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Race framing directly trades off with a prioritization of class—vote negative to move
past the politics of racial difference into a radical critique of the material conditions of
racial oppression
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, “The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of “Race” and “Difference” ”, 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)

Callinicos observations are similar, in many ways, to the classic insights of Oliver Cromwell Cox in
Caste, Class, and Race, first published in 1948. Recently, Reed (2001) has argued that Coxs work is
particularly valuable in light of some of the problematic aspects of contemporary theorizing around race.
Cox proceeded consistently and rigorously from the "conviction that making sense of the meaning of
race" and the character of racialized relations required "an understanding of the dynamics of capitalism as
a social system" (p. 24). For Cox, race was most fundamentally an "artifact of capitalist labor
dynamics"—a relation that "originated in slavery"—and racial antagonism as essentially "political-class
conflict" (p. 27). Cox "emphasized the ruling-class foundations of racism as part of his critique of the
liberal scholars of race rela- tions who theorized race relations without regard to capitalist political econ-
omy and class dynamics" (p. 27). Reed suggested that Coxs perspective goes right to the heart of how we
should try to understand race by encouraging us to move beyond categories for defining and sorting
supposedly discrete human populations, beyond concepts of racial hierarchies, and beyond racist ideolo-
gies ... and instead recognize that race is a product of social relations within his- tory and political
economy.... Coxs interpretation is a refreshing alternative to the idealist frames that have persisted in
shaping American racial discourse and politics. . . . Racism is ... a pattern of social relations. ... It exists
only as it is reproduced in specific social arrangements in specific societies under historically specific
conditions of law, state and class power, (pp. 27-28) This implies that to abolish racism in any substantive
sense, a serious challenge to capitalism must be launched." It does not mean that racism will simply dis-
appear if democratic socialism is established, but we agree with Callinicos (1993, p. 68) that the struggles
for socialism and Black liberation are inseparable— something well understood by Black revolutionaries
in the past and something seemingly forgotten by contemporary champions of "difference" politics
(Fletcher, 1999). As Bannerji (2000) has noted, a politics based on differences —be it in the form of
cultural/racial nationalism or religious fundamentalism— is far more tolerable to those in power than
would be "class based social movements" among "minority" populations (pp. 7-8).12 Remarkably,
much contemporary social theory, particularly those theories ostensibly concerned with race and
difference, has failed to acknowledge that struggles based on class are funda- mentally different from
others for such struggles are aimed at the very founda- tions of capitalist society—including its racist,
exploitative underpinnings. Class struggle, rooted "as it is in the objective structures of capital itself, is
onto- ically distinct" (Harvey, 1998, p. 7) from those forms of oppression that motivate the various
agendas of difference and cultural politics. Multiple forms of oppression do exist, but these are best
understood within the overarching system of class domination and the variable discriminating
mechanisms central to capitalism as a system. This position is emphasized by Foster (2002) when he
insisted that it is a serious mistake to view the working class, except as an artificial abstraction, as cut off
from issues of race, gender, culture and community. In the United States the vast majority of the working
class consists of women and people of color. The power to upend and reshape society in decisive ways
will come not pri- marily through single-issue movements for reform, but rather through forms of
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organization and popular alliance that will establish feminists, opponents of rac- ism, advocates of gay
rights, defenders of the environment, etc. as the more advanced sectors of a unified, class-based,
revolutionary political and economic movement, (p. 45) We have argued that it is virtually impossible to
conceptualize class without attending to the forms and contents of difference, but this does not imply that
class struggle is now supplanted by the politics of difference. Indeed, we are now in the midst of returning
to the "most fundamental form of class struggle" in light of current global conditions (Jameson, 1998, p.
136). Today’s climate suggests that class struggle is "not yet a thing of the past" and that those who seek
to undermine its centrality are not only "morally callous" and "seriously out of touch with reality" but also
largely blind to the "needs of the large mass of people who are barely surviving capitals newly-honed
mechanisms of global- ized greed" (Harvey, 1998, pp. 7-9). In our view, a more comprehensive and
politically useful understanding of the contemporary historical juncture neces- sitates foregrounding class
analysis and the primacy of the working class as the fundamental agent of change.14
Discourses of difference distract attention from capitalism—the impact is the
continuation of superexploitation of colored labor pools by multinational
corporations
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, “The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of “Race” and “Difference” ”, 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)
A deepened understanding of this phenomenon is essential for understand- ing the emergence of an
acutely polarized labor market and the fact that dispro- portionately high percentages of "people of color"
are trapped in the lower rungs of domestic and global labor markets (McLaren & Farahmandpur, 1999).
Difference in the era of global capitalism is crucial to the workings, movements, and profit levels of
multinational corporations, but those types of complex relations cannot be mapped out without attending
to capitalist class formations (Ahmad, 1998). To sever issues of difference from class conve- niently
draws attention away from the crucially important ways in which "peo- ple of color" (and more
specifically "women of color") provide capital with its superexploited labor pools—a phenomenon that
is on the rise all over the world . Most social relations constitutive of racialized differences are consider-
ably shaped by the relations of production, and there is undoubtedly a racialized and gendered division of
labor whose severity and function vary depending on where one is situated in the capitalist global
economy (Meyerson, 2000; Stabile, 1997). That racism and sexism are necessary social relations for the
organization of capitalism and new forms of emerging neoco- lonialism seems to escape the collective
imaginations of those who theorize difference in a truncated and exclusively culturalist manner. Bannerji
(2000, pp. 8-9) forcefully argued that culturalist discourses of difference have had the effect of "deflecting
critical attention" from an increasingly "racialized" politi- cal economy.

Only a historical materialist approach to critical pedagogy can break down the
dialectical relation between capital and labor and the material force used to
perpetuate racist ideologies
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, “The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of “Race” and “Difference” ”, 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)

A historical materialist approach adopts the imperative that categories of difference are social/political
constructs that are often encoded in dominant ideological formations and that they often play a role in
"moral" and "legal" state-mediated forms of ruling. It also acknowledges the "material" force of ide-
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ologies—particularly racist ideologies—that assign separate cultural and/or biological essences to

different segments of the population that, in turn, serve to reinforce and rationalize existing relations of
power. But more than this, a historical materialist understanding foregrounds the manner in which differ-
ence is central to the exploitative production/reproduction dialectic of capital, its labor organization and
processes, and the way labor is valued and enumer- ated. The real problem is the internal or dialectical
relation that exists between capital and labor within the capitalist production process itself—a social rela-
tion in which capitalism is intransigently rooted. This social relation—essen- tial or fundamental to the
production of abstract labor—deals with how already existing value is preserved and surplus value is
created. If, for example, the process of actual exploitation and the accumulation of surplus value are to be
seen as a state of constant manipulation and as a realization process of con- crete labor in actual labor
time—within a given cost-production system and a labor market—we cannot underestimate the ways in
which difference—racial as well as gender difference—is encapsulated in the production/reproduction
dialectic of capital. It is this relationship that is mainly responsible for the ineq- uitable and unjust
distribution of resources. Hence, we applaud E. San Juan's goal of racial/ethnic semiotics that is
"committed to the elimination of the hegemonic discourse of race in which peoples of color are produced
and repro- duced daily for exploitation and oppression under the banner of individualized freedom and
pluralist, liberal democracy" (1992, p. 96).
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Uniqueness—AT: Squo solves

Class disparities have been exacerbated the past 50 years—increase equality in
other sectors have justified class inequalities
Ben Michaels 03 (Walter, is an American literary theorist, known as the author of Our America:
Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism (1995) and The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History
(2004), “What Matters”, 2003, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n16/walter-benn-michaels/what-matters, MC)

But it would be a mistake to think that because the US is a less racist, sexist and homophobic society, it is
a more equal society. In fact, in certain crucial ways it is more unequal than it was 40 years ago. No group
dedicated to ending economic inequality would be thinking today about declaring victory and going
home. In 1969, the top quintile of American wage-earners made 43 per cent of all the money earned in the
US; the bottom quintile made 4.1 per cent. In 2007, the top quintile made 49.7 per cent; the bottom
quintile 3.4. And while this inequality is both raced and gendered, it’s less so than you might think. White
people, for example, make up about 70 per cent of the US population, and 62 per cent of those in the
bottom quintile. Progress in fighting racism hasn’t done them any good; it hasn’t even been designed to
do them any good. More generally, even if we succeeded completely in eliminating the effects of racism
and sexism, we would not thereby have made any progress towards economic equality. A society in
which white people were proportionately represented in the bottom quintile (and black people
proportionately represented in the top quintile) would not be more equal; it would be exactly as unequal.
It would not be more just; it would be proportionately unjust.
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Link—Starting point
The aff’s starting point reinforces capitalism—ignorance of the material sources
marginalization cements an ahistorical form of culturalism that reduces their
strategy to pseudopolitics
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, “The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of “Race” and “Difference” ”, 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)
Hence, we would not discount the salience of such concerns, but nor should progressives be
straightjacketed by struggles that fail to move beyond the dis- cursive/cultural/textual realms. Such
approaches have sometimes tended to redefine politics as a signifying activity generally confined to the
realm of "representation" while displacing a politics grounded in the mobilization of forces against the
material sources of political and economic marginalization. In this regard, textual/discursive politics have
their limitations for they fail to guar- antee the "material power necessary for social flourishing and living
freely" (Goldberg, 1994, p. 13).* In their rush to avoid the "capital" sin or "economism," far too many
post-al theorists (who often ignore their own class privilege) have fallen prey to an ahistorical form of
culturalism that holds, among other things, that cultural antagonism external to class analysis and struggle
provide the cutting edge of emancipatory politics. In many respects, this posturing has yielded an
intellectual pseudopolitics that has served to empower "the theorist while explicitly disempowering" real
citizens (Turner, 1994, p. 410). Although space limitations prevent us from elaborating this point further,
we contend that such positions are deeply problematic in terms of their penchant for de-emphasizing the
totalizing (yes totalizing!) power and function of capital and for their attempts to employ culture as a
construct that would diminish the centrality of class.6 In a proper historical materialist account, "culture"
is not the "other" of class but rather constitutes part of a more comprehensive theorization of class
relations in different contexts (cf. Scatamburlo-D'Annibale & Langman, 2002).

One is an alibi for the other—diversity is the neoliberal substitute for class equality
Ben Michaels 03 (Walter, is an American literary theorist, known as the author of Our America:
Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism (1995) and The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History
(2004), “What Matters”, 2003, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n16/walter-benn-michaels/what-matters, MC)

My point is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not good things. It is rather that they currently have
nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad
thing. American universities are exemplary here: they are less racist and sexist than they were 40 years
ago and at the same time more elitist. The one serves as an alibi for the other: when you ask them for
more equality, what they give you is more diversity. The neoliberal heart leaps up at the sound of glass
ceilings shattering and at the sight of doctors, lawyers and professors of colour taking their place in the
upper middle class. Whence the many corporations which pursue diversity almost as enthusiastically as
they pursue profits, and proclaim over and over again not only that the two are compatible but that they
have a causal connection – that diversity is good for business. But a diversified elite is not made any the
less elite by its diversity and, as a response to the demand for equality, far from being left-wing politics, it
is right-wing politics.
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Link--Inclusion
The aff’s focus on inclusion reinscribes neoliberal pluralism—liberty is achieved
when all vendors can display their different “cultural” goods
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, “The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of “Race” and “Difference” ”, 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)

Because post-al theories of difference often circumvent the material dimen- sions of difference and tend
to segregate questions of difference from analyses of class formation and capitalist social relations, we
contend that it is necessary to (re)conceptualize difference by drawing on Marx's materialist and historical
formulations. Difference needs to be understood as the product of social con- tradictions and in relation to
political and economic organization. Because sys- tems of difference almost always involve relations of
domination and oppres- sion, we must concern ourselves with the economies of relations of difference
that exist in specific contexts. Drawing on the Marxist concept of mediation enables us to unsettle the
categorical (and sometimes overly rigid) approaches to both class and difference for it was Marx himself
who warned against creat- ing false dichotomies at the heart of our politics—that it was absurd to choose
between consciousness and the world, subjectivity and social organization, personal or collective will,
and historical or structural determination. In a simi- lar vein, it is equally absurd to see "difference as a
historical form of conscious- ness unconnected to class formation, development of capital and class
politics" (Bannerji, 1995, p. 30). Bannerji has pointed to the need to historicize differ- ence in relation to
the history and social organization of capital and class (inclusive of imperialist and colonialist legacies)
and to acknowledge the changing configurations of difference and "otherness." Apprehending the
meaning and function of difference in this manner necessarily highlights the importance of exploring (a)
the institutional and structural aspects of differ- ence; (b) the meanings and connotations that are attached
to categories of dif- ference; (c) how differences are produced out of, and lived within, specific his-
torical, social, and political formations; and (d) the production of difference in relation to the
complexities, contradictions, and exploitative relations of capitalism. Moreover, it presents a challenge to
"identitarian" understandings of differ- ence based almost exclusively on questions of cultural and/or
racial hegemony. In such approaches, the answer to oppression often amounts to creating greater cultural
space for the formerly excluded to have their voices heard (repre- sented). Much of what is called the
"politics of difference" is little more than a demand for an end to monocultural quarantine and for
inclusion into the met- ropolitan salons of bourgeois representation—a posture that reinscribes a
neoliberal pluralist stance rooted in the ideology of free market capitalism. In short, the political sphere is
modeled on the marketplace, and freedom amounts to the liberty of all vendors to display their different
"cultural" goods. A paradigmatic expression of this position is encapsulated in the following pas- sage
that champions a form of difference politics whose presumed aim is to make social groups appear.
Minority and immigrant ethnic groups have laid claim to the street as a legitimate forum for the
promotion and exhibition of tra- ditional dress, food, and culture... . [This] is a politics of visibility and
invisibil- ity. Because it must deal with a tradition of representation that insists on sub- suming varied
social practices to a standard norm, its struggle is as much on the page, screen ... as it is at the barricade
and in the parliament, traditional forums of political intervention before the postmodern. (Fuery &
Mansfield, 2000, p. 150)

Inclusion is a guise by the marketplace to encourage the fetishization of identities

and cements cultural particularities as markers of groups
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
 8
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Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, “The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of “Race” and “Difference” ”, 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)

This position fosters a "fetishized" understanding of difference in terms of pri- mordial and seemingly
autonomous cultural identities and treats such "differ- ences" as inherent, as ontologically secure cultural
traits of the individuals of particular cultural communities. Rather than exploring the construction of
difference within specific contexts mediated by the conjunctural embeddedness of power differentials, we
are instead presented with an over- flowing cornucopia of cultural particularities that serve as markers of
ethnicity, race, group boundaries, and so forth. In this instance, the discourse of differ- ence operates
ideologically—cultural recognition derived from the rhetoric of tolerance averts our gaze from relations
of production and presents a strategy for attending to difference as solely an ethnic, racial, or cultural
issue. What advocates of such an approach fail to acknowledge is that the forces of diversity and
difference are allowed to flourish provided that they remain within the prevailing forms of capitalist
social arrangements. The neopluralism of difference politics cannot adequately pose a substantive
challenge to the pro- ductive system of capitalism that is able to accommodate a vast pluralism of ideas
and cultural practices. In fact, the post-al themes of identity, difference, diversity, and the like mesh quite
nicely with contemporary corporate interests precisely because they revere lifestyle—the quest for, and
the cultivation of, the self—and often encourage the fetishization of identities in the marketplace as they
compete for "visibility" (Boggs, 2000; Field, 1997). Moreover, the uncritical, celebratory tone of various
forms of difference politics can also lead to some disturbing conclusions. For example, if we take to their
logical conclusion the statements that "postmodern political activism fiercely contests the reduction of the
other to the same," that post-al narratives believe that "dif- ference needs to be recognized and respected
at all levels" (Fuery & Mansfield, 2000, p. 148), and that the recognition of different subject positions is
para- mount (Mouffe, 1988, pp. 35-36), their political folly becomes clear. Eagleton (1996) sardonically
commented on the implications: Almost all postmodern theorists would seem to imagine that difference,
variabil- ity and heterogeneity are "absolute" goods, and it is a position I have long held myself. It has
always struck me as unduly impoverishing of British social life that we can muster a mere two or three
fascist parties.... The opinion that plurality is a good in itself is emptily formalistic and alarmingly
unhistorical. (pp. 126-127)
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Link—Individualism
The use of individual action detracts from breaking down machinations of capitalist
institutions—identitarianism is a cornerstone of neoliberal ontology
Reed Jr 13 (Adolph, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in
race and American politics, “Django Unchained, or, The Help: How “Cultural Politics” Is Worse Than
No Politics at All, and Why”, February 25 2013, http://nonsite.org/feature/django-unchained-or-the-help-
how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why, MC)

Never mind that, for what it’s worth, Kerry Washington’s character, as she actually appears in the film, is
mainly a cipher, a simpering damsel in distress more reminiscent of Fay Wray in the original King Kong
than heroines of the blaxploitation era’s eponymous vehicles Coffy or Foxy Brown. More
problematically, Wiener’s juxtapositions reproduce the elevation of private, voluntarist action as a politics
—somehow more truly true or authentic, or at least more appealing emotionally—over the machinations
of government and institutional actors. That is a default presumption of the identitarian/culturalist left and
is also a cornerstone of neoliberalism’s practical ontology. In an essay on Lincoln published a month
earlier, Wiener identifies as the central failing of the film its dedication “to the proposition that Lincoln
freed the slaves” and concludes, after considerable meandering and nit-picking ambivalence that brings
the term pettifoggery to mind, “slavery died as a result of the actions of former slaves.”19 This either/or
construct is both historically false and wrong-headed, and it is especially surprising that a professional
historian like Wiener embraces it. The claim that slaves’ actions were responsible for the death of slavery
is not only inaccurate; it is a pointless and counterproductive misrepresentation. What purpose is served
by denying the significance of the four years of war and actions of the national government of the United
States in ending slavery? Besides, it was indeed the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery.
Slaves’ mass departure from plantations was self-emancipation, by definition. Their doing so weakened
the southern economy and undermined the secessionists’ capacity to fight, and the related infusion of
black troops into the Union army provided a tremendous lift both on the battlefield and for northern
morale. How does noting that proximity of Union troops greatly emboldened that self-emancipation
diminish the import of their actions? But it was nonetheless the Thirteenth Amendment that finally
outlawed slavery once and for all in the United States and provided a legal basis for preempting efforts to
reinstate it in effect. Moreover, for all the debate concerning Lincoln’s motives, the sincerity of his
commitment to emancipation, and his personal views of blacks, and notwithstanding its technical limits
with respect to enforceability, the Emancipation Proclamation emboldened black people, slave and free,
and encouraged all slavery’s opponents. And, as Wiener notes himself, the proclamation tied the war
explicitly to the elimination of slavery as a system.

Use of inspiration stories about individual Overcoming plays into neoliberal

ideology and is class politics
Reed Jr 13 (Adolph, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in
race and American politics, “Django Unchained, or, The Help: How “Cultural Politics” Is Worse Than
No Politics at All, and Why”, February 25 2013, http://nonsite.org/feature/django-unchained-or-the-help-
how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why, MC)

The tendency to craft political critique by demanding that we fix our gaze in the rearview mirror appeals
to an intellectual laziness. Marking superficial similarities with familiar images of oppression is less
mentally taxing than attempting to parse the multifarious, often contradictory dynamics and relations that
shape racial inequality in particular and politics in general in the current moment. Assertions that phenomena
like the Jena, Louisiana, incident, the killings of James Craig Anderson and Trayvon Martin, and racial
disparities in incarceration demonstrate persistence of old-school, white supremacist racism and charges that the sensibilities of Thomas
Dixon and Margaret Mitchell continue to shape most Americans’ understandings of slavery do important, obfuscatory ideological work. They
 10
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lay claim to a moral urgency that, as Mahmood Mamdani argues concerning the rhetorical use of charges of genocide, enables
disparaging efforts either to differentiate discrete inequalities or to generate historically specific causal
accounts of them as irresponsible dodges that abet injustice by temporizing in its face .38 But more is at work here
as well. Insistence on the transhistorical primacy of racism as a source of inequality is a class politics. It’s
the politics of a stratum of the professional-managerial class whose material location and interests, and thus
whose ideological commitments, are bound up with parsing, interpreting and administering inequality
defined in terms of disparities among ascriptively defined populations reified as groups or even cultures. In fact, much
of the intellectual life of this stratum is devoted to “shoehorning into the rubric of racism all manner of inequalities that may appear statistically as
racial disparities.”39 And that project shares capitalism’s ideological tendency to obscure race’s foundations, as
well as the foundations of all such ascriptive hierarchies, in historically specific political economy . This
felicitous convergence may help explain why proponents of “cultural politics ” are so inclined to treat the
products and production processes of the mass entertainment industry as a terrain for political struggle and debate .
They don’t see the industry’s imperatives as fundamentally incompatible with the notions of a just society they seek to advance. In fact, they
share its fetishization of heroes and penchant for inspirational stories of individual Overcoming. This sort
of “politics of representation” is no more than an image-management discourse within neoliberalism . That
strains of an ersatz left imagine it to be something more marks the extent of our defeat. And then, of course, there’s that Upton Sinclair point.
 11
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Link—Mass Culture
Use of specialty market niches like <<INSERT AFF’S THING>> are a ploy by the
mass industry to fuel consumption of mass culture
Reed Jr 13 (Adolph, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in
race and American politics, “Django Unchained, or, The Help: How “Cultural Politics” Is Worse Than
No Politics at All, and Why”, February 25 2013, http://nonsite.org/feature/django-unchained-or-the-help-
how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why, MC)

In both versions, this argument casts political and economic problems in psychological terms. Injustice
appears as a matter of disrespect and denial of due recognition, and the remedies proposed—which are all
about images projected and the distribution of jobs associated with their projection—look a lot like self-
esteem engineering. Moreover, nothing could indicate more strikingly the extent of neoliberal ideological
hegemony than the idea that the mass culture industry and its representational practices constitute a
meaningful terrain for struggle to advance egalitarian interests. It is possible to entertain that view
seriously only by ignoring the fact that the production and consumption of mass culture is thoroughly
embedded in capitalist material and ideological imperatives. That, incidentally, is why I prefer the usage
“mass culture” to describe this industry and its products and processes, although I recognize that it may
seem archaic to some readers. The mass culture v. popular culture debate dates at least from the 1950s
and has continued with occasional crescendos ever since.5 For two decades or more, instructively in line
with the retreat of possibilities for concerted left political action outside the academy, the popular culture
side of that debate has been dominant, along with its view that the products of this precinct of mass
consumption capitalism are somehow capable of transcending or subverting their material identity as
commodities, if not avoiding that identity altogether. Despite the dogged commitment of several
generations of American Studies and cultural studies graduate students who want to valorize watching
television and immersion in hip-hop or other specialty market niches centered on youth recreation and the
most ephemeral fads as both intellectually avant-garde and politically “resistive,” it should be time to
admit that that earnest disposition is intellectually shallow and an ersatz politics. The idea of “popular”
culture posits a spurious autonomy and organicism that actually affirm mass industrial processes by
effacing them, especially in the putatively rebel, fringe, or underground market niches that depend on the
fiction of the authentic to announce the birth of new product cycles.
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Link—Historical Example/Historical Starting Point

Insistence on the transhistorical primacy of racism is class politics that masks the
true foundations these ascriptive hierarchies
Reed Jr 13 (Adolph, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in
race and American politics, “Django Unchained, or, The Help: How “Cultural Politics” Is Worse Than
No Politics at All, and Why”, February 25 2013, http://nonsite.org/feature/django-unchained-or-the-help-
how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why, MC)

That sort of Malcolm X/blaxploitation narrative, including the insistence that Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind
continue to shape Americans’ understandings of slavery, also is of a piece with a line of anti-racist argument and
mobilization that asserts powerful continuities between current racial inequalities and either slavery or the
Jim Crow regime. This line of argument has been most popularly condensed recently in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, which
analogizes contemporary mass incarceration to the segregationist regime. But even she, after much huffing and puffing and asserting the relation
gesturally throughout the book, ultimately acknowledges that the analogy fails.37 And it would have to fail because the
segregationist regime was the artifact of a particular historical and political moment in a particular social
order. Moreover, the rhetorical force of the analogy with Jim Crow or slavery derives from the fact that those regimes are associated
symbolically with strong negative sanctions in the general culture because they have been vanquished. In that sense all versions of the lament that
“it’s as if nothing has changed” give themselves the lie. They are effective only to the extent that things have changed significantly. The
tendency to craft political critique by demanding that we fix our gaze in the rearview mirror appeals to an
intellectual laziness. Marking superficial similarities with familiar images of oppression is less mentally
taxing than attempting to parse the multifarious, often contradictory dynamics and relations that shape
racial inequality in particular and politics in general in the current moment. Assertions that phenomena like
the Jena, Louisiana, incident, the killings of James Craig Anderson and Trayvon Martin, and racial
disparities in incarceration demonstrate persistence of old-school, white supremacist racism and charges that the sensibilities of Thomas
Dixon and Margaret Mitchell continue to shape most Americans’ understandings of slavery do important, obfuscatory ideological work. They
lay claim to a moral urgency that, as Mahmood Mamdani argues concerning the rhetorical use of charges of genocide, enables
disparaging efforts either to differentiate discrete inequalities or to generate historically specific causal
accounts of them as irresponsible dodges that abet injustice by temporizing in its face .38 But more is at work here
as well. Insistence on the transhistorical primacy of racism as a source of inequality is a class politics. It’s
the politics of a stratum of the professional-managerial class whose material location and interests, and thus
whose ideological commitments, are bound up with parsing, interpreting and administering inequality
defined in terms of disparities among ascriptively defined populations reified as groups or even cultures. In fact, much
of the intellectual life of this stratum is devoted to “shoehorning into the rubric of racism all manner of inequalities that may appear statistically as
racial disparities.”39 And that project shares capitalism’s ideological tendency to obscure race’s foundations, as
well as the foundations of all such ascriptive hierarchies, in historically specific political economy . This
felicitous convergence may help explain why proponents of “cultural politics ” are so inclined to treat the
products and production processes of the mass entertainment industry as a terrain for political struggle and debate .
They don’t see the industry’s imperatives as fundamentally incompatible with the notions of a just society they seek to advance. In fact, they
share its fetishization of heroes and penchant for inspirational stories of individual Overcoming. This sort
of “politics of representation” is no more than an image-management discourse within neoliberalism . That
strains of an ersatz left imagine it to be something more marks the extent of our defeat. And then, of course, there’s that Upton Sinclair point.
 13
File Title

Impact
Liberal pluralism endorses capitalism—the impact is exploitation
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, “The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of “Race” and “Difference” ”, 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)

The liberal pluralism manifest in discourses of difference politics often means a plurality without conflict,
contestation, or contradiction. The inherent limita- tions of this position are also evident if we turn our
attention to issues of class. Expanding on Eagleton's observations and adopting the logic that seems to
inform the unqualified celebration of difference, one would be compelled to champion class differences
as well. Presumably, the differences between the 475 billionaires whose combined wealth now equals the
combined yearly incomes of more than 50% of the world's population are to be celebrated—a posturing
that would undoubtedly lend itself to a triumphant endorsement of capitalism and inequitable and
exploitative conditions. San Juan (1995) noted that the cardinal flaw in current instantiations of
culturalism lies in its decapi- tation of discourses of intelligibility from the politics of antagonistic
relations. He framed the question quite pointedly: "In a society stratified by uneven property relations, by
asymmetrical allocation of resources and of power, can there be equality of cultures and genuine
toleration of differences?" (pp. 232- 233).
 14
File Title

Alternative—historical materialism
Only a historical materialist approach to critical pedagogy can break down the
dialectical relation between capital and labor and the material force used to
perpetuate racist ideologies
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, “The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of “Race” and “Difference” ”, 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)

A historical materialist approach adopts the imperative that categories of difference are social/political
constructs that are often encoded in dominant ideological formations and that they often play a role in
"moral" and "legal" state-mediated forms of ruling. It also acknowledges the "material" force of ide-
ologies—particularly racist ideologies—that assign separate cultural and/or biological essences to
different segments of the population that, in turn, serve to reinforce and rationalize existing relations of
power. But more than this, a historical materialist understanding foregrounds the manner in which differ-
ence is central to the exploitative production/reproduction dialectic of capital, its labor organization and
processes, and the way labor is valued and enumer- ated. The real problem is the internal or dialectical
relation that exists between capital and labor within the capitalist production process itself—a social rela-
tion in which capitalism is intransigently rooted. This social relation—essen- tial or fundamental to the
production of abstract labor—deals with how already existing value is preserved and surplus value is
created. If, for example, the process of actual exploitation and the accumulation of surplus value are to be
seen as a state of constant manipulation and as a realization process of con- crete labor in actual labor
time—within a given cost-production system and a labor market—we cannot underestimate the ways in
which difference—racial as well as gender difference—is encapsulated in the production/reproduction
dialectic of capital. It is this relationship that is mainly responsible for the ineq- uitable and unjust
distribution of resources. Hence, we applaud E. San Juan's goal of racial/ethnic semiotics that is
"committed to the elimination of the hegemonic discourse of race in which peoples of color are produced
and repro- duced daily for exploitation and oppression under the banner of individualized freedom and
pluralist, liberal democracy" (1992, p. 96).

A dialectical approach is key to deconstruct capitalist social relations—that

deconstructs the ideological legitimization of racialized labor
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, “The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of “Race” and “Difference” ”, 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)

Given these limitations, we agree with Gilroys (2000, p. 12) bold call for "transcending" and deliberately
renouncing race. We understand, as did Gilroy, that efforts to eliminate race as a metaphor in scholarly
work and as a general category that frames social understandings will be met with resis- tance—
particularly by those who fear delegitimating the historical movements for liberation that have been
principally defined in terms of race struggles. Yet we agree with San Juan (2002) that race too often
"conceals the predatory sys- tem of class relations" (p. 59) and as such must be abandoned as a lens
through which social relations are explored and explained. Rather than attempting to advance a critical
theory of race, progressive scholars should instead seek to understand race as a social construct that is
embedded in the structures of power and privilege, in particular historical and geographical
configurations, and that its signifying power is largely derived from its relationship to a "mode of
 15
File Title

production centered on capital accumulation and its attendant ideological apparatuses" that serve to
rationalize inequitable property relations (p. 143). This does not imply that we ignore the realities of
racism and racial oppression; rather, it suggests that an analytical shift from race to a pluralized
conceptual- ization of racisms and their historical articulations with other ideologies and capitalist social
relations is warranted (McLaren & Torres, 1999). In our view, this plural notion of racisms would more
accurately capture the historically specific nature of racism and the variety of meanings/connotations
attributed to evaluations of difference and assessments of the "superiority" and "inferior- ity" of various
groups of people. An understanding of the plurality of racisms and a more dialectically oriented approach
to examining the exclusionary social processes that function to perpetuate racialized social relations under
capitalism are necessary. We do not seek to subsume race into class for such a gesture would be anti-
thetical to the animating principles of historical materialism (San Juan, 2002, p. 57). Rather, we advocate
a position that strives to contextualize an under-standing of racisms within a broader framework of
capitalist class relations— one that is similar to what Meyerson (2000) has called a "class rule social con-
trol explanation." Callinicos (1993) has argued that racism as we witness it today is related to the
development of capitalism as the dominant mode of pro- duction on a global scale. He noted that in
hierarchical (precapitalist) societies that relied on extraeconomic force, slavery was "merely one of a
spectrum of unequal statuses, requiring no special explanation" (p. 27). This changed with the advent of
capitalist society. As Callinicos has explained, the capitalist mode of production is premised on the
exploitation of free wage labor and the work- ers' separation from the means of production and their
compulsion to sell their labor power (the only productive resource available to them). Capitalism relied
on slave labor and needed an ideological legitimization—that Black people were subhuman—to proceed
apace.10
 16
File Title

Alternative—Dismantle Capitalism
Only deconstructing and redistributing wealth creates true equality—the aff’s
inclusion of marginalized people into mainstream society simply justifies capitalism
Ben Michaels 03 (Walter, is an American literary theorist, known as the author of Our America:
Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism (1995) and The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History
(2004), “What Matters”, 2003, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n16/walter-benn-michaels/what-matters, MC)

The great virtue of this debate is that on both sides inequality gets turned into a stigma. That is, once you
start redefining the problem of class difference as the problem of class prejudice – once you complete the
transformation of race, gender and class into racism, sexism and classism – you no longer have to worry
about the redistribution of wealth. You can just fight over whether poor people should be treated with
contempt or respect. And while, in human terms, respect seems the right way to go, politically it’s just as
empty as contempt. This is pretty obvious when it comes to class. Kjartan Páll Sveinsson declares that
‘the white working classes are discriminated against on a range of different fronts, including their accent,
their style, the food they eat, the clothes they wear’ – and it’s no doubt true. But the elimination of such
discrimination would not alter the nature of the system that generates ‘the large numbers of low-wage,
low-skill jobs with poor job security’ described by Bottero. It would just alter the technologies used for
deciding who had to take them. And it’s hard to see how even the most widespread social enthusiasm for
tracksuits and gold chains could make up for the disadvantages produced by those jobs. Race, on the other
hand, has been a more successful technology of mystification. In the US, one of the great uses of racism
was (and is) to induce poor white people to feel a crucial and entirely specious fellowship with rich white
people; one of the great uses of anti-racism is to make poor black people feel a crucial and equally
specious fellowship with rich black people. Furthermore, in the form of the celebration of ‘identity’ and
‘ethnic diversity’, it seeks to create a bond between poor black people and rich white ones. So the
African-American woman who cleans my office is supposed to feel not so bad about the fact that I make
almost ten times as much money as she does because she can be confident that I’m not racist or sexist and
that I respect her culture. And she’s also supposed to feel pride because the dean of our college, who
makes much more than ten times what she does, is African-American, like her. And since the chancellor
of our university, who makes more than 15 times what she does, is not only African-American but a
woman too (the fruits of both anti-racism and anti-sexism!), she can feel doubly good about her. But, and
I acknowledge that this is the thinnest of anecdotal evidence, I somehow doubt she does. If the downside
of the politics of anti-discrimination is that it now functions to legitimate the increasing disparities not
produced by racism or sexism, the upside is the degree to which it makes visible the fact that the increase
in those disparities does indeed have nothing to do with racism or sexism. A social analyst as clear-eyed
as a University of Illinois cleaning woman would start from there.
 17
File Title

Root Cause
Capitalism comes first—the alternative reveals individuals must confront the social
system collectively or risk being confined to isolated difference prisons that
perpetuate the status quo
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, “The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of “Race” and “Difference” ”, 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)

Kovel's remarks raise questions about the primacy given to class analysis and class struggle—a debate
that continues unabated in most leftist circles. Con- trary to what many have claimed, not all Marxian
forms of class analysis rele- gate categories of difference to the conceptual mausoleum. In fact, recent
Marxist theory has sought to reanimate them by interrogating how they are refracted through material
relations of power and privilege and linked to rela- tions of production. Marx himself made clear how
constructions of race and ethnicity are "implicated in the circulation process of variable of capital." To the
extent that "gender, race, and ethnicity are all understood as social con- structions rather than as
essentialist categories," the effect of exploring their insertion into the "circulation of variable capital
(including positioning within the internal heterogeneity of collective labor and hence, within the division
of labor and the class system)" must be interpreted as a "powerful force recon- structing them in distinctly
capitalist ways" (Harvey, 2000, p. 106). Unlike contemporary narratives that tend to focus on one or
another form of oppres- sion, the irrefragable power of historical materialism resides in its ability to
reveal (a) how forms of oppression based on categories of difference do not pos- sess relative autonomy
from class relations but rather constitute the ways in which oppression is lived/experienced within a class-
based system and (b) how all forms of social oppression function within an overarching capitalist system.
This framework must be further distinguished from those who invoke the terms classism and/or class
elitism to (ostensibly) foreground the idea that "class matters" (cf. hooks, 2000) because we agree with
Gimenez (2001) that "class is not simply another ideology legitimating oppression" (p. 24). Rather, class
denotes "exploitative relations between people mediated by their relations to the means of production" (p.
24). To marginalize such an understanding of class is to conflate individuals' objective locations in the
intersection of struc- tures of inequality with individuals' subjective understandings of how they are
situated based on their "experiences."7 Another caveat. We are not renouncing the concept of experience.
On the contrary, we believe that it is imperative to retain the category of lived experience as a reference
point in light of misguided post-Marxist critiques that imply that all forms of Marxian class analysis are
dismissive of subjectivity. We are not, however, advocating the uncritical fetishization of "experience"
that tends to assume that personal experience somehow guarantees the authenticity of knowledge and that
often treats expe- rience as self-explanatory, transparent, and solely individual. Rather, we advance a
framework that seeks to make connections between seemingly iso-lated situations and/or particular
experiences by exploring how they are consti- tuted in, and circumscribed by, broader historical and
social conditions. They are linked, in other words, by their "internal relations" (Oilman, 1993). Expe-
riential understandings, in and of themselves, are initially suspect because dia- lectically they constitute a
unity of opposites—they are at once unique, spe- cific, and personal but also thoroughly partial, social,
and the products of historical forces about which individuals may know little or nothing. A rich
description of immediate experience can be an appropriate and indispensable point of departure, but such
an understanding can easily become an isolated difference prison unless it transcends the immediate
perceived point of oppres- sion, confronts the social system in which it is rooted, and expands into a com-
plex and multifaceted analysis (of forms of social mediation) that is capable of mapping out the general
organization of social relations. That, however, requires a broad class-based approach.
 18
File Title

Turns case
Discourses of difference distract attention from capitalism—the impact is the
continuation of superexploitation of colored labor pools by multinational
corporations
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, “The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of “Race” and “Difference” ”, 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)
A deepened understanding of this phenomenon is essential for understand- ing the emergence of an
acutely polarized labor market and the fact that dispro- portionately high percentages of "people of color"
are trapped in the lower rungs of domestic and global labor markets (McLaren & Farahmandpur, 1999).
Difference in the era of global capitalism is crucial to the workings, movements, and profit levels of
multinational corporations, but those types of complex relations cannot be mapped out without attending
to capitalist class formations (Ahmad, 1998). To sever issues of difference from class conve- niently
draws attention away from the crucially important ways in which "peo- ple of color" (and more
specifically "women of color") provide capital with its superexploited labor pools—a phenomenon that
is on the rise all over the world . Most social relations constitutive of racialized differences are consider-
ably shaped by the relations of production, and there is undoubtedly a racialized and gendered division of
labor whose severity and function vary depending on where one is situated in the capitalist global
economy (Meyerson, 2000; Stabile, 1997). That racism and sexism are necessary social relations for the
organization of capitalism and new forms of emerging neoco- lonialism seems to escape the collective
imaginations of those who theorize difference in a truncated and exclusively culturalist manner. Bannerji
(2000, pp. 8-9) forcefully argued that culturalist discourses of difference have had the effect of "deflecting
critical attention" from an increasingly "racialized" politi- cal economy.

Racial antagonism plays into the hands of the powerful—it allows them to keep the
working class subdued and detracted from class movements
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, “The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of “Race” and “Difference” ”, 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)

Callinicos observations are similar, in many ways, to the classic insights of Oliver Cromwell Cox in
Caste, Class, and Race, first published in 1948. Recently, Reed (2001) has argued that Coxs work is
particularly valuable in light of some of the problematic aspects of contemporary theorizing around race.
Cox proceeded consistently and rigorously from the "conviction that making sense of the meaning of
race" and the character of racialized relations required "an understanding of the dynamics of capitalism as
a social system" (p. 24). For Cox, race was most fundamentally an "artifact of capitalist labor
dynamics"—a relation that "originated in slavery"—and racial antagonism as essentially "political-class
conflict" (p. 27). Cox "emphasized the ruling-class foundations of racism as part of his critique of the
liberal scholars of race rela- tions who theorized race relations without regard to capitalist political econ-
omy and class dynamics" (p. 27). Reed suggested that Coxs perspective goes right to the heart of how we
should try to understand race by encouraging us to move beyond categories for defining and sorting
supposedly discrete human populations, beyond concepts of racial hierarchies, and beyond racist ideolo-
gies ... and instead recognize that race is a product of social relations within his- tory and political
economy.... Coxs interpretation is a refreshing alternative to the idealist frames that have persisted in
 19
File Title

shaping American racial discourse and politics. . . . Racism is ... a pattern of social relations. ... It exists
only as it is reproduced in specific social arrangements in specific societies under historically specific
conditions of law, state and class power, (pp. 27-28) This implies that to abolish racism in any substantive
sense, a serious challenge to capitalism must be launched." It does not mean that racism will simply dis-
appear if democratic socialism is established, but we agree with Callinicos (1993, p. 68) that the struggles
for socialism and Black liberation are inseparable— something well understood by Black revolutionaries
in the past and something seemingly forgotten by contemporary champions of "difference" politics
(Fletcher, 1999). As Bannerji (2000) has noted, a politics based on differences —be it in the form of
cultural/racial nationalism or religious fundamentalism— is far more tolerable to those in power than
would be "class based social movements" among "minority" populations (pp. 7-8).12 Remarkably,
much contemporary social theory, particularly those theories ostensibly concerned with race and
difference, has failed to acknowledge that struggles based on class are funda- mentally different from
others for such struggles are aimed at the very founda- tions of capitalist society—including its racist,
exploitative underpinnings. Class struggle, rooted "as it is in the objective structures of capital itself, is
onto- ically distinct" (Harvey, 1998, p. 7) from those forms of oppression that motivate the various
agendas of difference and cultural politics. Multiple forms of oppression do exist, but these are best
understood within the overarching system of class domination and the variable discriminating
mechanisms central to capitalism as a system. This position is emphasized by Foster (2002) when he
insisted that it is a serious mistake to view the working class, except as an artificial abstraction, as cut off
from issues of race, gender, culture and community. In the United States the vast majority of the working
class consists of women and people of color. The power to upend and reshape society in decisive ways
will come not pri- marily through single-issue movements for reform, but rather through forms of
organization and popular alliance that will establish feminists, opponents of rac- ism, advocates of gay
rights, defenders of the environment, etc. as the more advanced sectors of a unified, class-based,
revolutionary political and economic movement, (p. 45) We have argued that it is virtually impossible to
conceptualize class without attending to the forms and contents of difference, but this does not imply that
class struggle is now supplanted by the politics of difference. Indeed, we are now in the midst of returning
to the "most fundamental form of class struggle" in light of current global conditions (Jameson, 1998, p.
136). Today’s climate suggests that class struggle is "not yet a thing of the past" and that those who seek
to undermine its centrality are not only "morally callous" and "seriously out of touch with reality" but also
largely blind to the "needs of the large mass of people who are barely surviving capitals newly-honed
mechanisms of global- ized greed" (Harvey, 1998, pp. 7-9). In our view, a more comprehensive and
politically useful understanding of the contemporary historical juncture neces- sitates foregrounding class
analysis and the primacy of the working class as the fundamental agent of change.14

Neoliberalism creates bonds between the poor and rich via celebration of
“identity”—the poor black woman has no need to resent his employer who earns 10
times his wages because his employer isn’t racist or sexist
Ben Michaels 03 (Walter, is an American literary theorist, known as the author of Our America:
Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism (1995) and The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History
(2004), “What Matters”, 2003, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n16/walter-benn-michaels/what-matters, MC)
The great virtue of this debate is that on both sides inequality gets turned into a stigma. That is, once you
start redefining the problem of class difference as the problem of class prejudice – once you complete the
transformation of race, gender and class into racism, sexism and classism – you no longer have to worry
about the redistribution of wealth. You can just fight over whether poor people should be treated with
contempt or respect. And while, in human terms, respect seems the right way to go, politically it’s just as
empty as contempt. This is pretty obvious when it comes to class. Kjartan Páll Sveinsson declares that
‘the white working classes are discriminated against on a range of different fronts, including their accent,
their style, the food they eat, the clothes they wear’ – and it’s no doubt true. But the elimination of such
 20
File Title

discrimination would not alter the nature of the system that generates ‘the large numbers of low-wage,
low-skill jobs with poor job security’ described by Bottero. It would just alter the technologies used for
deciding who had to take them. And it’s hard to see how even the most widespread social enthusiasm for
tracksuits and gold chains could make up for the disadvantages produced by those jobs. Race, on the other
hand, has been a more successful technology of mystification. In the US, one of the great uses of racism
was (and is) to induce poor white people to feel a crucial and entirely specious fellowship with rich white
people; one of the great uses of anti-racism is to make poor black people feel a crucial and equally
specious fellowship with rich black people. Furthermore, in the form of the celebration of ‘identity’ and
‘ethnic diversity’, it seeks to create a bond between poor black people and rich white ones. So the
African-American woman who cleans my office is supposed to feel not so bad about the fact that I make
almost ten times as much money as she does because she can be confident that I’m not racist or sexist and
that I respect her culture. And she’s also supposed to feel pride because the dean of our college, who
makes much more than ten times what she does, is African-American, like her. And since the chancellor
of our university, who makes more than 15 times what she does, is not only African-American but a
woman too (the fruits of both anti-racism and anti-sexism!), she can feel doubly good about her. But, and
I acknowledge that this is the thinnest of anecdotal evidence, I somehow doubt she does. If the downside
of the politics of anti-discrimination is that it now functions to legitimate the increasing disparities not
produced by racism or sexism, the upside is the degree to which it makes visible the fact that the increase
in those disparities does indeed have nothing to do with racism or sexism. A social analyst as clear-eyed
as a University of Illinois cleaning woman would start from there.

Exposing racism fails as a political strategy—it’s too porous to effectively describe

inequalities and has no political warrant
Reed Jr 05 (Adolph, is professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, “The Real
Divide”, November 1 2005, http://www.progressive.org/mag_reed1105, MC)

Before the “yes, buts” begin, I am not claiming that systemic inequalities in the United States are not
significantly racialized. The evidence of racial disparities is far too great for any sane or honest person to
deny, and they largely emerge from a history of discrimination and racial injustice. Nor am I saying that
we should overlook that fact in the interest of some idealized nonracial or post-racial politics. Let me be
blunter than I’ve ever been in print about what I am saying: As a political strategy, exposing racism is
wrongheaded and at best an utter waste of time. It is the political equivalent of an appendix: a useless
vestige of an earlier evolutionary moment that’s usually innocuous but can flare up and become harmful.
There are two reasons for this judgment. One is that the language of race and racism is too imprecise to
describe effectively even how patterns of injustice and inequality are racialized in a post-Jim Crow world.
“Racism” can cover everything from individual prejudice and bigotry, unself-conscious perception of
racial stereotypes, concerted group action to exclude or subordinate, or the results of ostensibly neutral
market forces. It can be a one-word description and explanation of patterns of unequal distribution of
income and wealth, services and opportunities, police brutality, a stockbroker’s inability to get a cab,
neighborhood dislocation and gentrification, poverty, unfair criticism of black or Latino athletes, or being
denied admission to a boutique. Because the category is so porous, it doesn’t really explain anything.
Indeed, it is an alternative to explanation. Exposing racism apparently makes those who do it feel good
about themselves. Doing so is cathartic, though safely so, in the same way that proclaiming one’s
patriotism is in other circles. It is a summary, concluding judgment rather than a preliminary to a concrete
argument. It doesn’t allow for politically significant distinctions; in fact, as a strategy, exposing racism
requires subordinating the discrete features of a political situation to the overarching goal of asserting the
persistence and power of racism as an abstraction. This leads to the second reason for my harsh judgment.
Many liberals gravitate to the language of racism not simply because it makes them feel righteous but also
because it doesn’t carry any political warrant beyond exhorting people not to be racist. In fact, it often is
exactly the opposite of a call to action. Such formulations as “racism is our national disease” or similar
 21
File Title

pieties imply that racism is a natural condition. Further, it implies that most whites inevitably and
immutably oppose blacks and therefore can’t be expected to align with them around common political
goals. This view dovetails nicely with Democrats’ contention that the only way to win elections is to
reject a social justice agenda that is stigmatized by association with blacks and appeal to an upper-income
white constituency concerned exclusively with issues like abortion rights and the deficit. Upper-status
liberals are more likely to have relatively secure, rewarding jobs, access to health care, adequate housing,
and prospects for providing for the kids’ education, and are much less likely to be in danger of seeing
their nineteen-year-old go off to Iraq. They tend, therefore, to have a higher threshold of tolerance for
political compromises in the name of electing this year’s sorry pro-corporate Democrat. Acknowledging
racism—and, of course, being pro-choice—is one of the few ways many of them can distinguish
themselves from their Republican co-workers and relatives. As the appendix analogy suggests, insistence
on understanding inequality in racial terms is a vestige of an earlier political style. The race line persists
partly out of habit and partly because it connects with the material interests of those who would be race
relations technicians. In this sense, race is not an alternative to class. The tendency to insist on the
primacy of race itself stems from a class perspective. For roughly a generation it seemed reasonable to
expect that defining inequalities in racial terms would provoke some, albeit inadequate, remedial response
from the federal government. But that’s no longer the case; nor has it been for quite some time. That
approach presumed a federal government that was concerned at least not to appear racially unjust. Such a
government no longer exists.
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AT: Intersectionality/Race comes first

Cap comes first—only prioritization of the class struggle has any hope of rebuilding
society because it is what entailed the state with power and is the only man-made
category
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, “The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of “Race” and “Difference” ”, 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)

We need to include an important caveat that differentiates our approach from those who invoke the
hackneyed race/class/gender triplet that can sound, to the uninitiated, both radical and vaguely Marxian. It
is not. Although race, class, and gender invariably intersect, they are not coprimary. On the surface, the
triplet may be convincing—some people are oppressed because of their race, some as a result of their
gender, and others because of their class—but this "is grossly misleading" and approximates what
philosophers call a "category mistake." For it is not that "some individuals manifest certain characteristics
known as 'class' which then results in their oppression; on the contrary, to be a member of a social class
just is to be oppressed," and in this regard, class is "a wholly social category" (Eagleton, 1998, p. 289).
Furthermore, even when "class" is invoked as part of the aforementioned triptych, it is usually gutted of
its practical, social dimension or treated solely as a cultural phenomenon or cat- egory—as just another
form of difference. In these instances, class is trans- formed from an economic and, indeed, social
category to an exclusively cul- tural or discursive one or one in which class merely signifies a "subject
position." Class is therefore cut off from the political economy of capitalism, and class power is severed
from exploitation and a power structure "in which those who control collectively produced resources only
do so because of the value generated by those who do not" (Hennessy & Ingraham, 1997, p. 2). This has
had the effect of replacing a historical materialist class analysis with a cul- tural analysis of class. As a
result, many post-Marxists have also stripped the concept of class of precisely that element which, for
Marx, made it radical— namely, its status as a universal form of exploitation whose abolition required
(and was also central to) the abolition of all manifestations of oppression (Marx, 1978, p. 60). With regard
to this issue, Kovel (2002) was particularly insightful for the explicitly tackled the priority given to
different categories (i.e., gender, class, race, ethnic, and national exclusion) of what he called
" dominative splitting. " Kovel argued that we need to ask the question: Priority with respect to what? He
noted that if we mean priority with respect to time, then the category of gender would have priority
because there are traces of gender oppression in all other forms of oppression. If we were to prioritize in
terms of existential signifi- cance, Kovel suggested that we would have to depend on the immediate
histori- cal forces that bear down on distinct groups of people—he offered examples of Jews in 1930s
Germany who suffered from brutal forms of anti-Semitism and Palestinians today who experience anti-
Arab racism under Israeli domination. The question of what has political priority, however, would depend
on which transformation of relations of oppression is practically more urgent, and although this would
certainly depend on the preceding categories, it would also depend on the fashion in which all the forces
acting in a concrete situation are deployed. As to the question of which split sets into motion all the
others, the priority would have to be given to class because class relations entail the state as an instrument
of enforcement and control, and it is the state that shapes and organizes the splits that appear in human
ecosystems. Thus class is both logically and historically distinct from other forms of exclusion (hence we
should not talk of "classism" to go along with "sexism" and "racism" and "species- ism"). This is, first of
all, because class is an essentially man-made category, with- out root in even a mystified biology. We
cannot imagine a human world without gender distinctions—although we can imagine a world without
domination by gender. But a world without class is eminently imaginable—indeed, such was the human
world for the great majority of our species' time on earth, during all of
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Aff
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Cap fails to solve our impacts

Cap fails--Only contemporary methods of theorization are able to help us uncover
the genealogy of hidden terror and help subordinated groups reconstruct their
histories and identities—deconstructing capitalism does nothing to break down
hegemonic articulations of race and otherness
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren 03 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical
Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire
Democratic Project, “The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of “Race” and “Difference” ”, 2003,
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf, MC)

To suggest that culture is generally conditioned/shaped by material forces and social relations linked to
production does not reinscribe the sim- plistic and presumably deterministic base/superstructure
metaphor, which has plagued some strands of Marxist theory. Rather, such a formulation draws on Marx's
own writings from both the Grundrisse (Marx, 1858/1973) and Cap- ital (Marx, 1867/1967) in which he
contended that there is a consolidating logic in the relations of production that permeates society in the
complex vari- ety of its "empirical" reality.4 This emphasizes Marx's understanding of capital- ism and
capital as a "social" relation—one that stresses the interpenetration of these categories and one that offers
a unified and dialectical analysis of history, ideology, culture, politics, economics, and society (see Marx,
1863/1972, 1867/1976a, 1866/1976b, 1865/ 1977a, 1844/1977b). Moreover, fore- grounding the
limitations of "difference" and "representational" politics does not suggest a disavowal of the importance
of cultural and/or discursive arena(s) as sites of contestation. We readily acknowledge the significance of
theorizations that have sought to valorize precisely those forms of difference that have historically been
denigrated. They have helped to uncover the geneal- ogy of terror hidden within the drama of Western
democratic life. This has been an important development that has enabled subordinated groups to
reconstruct their own histories and give voice to their individual and collective identities (Bannerji, 1995;
Scatamburlo-D'Annibale & Langman, 2002). Contemporary theorists have also contributed to our
understanding of issues Contemporary theorists have also contributed to our understanding of issues of
"otherness" and "race" as hegemonic articulations (Hall, 1980, 1987, 1988), the cultural politics of race
and racism and the implications of raciology (Gilroy, 1990, 2000), as well as the epistemological violence
perpetrated by Western theories of knowledge (Goldberg, 1990, 1993). Miron and Indas (2000) work,
drawing on Judith Butlers theory of performativity, has been insightful in showing how race works to
constitute the racial subject through a reiterative discursive practice that achieves its effect through the act
of naming and the practice of shaming.