six cases, a majority of participants assigned superhumanness to the
Black target rather than the White target," the study's authors explain. "Overall, this study's findings suggest that broadly
superhumanization of Blacks versus Whites emerges at an explicit level." Why it matters: Perhaps this might not seem so bad at first
glance. After all, why would it be a negative thing to be associated with incredible abilities? Unfortunately, the
authors
conclude that the superhumanization bias mainly has to do with "long-held stereotypes about
toughness, aggression, physicality and sexuality." A final study with 190 participants found that the
superhumanization bias also was associated with decreased perception of pain in black people. It also found that white people
see blacks as "marginally less capable" than whites of everyday human activities like walking a dog or
picking out a ripe avocado at the store. It's clear that the quasi-mystical qualities whites associate with
blacks don't make them equals. Source: YouTube For example, whether white perception of black
immunity to pain has more to do with stereotypes of increased toughness or dehumanization, the
result is that whites are probably less able to recognize the suffering of black folk. That might
explain why whites are quicker to assume young black men are dangerous or that young black
offenders are more "adult" than white ones in the sentencing process. As the Huffington Post's H.A.
Goodman writes, white empathy with black suffering would require challenging a status quo that largely benefits whites. But blacks
aren't just stereotyped as having better physical abilities than whites. The
tendency to associate black folk with
magical abilities is reflected in the classical trope of the "magical Negro [black person]" in
which an exotic, wise and sometimes outright magical black person appears to handily guide struggling
whites to success. Usually, the magical black character is poorly developed, existing only as a
prop for whites. Black director Spike Lee ties both to the stereotypes of the "noble savage and the happy slave." As Slate's
Matthew Hudson adds, this is backed up by similar tests that find whites think blacks rely more on intuition while making decisions
and give better relationship advice. In other words, exoticizing black people relegates them to roles
subservient to whites in society. Hopefully these stereotypes will vanish as the white majority does; current
projections have found that current minority groups will outnumber white people in the U.S. within 30 years.

[Didn’t read] Slavery it is a political system of anti-black desire that

mutates and perfects itself according to contingent changes in the
political economy. From Plantations to Segregation to Prisons to the
World of the plan, contingent changes veil an unchanging hierarchy of
human-over-black that maintains anti-black captivity, vote neg on
presumption.
Farley 5 (Anthony, J.D., Harvard Law School, Professor at Boston College, CUNY School of
Law, Thurgood Marshall School of Law, Texas Southern University, and Albany Law School,
“Perfecting Slavery”, January 27th 2005
http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1028&context=lsfp)
Slavery is with us still. We are haunted by slavery. We are animated by slavery. White-
over-black is slavery and segregation and neosegregation and every situation in which the
distribution of material or spiritual goods follows the colorline. The movement from slavery to
segregation to neosegregation to whatever form of white-over-black it is that may come with post-modernity or after is
not toward freedom. The movement from slavery to segregation to neosegregation is the
movement of slavery perfecting itself. White-over-black is neosegregation. White-
over-black is segregation. White-over-black is slavery. All of it is white-over-black, only
white-over-black, and that continually. The story of progress up from slavery is a lie, the longest lie. The
story of progress up from slavery is told juridically in the form of the rule of law. Slavery
is the rule of law. And slavery is death. The slave perfects itself as a slave when it bows
down before its master of its own free will. That is the moment in which the slave
accomplishes the impossible reconciliation of its freedom with its unfreedom by
willing itself unfree.3 When exactly does this perfection of slavery take place? The slave bows down
before its master when it prays for legal relief, when it prays for equal rights, and
while it cultivates the field of law hoping for an answer . The slave’s free choice, the
slave’s leap of faith, can only be taken under conditions of legal equality. Only after
emancipation and legal equality, only after rights, can the slave perfect itself as a
slave. Bourgeois legality is the condition wherein equals are said to enter the commons
of reason4 or the kingdom of ends5 or the New England town meeting of the soul to discuss universalizable
principles, to discuss equality and freedom. Much is made of these meetings, these struggles for law, these
festivals of the universal. Commons, kingdom, town meeting, there are many mansions in the house of law, but the law
does not forget its father, as Maria Grahn-Farley observes: The law of slavery has not been
forgotten by the law of segregation; the law of segregation has not been forgotten by the
law of neosegregation. The law guarding the gates of slavery, segregation, and
neosegregation has not forgotten its origin; it remembers its father and its grandfather before that. It
knows what master it serves; it knows what color to count.6 To wake from slavery is to
see that everything must go, every law room,7 every great house, every plantation,
all of it, everything. Requests for equality and freedom will always fail. Why? Because the
fact of need itself means that the request will fail. The request for equality and
freedom, for rights, will fail whether the request is granted or denied. The request is
produced through an injury.8 The initial injury is the marking of bodies for less—less
respect, less land, less freedom, less education, less . The mark must be made on the flesh because that
is where we start from. Childhood is where we begin and, under conditions of hierarchy, that childhood is already marked.
The mark organizes, orients, and differentiates our otherwise common flesh. The mark is race, the mark is gender, the
mark is class, the mark is. The mark is all there is to the reality of those essences—race, gender, class, and so on—that are
said to precede existence. The mark is a system.9 Property and law follow the mark. And so it goes. There is a pleasure in
hierarchy. We begin with an education in our hierarchies. We begin with childhood and childhood begins with education.
To be exact, education begins our childhood. We are called by race, by gender, by class, and so on. Our
education
cultivates our desire in the direction of our hierarchies . If we are successful, we acquire an
orientation that enables us to locate ourselves and our bodies vis-à -vis all the other
bodies that inhabit our institutional spaces. We follow the call and move in the generally expected way.
White-overblack is an orientation, a pleasure, a desire that enables us to find our place,
and therefore our way, in our institutional spaces. This is why no one ever need ask for equality and
freedom. This is why the fact of need means that the request will fail. The request for rights—for equality—will always fail
because there are always ambiguities. To be marked for less, to be marked as less han zero, to be marked as a negative
attractor, is to be in the situation of the slave. The slave is not called. The slave is not free. The slave is called to follow the
calling that is not a calling. The slave is trained to be an object; the slave is trained, in other words, to not be. The slave is
death. Death is the end of ambiguity. To be in the situation of the slave is to have all the ambiguities organized against you.
But there are always ambiguities, one is always free. How, then, are the ambiguities organized? How is freedom ended?
The slave must choose the end of ambiguity, the end of freedom, objecthood . The slave must
freely choose death. This the slave can only do under conditions of freedom that present it
with a choice. The perfect slave gives up the ghost and commends its everlasting spirit to its master. The slave’s
final and perfect prayer is a legal prayer for equal rights. The texts of law, like the manifest content of
a dream, perhaps of wolves, may tell a certain story or an uncertain story. The certainty or uncertainty of the story is of
absolutely no consequence. The story, the law, the wolves’ table manners, do not matter. The story, the law, the story of
law, the dream of wolves,10 however, represents a disguised or latent wish that does matter. The
wish is a matter
of life or death. We are strangers to ourselves. The dream of equality, of rights, is the disguised
wish for hierarchy. The prayer for equal rights is the disguised desire for slavery.
Slavery is death. The prayer for equal rights, then, is the disguise of the deathwish. The
prayer for equal rights is the slave’s perfect moment. The slave’s perfect prayer, the prayer of the
perfect slave, is always answered. The slave, however, knows not what it does when it prays for
rights, for the slave is estranged from itself. Of its own inner strivings it knows not. The slave strives to be
property, but since property cannot own property the slave cannot own its inner strivings. The slave strives to produce
the final commodity— law. In other words, the slave produces itself as a slave through law. The
slave produces
itself as a slave (as a commodity) through its own prayer for equal rights. And that
prayer is all there is to law. The slave bows down before the law and prays for equal
rights. The slave bows down before the law and then there is law. There is no law before the slave bows
down. The slave’s fidelity becomes the law, and the law is perfected through the
slave’s struggle for the universal, through the slave’s struggle for equality of right .
The slave prays for equality of right. Rights cannot be equal. Its perfect prayer is answered; the law’s ambiguities
open, like the gates of heaven, just above its head. And all of the white-over-black accumulated within the endless
ambiguities of law rains down. White over-black is slavery and slavery is death. Death is the end of forever. The end of
forever is perfection and perfection, for us, seems divine, beyond the veil, beyond death; hence, the end of forever.

The role of the ballot is to vote for the team that best comes to terms
with black fungibility and accumulation. IT IS UNETHICAL TO BE FREE IN A
WORLD OF SLAVES. THEIR IMPACTS CENTRALIZE THE GRAMMAR OF
SUFFERING OF THE MASTER, WHICH IS A CONTINGENT RELATION TO
VIOLATION THAT CROWDS OUT ANY CONSIDERATION FOR GRATUITOUS
VIOLENCE. THEIR IMMUNITY FROM STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE IS BORN
FROM THE SUFFERING OF THE BLACK WHO ARE POSITIONED BY VIOLENCE
IN EVERY INTERACTION WITH THE WORLD, INCLUDING DEBATE.
WILDERSON IN 10 [Frank B., Associate Professor of African American Studies and Drama
at the University of California & former member of the Umkhonto we Sizwe, Red, White and
Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms, p. 10, C.A.]
Again, if accumulation and fungibility are the modalities through which Blackness is
positioned as incapacity, then genocide is that modality through which embodied Redness is
positioned as incapacity. Ontological incapacity, I have inferred and here state forthright, is the
constituent element of ethics. Put another way, one cannot embody capacity and be,
simultaneously, ethical. Where there are Slaves it is unethical to be free . The Settler/Master’s capacity,
I have argued, is a function of exploitation and alienation, and the Slave’s incapacity is elaborated by accumulation and fungibility.
But the “Savage” is positioned, structurally, by subjective capacity and objective incapacity, by sovereignty and genocide,
respectively. The Indian’s liminal status in political economy, how her and his position shuttles between the incapacity of a genocided
object and the capacity of a sovereign subject, coupled with the fact that Redness does not overdetermine the thanatology of libidinal
economy (this liminal capacity within political economy and complete freedom from incapacity within libidinal economy) raises
serious doubts about the status of “Savage” ethicality vis-à-vis the triangulated structure (Red, White, and Black) of antagonisms.
Clearly, the
coherence of Whiteness as a structural position in modernity depends on the
capacity to be free from genocide, perhaps not as a historical experience, but at least as a
positioning modality. This embodied capacity (genocidal immunity) of Whiteness jettisons the White/Red relation from that
of a conflict and marks it as an antagonism: it stains it with irreconcilability. Here, the Indian comes into being and is positioned by an
a priori violence of genocide. Whiteness can also experience this kind of violence but only a fortiori: genocide may be one of a
thousand contingent experiences of Whiteness but it is not a constituent element, it does not make Whites white (or Humans human).
Whiteness can grasp its own capacity, be present to itself, coherent, by its unavailability to
the a priori violence of Red genocide, as well as by its unavailability to the a priori violence
of Black accumulation and fungibility. If it experiences accumulation and fungibility, or
genocide, those experiences must be named, qualified, that is, “White slavery,” or the Armenian massacre, the
Jewish Holocaust, Bosnian interment, so that such contingent experience is not confused with
ontological necessity. In such a position one can always say, “Im not a ‘Savage’” or “I’m being treated like a nigger.” One
can assert one’s Humanity by refusing the ruse of analogy. Regardless of Whites’ historical, and brief, encounters with the modalities
of the “Savage” and the Slave, these modalities do not break in on the position of Whiteness with such a force as to replace
We might think of exploitation and
exploitation and alienation as the Settler/Master’s constituent elements.
alienation as modalities of suffering which inoculate Whiteness from death . If this is indeed
the case, then perhaps Whiteness has no constituent elements other than the immanent
status of immunity. Still, this immunity is no small matter, for it is the sine qua non of
Human capacity.
Only a refusal to create a distance from the pathology of
blackness, to work inside of it, can produce the end of the world,
and therefore sociality.
Sexton 10 (Jared Sexton, Director, African American Studies School of Humanities ,
Associate Professor, African American Studies School of Humanities, Associate
Professor, Film & Media Studies School of Humanities at University of California Irvine,
“The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism”)
What I find most intriguing about the timbre of the argument of “The Case of Blackness,” and the black optimism it
articulates against a certain construal of afro-pessimism, is the way that it works away from a discourse of
black pathology only to swerve right back into it as an ascription to those found to be
taking up and holding themselves in “the stance of the pathologist” in relation to black
folks. I say this not only because there is, in this version of events, a recourse to psychoanalytic terminology
(“fetishization,” “obsession,” “repetition,”), but also because there is at the heart of the matter a rhetorical
question that establishes both the bad advice of a wild analysis and a tacit diagnosis affording a
certain speaker’s benefit: “So why is it repressed?” The “it” that has been afflicted by the
psychopathology of obsessional neurosis is the understanding, which is also to say the
celebration, of the ontological priority or previousness of blackness relative to the
antiblackness that establishes itself against it, a priority or previousness that is also
termed “knowledge of freedom” or, pace Chandler, comprehension of “the constitutive force of the African
American subject(s)” (Chandler 2000: 261). [21] What does not occur here is a consideration of the
possibility that something might be unfolding in the project or projections of afro-
pessimism “knowing full well the danger of a kind of negative reification” associated with
its analytical claims to the paradigmatic (Moten 2004: 279). That is to say, it might just be the
case that an object lesson in the phenomenology of the thing is a gratuity that
folds a new encounter into older habits of thought through a reinscription of
(black) pathology that reassigns its cause and relocates its source without ever
really getting inside it. In a way, what we’re talking about relates not to a disagreement about
“unthought positions” (and their de-formation) but to a disagreement, or discrepancy, about “unthought
dispositions” (and their in-formation). I would maintain this insofar as the misrecognition at work in the
reading of that motley crew listed in the ninth footnote regards, perhaps ironically, the performative
dimension or signifying aspect of a “generalized impropriety” so improper as to appear
as the same old propriety returning through the back door. Without sufficient consideration of the
gap between statement and enunciation here, to say nothing of quaint notions like context or audience or historical
conjuncture, the discourse of afro-pessimism, even as it approaches otherwise important questions, can only seem like a
“tragically neurotic” instance of “certain discourse on the relation between blackness and death” (Moten 2007: 9).xiii
Fanon and his interlocutors, or what appear rather as his fateful adherents, would seem to have a problem embracing
black social life because they never really come to believe in it, because they cannot acknowledge the social life from
which they speak and of which they speak—as negation and impossibility—as their own (Moten 2008: 192). Another way
of putting this might be to say that they are caught in a performative contradiction enabled by disavowal. I wonder,
however, whether things are even this clear in Fanon and the readings his writing might facilitate. Lewis Gordon’s
sustained engagement finds Fanon situated in an ethical stance grounded in the affirmation of blackness in the historic
antiblack world. In a response to the discourse of multiracialism emergent in the late twentieth-century United States, for
instance, Gordon writes, following Fanon, that “there is no way to reject the thesis that there is something wrong with
being black beyond the willingness to ‘be’ black – in terms of convenient fads of playing blackness, but in paying the costs
of antiblackness on a global scale. Against the raceless credo, then, racism cannot be rejected without a dialectic in which
humanity experiences a blackened world” (Gordon 1997: 67). What is this willingness to ‘be’ black, of choosing to be
black affirmatively rather than reluctantly, that Gordon finds as the key ethical moment in Fanon? [23] Elsewhere, in a
discussion of Du Bois on the study of black folk, Gordon restates an existential phenomenological conception of the
antiblack world developed across his first several books: “Blacks here suffer the phobogenic reality posed by the spirit of
racial seriousness. In effect, they more than symbolize or signify various social pathologies—they become them. In our
antiblack world, blacks are pathology” (Gordon 2000: 87). This conception would seem to support
Moten’s contention that even much radical black studies scholarship sustains the
association of blackness with a certain sense of decay and thereby fortifies and extends
the interlocutory life of widely accepted political common sense. In fact, it would seem
that Gordon deepens the already problematic association to the level of identity. And yet,
this is precisely what Gordon argues is the value and insight of Fanon: he fully accepts
the definition of himself as pathological as it is imposed by a world that knows itself
through that imposition, rather than remaining in a reactive stance that insists on the
(temporal, moral, etc.) heterogeneity between a self and an imago originating in culture.
Though it may appear counterintuitive, or rather because it is counterintuitive, this
acceptance or affirmation is active; it is a willing or willingness, in other words, to pay
whatever social costs accrue to being black, to inhabiting blackness, to living a black
social life under the shadow of social death. This is not an accommodation to the
dictates of the antiblack world. The affirmation of blackness, which is to say an
affirmation of pathological being, is a refusal to distance oneself from blackness
in a valorization of minor differences that bring one closer to health, to life, or to
sociality. Fanon writes in the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, “The Black Man and Language”: “A
Senegalese who learns Creole to pass for Antillean is a case of alienation. The Antilleans who make a mockery out of him
are lacking in judgment” (Fanon 2008: 21). In a world structured by the twin axioms of white superiority and black
inferiority, of white existence and black nonexistence, a world structured by a negative categorical imperative—“above all,
don’t be black” (Gordon 1997: 63)—in this world, the zero degree of transformation is the turn toward blackness, a turn
toward the shame, as it were, that “resides in the idea that ‘I am thought of as less than human’” (Nyong’o 2002: 389).xiv
In this we might create a transvaluation of pathology itself, something like an embrace of
pathology without pathos.