1NC

T – 1NC
‘United States’ means the federal government, not private entities.
Ikuta ’10 [Sandra; December 8; Circuit Judge for the United States Court of Appeals in the Ninth
Circuit; Ninth Circuit, “Transwestern Pipeline Company, LLC v. 3.42 acres of permanent easement
located in Maricopa County et al,” Lexis]
We disagree with the last step of Agua Fria's analysis. When determining statutory meaning, we look first to the plain meaning of the text. Paul Revere Ins. Grp. v.
United States, 500 F.3d 957, 962 (9th Cir. 2007). "[U]nless otherwise defined, words will be interpreted as taking their ordinary, contemporary, common meaning."
Perrin v. United States, 444 U.S. 37, 42, 100 S. Ct. 311, 62 L. Ed. 2d 199 (1979). "When determining the plain meaning of language, we may consult dictionary

definitions." Af-Cap Inc. v. Chevron Overseas (Congo) Ltd., 475 F.3d 1080, 1088 (9th Cir. 2007). Taking its ordinary , common meaning, the
term " U nited S tates" means our nation , located primarily in North America, which acts through our federal form of
government. The dictionary definition s are consistent with this common understanding. See, e.g., 19 Oxford
English Dictionary 79-80 (J.A. Simpson & E.S.C. Weiner eds., 2d ed. 1989) (definition 1b: "The Republic of North America"); Black's Law Dictionary 1675 (9th ed.
2009) ("A federal republic . . . made up of 48 coterminous states, plus the state of Alaska and the District of Columbia in North America, plus the state of Hawaii in
the Pacific."). 3

The Act does not define the term "United States" and does not indicate that we are to read the special definition of "Federal agency" from § 4601(1) into the term
"United States." Accordingly, we decline to do so, and adhere instead to the common understanding of the term "United States." Given
our
interp retation of the term, the landowner's right to costs and fees is triggered only when the fed eral government abandons a
not when a private entity such as Transwestern does so, even if that private entity is exercising federally
condemnation proceeding,

granted condemnation power. 4

Agua Fria contends that Tennessee Gas Pipeline Co. v. 104 Acres of Land, 828 F.Supp. 123 (D.R.I.1993), aff'd in part and vacated in part on other grounds, 32 F.3d
632 (1st Cir.1994), supports its contention that the term “United States” includes Transwestern for purposes of § 4654(a)(2). We disagree. In Tennessee Gas, a
private gas company, acting under FERC's authority to acquire property for a pipeline, dismissed a condemnation proceedings it had brought against a landowner
after FERC approved a change in the pipeline's route. Id. at 124–25. The district court held that, under these circumstances, it would deem FERC to have abandoned
the proceedings for purposes of § 4654(a)(2). Id. at 128. The court therefore concluded that the landowner was entitled to litigation costs and fees under § 4654(a)
(2) “whether or not Tennessee Gas is an entity within the term ‘United States' as used in the statute.” Id. In other words, Tennessee Gas avoided the very point Agua
Fria claims it supports.5

5 “If the plain meaning of the statute is unambiguous, that meaning is controlling and we need not examine legislative history as an aid to interpretation unless the
legislative history clearly indicates that Congress meant something other than what it said.” Greenwood v. CompuCredit Corp., 615 F.3d 1204, 1207 (9th Cir.2010)
(quoting Carson Harbor Vill., Ltd. v. Unocal Corp., 270 F.3d 863, 877 (9th Cir.2001) (en banc)) (internal quotation marks omitted). Agua Fria has not pointed to any
legislative history that contradicts the plain language of the statute. Rather, the House Report on which Agua Fria relies indicates that § 4654(a) was intended to
reimburse property owners for fees and costs incurred “where (1) the court determines that a condemnation was unauthorized, [or] (2) the government abandons a
condemnation.” H.R.Rep. No. 91–1656, 91st Cong.2d Sess., reprinted in 1970 U.S.C.C.A.N. 5850, 5874–75 (emphasis added). This interpretation is consistent with
the plain language of the statute and does not suggest that Congress intended to make fees and costs available when a private party abandons a proceeding.
Further, Congress made no changes to the term “United States” in § 4654(a)(2) when it changed the definition of “Federal agency” to include private persons. See
Uniform Relocation Act Amendments of 1987, Pub.L. No. 100–17, § 402, 101 Stat. 132, 246. Had Congress wished to include private persons in the meaning of the
term “United States,” it clearly knew how to do so. See Landgraf v. USI Film Prods., 511 U.S. 244, 255–56, 114 S.Ct. 1483, 128 L.Ed.2d 229 (1994).

Because we adhere to the plain meaning of the term “ U nited S tates” in § 4654(a)(2), and that term does not include private
entities , we affirm the district *1272 court's denial of Agua Fria's motion for litigation costs and fees.6

Restrict is to confine within limits

American Heritage Dictionary 2k, http://www.thefreedictionary.com/restrict
re·strict (r-strkt)
tr.v. re·strict·ed, re·strict·ing, re·stricts

To keep or confine within limits. See Synonyms at limit.

'Its' refers to the U.S., is possessive, and exclusive.
Brent '10 [Douglas F; Attorney, 6/2/2010, “Reply Brief on Threshold Issues of Cricket Communications,
Inc.,” http://psc.ky.gov/PSCSCF/2010%20cases/2010-
00131/20100602_Crickets_Reply_Brief_on_Threshold_Issues.PDF Italics in the original]
AT&T ignores the fact that these are two separate and distinct contracts because it knows that the merger commitments apply to each agreement that an individual
telecommunications carrier has with AT&T. Notably, Merger Commitment 7.4 states that “AT&T/BellSouth ILECs shall permit a requesting telecommunications
carrier to extend its current interconnection agreement . . . . As written, the commitment allows any carrier to extend “its” agreement. Clearly, the use of
the pronoun “its” in this context is possessive , such that the term “its” means - that particular carrier’s
agreement with AT&T (and not any other carrier’s agreement). Thus, the merger commitment applies to each agreement that an individual
carrier may have with AT&T. It necessarily follows then, that Cricket’s right to extend its agreement under Merger Commitment 7.4 is separate and distinct right
from another carrier’s right to extend its agreement with AT&T (or whether such agreement has been extended).

'Nuclear forces' refers to delivery platforms, weapons, support systems, C&C assets,
and military infrastructure.
Roberts '23 [Brad, a study group chair and Director, Center for Global Security Resarch, Ph.D., Director
of the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Prior to this
position, he was deputy assistant secretary of defense for Nuclear and Missile Defense Policy, March
2023, “China’s Emergence as a Second Nuclear Peer,” CGSR Study Group Report, p. 34,
https://cgsr.llnl.gov/content/assets/docs/CGSR_Two_Peer_230314.pdf]

Does the U nited S tates have sufficient weapons of the right types, and will possess sufficient weapons as it modernizes? If not, what changes are needed?

The term “ nuclear forces ” refers here to the delivery platforms (bombers and ballistic missile submarines), weapons (warheads and
bombs) mated to delivery systems (e.g., SLBMs and ICBMs), support systems (e.g., tankers), c ommand and c ontrol
assets, and associated military infrastructure necessary to conduct nuclear combat op eration s . The platforms and
weapons can conceptually be split into two components: those that are operationally deployed and those that are not operationally deployed. The operationally-
deployed component is readily available (immediately or within a few days), while the non-deployed component may take weeks to years to become operational.
2 impacts –
1. FAIRNESS. Their interp explodes limits and allows affs to monopolize the moral high
ground. The lack of a stable mechanism lets them radically re-contextualize their aff
and erase neg ground via perms. Fairness is good and prior – debate’s a game that
requires effective competition and negation. Cutting negs to every possible aff wrecks
small schools, which has a disparate impact on under-resourced and minority
debaters.
2. CLASH. Only a predictable stasis fosters the in-depth process of negation, research,
and refinement. Iterative testing over the course of a year produces debaters with a
skeptical worldview and breaks down dogmatic conceptions in favor of critical
reflection. That is a prerequisite to their offense – creating the conditions for clash is
the only possible way people will respond with something more than the Cap K.
We ought not tie the ballot to “energy.” Switching sides demonstrates that we need
not invest psychically in the arguments we make, BUT tying energy and affirmation of
Black women’s strategies to wins/losses drives reactionary impact turns that intensify
psychic violence against Black women OR has no role for the NEG, and puts you in an
untenable position to adjudicate.
 K – Grammar – 1NC
There is no singular grammar that defines modernity as anti-Black. This thesis unites
two objections to their case:
FIRST, centering the middle passage in our discourse reproduces the hegemony of
western history – our model needs to de-Atlanticized.
Zeleza ’10 [Paul Tiyambe Zeleza is the dean of the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts and Presidential
Professor of African American Studies and History at Loyola Marymount University. He served as the
director of the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and was the
Liberal Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor and head of the Department of African American
Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. African Diasporas: Toward a Global History
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/384918]

It has become increasingly clear to me that as the field grows, the

need to clarify the terms of discourse and analysis is
more imperative than ever . The first issue concerns hegemonies in African diaspora studies: the
where , when , what , why , and who is privileged in the field. The second involves the need to clarify the key concepts
we use in structuring our methodological and theoretical frameworks. Conceptual clarification entails specifying our intellectual and ideological
interests, identifying disciplinary and interdisciplinary influences, and problematizing our analytical metaphors and interpretive analogies.

Among scholars of African diasporas in Asia and Europe, common critiques are heard against the
domination of the Afro-Atlantic model and the African Americanization of Afro-Europe and Afro-Asia .
There is no question that the Atlantic model dominates African diaspora studies , which focus on movements
from western Africa to the Americas through the forced migrations of the Atlantic slave trade and are
preoccupied with the construction of "black" identities . But African American hegemony in diaspora studies both in the
Americas and in its export to other world regions is not simply a question of what could be called, to paraphrase Gordon Lewis's (1999) term,
epistemological bad faith. The hegemony or universalizing ambitions of the Atlantic model are based partly on the sheer size of the Afro-
Atlantic diasporas in the Americas, which currently number more than 160 million people (more than 100 million in South America, 40 million in
North American, and 22 million in the Caribbean).

They are also embedded in the very cultural and economic hegemony of the United States. This has
become a heated issue at international diaspora conferences, as Darlene Clark Hine et al. (2009) and Carole Boyce
Davies (2008) note in their recent publications, Black Europe and the African Diaspora and the three-volume Encyclopedia of the African
Diaspora, respectively. This was also evident at the First International Conference on the African Diaspora in Asia held in Goa, India, in January
2006 (Prasad & Angenot 2008).

During my travels, I often had to fend off suspicions that I had come to propagate exclusively American conceptions of African diasporas, and I
agree with both Hine et al. and Davies that such critiques and suspicions cannot be wished away. We
need to confront the
asymmetries in knowledge [End Page 4] production about African diasporas in different world regions ,
desist from imposing models derived from specific African American experiences, and understand how
much there is to gain from truly comparative perspectives and historiographies .

This is the source of my argument that we need to de-Atlanticize and de-Americanize the histories of African
diasporas . In order for the field to grow, it is critical that the Afro-Atlantic and U.S. African American
models of African diaspora studies be provincialized rather than universalized , as is the tendency
among many of us in the U.S. and Anglophone academies for whom the world beyond our borders can
only be simulated copies of our own and for those elsewhere who are anxious to signal their cosmopolitan familiarity with the
intellectual products of the world's largest academic system by producing mimic histories.
Afrofuturism is geopolitically inappropriate- it papers over the diverse history of
African fiction with American exceptionalism
Samatar, PhD, 17
(Sofia, English@JamesMadison, Toward a Planetary History of Afrofuturism Research in African Literatures , Vol. 48, No. 4, Ken Saro-Wiwa as
Public

Intellectual (Winter 2017), pp. 175-191

In the twenty-first century, African science fiction has become visible. While earlier literary works such as Sony Labou Tansi’s
Life and a Half (1977) and Kojo Laing’s Woman of the Aeroplanes (1988) circulated simply as African literature or perhaps magical realism,
contemporary authors and editors are claiming the term “science fiction” (or the more general “speculative fiction”) and marketing their works
to genre readers.1 These
works have sometimes been described as “Afrofuturism,” but there are also
concerns that Afrofuturism is specifically American and therefore, as Tade Thompson puts it,
“ geopolitically inappropriate” as a descriptor of speculative fiction from the African continent.2 The idea
that Afrofuturism is American derives from etymological history: Mark Dery, an American critic, coined the term
in his 1993 essay “Black to the Future,” defined it as “African-American” speculative fiction and signification, and

interviewed the Americans Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose. While “Black to the Future” hints at a wider
Afro-diasporic archive , mentioning, for example, the Jamaican Lee “Scratch” Perry, Dery does not glance toward Africa
except as a lost realm, the site of the massive alien abduction of the slave trade . In the future—that is, in our
own time—things are different. Ytasha L. Womack’s 2013 Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, the first comprehensive
primer on the subject, treats a number of African artists, including the novelist Nnedi Okorafor and the filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu. These 21st-
century artists are absorbed seamlessly into the flow of Afrofuturism as Womack presents it, without a
discussion of how their relationship to the African continent , obviously different from that of most
artists in the diaspora, informs their engagement with the field. On the one hand, this embrace of black
futurists without regard to their position on the planet aligns with Afrofuturism’s emphasis on
blackness rather than nationhood and its orientation toward outer space, in which Earth figures as one
star among others rather than a map carved up by borders . On the other, the lack of attention to the diverse
streams of Afrofuturism threatens not only to obscure possibilities for rich discussions , but to imply a
development narrative that assumes there were no African futurists before 2000. Such a narrative runs
counter to the philosophy of Afrofuturism, which distrusts models of progress and development, prizing
instead time-traveling leaps, sidesteps into alternate universes, and the reanimation of history. In what follows, I trace an
alternate history of Afrofuturism, one that explores a Pan-African psychogeography , resists the framing
of Africa as a latecomer to science fiction, and attests to the continued relevance of Afrofuturism for
both Africa and the diaspora. I proceed not like a development theorist, but like a data thief .

The very paradigm of blackness is Eurocentric – the discourse of the Atlantic reduces
“Africa” to “sub-Saharan Africa” and erases other African diasporas.
Zeleza ’10 [Paul Tiyambe Zeleza is the dean of the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts and Presidential
Professor of African American Studies and History at Loyola Marymount University. He served as the
director of the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and was the
Liberal Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor and head of the Department of African American
Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. African Diasporas: Toward a Global History
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/384918]
This implies that our conception of "African diasporas" crucially depends on how we define these very
terms , and these definitions in turn have national and transnational contexts that frame them. This is merely to
stress the obvious point that hegemonic ideas ride on the hegemonies of material power . This is why the Afro-
Atlantic and the African American models are dominant, but it is for the same reason that they should
not be applied to other world regions unquestioningly , however accurately they capture and explain the historical
experiences and struggles in the Afro-Atlantic world and the United States. Even internally, as we all know, these models are not cast in the iron
grid of methodological and theoretical rigidity. But as is often the case with discursive exports, they acquire the conceits of suffocating
homogeneity as they cross the Atlantic to foreign lands.

The Atlantic model is problematic when applied to other world regions and periods in part because it is
premised on a conception of "Africa" as "sub-Saharan Africa," a racialized construct that haunted
African studies [End Page 6] in Euroamerica over the last century and that some African scholars have
desperately sought to deconstruct . This reflects the dominance in the Euro-American academy of the
Atlantic model and of race in the fields of African studies in general and African diaspora studies in particular. Quite
predictably, " black" is the paradigmatic trope in Afro-Atlantic diaspora studies, the pivot around which
discourses of "African" diaspora identities , subjectivities , transnationalisms , engagements , or
dialogues are framed and debated .

This is quite evident in several recent studies. Let me just mention three, all published in 2009. The first is Patrick Manning's The
African Diaspora: A History Through Culture, which despite its global ambitions remains trapped in Eurocentric
cartographic conceptions of Africa as sub-Saharan Africa and American preoccupations with the black
diaspora . The others openly substitute "Africa" with "black." The two-volume Encyclopedia of Blacks in European
History and Culture (Martone 2009) focuses on the historical experiences in Europe of peoples from sub-Saharan Africa except where an
Afrocentric claim cannot be resisted and North Africa is sneaked in. In Black Europe and the African Diaspora by Hine at al., the mostly U.S.-
based authors have great difficulty in explaining what they mean by "Black Europe," and their African diaspora in Europe excludes North
Africans, who surely do have a claim to an African origin and identity as much as the descendants of diasporans from the Americas who have
relocated to Europe or the offspring of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed, there has been a proliferation of studies
on "Black
Europe" that are largely patterned on "Black America" and remain trapped in the racialized discourses and
imaginaries of American studies . Ironically, "Black Europe" has continued to be inscribed long after "Black Americans" have
become African Americans.

The conflation of African diaspora formations with the histories and geographies of Atlantic slavery
disregards the histories of other African diasporas in the Americas , both during the period of the slave trade and
after. To begin with, it fails to problematize the identity of the very Iberians—the Spanish and Portuguese— who
began the conquest of the Americas. Among them were peoples of African descent who had been resident in
Iberia for centuries. On my trip to Spain this summer, an Afro-Spanish scholar and activist insisted that Spanish identity only fully dis-
Africanized itself following the country's inclusion in the European project (Toasije 2009). The joke that Africa began
at the Pyrenees articulates Spain's and Portugal's mixed historical heritage from the Moors (or, according to some, Muslims, Arabs, or Berbers
—the designations are themselves quite revealing) who conquered and ruled large parts of the peninsula between 711 and 1492. In
the
view of Anouar Majid (2000:77), a Moroccan scholar, Al Andalus could be considered "essentially an African
kingdom in Europe." Recent work on the migrations of the Moriscos, Ladinos, and even Cape Verdians to the Americas is pertinent in
this regard (Garafalo forthcoming; Molina & López 2001). [End Page 7]

The findings on the free Afro-Iberian migrations to the Americas serve to qualify, but do not of course displace, the centrality of forced
migrations from western Africa to the Americas. But in
its universalizing ambitions, the Afro-Atlantic model easily
yields to a Eurocentric conception of Africa in which Africa, Hegel's (1956:91) "Africa proper," entails sub-Saharan
Africa and African diasporas are exclusively "black," a paradigm that leads to a preoccupation with the
formation of black racial identities among African diasporas . This model also ignores the formation of
" new" African diasporas out of voluntary migrations since the abolition of slavery and especially since
decolonization.

Over the last two decades, more African migrants have been arriving in the United States than during
the Atlantic slave trade. As shown in the recent capacious collection by Isidore Okpewho and Nkiru Nzegwu, The New African Diaspora
(2009), the mobilities , experiences , identities , and dialogues of these diasporas differ and intersect

with those of the historic Afro-Atlantic diasporas in complex and contradictory ways.6 The very existence
of intercultural and intertextual diaspora spaces in which they find themselves ensures complex negotiations and performances
of racial, national, ethnic, and gender identities that are neither already fixed in the diaspora nor imported from

Africa . And of course we know the identities of the historic Afro-Atlantic diaporas are not frozen ; they have
continually been reconstructed and reshaped by changing economic , social , cultural , and political
contexts, and through the dialogic and dialectical interplay of material and discursive processes, the
shifting structures of power, and the agencies of resistance.

But even for the historic Afro-Atlantic diasporas, some scholars object to the regionalization of the African American model in which the
U.S.
experience and modes of racialization and identity formation are often generalized to the rest of the
Americas, even though Afro-Latin America, which is more than twice as large as Afro-North America, has
its own quite distinctive histories . Paul Gilroy's influential Black Atlantic (1993), which ignores both Africa and
Afro-Latin America, exemplifies this Anglophone analytical conceit . Let me hasten to add that in recent years many
U.S. diaspora scholars have produced excellent comparative studies of Afro-Atlantic diaspora histories and anthropologies. The works by Sheila
Walker (2001), George Andrews (2004), and Kevin Yelvington (2006) readily come to mind.

Historical Mappings

The Afro-Atlantic model is clearly inadequate when applied to the much older and more complicated
histories of African interactions with, and diasporas in, Europe and Asia. I am struck by the amount of
intellectual energy expended in trying to restrict the histories of African movements to Europe and Asia, and to
force the formation of African diasporas in these regions into the Atlantic model by seeing their
movements primarily in [End Page 8] terms of slavery and sub-Saharan Africans. "Africa" and "Africans" of course
include "blacks" but are not confined to them , and before the twentieth century some Africans went to Europe and Asia as
enslaved people, but not all, perhaps not even the majority, and their identities were not always framed by American-style
regimes of racialization. Other social inscriptions and ideologies such as religion sometimes played a
more salient role.

Systematic studies of African diasporas in Europe and Asia are a recent phenomenon. Both are inspired by some
of the same forces noted earlier. In the case of Europe, additional impetus has been provided by the increased African migrations over the last
few decades and by European anxieties, which have manifested themselves both in the development of multiculturalism as public policy and in
xenophobic violence. In Europe the definitional challenges are thrown into particularly sharp relief: do we talk of "black" or "African" diasporas,
"Black Europe" or "Afro-Europe"? Some of the scholarship on "Black Europe," "Black Britain," "Black France," and so on, is illuminating,
but much of it, which
seems to borrow uncritically from the Atlantic model, is clearly problematic. These
works are often written by African American scholars, specialists in African American studies, or Afro-European scholars
who have discovered their epistemic and existential blackness on American campuses and remained in
the United States ; an example of the latter is Pap Ndiaye (2008), the Afro-French historian, whose celebrated La Condition Noire was
inspired by his studies of African American history.7
SECOND, we should analyze Black slavery as labor, not social death. Insistence that
there is “no grammar” for anti-Black violence denies its intimacy and continuity with
other forms of racial-colonial capitalism.
Lowe, ’15 – Distinguished Professor of English and Humanities, a faculty member of the Consortium of
Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora, and Director of the Center for the Humanities at Tufts
University; Lisa Lowe; The Intimacies of Four Continents; Duke University Press; p.148-150; 05-20-15;
NC)

For Black anticolonial thinkers like James and Du Bois, as well as Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, Orlando Patterson, Cedric Robinson,
and others, it has been urgent and necessary to address the exclusion of Blacks and Africans from Hegel's understanding of world
history, and to rework Marxism to envision an emancipatory politics that would address the contradictions of
colonialism and slavery . Although Hegel's denial of history and humanity to Africa is not explicitly stated by Marx, Western Marxism has
contributed to a European historical model that opposes capitalism to slavery, and that cannot recognize Black slaves
and colonized subjects as actors in history and historical change. For the critique of capitalist political economy that focuses on wage
labor as the site of alienation, and on the capital-wage labor relation as the full development of commodity production that structures capitalism and announces the

capitalist era, slavery is situated as "precapitalist;' rather than specifically embedded in colonial capitalism , or
coterminous and interdependent with a spectrum of other labors . By positioning slavery as external or prior to
capitalism, not integral to it, the Marxist critique of capitalism is unable to grasp the complex combination of both waged

and unwaged labor that makes up relations of production in modern capitalism. When privileging industrialized
Europe and North America as the sites of mature capitalism, Marxism not only fails to recognize slave labor as
labor , but it denies the role of slavery as the formative condition for wage labor and industrialization, over
against which "free labor" was posed. As Cedric Robinson observes in Black Marxism, ''At its epistemological substratum, Marxism is a Western construction-a
c􀁦:mceptualization of human affairs and historical development that is emergent from the historical experiences of European peoples mediated, in turn, through
their civilization, their social orders, and their cultures:' 39 In his work on the Black radical tradition, Cedric Robinson built upon James, Du Bois, Frantz Fanon,
Walter Rodney and others to observe the significance of Black labor in the history of industrial capitalism, when African slavery provided the necessary agricultural
labor just as Europeans moved to factory work. In Robinson's analysis, capitalism has been always "racial capitalism"; that is, the organization, expansion, and
ideology of capitalist society was expressed through race, racial subjection, and racial differences .

The term racial capitalism captures the sense that actually existing capitalism exploits through culturally and socially constructed
differences such as race, gender, region, and nationality, and is lived through those uneven formations; it refuses the idea
of a "pure" capitalism external to, or extrinsic from, the racial formation of collectivities and populations, or that capitalism's

tendency to treat labor as abstract equivalent units does not contravene its precisely calibrated exploitation of

social differences and particularities. 40 Robinson states: "I use the term racial capitalism to refer to this development and to the subsequent structure as
historical agency. From its very foundations capitalism had never been any more than Europe-a closed system:'41 What Robinson elaborates as " racial

capitalism'' includes the settler colonial dispossession of land and removal of indigenous peoples, the colonial slavery
that extracted labor from people to whom it denied human being, and the racialized exploitation of immigrants from
around the world-making the political sphere of human rights and representation the precise location that permits and sustains the violent inequality

issuing from the longer history of slavery, colonial settlement and occupation, and capitalist exploitation.
42 Furthermore, racial capitalism suggests that capitalism expands not through rendering all labor, resources, and markets across the world

identical, but by precisely seizing upon colonial divisions , identifying particular regions for production and others for

neglect, certain populations for exploitation and still others for disposal.
Gratuitous violence does not separate slave and worker – spectacular violence has
been a key anti-labor tool. Recognizing linkages instead of trying to trace a root cause
is key to transform conditions of work.
Nikhil Pal SINGH Social and Cultural Analysis & Education @ NYU; Director NYU Prison Education
Program ’17 in Futures of Black Radicalism eds. Gaye Theresa Johnson & Alex Lubin p. 54-55
Civil society, as both Foucault and Marx argue in different ways, is the perfect site for capitalism, as a realm of economic freedom that
fundamentally modifies the terms of political authority. While Marx attempted to demystify this process by describing the actual subordination
of sovereign political status to forceful economic tyranny, Foucault at times emphasizes the real limitations placed by market freedom on the
political life of the state. “The condition of governing well,” he writes, “is that freedom, or certain forms of freedom are really respected.”54
The idea of a totalizing police power gives way to a police force focused upon the prevention and management of the probability of “disorders”
and “disasters.” At the same time, both Marx and even Foucault exception- alize the phenomenon that at different points preoccupies both of
them: the bloody, annihilating violence that haunts modern social existence. In an echo of Marx’s account of the decreasing frequency in use of
overt force, Foucault, for example, calls Nazi genocide an “eruption of racism,” an expression of the outdated right of a sovereign to kill that is
retained alongside normative governmental imperatives of population management and biopolitical growth. But like Marx, he ultimately begs
the question of how to account for the enduring nature of this always waning, quasi-hallucinatory genocidal force.55

It is not, moreover, only spectacular violence , but the slow , repetitive , incremental , often concealed
violence of appropriation that needs to be considered here. If socially necessary labor time constitutes
value for capital , as Jason Moore writes, such value is embedded in a “ web of life ” that capital uses to exploit
formally free wage labor . Marxist theory that considers the most distinct undertakings of capitalism to be economic exploitation and
the production of surplus value separating economic compulsion from direct domination fails to recognize what may be an even greater
capitalist novelty: the dynamic by which capital is able to “identify, secure and channel unpaid work outside the commodity system into the
circuit of capital.” As Marxist-feminists have long noted, “The appropriation of accumulated unpaid work in human
form,” including the labors of biological and social reproduction undertaken the world over by women,
provides the real historical conditions for “ socially necessary labor time .” A “narrow sphere” of productive
relations, in this view, depends upon a “more expansive sphere of appropriation” in which cheap human and extrahuman nature “are taken up
by commodity production.”56

Embodied in the figures of the slave , the migrant worker , the household worker , the chronically
unemployed , and others like them, appropriation encompasses both privatized and publically
sanctioned coercion and ethico- political devaluation inseparable from capitalist processes of
assigning value . Thus, rather than opposing notions of absolute sovereignty and its power of life over
death with a biopolitically , productive materialist history , we might instead recognize how the two are
inextricably linked through the conquest/commodification of Black bodies (as well as in the
conquest/commodification of indigenous lands ) that for Marx comprises the moment of “so-called primitive accumulation.”
This connection extends to the ongoing unpaid work of women the world over, accumulated unpaid
work represented by labor migration , and war capitalisms differentiation between internally ordered,
rule-bound spaces of production and market exchange and exceptional zones of armed appropriation .
The latter are not only domains for enacting “plunder”—that is, primitive accumulation (or accumulation by dispossession)—but also for
developing cutting-edge procedures, calculations, and fungible systems of commercial and military infrastructure—the slaver s management of
human cargo, railways of extraction and settlement, coerced urbanisms, strategic hamlets and forward military bases—that are able to proceed
insofar as they are unfettered by legally protected human beings, thus advancing new prejudices that build upon the old.
Voting negative endorses a global systems paradigm instead of an Atlantic-centric
slavery paradigm – it’s the only way to generate a fuller understanding of African
diaspora.
Allen ’14 [Richard B. Allen, Professor of History Framingham State University & Research Consultant
and Editor Aapravasi Ghat Trust Fund (UNESCO World Heritage Site). Slaves, Convicts, Abolitionism and
the Global Origins of the Post-Emancipation Indentured Labor System, Slavery & Abolition, 2014 Vol. 35,
No. 2, 328–348, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2013.870789
http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Allen2014.pdf]

In his excellent survey of indentured labor in the age of imperialism, David Northrup
emphasized the need to view the
movement of millions of indentured workers throughout and beyond the colonial plantation world not
only in the context of its times, but also as a global system that invites comparison with the great European migrations of the day and
age.93 Even a cursory survey of published scholarship since the appearance of Northrup’s book almost 20 years ago reveals, however, that
indentured labor studies remain hobbled by a failure to examine the indentured experience in well-
developed local, regional, global and comparative contexts. This historiographical inertia may be traced
to various factors: the continuing dominance of the Tinkerian ‘new system of slavery’ paradigm in both scholarly
and public discourse about indentured labor; a corresponding propensity to view this system’s origins largely,
if not exclusively, through the prism of an Atlantic-centric abolitionism in which the 1834 emancipation of slaves in the
British Empire has acquired iconic status; and an Indo-centrism that distracts attention from or obscures work on other indentured populations.
Northrup’s comments about the origins of the indentured labor trade echo these historiographical preoccupations:

Despite the existence of a few earlier experiments, it is fair to say that the
new indentured labor trade arose in
direct response to the abolition of slavery in the colonies of Great Britain in the 1830s and to its subsequent
abolition or decline in French, Dutch, and Spanish colonies.94

Recent research on free and forced labor migration in the Indian Ocean reveals that the early experiments to
which Northrup referred were, however, neither few in number nor marginally important to
understanding the indentured labor system’s origins and subsequent development. This research highlights,
moreover, that these experiments occurred in a truly global setting that stretched from the Caribbean to
the South Atlantic and across the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asia and China. That this was so should come as no
surprise given recent scholarship on the trans-imperial movement of ideas, personnel and news with the British Empire, especially during the
late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.95 As P.J. Marshall has trenchantly observed, if there were significant differences between the British
experience in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, there were also significant similarities between these two components of a single imperial
entity.96 Compelling work on the impact that public knowledge about and perceptions of empire had on British politics and identity
underscores this point.97 So do astute assessments of the limitations inherent in oceanic basin approaches to studying labor migration and
maritime history.98 Insights provided by the emerging field of global labor history, including case studies such as Jan Lucassen’s examination of
the VOC’s role in the
emergence of an international labor market which connected Europe with southern
Africa and South and Southeast Asia, further illustrate the need for indentured labor historians to
transcend the conceptual parochialism that inhibits the development of a much fuller understanding of
this post-emancipation labor system in all of its complexity .99 The challenge before us is, accordingly, to probe
much more deeply and perceptively into the ways in which the complex dialog within and between
these oceanic worlds shaped the nature and dynamics of a global migrant labor system, the legacy of
which continues to resonate in our own day and age.
 Case
1. We should conceptualize of disarmament and nuclear policy as compatible with,
not exclusive of, afrofuturism. Anti-nuclearism links anticolonialism and anti-
militarism. Historiography that connects anticolonial internationalism and opposition
to US nuclear weapons should guide contemporary anti-racism.
Vincent INTONDI ’15 African Americans Against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the
Black Freedom Movement p. 1-5
In August 1945, only A few days After the United States dropped two atomic bombs destroying the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
the Reverend J.E. Elliott, pastor of St. Luke Chapel, stepped up to the pulpit and began his Sunday sermon. The pastor condemned the use of
atomic bombs in Japan and suggested that racism played a role in President Truman’s decision. “I have seen the course of discrimination
throughout the war and the fact that Japan is of a darker race is no excuse for resorting to such an atrocity,” Elliott said.1

Twenty-three years later, on February 6, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., also stepped up to the pulpit to warn against the use of nuclear
weapons. Addressing the second mobilization of the Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, King
urged an end to the
war, and warned that if the United States used nuclear weapons in Vietnam the earth would be transformed
into an inferno that “even the mind of Dante could not envision.”2 Then, as he had done so many times before, King
made clear the connection between the black freedom struggle in America and the need for nuclear
disarmament:

These two issues are tied together in many, many ways. It is a wonderful thing to work to integrate lunch
counters, public accommodations, and schools. But it would be rather absurd to work to get schools and lunch counters integrated
and not be concerned with the survival of a world in which to integrate. And I am convinced that these two
issues are tied inextricably together and I feel that the people who are working for civil rights are working for
peace; I feel that the people working for peace are working for civil rights and justice.3

Almost fifteen years later, on June 12, 1982, nearly one million activists and concerned citizens gathered in New York
City for what became known as the largest antinuclear demonstration in the history of the United States.4 A large
contingent of minority groups organized under the Reverend Herbert Daughtry’s National Black United Front was among the thousands of
protesters. Marching through Harlem, these
activists, including prominent African Americans Harry Belafonte, Chaka Kahn, Toni
Morrison, Ossie Davis, and Ruby Dee, demanded an end to the nuclear arms race and a shift from defense
spending to helping the poor. When asked why they were marching, Dick Gregory responded, “to write the unwritten page of the
Constitution, dealing with the right to live free from nuclear terror.”5

From 1945 onward, many in the African American community actively supported nuclear disarmament, even when the cause was abandoned
by other groups during the McCarthy era. This allowed the fight to abolish nuclear weapons to reemerge powerfully in the 1970s and beyond.
Black leaders never gave up the nuclear issue or failed to see its importance; by doing so, they
broadened the black freedom movement and helped define it in terms of global human rights.
African Americans Against the Bomb examines those black activists who fought for nuclear disarmament, often connecting the nuclear issue
with the fight for racial equality and with liberation movements around the world. Beginning with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, this book explores the shifting response of black leaders and organizations, and of the broader African American public, to the
evolving nuclear arms race and general nuclear threat throughout the postwar period. For too long scholars, v iewing slavery,
Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement as national phenomena, have failed to appreciate the black
freedom struggle’s international dimensions . Because of the understandable focus on African Americans’ unique oppression,
historians have often entirely ignored African American responses when addressing other important issues, such
as the nuclear threat. This omission comes despite the fact that African Americans, as part of the larger human community, have as
great a stake as any other group of citizens. In fact, given the increasing urban concentration of African Americans, they face a greater risk when
it comes to nuclear war and terrorism than do other groups.
The question of how African Americans have responded to nuclear issues is therefore of great historical consequence. Did African Americans
respond differently to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki compared to other Americans, and if so, to what extent was this related
to the fact that the victims were nonwhite? Did African Americans’ discrimination-induced estrangement from American life allow for a more
critical attitude toward the Cold War, and U.S. nuclear policy in particular? Did the left-oriented social and political activism inspired by black
Popular Front groups translate into a broader critique of U.S. militarism and foreign policy, both of which were undergirded by the Ameri- can
nuclear arsenal?

While African Americans immediately condemned the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not all of the activists protested for the
same reason. For some, race was the issue. Many in the black community agreed with Langston Hughes’s assertion that racism was at the heart
of Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons in Japan. Why did the United States not drop atomic bombs on Italy or Germany, Hughes asked.6
Black activists’ fear that race played a role in the decision to use atomic bombs only increased when the United States threatened to use
nuclear weapons in Korea in the 1950s and in Vietnam a decade later. For others, mostly black leftists ensconced in Popular Front groups, the
nuclear issue was connected to colonialism. From the United States’ obtaining uranium from the Belgian-controlled Congo to France’s testing a
nuclear weapon in the Sahara, activists saw a direct link between those who possessed nuclear weapons and those who colonized the nonwhite
world. However, for many ordinary black citizens, fighting for nuclear disarmament simply translated into a more peaceful world. The bomb,
then, became the link that connected all of these issues and brought together musicians, artists, peace activists, leftists, clergy, journalists, and
ordinary citizens inside the black community.

Examining the role of black antinuclear activists is part of a larger narrative that challenges the idea that
the black freedom struggle was an isolated movement in a narrowly defined set of years. The past two decades have
seen a rise in new scholarship that challenges the accepted narrative of the black freedom movement. Historians have begun to rediscover the
forgotten history of black Popular Front groups, Communist Party members and labor organizers, as well as anticolonial and peace activists. A
number of these studies suggest that the black freedom movement’s origins date back to the 1930s and 1940s, were much more global in
scope, and were influenced by those who consistently combined their plight with those seeking peace and an end to colonialism.7 From the
Italo- Ethiopian War of 1935 to the Bandung Conference twenty years later, historians have convincingly shown that
black activists consistently connected foreign affairs to their struggle for freedom , often demonstrating
an anticolonial and Pan- African perspective . Scholars have reexamined the roots of black radicalism and by doing so have taken
African Americans out of the neat categorical boxes in which they were trapped for so many years and have offered a history of the black
freedom movement that is much more complex. As Jason Parker explains, scholarship on colonization and the black freedom struggle has
“coalesced into a synthesis of international history,” and it is important to examine these subjects through a l ens of a
“global race revolution. ”8 How then does the inclusion of black antinuclear activism alter or reaffirm this emerging narrative?

While scholars have provided a valuable service by shedding light on these connections, many have
failed to appreciate the role of nuclear weapons . From 1945, the bomb is what in many cases connected
various groups and individuals inside the black community. Nuclear disarmament was a main part of
the platform at the Bandung Conference in 1955. In the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, Bayard Rustin led a team in
Ghana to stop the French from testing a nuclear weapon in the Sahara. Two years later, Kwame Nkrumah,
joined by African American activists, held the “World Without the Bomb” conference. Dr. King began
connecting the nuclear issue to black freedom as early as 1957. Therefore the role of the bomb is essential
when examining the length and scope of the black freedom movement.

Throughout this new line of study scholars continue to disagree as to the length and influence of black radical activism. Historian Robbie
Lieberman contends that Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist crusade dramatically stymied black leftists’ progress and thus broke the chain
connecting the black freedom movement to peace and colonialism, causing it to largely disappear. Clearly McCarthyism was a major factor in
the decline of activists working within Popular Front or peace groups. The federal government targeted black leftists like W.E.B. Du Bois and
Paul Robeson, and as anticommunism swept through the country many activists fell silent or disavowed their earlier actions. Indeed, Lieberman
concludes that not until the late 1960s did activists once again connect the black freedom movement to peace.9 Brenda Gayle Plummer
disagrees, contending that “militant international racial discourse” continued even after the purges of the “conventional Left” in the 1950s. In
examining black antinuclear activism, I am suggesting that while connections between the black freedom movement and peace were damaged,
they were not completely severed. Rather, there
was a consistent voice inside the black community making the case
that freedom, peace, and colonialism were links in the same chain . At times the voice was faint, at other times quite
loud, but it was always present.10
As Carol Anderson and Mary Dudziak have shown, this was in part due to the fact that liberals also continued to speak out against colonialism
past the 1950s. Parker agrees, arguing that the links survived the “anticommunist witch hunters” of the 1950s. This was largely because the
nuclear issue resonated in both liberal and radical circles. Beyond the “usual suspects,” artists, clergy, and ordinary citi- zens cared deeply about
nuclear disarmament. Therefore, these connections do not disappear in the 1950s as some have suggested. Indeed, by focusing on the bomb, it
is clear that they not only remained but in some ways strengthened throughout the 1980s and into the present day.11

While this is not the first book to address black activists’ participation in the Peace Movement and foreign affairs, my intent is to focus on the
role nuclear weapons played in linking these issues together. The black freedom struggle cannot be properly understood without exploring
antinuclear campaigns. African Americans’ views of nuclear weapons directly influenced their response to other international issues. Therefore,
examining the African American response to the nuclear threat will not only add to the rich body of scholarship dedicated to African Americans
and global affairs, but will alter the way we discuss these subjects.

2. Nuclear use is an extreme expression of a spectrum of violence. Demands for

disarmament are not single-issue but learn from and work with a rich history of social
justice traditions.
Ray Acheson 22. Visiting researcher from the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom;
Leader, disarmament program, Reaching Critical Will; MA, Politics, The New School for Social Research.
“Notes on Nuclear Weapons & Intersectionality in Theory and Practice.” Working Paper, Program on
Science and Global Security, Princeton University. June 2022.
https://sgs.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/2022-06/acheson-2022.pdf.
Those who possess or desire nuclear weapons argue that the mere possession of the bomb prevents conflict and deters attack. They insist on
talking about nuclear weapons in the abstract, as magical tools that keep us safe and maintain stability in the world. But nuclear
weapons
are not abstract. They are made of radioactive materials. They are made to destroy flesh and bone. They are designed
to turn human beings into shadows. To melt the skin from our bodies. To reduce entire cities to ashes. The
abstraction of nuclear weapons into instruments of politics and power is an exercise in patriarchal discourse,
employing techniques such as gaslighting, victim blaming, denial of lived experience, and gendered assertions about credibility and rationality
to stifle alternative perspectives.

The bomb itself is, I believe, the most extreme expression of violence and control of the patriarchal, racist,
and capitalist world order . To the majority of people struggling daily under this oppressive order, the
abolition of nuclear weapons may not seem like a priority . When faced with the violence of settler colonialism,
imperial intervention, war, the carceral system, poverty, displacement, environmental devastation, and violence in our homes and
communities , nuclear weapons may seem like an abstraction. But these weapons are part of the
spectrum of institutionalized violence. Even without being launched, they are used to project the power and
invincibility of their possessor. They are the pinnacle of a state’s monopoly on violence, the ultimate
signifier of domination. In addition, we cannot lose sight of the fact that these weapons can manifest
the most violence in a single moment —the most death, destruction, and despair.

Thus, itis important for those resisting injustice and oppression to pay attention to the role nuclear weapons
play in our world order, at
the intersection of patriarchal, racist, colonial, and capitalist oppressions. Even more so,
it is crucial for those opposing nuclear weapons to pay attention to the ways in which the critiques and
strategies of resistance of these oppressions can help inform, guide, and shape the work to abolish nuclear
weapons . This means privileging voices and perspectives of those who are usually overlooked, ignored, or ridiculed, changing
perspectives about what is realistic and rational, and offering alternative ways to organize and engage in relationship in
international society. Doing so means changing the conversation, changing the location of conversations, and diversifying the participation in
conversations about nuclear weapons.
3. “Envisioning a post-apocalyptic world where black people survive” relies on a
misreading of Walker. Nuclear futurity is compatible with demand for racial justice.
Paul WILLIAMS English @ Exeter ’11 Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War Representations of Nuclear
Weapons and Post-Apocalyptic Worlds p. 168-171
At the aforementioned 1982 ‘Anti-Nuke Rally’, Alice Walker offered a personal dilemma she faced in relation to her involvement with
antinuclear activism. Walker began her address by articulating her reluctance to endorse antinuclear politics. Walker’s
‘problem’ with
supporting nuclear disarmament is the ‘hope for revenge’ that she believed to be ‘at the heart of People
of Color’s resistance to any anti-nuclear movement’. She suggests that the idea of nuclear apocalypse as a just consequence
of white racial chauvinism might seduce the peoples of the African diaspora into renouncing opposition to nuclear weapons. Considering ‘the
enormity of the white man’s crimes against humanity’, including contemporary racist discourse arguing ‘Blacks are genetically inferior and
should be sterilized’, Walker
wonders whether extinction alone will stop the white man’s destructive course:
‘Let the bombs cover the ground like rain. For nothing short of total destruction will ever teach them
anything.’ Would extinction now not be preferable to a future of exponential white domination ? ‘[It] would
be good, perhaps, to put an end to the species in any case, rather than let white men continue to subjugate it’. The white men’s rapacious
course has designs on the universe and Walker believes ‘Fatally irradiating ourselves […] to save others from what Earth has already become’
requires our ‘serious thought’.91 This
opening rhetoric is clearly intended to shock her audience in order to
impress upon them how deeply felt Walker’s indignation at white supremacism is. Her speech concludes
with renewed support for the antinuclear cause. Walker seeks to retain the anger at racial injustice that
fuelled her entertainment of the desirability of nuclear extinction, allying that emotion to hope for
change in the future. As her home, Walker pledges to protect the Earth, and she affirms the desirability of
life. Linking nuclear genocide with racial oppression, the Earth will only be spared and humankind saved
on the precondition of justice for ‘every living thing’.92 Extinction can only be averted if humankind
manages to think outside of modernity’s division of peoples into hierarchies of race . This is the message
contained in The Fire Next Time; Baldwin opposes racial hierarchies and nuclear stockpiling in the name of national security by calling for the
‘transcendence of the realities of colour, of nations, and of altars’.93 While Baldwin was writing these words in the early 1960s, a similar project
could be discerned in the Committee for Nonviolent Action. Antinuclear and antiracist, the Committee for Nonviolent Action supplemented
marching against segregation through Albany, Georgia with protests against the US military at an Army Supply Depot in Oakland, California. In
1966, Gerald J. Ringer called this a ‘loose-but-conscious alliance of the movements for civil rights and world peace’, affirming ‘human dignity
and human solidarity in terms of the present human condition’.94 The Fellowship of Reconciliation was another organization protesting for civil
rights and against nuclear weapons.95 Appropriately for the transatlantic roam of black Atlantic studies, in 1958 a member of both
organizations, Bayard Rustin, connected his civil rights and peace activism in a speech delivered in London’s Trafalgar Square. This speech was
part of the events surrounding the Aldermaston march, a famous moment in the history of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The
march, which took place during Easter week, began at the nuclear facility at Aldermaston in the county of Berkshire and concluded in Trafalgar
Square; in his speech Rustin linked ‘the struggle against weapons of mass destruction with the struggle of
blacks for their basic rights in America’.96 Belonging to various civil rights and antinuclear movements (in
addition to the ones above, Rustin was a member of the Peacemakers and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference), he saw the
utility of pacifist non-violence and was organizing civil disobedience protests on interstate buses in
1947.97 In 1959, Rustin worked again with the British antinuclear movement. The Committee for Nonviolent Action and the British Direct
Action Committee planned to march from Accra, Ghana, to a French nuclear installation in the Sahara, 2,000 miles to the north. Here, they
protested nuclear proliferation and the introduction of weapons research to Africa. The groups enjoyed the tacit approval of local governments
that opposed nuclear weapons and testing but lacked the power to confront France directly. The French army stopped the marchers on the
Upper Volta frontier, but Rustin had helped link disarmament to African desires for neutrality and peaceful development.98 Rustin actually
returned to the USA shortly after the march started, following pressure from Martin Luther King Jr and others for Rustin to resume domestic
civil rights activism.99 He accompanied King on his journey to Europe to accept the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, arranging a stop in London for
King to address a fund-raiser for the British peace movement. 100 An antinuclear spirit suffused the Nobel Lecture that King gave on 11
December 1964, when he stated, ‘mankind’s survival is dependent upon man’s ability to solve the problems of racial injustice, poverty, and
war’. This was hardly a new concern of King’s – his wife, Coretta Scott King, was one of the founders of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy
(SANE) in 1957. In his Nobel Lecture, King specifically warned of nuclear weapons, ‘which threaten the survival of mankind, and which are both
genocidal and suicidal in character’. King was acutely aware that the perception of racial difference and the repercussions of racial injustice
were now more than ever at the forefront of questions around human survival. Less than two months earlier, ‘the detonation of an atomic
device by the first nonwhite, non-Western, and so-called underdeveloped power, namely the Chinese People’s Republic, opens […] vast
multitudes, the whole of humanity, to insidious terrorization by the ever-present threat of annihilation’. King argued for the translation of non-
violence, the philosophy and strategy of the civil rights movement, into the sphere of international relations.101 The relevance of non-violence
to the threat of nuclear war is compelling and radical; defence in the Cold War era was maintained by the presumption neither superpower
would launch a nuclear attack on the other for fear of retaliation, therefore deterring both from a first strike and ensuring the peace. Rather
than mimicking this system where the threat of retaliation kept the peace, King’s philosophy deconstructed its logic. His belief ‘nonviolence is
the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time’ represented its antithesis. Such a system of defence had no place in the
future King presented in Oslo: ‘man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation’.102 Non-
violent struggle must be used to roll back racial injustice and the threat of nuclear war in tandem: ‘Equality with whites will hardly solve the
problems of either whites or Negroes if it means equality in a society under the spell of terror and a world doomed to extinction.’103 Kinchy
sees in King’s peace activism the legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois. Du
Bois dedicated the last stage of his life, from the late
1940s to his death in 1963, to promoting world peace through antiracism, anticolonialism and ‘opposing
the cold war escalation’. Du Bois led the American delegation at the World Peace Congress in Paris in April
1949 and as chair of the Peace Information Center he actively supported the World Peace Appeal, an international petition calling for the
outlawing of atomic weapons. Paul Robeson, who attended the meetings of the PIC’s Executive Committee, exhorted American workers to sign
the petition by connecting their plight to that of colonized peoples. ‘The Afro-American community was a conscious and special target of the
Appeal’, and their response was ‘disproportionately favourable’. The World Peace Appeal seems to have attracted between 1.35 and 2.5 million
signatures in the USA, and signatories were as varied as Albert Einstein, Leonard Bernstein and Charlie Parker (Parker was an ‘avid’ supporter of
the Appeal).104 By the early 1980s, the intersection of civil rights and peace movements was being redefined by black feminism. In seeking to
build ‘a new antiwar movement unlike the old peace movement which excluded so many oppressed people’,105 black
feminism and
allied lesbian and gay groups demonstrated a commitment to issues of global significance, pre-empting
criticism of their agenda as limited. Barbara Smith responded to such criticism by asserting that ‘a
movement committed to fighting sexual, racial, economic, and heterosexual oppression […] at the same
time that it challenges militarism and imminent nuclear destruction is the very opposite of narrow’.106
Antinuclear protest served a double role for black feminism in this period: as a further battleground for activism and as an emblem of the
movement’s importance beyond identity politics. In a permutation of the black Atlantic as a counterculture of modernity, Smith believes black
women have a privileged position of critical purchase, since women of colour ‘comprehend white-male values and culture in a way that white
men have never remotely understood themselves’.107

4. It also romantically assumes the postwar environment would be conducive to

Black existence, which is wrong.
Jacqueline Foertsch 13. Professor of English at the University of North Texas. 08/30/2013. Reckoning
Day: Race, Place, and the Atom Bomb in Postwar America. Vanderbilt University Press.
Smelser’s phrasing raises many questions, specifically regarding the identity of that “very strong ideological force” so intent to ignore racial and
ethnic differences in the mid-1960s. Can he be referring to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who surely would have phrased their
bid for equality very differently? To the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, which indeed worked to minimize the gaps between black and
white with respect to education, healthcare, and voting rights? To color-blind white liberals who looked forward to the day
when we could all “put race behind us” for reasons both altruistic and self-serving? His reference to “touchy” political problems
contains its own ambiguities, with touchy construed either as “delicate” (i.e., requiring careful attention) or, as in more common usage,
“oversensitive” or “fussy.” Evidently, Smelser regards his own day’s sectarianism a historical aberration, which is sure to revert to patterns of
peace and agreeability well before nuclear doomsday tears apart the social fabric once more. Yet it is implausible that societal-recovery
analysts like Nordlie and Smelser failed to notice the conflicts between segregationists and integrationists, right-wingers and women’s-
libbers, anti-war protesters and the middle-aged establishment that burgeoned all around them in the mid- and late-1960s when many of these
texts were written. More likely, their vision of the America specifically threatened by nuclear attack simply failed or refused to
diversify “ abstract ” (i.e., white, propertied) notions of America that had prevailed since the penning of the Declaration
of Independence. Perhaps there were optimists in the group who, flush with the promise of Johnson’s Great Society and inspired
by the gains made by the civil rights movement over the past decade, believed that at long last all citizens had come to
share the bounty of the American enterprise and thus now equally embraced its values and institutions .
This, of course, was a rose-tinted viewpoint never borne out by the facts of persistent poverty and demoralization experienced by many African
Americans in urban and rural settings throughout this period. Finally in 1971, researcher
Bruce C. Allnut came to the
depressing but realistic conclusion that following nuclear war, “an increase in conflict between sections
of the country, between advocates of varying war policies, and between urban and rural populations . . . would pose serious
problems . . . [and] racial or class conflict as well . . .” (qtd. in Katz 222–23). After a decade’s worth of social
upheaval and thoroughgoing indifference to same in the war-theorizing of its day, Allnut is among the
first to admit that American society is so internally divided over race , social class, and the Vietnam War that
nuclear catastrophe would only make such national disarray exponentially more unbearable . In agreement,
and writing yet another decade later, Arthur M. Katz makes the fitting summation: “ Ethnic, racial, regional, and economic
conflicts present in pre-attack society, while minimized in the period immediately after an attack, will
be heightened by the extent of the new deprivation and the resulting tensions after only a limited time.
New antagonisms will develop between hosts and evacuees or refugees over the possession and use of
surviving resources ” (240). Like the rats and roaches predicted to survive in profusion in the post-nuclear landscape, race hostility
will be dealt a temporary setback by the blast itself but burst forth with new vigor when the initial
shock and its accompanying brief shining moment of universal goodwill wear away . On several occasions
throughout this study, the cultural artifacts of the period will provide the implicit thesis that “it will take an
atom bomb” to bring the races together; here, America’s conflicting groups will be literally thrown
together on X-day but reestablish and intensify old animosities during the lingering crisis. Within scenarios
acknowledging the prospect of racial conflict lies often the implicit coincident acknowledgement that nuclear
attack would be less
the founding occasion for said conflict than the long-awaited opportunity for two historically polarized
social classes (i.e., the haves and have-nots marked variously by race and ethnicity) to slug it out to the
death . Smelser predicted that ethnic and religious groupings would give way to one core opposition—Â�between hosts and evacuees,
though he conceded that this “fundamental conflict . . . would be assimilated to several pre-attack bases of cleavage—Â�rural vs. urban, one
region vs. another, and one ethnic group vs. another” (253). And in a fictional account written by Nan Randall for the US Office of Technology
Assessment in 1979, “Blacks distrusted whites, the poor distrusted the rich and everyone distrusted the refugees as ‘outsiders’” (132) in the
weeks and months of continued deprivation (see also Katz 231–32). These authors raise the question whether race and ethnic division would
exacerbate or ultimately submit to the new source of conflict between hosts and evacuees or shelter survivors.

5. Nuclear “apocalypse” is neither a historical fact for Black people nor are nuclear
fears a mechanism to pave over quotidian violence of anti-Blackness.
Thompson 18 – (Nicole Akoukou Thompson. Chicago-based creative writer. 4-6-2018. "Why I will not
allow the fear of a nuclear attack to be white-washed." RaceBaitR.
http://racebaitr.com/2018/04/06/2087/#)

I couldn’t spare empathy for a white woman whose biggest fear was something that hadn’t happened yet
and might not. Meanwhile, my most significant fears were in motion : women and men dying in cells after
being wrongly imprisoned, choked out for peddling cigarettes, or shot to death during ‘routine’ traffic stops. I twitch when
my partner is late, worried that a cantankerous cop has brutalized or shot him because he wouldn’t prostrate himself. As a woman of
color, I am aware of the multiple types of violence that threaten me currently—not theoretically . Street
harassment , excessively affecting me as a Black woman, has blindsided me since I was eleven. A premature body meant being
catcalled before I’d discussed the birds and the bees. It meant being followed , whistled at , or groped . As an adult, while
navigating through neighborhoods with extinguished street lights, I noticed the correlation between women’s safety and street lighting—as
well as the fact that Black and brown neighborhoods were never as brightly lit as those with a more significant white population. I move quickly
through those unlit spaces, never comforted by the inevitable whirl of red and blue sirens. In fact, it’s always been the contrary. Ever so often,
cops approach me in their vehicle’s encouraging me to “Hurry along,” “Stay on the sidewalk,” or “Have a good night.” My spine stiffening, I
never believed they endorsed my safety. Instead, I worried that I’d be accused of an unnamed accusation, corned by a cop who preys on Black
women, or worse. A majority of my 50-minute bus ride from the southside of Chicago to the north to join these women for the birthday
celebration was spent reading articles about citywide shootings. I began with a Chicago Tribute piece titled “33 people shot, seven fatally, in 13
hours,” then toppled into a barrage of RIP posts on Facebook and ended with angry posts about police brutality on Tumblr. You might guess, by
the time I arrived to dinner I wasn’t in the mood for the “I can’t believe we’re all going to die because Trump is an idiot” shit. I shook my head,
willing the meal to be over, and was grateful when the check arrived just as someone was asking me about my hair. My thinking wasn’t all too
different from Michael Harriot’s ‘Why Black America Isn’t Worried About the Upcoming Nuclear Holocaust.” While the meal was partly
pleasant, I departed thinking, “fear of nuclear demolition is just some white shit .” Sadly, that thought would not last
long. I still vibe with Harriot’s statement, “Black people have lived under the specter of having our
existence erased on a white man’s whim since we stepped onto the shore at Jamestown Landing.” However, a
friend—a Black friend—ignited my nuclear paranoia by sharing theories about when it might happen and who faced the greatest threat. In an
attempt to ease my friend’s fear, I leaned in to listen but accidentally toppled down the rabbit hole too. I forked through curated news feeds. I
sifted through “fake news,” “actual news,” and foreign news sources. Suddenly, an idea took root: nuclear
strike would
disproportionately impact Black people , brown people , and low-income individuals . North Korea
won’t target the plain sight racists of Portland , Oregon, the violently microaggressive liberals of the rural
Northwest , or the white-hooded klansmen of Diamondhead, Mississippi . No, under the instruction of the
supreme leader Kim Jong-un, North Korea will likely strike densely populated urban areas , such as Los
Angeles, Chicago, Washington D.C., and New York City. These locations stand-out as targets for a nuclear strike because
they are densely populated U.S. population centers. Attacking the heart of the nation or populous cities would
translate to more casualties. With that in mind, it’s not lost on me that the most populous cities in the United States
boast sizeable diverse populations, or more plainly put: Black populations . This shit stresses me out! There’s a
creeping chill that follows me, a silent alarm that rings each time my Google alert chimes letting me know that Donald Trump has yet again
provoked Kim Jong-Un, a man who allegedly killed his very own uncle. I’ve grown so pressed by the idea of nuclear holocaust that my partner
and I started gathering non-perishables, candlesticks, a hand-crank radio, and other must-buy items that can be banked in a shopping cart.
The practice of preparing for a nuclear holocaust strike sometimes feels comical , particularly when
acknowledging that there has long been a war on Black people in this country. Blackness is bittersweet in flavor.
We are blessed with the melanized skin, the MacGyver-like inventiveness of our foremothers, and our blinding brightness—but the anti-
blackness that we experience is also blinding as well as stifling. We
are stuck by rigged systems, punished with the prison
industrial complex, housing discrimination, pay discrimination, and worse. We get side-eyes from
strangers when we’re “loitering,” and the police will pull us over for driving “too fast” in a residential neighborhood.
We get murdered for holding cell phones while standing in our grandmother’s backyard. The racism that strung up
our ancestors, kept them sequestered to the back of the bus and kept them in separate and unequal
schools still lives. It lives, and it’s more palpable than dormant. To me, this means one thing: Trump’s America
isn’t an unfortunate circumstance, it’s a homecoming event that’s hundreds of years in the making, no matter how
many times my white friends’ say, “He’s not my president.” In light of this homecoming, we now flirt
with a new, larger fear of a Black genocide . America has always worked towards Black eradication
through a steady stream of life-threatening inequality , but nuclear war on American soil would be
swift . And for this reason I’ve grown tired of whiteness being at the center of the nuclear conversation .
The race-neutral approach to the dialogue , and a tendency to continue to promote the idea that
missiles will land in suburban and rural backyards , instead of inner-city playgrounds, is false . “The Day
After,” the iconic, highest-rated television film in history, aired November 20, 1983. More than 100 million people tuned in to watch a film
postulating a war between the Soviet Union and the United States. The film, which would go on to affect President Ronald Reagan and
policymakers’ nuclear intentions, shows the “true effects of nuclear war on average American citizens.” The Soviet-targeted areas featured in
the film include Higginsville, Kansas City, Sedalia, Missouri, as well as El Dorado Springs, Missouri. They depict the destruction of the central
United States, and viewers watch as full-scale nuclear war transforms middle America into a burned wasteland. Yet unsurprisingly, the
devastation from the attack is completely white-washed , leaving out the more likely victims which are
the more densely populated (Black) areas . Death tolls would be high for white populations, yes, but
large-scale losses of Black and brown folks would outpace that number , due to placement and
poverty . That number would be pushed higher by limited access to premium health care , wealth , and
resources . The effects of radiation sickness, burns, compounded injuries, and malnutrition would
throttle Black and brown communities and would mark us for generations . It’s for that reason that we
have to do more to foster disaster preparedness among Black people where we can. Black people deserve
the space to explore nuclear unease , even if we have competing threats, anxieties, and worries . Jacqui
Patterson, Director of the Environmental and Climate Justice Initiative, once stated: African American communities are
disproportionately vulnerable to and impacted by natural (and unnatural) catastrophes. Our socio-
economic vulnerability is based on multiple factors including our lack of wealth to cushion us, our
disproportionate representation in lower quality housing stock, and our relative lack of mobility, etc.

6. Ethical nuclear decision-making requires the contemplation of futures.

Anthony Burke 16. School of Humanities and Social Sciences, UNSW. 01/02/2016. “Nuclear Time:
Temporal Metaphors of the Nuclear Present.” Critical Studies on Security, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 73–90.

How long, then, is nuclear time? In some accounts of the Anthropocene – an era in which the collective impact of human
industrialisation and life has such profound consequences for the planetary biosphere that it will be found in the geological record – its
emergence is dated from the Manhattan project’s Trinity test of July 1945 (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016, ch. 1). While we should
acknowledge that the Anthropocene has multiple points of emergence – of which the industrial revolution is the
most decisive – the global nuclear winter that was predicted as the certain outcome of nuclear war is one
potent example of the moral and physical enormity of humankind’s new power over the planet.
Thousands of atmospheric nuclear tests have left concentrations of strontium 90 in the bones of almost
every human being ; the radioactive wastes created by nuclear power stations will remain toxic to life for
hundreds of thousands of years ; and the radioactive and fissile materials from our nuclear weapons and testing stocks constitute a
diabolical challenge for safe storage and disposal, threatening human communities and ecosystems around the world. When to this we add
consideration of the abject trust we place in deterrence, and the ineradicability of nuclear knowledge, nuclear time seems inordinately long,
longer than homo sapiens has walked the earth. Martin Amis’s now famous line that ‘the
trouble with deterrence is that it can’t
last out the necessary timespan, which is roughly between now and the death of the sun ’ (1987, 16),
captures exactly the terrible duration of this kind of nuclear time. This kind of time demands an
extraordinary kind of strategic and moral responsibility : a temporally and structurally intertwined
responsibility , both for the past and for future generations of humans, animals, plants, forests and
fish .

Moral responsibility here faces both temporal stretching into an indefinite future , and temporal
reverberation from the complex interaction of decisions and processes taken in a past flowing ever
forward, as it perpetually takes over the now and affects what can be (Burke 2013, 23–24). As Stefanie Fishel argues
(2015, 132), half life is a form of physical memory that perseveres forwards: ‘plutonium… remembers for up 24,100 years’. There is a profound
challenge of collective common will and action here, of global coordination and commitment, that begins in the present and extends for the
next thousand years. Yet
the imagination of political time rarely extends beyond the next administration, and
the terribly fractured nature of international and (most domestic) political society makes such a
commitment seem illusory and quixotic . At the same time, scepticism of our nuclear responsibilities is
also an extraordinary and reckless form of denial . The nuclear Anthropocene is a brute ontic fact; it
cannot be wished away .

we are all in some way responsible , even if that responsibility is being failed (and some are more
In short,
responsible than others, because of their direct role or implication in the system and their greater ability
to contribute to beneficial change). It was, in part, this aspect of the nuclear predicament that spurred me to formulate the theory
of Security Cosmopolitanism, with its second ethical principle that ‘all states and security actors have fundamental responsibilities to future
generations and the long-term survival of global ecosystems: to consider the impact of their decisions, choices and commitments through time’
(Burke 2013, 22; Burke, Lee-Koo, and McDonald 2014, 17–18). Traditionally, cosmopolitanism expands responsibilities in space, to the global,
but not to the planet and not into extended time.

The globally distributed harms that are produced by the nuclear complex – harms that are not captured adequately by the nonproliferation
regime (Biswas 2014) – make a cosmopolitan ethics compelling in the nuclear space. However, in the same way that we must expand our
concept of responsibility spatially, to communities such as those in the Marshall Islands who have been left with the toxic legacy of nuclear
testing (Matheison 2015), we must extend responsibility temporally: into a future that will take in hundreds and thousands of future
generations in as many potential sites. The political theorist Iris Marion Young put such a principle forcefully in her book Responsibility for
Justice, where she developed a ‘social connection model’ of responsibility for collective and distributed forms of structural injustice (Young
2011). Security cosmopolitanism is similarly concerned with collective, systemic and distributed forms of insecurity that do not have a single
source or cause (Burke 2015). Young argues that our responsibility derives from ‘belonging together with others in a
system of interdependent processes of cooperation and competition through which we seek benefits and aim to realise
projects…All
who dwell within the structures must take responsibility for remedying injustices they
cause’. Importantly, she insists that the ‘primary emphasis’ of the social connection model ‘is forward-
looking. We seek to assign responsibility for structural social injustice that has existed recently, is
ongoing, and is likely to persist unless social processes change’ (Young 2011, 105). It is in an attempt to promote
such a responsibility that Security Cosmopolitanism insists on a ‘ global categorical imperative’ that
directs security actors to ‘act as if both the principles and consequences of [their] action will become
global , across space and through time, and [to] act only in ways that will bring a more secure life for all
human beings closer’ (Burke 2013, 23). This ethics can also support a notion of ‘worldly’ security that aims to
secure the ‘ worlds’ in which ‘ diverse forms of being’ coexist and interrelate , with the important proviso –
missing from Audra Mitchell’s (2014) statement of the theory – that our worlds must be secured through indefinite time.

Responsibility in time circles and reverberates between the past and future : we remember the Los Alamos
scientists who signed a petition asking for the weapons they were building not to be used against Japan ,
and who worried about the potential impact of atomic weapons on the future security of humanity; and we know that such
expressions of responsibility, with the memory of our Cold War failures all too vivid, can in turn drive us
forward , to renewed efforts to compensate and support communities subject to myriad nuclear harms,
to end the production of fissile material and eliminate existing stocks , and to reduce and then
eliminate the threat that nuclear weapons pose to the planet. There is no circumstance under
which we can assume that we have a right to burden future generations with the same level
of fear and toxicity that postwar communities have had to endure . It is this vertiginous but
inescapable responsibility that is failed by strategic time, by deterrence time, by the times of progress
or recurrence . In sum, our dominant metaphors of nuclear time fail the true span and horror of nuclear
time . If tomorrow is to be survived, abolition must be our task today.
A true kritik of Euro-centrism must acknowledge the power of the Global South to aim
for a non-nuclear world.
Sizwe MPOFU-WALSH PhD IR @ Oxford, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wits Institute for Social and
Economic Research ’22 “Obedient rebellion: conceiving the African nuclear weapon-free zone”
International Affairs 98 (1) pp. 145-163
NWFZs epitomize the tensions which stabilize nuclear order: between sovereign equality and nuclear
inequality; between local solidarities and global loyalties; and between contestation and compromise. At
first, these tensions seem to imperil NWFZs; but in fact, they stabilize them. To newly decolonizing
African states, the African NWFZ symbolized both postcolonial anti-nuclear solidarity and nuclear
responsibility; it represented both ‘obedience’ to and ‘rebellion’ against global nuclear order. This
ambivalence between ‘obedience’ and ‘rebellion’ paradoxically accommodated multiple, conflicting
audiences simultaneously. The African zone's ambiguous meanings made it viable, even though those
meanings conflicted. This conclusion is supported by evidence from the early conception of the African
NWFZ, in which African states and leaders conceptualized the zone as both a symbol of anti-imperialist
policy and a chance for global nuclear citizenship within established institutions like the UN.

This conclusion also holds implications for IR theory. It proposes Africa as a source of theory,
challenging the assumption that events in the North map onto the South , but not the reverse. On the
contrary, it inverts traditional theoretical metanarratives along the lines of Comaroff and Comaroff:

What if we posit that, in the present moment, it is the so-called ‘South’ that affords privileged insight
into the workings of the world at large? That it is from here that our empirical grasp of its lineaments,
and our theory-work in accounting for them, ought to be coming, at least in major part?94

Accepting this inversion comes with an explanatory burden, as Acharya observes:

Scholars from the South should not just confine their research agenda to the traditional signature
issues for the South—underdevelopment, development, race, and internal conflicts—but also get
engaged with all the big issues and debates in IR, including climate change, security, and global
governance.95

Abandoning Eurocentric or racialized theoretical assumptions should, after all, ultimately expand the
explanatory canvas of the overall discipline of IR.

This article foregrounds Africa in explaining nuclear non-proliferation. In doing so, I reject the dominant
view in the subfield that ‘ major states are the major actors’ around which ‘the structure of
international politics is defined’ .96 Instead, I claim that understanding nuclear order requires
engagement with Africa; appreciating Africa's contributions to nuclear order is not merely useful—it is
essential. Through the African NWFZ, I exemplify the insights available to the wider discipline by
foregrounding the global South in theory-building, particularly in the realm of nuclear security and the
subfield of NWFZ studies.

Finally, this work builds on research linking decolonization with denuclearization . In official histories of
nuclear weapons, the story of decolonization often plays a peripheral role, as the ambitions of colonial
powers and NWS take centre stage.97 On the contrary, I argue here that African decolonization
reorientated the trajectory of the nuclear order and contributed significantly to the non-proliferation of
nuclear weapons. As the UN Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs between 1998 and 2003,
Jayantha Dhanapala, observes:

The non-aligned, true nuclear-weapon-free zones have long demonstrated that they have rejected
nuclear weapons. It did not take the NPT … to realize that it was not in our interest to have nuclear
weapons, so our rejection of nuclear weapons predates the NPT.98
2NC
 T
That draws upon a rich history of Black anti-nuclear activism arguing for disarmament.
Raeghn Draper 22. “Black Excellence in Nuclear Activism.” Beyond the Bomb. Jun. 15, 2022.
https://beyondthebomb.org/black-excellence-in-nuclear-activism/.

When I first applied to work with Beyond the Bomb back in the summer of 2019 I was unsure of my place
organizing around nuclear weapons as a Black woman. Like many things in American culture, to find a representation of
yourself as a non-white person can be challenging. The nuclear field sadly is no exception. A quick Google search of terms and images common
in this field will showcase an abundance of nuclear plants and white faces — mostly white male faces. I did not see a place for myself in nuclear
activism andI didn’t want to be the only Black person who cared about these issues. Fortunately, I’m not .
There is a rich history of Black people advocating for nuclear policy, disinvestment from the military,
peace, nuclear disarmament , and more. I just had to find them. Here are a few. Coretta Scott King A devoted
pacifist, civil rights leader, and activist, Coretta influenced her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s, views on
nuclear weapons and war. She worked closely with groups like Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the
National Committee for Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), and Women Strike for Peace (WSP). Reported on May 21st, 1962 in the Chicago Defender,
Mrs. King said, “It is of vital importance that we solve world tensions and bring about understanding between nations. If we fail in this,
then the world is lost and our efforts in race relations will have been in vain … We are on the brink of
destroying ourselves through nuclear warfare.” She explained that her statement was the reason she attended the 17-nation
Disarmament Conference in Geneva in 1962. Lorraine Hansberry A personal favorite of mine, Lorraine Hansberry was a playwright
who used her skills to vocalize her disdain for nuclear bombs and their use as weapons of mass destruction. Throughout
her life, she linked freedom to anti-colonialism, nuclear disarmament, and antiracism . Her last two bodies of work
were plays that focused on antinuclear topics, What Use Are Flowers?, and anti-colonialism, Les Blancs. She is truly an inspiration in
how our art can be political. Erna Harris A member of the Women’s International League for Peace and
Freedom (WILPF), Erna Harris’s life was spent championing for equality. In 1964, she was among twelve women
selected from the U.S. to participate in the Soviet-American Women’s Conference in Moscow which focused
on universal nuclear disarmament , relaxing international tensions, and the role of the United Nations. Harris’s life was dedicated
to working with peace and civil rights organizations. Martin Luther King Jr. World renowned activist and minister Martin Luther King Jr. was
most famous for his involvement with the civil rights movement and his “I Have A Dream” speech. His work, however, did incorporate
nuclear injustice. In 1961, King told a journalist, “I am a strong believer in disarmament and suspension of nuclear
weapons.” Standing behind these values, he became involved with the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) in March of 1958.
Founded by pacifists and anti-nuclear activists, the organization quickly became a leader in the struggle for nuclear disarmament. Showing his
support, Dr. King signed many letters, petitions, advertisements, and brochures from the group. Walter
White Leader of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1929-1955, Walter White was vocal about his opposition to
nuclear weapons. In the September 8th, 1945 issue of the Chicago Defender he wrote, “the most terrible weapon of them all, the atomic
bomb” and “the occidental western world may have loosed a mechanistic genii from the bottle which it may soon wish it could reimprison to
save itself from destruction”. Walter White was recruited to the National Committee for Civil Control of Atomic
Energy and was invited to a meeting with the National Committee on Atomic Information. Under his
leadership, the NAACP protested atomic bombings. These are just a few examples of Black people who used their
voices and dedicated their lives to nuclear disarmament and peace. The nuclear field may be one that is overflowing with
white faces and I might not see a surplus of people who look like me plastered over the related Google images, but we are here
and always have been . Nuclear issues disproportionately impact people of marginalized communities.
Our voices are needed if we want to best protect ourselves. Our interests and survival cannot be left in
the hands of those who do not look like us and understand our communities’ particular needs . Black
people have cared about these issues and will continue to lead in advocating for nuclear disarmament,
demilitarization, decolonization,
and peace. I am proud to stand behind the rich history of my ancestors and
call for an end to all nuclear weapons.
 Case
A true kritik of Euro-centrism must acknowledge the power of the Global South to aim
for a non-nuclear world.
Sizwe MPOFU-WALSH PhD IR @ Oxford, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wits Institute for Social and
Economic Research ’22 “Obedient rebellion: conceiving the African nuclear weapon-free zone”
International Affairs 98 (1) pp. 145-163

NWFZs epitomize the tensions which stabilize nuclear order: between sovereign equality and nuclear
inequality; between local solidarities and global loyalties; and between contestation and compromise. At
first, these tensions seem to imperil NWFZs; but in fact, they stabilize them. To newly decolonizing
African states, the African NWFZ symbolized both postcolonial anti-nuclear solidarity and nuclear
responsibility; it represented both ‘obedience’ to and ‘rebellion’ against global nuclear order. This
ambivalence between ‘obedience’ and ‘rebellion’ paradoxically accommodated multiple, conflicting
audiences simultaneously. The African zone's ambiguous meanings made it viable, even though those
meanings conflicted. This conclusion is supported by evidence from the early conception of the African
NWFZ, in which African states and leaders conceptualized the zone as both a symbol of anti-imperialist
policy and a chance for global nuclear citizenship within established institutions like the UN.

This conclusion also holds implications for IR theory. It proposes Africa as a source of theory,
challenging the assumption that events in the North map onto the South , but not the reverse. On the
contrary, it inverts traditional theoretical metanarratives along the lines of Comaroff and Comaroff:

What if we posit that, in the present moment, it is the so-called ‘South’ that affords privileged insight
into the workings of the world at large? That it is from here that our empirical grasp of its lineaments,
and our theory-work in accounting for them, ought to be coming, at least in major part?94

Accepting this inversion comes with an explanatory burden, as Acharya observes:

Scholars from the South should not just confine their research agenda to the traditional signature
issues for the South—underdevelopment, development, race, and internal conflicts—but also get
engaged with all the big issues and debates in IR, including climate change, security, and global
governance.95

Abandoning Eurocentric or racialized theoretical assumptions should, after all, ultimately expand the
explanatory canvas of the overall discipline of IR.

This article foregrounds Africa in explaining nuclear non-proliferation. In doing so, I reject the dominant
view in the subfield that ‘ major states are the major actors’ around which ‘the structure of
international politics is defined’ .96 Instead, I claim that understanding nuclear order requires
engagement with Africa; appreciating Africa's contributions to nuclear order is not merely useful—it is
essential. Through the African NWFZ, I exemplify the insights available to the wider discipline by
foregrounding the global South in theory-building, particularly in the realm of nuclear security and the
subfield of NWFZ studies.
Finally, this work builds on research linking decolonization with denuclearization . In official histories of
nuclear weapons, the story of decolonization often plays a peripheral role, as the ambitions of colonial
powers and NWS take centre stage.97 On the contrary, I argue here that African decolonization
reorientated the trajectory of the nuclear order and contributed significantly to the non-proliferation of
nuclear weapons. As the UN Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs between 1998 and 2003,
Jayantha Dhanapala, observes:

The non-aligned, true nuclear-weapon-free zones have long demonstrated that they have rejected
nuclear weapons. It did not take the NPT … to realize that it was not in our interest to have nuclear
weapons, so our rejection of nuclear weapons predates the NPT.98
1NR
 K
1. Arguments to the contrary are a trick of the colonial archive.
Lisa LOWE Distinguished Professor of English and Humanities, a faculty member of the Consortium of
Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora, and Director of the Center for the Humanities at Tufts
University ’15 The Intimacies of Four Continents p. 34-39

I wish to emphasize, finally, an emergent meaning of the "intimacies of four continents:' An

emergent social or cultural formation
does not necessarily require completely "new" subjectivities or constituencies but can comprise elements of
residual ongoing conditions like settler colonialism , colonial slavery , and trade , yet rearticulated in
other ways through new practices . In this sense, we could consider one emergent formation of the
intimacies of four continents as the variety of contacts among slaves, indentured, and mixed peoples
living , working , and surviving together in the Americas. In the British colonial archive , such intimacies
between contracted emigrants, indigenous people, slaves, and slave-descendant peoples are referenced
by negative means , in cautionary rhetorics and statements of prohibition with respect to possible
contacts between colonized groups, all implying the fear and anxiety of racial proximity in a context of
mixture and unstable boundaries. For example, White's 1851 letter to the Governor of British Guiana warned: "The Chinese are
essentially a social and a gregarious people and must be located in masses together, not scattered throughout the colony. They must be kept in
the first instance distant and separate from the Negroes, not only at their work, but also in their dwellings:'110

The repeated injunctions that different groups must be divided and boundaries kept distinct indicate
that colonial administrators imagined as dangerous the sexual, laboring, and intellectual contacts
among enslaved and indentured nonwhite peoples. The racial classifications in the archive arise, thus, in
this context of the colonial need to prevent these unspoken "intimacies" among the colonized . m Reading
the archive, one notes explicit descriptions and enumerations, as well as the rhetorical peculiarities of the documents, the places where
particular figures, tropes, or circumlocutions are repeated to cover gaps or tensions; these rhetorical ellipses point to illogic in the archive, as
well. So, while this emergent sense of intimacies-the varieties of contacts between laboring peoples-is not explicitly named in the documents, it
is, paradoxically, everywhere present in the archive in the presence of such detours. This emergent idea of "intimacies;' then, can be said to
include the range of laboring contacts that are necessary for the production of bourgeois domesticity, as well as the intimacies of captured
workers surviving together, the proximity and affinity that gives rise to political , sexual , intellectual
collaborations , subaltern revolts and uprisings , such as the Haitian Revolution , the Louisiana cane
workers strike of 1887 , or the cross-racial alliances that underlay the Cuban struggles for
independence in 1895-98.'12

These imminent , potential alliances among subjugated people are referenced negatively in policies
and prohibitions against contacts, and are legible as apprehension and anxiety in the unwritten, blank
spaces of the colonial archive. These alliances appear later, in the work of twentiethcentury anticolonial and antislavery thinkers
such as Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Walter Rodney, Fernando Ortiz, Cedric Robinson, Sylvia Wynter, and others, who
allude to connections between slavery-based settler colonies, Chinese and Indian labor, and the prosperity of Europe. Douglass, for example,
linked African slavery to a global system that used Chinese and Indian "coolie" labor and wrote in 1871: "the rights of the coolie in California, in
Peru, in Jamaica, in Trinidad, and on board the vessels bearing them to these countries are scarcely more guarded than were those of the Negro
slaves brought to our shores a century ago:' 113 Du Bois described "that dark and vast sea of human labor in China and India, the South Seas
and all Africa, in the West Indies and Central America and in the United States" and called for "the emancipation of that basic majority of
workers who are yellow, brown, and black:'114 In his history of the colonial division of labor in Guyana that separated Blacks and Asians and
permitted the postemandpation exploitation of those divisions, Walter Rodney imagined the " definite historical
achievement " that would have been possible if Black and Asian workers, the descendants of slaves and
indentured laborers, could have forged solidarity across the residues of colonial division .U5 These
" flashes " of the intimacies of four continents critically frame the more restricted dominant meaning of
intimacy as the interiority and private property of the European and North American individual.

1. Imperial violence and aesthetic colonization.

Samatar, PhD, 17
(Sofia, English@JamesMadison, Toward a Planetary History of Afrofuturism Research in African Literatures , Vol. 48, No. 4, Ken Saro-Wiwa as
Public

Intellectual (Winter 2017), pp. 175-191

Contemporary black speculative narratives make similar demands. Nnedi Okorafor’s fantasy Zahrah the Windseeker, for example, draws on
myths of people who could fly in both African American and Igbo traditions. The films of Kibwe Tavares include both Robots of Brixton (2011), a
science-fictional reimagining of the Brixton riots, and Jonah (2013), a fantastical critique of the tourist industry in Tanzania. The notion of a Pan-
African mode of futurism and speculation would go further in addressing the works of these artists than an approach limited by geopolitical
borders. Yet there
is a legitimate hesitation on the part of artists who consider their work African science fiction
to embrace the idea of Afrofuturism : the fear of a loss of cultural and historical specificity , or, as Tade
Thompson puts it, “the erasure of the African for the African-American when the history is being told.”
This is a fear of intellectual and aesthetic colonization by the West and the type of leveling globalization
Paul Gilroy describes using science-fictional imagery: the “great danger in humanity’s being recast as a legion of
clones ” (Postcolonial Melancholia 62). Yet Gilroy offers an alternative way of regarding large-scale social phenomena. He
prefers the term “planetarity” to globalization because it “suggests both contingency and movement” and
“specifies a smaller scale than the global, which transmits all the triumphalism and complacency of
ever-expanding imperial universals” (xv). Gayatri Spivak makes a similar move, using planetarity as a way of
returning small-scale lived experience to the domain of large-scale thinking : The globe is on our computers. No one
lives there. It allows us to think that we can aim to control it. The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another
system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan. (72) Spivak’s use of “planet” links the “inhabited” and experienced
human context with the alterity of a nonhuman system. The planet stands in contrast to the globe in that it is
experienced through the senses, physically inhabited; yet because each body experiences only a part of the planet, the world as
planet resists being known and captured in the way we map the globe. Planetarity indicates an emphasis on local ways of
imagining and navigating world space. It offers an approach to the departures and returns of Gerima’s
Sankofa that resists “e rasing the African ” and insists that a lived space such as the Cape Coast Castle is
irreducible to a dot on a map. The notion of planetarity invokes Planet Earth in a way that suits discussions
of science fiction; it may also serve as a way of conceptualizing the Pan-African flows and loops of
Afrofuturism not as a form of US imperial domination but as a “[c]osmopolitan solidarity from below
and afar” (Gilroy, Postcolonial 80).

1. We should debate about the relative desirability of Afrofuturism, NOT trust them
that “theirs is different.”
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor 16, assistant professor in Princeton University's Center for African American
Studies, Ch. 7 in From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, p. 211-216

Far and away, African Americans suffer most from the blunt force trauma of the American criminal justice
system, but the pervasive character of law-and-order politics means that whites get caught up in its web
as well. African Americans are imprisoned at an absurd rate of 2,300 for every 100,000 Black people. White people, on the other hand, are
incarcerated at a rate of 450 people per 100,000. The difference speaks directly to the racial disparities that define
American criminal justice, but it is worth noting that the rate at which white people in the U nited S tates are
incarcerated is still higher than the incarceration rates of almost every other country in the world .33 It’s
also unquestionable that Blacks and Latino/as experience death at the hands of police at much greater
rates than whites, but thousands of white people have also been murdered by the police. This does not
mean the experiences of whites and people of color are equal, but there is a basis for solidarity among
white and nonwhite working-class people.

This more complicated picture of the material reality of white working-class life is not intended to diminish the extent to which ordinary whites
buy into or accept racist ideas about Blacks. It is also true that, by every social measure, whites do better than African Americans on average,
tchabut that does not say much about who benefits from the inequality of our society. For example, in a country with four hundred billionaires,
what does it mean that 43 percent of white households make only between $10,000 and $49,000 a year?34 Of course, an even larger number
of Black people make this pitiful amount—65 percent—but when we only compare the average incomes of working-class Blacks and whites, we
miss the much more dramatic disparity between the wealthiest and everyone else.

If it isn’t in the interest of ordinary whites to be racist, why do they accept racist ideas? First, the same question could be asked of any group of
workers. Why do men accept sexist ideas? Why do many Black workers accept racist anti-immigrant rhetoric? Why do many Black Caribbean
and African immigrant workers think that Black Americans are lazy? Why do most American workers of all ethnicities accept racist ideas about
Arabs and Muslims? In short, if most people agree that it would be in the interest of any group of workers to be more united than divided, then
why do workers hold reactionary ideas that are an obstacle to unity?

There are two primary reasons: competition and the prevalence of ruling-class ideology. Capitalism creates false scarcity, the perception that
need outstrips resources. When billions are spent on war, police-brutality settlements, and publicly subsidized sports stadiums, there never
seems to be a shortage of money. But when it comes to schools, housing, food, and other basic necessities, politicians always complain about
deficits and the need to curb spending and cut budgets. The scarcity is manufactured, but the competition over these resources is real. People
who are forced to fight over basic necessities are often willing to believe the worst about other workers to justify why they should have
something while others should not.

The prevailing ideology in a given society consists of the ideas that influence how we understand the world and help us make sense of our lives
—through news, entertainment, education, and more. The political and economic elite shape the ideological world we all live in, to their
benefit. We live in a thoroughly racist society, so it should not be surprising that people have racist ideas. The more important question is under
what circumstances those ideas can change. There is a clash between the prevailing ideology in society and people’s lived experience. The
media may inundate the public with constant images and news stories that describe Blacks as criminals or on welfare, but an individual’s
experience with Blacks at work may completely contradict the stereotype—hence the insistence from many whites that they are not racist
because they “know Black people.” It can be true in that person’s mind. People’s consciousness can change and can even contradict itself.

This is also true for African Americans, who can harbor racist ideas about other Black people while simultaneously holding antiracist ideas. After
all, Black people also live in this racist society and are equally inundated with racist stereotypes. The development of consciousness is never
linear—it is constantly fluctuating between adhering to ideas that fit a “common sense” conception of society and being destabilized by real-life
events that upend “common sense.” The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci explains the phenomenon of mixed consciousness this way:

The active man-in-the-mass has a practical activity but has no clear theoretical consciousness of his practical activity which nonetheless involves
understanding the world in so far as it transforms it. His theoretical consciousness can . . . be historically in opposition to his activity. One might
almost say that he has two theoretical consciousness[es] (or one contradictory consciousness): one which is implicit in his activity and which in
reality unites him with all fellow workers in the practical transformation of the real world; and one superficially explicit or verbal, which he has
inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed. The person is strangely composite: it contains Stone Age elements and principles of a more
advanced science, prejudices of all past phases of history at the local level and intuitions of a future philosophy which will be that of a human
race united the world over.35

Whether or not a group of workers has reactionary, mixed, or even revolutionary consciousness does not change its objective status as
exploited and oppressed labor. The achievement of consciousness is the difference between the working class being a class in itself as opposed
to a class for itself. It affects whether or not workers are in a position to fundamentally alter their reality through collective action. As one writer
observed, “Only a collective can develop a systematic alternative world view, can overcome to some degree the alienation of manual and
mental work that imposes on everyone, on workers and intellectuals alike, a partial and fragmented view of reality.”36

Just because white workers, to take a specific example, may at times fully accept reactionary ideas about African Americans does not change
the majority of the US poor are white, the majority of people without health insurance
the objective fact that
are white, and the majority of the homeless are white. It is true that Blacks and Latino/as are
disproportionately affected by the country’s harsh economic order, but this is a reality they share with the majority of white
workers. The common experience of oppression and exploitation creates the potential for a united
struggle to better the conditions of all. This is obviously not an automatic process, nor is it a given that
essentially economic struggles will translate to support or struggle for the political rights of Blacks to be free of discrimination and racism.
Political unity, including winning white workers to the centrality of racism in shaping the lived experiences of Black and Latino/a workers, is key
to their own liberation.

Tim Wise’s observations reduce these real issues to an abstract accusation of “privileging” class over race. But
our movement has to have theoretical, political, and strategic clarity to confront challenges in the real world.
When, in 2012, Chicago’s Black public school CEO Barbara Byrd Bennett was scheming with mayor Rahm Emanuel
to close more than fifty schools located exclusively in Black and Latino/a neighborhoods, should Black teachers,
students, and parents have united with Bennett , who has certainly experienced racism and sexism in her life and career, but
who was also leading the charge to undo public education in Chicago? Or should they have united with the thousands of white
teachers in Chicago schools and the v ice p resident of the C hicago T eachers U nion, a white, heterosexual man, to
build the movement to save public education in the city?

Probably very few people in history have had as much racist invective directed at them as Barack Obama has—hating him is basically
shorthand for racism now. But he has also championed policies that absolved
the banks and Wall Street of any responsibility for crashing
the economy; as a result, since 2007 ten million people have been displaced from more than four million homes by the
foreclosure crisis.37 Should Black workers put that aside and unite with Obama out of racial solidarity and a
shared “lived experience,” or should they unite with ordinary whites and Latino/as who have also lost their homes
to challenge a political program that regularly defends business interests to the detriment of all working-class and poor
people? In the abstract, perhaps these are complicated questions. But in the daily struggles to defend public education,

fight for real healthcare reform, or stop predatory foreclosures, these are the concrete questions every
movement faces .

The “blind spot” of class within the framework of people like Tim Wise not only leaves them incapable of explaining
class division among the oppressed , it also underemphasizes the material foundation for solidarity and
unity within the working class. Instead, the concepts of solidarity and unity are reduced to whether or not
one chooses to be an “ally.” There’s nothing wrong with being an ally, but it doesn’t quite capture the degree to
which Black and white workers are inextricably linked . It’s not as if white workers can simply choose not
to “ally” with Black workers to no peril of their own. The scale of attack on the living standards of the working class is

overwhelming. There is a systematic , bipartisan effort to dismantle the already anemic welfare state. When, in
2013, $5 billion cut was cut from food stamps, it had a direct and deleterious impact on the lives of tens
of millions of white working-class people .

In this context, solidarity is not just an option ; it is crucial to workers’ ability to resist the constant
degradation of their living standards. Solidarity is only possible through relentless struggle to win white workers to antiracism, to
expose the lie that Black workers are worse off because they somehow choose to be, and to win the white working class to the understanding
that, unless they struggle, they too will continue to live lives of poverty and frustration, even if those lives are somewhat better than the lives
Success or failure are contingent on whether or not working people see themselves as
led by Black workers.
brothers and sisters whose liberation is inextricably bound together .

Solidarity is standing in unity with people even when you have not personally experienced their particular oppression, The reality is that as
long as capitalism exists, material and ideological pressures push white workers to be racist and all workers to
hold each other in general suspicion. But there are moments of struggle when the mutual interests of workers are
laid bare, and when the suspicion is finally turned in the other direction—at the plutocrats who live well while
the rest of us suffer. The key question is whether or not in those moments of struggle a coherent political
analysis of society, oppression, and exploitation can be articulated that makes sense of the world we live in, but that
also champions the vision of a different kind of society—and a way to get there .

2. Black women’s labor is embroiled in struggle — racial capitalism must be the

starting point for subaltern pathways to repoliticize the domestic
Vasudevan, PhD, ’20 [Pavithra, Professor in Department of African & African Diaspora Studies and
the Center for Women’s & Gender Studies @Texas, PhD in Geography @UNC, and Sara Smith, Professor
of Geography @UNC, PhD in Geography @Arizona, “The domestic geopolitics of racial capitalism,”
Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space: Politics and Space, 2020: 2399654420901567, p. 1-20,
DFU | AS]
Everyday struggles of body, home, life

Feminist geopolitics reveals the domestic as a geopolitical arena : states produce insecurity for
marginalized populations by targeting everyday life, and communities enduring conflict restructure intimacy, kin, and care
to sustain home (Clark, 2016; Fregones, in Rokem et al., 2017). However, domestic space is sharply differentiated by internal colonialism’s
racialized territorialities. Poor Indigenous women and women of color living in toxic landscapes are additionally
burdened in every aspect of social reproduction —from childbearing, to elder and childcare, to the provision of safe food and
water, to the maintenance of social relations (Di Chiro, 2008/1965; LaDuke, 2015/1999). We argue that this social reproductive labor
is geopolitical , drawing inspiration from scholars who attend to labor, socialization, and racial violence particular to Black women’s
experiences, to redress the erasure of Black women from historiographies of political struggle (Farmer, 2017; McCutcheon, 2019; McGuire,
2010).

The hearth of the US racial empire , maintained by Black women’s racialized, classed, and gendered
labor, is embroiled in a history of struggle . In the efforts of enslaved women who “judged the plantation a
viable site from which to wage war and engage in the process of emancipation ” (Glymph, 2013: 492), and in the organizing
campaigns of waged household workers (Nadasen, 2015), we trace a lineage of racialized oppression and
resistance that calls for repoliticizing the domestic . For Black women, exploited to reproduce empire, the domestic
signifies a parallel space of struggle, that of nurturing their own homes, families, and communities amidst the violence of internal colonialism
(Davis, 1972). In the early 20th century, following mass migration to the North, Black
women’s clubs organized neighborhood
campaigns to address unsafe living conditions in overcrowded cities (Mann, 2011). This eco-feminist lineage
persists in contemporary environmental justice, concerned with “the survivability of individual bodies, particular communities,
national cultures, and the earth itself” (Di Chiro, 2008: 280). In sustaining sociality and personhood in excess of the demands of imperial
reproduction, Black
women have ensured the persistence of “ remaindered life ,” that is, “ subaltern pathways
of social and self-formation that remain beneath the threshold of visibility of raced subjects” (Tadiar, 2015: 156).

Roberta’s history of fighting racial capitalism are a starting point to consider how feminist political
geography and environmental justice scholarship might be strengthened by engaging with Black
feminist theorizations of the domestic. We argue that Black social reproductive practices constitute an
embodied form of geopolitical praxis , an unacknowledged engagement with the imperial state’s
necropolitical governance of Black life (Smith, 2016). We identify three categories of labor as strategies of
domestic geopolitics. The labor of keeping wake refers to practices of caring for, attending to, and registering deaths in the
community, a secular ritual of valuing lives in death that are sacrificed in life (Sharpe, 2016). The labor of tactical
expertise addresses how racialized people, living with double consciousness (Du Bois, 2008; Fanon, 2008/1967), must
translate the lived experience of racial violence into scientific and legal discourses legible to the state. The labor
of revolutionary mothering (Gumbs et al., 2016; James, 1997) describes the responsibility of nurturing communal life in
the face of persistent death as a creative force of worldmaking. In the next sections, we describe the context of everyday life in Badin and
Flint, abandoned as surplus populations by a state intent on facilitating racial capitalism, followed with a discussion of the labors that constitute
domestic geopolitics’ challenge to the racial state.

1. The claim that Black people are “in but not of” modernity is wrong. It merely
inverts the progress narrative.
Gordon ’21 [Lewis; Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy @ University of Connecticut,
Storrs; Honorary Professor in the Unit for Humanities @ Rhodes University, South Africa, and
Chairperson of the Awards Committee @ Caribbean Philosophical Association; “Thoughts on
Afropessimism” in Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization, p. 75-81]

The first is that ‘‘an antiblack world’’ is not identical with ‘‘the world is antiblack.’’ My argument is
that such a world is an antiblack racist project. It is not the historical achievement of such. Its limitations
emerge from a basic fact. Black people and other opponents of such a project fought, and continue to fight against it. The
same argument applies to the argument about social death. Such an achievement would have rendered even those
authors’ and the reflections I am offering here stillborn. The basic premises of the antiblack world and social death
arguments, are, then locked in performative contradictions. Yet, they have rhetorical force. This is evident through the continued growth of its
proponents, literature, and forums devoted to it, in which all lay claim to stillborn status.

In Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, I argued that there are forms of antiblack racism that are also offered under the guise of love. I was writing
about whites who exoticize blacks while offering themselves as white sources of black salvation. It was a response to those who regard racism
exclusively as acts of demonization. There are also racist forms of valorization. Analyzed in terms of bad faith, where one lies to oneself in an
attempt to flee displeasing truths for pleasing falsehoods, exoticists romanticize blacks while affirming white normativity and themselves as
principals of reality. These ironic, performative contradictions are features of all forms of racism, where one group is elevated to godlike status
and another is pushed below that of human despite both claiming to be human.

Antiblack racism offers whites self-other relations (necessary for ethics) with each other but not so for groups forced in a ‘‘zone of nonbeing’’
below them. Although to be outside is not necessarily to be below, it is so in a system of hierarchy in which above is also interpreted as being
within. There is asymmetry where whites and any designated racially superior group stand as others who look downward to those who are not
their others or their analogs. Antiblack racism is thus not a problem of blacks being ‘‘others.’’ It’s a problem of their not-being-analogical-selves-
and-not-even being-others.

Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), reminds us that Blacks among each other live in a world of selves and others.
It is in attempted relations with whites under circumstances where whites control the conditions that these problems of dehumanization and
subordination occur. Reason in such contexts, as he observes, has a bad habit of walking out when Blacks enter. What are Blacks to do? As
reason cannot be forced to recognize Blacks because that would be “violence,” they must ironically reason reasonably with such forms of
unreasonable reason. Contradictions loom. Racism is, given these arguments, a project of imposing non-relations as the model of dealing with
people designated ‘‘black.’’

In The Damend of the Earth, Fanon goes further and argues that colonialism is an attempt to impose a
Manichean structure of contraries instead of a dialectical one of ongoing, human negotiation of
contradictions . The former segregates the groups; the latter is produced from interaction. The police , he
observes, is the primary mediator between the two models, as their role is the use of force/violence to maintain
contraries instead of the human, discursive one of politics and civility requiring the elimination of separation through
the interactive, ultimately intimate, dynamics of communication. Such societies draw legitimacy from Black non-existence or invisibility.
Black appearance, in other words, would be a violation of those systems. Think of the continued blight of police, extra-judicial killings
 The ongoing model of fascist white rule as the daily condition of blacks is to
of blacks and Blacks in those countries.
prevent the emergency of Blacks.

An immediate observation of many postcolonies is that antiblack attitudes, practices, and institutions are not exclusively white.
Black antiblack dispositions make this clear. In addition to black antiblackness taking the form of white hatred of black people, there is also the
adoption of black exoticism. Where this exists, blacks simultaneously receive black love alongside black rejection of agency . Many
problems follow. The absence of agency bars maturation, which would reinforce the racial logic of Blacks as in
effect wards of whites . Without agency, ethics, liberation, maturation, politics, and responsibility could
not be possible. This is because blacks would not actually be able to do anything outside of the sphere
of white approbation and commands.

Afropessimism endorses the previous set of observations, but this agreement is supported by a hidden
premise of white agency versus black and Black incapacity. They make much of Fanon’s remark that
“the Black has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white.” Fanon’s rhetorical flare led many
unfortunate souls to misread this remark . As he had already argued that racism is a socially produced phenomenon,
his point was that those who produced it take it to be ontological. In other words, such people – in this case whites –

do not take seriously that blacks have any ontological resistance to white points of view. Fanon was not arguing that blacks are
ontologically beings, or even nonbeings , of that kind. If this were so, he would not have pointed out , in
numerous sections of that book, black and Black experiences with each other. The whole point of the chapter in which that remark is made,
“ The Lived-Experience of the Black ,” is to explore blacks’ and Blacks’ points of view. This is a patent rejection of ontological status
while pointing to the presumed ontological status of a skewed perspective.

Proponents of Afropessimism might respond that their position on white agency and black incapacity comes from Fanon’s famous remark that
though whites created le Negre – the French term for, depending on the context, “negro,” “nigger,” and “black” – it was les Negres who
created Negritude. Whites clearly did not create Afropessimism, which Black liberationists should, in agreement celebrate. We
should
avoid the fallacy, however, of confusing source with outcome. History is not short of bad ideas from
good or well-intentioned people. If intrinsically good, each person of African descent would become ethically and epistemologically
a switching of the Manichean contraries, which means only changing players instead of the racist game. We come, then, to the crux of the
matter. If the goal of Afropessimism is Afropessimism, its achievement would be attitudinal and, in the language of old, stoic – in short, a
symptom of antiblack society.

At this point, there are several observations that follow. The first is a diagnosis of the implications of Afropessimism as symptom. The second
examines the epistemological implications of Afropessimism. The third is whether a disposition counts as a political act and, if so, is it sufficient
for its avowed aims. There are more, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll simply focus on these.

An ironic dimension of pessimism is that it is the other side of optimism. Oddly enough, both are connected
to nihilism, which is, as Nietzsche showed, a decline of values during periods of social decay. It emerges when people no longer want to be
responsible for their actions. The same problem surfaces in movements. When one such as the Black Liberation movement is suffering from
decay, nihilism is symptomatic. Familiar tropes follow. Optimists expect intervention from beyond . Pessimists declare
relief is not forthcoming. Neither takes responsibility for what is valued. The valuing is what leads to the second, epistemic
point. The presumption that what is at stake is what can be known to determine what can be done is the problem. If such knowledge were
possible, the debate would be about who is reading the evidence correctly. Such judgment would be a priori – that is, prior to events actually
unfolding. The future, unlike transcendental conditions such as language , signs , and reality , is ex post
facto; ot is yet to come . Facing the future, the question isn’t what will be or how do we know what will be but instead the realization
that whatever is done will be that on which the future will depend. Rejecting optimism and pessimism, there is a
supervening alternative, as we have seen throughout the reflections offered throughout this book –
namely, political commitment .
The appeal to political commitment is not only in stream with what French existentialists call l’intellectuel engage´ (committed intellectual) but
also reaches back through the history and existential situation of enslaved, racialized ancestors. Many were, in
truth, an existential
paradox: commitment to action without guarantees. The slave revolts, micro and macro acts of
resistance, escapes, and returns help others do the same, the cultivated instability of plantations and other forms of enslavement,
and countless other actions, were waged against a gauntlet of forces designed to eliminate any hope of success. The claim of colonialists and
enslavers was that the future belonged to them, not to the enslaved and the indigenous. Such people were, in colonial eyes, incapable of
ontological resistance. A result of more than 500 years of conquest and 300 years of enslavement was also a (white) rewriting of history in
which African and First Nations’ agency was, at least at the level of scholarship, practically erased. Yet there was resistance even in that realm,
as Africana and First Nation intellectual history and scholarship attest; what, after all, are Africana, Black, and Indigenous Studies? What, after
all, are those many sites of intellectual production and activism outside of hegemonic academies? Such actions set the course for
different kinds of struggle today.

Such reflections occasion meditations on the concept of failure. Afropessimism, the existential critique
suggests, suffers from a failure to in their analysis of failure . Consider Fanon’s notion of constructive
failure, where what doesn’t initially work transforms conditions for something new to emerge . To
understand this argument, one must rethink the philosophical anthropology at the heart of a specific line of Euromodern thought on what it
means to be human. Atomistic and individual-substance-based, this model, articulated by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and
many others, is of a non-relational being that thinks, acts, and moves along a course in which continued movement depends on not colliding
with others. Under that model, the human being is a thing that enters a system that facilitates or obstructs its movement. Under this model,
the human being is actually a being. An alternative model, shared by many groups across southern Africa, Asia, South America, and even parts
of Continental Europe, is a relational version of the human being as part of a larger system of meaning. Actions, from that perspective, are not
about whether ‘‘I’’ succeed but instead about ‘‘our’’ unending story across time. Under this model, no human being is a being simpliciter or
being-in-her-or-himself-or-themselves. As relational, it means that each human being is a constant negotiation of
ongoing efforts to build relationships with others, which means no one actually enters a situation
without establishing new situations of action and meaning . Instead of entering a game, their participation requires a
different kind of project – especially where the ‘‘game’’ was premised on their exclusion. Thus, where the system or game repels initial
participation, such repulsion is a shift in the grammar of how the system functions, especially its dependence on obsequious subjects. Shifted
and shifting energy affords emergence of alternatives. Participation, understood in these terms, is never in games but acts of changing them.

Abstract as this sounds, it has much historical support. For example, Evelyn Simien, in her insightful political study
Historic Firsts, examines the new set of relations established by Shirley Chisholm’s and Jesse Jackson’s
presidential campaigns. There would have been no President Barack Obama without such important predecessors
affecting the demographics of voter participation. Simien intentionally focused on the most mainstream example of political life to illustrate this
point. Although no exemplar of radicalism, Obama’s ‘‘success’’ emerged from Chisholm and Jackson’s (and
many others’) so-called ‘‘failure.” Despite the appalling reactionary response of a right-wing majority in the
th
114 Congress during the second term of Obama’s presidency and the election of Donald Trump , whose
obsession with erasing Obama’s legacy exemplified a form of psychoanalytical little man’s trauma, the historic fact remains that
Obama took the helm of a mismanaged executive branch and gave it a level of dignity and intelligence
matched by few of its white exemplars. His successors claim for a restored greatness only reveals the joke that is, in fact, any
project on which the term “supremacy” is built: the naked racism and mediocrity that followed – there is an amusing photograph of a
Klansman holding up a sign declaring his race’s “superior jeans!” – reveal the folly and terror of white megalomania. Beyond presidential
electoral politics, there are numerous examples of how prior, radical so-called ‘‘failures’’ transformed relationships that
facilitated other kinds of outcome . The trail goes back to the Haitian Revolution, which offered a vision of Black sovereignty that
garnered the full force of Euromodern colonial racial alliances to stall, and back to every act of resistance from Nat Turner’s Rebellion in the
USA, Sharpe’s in Jamaica, or Tula’s in Curacao and so many other efforts for social transformation to come.

In existential terms, then, many ancestors of the African diaspora embodied what Søren Kierkegaard (1983) calls an existential paradox. All the
evidence around them suggested failure and the futility of hope. They first had to make a movement of infinite resignation – that is, resigning
themselves to their situation. Yet they must simultaneously act against that situation. Kierkegaard, as we have seen called this seemingly
contradictory phenomenon ‘‘faith,’’ but that concept relates more to a relationship with a transcendent, absolute being, which could only be
established by a ‘‘leap,’’ as there are no mediations or bridge to the Absolute whose distant is, as Kierkegaard put it, absolutely absolute.
Ironically, if the Afropessimist’s argument rejects transcendental intervention and focused on committed political action, of taking responsibility
for a future that offers no guarantees, then the movement from infinite resignation becomes existential political action.

At this point, the crucial meditation would be on politics and political action. An attitude of infinite resignation to the world without the leap of
committed action would simply be pessimistic or nihilistic. Similarly, an attitude of hope or optimism about the future would lack infinite
resignation. We see here the underlying failure of the two approaches. Yet ironically, there is a form of failure at failing in the pessimistic turn
versus the optimistic one, since if focused exclusively on resignation as the goal, then the ‘‘act’’ of resignation would have been achieved,
which, paradoxically, would be a success; it would be a successful failing of failure. For politics to emerge, however, there are two missing
elements in inward pessimistic resignation to consider.

The first is that politics is a social phenomenon, which means it requires the expanding options of a social world. It must transcend the self.
Turning away from the social world, though a statement about politics, is not, however, in and of itself
political. As we have seen, The ancients from whom much western political theory or philosophy claimed affinity had a disparaging term for
individuals who resigned themselves from political life: idiotes, a private person, one not concerned with public affairs, in a word – an idiot. I
mention western political theory because that is the hegemonic intellectual context of Afropessimism; I have not come across Afropessimistic
writings on thought outside of that framework. We do not have to end our etymological journey in ancient Greek. Recall that extending our
linguistic archaeology back a few thousand years we could examine the Middle Kingdom Egyptian word idi (deaf). The presumption, later taken
on by the ancient Athenians and other Greek-speaking peoples, was that a lack of hearing entailed isolation, at least in terms of audio speech.
The contemporary inward resignation of seeking a form of purity from the loathsome historical reality of
racial oppression, in this reading, retreats ultimately into a form of moralism ( private, normative
satisfaction ) instead of public responsibility born of and borne by action. The nonbeing to which Afropessimist
refer is also a form of inaudibility.

The second is the importance of power. Politics makes no sense without it. As we have sene throughout our earlier reflections of power,
Eurocentric etymology points to the Latin word potis as its source, from which came the word ‘‘potent’’ as in an omnipotent god. If we again
look back further, we will notice the Middle Kingdom (2000 BCE–1700 BCE) KMT/ Egyptian word pHty, which refers to godlike strength. Yet for
those ancient Northeast Africans, even the gods’ abilities came from a source: In the Coffin Texts, HqAw or heka activates the ka (sometimes
translated as soul, spirit, or, in a word ‘‘magic’’), which makes reality. All this amounts to a straightforward thesis on power as the ability with
the means to make things happen.

There is an alchemical quality to power. The human world, premised on symbolic communication , brings many
forms of meaning into being , and those new meanings afford relationships that build institutions through
a world of culture, a phenomenon that Freud (1989) rightly described as ‘‘a prosthetic god.’’ It is godlike because it addresses what humanity
historically sought from the gods – protection from the elements, physical maledictions, and social forms of misery. Such power clearly can be
abused. It is where those enabling capacities (empowerment) are pushed to the wayside in the hording of social resources into propping up
some people as gods that the legitimating practices of cultural cum political institutions decline and stimulate pessimism and nihilism. The
institutions in Abya Yala and in Northern countries, such as the United States and Canada, very rarely attempt to establish positive relations to
blacks, and Blacks the subtext of Afropessimism and this entire meditation.