T

Interp:
Affs must defend instrumental affirmation of one of the five topic areas.
Legalization means to apply regulation
Adrienne D. Davis 2010, Professor of Law, Washington University School of Law, 10
REGULATING POLYGAMY: INTIMACY, DEFAULT RULES, AND BARGAINING FOR
EQUALITY December, 2010 Columbia Law Review, 110 Colum. L. Rev. 1955

Several legal theorists recently re-clarified the crucial distinction between decriminalization and
legalization. Discussing sex work, they say, "Legalization involves complete decriminalization
coupled with positive legal provisions regulating one or more aspect of sex work businesses." Janet
Halley et al., From the International to the Local in Feminist Legal Responses to Rape, Prostitution/Sex
Work, and Sex Trafficking: Four Studies in Contemporary Governance Feminism, 29 Harv. J.L. & Gender
335, 339 (2006). Decriminalization may be partial, i.e., decriminalizing the activities of sex workers
alone, or complete, eliminating all criminal legislation.

Violation the affirmative is a narrative about indigenous people, it doesnt create

regulations or affirm a topic area.
Voting issue
First, GROUND key to legal distinctions- Most AFF areas can be decimalized and
hide the states ability to abuse black flesh.
Second, PREDICTABILITY Key to the decriminalize alt- If the alt gets to decrim
the alt can never result in any legal change and also be competitive. This is the heart
of the topic and competing method debates.
And, failure to specify means we are never able to engage in a discussion of the
regulation removing that form of education. This education outweighs A yes-no
decriminalization debate or a should it be legal yes/no debate leaves us stuck in
shallow discussions while the technical discussion of regulations is complex and
nuanced that results in the ambiguity that is key to sustaining anti-blackness.
Mark Kleinman 2014, (Prof. of Public Policy in the UCLA School of Public Affairs), Washington
Monthly, How not to make a hash out of cannabis legalization,
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/march_april_may_2014/features/how_not_to_make_a_has
h_out_of049291.php?page=all,mm

But even if the federal-state legal issues get resolved, the

state-level tax and regulation systems likely to emerge will

be far from ideal. While they will probably do a good job of eliminating the illicit cannabis markets in those states, theyll be mediocre to
lousy at preventing an upsurge of drug abuse as cheap, quality-tested, easily available legal pot replaces the more expensive, unreliable, and
harder-to-find material the black market offers. The

systems being put into place in Washington and Colorado

roughly resemble those imposed on alcohol after Prohibition ended in 1933. A set of competitive commercial
enterprises produce the pot, and a set of competitive commercial enterprises sell it, under modest regulations: a limited number of licenses, no
direct sales to minors, no marketing obviously directed at minors, purity/potency testing and labeling, security rules .

The postProhibition restrictions on alcohol worked reasonably well for a while, but have been substantially
undermined over the years as the beer and liquor industries consolidated and used their economies
of scale to lower production costs and their lobbying muscle to loosen regulations and keep taxes
low (see Tim Heffernan, Last Call). The same will likely happen with cannabis. As more and more states begin to legalize marijuana over the
next few years, the cannabis industry will begin to get richerand that means it will start to wield considerably more political power, not only
over the states but over national policy, too. Thats how we could get locked into a bad system in which the primary downside of legalizing pot
increased drug abuse, especially by minorswill be greater than it needs to be, and the benefits, including tax revenues, smaller than they could
be. Its easy to imagine the cannabis equivalent of an Anheuser-Busch InBev peddling low-cost, high-octane cannabis in Super Bowl

The standard framing of the cannabis

legalization debate is simple: either youre for it or youre against it. Setting up the debate that way
tempts proponents of legalization to deny all risks, while supporters of the status quo deny how bad
the current situation is. Both sides deny the unknown. In truth, theres no way to gauge all the consequences of adopting
commercials. We can do better than that, but only if Congress takes actionand soon.

unprecedented policies, so its foolish to pretend to be 100 percent certain of anything. But its possible to guess in advance some of the
categories of gain and loss from policy change, even if the magnitudes are unknown, and to identify the complete wild cards: things that might
get either better or worse.

K
Inclusion and accumulation of narratives/poems is bad their proposition of a coherent, hopeful
solution destroys their methodology and reinserts the slave-savage into the libidinal economy and
civil society of master-settler society only voting neg can foreground ontology without obliterating
it

Hartman and Wilderson 3(Saidiya V. Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson, III, THE POSITION OF THE
UNTHOUGHT, Qui Parle, Vol. 13, No. 2, Spring/Summer 2003, pp. 183-201, University of Nebraska Press,
www.jstor.org/stable/20686156, Accessed: 17/10/2012 16:55) [m leap]

Frank B. Wilderson, Ill- One of the first things I want to say is how thankful I am that you wrote Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and SelfMaking in Nineteenth-Century America. And I want to say a little bit about how meaningful the book is to me as a black graduate student- a socalled aspiring academic - and as someone caught in the machine but not of it. Because in general, when one reads the work of black scholars if
one is another black scholar or a black student- one prepares oneself for a disappointment, or works a disappointment into the reading. And one
doesn't have to do that with this particular book. What I mean, is that so

often in black scholarship, people consciously or

unconsciously peel away from the strength and the terror of their evidence in order to propose some
kind of coherent, hopeful solution to things. Your book, in moving through these scenes of subjection as they take place in
slavery, refuses to do that. And just as importantly, it does not allow the reader to think that there was a radical enough break to reposition the
black body after Jubilee. That is a tremendous and courageous move. And I think what's important about it, is that it corroborates the experience
of ordinary black people today, and of strange black people like you and me in the academy [Iaughter]. But there's something else that the book
does, and I want to talk about this at

the level of methodology and analysis. If we think about the registers of subjectivity as
being preconscious interest, unconscious identity or identifications, and positionality, then a lot of the work in the social sciences
organizes itself around preconscious interest; it assumes a subject of consent, and as you have said, a
subject of exploitation, which you reposition as the subject of accumulation.2 Now when this sort of social
science engages the issue of positionality if and when it does it assumes that it can do so in an un-raced
manner. That's the best of the work. The worst of the work is a kind of multiculturalism that assumes we all have
analogous identities that can be put into a basket of stories, and then that basket of stories can lead to
similar interests. For me, what you've done in this book is to split the hair here. In other words, this is not a book that celebrates an
essential Afrocentrism that could be captured by the multicultural discourse. And yet it's not a book that remains on the surface of preconscious
interest, which so much history and social science does. Instead, it demands a radical racialization of any analysis of positionality. So. Why don't
we talk about that? Saidiya V Hartman - Well! That's a lot, and a number of things come to mind. I think for me the book is about the problem of

the whole
issue of empathic identification is central for me. Because it just seems that every attempt to employ the
slave in a narrative ultimately resulted in his or her obliteration , regardless of whether it was a
leftist narrative of political agency - the slave stepping into someone else's shoes and then becoming a political agent- or
whether it was about being able to unveil the slave's humanity by actually finding oneself in that position. In many ways,
what I was trying to do as a cultural historian was to narrate a certain impossibility, to illuminate those
practices that speak to the limits of most available narratives to explain the position of the enslaved.
On one hand, the slave is the foundation of the national order, and, on the other, the slave occupies
the position of the unthought. So what does it mean to try to bring that position into view without making it
a locus of positive value, or without trying to fill in the void? So much of our political
vocabulary/imaginary/desires have been implicitly integrationist even when we imagine our claims
are more radical. This goes to the second part of the book - that ultimately the metanarrative thrust is always
towards an integration into the national project, and particularly when that project is in crisis,
black people are called upon to affirm it.So certainly it's about more than the desire for inclusion with in the limited set of
crafting a narrative for the slave as subject, and in terms of positionality, asking, "Who does that narrative enable?" That's where

possibilities that the national project provides. What then does this language - the given language of freedom- enable? And once you realize its
limits and begin to see its inexorable investment in certain notions of the subject and subjection, then that language

of freedom no
longer becomes that which rescues the slave from his or her former condition, but the site of the reelaboration of that condition, rather than its transformation. F.W - This is one of the reasons why your book has

been called "pessimistic" by Anita Patterson.3 But it's interesting that she doesn't say what I said when we first started talking, that it's enabling.
I'm assuming that she's white - I don't know, but it certainly sounds like it. S.VH. - But I think there's a certain integrationist rights agenda that
subjects who are variously positioned on the color line can take up. And that

project is something I consider obscene: the

attempt to make the narrative of defeat into an opportunity for celebration, the desire to look at the
ravages and the brutality of the last few centuries, but to still find a way to feel good about
ourselves. That's not my project at all, though I think it's actually the project of a number of people. Unfortunately, the kind of social
revisionist history undertaken by many leftists in the 1970s, who were trying to locate the agency of dominated groups,
resulted in celebratory narratives of the oppressed. 4 Ultimately, it bled into this celebration, as if there was a
space you could carve out of the terrorizing state apparatus in order to exist outside its clutches and
forge some autonomy. My project is a different one. And in particular, one of my hidden polemics in the book was an
argument against the notion of hegemony, and how that notion has been taken up in the context of
looking at the status of the slave.

The aff's politics of Empathy assumes recognition between subjects, but empathy
from master to chattel is only an act of possession. Your empathetic identification
produces pleasure because it enables whites to percieve themselves as flexible -the
master can augment themselves because the slave is an empty vessel for projecting
sentiment. Performance compels that we show our broken bodies, our wounds, to
white people, rendering us pure flesh.
Hartman 97 [Saidiya V. Hartman Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford University Press 1997] MI

Empathic identification is complicated further by the fact that it cannot be extricated from the economy of chattel
slavery with which is at odds, for this projection of one s feeling upon or into the object of property and the phantasmic slipping into captivity, while it is distinct
from the pleasures of self-augmentation yielded by the ownership of the captive body and the expectations fostered therein, is nonetheless entangled with this
economy and identification facilitated by a kindred possession or occupation of the captive body , albeit on a different
register. In other words, what I am trying to isolate are the kinds of expectations and the qualities of affect distinctive to the economy of slavery. The relation between

the joy
made possible by virtue of the replaceability and interchangeabifity endemic to the commodity and
by the extensive capacities of property that is, the augmentation of the master subject through his embodiment in
external objects and persons.11 Put differently, the fungibility of the commodity makes the captive body an
abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others feelings, ideas, desires, and values; and, as
property, the dispossessed body of the enslaved is the surrogate for the master s body since it
guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power and dominion. Thus, while the beaten and mutilated body
presumably establishes the brute materiality of existence, the materiality of suffering regularly eludes (re)cognition by
virtue of the body s being replaced by other signs of value, as well as other bodies. Thus the desire to don, occupy,
or possess blackness or the black body as a sentimental resource and/or locus of excess enjoyment is both founded upon and
enabled by the material relations of chattel slavery. In light of this, is it too extreme or too obvious to suggest that Rankin s flight of
pleasure and the possession of slave property, in both the figurative and literal senses, can be explained in part by the fungibility of the slave that is,

imagination and the excitements engendered by suffering might also be pleasurable? Certainly this willing abasement confirms Rankin s moral authority, but what
about the pleasure engendered by this embrace of pain that is, the tumultuous passions of the flightly imagination stirred by this fantasy of being beaten? Rankin s
imagined beating is immune neither to the pleasures to be derived from the masochistic fantasy nor to the sadistic pleasure to be derived from the spectacle of
sufferance. Here my intention is not to shock or exploit the perverse but to consider critically the complicated nexus of terror and enjoyment by examining the
obviated and debased diversions of the capricious master; the pleasure of indignation yielded before the spectacle of sufferance; the instability of the scene of
suffering; and the confusion of song and sorrow typical of the coffle, the auction block, performing before the master, and other popular amusements. _ B y slipping
into the black body and figuratively occupying the position of the enslaved, Rankin plays the role of captive and attester and in so doing articulates the crisis of
witnessing determined by the legal incapacity of slaves or free blacks to act as witnesses against whites. Since the veracity of black testimony is in doubt, the

crimes of slavery must not only be confirmed by unquestionable authorities and other white observers but also
must be made visible, whether by revealing the scarred back of the slave in short, making the body
speak or through authenticating devices, or, better yet, by enabling reader and audience member to
experience vicariously the tragical scenes of cruelty . 12 If Rankin as a consequence of his abolitionist sentiments was willing to
occupy the unmasterly position, sentimentalism prescribed the terms of his identification with the enslaved, and the central term of this identification was suffering .
For Rankin, the pageantry of the coffle and sportive music failed to disguise the sorrows of suffering innocence . However, for others who also possessed
antislavery sentiments, the attempt to understand the inner feelings of the enslaved only effaced the horrors of slavery and further circumscribed the captives
presumably limited capacity for suffering. For many eyewitnesses of the coffle, the terrors of slavery were dissipated by song and violence was transformed into a
display of agency and good cheer

The aff's desire for absolute mixture and incoherence results in absolute
integretation - disappearing the black body into one cosmic hybrid race - this is
eugenicism under guise of eros
Sexton 01
[Jared "The Consequence of Race Mixture: Racialised Barriers and the Politics of Desire" Director,
African American Studies, Assoc Prof of Film and Media Studies @ Irvine. Ph.D., University of
California, Berkeley, Ethnic Studies]MI
By this account, the blacks disappearance is redemptive a redemptive self-annihilation, as it were brought about by the
dazzling call of human beautification. No longer an imposition or an assault, no longer genocide per se, the elimination of
blackness (and, importantly, Indianness) has become a painless, even pleasurable duty to disappear. This edifying synthesis,
no doubt a dream of ethnic cleansing, is, however, decidedly not white supremacist. That is, it does not elevate whiteness to its apex, its
maximum type, or its ideal. Rather, the doctrine of white superiority is dethroned, as a new mixed race will have superseded the white,
presenting itself as that select taste toward which even the former rulers of the world aspire. What is deemed most encouraging about
the emergence of this new race the fruit of racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross-pollinization is that it is
forged in the pathos of love. Beyond violence and instrumental reason there is the cosmic force of eros, the seemingly

benevolent prime mover of global integration. The mode of eugenics will have changed, but its ends remain frighteningly
consistent a selection more efficient than a brutal Social Darwinism. Less carnage, less coercion, and less political
controversy, this appears to be evolution at a discount. The Indian must modernise (or disappear); the black (having already modernised) must
certainly disappear too poor a gene pool, too ugly, too little malleability, in a word, deficient. The aesthetic of mestizaje is, then,

marked by a profound ambivalence, a double life. Its eugenicist impulses, ruefully unshakable, cast a long shadow over
whatever threats it might present to the ethnic absolutism12 of Anglo-Saxon white supremacy. For in its unfolding it seeks to
abolish not only the reign of whiteness, but also the existence of those uglier stocks uneducated, inferior races. Perhaps it cannot help
itself since, in the name of consistency, it must integrate everything and everyone la primera raza sntesis del globo. The
empowerment and enfranchisement of an emergent identity can, it seems, incur not-so-hidden expenses. More recently, historian Gary Nash
(who recognises, among others, the work of Root et al. as an influence) has written a book about the secret history of mixed-race America, an
account of the America that could have been. Early on he claims that the union of [John] Rolfe and Pocahontas could have become the
beginning of an openly mestizo or racially intermixed United States (Nash, 1999, p. 8). His extended essay is a chronicle of relatively
anonymous Americans [that] have taken history into their own hands and have defied the official racial ideology (p. 19). He finds that some
Americans built racial classifications andsome Americans have defied the way society defined them and dared to dream of a mixed-race
nation. (p. viii)

The savage is another part of the bloc of humanism. Further the capacity for the
savage to one day become a functioning member within the settler community is
contingent on leaving the black flesh outside as a force to fight against.

Wilderson10

(Frank.

B. Wilderson, Red White and black, 2010. Frank B. Wilderson is a tenured

professor at the University of California Berkeley. He has attended the University
of Colombia where he got a degree in psychology. This is an excerpt from pages
72-73 of the Book.)

. The bloc does not recognize the Slaves world as an alternative or competing world because the
violence that produces the Slave makes it impossible to think Slave and world together. As
such, the Slaves consent is immaterial to modernitys Savage/Human bloc because Slave
consent cannot be recognized and incorporated. Therefore, the moment in Western history in
which humanism becomes hegemonic (and detrimental to the Indians way of life) is not a
moment in which the Slave achieves relationality (even as a subaltern) except in that
Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms 73 his/her
negativity stands now in relation not only to the Settler/Master, but to the Savage as well, and so
becomes all the more nonrecuperable and all the more isolated. This state of affairs
is more than a little disturbing, for it suggests that the relativity of the Indians relative
isolation and relative humanity, the push/pull of his/her positional tension, is
imbricated withif not dependent uponthe absolute isolation of the Slave. Central to the
triangulation of antagonisms is a structural antagonism between the Savage and
the Settler, as well as structural solidarity, capacity for articulation (conflictual
harmony), between the Savage and the Master. This solidarity/antagonism totters
on that fulcrum called the Slave.

The narrative in the 1ac is an attempt to call to a power structure that defines itself
against the other that is black flesh. The affirmatives advocacy is a fantasy at best.

Wilderson10
(Frank.

B. Wilderson, Red White and black, 2010. Frank B. Wilderson is a tenured

professor at the University of California Berkeley. He has attended the University
of Colombia where he got a degree in psychology. This is an excerpt from pages 57
of the Book.)

Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S.

Antagonisms 57 embrace what Saidiya Hartman calls the abject status of the will-less
object ( Scenes of Subjection 52). Explicating the rhetorical and philosophical
impossibility of such an embrace, Judy writes: The assumption of the Negros
Civil society cannot

transcendent worth as a human presupposes the Negros being comprehensible in

Western modernitys terms. Put somewhat more crudely, but nonetheless to the
point, the humanization in writing achieved in the slave narrative require[s] the conversion of the
incomprehensible African into the comprehensible Negro. The historical mode of conversion
was the linguistic representation of slavery: the slave narrative [or Black film and
Black film theory]. By providing heuristic evidence of the Negros humanity the
slave narrative begins to write the history of Negro culture in terms of the history
of an extra-African self-reflective consciousness. (Judy 92) But this exercise is as
liberating, as productive of subjectivity, as a dog chasing its tail. For [p]recisely
at the point at which this intervention appears to succeed in its determination of a
black agent, however, it is subject to appropriation by a rather homeostatic thought:
the Negro (97). And the Negro, as Fanon illustrates throughout Black Skin, White
Masks, is comparison, nothing more and certainly nothing less, for what is less
than comparison? Fanon strikes at the heart of this tail-chasing circularity and the
dread it catalyzes when he writes: No one knows yet who [the Negro] is, but he
knows that fear will fill the world when the world finds out. And when the world
knows the world always expects something of the Negro. He is afraid lest the
world know, Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
58 he is afraid of the fear that the world would feel if the world knew. (BSWM
emphasis mine 139) By aspiring to the very ontological capacity which modernity foreclosed to
themin other words, by attempting to write themselves into being ( (Dis)Forming the
American Canon 97) Black film theorists and many Black films experience as
unbearable a tenet shared by Judy and other Afro-Pessimists that humanity recognizes
itself in the Other that it is not (94). This makes the labor of disavowal in Black
scholarly and aesthetic production doubly burdensome, for it is triggered by a
dread of both being discovered, and of discovering oneself, as ontological
incapacity. Thus, through borrowed institutionalitythe feigned capacity to be
essentially exploited and alienated (rather than accumulated and fungible) in the
first ontological instance (in other words, a fantasy to be just like everyone else, which is
a fantasy to be) the work of Black film theory operates through a myriad of
compensatory gestures in which the Black theorist assumes subjective capacity to be
universal and thus finds it everywhere. We all got it bad, dont we Massa.

Whiteness perpuates a system of abuse of the black. The normativity of whiteness

creates a hyper visibility for blacks. The result of this hyper visibility is being
received as a body that is already marked and already dead. The perception of being
already dead legitimizes the slaughter of black flesh.
Yancy13

(George Yancy is Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University and Coordinator of the Critical Race
Theory Speaker Series. He is the author of Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of
Race, which received an Honorable Mention from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry
and Human Rights. He has also edited twelve influential books, three of which have received Choice
Awards. He was also recently nominated for the Duquesne University Presidential Award for Excellence
in ScholarshipGeorge Yancy, George, associate professor of philosophy at Duquesne University,
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/walking-while-black-in-the-white-gaze/?
_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0#more-148458)

Despite the ringing tones of Obamas Lincoln Memorial speech, I find myself still often thinking of a
more informal and somber talk he gave. And despite

the inspirational and ethical force of

Dr. King and his work, Im still thinking about someone who might be
considered old news already: Trayvon Martin. In his now much-quoted White House
briefing several weeks ago, not long after the verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman, the president
expressed his awareness of the ever-present danger of death for those who inhabit black bodies. You
know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son, he said. Another
way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. I wait for the day when a white
president will say, There is no way that I could have experienced what Trayvon Martin did (and other
black people do) because Im white and through white privilege I am immune to systemic racial
profiling. Obama also talked about how black

men in this country know what it is like

to be followed while shopping and how black men have had the experience of
walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. I
have had this experience on many occasions as whites catch sight of me walking past their cars: Click,
click, click, click. Those clicks can be deafening. There are times when I want to become their
boogeyman. I want to pull open the car door and shout: Surprise! Youve just been car-jacked by a
fantasy of your own creation. Now get out of the car. The presidents words, perhaps consigned to a
long-ago news cycle now, remain powerful: they validate experiences that blacks have undergone in their
everyday lives. Obamas voice resonates with those philosophical voices (Frantz Fanon, for example) that
have long attempted to describe the lived interiority of racial experiences. He has also
deployed the power of narrative autobiography, which is a significant conceptual tool used insightfully by
critical race theorists to discern the clarity and existential and social gravity of what it means to
experience white racism. As a black president, he has given voice to the epistemic violence that blacks

David
Hume claimed that to be black was to be like a parrot who speaks a few
words plainly. And Immanuel Kant maintained that to be black from head
to foot was clear proof that what any black person says is stupid. In his
Notes on Virginia, Thomas Jefferson wrote: In imagination they [Negroes]
are dull, tasteless and anomalous, and inferior. In the first American Edition
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1798), the term Negro was defined as
someone who is cruel, impudent, revengeful, treacherous, nasty, idle,
dishonest, a liar and given to stealing. My point here is to say that the white gaze is
often face as they are stereotyped and profiled within the context of quotidian social spaces. III.

global and historically mobile. And its origins, while from Europe, are deeply seated
in the making of America. Black bodies in America continue to be reduced to
their surfaces and to stereotypes that are constricting and false, that often
force those black bodies to move through social spaces in ways that put white
people at ease. We fear that our black bodies incite an accusation. We move in ways that help us to
survive the procrustean gazes of white people. We dread that those who see us might feel
the irrational fear to stand their ground rather than finding common ground, a reference
that was made by Bernice King as she spoke about the legacy of her father at the steps of the Lincoln
Memorial. The

white gaze is also hegemonic, historically grounded in material

relations of white power: it was deemed disrespectful for a black person to violate the white gaze
by looking directly into the eyes of someone white. The white gaze is also ethically solipsistic: within it
only whites have the capacity of making valid moral judgments. Even with the unprecedented White
House briefing, our national

discourse regarding Trayvon Martin and questions of

race have failed to produce a critical and historically conscious discourse that
sheds light on what it means to be black in an anti-black America. If historical
precedent says anything, this failure will only continue. Trayvon Martin, like so many black boys
and men, was under surveillance (etymologically, to keep watch). Little did he know that
on Feb. 26, 2012, that he would enter a space of social control and bodily policing, a
kind of Benthamian panoptic nightmare that would truncate his being as suspicious; a space where he
was, paradoxically, both invisible and yet hypervisible. RELATED More From The Stone Read previous
contributions to this series. I am invisible, understand, simply because people [in this case white people]
refuse to see me. Trayvon was invisible to Zimmerman, he was not seen as the black child that he was,
trying to make it back home with Skittles and an iced tea. He was not seen as having done nothing wrong,
as one who dreams and hopes. As

black, Trayvon was already known and rendered

invisible. His childhood and humanity were already criminalized as part of a
white racist narrative about black male bodies. Trayvon needed no introduction: Look,
the black; the criminal! IV. Many have argued that the site of violence occurred upon the confrontation
between Trayvon and Zimmerman. Yet, the

violence began with Zimmermans non-emergency

dispatch call, a call that was racially assaultive in its discourse, one that used the tropes of antiblack racism. Note, Zimmerman said, Theres a real suspicious guy. He also said, This guy looks like
hes up to no good or hes on drugs or something. When asked by the dispatcher, he said, within seconds,
that, He looks black. Asked what he is wearing, Zimmerman says, A dark hoodie, like a gray hoodie.
Later, Zimmerman said that now hes coming toward me. Hes got his hands in his waist band. And
then, And hes a black male. But what does it mean to be a real suspicious guy? What does it mean to
look like one is up to no good? Zimmerman does not give any details, nothing to buttress the validity of
his narration. Keep in mind that Zimmerman is in his vehicle as he provides his narration to the
dispatcher. As the looker, it is not Zimmerman who is in danger; rather, it is Trayvon Martin, the
looked at, who is the target of suspicion and possible violence. After all, it is Trayvon Martin who is
wearing the hoodie, a piece of racialized attire that apparently signifies black criminality. Zimmerman
later said: Somethings wrong with him. Yep, hes coming to check me out, and, Hes got something in
his hands. Zimmerman also said, I dont know what his deal is. A black young male with something
in his hands, wearing a hoodie, looking suspicious, and perhaps on drugs, and there being something

wrong with him, is a racist narrative of fear and frenzy. The history of white supremacy underwrites this
interpretation. Within this context of discursive violence, Zimmerman was guilty of an act of aggression
against Trayvon Martin, even

before the trigger was pulled. Before his physical

death, Trayvon Martin was rendered socially dead under the weight of
Zimmermans racist stereotypes. Zimmermans aggression was enacted
through his gaze, through the act of profiling, through his discourse and through his
warped reconstruction of an innocent black boy that instigates white fear. V. What does it say
about America when to be black is the ontological crime, a crime of simply
being? Perhaps the religious studies scholar Bill Hart is correct: To be a black man is to be
marked for death. Or as the political philosopher Joy James argues, Blackness as evil [is]
destined for eradication. Perhaps this is why when writing about the death of his young black
son, the social theorist W.E.B. Du Bois said, All that day and all that night there sat an awful gladness in
my heart nay, blame me not if I see the world thus darkly through the Veil and my soul whispers
ever to me saying, Not dead, not dead, but escaped; not bond, but free. Trayvon Martin was killed
walking while black. As the protector of all things gated, of all things standing on the precipice of being
endangered by black male bodies, Zimmerman created the conditions upon which he had no grounds to
stand on. Indeed, through his racist

stereotypes and his pursuit of Trayvon, he created the

conditions that belied the applicability of the stand your ground law and
created a situation where Trayvon was killed. This is the narrative that ought to have been
told by the attorneys for the family of Trayvon Martin. It is part of the narrative that Obama brilliantly
told, one of black bodies being racially policed and having suffered a unique history of racist vitriol in
this country. Yet it is one that is perhaps too late, one already rendered mute and inconsequential by the
verdict of not guilty.

The Alt:
Vote negative to engage in an unflinching structural analysis of
the ontological position of Blacknessthe very possibility of
ethics and freedom resides in a rejection of the affirmatives
ratification of civil society. Resisting the lure of anti-blackness
through a genealogy of historys constitutive void is the
starting point for imagining a new world.
Kokontis 2011 (Kate, PhD in Performance Studies from UC-Berkeley, Performative Returns and the
Rememory of History: genealogy and performativity in the American racial state, Dissertation available
on Proquest)

On one hand, she addresses the literal politics that the theological narratives espouse. There is a long tradition of deploying the Exodus narrative toward the pursuit of
social reform. That is, instead of appealing to it in a way that focuses on the next world, [t]hrough biblical typology, particularly uses of Exodus, African Americans
elevated their common experiences to biblical drama and found resources to account for their circumstances and respond effectively to them. [...] Exodus history
sustained hope and a sense of possibility in the face of insurmountable evil. The analogical uses of the story enabled

a sense of agency and

resistance in persistent moments of despair and disillusionment.64 But even these efforts have not exclusively, but often relied on a particular iteration of
the social gospel that presupposes a set of moral and institutional imperatives (for instance, the ideal of
training racial, religious, sexual, social, or institutional deviants or outlyers to behave according
to an ostensibly correct set of moral principles) that run counter to a radical critique of the
underlying terms of the state and civil society which tend to ratify, naturalize, and invisibilize
antiblackness and/or policies that adversely impact black people who are not part of the middle
class, rather than to critique or subvert it. Hartman, on the other hand, does call for, and mount, a radical critique of the terms of the
state and civil society: for her, they are inherently unethical rather than redeemable, having engendered
centuries of black social death and historical unknowability, and thus any struggle toward freedom
demands an unflinching critical analysis rather than an implicit or explicit ratification of these
institutions and the terms on which they are predicated. But more fundamentally, she addresses the political implications of the
assumptive logic of a theological teleology. I interpret Hartman to posit that there is a kind of freedom that can be predicated on not-knowing: if there is no
predetermined future, there is no divine imperative that might encourage an investment in the moral prescriptions of a conservative social gospel: a

toppled
faith in the redemptive possibilities of the struggle has the potential to open the door to invention,
speculation, refashioning, and cobbling together something from nothing, presence from absence. I
interpret her to posit that a viable freedom dream necessitates the acknowledgment of loss and
absence and the history of processes of dehumanizing antiblackness, the acknowledgement of the
wound and its psychic, social, political, and ethical causes as well as an acknowledgement of its
persistence rather than being deluded by tidy or optimistic but under-analyzed narratives of
progress or redemption. Only then can any realistic stock be taken toward re-imagining the world
and the possibilities and imperatives of a black freedom struggle . While Haley and Gates draw on
narratives that say that the past, including its suffering, was meaningful, Hartman offers what might appear to be a
much bleaker interpretation that insists that it is meaningless insofar as it is not folded into any sort
of teleology. But in that is a kind of freedom/dream, because the subjects of her narrative are free from
a predetermination of the terms on which liberation is possible , the structures around its enactment. What she calls
for is a profound refashioning of the epistemology of the invisible , which is as fundamental a component of the black
freedom struggle as is an epistemology of verifiable evidence of oppression. That is, she advocates the excavation of psychic
structures and historical silences to replace an implicit or explicit faith in a divine logic in the
(racial) order of things. Genealogy cannot connect with the unknown, so it becomes a ghost story,
an excavation. The term might then be interpreted less as a means of accessing literal ancestors, and more as a process toward understanding. Hartman
constructs, in her text, not a genealogy of anyones family, but a genealogy of the stranger, of the slave; a genealogy of loss, of the lost, of
searching. Projects that make use of imaginative , performative, quasi-fictional or poetic devices cant rest with notknowing: the imaginative devices emerge, in fact, from attempts to piece together or construct/invent evidence from its lack. They all insist on the importance of
knowing, whether because of some large-scale sense of collective responsibility, or because of personal yearning, or both. The imaginative devices
dont exist for the sake of being imaginative; they exist for the sake of survival. But in being
imaginative, they allow for radical possibilities to emerge that literality forecloses . Part of what performance
might offer the study of history is a) different keys to be able to fill in the gaps, that arent so heavily reliant upon explicit, legible empiricism, and b) not only
permission for, but encouragement of what uncertainty can yield. Genealogy, broadly understood, is what furnishes evidence: it is the key to filling in blanks that are
impossible to fill. One version of it is capable of being profoundly literal; of making reconstruction possible; it is used to fill in the blank that has been lost to us
whomever the us is: the dispossessed, displaced, marginalized providing an object to slip into a gaping negative space. This I would call genealogy as an
object. A different version is

used in order to understand the gaps, to underscore or illuminate the negative

spaces and ask how they came to be, and filling in the context around the blank spaces, inheriting
the loss, becomes the way to trace the relationship between the past, present, and future . This I would call
genealogy as a process. What, then, is or could be critical or even radical in roots-seeking genealogy projects ?
There is something inherently conservative about nostalgia, according to most interpretations; but not if a notion of radical nostalgia, such as that offered by Peter
Glazer, is pursued: such an enactment of notalgia engages in worldmaking and invention; the definition takes for granted that nostalgia is for worlds and times that
never existed, and that therefore it is not conservative (i.e. about returning to an idealized past), but that it is creative and always seeking something new. Performative
returns are inevitably projects of yearning, of wishing for a past that was imagined to be better than the present (which has devolved in some way) or a future that has
promise and potential. The mythical Aztec homeland Aztlan that was made popular during the Chicano Movement is a very elegant example: it is a wished-for,
utopian space, acknowledged as being impossible to realize, but always animating the spirit of the concrete efforts of its adherents toward social justice and structural
change (see Anaya and Lomeli 1991). Hartman writes: To

believe, as I do, that the enslaved are our contemporaries is to understand that we share

their aspirations and defeats, which isnt to say that we are owed what they were due but rather to acknowledge

that they accompany our

every effort to fight against domination, to abolish the color line, and to imagine a free territory, a
new commons. It is to take to heart their knowledge of freedom. The enslaved knew that freedom had to be taken; it wasnt something that could ever be
given to you. The kind of freedom that could be given to you could just as easily be taken back . [...] The
demands of the slave on the present have everything to do with making good the promise of
abolition, and this entails much more than the end of property in slaves. It requires the
reconstruction of society, which is the only way to honor our debt to the dead. This is the intimacy
of our age with theirs an unfinished struggle. To what end does one conjure the ghost of slavery, if
not to incite the hopes of transforming the present? (Hartman 2007, 269-270). But performative return is not necessarily critical,
and part of what I demonstrate throughout this dissertation is how such projects are always more complicated than they seem; they work to challenge and bolster the
racial state; they are in some ways radical and in others extremely conservative. And this question of criticality has precisely to do with normativity: do genealogical
practices, the conclusions they draw and the worldmaking they do, work to undo or to reinscribe oppressive patterns, habits, worldviews, available roles of and
categories for historically marginalized groups of people? All three of these

projects attempt to re-write the terms of America, such that the

circumstances of African-Americans are configured as being integral instead of outside the dominant narrative ;
constitutive rather than an aberration. But they waver between trying to write that as a narrative of progress, in
which we have left slavery behind and have ascended to a space of constitutive normativity ; and
trying to underline the fundamental and unending nature of slavery a kind of rejoinder to
uncritical narratives that not only attends to the subjective space of social death that it has yielded
but the possibilities and necessities of invention that have flourished in its wake. What they have in common is
that they present the necessity of grappling with the past instead of ignoring it, allowing African-Americans movements and reinscriptions of migration to trouble the
waters of complacency, forging a broader awareness of the fraught position they have historically occupied. Each contains kernels of great possibility for an inclusive
vision of the future as well as more or less significant red flags. Hartmans

vision, however, seems to espouse a particularly

liberating articulation of freedom, because it does not try to deny or occlude the presence or
significance of ongoing disparity and loss: while Gates and Haleys subjects and implied audience have
already succeeded, gained access to civil society, and have implicitly ratified the fundamental terms
on which it is predicated, Hartmans are still struggling to make something from nothing; they have
an urgency in attending to disparities, and no investment in a status quo that excludes or violates
their well-being. What she claims or advocates is not a victimized stance, but rather a staunch
activist one that is inflected by a rigorous and unflinching structural analysis, and a sensitive and
equally rigorous understanding of desire, yearning, and the possibilities for reinvention and
reconstruction that emerge when faced with profound absence and loss .

To do anything while the black flesh is still fungible is to take part in an unethical
world. Solving the antagonism of the anti-black flesh is a 1st priority issue when
attempting to create good scholarship.

The Wilderson10
(Frank.

B. Wilderson, Red White and black, 2010. Frank B. Wilderson is a tenured

professor at the University of California Berkeley. He has attended the University
of Colombia where he got a degree in psychology. This is an excerpt from pages
67-68 of the novel.)

Ontological incapacity,
of ethics. Put another

I have inferred and here state forthright, is the constituent element

way, one cannot embody capacity and be, simultaneously, ethical. Where

there are Slaves it is unethical to be free. The Settler/Masters capacity, I have argued, is a
function of exploitation and alienation; and the Slaves incapacity is elaborated by accumulation
and fungibility. But the Savage is positioned, structurally, by subjective capacity

and Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms 68
objective incapacity, by sovereignty and genocide, respectively. It is the Indians
liminal status in political economy, the manner in which her/his positionality
shuttles between the incapacity of a genocided object and the capacity of a
sovereign subject, coupled with the fact that Redness does not overdetermine the
thanatology (Judy 89, 94) of libidinal economythis liminal capacity within
political economy and complete freedom from incapacity within libidinal economy which raises
serious doubts about the status of Savage ethicality vis--vis the triangulated structure
(Red, White, and Black) of antagonisms. Clearly, the coherence of Whiteness as a
structural position in modernity depends on the capacity to be free from genocide, not, perhaps, as
an historical experience, but at least as a positioning modality.

Their project of emancipation from colonialialism reifies the fungibility of the slave
by transforming images of suffering into an advertisement for the advancement of
their own political agenda they will steal it and use it to recreate the images in the
form of glorification
Wilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of two Americans to hold
elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANCs armed wing, 2010 (Frank B. III
Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, Pg 26-28) GG

Again, what is important for us to glean from these historians is that the pre-Columbian period, the Late
Middle Ages, reveals no archive of debate on these three questions as they might be related to that
massive group of Black-skinned people south of the Sahara. Eltis suggests that there was indeed massive
debate which ultimately led to Britain taking the lead in the abolition of slavery, but he reminds us that
that debate did not have its roots in the late Middle Ages, the post-Columbian period of the 1500s or the
Virginia Colony period of the 1600s. It was, he asserts, an outgrowth of the mid- to late-18th century
emancipatory thrustintra-Human disputes such as the French and American Revolutionsthat swept
through Europe. But Eltis does not take his analysis further than this. Therefore, it is important that we
not be swayed by his optimism about the Enlightenment and its subsequent abolitionist discourses. It is
highly conceivable that the discourse that elaborates the justification for freeing the slave is not the
product of the Human being having suddenly and miraculously recognized the slave. Rather, as
Saidiya Hartman argues, emancipatory discourses present themselves to us as further evidence of the
Slaves fungibility: [T]he figurative capacities of blackness enable white flights of fancy while
increasing the likelihood of the captives disappearance (Scenes22). First, the questions of
Humanism were elaborated in contradistinction to the human void, to the African-qua-chattel (the
1200s to the end of the 17th century). Then, as the presence of Black chattel in the midst of exploited
and un-exploited Humans (workers and bosses, respectively) became a fact of the world, exploited
Humans (in the throes of class conflict with un-exploited Humans) seized the image of the slave as

an enabling vehicle that animated the evolving discourses of their emancipation, just as unexploited Humans had seized the flesh of the Slave to increase their profits. Without this gratuitous
violence, a violence that marks everyone experientially until the late Middle Ages when it starts to
mark the Black ontologically, the so-called great emancipatory discourses of modernitymarxism,
feminism, postcolonialism, sexual liberation, and the ecology movementpolitical discourses
predicated on grammars of suffering and whose constituent elements are exploitation and
alienation, might not have developed. Chattel slavery did not simply reterritorialize the ontology of
the African. It also created the Human out of culturally disparate entities from Europe to the East.

Case
The aff's production of scholarship turns our experiences into knowable objects,the
materials to study - the impact is bodies become ethnographic objects of study and
Native populations are subject to biopolitical managment
Smith 2013
[Andrea The Problem with Privilege <http://andrea366.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/the-problem-withprivilege-by-andrea-smith/>] MI
The presupposition is that Indigenous peoples are oppressed because they are not sufficiently
known or understood. In fact, however, this desire to know the Native is itself part of the settlercolonial project to apprehend, contain and domesticate the potential power of indigenous peoples to
subvert the settler state. As Mark Rifkin has argued, colonial logics attempt to transform Native
peoples who are producers of intellectual theory and political insight into populations to be known
and hence managed. Native struggles then simply become a project of Native peoples making their
demands known so that their claims can be recognized the by the settler state. Once these demands
are known, they can they be more easily managed, co-opted and disciplined. Thus, the project of
decolonization requires a practice of what Audra Simpson calls ethnographic refusal the refusal to
be known and the refusal to be infinitely knowable. The politics of decolonization requires the
proliferation of theories, knowledge, ideas, and analyses that speak to a beyond settler colonialism
and are hence unknowable.